My body knows it a full second before my head does, heat coming up the back of my neck, my pulse gone loud.
"Is that why you're here?" Keeping my voice level is the hardest work I've done all week. "Because my mother's in your bed? Because if you need a place to sleep, I'll take the floor. I'll take the couch in the main room. Say the word."
"No."
"No?"
"That's not why I'm here." She uncrosses her arms, stands there in my doorway with her hair down and her bare feet on the concrete, and she doesn't step in, because she wants me to hear it before she does. "You knowwhyI'm here."
My heart's slamming and I'm certain she can hear it.
"Say it. I need you to say it out loud, because I'm not putting a hand on you over an assumption. Not one more time in my life do I guess at what you want."
Her breath goes ragged and her eyes fill, and then her whole face softens.
"I'm here because I want you," she says. "Sober. Clear-headed. My mother's dead, and yours is asleep in my bed, and there are men coming for the both of us, and I could be in the ground in two weeks. I have spent ten years being taken, and I’m done being taken. Tonight I decided I get one thing that's mine, and it's you."
I'm on my feet without deciding to be.
"So the only question left," she says, and her voice holds steady, "is whether you make me stand out here in this hallway, or you let me in."
I let her in.
She steps in, shuts the door, and turns the lock.
The one she checks in every room she enters, and the small click of it is the loudest sound in the world.
Then she turns around and looks at me.
Everything in me wants to close the distance.
Ages of wanting it, every muscle strung tight with it, and I make myself stand exactly where I am with my hands loose at my sides, because tonight is hers.
All of it. Every inch of it is hers to steer, and I'm not taking a single step she doesn't hand me.
"You're not moving," she says.
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you'll tell me when." My voice drags rough. "You crossed this whole club to get here. You'll cross the last of it too, when you're ready. I've got nowhere else in the world to be."
Her eyes go bright, and she crosses the room.
She comes up flush against me and lays her hands flat on my chest—the way she did in the sunroom, the way she did in the courtyard—except now there's nothing under her palms but thin cotton.
I feel the warmth of every finger through it.
She slides them up and hooks them behind my neck and draws my mouth down to hers.
And then it stops being slow.
She kisses me like she's been holding it in for years, because she has, and I give it back and let her set the tone of it.
How hard, how deep, when to pull me down and when to slow me.
She fists both hands in my shirt and shoves it up.
