Page 78 of Honeyfires

I held her through it. Felt the last tremors ease.

"One," I said, against her shoulder.

She laughed, unsteady and spent. "One," she agreed.

I gave her sixty seconds. Then I said, "Kitchen."

"I can't walk," she informed me.

"Yes, you can."

She could. Barely. I walked behind her with my hand at the small of her back, steering, and felt her collect herself with every step until we reached the kitchen doorway and she turned to look at me with that expression I'd learned meant she was nervous and excited in equal measure and intended to pretend it was entirely the former.

"Up," I said, and lifted her onto the counter before she'd finished the thought, her thighs falling open around my hips automatically. The same counter where she'd made us breakfast this morning. Where she'd make us breakfast tomorrow.

I reached up to the cabinet above the refrigerator and found the dish towel she kept folded over the handle.

She watched me take it down.

"Petra," she said.

"Do you trust me?"

"Yes."

"Then give me your hands."

She held them out. I wrapped the dish towel loosely around her wrists, nothing she couldn't slip free from in two seconds, both of us knowing it, both of us knowing that wasn't the point, and set them on the counter edge beside her hips.

"Keep them there," I said.

She looked down at her loosely bound wrists. "Okay," she said quietly.

I took my time.

I kissed down her throat, her collarbone, her chest, her stomach, all of it, with the particular patience of someone who had nowhere else in the world to be. She was trembling before I'd gotten below her ribs, her breath coming in short pulls, her wrists staying where I'd put them even though she could have moved them at any moment.

That was the part I loved. That she chose to hold still. That the whole dynamic lived in that choice, freely made, renewed with every second she didn't move.

When I finally dropped to my knees on our kitchen floor and put my mouth on her, she made a sound that probably carried to the landing. Her hands went rigid on the counter's edge. Her thighs pressed against my head. I pinned her hips and worked her slowly, learning her again in this new context, our kitchen, our home, her wrists loosely bound with our dish towel and her taste on my tongue.

"Petra—please—I'm so close—"

I pulled back.

"What— no—"

"Ask me."

"I—please, Petra, please let me come, please—"

"Please, what?"

A sound of pure frustration. "Please, can I come?"

"Please, who?"

She made a sound that was not a word and contained volumes.