Page 79 of Honeyfires

"Please, Petra. Please."

I put my mouth back on her and gave her what she'd asked for, and she came so hard her legs locked around my head and she said my name like it was the only word she knew.

When I stood, she was leaning back on her bound wrists, staring at the ceiling, chest heaving.

"Two," she managed.

"Two," I agreed, and untied the dish towel. Pressed a kiss to each wrist. Watched her watch me do it, unguarded and overwhelmed, trying not to show it and not quite succeeding.

"Shower," I said.

"Give me thirty seconds."

"You've got twenty."

She got off the counter faster than the circumstances strictly warranted.

I had the water running before she'd made it down the hall. She stepped in behind me, and the steam rose around us immediately, the hot water cutting through the last of the day—the moving boxes, the crew, the pizza, all of it dissolving.

"My turn," she said, and her voice had that quality it sometimes got, the voice of a woman who had been taken apart twice and had something to say about it.

"Is it?" I said.

"It is." She pressed me back against the tile with both hands on my shoulders, and I let myself be moved, looking down at her. She was flushed from steam and from everything that had come before, her hair dark and wet, water running over the curves of her body.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I want to be on my knees," she said, "and I want you to tell me what to do."

My stomach tightened. "Vera."

"Tell me." She held my gaze. "Say please. I want to hear it."

I looked at her for one moment. "On your knees. Please."

The smile she gave me was radiant and wicked, and entirely earned.

She sank down, the water cascading over her shoulders, and looked up at me with those darkened eyes and wet lashes, and then she put her mouth on me, and I stopped thinking in sentences entirely.

I kept one hand in her wet hair and she used that anchor the way she always did, tilting into it, and she worked me with everything she'd learned, five months of paying close attention.

"Faster," I said, when I was close.

She slowed.

I stared down at her.

She looked up, poised, waiting.

"Please," I said.

The smile against my skin ruined the last of my coherence. She gave me what I asked for, and I came with my hand fisted in her hair and her name on my lips and the hot water still running over us both.

She stood, swollen-lipped and deeply pleased with herself.

"How was that?" she asked.

"You know exactly how that was."