Page 57 of The Drifter

I nodded.

"But I have to help my brothers," I said. "Whatever it turns out to be. I came because they asked, and they've never once asked. I can't walk away from that."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then, she took my face in her hand and kissed me, soft and sure.

"I wouldn't expect anything different," she said, against my mouth. "That's not a thing I'd change."

She was warm and bare in my lap and the kiss went on a beat past comfort. My body did a thing before I'd signed off on it. She felt it happen under her. She pulled back an inch and grinned at me, slow and entirely without mercy.

"Good morning," she said.

"It's shaping up."

She laughed, and shifted, deliberate. I took a breath through my teeth. I decided a change of subject was the only honorable exit.

"Tell me about that bathtub," I said.

Her whole face lit.

I'd seen it the first night, hunting the light switch—a tub the size of a stock tank, white as a new hat, standing on clawed feet in a bathroom that had clearly been built around it. It didn't match the rest of the place. Everything else in her home was handsome and careful and sensible. The tub was a throne.

"You noticed."

"It's hard to miss. It's the biggest thing in the building that isn't the building."

"That," she said, sitting up straighter in my lap, "is the one thing I really spent money on. The whole condo, I bought smart. Good bones, good view, didn't touch a thing. Except that." She held up one finger. "Since I was a little girl, I have had one idea fixed in my head, and the idea was a bathtub fit for a queen. I blame a princess movie. Some Disney thing with a castle. It planted a seed. Somewhere down in me there was always going to be a tub."

"So, you built the castle around the tub."

"I found the tub," she said. "That's the good part. There was a boutique hotel down the peninsula, beautiful old property, went under a few years back. And when they closed, they sold everything. Everything. Drapes, doorknobs, chandeliers, the lot, whole ballrooms walking out the door piece by piece. And I went down there on my lunch break—in my blouse, on my feet all day, I had no business—and there it was. Cast iron. Original. They'd had it in the honeymoon suite."

"And you haggled."

"Clint." She put her hand on her chest. "I negotiated like my grandmother was watching. The man never had a chance. He started at a number and I looked at him the way you look at a guest who wants a free upgrade on Memorial Day weekend. By the end of it, he was helping me arrange delivery just to get me out of the building."

I was grinning. I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.

"It took four men to bring it up here," she said. "Four. They had to take the door off the hinges and open up the doorframe. One of them told me it was the heaviest thing he'd moved in twenty years of moving, and I tipped them like it was a wedding. And then, I sat in it that first night, in water up to my chin, in my own home, and I—" she stopped, and her voice went somewhere softer. "It was the first thing I ever bought that wasn't useful. That's all. It doesn't do anything a shower doesn't do. It's just mine, and it's ridiculous. I love it."

"So, it's a nice tub," I said.

She looked at me. Then, she reached down between us and wrapped her hand around my cock, firm and sure. My whole spine reported in.

"Come, find out," she said.

I lifted her.

She came up out of that chair wrapped around me, laughing into my neck. I carried her down the hall, into the bathroom, and set her down on the rolled edge of that great white beast of a tub. She leaned over and got the water going—old brass fixtures, the handles squeaking a note apiece—and steam started climbing off the stream. While the tub filled, we kissed like teenagers.

That's the only word for it. Her sitting on the tub edge, me standing between her knees, her arms looped up around my neck, both of us trading long, easy, greedy kisses with the water thundering behind her and the steam fogging the mirror and the morning nobody was allowed to interrupt. She'd break off to test the water and come back. I'd break off to look at her and she'd pull me back. The room went warm and blind around us.

The tub filled deep. We got in—me first, at her direction, my back against the sloped end, and then her, folding down into the water between my legs with a hiss and a sigh. She'd been right about all of it. The thing fit two people the way her whole life had refused to. The heat came up around us and took every mile out of my body at once.

She found a loofah and a bottle of something that smelled like almonds, worked up a lather, and turned around in the water to face me.

"Hold still," she said. "You're filthy."

"I showered yesterday."