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She reaches past me to the drawer without looking and puts a condom in my hand. That’s the only instruction I get all night, and it isn’t one. I set it on the nightstand for later.

She kisses me, and it isn’t where we left off. There’s nothing careful in it and nothing checking, and when I get a hand into her hair she makes a sound I’ve heard exactly once before, through my own fingers.

I put my mouth on her throat, then lower, and I keep going.

Earlier she caught my face before I got anywhere near this. Her hand comes to my jaw now the same way, and I stop an inch above her stomach. Her call.

Her fingers slide into my hair.

I settle between her thighs with my shoulders holding them open. She’s still soaked from the first time, and the first slow drag of my tongue gets me her heel in my back.

I find her clit and stay on it.

She drags the pillow over her own face. I can hear her through it every time I change what I’m doing, so I stop changing anything.

My right arm’s under her thigh. The left stays flat on the mattress, where it can’t let me down.

She’s got both hands in my hair and she isn’t steering. She doesn’t need to. I’m already where she wants me, and I’m not leaving until she’s done.

She comes with her thighs locked against my ears, and I stay with her through all of it until she gets a fist in my hair and drags me up.

Then she takes my right arm and moves it.

She does it the way she used to do it across a table, with her thumb finding the front of the joint and her other hand under my elbow, except she’s naked and she’s putting the arm where it can carry weight instead of where it can be measured. Eleven weeks of learning what my shoulder will and won’t do, and this is what she does with it.

She doesn’t say one word about why.

I get the condom on. I get my knee between hers and she takes the rest of me down on top of her, and for the first time since a hotel room I’d rather not discuss, I’m over a woman with my weight on my arms and nothing giving out.

“Astrid.”

“No.”

Fine.

The lamp is still on. She hasn’t turned it off and she isn’t covering anything and she’s looking straight up at me while I push into her, and she’s wet enough that there’s nothing to negotiate. Her knees come up along my ribs.

I go slow for about four strokes.

Then she gets a hand behind my head and brings my mouth down to her breast and holds it there.

She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t tell me. She puts me where she wants me and keeps me there with her fingers in my hair, and when I get my mouth around her nipple she arches up off the bed and holds my head harder.

Jesus Christ.

I come off her long enough to see her face and she pushes me back down.

Twice more. Both times she puts me back.

Careful is gone, and I’m not going to go looking for it. I get an arm under her lower back and take the angle I want and she finds out about it immediately.

“Colt.”

“Quiet,” I say, which is funny right up until I understand she can’t be and neither can I.

My left hand is on the headboard because it’s the only thing I can do with it that works. It doesn’t grip and it doesn’t have to. I hold the wood still with the flat of it so the bed doesn’t walk into the plaster, and I keep going.

She comes with both hands on my back and her mouth against my shoulder, and she bites down, which is new, and it’s going to be there in the morning, and I’m going to look at it.