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“Yours. I…I’m yours,” I said, louder.

“That’s right. Now open up.”

He wasn’t gentle after that, and I didn’t want him to be. His thumb dragged along my cheekbone, wiping away a tear, gentle despite the rhythm of his hips. “You’re so fucking beautiful like this. You have no idea.”

Then he pulled all the way out and the complaint came out of me close to a whine, and he laughed at it, low and ruined. There was sweat along his hairline under the band of the hat, the first crack in him all morning.

“Can I come on those beautiful tits?” He didn’t say may I. He said can I, as if he were checking a fact about the world.

“Yes, please,” I replied.

“Christ,” he said, and lost the last of his control. His hand pulled my head back so my breasts pushed up, and I held the position he’d put me in, back arched and face turned up, and he didn’t let go of my hair until he was done.

“Look at you,” he said, hoarse. “God. Look at what you let me do.”

He pulled me up off the floor before my heart slowed, my knees red and printed with the grout line, and carried me into his bathroom and ran the shower until it steamed, holding the back of his wrist under the water to check it. He pulled the hat off and set it on the counter, then lifted me in, and it was hotter than I’d ever have run it myself.

He washed me. He pushed my hair back off my face with both hands and ran the soap over my breasts with his palm, slow, until the last of him had lifted off my skin, then washed each of my hands, one finger at a time, with nothing on his face but concentration.

Nobody had washed me since I was a child. I started shaking partway through, and it wasn’t the cold, and I couldn’t have said whether I’d laugh or break open, and didn’t have to decide, because he got there first.

“Hey.” His hand flattened on my back. “I’ve got you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

Then he brought his mouth against my ear and said, “Good girl. Now hold on to something.”

He sank onto his knees in his own shower with the water sheeting off his back and put one of my legs over his shoulder.

“What are you⁠—”

“You were very good,” he said, against the inside of my thigh. “This is what happens.”

Then he licked into me, broad and slow, and the noise I made hit four tiled walls and bounced back. My hips lifted off the wall and he put his forearm across them, pinning me down.

“Eli—” My voice was shredded. “Eli, wait, I can’t⁠—”

He didn’t stop. He flattened his tongue and dragged it slow through me, then narrowed to the point of it and worked tight circles right where I’d been begging for it, each pass winding me higher, my heel pressed into his back, the water sheeting warm down between us. When he closed his mouth over me and sucked, my knees quit under me and the sound I made wasn’t a word. It climbed from the soles of my feet and took the rest of me with it. My thighs locked around his head. My body drew tight around the two fingers he’d worked into me, and he curled them up and kept his tongue moving through all of it, until it broke and I came apart against the tile with his forearm the one thing holding me up. It was nothing like the ones I’d given myself in the casita bed. This one had a man attached to it, and somebody else had decided in advance that it would happen to me, and when.

Afterward he wrapped me in a towel, lifted me onto the counter, and dried my hair, badly, rubbing with both hands until it stood up.

“Was that too much?”

I looked at him. The seriousness was what undid me. He’d said the filthiest sentences that had ever been said to me, and now he stood between my knees with an expression I recognized from parent conferences.

“No,” I said.

“You’d tell me?”

“I would tell you.”

He went back to drying my hair, and I let a professional athlete do a bad job on my head.

“You’re doing the thing,” he said. “Where you go somewhere.” He turned my chin with two fingers. “Stay here. Say what you’re thinking.”