Page 72 of Crown of Thorns

"Say it properly."

"I understand you." A pause. His voice has gone somewhere I have never heard it go. "Renny."

"That's better."

I examine him the way a veterinarian examines a wound. I trace his chest. I count his ribs. I map the scars he's collected over fifteen years of violence. I touch the small tattoo on his collarbone—the Gallagher mark, family ink. I press my lips to it. I breathe against his skin.

He's completely still. His hands are gripping the headboard rail. His jaw is clenched. He's holding back something enormous, and I'm the one holding him in place now.

I take him in my hand first. Not gently. He is already hard and getting harder and I stroke him slowly and watch his stomach go tight and his hands close on the headboard rail above his head, and I keep the rhythm exactly where it is, unchanging, until his hips start to come up off the mattress to meet me. Then I stop.

"No," I say.

"Renny."

"You had ten months of me deciding nothing." I put my mouth on him, briefly, just enough, and lift off again. "Ten months. So you can have twenty minutes."

I straddle him. I don't rush. I hold him against me and slide along the length of him without letting him in, wet enough that he can feel exactly what he isn't getting, and I do that until his jaw is locked and there is sweat at his hairline and the tendons stand out along both forearms.

"Tell me what you want."

"You know what I want."

"I want it out loud. In the words. You've spent your whole life talking around things."

He tells me. In the plainest and filthiest terms available to him, in two languages, and he does not look away from my face while he does it, and by the end of it his voice is not steady and neither is anything else about him.

"Better," I say. "Again."

He says it again. I let him get about half of it out and then I reach between us and hold him steady and take just the head of him inside me and stop there, and the sound he makes goes through the whole room.

I hold him there. Just the head of him. I don't move and I don't let him move, and I watch what it does to his face, and what it does to his face is worth every one of the ten months.

His arms are still above his head. The tendons stand out along them like cable under the skin. There is a vein at his temple I have never seen before tonight.

"You're shaking," I tell him.

"I know."

"Say why."

"Because you're going to make me wait."

"Good." I lift off him completely. The sound he makes has no dignity left in it at all. "Now say the other thing."

"What other thing."

"The thing you said on the blood-oath night. Into my throat. The word you decided I wouldn't repeat."

He says it. Flat and low and stripped of every piece of control he carried into this room, and it lands on me the way it landed in January, except that in January I was underneath him and tonight I am not.

"Again."

He says it again. I take two inches of him and stop. He says it a third time without being asked, and that is the moment I understand that I have him. Completely. And that he understands it too. And that neither of us will mention it downstairs.

I keep him there a long time. I use my hand. I use my mouth again, twice, each time only long enough to find out what it does to his breathing. Every time he gets close I stop and let it recede, exactly the way he did to me in a third-floor bedroom in January when I still thought of him as a problem to be managed, and the symmetry isn't lost on either of us.

"Please," he says.