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My hands move slowly across her skin, working the ointment into each mark with a pressure that shifts from firm to gentle whenever she tenses. I check the places that make her hiss and spend more time there, circling my thumb over the edges of the bruising until her muscles loosen under my touch.
“You’re being careful,” she says after a minute. Her voice has lost the edge. “Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why are you being so gentle now when you’re the one who made me sore?”
The question hangs between us. I keep my hands moving, focusing on the heat of her skin under my palms, the way her breathing is now matching the rhythm of my strokes.
“Hurting you because I choose to is different from leaving you hurting afterward.” I say it simply because it is simple. It’s the most basic rule I know.
She goes quiet. The kind of quiet that tells me something landed.
I give her space to sit with it. My hands keep working, smoothing the ointment over her ass and down to the curve of her thighs.
“I liked it more than I expected,” she admits. Her voice is soft, muffled by the pillow. “The punishment.”
Pride moves through me before I can stop it. Not because she liked the punishment, although I’d be lying if I said that didn’t please the fuck out of me. Because she said it. No embarrassment. No trying to give me the answer she thinks I want.
She’s getting better at that—telling me what she wants, what she likes, what she doesn’t. Even earlier, when she finally admitted she wanted my cock but wasn’t ready for all of it, she didn’t hide from the truth just because it complicated what she wanted.
Fuck, I like watching her find her voice.
“I know you did.” I let my thumb trace the crease where her ass meets her thigh, and she doesn’t pull away. “I could tell by how quickly your indignation turned into begging.”
“Don’t you dare,” she snips, but there’s no heat in it.
“Begging me not to stop.” I lean down, my mouth close to her ear. “Begging me to make you come on my fingers while I kept your ass burning.”
She lifts her head and shoots me a look that would melt steel. “Don’t forget I almost made you come with my hand. You had to stop me.”
Fuck. She’s not wrong. And judging by the smug look on her face, she’s damn proud of herself. Good. She should be.
“You did,” I admit. “And it won’t happen again.”
“Wait, what? Are you saying you won’t let me touch you again?”
I chuckle. “No, baby. That’s not what I’m saying.” My voice drops lower. “I’m saying that next time, I won’t stop you.”
She holds my gaze for a beat, and I watch the flush spread from her cheeks down her neck before she buries her face in the pillow again, but I catch the smile she’s trying to hide.
The conversation shifts after that. The teasing softens, becoming something easier. She stays sprawled beneath my hands, and I keep working the ointment into her skin long after the redness has started to fade, because I like the way her body sinks into the mattress when I touch her. Like she trusts the weight of my hands.
“Do you ever sleep?” she asks after a while. “Like, actually sleep? Because I’ve woken up at least five times in the middle of the night and you were gone.”
“Sometimes.” I move my hands to her lower back, digging my thumbs into the muscles on either side of her spine. She groans, and the sound goes straight to my cock. “Not often, though.”
“What do you do when you’re not working?”
I consider deflecting. I always deflect. But she’s lying here with my marks on her skin, and something about the way she asked—casual, curious, not digging—makes the wall harder to maintain.
“I read. Old books. History, mostly.” My thumbs press deeper, and she makes that sound again. “Sometimes I sit on the balcony and drink whiskey until the sun comes up.”
“Alone?”
“Always.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “That sounds lonely.”
