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We end up on the bed.

We’ve been in beds before — hotel rooms, my room at Raven House, a library study chair, the back of a memory I’ve been turning over since December thirty-first. But this is different in the way this whole weekend has been different. The pink room, the four-poster bed, the Atlantic outside, and everything she handed me in the dark last night, sitting in the room with us. I know her differently now. She knows I know.

I sit back against the headboard and pull her into my lap and she comes, settling against me, her knees on either side of my hips, her arms coming up around my neck, and we just hold like that for a moment. Her forehead to mine. Looking at each other. No performance, no audience, no rule covering what this is.

“Hey,” she says. Quiet.

“Hey.”

She kisses me. Slow. The kind of kiss I’ve been learning is different from the other kinds — not the urgent, not the midnight, not the have-twenty-minutes version. This one goes where it wants to go, unhurried, and I let it, my hands warm at her hips, and when it deepens she makes the sound that isn’t the hotel sound, the real one, the one that costs her more.

I get her out of her clothes and she gets me out of mine, and then she pulls me close again — sitting up against me, face to face, arms around my neck — and I feel how warm she is, how ready, when I get a hand between us.

“You’re wet for me,” I murmur.

“Always,” she breathes. Like it’s just true.

I keep my hand there, slow, working her clit until she’s rocking against my fingers, her breath catching, her face gone real and present the way it only goes in rooms with no audience. I work her unhurried, watching her — slower than Burlington, slower than Raven House, the whole morning behind us and nowhere to be. She chases it with her hips, shameless, and I feel how ready she is, and I don’t stop until she comes apart quietly against my neck, the sound of it muffled and real and entirely hers.

“Theo.” My name, soft. “Now.”

I reach and she takes me in hand first — warm, steady, her grip sure — and she guides my cock to her entrance, and then she sinks down onto me, slow, taking me in inch by inch, and the sound I make is involuntary, and I don’t care. Because it’s different. This distance, this closeness — her in my lap, chest to chest, her arms around my neck and her thighs around my hips and her eyes on mine, nowhere to look but at each other. No shoulder to bury a face in. No wall behind her. Just her, just me, the full length of us connected and nowhere to hide from what that is. Every other time, we’ve had space to look away, to bury a face in a shoulder, to be close without being quite this close. Not now.

She starts to move. Slow rolls of her hips, finding the depth and the angle, and I keep my hands at her hips without directing, because she knows what she needs and I’m learning to let her take it. I feel everything. All of it, every small shift, every breath, the clench of her when she finds the angle that works and stays there. My cock hitting deep with each movement and her chasing it, and the specific intimacy of watching her chase it on my face without either of us looking away.

“Right there,” she breathes. “Don’t move.”

I hold perfectly still and let her work, and she does, her hips finding the rhythm that’s hers, her clit pressed against me and building, and I watch her chase it, this woman who manages everything, who performs for every room, who has been easy her whole life — and here she is taking exactly what she needs without managing a single thing.

“I’ve got you,” I tell her. Low. My hand coming around to her lower back, steadying. “Take it.”

She comes with her face against mine, our foreheads pressed together, the sound of it nothing like the hotel sounds — quieter, deeper, a breath that went somewhere specific. I feel her around my cock, and I let go, pulling her close, and I’m right behind her, my mouth at her shoulder, her name in my chest instead of out loud.

For a long time after, neither of us moves. We stay exactly like that — her in my lap, her arms around my neck, my arms around her, both of us working to catch our breaths.

“Okay?” she says, into my neck.

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t move. Neither do I.

The room is quiet. The house is quiet. The Atlantic keeps doing what it does, and the dunes hold the house from the wind, and it’s just us in here with the afternoon light coming through the curtains and nowhere to be for another few hours.

I’ve been holding something all trip that I haven’t said yet.

She showed me her things in the dark last night. The performance, the eating disorder, the specific cruelty of Maddison’s version of events. She handed me all of it, and I held it, and I still haven’t given her the equivalent.

After a while she stirs. She climbs off my lap — unhurried, easy, the way she moves when there’s no performance running — and she goes to the bathroom. I hear the water. I lie back against the headboard and I look at the ceiling and I let myself hold what we just did in the pink room, in the four-poster, on Sullivan’s Island.

She comes back in my shirt.

The white button-down, the one I had on this morning, which she’s found from wherever it landed on the floor. She’s got it buttoned halfway, the collar wide, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looks at me from the doorway for a second — no performance, no brightness, just the real one, checking whether this is okay. Like she’s asking permission to be comfortable.

“Come here,” I tell her.

She crosses the room and climbs back onto the bed, tucking herself into my side, her legs folding up under her. I put my arm around her and she settles against me, and the room is very quiet, and the Atlantic is outside, and she’s in my shirt. I reach for my phone on the nightstand. I find the tab — the one I keep in the notes app because it syncs to the laptop and I can update it anywhere. I hold it for a second. Then I turn the screen toward her.

“That’s what I owe my father,” I tell her.