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Because apparently something's genuinely wrong with me. I never wanted it like this before. With Charles it was always soft, bland, careful, and now, with this maniac who does his best work on the dead, some switch has been flipped in me that I can't flip back. All I want is more of it. All I want is the ache of him, the force of him. The going-too-far.

He lifts his head and looks up at me, this powerful, terrifying man sprawled across a cemetery plot with grass in his hair. The sight is almost ridiculous. Then I see his cock already stirring, and a slow smile spreads over his handsome face.

"Such a greedy little kwiatuszek," he murmurs.

I have no idea what he just called me. But I climb over him anyway, ignoring the cold biting into my knees, and sink down onto him until he fills me completely. It’s too much...

"You're right about one thing," I breathe, rolling my hips and feeling every inch of the stretch. "You're too big, and I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow."

He grins up at me like I've just told him a fresh body is being delivered on Christmas morning. His hands come up to my breasts under the sweater, thumbs dragging over my nipples, then pinching, and the small, sharp pain makes me clench around him so hard.

"You're soaking, ma macabre," he says, watching the place where our bodies meet with the same focused reverence he probably gives a difficult restoration. "And you can take it. Look how well your pussy grips me. Like it doesn't want to let me go." He tips his chin up, eyes half-lidded. "Now ride me before you freeze to death on top of the only man who adores you to death."

Those words shouldn't do anything to me. But they do everything to me. They make me do something wild and remove my sweater, leaving my body completely bare to the elements. To him.

I close my eyes and ride him, increasing the pace, chasing the drag and the fullness, and I keep going until we're both panting and the cold air scrapes my throat because I can't seem to get enough oxygen into my lungs. My thighs are burning. My head is light. It’s cold in the graveyard but the heat of him surrounds me, lights my insides in flames, and I don’t give a fuck. I abandon myself to the rhythm; the only option is to feel.

“Please, I wanna cum. I want to feel your cock all the way inside. Please. Don’t stop.”

He obliges by thrusting harder, and I see stars.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”

Laszlo slides an arm around the small of my back and lifts himself up so he can get deeper, and there's no space left between us at all. I lean down and we are chest-to-chest now. His mouth finds mine as he thrusts up into me.

His tongue slides against mine, unhurried, and the new angle drives him into a place inside me that makes my whole spine light up. Before I can take the next breath, that feeling starts again at the pit of my stomach, tingling through my core, and I’m coming once more, breaking apart on his lap with a broken sound swallowed straight into his mouth.

"That's it," he says against my lips, one hand fisted in my hair to keep my head exactly where he wants it. "That's it, moja Manon. Give me one more. I know you have one more in you. You always do."

"I can't," I whimper, still riding out the last of it. "Laszlo, I can't…"

"You can." He rolls his hips up in a slow, cruel circle that finds the exact spot again. "You're a doctor. You know precisely how much your body can take. And your body," another roll, another spark, "is telling me you're lying."

He's right and I hate him, and hate him some more. Soon enough, I come apart a fourth—fifth?—time. I shout out his name to the heavens, my scream resounding so that a couple of birds burst out of a nearby tree. He follows me over the edge a second time with a shudder and a groan pressed into my collarbone, holding me so tightly I couldn't fall if I tried. Both of us are trembling, utterly finished, laid out as we are, obscenely across the plot of ground he bought so we could rot together for eternity.

For a long moment, neither of us moves. My cheek is against his temple. His heart is slamming under my palm. I could genuinely fall asleep here, on top of him, and I think that says something deeply twisted about the state of my psyche … and marriage.

Laszlo goes still beneath me.

"Manon," he says, and there's a thread of something almost like laughter under the calm. "I think we have a little audience."

I gasp and try to turn around, but my muscles are sore, and now the cold creeps in with a vengeance.

"We have a what?"

"Look to the left," he murmurs, one hand sliding up to press the spot between my shoulder blades, anchoring me. "Slowly. Toward the chapel gate."

I lift my head to look.

There, across the silvery rows of white headstones, standing just inside the little iron gate that leads up from the lane, are three old women, bundled in headscarves and heavy coats, each clutching a bunch of flowers to lay on some beloved’s grave at this hour. They're too far away for me to make out their faces. But I do know they’re so rigid, they’d pass for statues. I bet the last thing they expected to find were a couple of strangers copulating by the one gravestone that stands out among the rest.

"Oh my God." I scramble, grabbing for anything, finding grass and Laszlo's sweater and my coat somewhere behind me out of reach … and nothing else that will cover me. "Oh my God, Laszlo. There are three women…"

"There are." He sounds, if anything, delighted. He sits up with me still half in his lap, entirely unbothered, and lifts one hand toward the gate in a gracious, appalling little wave, as if he's greeting them at a garden party. "Good morning, ladies."

That's all it takes. The three shapes break apart at once and hurry back down the lane, coats flapping, flowers still clutched to their chests, moving at a speed that frankly, as a doctor, I find very reassuring for women their age.

"You waved at them." I'm getting my arms into his sweater and pulling it over my head, not quite managing to look at him. "You fucking waved."