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"And then I'd tell him about tonight." His mouth is at my ear, his stubble on my jaw, his hand not stopping. "I'd tell him what you smelled like when you came home to me. I’d tell him I had to change that smell. To mine."

I'm gone. I'm right there, my hand in his hair, my back arching⁠—

The valve opens.

That soft hiss, all the air going at once, everything unclenching … and his hand lifts away in the same half-second. A superhuman sound escapes my lips because I want to fucking die. The bastard!

"Ask me to stop," he says, perfectly level.

I don't.

He pumps it up again.

He does it twice more, and each time is worse than the last, because each time he learns another thing about my body and uses it against me. His fingers work me slow and deep while the cuff swells tight around my thigh, and I grab the edge of the counter, shut my eyes and try to swallow the noise, but it escapes me anyway. I know he can see it, and that he knows the exact moment I'm about to climax, the bastard.

That's when he stops. Fingers still, valve open, that soft hiss as the pressure drops out of my leg and takes the orgasm with it, right out of my hands.

The second time, I come up off the counter with a keening moan and fist my hand in his shirt, right over the stitches I put in his shoulder a week ago. I dig my knuckles in. I want him to feel something too. He doesn't even flinch. He just waits, calm as a man asking how I take my coffee, until I've stopped shaking enough for him to start again.

"You could just say it," he murmurs. "One syllable. You say worse to nurses."

"I fucking hate you."

"You've mentioned." Squeeze. "It's becoming a whole thing."

The third time, I'm sobbing, tears running down my cheeks. I am so turned on and so denied that my body doesn't know what else to do. I want to come so badly it's stopped being pleasure and it's pure agony now. He is doing this to me slowly, on purpose, with a piece of my own medical equipment, watching me fall apart.

"Please."

"That's not the word."

"Laszlo—"

"Not that either."

He opens the valve yet another time. The hiss, the drop, the ache of it rushing back into my leg, and his hand lifting away right at the peak, and I really want to kill him. I could genuinely do it, in a more gruesome manner than he can ever imagine. His homicide fantasies would be child’s play.

All night he's told me the same thing. Say stop and he stops, no argument. That's the one word that ends this. And it's not the word climbing up my throat. The word I want to say is please, more, finish it. I'll get on my knees, do anything, but I hate that those are the words, not the other one. I want to slide off this counter and take his hard cock in my mouth just to feel like I did one thing tonight he didn't plan.

I don't speak though. I clamp my teeth down on all of it and stare at the ceiling, because I am not going to be the one who breaks first. Not right now.

He knows. Of course he knows. And he does the worst possible thing about it, which is nothing.

He straightens up slowly, undoes the cuff and rolls it properly, tube tucked in, the way it's meant to be done. Then he puts everything back in my bag, the pens, the throat lozenges, the gloves. The cuff goes back in its drawer. He zips the bag and sets it beside my hip, ready for my shift at eleven, like he hasn't just left me wrecked and dripping on my own counter.

He washes his hands in my sink, wrists and all, dries them on my dish towel, and hangs it back exactly where it lives.

I'm still on the counter. I don't trust my legs yet and I am not giving him the satisfaction of watching me find that out.

He's hard. Painfully, obviously hard, and he doesn't do one thing to hide it. He sees me clock it, sees me wonder if this cost him anything at all.

"Yes," he says, answering the look. "Obviously. You think this was easy for me."

"You could—" let me. I could get down on my knees and suck you off.

"I could." He picks his coat off the chair. "But you haven't said it. Out loud, in words. We agreed on the terms at the engagement party, remember? I'm not going to be the one who cheats."

His words feel like a slap in the face. As the shame hits me, he reaches over, picks my underwear off the counter, and puts them in his coat pocket.