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Then she gathers her wrists together and holds them out to me again.

“I want your hand back,” she says.

I close my fingers around her wrists. I don’t warn her or promise anything or ask if she’s sure. She already told me. Believing her now, as completely as I believed her breathing a minute ago, is the only respect I have to give.

She breathes out and leans into me. The relief in her face is the look of somebody who tested a fact and found it true.

She kisses me harder this time. I pin her wrists against the pillow above my shoulder and slide my other hand back into her jeans. She takes my fingers deep and rolls her hips down onto them.

“There,” she says. “Keep that.”

I keep exactly that. Same pressure, same angle, nothing for show.

She comes with her forehead pressed to mine and her wrists pulling hard against my grip, not away, just upward, using me to push against while it tears through her. I hold steady through all of it, watching her eyes stay on mine.

When it eases, I let go.

She climbs off and strips the rest of the way and stands naked beside the bed in the clear lamplight, no shadow to make her choice look like anything but what it is.

She rolls the condom on me herself and grips me once at the base, firm and possessive, before she lets go.

“Left sides,” she says. “Your leg stays straight.”

We work it out slowly. I lie on my left side with pillows under my right leg from thigh to ankle. She lies in front of me, her back to my chest, and reaches between us and guides me into her.

She takes me a little at a time, moving back onto me while I stay still, until I’m all the way inside her.

I grip the sheet. Every protective instinct I have has been bent into a reason to decide for somebody else. She strips it down to its bones. Notice. Answer. Don’t steal the next choice.

She draws forward and presses back. She finds the angle that keeps my leg quiet and gives her the pace, and she uses it.

Then she reaches back, takes my free hand, and brings it around to the center of her chest and puts both her wrists into it again.

I hold them there. With my other hand I reach down between her legs, and she spreads her knees and moves back onto me and forward onto my fingers, both at once.

Her heart knocks against my palm, fast but even. She’s here. I’m here. The door is open.

“Harder,” she says.

I tighten my grip without crushing and thrust forward as she drives back. My leg hates it, but the pillows hold it and she takes most of the movement into her own body. She makes a low broken sound every time I fill her, like she refuses to waste a single one.

“Cole.”

She says my name once, and her whole body locks around me. I work her through it, feeling her shake, feeling her wrists strain in my hand, and the sight of my hand holding what she gave me pulls me over right behind her.

I loosen my grip the instant her wrists stop pushing. Then I open my hand all the way and lay both hands on the mattress where she can see them.

She turns her head on the pillow. Her eyes go from my open hands to my face.

Then she reaches back, catches my wrist, and pulls my arm around her.

I lie there holding her, and I think: I would lose the ranch for this. I would lose every key I ever carried. I would lose all of it, and I wouldn’t even have to think about it.

I don’t say it. It isn’t hers to carry yet.

* * *

Later, after water and a checked bandage, she opens her phone.