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My red heels are where I put them when I came in.

I pick them up and put them on. One, and then the other. I take my time with the second one.

Four inches. It puts my mouth level with his throat.

“Say it.”

“Not yet.”

He comes across the room and puts his mouth on my shoulder, and there is nothing careful left anywhere in it. His beard is rough. I turn my head and give him my neck.

His left hand comes up my ribs and stops with the fingers spread wide, as though he needs to see where he is touching me. I lift it the rest of the way myself. His palm is warm. He closes his hand, and my breathing stops being something I arrange.

“Astrid.”

“Do not stop.”

His mouth goes down my throat. He puts his right hand on the wall to get lower and the arm stops short, and he covers it by sliding the left under my thigh and lifting instead.

I put my foot back on the floor.

“Here,” I say. “Standing.”

His eyes go to the stairs and come back. I do not give him the second he wants.

“I am not going to ask twice.”

He laughs against my collarbone.

Then he stops laughing, and he goes down.

Not all at once. He takes his mouth down my throat and across my chest and stays there long enough that my hand goes into his hair and closes, and then lower, with one palm flat on my stomach holding me against the wall.

He gets onto his knees in his own hallway in a suit that cost more than my first car.

“Leg over my shoulder.”

I look down at him.

“Astrid.”

I put my leg over his shoulder.

The heel makes it possible. The wall makes it possible. He makes it possible by taking most of my weight on one forearm across my hips and not appearing to find it difficult, and I have measured the strength in that man’s arms with instruments and I have never had it used on me.

Then his mouth is on my pussy and the evening stops having a sequence.

I have had years of practice at being a woman who makes no sound. Thin walls. A sleeping child ten feet away. A marriage in which quiet was the most useful thing I did. The practice is old enough that I had stopped experiencing it as a decision.

It lasts about forty seconds.

He is unhurried about it, which I would not have predicted from a man who cannot sit still in a waiting room. He changes things until my hands answer him, and then he stops changing anything at all, and that is the method, and I am the woman who taught it to him in a room with a chart, and neither of us is going to say so tonight.

His tongue stays exactly where it is. Two fingers push up into me and curl.

My head goes back against the wall.

I say something in Swedish.