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I get my hand between us. She’s soaked, and she comes up onto her knees to give me the room, and for a while the only thing happening in this house is her working herself on my fingers and telling me in two languages what to do with them.

She stays up there while I get the pants off one-handed. She doesn’t help.

I reach past her for the packet and she lifts it out of my fingers. Then she puts it back in my hand.

“Guess correctly,” she says.

I do it. She watches me do it.

Then she gets a hand between us and puts me where she wants me.

She takes the first of it slowly and stops.

“Do not move.”

I don’t move. Her forehead comes down on mine and I can hear her working out what to do about the rest of me, her breath going short against my face, her hand still around the base of me holding back what she hasn’t taken.

The lamp is on. I can see all of it.

“Astrid.”

“Be quiet.”

She takes a little more and stops again, and her whole body goes tight across the front, and she says something that’s not a word.

“You want help with that?”

“I said be quiet.”

She works down the rest of it in stages, with her hand coming off me an inch at a time, and by the time she’s all the way down she has her forehead on my shoulder and she’s breathing like a woman at the end of something rather than the start.

Neither of us moves for a few seconds.

Then she sits up, and her hands find my shoulders, and she grips the left one. The right one she only rests on.

Then she starts to move. Slow while she works out the angle, and then she finds it and everything about her changes, her mouth open and her breath going out of her on every drop. I get my thumb on her clit and she swears in Swedish and doesn’t slow down for it.

“Eleven weeks you had your hands on me,” I tell her.

She doesn’t answer that. Her nails go into my left shoulder and she rides me harder.

I get my right arm around her back and start to turn us over, because that’s where I want her, and her palm comes flat against my chest.

She doesn’t push. She doesn’t have to. She holds me where I am and keeps moving, and she doesn’t say why.

There are two reasons it could be. I don’t ask which.

So I stay where she put me.

She takes it from there. Both hands on my chest, her hair down over one shoulder, working herself on me at a pace I didn’t choose and wouldn’t have picked, and my hands are on her hips and they’re not steering anything.

“Harder.”

She goes harder.

My left hand is on her hip and I can feel her moving under it and almost nothing else. It has been like that since November. I move it to her thigh, where it still works, and hold on there.

She’s loud in the wrong language and then she’s not loud at all. Her eyes stay open the whole way through it, on me.