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I know exactly what he wants. I consider, briefly, killing him.

“Please.”

“There she is.”

He gives me harder. He does not check whether that was the right amount.

“All of it.”

He gives me that too.

Under my fingers his left hand slips on the sheet. He sets it again.

There is a child asleep at the other end of this hallway. I know exactly how far sound carries in this house, because I have listened for her from every room in it.

I put my face into the pillow.

It is not enough.

“You go tight on my cock right before you get loud,” he says. “Every time.”

His right hand leaves my back and covers my mouth before I can prove him right. His palm is warm and his fingers lie along my jaw and he does not slow down to do it.

“Quiet.”

It is not a request, and the fact that it is not a request does something to me I will be examining later.

Something gets past his hand anyway. He hears it.

He goes harder.

My fingers are still around his wrist. I do not use them.

I pull his hand off my mouth long enough to say it.

“Do not be careful with me.”

Then I put it back myself.

Whatever he had left, he stops holding on to. The headboard finds the wall, and he reaches past me and braces his arm against it, and the sound goes out of the room and into his shoulder.

I come with my forehead against the sheet and his palm across my mouth and his name going into it. I clench around him so hard he swears into my hair.

He takes the hand away.

“Again,” he says, and he does not stop. “I want one more out of you.”

“Colt.”

I hear it in the room this time. So does he. He comes with both hands on my hips and his forehead between my shoulder blades, and the sound he makes is not one I have heard from him before.

For a while neither of us moves.

Then both of us are listening.

The house does what houses do. The refrigerator. Something settling in a wall. No door. No feet on the landing.

“She sleeps like her mother,” Colt says.