Page 101

Then he reached up and turned his hat around backward.

He did it all day long. He did it getting out of the truck, at the stove, once at a preschool morning while holding a glue stick. It was his, the same as his hands were his, and I’d seen it for months and thought nothing of it.

He did it now in the middle of a plain ordinary morning, with the house to ourselves, without breaking eye contact. The brim swung past his ear and he pushed the band down with the heel of his palm, and the hair at his temple flattened under it.

Everything below my ribs dropped. My hands quit moving on the towel. He turned a hat around, and his eyes never left me, and I knew what it meant from my throat to my knees.

“Bedroom,” he said.

I moved.

He shut the bedroom door, which he’d never done in daylight, and the click of the latch dropped straight through me. The room was full of late-morning light off the block wall, with nowhere to stand that wasn’t lit.

“Take your clothes off.”

He didn’t say do you want to. We’d done that properly the first time, with him stopping four inches down a zip to make me say out loud that I’d heard him, and it didn’t need doing again.

I got everything off with my back mostly to him, my socks last, hopping on one foot, and turned around. He hadn’t moved from the door or taken off so much as his hat, and I was standing in his bedroom with nothing on in full daylight.

He looked at my mouth first, then my breasts, long past a glance, then down to my feet and back up. He wasn’t deciding. He’d done that in the kitchen.

“Come here.”

I did. He kissed me, and slowed the morning down to do it, denim and cotton against every bare part of me. When he stopped he left both hands on me and put his mouth by my ear.

“You know I respect you, right? That I’d never hurt you?”

I opened my eyes and my chin dipped, and he studied my face and smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. “Your words, Delaney. I want your words.”

“I know you’d never hurt me,” I stammered in a whisper.

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m about to do some extremely disrespectful things to your body.”

The heat rolled up my neck and dropped straight back down between my legs, and I clenched around nothing.

“On your knees.” He said three words, and I went down onto his bedroom floor, and the running argument I’d been having with myself since August stopped mid-sentence. The tile was hard and cold.

“Good girl,” he said, and my shoulders dropped and my thighs fell open half an inch without my asking them to. “Take my cock out.”

My fingers fumbled on his belt and the buckle took me three tries, and he didn’t help me and didn’t hurry me, he watched. Then he pushed the denim off his hips, wrapped his fist around himself, and worked it, two strokes, three, only letting me watch.

“Look at me.” I looked up. “There she is,” he said. “Open your mouth, Delaney.”

I did, and he fed the head of it in slow, and the noise he made was low and torn out of him, the first sound he’d made all morning that he hadn’t decided to make. His fingers gathered my hair into a fist at the crown of my head, not pulling, there so he could watch.

“That’s it. That’s my girl. Look at how good you are at this.” Every muscle in him had locked. “You’re such a good girl, baby.”

I hummed around him at his praise.

“She likes that,” he said, to the room, to nobody. “Do that again.”

I did, and his fist tightened in my hair, and that was the end of him standing still. He put his other hand on the back of my skull and held my head where he wanted it and used it, and I gave it to him.

“This mouth is mine. You’re mine, Delaney. Do you understand that? Say it.” He drew back and let me up to the tip of him, room for the word and not one syllable further.

“Yours,” I muttered.

“Again.”