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“Move,” she said. “Please, move.”

I moved. Every time she started to get loud I put my thumb against her bottom lip and she closed her mouth around it, and that did more to me than anything either of us said all night. The number rode up her stomach. I put it back down, put it back down again, and gave up.

“Eli—” She was clawing at my forearm. “I can’t⁠—”

“You can.” I slowed right down, which she hated, and the noise out of her was pure complaint. “Look at me.”

She did.

“There she is.” I pressed my thumb to her clit, slick off her own wet, and started moving again, and she came apart six inches from me with her hair stuck to her face and my number bunched under her ribs. “Good girl. Now.”

She came with both hands fisted in the jersey and her heels locked at the base of my spine, and she said it into my mouth, completely deliberate, one word, in a voice she’d been keeping back since the day I met her.

“Daddy.”

I stopped. It wasn’t long. Two breaths, maybe. It was long enough for her to hear me do it.

Her eyes opened. She’d gone still underneath me, and I could see her deciding whether she’d just made a mistake, and I wasn’t having one second of that.

“Say it again,” I said, against her mouth.

“Daddy.”

“Once more.”

“Daddy. Please.”

I stopped being careful after that. I put the next part low against her ear, where only she could have it, and I said the things I’d never once let out in that house.

“You’re mine.” I rolled into her, slow and deep, and she took all of it with her breath coming apart. “Say it back to me.”

“I’m yours.”

“This too.” I pressed my lips under her ear and down the line of her throat, to the pulse going wild there. “You wore my name out in front of a full building so every one of them would know whose you are. Didn’t you.”

“Yes,” she managed. “Yes.”

“I watched you do it from the ice and nearly forgot how to play.” I set my teeth light at her shoulder. “You’ve soaked these sheets for me, and you’re going to do it again before I let you sleep.”

She clenched around me, helpless with it, and I worked her through it and gave her nowhere to go.

“When I can breathe again, I’m turning you over, and I’m going to take my time with you.” Her body pulled tight under mine. “You’re going to stay just like this and let me. Open, and quiet, and you’re going to thank me when I’m done.”

“Please,” she said, past anything careful now. “Please, Eli.”

“Let go.” I brought my mouth to her throat. “Let go for me.”

She did, and I went with her, buried as deep as she’d take me, hard enough the edges of the room went white, shaking into her with her hand fisted in my hair and her open mouth on my shoulder.

“Still with me,” I said. It didn’t land as a question.

“No,” she said.

I laughed, and put my forehead down onto her shoulder, and she pressed her palm to the side of my face and didn’t take it away.

I woke up a little after three. The hall light was on and my door stood open two inches. I’d got up at some point and opened it, the same as I had every night since Edmonton, and I had no memory of doing it.

Delaney was asleep on her stomach beside me with one hand under the pillow and her face turned toward me. She had the jersey on, nothing else. It had twisted in the night so my name sat crooked across her back, and there was a mark coming up under her jaw that she was going to have opinions about in the morning.