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“There were ten square ones on that table tonight.” She folded the towel, folded it again. “She cut them wrong and you filled every single one and boiled the lot anyway, and not a one had any business going near a pot, and she ate all ten and wouldn’t touch a round one. That’s what I’m going to be lying there thinking about at two in the morning. Not the six trays. The ten squares.”

I crossed the kitchen.

Her shoulders came up, and she still didn’t turn around. Her hands stopped on the towel, and she had it balled in both fists, and I stopped a hand’s width behind her and my breath moved the hair at the back of her neck. She smelled like dish soap and butter and her own shampoo. Her pulse ticked in the hollow under her ear.

“Turn around.”

She turned around.

“I want you,” I said.

I didn’t put anything after it, and she didn’t ask me to.

What she did was drop the towel on the counter and get both hands into the front of my shirt, a fistful in each one, and pull. I went. Her hands were still wet from the sink.

Her back hit the counter. The edge of it caught her low and she pushed up onto her toes against it. I had one hand in her hair at the base of her skull, the other under her jaw, and I kissed her with every week of wanting her behind it, deep and slow and then not slow, and she groaned into it, low, at the back of her throat, and she didn’t appear to know she’d done it. I wanted to hear it again, with nothing on her.

She got my shirt out of my jeans. Her hands slid up under it, cold from the dishwater, spread wide across my stomach, and my breath punched out of me hard.

“Up,” I said.

She was up on that counter before I finished the word. I got both hands under her and hauled her to the edge, and she locked her ankles at the small of my back, and neither of us was careful anymore. She had her mouth at the side of my neck. She said my name once, not a question in it. I was hard against the seam of her jeans and she rolled her hips into it.

I had my hand on the button of her jeans.

Down the hall a door came open three inches, the three inches Iris always gave a door when she was most of the way asleep. Her door had one note in its hinge and there was no other sound in the house like it.

“Daddy?”

I had my face down against her throat and my hand where it was, and I didn’t move for the length of one breath. Neither did she.

“Yeah, bug.”

“Is it morning?”

“No.”

“Okay.” The door stayed open three inches. “Is D here?”

Delaney put her face into my shoulder. Her body shook against me, one jolt, and I couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or a groan.

“D went home,” I said.

“Okay.” The door shut.

She opened her fists on my shirt one finger at a time. Then she slid down off the counter with her hair wrecked and her mouth wrecked and both palms pressed back against the granite behind her, where a dust of flour printed the heels of her hands.

“I should go home,” she said.

“You live right through that door.”

“I am aware of the geography, Eli.”

I got her hair back off her face with both hands and she let me. She shut her eyes while I did it, and she turned her mouth toward the inside of my wrist and stopped an inch short of it. I didn’t close the inch. If I closed it she wasn’t leaving the kitchen, and Iris’s door had already opened three inches on us.

“That,” she said, “is an unfinished conversation.”

“Yes.”