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“Ask me.”

She couldn’t get it out.

“Delaney. Ask me.”

“Please.” Her voice cracked on it.

“Good.”

She went silent first, every muscle drawn up tight, and then it hit and she clenched around me in deep, greedy pulls, hard enough I had to work to keep moving through them, her heels digging into the backs of my thighs and her nails set into my shoulders. She said my name at the end of it in pieces. I didn’t last, and I didn’t try to, and I came buried in her with my face in her hair.

After, with her still coming down and my palm spread over her stomach, I said, “Good girl.”

She froze, all of her at once. Her stomach went hard under my palm and quit moving. Those two words were in the room now and I hadn’t asked first.

I didn’t apologize and I didn’t explain. I lay there with my hand where it was and gave her as long as she needed, and I didn’t take my eyes off her face.

Her eyes opened. She got a handful of my hair at the back and pulled me back down on top of her, hard, and kissed me with her teeth. She didn’t say one word. I’d never in my life been handed a clearer piece of information.

The second time, she came looking for me.

I’d half gone under with my hand flat on her stomach when she rolled into me in the dark, put her mouth on my jaw, and worked her way down my neck without a word. I lay still and let her, because I wanted to see what she’d do with it when no one was running her. Her hand found me and closed around me, and I was hard inside a breath.

“Look at that,” she said, against my throat. “You told me I wasn’t running this.”

“You’re not.”

“I’ve got you in my hand, Eli.”

“You’ve got what I’m letting you have.” I turned my head and caught her mouth. “Keep going and find out.”

She kept going. She stroked me slow and watched my face in the streetlight for what it did to me, and when my hips came up off the bed she made a low, satisfied sound against my throat.

“There it is,” she said. “That’s the thing you do to me all night. I want it back.”

“Then take it.” I reached past her, got a fresh one out of the nightstand drawer, and put it in her hand. “Put it on me and get up here.”

Her breath caught. She rolled it down over me with both hands, careful, shaking a little, and then she swung her leg across and settled down the length of me without letting me in, just the heat and the wet of her dragging along me while she braced both palms flat on my chest.

“Slow,” she said, giving my own word back to me. “You’ll get it the way I want to give it to you.”

I laughed, and it broke in the middle when she reached down and lined me up and sank onto me an inch, and stopped there.

“Delaney.”

“Mm.”

“That’s cruel.”

“I’m learning from the best.” She took another inch and stopped, her thighs shaking, her head dropping forward so her hair hung around both of us. “God. Okay.”

“Take the rest.”

She took the rest. She sat all the way down on me with a sound punched out of her, and we were both dead still for a second while she got her breath, and then she started to move, and she set a fast, hard pace. She rode me with her nails dug into my chest and her mouth open, and every time she came down she got a little louder, past anything she’d let out the first time, and I put both hands on her hips and let her have it her way until she couldn’t keep the rhythm.

“I can’t—” Her hips stuttered. “Eli, I’m going to⁠—”

“I know. I can feel it starting.” I brought my thumb to her clit and worked it in slow circles, counter to her, and her body seized. “Come on. You came looking for me. Finish what you started.”