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"You are looking at me like you are reading me," he murmured.

"I am."

He kissed me again. The water ran down between us.

I had not said it yet. I needed to.

"Daniil."

"Mm?"

"I have not... done this. Before."

He stopped.

He did not pull back. He stayed close, his forehead going down to mine, the water running off the back of his head and around our faces.

"Look at me, Chloe."

I did.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Say it again."

"I'm sure. I want you. I picked you."

Something in his face moved. Not surprise. He had known. He had read it in me already, in the way I had taken the buttons, in the steady of my hands by the end of them. What moved in his face was something else. The understanding of what he had just been handed.

He cupped my face in both his hands. He kissed my forehead, slow, the way a man kisses a thing he has been allowed to hold.

"Then we do this the way you deserve," he said, against my temple. "Slow. You tell me anything. Anything. You say stop, I stop."

"I know."

"Say you know."

"I know."

He kissed me again, and the kiss had changed. It had a different weight in it. It was the kiss of a man who had decided to be careful in a way that was going to cost him, and he did not care what it cost him.

His mouth moved. Down my jaw, down my throat, into the wet curve of my shoulder. His hands moved with his mouth, learning me by inches. He took his time at my breasts. Slow circles with the flat of his tongue, then the catch of his teeth, light, deliberate, the kind of light that pulled the air out of my chest in one long word. My legs stopped being interested in standing on their own. I leaned back into the cold tile of the shower wall. The cold against my shoulder blades, the heat of the water down my front, the warm working shape of his mouth on me. My hand went up and found the lip of the tile above the soap shelf and I held on.

He took his time lower. He went to his knees again, on the floor of the shower this time, and he looked up at me through the water, and he asked the question with his eyes that he had been asking all night.

"Yes," I said, before I had even finished hearing it.

The first touch of his mouth on me was a thing I had no shape for. I had read about it. I had imagined it badly. I had no way to have known what it would be. The flat of his tongue. Then the slow drag of it. Then the kind of careful pressure that made my hips jerk forward without my permission. His hand came up andpinned me to the tile, fingers spread on my belly, his thumb at the hollow of my hip. My fingers tightened on the shelf. My other hand went into his hair without my permission and I held on too hard, and he made a low approving sound against me that I felt more than heard. "Open for me," he said, low, against the inside of my thigh. "Let me have you." I did. He learned what I liked the way he had learned everything else about me, with attention, with patience, with the fact that he was not in a hurry. The small sound I made became a not-small sound. The sound after that was not a sound I had known I had in me.

He stayed with me. He worked me with his tongue and his fingers until my hand on the tile slipped, and he braced me with a flat palm at the small of my back to keep me upright, and my head went back against the wall hard enough that I felt the dull of it in my skull. He did not slow down. "Right there," he said into me, low, almost a growl. "Just like that. Give it to me." My thighs went, and I went with them, and the long break of it pulled a cry out of my mouth that would have embarrassed me any other night and did not embarrass me tonight, because he was the one I had given it to.

He kissed the inside of my thigh. He stood up slowly, the water sluicing off him, and he put his arms around me and held me while my legs remembered themselves.

"Beautiful," he said into my hair. "My girl. So beautiful."

He turned the water off. He got the big towel off the hook and he wrapped me in it like I was a small thing he had been entrusted with, drying me in slow careful passes, my hair, my arms, the back of my neck. He dried himself half as carefully and tossed his towel over the rail and lifted me again, still wrapped in mine, and carried me out of the steam into the dim of my bedroom.