Page 44 of Captive

She takes off the rest and climbs onto the bed from my left side so nothing touches the bad leg. I don’t reach for her until she settles over my good thigh and puts my hands on her waist herself.

Her skin is hot under my palms. I stroke up her ribs and cup her breasts and roll one nipple between my fingers until her breathing changes. She bends and kisses me, slow and then hard, and when I slide one hand into her hair, she lets me.

I try to lift my hips toward her. The stitches pull. It crosses my face before I can hide it.

She plants one palm on my chest and keeps me flat. “Four or six?”

“Six. Coming down.”

“Then you don’t move.”

“I want to.”

“Wanting isn’t a medical exception.”

She takes my hand and puts it between her legs. She’s already wet. I stroke her slowly, and she rocks against my fingers with her eyes open, watching me. When I slide two fingers inside her, she takes them with a low sound and sets the pace herself.

“There,” she says. “Keep it.”

I keep it. I keep it until she comes above me with her nails in my chest and her hips working through it, and she drops her forehead to mine and breathes.

Then she rolls the condom onto me and rises on her knees and sinks down, one hand braced by my shoulder.

Everything useful in my head goes white.

She controls all of it. The depth, the angle, every inch. My hands close on her hips and I don’t pull. She moves slow and steady, watching the dressing every time she shifts, not because it’s become clinical but because wanting me doesn’t make her careless with me.

Nobody has ever been careful with me. I didn’t know that until right now.

“You can touch me,” she says.

I put one hand on her breast and the other between us. She leans back to give me room, and I circle her while she rides me, and her rhythm starts to fall apart. Mine never had any to lose.

I can’t chase it. I can’t take it. All I can do is lie still and receive what she gives me, and I’ve spent my whole life being the one who takes, and this is the most I have ever felt.

“Sofia.”

“I know.”

She comes a second time with my name against her teeth, and it pulls me right over with her. I hold on to her waist and come with my bad leg frozen still and every other part of me stripped bare of the idea that holding still means holding control.

She stays over me until we can both breathe. Then she takes care of the condom and comes back with a cloth and water. I start to sit up.

“No.”

“I can help.”

“You can follow the expensive lesson.”

I stay down. She checks the dressing. Dry. She changes the damp pillowcase and moves the crutches where I can reach them and gets into bed on my left, and she doesn’t tuck herself against my hurt side or make her body responsible for keeping me still. She just lies there, close, with her hand on my chest.

I look at the ceiling of a house I was invited into, and for a minute I can’t swallow.

“If they take your license,” I say into the dark. I don’t know why I’m asking. “Over this. Over my part in it. What happens?”

She’s quiet a moment. “Then I start over again. Somewhere Warren isn’t.”

“I’d drive you.”