Page 71 of Power Play

“Eli—”

“Leave them.”

She made a noise with no word anywhere in it. Her hand came up off the granite and she got it over her eyes, and I took her by the wrist and brought it back down and set it on the stone.

“Not that either.”

“You are being extremely unreasonable.”

“I’m being slow.” I ran my thumb up the inside of her thigh, the length of it, and stopped where the skin turned hot. “There’s a difference and you’re going to learn it tonight.”

Her breathing came apart. Her eyes went to the ceiling and then the window and then back to me.

“Nobody does this,” she said.

“Does what?”

“This. The—” Her hand turned over on the stone, palm up, asking me for the word. “Looking. Nobody looks. You get about a second of it and then everyone gets on with the evening.”

“I’m not getting on with the evening.”

“I can see that.”

“Say the rest of it.”

She shut her eyes. Then she opened them.

“I’m thirty-six,” she said. “I have been doing this with the lights off since I was about thirty. Nobody made me. It was easier and nobody ever argued about it.”

“I’m arguing.”

Her chin came up and her mouth went hard and the bottom lids of her eyes went wet, and not one drop of it got any further than that, because she wouldn’t let it.

“Then get on with it,” she said.

“No.”

I pushed her thighs wider with the flats of my hands and went down on one knee to her, and I didn’t hurry.

“Hands in my hair,” I said. “Pull if you want it. She sleeps through the ice maker and there is nothing you’ve got that’s louder than the ice maker.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“It’s permission. Take it however suits you.”

I started above her knee. She said my name at the first pass of my mouth and I didn’t answer it. I worked up the inside of her thigh and gave every inch of it as long as it wanted, and by the time she had my breath on her she had both hands in my hair and her legs were shaking.

“Eli. Please.”

“There it is.” I held my mouth an inch off her and left it there long enough for her to feel every word. “I’m going to eat you until your legs quit. Then I’m going to sit you up and look at you again. Say yes.”

“Yes.”

I put my mouth on her.

She tasted like salt and heat and the back half of my year. I went up through her once, slow and flat and all of it, and her body jumped and her shoulders knocked the cabinet door and the dishes shifted behind it. I did it again. Then I found her clit and stayed there.

She was loud inside a minute, loud and unembarrassed, and every sound out of her went straight down my back.