When she finally pulled back she sat on her heels and looked up at me with her lips slightly swollen and her eyes dark and satisfied, the expression of a woman who had done exactly what she set out to do and was content with the result.
I reached down and brought her up off the floor.
She came easily, her hands finding my shoulders, her body warm against mine. I walked her back toward the bed and she went without resistance, the back of her knees meeting the edge of it, and then she was sitting and I was standing over her and the candlelight made everything amber and slow.
"Your turn," I said.
Something moved through her eyes. "Is that so."
"Lie back."
She held my gaze for a moment, that particular Mira quality of deciding rather than simply complying. Then she moved back onto the bed and lay down and looked up at me with her dark hair spread around her and her chest rising and falling with a rhythm that was not entirely steady.
I sat beside her and took my time.
My hands moved over her with the same unhurried patience I had used before, relearning the landscape of her. The curve of her throat. The line of her collarbone. She lay still and let me, her eyes tracking me in the dim light, her breath coming slow and controlled in the way of someone keeping a tight hold on their composure.
I pressed my lips to the side of her neck and felt her exhale.
Down to her shoulder. The top of her chest. She made a small sound when my mouth found her breast, her hand moving to the back of my head without her appearing to decide to put it there.
I took my time with that too.
By the time my hands moved down her stomach her composure had started coming apart at the edges.
Her breathing was uneven. Her free hand had found the sheet beside her and was holding it in a loose fist. She was not a woman who surrendered control easily or quickly but the patience worked on her the way it always did, the slow accumulation of sensation with nowhere to direct it and no reason to resist.
My fingers reached the hem of her underdress.
"Kael," she said. Low and slightly rough.
"Still with me?"
"Very much still with you."
I pushed the fabric up slowly and she lifted her hips slightly to help, which was its own kind of answer. I moved the last layer of cloth aside and found her vagina and she inhaled sharply through her nose, her back arching off the bed by a fraction.
She was warm and already wanting, which sent a particular kind of satisfaction through me that had nothing to do with the system. I traced her slowly, not rushing, reading every shift in her breathing and every small movement she could not quite suppress.
"There," she breathed.
"Here."
"Yes."
I worked with deliberate precision, finding the places that undid her and returning to them in a rhythm that built gradually, that gave her just enough and then slightly more, that kept her balanced on the edge of something without letting her fall over it.
Her hips began to move against my hand. Her head pressed back into the pillow.
"You are doing that on purpose," she managed.
"Everything I do is on purpose."
A sound that was half laugh and half something else entirely. Her hand left the sheet and found my wrist, not stopping, just holding on. Her thighs had closed around my hand with a pressure that was involuntary and eloquent.
I slid one finger inside her and she made a sound that was nothing like her usual voice, raw and open, her whole body lifting toward me. I worked slowly, carefully, her responses guiding every movement. A second finger and her hand tightened on my wrist and her head turned into the pillow and the sounds she was making had stopped being something she was managing.
I learned her the way I learned everything worth knowing. Thoroughly. Without hurry. With the full attention the subject deserved.
Her breathing had become something urgent and broken. Her hips moved with my hand in a rhythm she had stopped trying to control. The composure that she carried like a second skin had come fully undone and what was underneath it was warm and wanting and entirely unguarded.
"Kael." His name in her mouth like that, stripped of everything except need.
"I have you," I said.
"I know," she said. "I know, I know —"
And then she came apart completely, her whole body pulling tight and then releasing in long slow waves, her voice breaking on each one, her hand gripping my wrist through all of it until the last tremor passed and she went still beneath me, her chest heaving, her eyes closed.
The room was very quiet.
I withdrew my hand gently and she made a small sound at the loss of it.
She opened her eyes and looked at me and the expression on her face was open and unguarded. She reached up and pulled me down toward her.
"Come here," she said.
I positioned myself over her and she looked up at me with steady eyes and did not look away.
I entered her slowly.
Inch by inch, feeling her body accommodate me, her breath releasing in a long unsteady exhale as I pressed deeper. She was warm and close around me and her hands found my back and held without gripping, the way a person holds something they do not want to end.
I stilled when I was fully inside her.
Just for a moment. Both of us breathing. The candle throwing soft unsteady light across the ceiling.
"All right?" I said.
"More than all right," she said. Her voice was low and had a roughness in it I had not heard before.
I began to move.
Slowly. A long deep rocking that was nothing like urgency, nothing like the first night when everything had been tension breaking loose. This was something else.
Deliberate and close, her body rising slightly to meet each movement, her hands tracing up my back and back down again as if she was mapping something she wanted to remember.
She made small sounds with each stroke. Not loud. Private sounds, the kind people make when they are not performing for anyone, when the sensation is simply too present to stay entirely silent about. I kept the same pace and felt her relax further beneath me with each passing minute, the last of whatever she had been holding dissolving until there was nothing between us except warmth and contact and the slow building pressure of two people with nowhere else to be.
"Do not stop," she said quietly.
"I was not planning to."
Her legs wrapped around my waist. Not pulling, just closing the last distance, holding me in rather than driving me forward. I pressed my lips to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, and she turned her face toward mine and we stayed like that, moving together in the amber dark, slow and certain and without any hurry at all.
The tension built the way it does when there is no rushing it, from deep inside and spreading outward, her breathing coming apart in pieces, her hands finally gripping rather than tracing, her whole body beginning to pull toward something she had been approaching for a long time.
"Kael," she said. Just his name. Just that.
"I know," I said. "I have you."
She came with her face pressed to my neck and her arms tight around me and her voice barely a sound at all, just breath and warmth and the long shuddering release of a woman who had let herself be completely present for once without managing anything at all.
I looked down at her when it passed. Her eyes were closed, her chest heaving, her expression completely unguarded in the candlelight.
She had given me everything she had.
I smiled.
Now it was my turn.