Page 27 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"Bedroom," I say. "Now."

She goes still. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. I want you."

"You always want me. This is different." She touches my face. "What happened?"

"I'll tell you after."

She looks at me for a long moment. Then she takes my hand and leads me toward the stairs, which is its own kind of trust, and I don't deserve it as much as I'm going to take it.

We make it upstairs. She starts undoing my shirt buttons from the top and I watch her do it.

"Let me," she says. Focused, deliberate — it's the same attention she gives everything, patients and her work and now me. She pushes the shirt off my shoulders and runs her hands across my chest, fingers finding the old scar along my ribs like she's checking it's still there.

I feel it differently when she touches me. Like I'm being learned.

She unzips her own jeans, steps out of them. Her sweater comes off. I help with her bra because I'm impatient and she laughs, which is better than anything in the Brazil email.

"I want—" She glances up at me, something bold and a little shy at once in her expression. "Can I?"

"Yes," I say, before she finishes the question.

She drops to her knees.

I'm not prepared, even though I should be. She takes me into her mouth and I brace one hand on the dresser and the other goes into her hair, soft and warm, and she finds a rhythm that removes most of my higher cognitive functions almost immediately.

Sophie. On her knees in front of me, looking up when she wants to watch my face, absolutely in control of this moment. She does something with her tongue and I swear under my breath, low and rough. She does it again, because she's learned what I respond to just like I've learned her, and I realize I'm close faster than I have any right to be — faster than I've been in longer than I want to admit, undone by a woman who's had four weeks of practice reading exactly what makes my hips jerk forward and my breath go ragged.

"Sophie—" My voice comes out rough. "I'm going to—"

She pulls back. Rises. Kisses me with unhurried confidence, like she knows exactly what she's doing to me and intends to keep doing it.

"Bed," she says. "Now."

I put her on the bed.

I go down on her until she's shaking and saying my name in the urgent, breathless way that I've been storing in some place I don't examine too closely. She comes with her fingers in my hair and her back arched off the mattress, and I work her through every second of it, watching her face the whole time, memorizing the exact moment her breath catches and holds.

Then I'm inside her, and she wraps her legs around me, and the desperation that's been sitting in my chest all afternoon finds somewhere to go.

I need her. Not just this — though I need this too, need it more than I've needed anything in longer than I'll admit out loud — but her specifically. The way she argues with me about Patty's medication schedule. The way she keeps the half-deadsucculent. The way she'll sit in the kitchen with Mom for an hour talking about nothing and everything, and when she leaves, Mom looks like she's been filled up.

I find her clit while I move and she gasps.

"Grant—"

"I've got you."

"I know." She arches up into me. "I know you do."

I move harder into her, chasing something I can't name and don't want to examine too closely, and she meets every thrust like she's chasing it too. She comes again with her nails in my back, which I am entirely fine with. I follow her, burying myself deep, groaning her name into her shoulder, and the world narrows to this room and this woman and the particular sound she makes when she finally lets go completely.

I lie with her in the gathering dark of my childhood bedroom and keep her close, her heartbeat slowing against my chest, and I think about eight weeks.

"You're going to tell me something I don't want to hear," she says.

It's not a question.