Page 84 of Captive

That night I’m clearheaded and sick of being arranged with pillows. Sofia helps me onto the bed, props my shoulder, keeps my leg straight. The new key sits on the nightstand beside her blue pencil.

Then she unbuttons her shirt.

She doesn’t make a speech. There’s no list of what this isn’t. Not long ago I would have needed one, and she would have given it to me. Tonight she just looks at me over the third button with one eyebrow up, like she’s waiting to see whether I’m going to be difficult about it.

“I’m not,” I say.

“Good,” she says, and takes off the rest.

She climbs onto the bed beside my good hip, the bruise on her arm faded to yellow.

Her mouth finds mine. I cup the back of her head with my left hand, then slide it down her neck and between her shoulder blades. My right arm is strapped useless across my chest. I can’t pull her anywhere. Every choice about where she goes belongs to her.

She doesn’t make any of them. She just settles against me.

She puts her breast in my hand and wraps her fingers around me. I roll her nipple between my fingers. She leans into it.

The new key catches the lamplight when she moves. I’ve carried keys as tools, as proof of rank, and once to lock the door on the person now straddling my good thigh.

“Look at me,” she says.

I look. I find her with my fingers and she adjusts until my touch and the pressure of my thigh meet exactly where she wants them.

“That.”

I hold it while she moves against me. When I slide two fingers inside her, she controls every inch of it, her hand tightening around me whenever I curl against the place that makes her gasp.

I can’t use both hands. I can’t take over. All I have left is attention.

It turns out attention is enough.

She comes hard around my fingers. I stay with her until her body loosens. Then she looks down at her hand, still working me, and decides I’m next.

“Sofia.”

She shakes her head once. A decision, not a refusal.

She strokes me faster, her palm twisting over the head and sliding down with the pressure that turns my next breath into a rough sound. I keep my right side still and my left hand spread on her hip.

“Come for me,” she says.

I do.

She keeps the same steady rhythm through all of it. I can’t brace or pull or thrust, and none of it matters while she holds me like that and watches my face.

Afterward, she checks the bandages and the sling. Then she lies along my good side with her palm flat on my stomach. The key and the pencil sit together on the nightstand.

“I love you,” she says into my shoulder. Like she’s testing it again. Like she likes the way it sounds.

“I love you.”

When she gets up later to lock the front door, she uses the key we share.

Epilogue

SOFIA

Cow 14C tries to eat my blue grease pencil at nine-seventeen on the first morning Rios Large Animal Field Clinic is officially open.