Page 67 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“I’m not going to give you the list.” She shifts her weight.

“Priya.”

She’s a foot shorter than me and she doesn’t blink.

“Four of them are yours,” she says. “That’s not a statement about you; it’s arithmetic: you’ve played thirty of our last thirty-four. I’d tell you the same thing if you asked me in a corridor about anything else, which is that a request for footage is a request for footage, not an allegation.”

“Okay.”

“Is there anything you want to say to me?”

There it is. She says it perfectly evenly, standing in a hallway with her bag on her shoulder. She’s giving me a door, and she’s going to give it to me exactly once. For half a second I can feel the first word sitting behind my teeth. Then I see Fin’s hand in the emergency room, Marek’s face at my kitchen table. I swallow it.

“No,” I say.

“All right.” She shifts the bag. “Sleep. You were slow off the post on the second one.”

She goes.

I don’t remember the drive.

I still have the suit on. My coat is open and my bag is in the truck. It’s ten past eleven in the port district. The fish-and-chips place on the corner is still open. I go up the steps, and the door buzzes before I touch it.

He’s in the doorway of the apartment with the hall light behind him.

I get my coat off before I’m fully inside. I drop it. I get the top two buttons of my shirt open and start pulling it out of my pants with both hands. I haven’t said one word.

He shoves me.

Two hands shove my chest hard. I hit the inside of the door with my shoulder blades. The whole frame bangs. He comes with me, puts a forearm across me, holds me there.

“No,” he says.

Then he has my face in both hands.

He doesn’t kiss me. Neither of us does that. He has my jaw in both hands, his forehead against mine. We stand inside his front door, breathing on each other while the frame shudders. My fists are full of his shirt.

“Don’t ask me about it,” I say.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Don’t.”

“I know exactly what happened,” he says, “because I was in section 214, and I’m not going to say one word about any of it.”

I get his belt open.

I do it standing while he holds my face. The second he understands where I’m going, he takes his hands off me. I go down onto the floorboards with my shirt half out and my shoes still on.

It isn’t like February. In February, I was paying an invoice on a cold tile floor. I did it properly. I didn’t make a sound. This isn’t that. I drag his shorts down and his cock is already hard. I take it without being careful, too deep, too fast, choking on it and not stopping. I moan around him. I’ve never made a sound doing this in my life. He isn’t quiet, either. One hand goes to the back of my head, and the other braces flat against the door over my shoulder. He says words in the language that comes out of him when there’s nothing left in the way.

I get about ninety seconds.

Then his hand closes in my hair and he hauls me up.

He does it hard. He pulls me up the wall, off my knees, and then turns me around. My face hits the inside of his front door with one of his hands between my shoulder blades. I hear him spit into his other hand.

My pants and shorts go down to my thighs. My cock comes free against the cold painted wood. I still have my shirt on, my shoes on, my belt hanging.