Page 150 of Power Play

“Whose name?” Delaney said.

“The new cat.” Iris was very patient with her. “Gerald named Zamboni. He gets to name all of them.”

“All of them,” I said.

Delaney looked at me over Iris’s head. She didn’t take any of it back.

I got the knot open. It took me longer than any knot I’d ever untied in a dressing room with ten minutes to puck drop, because Iris had tied it for the ages and my hands weren’t steady either. Zamboni bit me once, lightly, to register a complaint. I worked the ring off the ribbon and took Delaney’s left hand, and it was shaking, and I held it still against my palm and put the ring on her.

It fit. I’d had three weeks to worry that it wouldn’t.

She looked down at it. She turned her hand over and back. Then she put the hand on my face, the ring cool against my jaw, and kissed me with Iris between us and the cat in her lap and the ribbon in a tangle on the rug, and Iris said, “Ew,” with deep satisfaction and did not move one inch.

Iris fought bedtime for an hour and a half, and won most of it. She needed the dragon book twice and a glass of water and a ruling on whether a cat could be a flower girl, which nobody had raised and which I promised to take under advisement. She fell asleep with Gerald across her neck and the orange ribbon tied around his wrist, because she’d taken it back off the cat and claimed it, and I left her door open two inches and the hall light on.

Delaney was in our bed when I got there. I was still getting used to calling it that. She was sitting up against the headboard in the gray T-shirt with her knees pulled up and her left hand flat on top of them, looking at it under the lamp.

I shut the door to two inches behind me. “You’re going to wear it out.”

“I’m checking it’s still there.”

“It’s still there.” I pulled my shirt off over my head and dropped it on the chair and came to the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

She came up onto her knees on the mattress and I took her face in both hands and kissed her, slow, and she made the small sound she made when I got to take my time, and I took it. I took the T-shirt off her an inch at a time and dropped it on the floor. She had nothing on under it. I’d known that since breakfast, when she’d crossed my kitchen in it with her hair flat and my daughter about to give it away, and I’d been thinking about it all day through the grocery store and the tacos and the cat.

“Lie down for me,” I said. “Back against the pillows.”

She did, and her hair spread out over the pillowcase. I took her left wrist and laid it above her head on the pillow, the stone catching the lamp.

“That hand stays up there,” I said. “I want to see that ring every second.”

Her breath went short. “Okay.”

“Say it properly.”

“Yes, Daddy.” The color came up her throat in one pass, as it always did the second I gave her an order she wanted.

My cock jerked hard against my zipper, and I had to stop with one knee on the mattress and breathe through my nose. She’d said it before, in the dark, with her face hidden in my neck. Tonight she said it looking straight up at me, with my ring on her hand above her head, and it went down my spine and settled low and heavy between my legs.

“Good girl.”

I kissed down her throat, her collarbone, her breasts, and took one nipple in my mouth and sucked until she arched up off the sheet, and then the other, and her right hand came up into my hair and held on. The left stayed where I’d put it. Every time I lifted my head I could see it on the white pillowcase above her, her fingers curling and uncurling, the ring flashing when they moved.

I went down her body slowly and spread her thighs with my hands and looked at her first, because I always did and she’d stopped asking me not to. She was wet, swollen and slick, and when I put my mouth on her she said my name in a voice that came all the way up from her belly. I licked her slowly, from the bottom to her clit, and then held her hips down against the mattress and stayed on her clit until her thighs shook against my ears.

I slid two fingers into her and curled them, and she clenched on them so hard her hips came up off the bed. Her right hand fisted in the sheet. The left stayed up on the pillow.

“Don’t you move that hand,” I said against her. “You come for me first. Right here on my mouth.”

She came with one heel dug into my back and my name breaking in half, pulsing around my fingers, and I kept my mouth on her and worked her through every bit of it, slower and slower, until her right hand pushed at my head because it was too much.

“Eli. God, Eli, please.”

“Please what?”

“Please fuck me.” She’d learned to say it this spring, and it still went straight through me every single time she did. “I want you inside me. Now, Eli.”

I moved up over her. I got my jeans and briefs off and kicked them away, and took myself in my hand, and stroked once, root to tip, and she watched me do it with her lips parted. I fit myself against her and pushed in slow, all the way, nothing between us, and stopped there with my hips flush to hers. Then I reached up and wrapped my hand around her left wrist on the pillow and pinned it there, my thumb over the band, and held her down by it.