Page 58 of Power Play

“Do you feel what you do to me?”

Her mouth fell open. Then she caught her bottom lip in her teeth and bit down on it.

I’d been managing until she did that.

“I’m not gentle,” I said.

She didn’t pull back. Her fingers curled and got hold of my shirt.

“Okay.” It came out in pieces.

“You want to hear what I actually think about?”

“Eli.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Her eyes lifted off my mouth, and it landed. I’d said those four words to her once before, on a Tuesday, in her own doorway.

She tried to lift up off my lap. It wasn’t to get away from me. She wanted a couple of inches of room to think in, which was the one thing I wouldn’t give her. I pinned her down against me and let her sit there feeling every inch of what she was sitting on, and I waited.

“Eli.”

“Yes or no?”

Her breathing broke up.

“Yes.” It was barely there.

“I couldn’t hear that.”

She leaned in and put her forehead against mine. Her hands closed in my shirt, and she said it into the space between our mouths.

“Yes. Tell me.”

I moved my hand up her spine and into her hair and closed my fist at the base of her skull. Her hair had more weight in my hand than it had on her head, cool on the outside and warm underneath where my fingers dug in. Then I turned her head and put my mouth against her ear.

“Every morning I pour you a cup of coffee,” I said, “and slide it down that counter, and you pick it up and say something about the schedule, and I stand there in my own kitchen and think about clearing the counter off and putting you on it.”

She stopped breathing.

“I think about getting your legs over my shoulders and my mouth on you until your arms won’t hold you up.” I closed my hand in her hair until she had to tip her head where I wanted it. “I’ve wanted to know what you taste like since the first week of October. It’s in my head while you’re standing there telling me about Tuesday.”

The noise she made ran down my spine and into my hands.

“I want you on your knees on my kitchen floor with my fist in your hair right where it is now and my cock in your mouth, and you looking up at me the entire time, and me telling you how good you’re being while you take it.”

“Eli—”

“I’m not finished.”

She shut her mouth and didn’t open it again. Three words was all it took. She stopped talking, stopped moving, and sat in my lap and waited for the rest.

Her breath hit the side of my neck on every exhale, hot, and then cooled on the wet the ice had left on my skin, so I got the heat and the cold off her in the same second, over and over, while I talked.

“I think about how loud you’d get if nobody was home,” I said against her ear. “You’re quiet in this house. You have been since August and I’d like to find out how hard you work at it.”

All of her rolled forward against me.