Page 60 of Power Play

Then we sat there. Her heart slammed against me, quick and high up, and mine was worse. The two of us were soaked through where we touched. I ran one hand up and down her back, the mesh dragging under my palm, and didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth.

“You’re all right,” I said. “I’ve got you. Breathe.”

She got a breath in, then most of another one, and her mouth moved against my throat.

“There you go. That’s it, baby girl.”

I hadn’t planned on saying that. It was out of my mouth before I knew I owned it. She turned boneless against me. Her weight dropped and didn’t lift again, both arms slack over my shoulders, and she wasn’t holding one ounce of it up herself.

I kept that. I would use it again.

Then she lifted her head off my shoulder.

“What about you?” she said.

She asked it straight out, in about the tone she used to check whether I’d eaten.

“Are you kidding me?”

“What?”

“Delaney.” I moved under her about an inch, which was all the information required.

She stopped dead. She dropped her eyes between us, then brought them back up to my face.

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“You—”

“I did.”

“In your⁠—”

“Yes.”

She laughed, then stopped, her face coming apart and back together on the way down. She sat back on my thighs with both palms on my ribs and read it like evidence in a case she’d been quietly losing since September.

“Huh,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head once. “Not nothing. I’ll tell you sometime.”

I got a hand around the back of her neck and brought her forehead down against mine and held it there. We breathed at each other in a wrecked kitchen.

“Go to bed,” I said, eventually.

“Is that an instruction?”

“Do you want it to be?”

She didn’t answer that. She got herself up off my lap on legs that weren’t entirely reliable. She straightened the sweater with both hands, and stopped at the door to the hall.

“That was—” She stopped.

“I know,” I said.