Page 88 of Power Play

I stood her in front of the dresser and got in behind her and didn’t touch her. Then I put my hands on her shoulders and moved her hair over to one side, all the weight of it, off her neck. Her shoulders came up under my hands, and I hadn’t started yet.

“Hold still.”

She held still.

I found the zip with two fingers and drew it down four inches, slowly, one long quiet rasp with nothing in the room to cover it, and stopped there with my knuckles resting at the top of her spine. There was no bra strap.

“Same as before,” I said, into her hair. “You tell me to stop and everything stops. Tonight, or in an hour, or halfway through. I want to hear that you heard me.”

“I heard you.”

“Say the sentence.”

She had to find her breath before she could. “If I tell you to stop, you stop.” Her voice dropped low and it wasn’t steady anywhere in it. “Eli. You are standing behind me handling this.”

“I’ve got it.”

“I know you’ve got it. That’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem, actually, and it has been the problem since September.”

I put my mouth on the back of her neck where the hair had been, and took the rest of the zip down. She tasted of salt there, and I didn’t move off the spot until her pulse came up against my lip.

The dress slid off her shoulders and down her arms and dropped in one go. She stepped out of it and her shoes and left it where it fell, a pile of green by my feet, and didn’t cover one inch of herself. She let me look for as long as I wanted, and I wanted a while. I had never been given anything like it.

I told a girl in Winnipeg what I wanted when I was nineteen. I wanted to run it in bed, to set the pace, to be handed the when and the how, and to take care of her all the way through. It was the middle of the night and I barely had the words, but I said them out loud. She heard me out and she was kind, and she’d already decided against me before she answered. I got the message. In the house I grew up in a man said what he wanted once, carefully, or he learned to live without it. I learned, and then I built a life where nobody had to hear it.

Now she was standing in my bedroom with almost nothing on, and she’d told me out loud, in a full sentence, that I would stop when she said stop, and until she said it I had the room.

Nobody had ever handed me that, not at nineteen and not since. I’d quit expecting anybody would, and I had to stand there with my hands at my sides until my breathing settled.

Then I turned her around and walked her backwards to the bed, and on the way I got my heel against the door and pushed it shut. She sat, and I laid her back and moved her up the mattress until her hair fanned out across my pillow. Not hurrying was work.

She kept trying to help. Her hands went for my belt and then my shirt buttons, and she had two of them open before I caught up with her. She was being useful. I took both her wrists in one hand and put them up over her head against the headboard, and the wood knocked against the wall. Both wrists fit in my grip with room left over, and the pulse in the left one hammered under my thumb.

“Leave them.”

A low moan came out of her with a catch in the middle of it.

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Not one thing. You’re not running this.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You’re going to be fine at it.”

She wasn’t fine at it. She talked. Talking was her way out, and she went for it inside a minute.

“Okay. I feel I should mention that normally at this point I’d be checking in, asking what you⁠—”

“No.”

“It’s a good habit. People appreciate it.”

“Delaney.”

“I’m only observing that there is a version of this in which I’m considerably more useful than⁠—”

I stopped everything. I took my hand off her and stopped moving over her, and didn’t give her a word. The fan went around. The only sound in the room was the air off the blades and her breath speeding up under me.

She lasted a few seconds. “That’s not fair.”