I reach behind me and turn on the shower. The water hits the tile with a hiss of cold that will warm in thirty seconds. Steam will take sixty.
I have time.
I drop to my knees behind her.
My hands find her hips first. Then her waist. Then the elastic of her underwear, which I pull down her legs without rushing. She steps out of them. I set them aside. My palms return to her body and begin the only examination that matters.
Her hips. The soft indent above each hipbone where the skin stretches thin over bone. The curve of her ass, full, firm, the muscles underneath tensing when my thumbs track the crease where curve meets thigh. The backs of her thighs. Warm. Smooth. Trembling in a frequency that registers through my fingertips like a pulse.
I part her thighs with both hands. She braces against the sink. The mirror reflects her face, the spill of dark hair over her shoulder, the white-knuckle grip of her hands on porcelain.
“You want to kneel in front of me,” I say against the skin of her lower back, my voice low enough that it is more vibration than sound, “and take what I give you.”
Her breathing changes.
“But let me kneel for you first.” I press my lips to the base of her spine. “Let me earn it.”
I part her from behind. Spread her open with both thumbs. Take one long look at her in the mirror, her dark eyes watching me over her shoulder, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and I put my mouth on her.
Her entire body jerks forward. A sound starts in her throat and dies there, strangled into silence. Her hips push back against my face and her fingers scrape against the basin and the sound of the shower warming behind us is the only cover either of us has.
I devour her.
My tongue parts her folds and finds her clit from behind. Swollen. Slick. Pulsing under my mouth with a heartbeat that mirrors the one hammering against her hip beneath my palm. I lick her in long, slow strokes that start at her clit and drag backward through her wetness, tasting her, and she tastes like salt and sex and the clean animal truth of a body that wants to be taken. I map her the way I used to map a patient before the first incision. Every nerve cluster. Every pressure point. The flat of my tongue for the broad strokes. The point of it for the places that make her knees buckle.
She presses her forearm against her own mouth. Bites down. The sound that escapes is a muffled whimper, barely audible over the shower. Good. But not good enough. I want her to struggle with it. I want the effort of keeping silent to become its own kind of undoing, so that when she finally does lose control, the release will wreck her.
I slow down. Pull my mouth away just far enough that she can feel my breath against her swollen clit but not my tongue. Shemakes a desperate sound. Pushes her hips back. Chasing the contact.
I give her nothing.
One second. Two. Three.
Her thighs are shaking so hard I can see the tremors in the mirror. Her head drops between her arms and her breathing is ragged, open-mouthed, fogging the mirror in front of her. She is soaked. Her arousal dripping down her inner thighs, and I can smell her, the raw, clean scent of a body so primed it is operating on pure nerve endings.
I put my mouth back on her. Harder.
She chokes on a sound. Her hand slams flat against the mirror.
I increase the pressure. My tongue circles her clit in tight, focused rotations while my hands spread her wider. She is dripping. Wet against my chin, my mouth, the stubble on my jaw. I can taste exactly how close she is, that shift in her arousal that tells me she is building toward a peak she will not be able to control.
I do not speed up. I do not change what I am doing.
Consistency. That is what undoes her. The relentless, unvarying rhythm that she cannot predict and cannot escape and cannot brace herself against because it never changes. It never stops. It strips away every defense she has, one stroke at a time, until the only thing left is her body’s honest response to a man on his knees behind her who refuses to rush.
Her legs give. One knee buckles and I catch her hip with my left hand, holding her upright without pulling my mouth away. My right hand slides between her thighs from behind and twofingers push inside her. Curving upward. Finding the spot that makes her spine arch like a bow being drawn.
The sound she makes into her own forearm is animal.
I keep my mouth on her clit. Keep my fingers inside her, stroking, curving, pressing. She is clenching around me now, her walls gripping my fingers in rhythmic contractions, her entire body coiled so tight the orgasm is building in her like a wave pulling back from the shore. Gathering mass. Gathering speed.
She detonates.
The orgasm rips through her and it registers everywhere. Her pussy clamps down on my fingers. Her thighs slam together against my ears. Her whole body convulses forward against the sink and the sound she makes is a strangled, bitten-off scream that she swallows so hard I can hear her throat click.
I keep going. Through the peak. Through the aftershocks. Through the trembling collapse of her weight against the sink. Until her hand comes back and grabs my hair and pulls, not in pleasure, in desperation, because she cannot take any more.
I stand.