“Peter.” My voice cracked. “Slower, please, just—”
He didn’t hear me, or didn’t care to. His rhythm turned sloppy, and a groan tore out of him—low and satisfied—as he shoved in one final time and came, his fingers bruising my thigh, his forehead dropping to my shoulder while he rode it out in shallow, jerky pulses.
He was pulling out—too fast, too sudden.
He set me on my feet as if I weighed nothing. My knees shook, and the ache between my legs pulsed with a sharp, useless insistence, my body still waiting for a release that wasn’t coming.
He wiped himself on the edge of the curtain.
“Gotta shower,” he absently voiced. “Meeting’s at nine.”
I turned to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass, putting my palms flat against the cool glass. I watched the rain dance down the other side in long, trembling rivulets while the warmth of him leaked down my inner thigh and my pulse hammered with something that had stopped being purely sexual several minutes ago.
The emptiness in my chest was familiar, so was the sum of it—the way it always added up to the same answer: Not enough. Never quite enough, not even worth the effort of slowing down.
I could finish it myself—two fingers, right here, while the city blurred gray beyond the glass. The thought immediately made it worse, which I didn’t particularly want to think about.
“See you tonight?” he called from somewhere behind me, casual, easy, like he hadn’t fucked me against a rain-streaked window and left me stranded three feet from shore.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out hoarse. “Tonight.”
The bathroom door clicked shut. The shower started its indifferent hiss. My hand drifted toward my thighs and then stopped and dropped away entirely.
I was too angry to want it now.
So I’d wait, and tonight he’d reach for me again—rough and fast—and I would let him, because the alternative was alonelier kind of emptiness, because somewhere along the way I had confused being wanted in the wrong way with being cherished, and I had never quite figured out how to uncross those wires. Every man who had passed through my life had left the same fingerprints—on my body, on my patience, on the shrinking space I’d once reserved for the idea that it could be different.
I watched the rain.
* * *
The front door clicked shut behind him, softer than the morning deserved.
His goodbye kiss was like a footnote—dry lips grazing the corner of my mouth, his keys already jingling, his mind already somewhere else, toward the day, toward everything that wasn’t me. “Have a good day,” said to the hall, gone before the words had left my lips.
I stood in the gray morning light and let the quiet settle around me.
My thighs were sticky. The ache between my legs still pulsed with frustrated insistence, steady as a second heartbeat, and about as useful.
I walked to the bathroom, flipped the light on.
The mirror reflected back: hair wrecked, cheeks still flushed with arousal and disappointment. A faint red mark visable on my hip where his grip had been more possession than desire. I looked like someone who had been wanted, if not briefly, in the way you want something you’ve already stopped valuing.
The shower he’d left running for me filled the small room with steam. I stepped under the spray and let it hit my shoulders, the back of my neck—hot enough to sting. I stood there and let it be.
My hand moved down on its own—palm cupping, heel pressing, feeling the throb answer back, not enough. Never enough when it’s your own hands.
I reached up and unhooked the handheld showerhead from its cradle. Twisted the dial until the stream narrowed, sharpened, the kind of pressure that walked the line between relief and slightly too much. I leaned back against the tile, shifted my feet wider, hooked one leg up on the built-in bench—open, exposed, ridiculous if someone was watching.
No one was watching.
The first contact drew a sharp gasp—too direct. I angled it lower, let the jet work along my slit in slow, deliberate passes, washing the evidence of him away in pale streams that swirled toward the drain. My free hand found my nipple, twisted with the kind of attention he’d stopped bothering with long ago. A sound slipped out of me, swallowed by the hiss of water.
I brought the showerhead closer, found the exact angle, the precise point of pressure that made my vision go momentarily soft at the edges. My hips rolled forward involuntarily. I let them.
The fantasy arrived the way they always did—unbidden and a little humiliating. Peter walking back in. His expression shifted as he took in the sight of me, legs spread, working myself under the spray with focused, unashamed intent. In the fantasy, I’d meet his eyes, let him watch, let him understand exactly what he’d left unfinished.
I slid two fingers inside and curled them toward the place he always bypassed—the one that made my thighs shake, that made coherent thought temporarily impossible. My fingers pressed against the tile for balance.