“You are a menace with dish soap.”
I laugh, and he catches it with his mouth. The ease undoes me more than the heat, and there is plenty of heat, rising fast and familiar. Ryan in my kitchen, takeout on the table, one bad conversation still breathing in the room and his hand steady at my back anyway.
He lifts me onto the counter.
“That is where food goes,” I say.
“Not currently.”
His mouth moves to my throat and my knees fall open around his hips before pride can review the decision. He notices. Ryan always notices. He steps into the space like he has been thinking about it through the entire dinner he pretended to cook.
His hands slide under the hem of my sweater, warm, palms flat against my ribs like he means to learn the whole of me by touch before he does anything else about it. He does not rush. That is becoming a problem. He turns patience into pressure, impossible to ignore, until I am the one coming apart and he has barely moved.
“You still working?” he asks, mouth at my jaw.
“Do I look like I am working?”
His gaze drops to where my hands have already found his belt.
“You look committed,” he says.
“I am thorough.”
The sound he makes is almost a laugh and almost not.
He keeps me there, on the edge of it, with his hand and his mouth and that maddening patience, until the careful part of me, the part that manages every room I walk into, simply stops showing up to work.
“Ryan.” My voice does something I did not authorize. “I do not want slow. I want your cock, I want you inside me, now.”
I hear myself say it.
I do not take it back.
It is the most honest sentence I have produced all night, blunt in a way I never let myself be in print, and I watch it land on him like a flat palm to the chest.
We do not make it to the bedroom.
That feels important later. In the moment it is the decision a body makes when the rest of life has gotten too complicated for rooms with doors.
He has a condom in his wallet. Prepared. Irritatingly responsible even while I am shoving his jeans down with one heel hooked behind his knee.
“You are enjoying this,” I say.
“Yes.”
“No shame?”
“Not currently.”
He kisses me until I stop diagnosing him.
When he finally pushes inside me, it is with one hand braced beside my hip and the other flat against my lower back, holding me to the edge of it. Close. Almost too close.
Nothing dramatic brought us here this time. No hospital. No story breaking in the next room. Just a Tuesday, and a man who showed up with groceries, choosing me in a kitchen that smells like basil and burned sauce.
I hold his shoulders and let myself be seen doing it.
He moves slowly at first, like he can make an ordinary night last on willpower alone. I do not have that kind of discipline. I hook both legs around him and pull him in, take all of him at once, and the restraint he was holding comes apart in my hands.