The room was quiet.
Rebecca lay beside him, propped on one elbow, watching his face in the low light with the particular attention of someone who had been waiting a long time for a specific moment and was now inside it and was not going to waste it. His eyes were closed. His breathing was the slow, even breathing of someone who had gone somewhere past the reach of ordinary consciousness — the specific depth of a man who had been drinking on an empty stomach after a fever and had arrived somewhere that ordinary decision-making could not follow.
Her fingers moved across his chest. Slowly. Following the lines of him — the firm, unhurried exploration of someone who had wanted this and was finally, carefully, taking it.
She felt his muscles twitch beneath her touch.
A low groan.
"Shh." She kept her voice soft. A whisper, the specific register of someone managing a situation. "I know you want this."
