Boss in the Bedsheets - Kate Canterbary Page 0,114

sweet, swollen button. "This is what you'd want me to do, isn't it? After I've left you empty and wanting all day, you'd want my fingers right here."

A frantic noise burst from Zelda, one that vibrated through my fingers, up my arms, into my chest. I wanted to pin her to the wall and I didn't care if I dislocated my shoulder again in the process. I wanted to hold her down, mark her and claim her in every way I could. I wanted to be a little mean and I wanted it to hurt in the good ways, and I wanted her to know she was safe with me. I'd deny her and I'd tease her and I'd invent new ways to defile her—and I'd protect her from everything.

I pumped into her in a fanatical, frenzied rhythm and dropped my head between her shoulder blades because I was dizzy and senseless, saying, "Come for me right now or I'm putting this cock in your ass."

That was all it took.

"Oh my—Ash," she cried, her hands slapping at the shower wall.

She came the way a tangled knot unfurled from the inside out—one small, nearly imperceptible loosening somewhere near the center, then another and another, and then she was fully undone.

As if my shaft knew its place in the pecking order, I exploded inside her the second those spasms slowed. It was a devastating sort of orgasm, the kind that made me wonder whether it was actually possible to fuck my brains out. Heat and prickles filled my limbs, white noise was still playing in my head, and words failed to form on my lips despite my best efforts.

Then my watch buzzed to notify me I'd closed a few activity rings. Well done.

We didn't move for several minutes, save for straightening into a position that didn't require Zelda to take the brunt of my weight, and that seemed right. I hadn't known until now that love was a full-bodied action, a response requiring everything inside me like a sacrifice. I hadn't known I'd want to sacrifice everything.

She reached back, patted my thigh. "I needed that."

I kissed her neck. "I know."

"You always do," she whispered. "Thank you."

I gave her backside a thorough squeeze. "You're welcome."

"I know you said we don't have to talk about, you know, everything," she said. "But maybe we could grab some lunch and—"

"And you can tell me as much or as little as you want," I added, meaning every word of it. Part of me wanted to live in a universe where I knew nothing of that bastard because the mere thought of him gave me ideas about digging a shallow grave. The other part of me needed to hear this so I could help her recover from everything he put her through—and that side won out. "We'll eat. You'll get this off your chest. Then we'll enjoy the hell out of this insanely expensive party my sister and Rob are throwing."

The soap and shampoo and leg shaving came along eventually, the awkward choreography of it all too, and then we found ourselves locked together under the spray once more.

And that was how we operated best—snuggly then rough then awkward then love.

25

Zelda

There was something inherently naked involved in explaining an unhealthy relationship to a person who knew very little about it. In sitting down at a perfectly ordinary table in a perfectly ordinary café and conducting a postmortem. But it was the worst kind because you had to live through the process of laying out all the ugly, misshapen bits of yourself while praying that person never determined those bits were too dreadful and misshapen—you were too dreadful and misshapen—for their affection.

The trouble was, you couldn't hide behind justification or rationalization or any of the other lies you'd told yourself when starting with "Everything was fine in the beginning."

And, "It started with us studying together. We were in a statistical methods lab class and he said my eyes were a chromosomal anomaly that would've led to my expulsion from ancient societies. He struggled with that class. He relied on me to get him through it and he appreciated it so much when I did."

However, "We weren't exclusive. We only moved in together after a year to save money and—and labels and restrictions were nothing more than social constructs."

Then, "It just didn't make sense for me to continue on with grad school. He was working on his dissertation and we needed to put all our attention on that. It was