He doesn’t move for an eternity, just stares down, eyes moving over every inch of me he can see from his vantage. He’s so hard it has to be edging discomfort for him, and I can feel the shake of his hand gripping the sheet near my head.

“You need to be reminded?” he whispers.

I nod frantically, hands grasping his sides as my hips move off the bed, hungry. He pulls back so slowly I feel my nails digging into the skin of his sides before I even realize what I’m doing. He hisses, stabbing back into me with a low groan.

And then he snaps back again, and then forward, hard and tormenting, his pace nearly punishing. Punishing me for the handprint, punishing us both for the distance that got between us. Punishing me for forgetting sex with us is like this, and nothing is better. He leans over me, his skin rubbing mine where I need him, sweat dampening his brow and the smooth expanse of his chest. I curl into him, licking his collarbone, his neck, pulling his head to mine to feel the deep rumble of his pleasure against my teeth, my lips, my tongue.

My thighs shake at his sides, pleasure climbing, and I need harder and more of him, my fingers are desperately pulling at his hips, my words begging and unintelligible. I feel my release twisting in me, tighter and tighter until it snaps, bursting wide open in a jerking, clutching lash of sensation and I’m arching from the bed, crying his name over and over.

He pushes up on his hands, watching me come apart under him, and through the fog of my orgasm, I watch him climb. His strokes are long and hard, our skin slapping together in a crude sound that makes me wilder, makes me wonder if I really am on the verge of coming again so soon.

“Aah,” I cry out. “I’m . . .”

“Show me,” he growls, dropping a hand between us, petting my clit in tiny, perfect circles.

I bow off the bed, my entire body clenching in a second orgasm so sharp my vision blurs.

Ansel’s neck becomes corded and tense, teeth clench and eyes narrow and he hisses, “Fuck,” before his hips become brutal, loudly pounding against my thighs. He collapses on top of me and I can feel the way he twitches inside, the way he shudders under my hands.

I let out a shaky gasp, winding my legs around his hips when he begins to pull back. “No,” I say into the skin of his neck. “Stay.”

He bends, his mouth latching on to my breast, sucking, tongue roaming up my neck to my jaw as his hips rock slowly back and forth. He seems insatiable, and even though I know he’s already come, I don’t sense that we’re done. Once his mouth finds mine, I’m lost again, lost in the wet slide of his tongue, the slow press of him in and out of me. It feels like only a second that his body relaxes inside before I feel him stirring again, lengthening until he’s moving in earnest, long curling thrusts with his body pressed all along mine.

This time it’s slow, and he kisses me every second of it, deep and searching, letting me hear the agony and pleasure of our bodies so thoroughly that it makes me delirious.

HE ROLLS OFF me, groaning in relief. I curl to him in the dark, my heart racing still, skin damp with sweat.

“Ah,” he whispers, kissing the top of my head. “There she is.”

I kiss his throat, tongue sliding over the hollow where I taste the faint salt of his sweat and mine.

“Thank you for this,” he says. “I love that you did this tonight.”

My hand drifts up his stomach, across his chest, and I close my eyes as I ask, “Tell me about the window.”

Beside me he freezes for a beat, before exhaling a long, slow breath. “It is complicated, maybe.”

“I don’t have anywhere I need to be,” I say, smiling into the darkness.

His lips press to my temple before he says, “My mother, as I mentioned, is American.” I look up at his face from where I rest on his chest, but it’s hard to make out his features in the dark. “She moved to France when she was just out of high school, and worked as a maid.”

“Oh,” I say, laughing. “Maybe my costume choice was a little weird for you.”

He groans, tickling my side. “I assure you, you did not make me think of my mother tonight at all.” After I’ve stilled at his side, he says, “Her first job was working in the very regal house of a businessman named Charles Guillaume.”

“Your father,” I guess.

He nods. “My mother is a wonderful woman. Caring, fastidious. I imagine she was a perfect housekeeper. I suppose I get those tendencies from her, but also my father. He required the house to be spotless. He was obsessive about it. He required that I never leave a mark, anywhere. Not on mirrors, or windows. Not a crumb in the kitchen. Children were neither to be seen nor heard.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is lighter. “Perhaps our fathers are not very nice, but would get along well?”

I hold my breath, not wanting to move or blink or do anything to break this moment. Each word feels like a gift and I’m so hungry for every little piece of his history. “Tell me more about them?”

He shifts me closer, sliding his hands into the hair at the back of my head. “They began to have an affair when my mother was only twenty, and my father was forty-four. From what my mother has told me, it was very passionate. It consumed her. She never planned to stay in France for so long, but she fell in love with Charles and I don’t think she has ever recovered.”

“‘Recovered’?”

“My father is an ass**le,” he says, laughing a little dryly. “Controlling. Obsessive about the house, as I mentioned. As he’s aged, he’s only gotten worse. But I think he must have a charisma, a charm that drew her in.” I smile into the dark when he says this, knowing he may be a better man, but he certainly got charm from his father. “During this time that he and my mother were together, he was married to another woman. She lived in England, but my father refused to leave his home to live with her, and my mother didn’t know this wife existed. When maman became pregnant with me, my father wanted her to remain in the servants’ quarters, and didn’t let her tell anyone it was his child.” He laughs a little. “Everyone knew anyway, and of course I turned three or four, and I looked exactly like him. Eventually, the wife found out. She divorced my father, but he did not choose to marry my mother.”