Right Enough for Court

1. Prologue - The Glass and the Belt

The lace had worked loose from her wrist and clung where his skin was damp, a small grated drag each time she shifted. Elena felt it and did not free it. Freeing it would have required a pause, and a pause would have sounded like doubt. The velvet robe had fallen to her elbows and stayed there, heavy as a curtain taken down mid-season, smelling of the drawer and of her own heat. Under it she was bare. Her knees bracketed his hips on the guest-room mattress, the old springs answering in a low, embarrassed tick.

She had brought a glass of water she did not need. It stood on the nightstand, beaded, absurd. The lamp was on. She had wanted to see his face for disgust large enough to stop her, and she had not found it, and now the light only made the room honest.

“Don’t speak,” she said again, though he had not spoken since she put his hand back where the afternoon had left it.

Marco’s mouth was at her hair. That was easier than her mouth, which had already corrected him once today, back into the name that kept the corridor orderly. Her breasts rested against his chest when she leaned, soft and heavy, nipples drawn tight; the brush of them made his stomach jump. He held her waist because she had not told him where else to put his hands. Holding still felt like obedience. Obedience was the only version of this he could carry downstairs later.

She sank the last of the way with a careful, irritated breath. The stretch burned in a thin bright line and then went warm. She was wet enough that the taking made a soft, slick sound, unmistakable in the quiet, and she hated the sound for being evidence. He filled her in one slow seat. Her cunt clenched once, involuntary, around the thickness of him, and the clench pulled a noise out of her throat that she bit off against his shoulder.

For a moment neither of them moved. His cock throbbed inside her. She could feel her own pulse answering it, a stupid sympathetic beat. The boiler knocked somewhere in the wall, the old fault, and she refused to let the knock become a reason.

Elena rolled her hips. A small circle, then another, grinding rather than lifting, so the wet drag stayed deep and the mattress did not talk more than it had to. The lace cuff rasped his ribs. Silver hair stuck to the corner of her mouth. She smelled of soap and of the skin under her breasts, salt already starting. He smelled of the cedar chest and of the afternoon’s coffee. When she rose even a little, the air cooled the shine on him; when she sank, the heat closed over again, swollen, plush, gripping on the way down.

His hands tightened. She felt the restraint in them, the not-thrusting, and used it. If he waited, the pace remained hers. She rocked, breath through her nose, the head of him nudging a place that made her thighs threaten to shake. Wetness gathered and slipped, a warm thread down over him, onto the sheet beneath his hips. She heard it. He heard it. His jaw flexed against her hair.

“Elena.” It came out before he could stop it, low, not a request.

“No.” Her voice shook and she despised the shake. She took his lower lip between her teeth, not a kiss, a correction, then let it go. “You had the afternoon to use that name. Not now.”

He swallowed whatever he had meant. The swallow moved under her palm where she had braced on his chest. She lifted higher this time, almost off him, the slick tug obscene, and eased down until her full weight settled and the breath left him in a rush. Again. Again. Shorter. Her breasts swayed. One nipple brushed his mouth and she allowed it for a moment, the heat of his tongue, the careful suction, then drew back because kindness of that kind would undo the instruction.

The shake arrived anyway. It started in the muscle above her knee and ran inward. She reached between them, two fingers clumsy on her own clit, slippery, and rubbed in tight circles while she kept him deep. The sensation stacked: the thick stay of him, the wet click of her fingers, the rasp of lace, the shamefully loud softness of the bed. Her cunt began to flutter, small grasping pulses she could not order aside.

She came with her forehead dropped to his shoulder and her teeth set in the same place as before, harder now. The sound stayed mostly in him. Inside, she clenched in long, milking waves, and the gush of it wet his belly, his thighs, the dark hair at the base of him. Her hand slipped. She caught herself on his chest and rode the aftershocks in short, helpless grinds, chasing the last of it even while her face burned.

Marco lasted through the first clench and not the second. The grip of her, the flood of heat, the bitten shoulder, undid the waiting. His hips jerked up despite himself, once, twice, driving deep enough that she grunted. He spilled in thick pulses, buried, the release so sudden his vision speckled. She felt the kick of it, the spreading warmth, and stayed seated, taking it, because telling him to withdraw would have been a second decision and she had spent the one she came downstairs to spend.

They breathed. The room smelled of sex and of the water going flat in the glass. A last thin seep escaped around him and cooled on her thigh. His hands had opened on her waist, no longer holding so much as resting, and that rest annoyed her more than the grip had. Rest looked like afterward.

Elena climbed off on unsteady knees. The loss of him made her hiss; semen followed in a slow, indecent slide, and she caught it with the corner of the sheet, then with the water on her fingers, practical, furious at the practicality. She drew the robe up, found the belt, knotted it. The lace cuff peeled from his skin with a tiny sound. In the lamp his shoulder showed the mark of her teeth, pink, not quite broken.

She did not touch it.

“This does not go to your mother.”

“No.”

His voice was wrecked. He did not look at her mouth. She looked at the glass, at the wet sheet, at the door she still had to walk through, and found she could do all three without asking him whether he meant to stay the week.

The lock, when she turned it on her own door, caught on the first try.

1. Chapter 1 -Eleven Days

The cedar chest had been emptied before he arrived, and still the room smelled of it. Marco woke with that dry, sweet edge in his throat and lay a moment under a blanket that had not been his in years, listening to the house arrange itself: a pipe, a shutter ticking against its hook, her step on the stair, unhurried, already dressed for a day that included him only as a task.

Eleven days. ...