What was he thinking while she fell quiet, took her time to come back to this place, here and now, with him? He hadn't left her, she didn't think, not from the way his fingers wrote patterns and what felt like runes across her back, not from how alert he'd been to her speaking and how promptly he responded.

Slowly recovering herself, she rubbed her cheek against his chest, and then folded her arms and rested her chin atop them. She offering him a quixotic half-smile as she let one of her legs fall to the outside of his in a minimalistic caress. "Taking this slow would be a lot easier if you weren't so kind on top of being sex on legs. One of the other, I could handle. Both is problem."

They were just words. Stupid words. But she had no practice at this kind of intimacy, or finding her way back to where they were without feeling like an insatiable, traitorous slut or worse. This was the first time any of it had ever mattered.