She reached for me, rubbing me over the perfect, slippery skin between her legs. My hands made fists around the sheets at my sides.

“Hanna?” I asked in a breathless burst.

Pausing, she asked, “Yeah?”

“Can I grab your hips, though?”

I could feel her go still over me and then start to laugh. “What in the world kind of dress would show my hips?”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, laughing. “I’m not thinking. Holy fuck, Plum, just get on my dick.”

But she didn’t. I could feel the heat of her, so close, and she slowly settled back down on my thighs, her hands running up over my stomach.

“You okay?” I asked, sitting up beneath her and clumsily finding her face again with my hands. “You’re freaking out about the dress again?” I tried to surreptitiously swipe my thumbs beneath her eyes to make sure she wasn’t crying, but she ducked away.

“I’m not crying.”

I nodded, going quiet, wanting to tread carefully.

“I’m just nervous,” she said.

My chest twisted. “You know that just because we’re getting married doesn’t mean that anything between us changes, right? We’re still Will and Hanna. We’re still us.”

“It feels different already,” she said, and slid her fingertips over my lips when I opened my mouth to protest, quickly adding, “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, it feels deeper. It feels more important. Before, I would look at your body and think, ‘Wow, I get to play with this all night long!’ Now, I look at your body and think, ‘Wow, I get to play with this, and Oh my God what if anything ever happened to him and—’ ”

“Hanna. Breathe,” I said gently from beneath her fingers.

She took a calming breath, sliding her hand down my neck almost as if she was tracing a line to my heart. “I’m only twenty-five,” she said after a long pause. “And I know my life would be ruined if I lost you.”

The idea of it stabbed sharply into my gut. “You’re never going to lose me.”

She didn’t say anything, just drew tiny circles on my chest with her fingertip.

“Plum, come on. We already take such good care of each other. This just makes it official.”

Her finger came up again, crossing from one side of my bottom lip to the other, stroking. Thunder pounded through my blood.

“I take care of you?” she asked.

“You do. And when you’re not sure how, you ask.”

After a few breaths of silence, she said, “Like now?”

I both loved and hated the darkness of the blindfold. I wanted to see her face, but from her voice alone I could imagine it: lip being gently chewed between her teeth, eyes fixed on where her fingers touched my skin with maddening care. This was how we started. She asked, I guided.