Then it began to rain outside, just like I’d known it would.

It fell first in a soft, pervasive shush, cattails rustling against one another in high wind; then a loud, cascading downpour, rattling like marbles onto the roof above our heads. The room filled with the smell of rain and gusting cold, but the two of us were such an inferno that the creeping chill felt like a balm. We were pure heat together, a building blaze with no known boundaries. A tangled locus of lips and hands, driving each other wild over and over again.

A fire that felt like madness, like it might never be put out.

24

What You Do Best

I just remembered,” I said, trailing my fingers idly down Talia’s back. She lay pillowed on my chest, my chin tucked against her crown, her head rising and falling with each of my breaths. “You never told me why you don’t have any tattoos.”

“Seriously, Emmy?” Her laugh feathered over my chest. “That’s what you want to talk about right now?”

“Just humor me.” It was so nice to keep hearing my name from her, even now that we weren’t caught up in the moment. It felt like gaining ground, like I’d won something precious that was finally mine to keep. “I have a feeling it’s something I’d want to know.”

She sighed, pouting against my skin, drawing runelike patterns into my lower belly. “But you’re going to make fun of me.”

“After you made me come, what, sixty-five thousand times? I could never. It’s like you fucked the sass right out of me.”

“When you put it that way . . .” She laughed a little, and then I heard her swallow in the dark. “Okay, I guess it is only fair. The thing is, I want to wait for matching tattoos. You know, with a partner. So we can have . . . something indelible, something that matters in a special way. Something that I’d never done on my own before.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, biting down on the inside of my cheek to keep a straight face. “You want to be an ink virgin, because you’re saving yourself for your first time with that extra special someone?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said, struggling against me as if to get up. I held her tight, locked against me until she lapsed back onto my chest, laughing despite herself.

“Wait a minute, now I’m processing the implications. Does this make me an ink slut? Dermally promiscuous?”

“You promised you wouldn’t make fun!”

“That was before I knew you were such a closet romantic,” I teased, tugging her up until we were nose to nose, her head nested on the pillow next to mine. “Now all bets are off.”

“It’s not like I go to such great lengths to hide it,” she said, and I sensed from the wary shift in her tone that we’d somehow wandered back into serious territory. “Is that a problem for you?”