His hand stayed where it was, palm cupped over her mouth, and she could taste herself on it — salt and the sour edge of her own tears, the flat of his fingers pressing her lips back against her teeth. The silk under her cheek had gone warm and damp where her face lay. Jasmine rose off the sheet with every breath he forced out of her, that cloying sweetness filling her head until she could not tell the smell of the room from the smell of her own panic. Behind her the lamp threw their shadows up the wall and she watched them, two black shapes joined at the hips, one of them moving.

He pulled back. Slow. The drag of him sliding out of her was its own long sentence, a thick friction that turned her whole body into one raw nerve, and she felt the ring of muscle at her entrance close behind him, trying to keep him, and then he pushed in again and opened her all over.

The first time, in the beginning, it had been only pain — a burning that split her and made her sob into his fingers. That pain had a shape and she had learned the shape. Now it was something else. He went deeper than her body wanted to allow and her body allowed it anyway, and somewhere past the point where the stretch stopped being a wound, there was a place he reached that made her cunt clench down on nothing at all, empty, hungry, her thighs shaking against the sheets.

"There," he said, low, almost to himself. "There it is."

She did not know what he meant. She only knew that his hips had settled into a rhythm, in and back, in and back, and that her own hips had started to answer it without her telling them to. Small at first. The tiniest tilt, a rolling of her pelvis against the mattress, testing what her body could do with him inside it. Then bigger. Then she was meeting him halfway, her ass pushing back into his belly each time he drove forward, and she heard his breath catch in his throat — a sound she had not heard from him all night, a sound that was not Papa's and not a stranger's but something underneath both.

His hand came off her mouth.

The air hit her wet lips and her chin and the slick track his palm had left across her cheek, and she gasped it in, and the gasp came out longer than a gasp. It came out as a moan. Deep and open and not sorry. She turned her face out of the silk and her hair fell across her mouth, the long black weight of it sticking to her tears, and she did not push it away.

"Papa," she said.

"Say it again."

"Papa."

Both his hands found her hips then. Not gentle. He got his fingers into the soft flesh above the bone and pulled her back into him, and the sound of their bodies meeting was flat and loud in the small room, skin on skin, and the bed frame knocked against the wall — one knock, then another, then a steady beat, the whole bed walking an inch across the floor with every thrust.

She pushed back once, hard, harder than she meant to, and took him to the root, and his whole body went still against her back. She felt his chest heave. She felt the wet heat of his breath on her shoulder blade and the way his fingers dug in and held, and for one long second neither of them moved at all.

"You want it," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Yes."

"Say what you want."

"More, Papa." The words came out of her cracked and low. "More."

He gave it to her.

The rhythm changed — no more of the slow deliberate inches, no more of him measuring her. He fucked her now, fast and even, his hips slapping against the backs of her thighs, and every thrust shoved her up the bed until her knees slipped on the silk and she had to brace her palms flat against the headboard to keep from being pushed into the wall. The bangles on her wrists knocked together with each jolt, thin bright ringing under the wet sounds and the knock of the frame, and her anklets chimed against her heels where her feet had come up off the mattress.

She was still dressed in the pieces he had left her. The sindur in the parting of her hair, the jhumkas swinging from her ears, the bangles, the anklets — nothing else. Her mother's gold moved on her with every thrust like it belonged to a wife being taken by her husband, and the thought went through her like a splinter and made her cunt clench again, tight and empty and aching, and she pressed her forehead into the headboard and groaned.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"No."

"Does it hurt, Beti?"

"No, Papa." She could barely get the words out between his thrusts. "It doesn't— it doesn't hurt anymore."

He laughed. Just a short breath of it, surprised out of him, and she felt it land against her back. "Good girl," he said. "Good girl."

Her face burned at that. She did not know why. She had been called worse things and better things and none of them had ever gone through her like this, and she turned her cheek against the headboard so the silk could cool it, and she kept her hips moving, kept giving him the rhythm back, because if she stopped she would have to think about what she was doing and she did not want to think.

The bed knocked. The bangles rang. Her hair had come loose from where it had stuck to her cheek and now it swung free down her back, the ends of it brushing his stomach every time he drove in, and he gathered a fistful of it near the crown of her head and pulled.

Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to hold. Her chin came up, her throat stretched, and she made a sound she had not made before — high, thin, cut off at the end — and she heard him breathe out through his teeth behind her.

"Look at you," he said.

There was a mirror on the far wall, small and framed in cheap gold paint, hung at an angle over the dresser. She had not looked at it once since he had bent her over the bed. Now he pulled her hair and her head came up and her eyes found it, and she saw herself.

Her kajal had run. Two black tracks down her cheeks where the tears had carried it, and her lips were swollen and open and wet, and the sindur was still there in the parting of her hair, bright red against the black, and the jhumkas swung and flashed, and behind her, over her shoulder, there was his face. Grey stubble. The gold ring in his ear. His mouth slightly open. His eyes on her in the glass, not on her back, on her eyes in the glass, and something in his face was so hungry and so lost that she had to look away and could not.

"Papa," she said.

"Mm."

"Do you see me?"

He did not answer with words. He let go of her hair and got both hands back on her hips and pulled her onto him, hard, over and over, and the knock of the bed against the wall went from a beat into a rattle, and she stopped trying to hold herself up on the headboard and let her cheek come down onto the silk again, face turned toward the mirror, watching them both.

The place he was reaching inside her had gone from ache to heat. She could feel it building behind her navel, low and deep, a pressure that had nowhere to go, and every thrust fed it, and her cunt was clenching and unclenching around nothing, wet enough that she could feel it running down the inside of her thigh, slick and warm, and she had not been touched there once all night.

"Papa—"

"What."

"I'm—" She could not finish it. She did not have the word for what was happening to her.

"Go on," he said. "Let it."

Her hips stuttered. The rhythm broke — hers first, then his, because he felt her go and he chased it, driving in deep and staying there, grinding against her, and the pressure behind her navel opened like a fist letting go and her whole body pulled tight around it, thighs shaking, cunt clenching down hard on nothing at all, empty and greedy and clenching anyway, and she came with her mouth open against the silk and his name coming out of her in a long broken sound that was not quite a word.

"Papa. Papa. Papa."

He fucked her through it, all of it, every wave, and she heard him saying something behind her but she could not make out the words over the ringing in her ears and the knock of the bed and her own voice. Her hands had found the sheet and fisted it. Her hair was stuck to her face again. Her mother's bangles rang on her wrists like a temple bell.

Then he pulled out.

The emptiness was sudden and enormous. She felt the cool air rush into her where he had been, felt her ass close and her cunt still pulsing around nothing, and she lay flat and gasping with her cheek in the wet silk while he worked himself over her back with his fist — she could hear it, the quick wet sound of it, and his breath coming hard through his nose.

"Don't move," he said.

She did not move.

He came across her spine. Hot and thick, the first stripe landing between her shoulder blades and the second lower, across the small of her back, and she felt it slide in the hollow of her waist and start to run down her side toward the sheet. She lay there with her hair in her face and her cheek in the silk and her mother's jhumkas still swinging from her ears, and she did not move, and she did not wipe it away, and she listened to him breathe.

For a long moment neither of them said anything. The bed frame had stopped knocking. Somewhere in the house a fan turned, and the lamp buzzed, and outside a dog barked twice and gave up. The smell of jasmine had gone under the smell of everything else — sweat and spit and the two of them — and she lay in it with her eyes open, watching the mirror, watching the two shapes on the bed, one of them still kneeling behind the other with his hand on her hip.

"Beti," he said at last, and his voice had gone soft and strange.

"Yes, Papa."

"You did well."

She closed her eyes.