The mattress gave under her knees. Maya sat up on him, straddling his hips, and the sheet slid down off her back and gathered in a white ring around his thighs. The sindur line was still bright in her part. The fan turned above them, one slow blade after another, and it moved the hair at her temple and moved nothing else in the room.

Under her, Rohan was hard. She had felt it against her hip while they lay there, and she had lain still and let it happen, and then she had pushed herself up on her palms and swung one leg over him and settled, and now she could feel it lying up along the inside of her thigh, hot and thick, and her own small cock pressed down against his belly, wet at the tip, leaving a shine on his skin.

He looked up at her. His eyes had gone somewhere else — not away, but under. His mouth was open and he was breathing through it.

"Papa," she said.

"Maya."

She reached back between her legs and found him with her fingers, and she lifted herself and set the head of him against her, and she did not go slow. She had been stretched an hour ago and she was still wet from it, and she took him down in one long sink until her thighs met his hips and her whole weight was on him, and she heard herself make a sound she had not planned to make.

Rohan's hands came up and caught her at the waist. His fingers dug into the curve of her hip on both sides, hard enough that she would find the marks tomorrow.

"Oh," he said. Just that.

Maya sat there and let herself feel it. Full. Her body had been made for this over two years — the pills, the hips, the softness, all of it — and now it was being used the way it had been built to be used, and the rightness of it went through her like a second pulse. She put her hands flat on his chest and began to move.

Slow at first. Lifting until he almost slipped out and sinking back down, and each time she came down he made a low sound in his throat that she filed away. The wet noise of it was loud in the small room. The springs sighed under them, one long complaint, and the fan hummed, and outside a scooter went past and faded.

Her hair had come loose from behind her ear. It swung forward over her shoulder in a black sheet and dragged across his chest as she moved, the ends of it catching on his nipple, and he shuddered under her every time it did.

"You like that," she said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I like it."

She rode him harder. The lengha was gone — it hung over the chair by the almirah, red and gold — and she was wearing only the blouse, unbuttoned, and the petticoat pushed down around her waist, and the bangles on her wrists clicked with every drop of her hips, a small bright sound under the wet one. Her breasts moved with her, heavy, and they had been aching all evening, and now they ached worse, a full hot pull low in each one that she had felt before and not understood until this moment.

She bent forward over him. Her hair fell on both sides of his face.

"Drink," she said.

He did not understand her. She took his head in both hands and brought his mouth up to her nipple, and she squeezed the breast with her own fingers, and the milk came — thin and white, a bead of it first and then a run, and it went into his mouth and he made a sound against her skin like something being pulled out of him.

He sucked.

Maya's eyes closed. Her hips kept moving without her telling them to. The pull of his mouth went straight down through her, breast to belly to cunt, one line of heat, and she ground down on him and felt him jerk inside her and she laughed — a soft, broken laugh, breath through her nose.

"Yes, Papa," she said.

He drank and drank. His hand came up and cupped the underside of her other breast and kneaded it, clumsy, and milk beaded at that nipple too and ran down his fingers and dripped onto his own chest. She watched it from above, her hair hanging, and something in her chest unclenched that had been clenched for years — this, this was the thing she had not been able to name, this giving, this being drunk from, this being the source.

"Yes," she said again. "Papa. Yes."

He pulled off her breast with a wet sound and tipped his head back on the pillow and looked up at her with his mouth shining. "Where did you—"

"Two years," she said. "Everything about me took two years. You only noticed tonight."

He had no answer for that. She did not need one. She straightened up again and put both hands on his chest and rode him in earnest, and the rhythm went from slow to fast the way a thing falls, and the headboard began to knock the wall, and she did not care, and neither did he — his hands had gone to her hips and he was pulling her down to meet him, driving up into her from below, and the wet slap of their bodies filled the room.

Her small cock swung against his stomach with every stroke, slick with her own wet, and every time it dragged across his skin she felt it — a bright thin pleasure that had nothing to do with coming and everything to do with being this, being here, being a woman on top of a man who was hers.

"Yes, Papa," she said. "Yes — yes—"

"Maya—"

"Say it again."

"Maya."

"No," she said, and she leaned down over him and her hair curtained them both and the milk from her nipple dripped onto his chin. "Say what I am."

He looked up at her. His eyes were wet at the corners, though whether from what he had drunk or what he had done she could not tell, and it did not matter.

"My wife," he said.

She came down on him so hard that the whole bed jumped. The word went through her like the sindur had gone through her hair — a mark made from the outside that she had been waiting for from the inside — and she heard herself moaning, loud, louder than the fan, louder than the street, and she did not put her hand over her mouth, and she did not lower her voice, because there was no one in this house to hear it but the two of them and the photograph in the front room.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, Papa, yes—"

He turned his face into her breast again and took the nipple back into his mouth and sucked hard, and the milk came and he swallowed it and she felt him swell inside her, and she knew he was close, and she did not let him go. She rode him through it. When he came he bucked up under her and his hands went white-knuckled on her hips and he made a long broken sound against her breast, and she kept moving, slow now, riding the last of it out of him, and the wet of him leaked out around where they were joined and ran down the inside of her thigh.

She held him there until he stopped shaking.

Then she lifted off him and rolled to the side and lay on her back beside him, one arm flung over her eyes, breathing hard. The fan turned. The headboard had left a mark on the wall. Her blouse was open and both nipples were wet and there was milk drying on her belly in a thin white line, and she could feel his come moving slowly down between her legs.

Rohan lay still for a while. Then he turned his head on the pillow and looked at her.

He pulled her in. He put his mouth on her breast again, gently this time, no sucking, just the flat of his tongue against the nipple, cleaning the last of the milk off her skin, and the tenderness of it was worse than the fucking had been. Her throat closed.

He released her with a wet gasp and his mouth traced up her neck, slow, along the line of her jaw, and stopped at her ear.

"I needed a woman," he said. "A wife."

His breath was hot on her neck. His hand was still on her hip, holding her to him like she might get up and leave, and she was not going to leave.

"And you are my wife."

The words sat in the air. Maya did not answer him. She turned her face toward the open door and the dark hallway beyond it and the fan turning overhead, and she listened to her own breathing slow down beside his, and she let the sentence stay where he had put it, in the room, on her skin, in the part of her hair.

The come kept moving. She felt it reach the fold of her thigh and stop there, cooling, and she did not wipe it away. It was a kind of proof. She lay with her arm over her eyes and let the room come back to her one piece at a time — the fan first, its slow uneven hum, then the smell of the room itself, clean laundry and the two of them, and under that the faint mineral sweetness of the milk still drying on her belly, and somewhere far off down the street a dog that had been barking all evening and had not stopped.

Rohan's hand had not left her hip. His thumb was moving. Not a stroke exactly — a small blind circle, back and forth over the bone, the way a man touches something he is afraid to wake. She counted the circles without meaning to. Eight, nine, ten.

"You're going to leave marks," she said, from under her arm.

"Where."

She moved her arm and looked down her own body. There were four small crescents on the left hip where his fingers had been, already going pink at the edges, and the same four on the right. She turned her head on the pillow and showed him.

He looked at them for a long time. Then he took his hand away and laid it flat on the sheet, palm up, like a man putting down something he has been told not to hold.

"Don't," she said.

"Maya—"

"Put it back."

He put it back. His palm fitted over the marks exactly, covering them, and she felt the heat of his hand soak into the ache and the ache did not go away, which was the point. She wanted it there tomorrow. She wanted to sit down at the vanity in the morning and feel it.

The sheet had come untucked at the foot of the bed. One corner of it hung down to the floor and lay in the dust, and the petticoat was still pushed down around her waist, the drawstring cutting a line across her belly, and the blouse hung open on her shoulders like something she had forgotten she was wearing. Her bangles had slid up her forearm and stayed there, out of place, a row of thin gold rings stacked near her elbow where they did not belong. She looked at them and felt, for the first time all night, ridiculous — and then she felt the opposite of ridiculous, because a woman who has just been fucked by her husband looks exactly like this. Undone. Out of order. Wearing her own jewelry wrong.

She pulled the blouse up over her shoulder with one hand, and did not button it.

"It's warm," she said.

"It's warm."

"The fan's not doing anything. It just moves the heat around."

"It's old." He said it the way he said everything about the house, flat, as if the house had been old before either of them and would be old after. Then, after a moment: "I'll look at it."

Maya turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time since he had said the word. Wife. He was lying on his back with his eyes on the ceiling and his mouth still a little open, and his chest was going up and down slowly, and there was a shine on his chin where the milk had run and dried, and he had not wiped that off either. His hair had come out of whatever shape it usually held and stood up on one side. His throat was working, swallowing and swallowing, like a man who has been given water after a long time and does not trust it to keep coming.

She reached over and put two fingers on his chin and wiped the milk off with her thumb. He went still under her hand. She held the thumb up where he could see it, the thin white smear on the pad, and then she licked it off herself, unhurried, the way she licked a spoon when she was cooking.

He made a sound. Not a word.

"You'll want it again," she said. "That's how it works. Once you've had it, the body asks." She settled back onto the pillow and folded her hands on her stomach, the bangles clicking once as they came down. "You'll wake up in the night and want it. I know because I've had it for two years and it never once stopped asking."

"Had what."

"Being somebody." She said it simply, without weight, the way she might have said the dal is done. "You spend your whole life being the person everyone already decided you are, and one day you stop, and after that there's a thing in you that wants and wants and won't be talked out of it. You've had it two hours. I've had it two years. You'll find out it doesn't go quiet in the morning."

He turned his head toward her. His eyes had come back from wherever they had gone — up under, she had thought, but they were here now, on her, and they were not the eyes of a man looking at a problem. They were the eyes of a man who has just been told the price and is still standing at the counter.

"And you," he said. "What do you want."

The question landed somewhere under her ribs and sat there. Nobody had ever asked her that. Not once, in eighteen years, not in any way that meant it. She lay still and let it sit and did not run at it, because she had learned in two years that the things worth having are the things you do not answer too fast.

"I want the door open," she said at last, and nodded at the dark rectangle of the hallway. "I've had it shut for two years. Every night. The lock, the towel against the bottom of it, all of it. I'm done with that door being shut."

He looked at the door. Then he got up — slowly, an old man's get-up, one hand on the mattress to push — and walked to it naked and stood in the frame with his back to her and the hallway dark in front of him, and the fan moved the hair on the back of his neck. She watched him from the bed. The marks on her hip ached when she shifted.

"It's dark out there," he said.

"The bulb's been gone a year. You keep saying you'll change it."

"I'll change it."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." He said it with his back to her, and she could not see his face, and she did not need to. He stood there a moment longer in the doorway, and then he came back and lay down and did not close it.

Maya turned onto her side and put her back against his chest, and his arm came over her without being asked, and she drew his hand down to her hip and set it on the marks, and he left it there. The fan went around. The dog down the street finally stopped. The sindur was still in her part, dry now, and it would be there in the morning, and the door was open, and she closed her eyes.