The rain had been at it since five, a steady drumming on the window glass that made the borrowed room feel smaller than it was. Saan lay on his back on the narrow bed with his phone face-up on the quilt beside him, the screen dimming every thirty seconds and brightening again when he tapped it awake. The house was quiet in that way it got when Nazir was on a double shift and Tarannum had gone to bed early with a headache she did not explain. He had eaten alone. He had washed his own plate. He had stood at the kitchen window for a long time watching water come off the eaves in a rope.

The phone buzzed. Unknown number. He looked at it the way he looked at most things now — a beat too long, weighing what it would cost him.

He answered.

"Saan?" A woman's voice, low and unhurried, the kind that made you lean in even when the room was empty. "I hope I'm not calling too late. This is Kusum — Riya's aunt. She gave me your number. I hope that's all right."

He sat up, the quilt pooling at his waist. "She didn't mention —" He stopped, recalibrating. "No. It's fine. Sorry, I just — you said Riya's aunt?"

"Her father's sister, yes. I'm in the city for a few weeks, sorting out some property business that has been sitting too long. Riya said you're the one with a head for numbers. She said it in a tone that made me think she was not exaggerating." A soft sound on the other end — a sip, maybe, or a dry little laugh. "I need someone to talk me through a few things before I make a fool of myself in front of a lawyer. Market strategy, projections, that whole grim language. Would you come by this evening? My flat is not far from the old market. I'd rather not do it over the phone."

Rain hammered the window. He looked at the door he had closed against the corridor, at the lamp throwing his shadow up the wall. "Tonight," he said.

"If you're free. I know it's short notice. I'm a woman who has learned to ask for what she wants when she wants it." Another pause, warmer now. "And I'll be honest with you, Saan. I'm not good at being alone in a strange flat on a night like this. You'd be doing me a kindness as much as a service."

He should have said no. He knew that with the part of him that still kept accounts, that still remembered his mother's voice on the phone telling him to be good, to be grateful, to be careful. But the flat was quiet and the rain was loud and Tarannum's door was shut and somewhere in the city a woman had said his name like it was worth saying.

"Give me the address," he said.

She gave it slowly, making him repeat it back, and when he did she said, "Good. Come as you are. Don't dress up for me." The line went quiet before he could answer.

He stood under the shower until the water ran cold, then dressed in the dark so he would not have to see himself doing it — a clean shirt, the trousers he wore to work, his hair pushed back with wet fingers. He left a note on the kitchen counter that said out for a while, back late and then stood looking at it, and then folded it small and put it in his pocket instead. The front door chain he left unlatched. He told himself it was because he would be back before anyone noticed, and the lie sat in his mouth like a coin.

The old market at night was a different animal — shutters down, the tarpaulin roofs drumming, the gutters running brown. He found the building behind the tailor's, climbed two flights of stairs that smelled of wet plaster and someone's cooking, and stood in the corridor with the rain still coming off his shoulders, his knuckles lifted to the door.

She opened it before he knocked.

"You're wet," Kusum said, and stepped back to let the corridor light fall on him.

She was taller than he had pictured, and older — the white in her hair was real, not a fashion, falling loose past her shoulders in a way that made her face look deliberate rather than aged. She wore a robe of dark silk, belted once at the waist, and it was not the robe of a woman who had dressed to receive a stranger. Her eyes came up from his shoes to his face and did not hurry on the way, and he shifted his weight, his hand going to the back of his neck.

"I didn't want to keep you waiting," he said.

"You didn't." She tilted her head, and the robe moved with her, the silk catching the lamp. "Come in. Leave your shoes at the door — the whole building tracks in the market."

He stepped inside and the door swung wider, and the flat opened around him in lamplight — low ceilings, a worn velvet sofa the colour of dried roses, a side table with two glasses already poured and a bottle breathing beside them. The rain sounded different in here, softer, boxed in by the walls. And under it, something else — a smell spiced and dry, cloves and old wood and the faint sweetness of the wine, all of it sitting in the warm air like the room had been waiting a while for him.

"You've already opened the wine," he said, before he could stop himself.

"I have." She crossed to the table and lifted a glass, holding it out to him. "I find a conversation about money goes down easier with something in the hand. Sit. Please. You're dripping on my floor."

He sat. The velvet was warm from the room, and the sofa was softer than it looked, and he found himself sitting forward, elbows on his knees, the way he did when he was trying to look like a man with a head for numbers. She took the other end — not the far end, but close, the way a person sits when they intend to talk quietly. The robe fell open at the knee, a line of bare leg in the lamplight, and he looked at his wine.

"So," he said. "The property."

"The property." She swirled her glass and watched the wine climb the sides. "My brother — Riya's father — he left me a share in something he bought years ago and never explained. Two shops and a godown near the station, all of it tangled up in a partnership with a man I don't trust. The lawyer wants figures. I want to know whether the figures are worth the trouble, or whether I should sell my share and be done with it." She looked at him over the rim. "That's the whole of it. You see why I didn't want to do it over the phone."

"I can look at it," Saan said. "If you have the papers — the lease, the partnership deed, whatever the lawyer's given you. I'd need to see what the shops are actually bringing in. A godown near the station could be worth a great deal or nothing at all, depending on who's been renting it and for how long."

"Listen to that." She smiled, slow and pleased, and set her glass down. "Riya said you were good. She didn't say you were careful. Careful is rarer."

"I've had to be," he said, and did not say why, and she did not ask.

The rain leaned harder against the window. She reached for the bottle and topped up his glass before he had finished it, and then she sat back and let the robe settle, and the silk slid off one shoulder and stayed there, and she did not pull it up. Her skin was warm brown in the lamplight, the hollow of her throat shadowed, and there was something in the way she let the silence sit that made the room feel like it had a pulse.

"You're young," she said. "Riya didn't tell me that either. Or she did, and I chose not to believe her."

"Twenty-three."

"Twenty-three." She said it the way you taste a wine. "When I was twenty-three I was married to a man who spoke to me once a day, at dinner, about the weather. I thought that was what life was. You learn." She lifted her glass. "You're not married."

"No."

"Good." She drank, and set the glass down close to his hand, and her fingers stayed on the stem a moment after. "Now. Show me what you can do, and I'll show you the papers, and we'll see whether the night was worth your trouble."

She rose and went to a bureau in the corner, and the robe moved with her hips in a way that made him look at his wine again, and when she came back she had a folder in her hand and she sat down closer than before — the folder open across both their knees, her shoulder against his, her hair falling forward so that the smell of her came off it, cloves and something under it, warm. He took the top sheet and read, and she watched him read, and the rain went on.

"This lease is expired," he said after a while. "Two years ago. Whoever's in that godown is paying rent to someone, but it isn't going through this deed. That's the whole of your trouble right there — the money's going somewhere, and the paperwork doesn't say where."

"And if I can't find where?"

"Then you sell your share for what it's worth on paper, which is less than it's worth in truth, and the man you don't trust buys it cheap and finds the money himself." He looked up. "Or you find where it's going first, and you don't sell at all."

She was quiet a moment. Then she laughed, low and genuine, and shook her head. "My brother said I was a fool to bring a boy into it. I'll enjoy telling him he was wrong." She closed the folder and set it aside, and her hand came to rest on his thigh — light, casual, the way you'd steady yourself on a railing. "You've earned your wine. And more than that."

The rain had slackened to a hiss. The lamp hummed faintly. He could feel the heat of her hand through the cloth, and he did not move it away, and he did not move it closer, and the moment sat there between them with the folder and the glasses and the whole quiet flat around it.

"You should know something about me, Saan," she said, and her voice had gone lower, the way a voice goes when it stops performing and starts meaning. "I don't do anything by accident. Not the wine, not the hour, not the robe. I'm too old to pretend I don't know what I want." Her fingers pressed, just once. "So I'll ask you plainly. Are you going to sit there being careful all night, or are you going to be worth the trouble?"

He looked at her hand on his thigh, and then at her face, and the lamplight was in her eyes and the rain was on the window and the flat smelled of cloves and wine and the long evening ahead.

"I'm here," he said. "Aren't I."

"Yes," Kusum said, and her thumb moved against the seam of his trousers, slow, unhurried. "You are." She picked up her glass and held it out to him, and he took it, and their fingers touched on the stem. "Then let's not waste the night on figures."

She took the glass back out of his hand and set it down on the floor beside the sofa, and then her hand came back to his thigh and did not stop there. It slid up over the seam, over the fold where his leg met his hip, and found his belt. One pull. The leather gave with a sound like a breath let out, and the button beneath it came undone under her thumb as though it had been waiting for her.

"Kusum—" His voice came out wrong. Too young.

"Shh." She was already leaning in, her hair falling forward off her shoulder, and her hand went flat down the front of his trousers, palm pressing, reading the shape of him through the cloth. Her eyes came up to his face and stayed. "Well. There you are."

She worked the zip down tooth by tooth, unhurried, and the room's warm air met his skin, and then her fingers slipped inside the waistband and found him. Her hand closed around his dick and he made a sound he could not have kept in if the whole building had been listening — a low, cracked thing that died in his throat.

She did not laugh at it. She held him, warm and hard in her fist, and her thumb found the underside and traced the length of him from root to tip, slow, measuring, the way she had swirled the wine in her glass.

"You've been sitting here careful all evening," she said, "with this in your trousers." She stroked down and up again, and his hips lifted off the velvet, helpless. "No wonder you read the lease so fast."

"I was trying—" He gripped the sofa cushion. The velvet bunched under his fingers. "You were talking about godowns."

"I was." Her thumb slid over the head of him, wet already, and spread it, and her fingers tightened. "And you were being very good about it. Look at you now."

She set a rhythm — slow, deep, her fist working him and her thumb returning each time to the same swollen place, and she watched his face while she did it, watched his mouth come open, watched his eyes go to the ceiling and come back to her. The rain had thinned to nothing on the glass. The lamp hummed. Somewhere below in the market a shutter rattled down and was still.

"Breathe," she said. "You've gone red."

He dragged a breath in. "You're — you've done this before."

"Once or twice." She leaned closer, and her voice dropped to nothing much above a whisper, and her hand slowed until it was almost cruel. "The trick is knowing when to stop." Her fist loosened, held him, let him feel how close to nothing she could bring it. "That's what being worth the trouble looks like from here, Saan. Not the fast part. This part."

He was shaking. He could feel the pulse in his own throat, in his wrists, in the place where she held him. "Don't stop," he said.

"There it is." She smiled, and it was not a kind smile, and it was the most beautiful thing he had seen in months. "Ask me properly."

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please don't stop."

She gave him her hand again, faster now, and he arched into it and his heel dug into the floor, and the folder slid off the sofa and spilled its papers across the rug and neither of them looked at it. Her robe had fallen open down the front and he could see the long line of her, the soft weight of her breasts in the lamplight, the shadow between them, and she saw him see it and did not close it.

"Sit up," she said. "No — like that. Hands where I can see them."

He sat up, and she rose onto her knees, and then she came over him, one knee on the velvet either side of his hips, and settled down onto his lap without taking her hand away. The silk of the robe pooled over both of them. She was warm through the thin fabric, warm and heavy, and she rolled her hips once, slow, and the seam of her pressed against the back of her own hand and against him, and she made a low sound of her own at last, the first crack in all that composure.

"You feel that," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes."

"I've been wet since you stood in my doorway dripping on the floor." She rolled again, and her breath caught. "I'm telling you because you're the kind of boy who worries whether a woman is enjoying herself. You can stop worrying."

She shifted her weight and took her hand away, and for a moment there was only the cloth of her robe and the hard press of her through it, and he could feel the heat of her, the damp of her soaking through the silk, and his dick jumped against her and she felt it and her eyes half closed.

"Kusum."

"Mm."

"I want—"

"I know what you want." She caught his wrists and put his hands on her hips, and his fingers sank into the softness there, into the give of her through the silk. "You want to put that inside me and find out what an old woman knows about it. Don't you."

His hands tightened. "Yes."

"Then say it like a man and not a boy at a door."

"I want to fuck you."

She made a sound — a laugh and a gasp at once — and her hips ground down against him, and her forehead came down to his. Her hair fell around both their faces, and she smelled of cloves and wine and the warm skin under it, and her mouth was so close he could feel her breath on his lips.

"The bed," she whispered. "Now. I want you inside me when I come this time."

She climbed off him, and the robe swung, and she caught his hand and pulled him up off the sofa, and the papers scattered under their feet, the lease and the partnership deed and the whole grim language of money, and she stepped over it all and led him through the low doorway into the dark of the next room.

The bed was wide and low and the sheets were cool when he came down onto them. She had already shrugged the robe off her shoulders and let it fall, and she stood a moment at the edge of the bed in nothing but the lamplight coming through the door, and she let him look — the softness of her belly, the white in her hair, the dark thatch between her thighs wet and catching the light — and then she came down onto the bed beside him and put her mouth on his.

Her kiss was slow and sure, and her tongue found his, and her hand went down between them and found his dick again and guided it up along her wetness, sliding it through her, over her clit, and she broke the kiss to gasp against his jaw.

"There," she said. "Feel that. That's what the wine was for."

"You're so wet."

"I told you." She lifted her hips and reached between them and fitted the head of him to her cunt, and held it there, and looked down at him with the lamplight in her eyes. "Now. Gently, first. I'm not twenty-three."

He pushed, and she took him in — slow, inch by inch, her cunt hot and tight and giving way around him, and she let her breath out in a long shudder as he filled her, and she did not stop until he was all the way in and her hips were flush against his and she had taken all of him.

"Oh," she said. Just that. Her eyes closed.

He lay still beneath her, his hands on her hips, feeling the pulse of her around his dick, the small clenches of her, the way she was learning the shape of him from the inside. The rain had started again, soft on the window. Her thighs were warm against his sides.

"All right?" he said.

She opened her eyes. "Better than all right." She began to move, slow, a long roll of her hips that took him deep and drew him out and took him deep again, and her mouth came open, and the sound she made was small and surprised, as though it had been a while and she had forgotten. "There. God. There."

He found her rhythm and met it, and the bed creaked softly under them, and her breasts swayed with the motion, and he reached up and cupped one and felt the weight of it and the hard bud of her nipple against his palm, and she pushed into his hand and made that small sound again.

"Faster," she said. "I'm not made of glass."

He drove up into her, and she cried out and caught herself on his chest, and her hair swung forward, and after that there was no more talking for a while — only the wet sound of him moving in her, the slap of her hips coming down on his, her breath breaking, his own breath ragged under her, the bed knocking softly against the wall. She rode him hard and then slow and then hard again, and each time she slowed she looked down at him with her lip caught in her teeth as if she were deciding something, and each time she sped up she decided it.

"Look at me," she said. "When you come, look at me."

He was close. He could feel it gathering at the base of him, tight and hot, and she felt him swell inside her and her cunt clenched around him and she gasped.

"That's it," she said. "That's it, give it to me—"

He came with a sound that was almost a sob, driving up into her, and she ground down onto him and took it, and he felt himself empty into her, pulse after pulse, his hands hard on her hips, his eyes open on her face the way she had told him to. She watched him do it. She watched all of it.

And then she came herself, and it took her by surprise — he saw it happen, the way her mouth opened and her eyes went wide and then shut, the way her whole body curled down over him, her cunt gripping him so tight it hurt, a long shaking moan pulled out of her that she did not try to keep quiet. She shuddered through it, and again, and then she went slack and heavy on his chest, her face in his neck, her breath hot and wet against his skin.

The rain came down. Her heart was going hard against his ribs, and his against hers, and neither of them moved to get up. After a while her hand found his shoulder and stayed there.

"Well," she said, into his neck. Her voice was wrecked. "The lawyer can wait until morning."

He let his hand travel up her back, along the ridge of her spine, the skin there damp and cooling now that the room had stopped being only the two of them breathing. Her hair was everywhere — across his chest, across his collarbone, a strand of it caught at the corner of his mouth. He turned his head to free it and it came away in his lips like a thread of silk.

"Kusum."

"Mm." She did not lift her face from his neck. Her voice had settled into something low and ruined and entirely at ease.

"The godown. The rent that isn't going through the deed." He shifted under her, catching his breath still. "Two years of it. Somebody's been collecting it every month and the papers don't say who. That's not a small thing to leave sitting till a lawyer wakes up."

She was quiet a moment. Then her shoulders began to shake — small at first, then more, and she pushed herself up on his chest and looked down at him with her hair falling on both sides of her face, and she laughed. Not the dry, deliberate laugh from the sofa. This one came out of her whole body, helpless, her eyes creasing at the corners and her breasts moving with it against his chest.

"What," he said. "What did I say."

"Nothing. Nothing." She wiped at the corner of her eye with the back of her wrist, still grinning. "It's only — you've just come inside me, boy, and the first thing out of your mouth is the rent." She lowered her head and pressed her mouth to his collarbone, and he felt her smile there. "I told my brother a boy would be no use to me. I'll have to eat every word."

"It's not funny. If the money's been going somewhere for two years, it's gone. The man you don't trust has had it all that time and you've been paying a lawyer to look at paper that doesn't say a thing."

She lifted her head at that, and the laughing went out of her face slowly, and what replaced it was not worry. It was worse than worry. It was the look of a woman who had known a thing for a long while and had been waiting to see how long it would take someone else to find it.

"Two years," she said. "You worked that out from one expired lease and a glass of wine."

"It's arithmetic. The deed's dead, the shops are still open, the godown's still got a lock on it. Money doesn't stop moving just because the paper does."

She rolled off him and lay on her back beside him, one arm flung up over her head, the lamp from the doorway laying a long gold stripe across her belly. The sheet was tangled down at their knees. She stared at the ceiling a moment, and then she said, very evenly, "I know where it's going."

Saan turned his head on the pillow. "You know."

"I've known since the spring." She did not look at him. Her fingers found the edge of the sheet and worried it. "My brother collects it. Not the man I told you about — my brother. Riya's father. He's been taking the godown rent into his own hand and putting the partnership deed in a drawer and telling me the property's a burden, that I should sell my share cheap and be grateful he's found a buyer at all."

"Riya's father." The words came out flat. The same man who had a daughter who picked Saan out of a room of analysts like a fruit off a stall. The same family. "And you let him?"

"Let him." She laughed again, but there was no body in it this time. "I let him because for two years I was a widow in a house that wasn't mine, and he was the brother who came to the funeral and stood at the gate and told the neighbours he'd look after me. That's what he told them. Look after her. And then he put his hand in the till and called it looking after." She turned her head at last and looked at Saan, and her eyes in the lamplight were steady and old. "I'm not a fool. I've known since the spring. What I didn't know was what to do about it. A woman alone with a lawyer and a brother — the lawyer costs money and the brother has the deed."

"So the wine and the robe—" He stopped himself.

"The wine and the robe were the wine and the robe." She reached across and laid her palm flat on his chest, over the place where his heart was still coming down. "Don't spoil it by making it a scheme. I asked Riya for the name of a man with a head for numbers because I needed one. I asked you to come tonight because I'd heard your voice on the phone and I wanted to see your face. Both things are true. A woman can want two things at once — it's the only advantage of getting old."

He lay still under her hand. Above them the rain had thinned to a drip off the ledge, and somewhere in the flat a clock he had not noticed before ticked its way toward something. The papers were still scattered on the rug in the other room, the lease and the deed and the grim language of money, and he thought of them lying there in the dark with their facts in them, and of the man who had put them in a drawer.

"If he's had two years of it," Saan said, "then there's a record somewhere. Not in the deed. In the godown — whoever's renting it has been paying someone. They'll have receipts, or a man's name, or a bank that took the money. You don't collect rent for two years and leave no trace at all."

"And what would I do with a trace? Take my brother to a court and have the whole street watch me do it?"

"No." He turned toward her, and her hand slid from his chest to his ribs. "You'd take the trace to him first. Not the court. Him. You'd sit at his table and put it in front of him and let him see that you know, and you'd ask him what he'd like to do about it before the neighbours ever hear a word. A man like that doesn't fear a court. He fears being seen."

She was silent for a long moment. Her thumb moved against his ribs, once, slow.

"You're a strange boy," she said at last. "You come to my door wet through, you read a lease in five minutes, you fuck me like the roof's coming down, and then you lie here in my bed and tell me how to handle my brother better than the lawyer I've been paying for a year." She turned onto her side to face him, drawing the sheet up over her hip. "Where did you learn to be careful like that?"

"I've watched people be careless," he said. "It costs them."

He did not say more, and she did not press. Her eyes moved over his face the way they had moved over him in the doorway, unhurried, taking their time, and something in her expression had changed — the appetite was still there, banked now, but under it was a different kind of attention. The attention of a woman deciding what a person is worth.

"Then here's what I'll do," she said. "Tomorrow I'll go to the godown myself. Not the lawyer — me. I'll stand at the gate and see who comes out with the keys, and I'll ask a question or two in a voice that doesn't sound like a woman who's been robbed. And when I have a name, I'll take it to my brother's table and see what he does with his face." She reached up and pushed a strand of hair back from his forehead, and her fingers stayed there. "And you'll tell me if I'm being a fool. Because you're the only one in this city who's looked at the paper and not at me."

"I've looked at you," he said.

"You've looked at me plenty." The corner of her mouth turned. "But you looked at the lease first. That's the thing I'm buying."

She leaned in and kissed him, and it was a different kiss than the ones before — slower, with less behind it, the kiss of a woman sealing a bargain rather than opening one. When she drew back her eyes were still on him.

"You'll stay," she said. It was not quite a question.

He thought of the note folded small in his pocket, the front door chain he had left unlatched, the quiet house with Tarannum's door shut against the corridor. He thought of the morning and what it would hold, and of the staff who came into Riya's house at dawn, and of all the women in this city who had decided he was worth the trouble and how each of them had a different idea of what the trouble was.

"I'll stay," he said.

"Good." She settled back against him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder as though it had been made for it, and drew the sheet up over them both. Her hand came to rest flat on his chest again, and her breathing began to slow. "Then sleep. We'll go and look at the godown in the morning, and you can tell me what a lock and a ledger have to say to each other."

The clock in the other room ticked on. The rain had stopped altogether now, and the flat was quiet except for the small sounds of the old building settling around them and her breath going soft and even against his skin. He lay awake a while with her weight on him and the scattered papers in the dark next room, and the name of Riya's father turning over in his mind like a coin he could not put down.

Then her hand on his chest moved, deliberate, and her voice came out of the dark, low and amused and not sleepy at all.

"The lawyer can have the figures," she said, and her fingers curled against his skin. "But not my night."

She said it into his skin, her lips still against his shoulder, and then she turned her face up and looked at him and laughed — not the helpless laugh from before, but a smaller one, private, the sound of a woman letting a door close on the evening.

"Not my night," she said again, and drew the sheet up higher, tucking it under her arm. "The night is the only thing in this flat my brother hasn't found a way to collect. He can have the rent. He can have the godown. He can have the deed and the lawyer and the whole paper trail of it, for all I care tonight. But the dark, and this bed, and the rain stopping — those are mine."

He felt her fingers walk down his chest, unhurried, the way a hand moves over a table looking for a match in the dark. They found the edge of the sheet and closed on it.

"You keep saying 'my brother' like it's a title," Saan said. "Like it's a thing he earned."

"It is a title." Her voice was quiet, flat, and she had stopped looking at him. "In this family it is the only title that means anything. The one who is a brother to a widow is a saint for a year and a landlord for the rest of his life. He came to the funeral with his hands folded and his eyes wet and the whole street saw it. Nobody sees the drawer."

"Then open the drawer."

"I'm going to." She said it to the ceiling. "Tomorrow, at the godown gate, with the keys in my own hand and a question in my mouth that doesn't sound like a question. And then I'll go to his table and put the trace down in front of him, and I'll watch the saint's face while he decides whether he's going to be a saint or a thief in front of his own sister." She turned her head, and the lamp from the doorway caught the line of her jaw. "And if he picks thief, I'll be the one who has to live with what comes after. Not you. Not the lawyer. Me."

"I know."

"Do you." She studied him. "You're twenty-three. You've been in this city four months and you've already got a woman in a flat and a woman in a house and a woman who wants to know your face on paper. You think you know what comes after."

He did not answer that. There was nothing in him that wanted to answer it. The rain had stopped and the flat had gone still and he could hear his own breath going in and out of him and the clock in the other room and the small settling noises of an old building talking to itself.

"I know a man who put his hand in a drawer," he said at last. "I know what it looked like from the outside. The neighbours never saw it either."

She turned onto her side to face him properly, drawing the sheet with her, her hip settling against his, and she propped her head on her hand and looked at him for a long while without saying anything. Her hair fell forward over her shoulder and the lamp set a gold edge along her arm.

"You're a strange boy," she said again, softer this time, and it was not the same as the first time she had said it. "You come to my door wet through and you fuck me like the roof's coming down and then you lie here in the dark and tell me the truth about my own brother before I've said a word I didn't already know." She reached over and pressed her thumb to the corner of his mouth, once, gently, and left it there. "My brother told me a boy would be no use to me. I'll have to eat every word of it. Every single one."

He caught her wrist and drew her hand down to his chest and held it there. Her pulse was under his thumb, slow and steady, and it did not jump or hurry.

"Then eat them tomorrow," he said. "Tonight, sleep."

She laughed and lay back down and pulled the sheet up over them both, and her head found the hollow of his shoulder again, and her breath began to even out against his skin. The lamp from the doorway threw its long gold stripe across the bed and up the wall, and somewhere in the flat a pipe knocked once and went quiet, and the clock in the other room ticked on toward whatever hour it was keeping.

He did not sleep, and after a while he stopped pretending to. The flat had gone still in the way old buildings do when the last of the day has run out of them, and his mind would not let the arithmetic alone. Two years. Twenty-four months of rent paid by a tenant he had never met, into a hand he had never seen, and a deed sitting dead in a drawer while the shops below stayed open and the godown kept its lock.

"Kusum."

"Mm." Her voice came from somewhere against his shoulder, thickened with the edge of sleep.

"The rent. Not the deed, not the lawyer — the money itself." He turned his head on the pillow. "Where does it go? Not into what account. Into what. A man doesn't carry two years of rent home in his pocket every month. It goes somewhere. It buys something."

She was quiet. Then her breath changed — the shallow rhythm of a woman coming up out of sleep because a question would not let her stay under. She shifted against him, her cheek sliding off his shoulder onto the pillow, and her eyes opened and found his in the lamplight and stayed there, and the corner of her mouth went up.

"You want to know where it goes," she said.

"I want to know what he's been building with it."

And then she laughed. It started low, down in her chest, and climbed — not the helpless laugh from before, but something sharper, a laugh with a blade in it, the laugh of a woman who had carried a thing so long it had gone funny.

"What," he said. "What did I say now."

"Nothing. Nothing at all." She pushed herself up on one elbow, and the sheet slid off her shoulder and pooled at her waist, and she looked down at him with her hair hanging loose and her eyes bright and mean with amusement. "You want to know what my brother's been building. I'll tell you what he's been building. He's been building a house."

"A house."

"A house in the hills. Two floors and a garden and a gate with his name on a brass plate before the paint's even dry." She said it lightly, as though she were describing a dress in a shop window. "I saw the plans. He left them in the car — a folder on the back seat with the architect's stamp on it, and my brother's handwriting in the margin saying *reduce the cost, reduce it again*. He didn't know I'd looked. He never knows when I've looked." She reached down and drew the sheet back up over her breast, unhurried. "Two years of godown rent is a garden and a gate, boy. That's what your arithmetic buys. A gate."

Saan lay still. The lamp threw its stripe up the wall and across her arm, and he watched the small shadow of her hand move over the sheet, and he thought of the folder on the back seat of a car, and the architect's stamp, and a man writing *reduce the cost* in the margin of his sister's money.

"He's not hiding it," he said slowly.

"What?"

"The house. If he's building it out in the open, with plans and a stamp and a gate with his name on it — he's not hiding where the money went. He's hiding that it was ever yours." He turned onto his side to face her. "That's a different kind of thief. A man who takes your money and spends it where everyone can see, and trusts that no one will ever ask whose it was. He's not afraid of being caught. He's afraid of being asked."

She did not laugh at that. Her hand went still on the sheet, and she looked at him for a long moment with the amusement draining out of her face and something older and harder coming up under it.

"Say that again," she said quietly.

"Tomorrow at the godown gate, you won't need to catch anyone with a hand in a drawer. You'll need one thing — a name on a receipt, a man who'll say to your face that he's been paying rent to your brother for two years. And then you walk into that house in the hills before the paint's dry and you ask him, in front of the gate with his name on it, whose money bought the brass."

She sat up. The sheet fell away entirely and she did not reach for it; she sat with her back straight and her hair loose down her back and her hands in her lap, and she looked at the far wall as though she could see through it into the street and the gate and the hills beyond.

"Whose money bought the brass," she repeated. Then, softer: "He'll have an answer. He always has an answer. He'll say it was a loan, that he meant to pay it back, that a widow can't manage property and he was only holding it for me until I married again or died." Her jaw tightened. "And half the street will believe him. They always believe the saint."

"Then don't take it to the street." Saan sat up beside her, the sheet falling to his waist. "Take it to his own table, like you said. But not with a lawyer's paper. With the man who paid the rent standing at your shoulder. Let the saint explain a tenant to his own sister while the tenant listens."

She turned her head and looked at him, and her eyes had the flat, considering stillness of a woman weighing a thing she had not let herself weigh before. Then she breathed out, slow, and some of the tightness went out of her shoulders.

"You are a dangerous boy to have in a bed," she said. "Most men, you put them in a bed and they fall asleep. You put one in a bed and he builds a case." She shook her head. "Riya told me you were quiet. She didn't tell me you were quiet like *this*."

"She doesn't know me like this."

"No," Kusum said, and the corner of her mouth turned again. "I don't suppose she does."

She lay back down, but she did not go to his shoulder this time. She lay on her back with her arm flung up over her head again and her eyes on the ceiling, and her breathing was no longer the breathing of a woman going to sleep. It was the breathing of a woman thinking.

"The tenant," she said at last. "The man who pays the rent. He'll be at the godown tomorrow or he won't. If he's there, I'll have his name before noon. If he's not, I'll have the watchman's, and the watchman's is worth more than the tenant's anyway — a watchman knows who comes and goes and who signs the book." She turned her head on the pillow. "You'll come with me. Not to speak. To stand there and look at the paper and tell me what it says before I say a word wrong."

"I have work in the morning."

"You have a boss's daughter who put you in her bed and a boss who doesn't know it yet." Kusum's eyes glinted. "Call in sick. I'll write you a note."

He laughed then, the first real laugh out of him all night, and it surprised him — the sound of it in the quiet flat, too loud, and he put his hand over his mouth too late. She grinned at him, pleased with herself, and reached over and pulled his hand away from his face.

"There," she said. "Now I've heard it. A boy with a head for numbers and a laugh like a door coming off its hinge." She let go of his wrist and settled back. "Sleep now. Truly. The godown opens at nine and I want to be at that gate before the watchman's had his tea, so he's still stupid with it and says more than he means to."

She turned onto her side away from him, drawing the sheet up over her shoulder, and her hand reached back and found his hip and stayed there, light, as though to keep him from going anywhere in the night.

The lamp threw its long gold stripe across the bed and up the wall. Saan lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and let the arithmetic settle into a shape — a gate with a brass plate, a folder with *reduce the cost* in the margin, a watchman stupid with tea. Outside, a cart went past on the wet street, its wheels hissing, and was gone.

He was almost under when her voice came again, quiet, not turned toward him.

"Saan."

"Mm."

"If it's true — if the tenant says it to my face and the watchman signs the book and I walk up to that gate with his name on the brass—" She stopped. The sheet moved with her breathing. "I'll be a woman who took her own brother to the wall in front of his own gate. Whatever he's done. That's what the street will say. Not that he stole. That I was the one who made a scene."

He thought about that. The clock ticked its way through a handful of seconds while he thought about it.

"Then make the scene a small one," he said. "Go at an hour when the street's empty. Take the truth to him quietly and let him keep his face if he'll give you back what's yours. A man who's given a way out with his dignity whole will take it nine times out of ten. It's only the ones you corner that turn into thieves in public."

The sheet moved again, and this time she turned her head, and in the lamplight he could see the line of her cheek and the wet shine at the corner of her eye, and she blinked it away before it could fall.

"Quietly," she said. "At an empty hour. With his face kept whole." Her hand tightened once on his hip. "You've a cruel kind of kindness in you, boy. I don't know yet whether to be glad of it or afraid of it."

"Be glad of it tomorrow," he said. "Tonight, sleep."

She laughed — soft, private, the last of the night's laughter — and turned her face away and pulled the sheet up over her shoulder, and her hand stayed on his hip, and after a while her breathing went long and slow and even, and the flat settled around them both.

Saan lay awake a little longer. The lamp burned down its wick, and the gold stripe on the wall thinned and drew back toward the doorway, and the clock in the other room went on keeping whatever hour it was keeping, and he thought of a gate in the hills with a brass plate on it, and of the morning, and of the watchman who would still be stupid with tea.

He turned onto his side and the sheet slid off his hip and lay in a heap between them, and he reached across the warm dip her body had made in the mattress and put his arm around her waist and drew her back against him, her spine fitting into his chest, her hair in his mouth.

"Kusum."

"Mm." Not asleep. Not quite awake either.

"Riya's father." He said it against the back of her neck, quiet, and felt her go still. "Tell me what kind of man he is."

She did not answer at once. Her hand came up and found his forearm where it lay across her belly and held it there, and out in the street a dog barked twice and gave it up, and the flat creaked the way old buildings do when the night turns over.

"Why do you want to know that?"

"Because I've been lying here building a plan out of a lease and a brass plate, and I don't know the man I'm building it against." His thumb moved along the softness above her hip without asking permission. "A man who folds when you put the truth in front of him and a man who doesn't are two different mornings. I'd like to know which one I'm walking into before I sleep."

She breathed out — long, through the nose, the sound of a woman setting down something heavy.

"You don't sleep, do you," she said. "You lie in the dark and take a man apart like a watch."

"Sometimes."

"And what do you do with the pieces?"

"Put them back in a different order."

She turned in his arms, and the turning brought her face close, and her breath was warm and tasted faintly of the wine they had finished. In the low light her eyes had gone flat and careful, the way a shopkeeper's do when the talk turns to money.

"He's not a man who shouts," she said. "That's the first thing. Men think a hard man is a loud one, and my brother has never raised his voice in his life. He doesn't need to. He has a way of going very quiet and very polite, and by the time he's finished being polite you've agreed to something and you don't know when you agreed to it." She laid her palm flat on his chest. "I've watched him do it to his own wife at a dinner table. She was crying by the coffee and he was passing the sugar."

Saan said nothing. He let her go on.

"He's patient. That's the second thing, and it's worse than the first." Her thumb pressed once at his sternum and stayed. "The godown's been two years. He didn't take it in one bite. He took it the way a man eats a meal he's not in a hurry for — a little at a time, and each time he took a little he watched to see if anyone had noticed, and nobody had, and so he took a little more. Now the plate's empty and the tablecloth's still white." She lifted her chin. "He's a man who has never once been caught at anything in his life. Not a school exam, not a business deal, not a lie to his mother. And he believes — he genuinely believes, Saan, this is the thing you have to understand — that a man who is never caught is a man who has done nothing wrong."

"That's not the same as being clever."

"No." Her mouth pulled. "But it's the next best thing to it, and it's fooled a great many people who should have known better. Including me."

He shifted, drawing her a little closer, and the sheet had come entirely off them now and the room's cool air moved across his back, and her leg slid between his without either of them deciding it.

"What does he do when he's cornered?"

She was quiet for a moment, and it was a different kind of quiet — not the quiet of a woman choosing her words but of one going back through a long ledger and finding the page.

"There was a man," she said. "Years ago, before my husband. A cousin on my mother's side who made the mistake of asking my brother to account for a loan at a family wedding, in front of everyone, with the plates still on the table. Not a big scene. A small question, asked politely. My brother put down his glass and said of course, of course, he'd have the papers by the week's end, and he smiled, and the wedding went on." She drew a slow breath. "By the next wedding that cousin wasn't invited. By the third nobody in the family would lend him a rupee or sit beside him at a meal, and no one could say exactly why. My brother never said a word against him. He never had to. He simply stopped being warm, and everyone around him got cold, and the cousin froze to death in the middle of his own family."

Saan's jaw tightened. "And the loan?"

"Never repaid. Never mentioned again. The papers never came." She turned her face a little toward the ceiling. "That's what cornering him looks like. Not a fight. A winter. He doesn't lose his temper at you. He takes the room's warmth away and lets you stand in it."

"So the plan—" Saan stopped. He was seeing it now, the shape of it, and the shape was wrong. "The plan I built. Take it to his table quietly, let him keep his face, give him a way out."

"Yes."

"That plan only works on a man who's afraid of being seen. A man who folds to keep his dignity." He turned it over. "Your brother isn't afraid of being seen. He's afraid of being asked — I said that before, and I was half right. But if a cousin asked him once and got frozen out of the family for it, then being asked isn't what frightens him. It's what he punishes."

She lay very still. Her hand on his chest had gone light, the way a hand goes when the mind behind it has left the room.

"You're right," she said slowly. "I've been thinking of it as a door I could open quietly and slip through. But there's no quiet door with him. There's only the front door, in daylight, with the neighbours' curtains moving." She was quiet again. "And if I go through it, and he decides I've asked him in front of the street, then it isn't the gate in the hills I lose. It's the shops, the share, and every cousin I've got. He'll be very polite about it. He'll pass the sugar."

Saan lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and let the arithmetic rearrange itself. The lamp had burned down to a stub and the gold stripe on the wall had thinned to a thread, and the room had gone the grey-blue of the hour before the hour before morning.

"Then you don't go at him with the truth," he said. "You go at him with something he can't make a scene about without making a bigger one for himself. You go to him with a man standing at your shoulder who has already said the thing out loud to somebody else. Then it isn't your word against the saint's. It's the tenant's word, and the watchman's word, and a book with dates in it. He can freeze you out of the family. He can't freeze all of them at once without the street asking why."

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him for a long moment, and something crossed her face that he had not seen there before — not appetite, not amusement. Fear, maybe, but with a hard bright edge to it, the way fear looks in a person who has decided to be afraid later.

"You've thought about this more than a boy should have to," she said.

"I've watched men get cornered." He said it flatly, and then, because her eyes were on him and would not come off, "My uncle's a government doctor. He's a good man. But I've seen what happens to a good man when somebody puts a truth in front of him he can't do anything about. He doesn't get angry. He gets tired. And then everybody around him starts carrying the tired for him, and the truth gets put back in a drawer because it's easier than watching him carry it."

Kusum was silent. Her fingers found the small hollow at the base of his throat and rested there, and her breath went in and out of her slowly, and he could hear her thinking.

"Then I'll need the tenant before I go near my brother," she said at last. "Not the watchman. The watchman can be paid to forget a book. The tenant's the one who's been writing the cheques, and a man who's been writing cheques for two years has kept the stubs, because a man who pays rent always keeps the stubs." She lifted her chin off the pillow. "And if he won't talk to a woman at a gate, he'll talk to a man with a head for numbers who can tell him his own lease is dead and he's been paying into a hole."

"You want me to go and see him."

"I want you standing at my shoulder when I do. There's a difference, and it's the difference between a boy doing my business and a woman doing her own." Her eyes glinted. "You can hold the paper. You're good at holding paper."

He almost laughed. Then her expression changed — the glint going out of it, the amusement draining away — and she pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at him with her hair falling loose and her mouth set.

"But before any of that," she said, "there's a thing you should know about my brother, because you're going to be standing next to me when I say it to his face, and I won't have you finding it out in the room."

"I'm listening."

She drew a breath and let it out slow, and her hand came off his chest and went to the sheet, gathering it up against herself without seeming to know she was doing it.

"He has never lost a fight in public," she said. "Not once. Not a cousin at a wedding, not a partner in a boardroom, not a man who called him a thief to his face at a club and got carried out of it by his own friends. He doesn't win because he's stronger. He wins because he knows exactly how long a man can stand in a cold room before he says something he'll regret, and he's always willing to stand there one minute longer than the other fellow." Her eyes did not leave his. "So if you and I walk up to that gate with the truth in our hands and he decides to make a fight of it — he will win it. He'll win it in front of the whole street, and he'll do it without raising his voice, and when it's over the neighbours will say what a shame it is that a widow should turn on her own brother."

She stopped. The clock in the other room ticked through the silence, and outside a cart went by on the wet street and its wheels hissed and faded.

"Then we don't let him make a fight of it," Saan said.

"How do you stop a man like that from making a fight?"

"You make sure nobody's watching when he falls." He said it quietly, and he watched her face while he said it. "Not the street. Not the gate. Not the brass plate. You take him somewhere there's no audience to win over and no neighbours to be sorry for you afterward, and you put the truth on a table between the two of you where it's just his sister and her papers, and you let him see that the only way to win the room is to give you back what's yours. A man who's never lost in public has spent his whole life learning one fight. He doesn't know how to fight in a room with the door shut and nobody to perform for. That's the room you want him in."

Kusum lay back down slowly and looked at the ceiling, and her hand found his again in the dark and held it, and for a long moment she did not say anything at all.

The room had gone the colour of wet slate, the lamp down to its last finger of flame, and her hand stayed in his while the clock in the other room counted off whatever it was counting. Then she turned her face on the pillow, and in the grey half-light her eyes were open and steady and not sleepy at all.

"Saan."

"Mm."

"Earlier. When I said I don't do anything by accident." Her thumb moved once across his knuckles, and stopped. "I meant it. But there's a thing I've never done, and I'd rather say it in the dark than have you find it out by trying."

He waited. The building creaked somewhere above them, a soft settling, and she drew a breath that he felt go through her hand.

"I've never had a man from behind." Her voice had dropped low, close to a whisper, and there was a shyness in it he had not heard from her all night — a girl's shyness, out of place in that low ruined voice. "Not — not the way you're thinking. I mean properly. All of it." She turned her face away, toward the ceiling. "My husband was a man who liked to see my face. It was the one thing he liked. So I've been on my back my whole married life, and I've been on my knees for no one, and I'm thirty-nine years old and I don't know what it feels like to be taken that way."

He lay very still. The sheet had come down to their waists and the cool of the room moved over his chest, and he was aware of his own heart going, and of the small warm weight of her hand in his, and of how strange it was that a woman who had ridden him with the lamp in her eyes could go small and quiet over a thing like this.

"You're not laughing," she said.

"No."

"Most men would laugh. Or they'd make it a joke and then make it a thing they did to me whether I wanted it or not." She turned her head back, and her eyes found his. "You're not most men. I keep finding that out and it keeps surprising me."

He let go of her hand and put his palm flat on her belly, just above the sheet, feeling the warmth of her skin and the soft give of it under his fingers. She went still — not the stillness of a woman who wanted him to stop, but the held stillness of one waiting to see what he would do.

"Do you want to try?" he said.

She did not answer at once. His hand moved, slow, down over the softness of her belly toward the sheet, and she caught her breath and her hips shifted under his palm, a small involuntary tilt, and he felt the heat of her through the cloth before he had even touched her.

"I don't know," she said. "I've thought about it. In the way a woman thinks about a thing she's never had — at night, alone, with the door shut. I've thought about being — held down and —" She stopped, and the shyness came up in her face again. "It frightens me a little. That's all. I'm not a girl. I don't want to be clumsy in front of you."

His fingers found the edge of the sheet and drew it down off her hip, and she let it go. Her thighs were warm and bare against his, and he slid his hand down over the soft hair between them and found her wet — wetter than she had been, slick and open, and she made a small sound and her hand came up to grip his wrist, not to stop him, only to hold on.

"You're not frightened now," he said.

"No." Her voice had gone thin. "I'm not frightened now."

He moved his fingers through her slowly, spreading her wetness up over her clit and back down, and her hips came up off the bed and her grip on his wrist tightened, and her mouth came open on a breath she did not let out.

"Saan—"

"Say it again," he said. "What you want. In the dark, like you said."

She turned her face toward him, and her eyes were bright and her cheeks had gone dark with blood, and she looked at him the way a woman looks at a thing she has decided to do and is still afraid of.

"I want to try," she said. "From behind. All of it. I want to know what it feels like to be taken that way by a man who isn't afraid to do it."

"Then turn over."

She did not move for a moment. Then she let go of his wrist and rolled onto her front, and the sheet slid off her entirely, and she lay with her cheek on her folded arms and her hair spread across the pillow and her back a long pale curve in the grey light, the soft weight of her hips rising to the small of her back, and she turned her head to watch him over her shoulder.

"Like this?" she said.

"Like this." He came up onto his knees behind her, and his hands found her hips and drew her up, and she pushed herself up onto her elbows and then down onto her forearms, her back dipping, and he looked at her — the curve of her spine, the dimples above her hips, the dark wet cleft of her cunt between her thighs, the small tight furl of her ass above it — and his dick was hard and aching and leaking against his own belly.

"Tell me if it's too much," he said. "Say it and I stop. I mean it."

"I'll say it." Her voice was muffled against her arm. "I'm not brave, I'm only curious. There's a difference."

He spat on his fingers and reached down and found her cunt first, sliding two fingers into her wet heat, and she gasped and her hips pushed back against his hand, and he worked her there a moment, slow, until his fingers came out of her slick and shining. Then he brought them up and pressed the wetness against her ass, circling, and she went rigid all over.

"Oh," she said. "Oh — that's—"

"Breathe." He kept circling, slow, one fingertip pressing just at the tight furl of her, not pushing in. "Don't hold your breath. It's worse if you hold it."

She let her breath out in a long shudder and her shoulders came down a little, and he pressed, and the tip of his finger slipped in, and she made a sound — not pain, something startled, a caught breath with a note in it she had not made before.

"There," he said. "That's it. Just that."

"It's —" Her voice had gone high and strange. "It's not what I thought. It's — more. Everything's more."

He worked the one finger in slowly, to the knuckle, and she took it, her whole body learning the shape of it, and her hips made a small circling motion she did not seem to know she was making. He drew it out and pressed in again, and again, and on the third she pushed back against his hand and made a sound that was almost a laugh, cracked and surprised.

"God," she said. "God, that's — I didn't know it was like that. It's like being — I can feel it all the way up my back."

"That's the point." He drew his finger out and pressed two against her, and she caught her breath hard and her fists closed on the sheet.

"Two?" she said.

"Two. Slow. Say if it's too much."

"Don't stop." She said it fast, before she could think better of it. "Don't stop, don't — oh."

The two fingers went in and she arched and her mouth came open against her arm, and he worked them slowly, twisting, spreading them a little, feeling her open around him, and she was wet — wetter than she had any right to be, her cunt slick and dripping down her thighs and her ass loosening around his fingers, taking them, learning them. He spat on his hand again and worked it in with them, and she made a low broken sound and her hips rocked back and forth, back and forth, riding his hand.

"Look at you," he said. "You said you weren't brave."

"I'm not." Her voice was wrecked and muffled. "I'm — Saan, I'm —"

"You're taking my fingers like you were made for it."

She cried out at that, a small sharp cry, and her hips bucked, and he felt her cunt clench around nothing, and he drew his fingers out slowly and she moaned at the loss of them.

"Now," she said. "Now, please — I don't want to lose my nerve."

He came up closer behind her, his knees between her thighs, and took himself in his hand and guided the head of his dick to her, and pressed, and felt the resistance of her there, tight and hot and unwilling.

"Push back," he said. "Slow. When you're ready."

She pushed. He felt her give way around him — a slow, burning inch, and she stopped, her whole body trembling, her breath coming in short gasps against her arm.

"Too much?" he said.

"No. No, don't — don't take it out. Just — give me a moment." Her shoulders heaved. "It's — it's so much more than fingers."

He held still, his hands on her hips, feeling her pulse around the head of him, feeling her slowly, deliberately, breathe herself open. Then she pushed back again, and he slid in another inch, and another, and she made a sound low in her throat, and her back dipped and her hips lifted and she took him deeper, and deeper, until he was buried in her to the root and her ass was flush against his belly and she had taken all of him.

"Oh," she said. Just that, again, the way she had said it when he first filled her cunt. "Oh, that's — I can feel you everywhere."

He began to move, slow, long draws out and back in, and she cried out at the first full stroke and then went quiet, her face down against her arm, her breath coming in time with his hips, and he watched her back — the long pale curve of it, the fine hairs rising along her spine, the way her shoulder blades moved under the skin with every breath.

"Talk to me," he said. "Tell me what it's like."

"It's—" Her voice came out cracked and small. "It's like being filled up somewhere I didn't know was empty. It's — every time you move I feel it in my — God, Saan, I feel it in my cunt, like you're — like you're in both places at once—"

"Good." He drove in harder, and she gasped and her hips came up to meet him. "That's what I want. I want you to feel it everywhere."

She reached back with one hand and found his thigh and gripped it, her nails digging in, and he took her harder, and the bed knocked softly against the wall and her breath broke into small rhythmic sounds, and he leaned down over her back and put his mouth to her shoulder blade and bit down, gently, and she cried out and pushed back against him.

"Harder," she said. "I'm not made of glass — you said it yourself—"

He gave her harder, and the sound of it filled the room, the wet slap of his hips against her, the creak of the bed, her breath coming in ragged bursts, and he reached around her hip and found her clit with his fingers and pressed, and she came apart under him — her whole body clenching, her ass tightening around his dick so hard it stopped his breath, a long shaking cry pulled out of her that she did not try to keep quiet.

She shuddered through it, and again, and he kept moving through it, slow now, drawing it out, and she was sobbing against her arm and pushing back against him all the same.

"I'm close," he said. "Kusum — I'm—"

"In me." Her voice was wrecked. "In me. Don't you dare stop."

He drove in deep and held, and came — pulse after pulse into her, his hands hard on her hips, his eyes shut, a sound torn out of him that he could not have kept in. She took it, all of it, her back arched and her hips pressed back against him, and when the last of it had gone out of him he was shaking, his forehead down on her shoulder blade, his breath hot against her skin.

For a moment neither of them moved. Then she let her arms give way and came down flat on the bed, and he came down with her, still inside her, and lay over her back with his cheek against her hair, and her hand found his where it lay on the sheet and held it.

"Well," she said at last, into the pillow. Her voice was small and ruined and entirely at ease. "Now I know."

He drew out of her slowly, and she winced and made a small sound, and he rolled onto his side and drew her with him, and she turned her face to him and looked at him with her hair in her eyes and her cheeks still dark and her mouth soft and slack, and she looked — he thought — like a woman who had just been given a thing she had wanted for a very long time and had not known how to ask for.

"Was it worth the trouble?" he said.

She laughed — soft, private, the last of the night's laughter — and reached up and pushed the hair back from his forehead, and her fingers stayed there.

"Ask me again in the morning," she said, and her eyes were bright and shy and terrible all at once, and she did not look away.