Gray light came through the window in a long seam, the kind that only exists for twenty minutes after dawn, when the city is still deciding whether to wake. It lay across the dark wood floor and up the side of the bed, pale and cool, and Xiao Lie watched it without moving because moving would mean acknowledging the arm across her waist.

She didn't know this ceiling. She knew her own—water stain in the corner shaped like a bird, crack running from the light fixture to the wall. This ceiling was smooth and dark and far away, and the sheets under her were silk, cool against her shoulder and hip, and they smelled like him. Like the two of them. The room still carried last night in its corners: cologne and something saltier underneath, the particular heaviness of air that had been breathed too many times.

She shifted her legs.

The soreness arrived immediately, deep and specific, a bruised feeling set low inside her, and she went still again with her mouth slightly open. Not pain, exactly. A reminder. Every part of her that had been used last night was still reporting in, and her body had no framework for it, no place to file the information. She'd read about this. She'd heard Sang Zhi joke about it once, and she'd laughed and changed the subject because it had nothing to do with her.

The arm around her waist tightened.

"You're awake," Sang Yan said against the back of her head. His voice was rough with sleep, lower than usual, and she felt it in her spine before she heard it. "I could tell. Your breathing changed."

She didn't answer. What was there to say. Good morning felt obscene, and anything else felt worse, so she lay there and looked at the seam of light and let him hold her.

His hand moved. Not fast—he did everything slowly when he wanted to, she'd learned that much in a single night—his palm sliding down over her hip, across the flat of her stomach, and settling there. Low. Below her navel. Flat and warm and possessive, the way a man holds something that belongs to him.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Sore." The word came out before she could stop it, and her face went hot against the pillow.

She felt him smile. Not because she could see it—she was facing away from him—but because she could feel the shape of it against her hair, the small shift of his jaw.

"Good," he said.

"That's not—" She stopped. Started again. "That's not something to be pleased about."

"It is." His thumb traced a slow circle on her belly, and she felt the muscles there jump under his hand, betraying her. "It means you'll remember it today. Every time you sit down. Every time you walk. You'll feel me."

She pressed her lips together and said nothing, because he was right, and because the way he said it—low, certain, entirely without shame—did something to her that she didn't have a name for. Something warm and unwelcome that started in her chest and moved downward.

He shifted behind her.

She felt it before she understood it. The press of him against the back of her thigh, hard and hot through the thin barrier of nothing at all—they were both naked, she realized, had been naked all night, and she'd stopped noticing. His cock lay against her ass, already full, already thick, and when he rocked his hips once, lazily, just to feel her, the head of it dragged along the crease and left a smear of wet.

"Sang Yan."

"Mm."

"It's morning."

"It is." He kissed the back of her neck, just below her hairline, and his hand slid lower on her belly, fingers spreading, pressing down. "And you're in my bed. And I'm hard. What did you think was going to happen?"

She didn't have an answer. She should have one. She should say she needed to go home, should say she had work, should say any of the dozen reasonable things that existed somewhere outside this room, and she could feel all of them lined up at the back of her throat, ready, and none of them came out.

His hand moved down.

Two fingers slid between her legs from behind, and she gasped—a small, involuntary sound that she hated the moment it left her—and then his fingers were there, in the wet heat of her, spreading her open. She heard it. That soft, obscene sound of her own slickness, loud in the quiet room, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

"You're soaked," he said, and there was something in his voice now, a rough edge under the calm. "You were sore and you woke up wet for me anyway. Do you know what that does to me?"

"I'm not—"

"You are." His fingers circled her entrance, gathering, not entering, just pressing enough to make her hips twitch back against him. "Feel that. That's you. That's what you do when I touch you, even when you're pretending you don't want it."

"I'm not pretending."

"Good." He bit her shoulder, gently, and she felt the graze of his teeth all the way down her spine. "Then don't."

His cock pressed against her then, not entering—sliding between her thighs, along the wet seam, the head dragging over her clit once, twice, and she made a sound she'd never made before, a thin, helpless whine that she pressed into the pillow. His hand came up and caught her chin, turning her face back toward him.

"Don't do that," he said. "Don't hide it. I want to hear you."

"Sang Zhi might—"

"Sang Zhi is asleep in her parents' apartment four kilometers from here." His mouth was at her ear now, and his voice was barely above a whisper, and it was somehow more commanding for it. "There's no one in this building who can hear you. There's no one in this city who's going to come through that door. It's you and me, Xiao Lie. So stop being quiet."

He pushed inside her.

Slow. Deliberate. She felt every centimeter of it, the stretch of him opening her again—she'd thought she'd be used to it after last night, and she wasn't, she wasn't at all, her body had to learn him all over again from the inside—and she felt the soreness flare and then dissolve under the heat of it, until all that was left was the feeling of being filled. Full. Her breath came out of her in a long, shaking exhale, and her hand found his forearm where it lay across her belly and held on.

"There," he said. Not a question. A statement. "There she is."

He didn't move. He stayed buried to the root, his hips flush against her ass, and let her feel it, let her body do the work of adjusting, and his hand pressed flat against her lower belly, low and heavy, and she felt the pressure of him from both sides—from inside and from his palm—and it was too much and she didn't want it to stop.

"Can you feel that?" he asked, pressing down. "You can, can't you. You can feel how deep I am."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I can feel you." Her voice broke on the last word. "I can feel you inside me."

He pulled back—slow, dragging, letting her feel the loss of him inch by inch—and pushed in again, harder this time, and the sound of it was wet and loud in the gray room, and she heard herself moan before she could stop it.

"That's it," he said. "Again."

He set a rhythm. Slow at first, long strokes, the kind that let her feel every part of him, and his hand stayed on her belly the whole time, palm grinding down with every thrust, and his other arm was under her head, and she was held—pinned—between his body and his hands and the bed, and there was nowhere in the world to go except into it.

Then his hand moved up.

He cupped her breast, and she felt his fingers find her nipple, already tight from the cool air and from everything else, and he pinched it—hard, a sharp bright point of pain that went straight down through her and made her clench around his cock.

"Ah—"

"Sensitive there," he said, and she could hear the satisfaction in his voice, the pleasure of finding a new thing she couldn't hide. He rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, tugging, and every pull sent a wire of sensation down to where he was moving inside her. "You like that."

"I don't—" He pinched again, harder, and her sentence died. "I—"

"You do. You just don't know how to say it yet." He kept his fingers there, working her, and his hips never stopped, the steady rhythm of him filling her over and over while he played with her breast like he had all the time in the world. "That's all right. I'll teach you."

She turned her face into the pillow and let him. Her body had stopped asking her permission for anything—her hips were moving with him now, meeting his thrusts, and the wet sound between them was constant and shameless, and her nipple was swollen under his fingers, aching, and every time he pinched it she felt it in her cunt.

"Look at you," he said quietly. "Last night you didn't know how to take my cock, and this morning you're pushing back on it."

"Sang Yan—"

"Say it. Tell me you want it."

"I—"

He stopped moving. Just stopped, buried deep, and his hand went still on her breast, and she made a sound of pure frustration that she would be ashamed of for the rest of the week.

"Tell me," he said, and his voice was calm and absolutely immovable, "and I'll keep going."

She hated him. She hated him, and she wanted him, and the two things had stopped being separate somewhere around two in the morning, and she turned her face just enough to be heard.

"I want it," she said. "Please. I want it."

He moved.

Hard this time, and fast, and the bed rocked with it, and his hand went back to her breast and took hold of her whole tit, gripping and kneading and pinching her nipple between his knuckles, and his other hand was still flat on her lower belly, holding her against him, and she was making sounds now, real ones, the kind she couldn't take back, and she didn't care.

"That's my girl," he said against her ear. "That's it. Take it."

The angle changed. He pulled her hip back a little, tilting her, and the next thrust hit something that made white flash behind her eyes, and she cried out—actually cried out, loud, into the room—and he made a low, satisfied sound and did it again, and again, until she was shaking.

"There," he said. "Right there. I can feel you getting close. You're squeezing me."

"I can't—"

"You can. Let go. I've got you."

His hand pressed down on her belly, harder, and his fingers pinched her nipple one more time, sharp and bright, and she came—her cunt clenching hard around him, her thighs shaking, a long broken sound pulled out of her that she couldn't have stopped if she'd tried. He fucked her through it, slow now, riding the waves, and she felt every one of them, each one rolling through her and breaking.

"Good," he said. "Good girl. Now hold still."

He fucked her through the last of it and then faster, harder, his breathing ragged behind her now, the calm finally gone, and his hand clamped on her hip and pulled her back onto him, and she felt him swell and then he was coming—deep, in long pulses, and she felt every one of them, felt the heat of it spreading inside her, and his hand pressed flat on her lower belly through all of it, holding it in, holding her.

His breath hitched. Once. Twice. And then he went still against her, his chest heaving against her back, his face buried in her hair.

Silence.

The gray light had moved across the floor while they were busy. It was brighter now, less forgiving, and she could see the dust in it, floating, and the shape of her own hand on his forearm, still holding on.

He didn't pull out. He stayed buried, softening slowly inside her, and his hand didn't leave her belly. It stayed there, flat and warm and heavy, and she lay in the circle of his arms and stared at the ceiling she didn't know and felt his cum settle inside her, and she didn't know if this was the end of something or the beginning, and she didn't know if she wanted to know, and she didn't move.

"Don't go anywhere," he said, into her hair, half asleep already. "Not yet."

She didn't answer. She just lay there, held, full, marked, in a bed that wasn't hers, in a penthouse she'd never seen before last night, and outside the window Shanghai was waking up without either of them.

She fell asleep like that — full, held, his arm a bar across her ribs — and the sleep came down over her like water closing over a stone, no resistance left in her anywhere.

When she woke the second time, the light was yellow. High and bright, cutting across the foot of the bed in a hard rectangle, and the city was fully awake behind the glass, traffic humming up through thirty-two floors of steel like something breathing. Her mouth was dry. Her hair was stuck to her cheek on one side, and the pillow under her head smelled like him so completely that for a second she didn't remember which of them she was.

She was alone.

She sat up too fast. The ache in her hips caught her mid-motion and she stopped, one hand braced on the mattress, and looked around a room she'd only ever seen in the dark — gray walls, a long low dresser with nothing on it, a single chair by the window with his shirt from last night draped over the back, and her own clothes in a heap on the floor where he'd left them. Her bag was still by the front door. She could see it through the open bedroom doorway, a small dark shape on the tile, and her phone was in it, and Sang Zhi had texted twice last night, and it was morning now.

The shower was running.

She heard it properly this time — the hiss of water through a half-open bathroom door, steam curling out into the corridor in a thin ribbon. She looked at her clothes on the floor. She looked at the doorway. Her body made the decision before her head did; she swung her legs off the bed, stood, and the soreness moved through her in a slow wave, deep and used, and she had to stand still for a moment with her hand on the nightstand.

"You're up."

She turned.

Sang Yan stood in the bathroom doorway with a towel low on his hips and water still running down his chest in lines. His hair was wet and pushed back off his forehead, dark and flat, and without the gel in it he looked younger — or he would have, if not for the way he was looking at her. He'd been watching her stand up. He'd watched the whole thing, the hand on the nightstand, the careful way she was holding her weight, and there was nothing on his face but a kind of patient satisfaction, like a man reading a receipt for something he'd bought.

"I need to go home," she said. Her voice came out scraped. "I have work."

"It's Saturday."

She opened her mouth. Closed it. It was Saturday.

"Come here." He stepped back into the bathroom and left the door open, which was an answer in itself, and after a moment she followed him because she didn't know what else to do with her body, and because the steam was warm and she was cold.

The bathroom was bigger than her entire kitchen. Gray stone, a mirror that ran the length of the wall, a walk-in shower with glass on three sides and water still falling inside it. He tested the temperature with one hand, adjusted it, and then turned and reached for her — not roughly, just the way he did everything, like the outcome was already settled and the motion was only courtesy.

"Arms up," he said.

"I can shower by myself."

"I know." He took the hem of nothing — she was naked, she'd slept naked, she'd forgotten again — and his hands closed around her waist instead and steered her under the water.

The heat hit her shoulders first and she made a sound without meaning to, a small exhale that was almost a groan, and her eyes closed on their own. Behind her, the glass door clicked shut. Then his hands were on her again, wet now, sliding up her back and over her shoulders, and he pulled her hair off her neck and gathered it and moved it over one shoulder so the water could reach her skin.

"You have marks," he said.

She looked down. There were — a bruise on the inside of her thigh in the shape of a mouth, faint red crescents on her hip where his fingers had been, and higher up, along the side of her breast, a scatter of small dark blooms she hadn't seen until now. She stared at them the way she'd stare at a bill she didn't remember running up.

"They'll fade," he said, and reached past her for the soap. "Most of them."

He washed her. That was the thing she had no framework for — he did it slowly, methodically, a bar of soap worked into a lather in his palms and then moved over her back, her shoulders, down her arms one at a time, lifting each of her wrists like he was checking it for damage. His hands were enormous and careful. He soaped her stomach, the undersides of her breasts, and when his palms passed over her nipples she felt them tighten under the slick and he felt it too and said nothing, only kept going, down over her hips, the outside of her thighs, and then — without asking, without any change in his face — between her legs.

She caught his wrist.

He let her hold it there. He didn't push. He stood behind her under the falling water with his forearm caught in her grip and his mouth close to her ear and waited, and the waiting was worse than the touching had been, because it made her feel the shape of her own hand around his wrist, and how easily she could let go, and how long she'd already been not letting go.

"You're sore," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Then I'll be careful." He turned his wrist in her grip — slow, unhurried, the water running down both of them — and his fingers found her anyway, and this time she didn't stop him.

He washed her there the way he'd washed everything else. Two fingers, gentle, spreading her under the water, and she felt last night come back out of her in a slow warmth that made her face burn, and he felt that too, and said nothing, and rinsed her clean and then turned her around to face him.

"Your turn," he said, and put the soap in her hand.

She looked at it. At his chest, wet and broad, the water beading on his shoulders and running in channels down the hard planes of him. She'd touched him last night in the dark, in pieces, without looking. Now the mirror ran the whole length of the wall behind him and there was nowhere to look that wasn't him.

"Sang Yan—"

"You've had your hands on me already." He said it mildly. "This is easier. You can see what you're doing."

So she washed him. Her hands small on his chest, the soap slipping, and she worked it over his shoulders and down his arms and across his stomach, and he stood there and let her, watching her face in the mirror over her shoulder, and when her hands slowed he caught one of them and moved it lower, down through the wet hair below his navel, and closed her fingers around him.

He was hard. He'd been hard since he'd stood in the doorway watching her stand up, probably, and now her hand was around him and the water was running over both of them and his breath went out of him in a slow, controlled stream, and his head tipped back against the stone.

"Tighter," he said.

She tightened her grip. She moved her hand, and he let her find the rhythm herself, and when she found it he made a low sound in his chest that she felt in her own ribs, and his hand came up and covered hers and showed her — slow, then slower, then the squeeze at the top that made his jaw lock.

"That's it," he said. "You learn fast."

She didn't know why that made her angry. It did — a small hot flare behind her sternum, because it wasn't a compliment, it was a grade, and because he was right.

He turned the water off.

Then he had a towel around her before she could reach for one, and he was drying her — her hair first, then her shoulders, unhurried, and then he wrapped her in it and lifted her off her feet.

"I can walk."

"I know." He carried her back through the doorway and set her down on the edge of the bed, and then he went to the dresser and pulled out a shirt — his, gray, soft from washing — and brought it back and worked her arms into it himself, one at a time, and buttoned three buttons and left the rest.

She sat there in his shirt with her wet hair on her neck and watched him pull on a pair of sweatpants, and waited for him to say something about last night. About what she'd said. About the two texts from Sang Zhi sitting in her bag by the door.

He didn't.

He went to the kitchen instead, and she heard a cabinet, a fridge, the clink of a glass on stone, and she sat on the edge of the bed in the yellow light and looked at her clothes on the floor and did not get up to put them on.

He came back with a glass of water and put it in her hand.

"Drink."

She drank. Her throat was raw and the water was cold and she drank all of it while he stood over her, and when she handed the glass back he set it on the nightstand and sat down beside her, and the mattress dipped and her body leaned toward him an inch before she caught it.

"About last night," she started.

"What about it."

"I told Sang Zhi I was coming here for a charger." She watched his face. "I have to text her back."

"Then text her back."

"And tell her what?"

He looked at her for a long moment. Water was still dripping from the ends of his hair onto the collar of his shirt, and outside a siren went by thirty-two floors down, small and distant, like something happening in another city.

"Tell her you fell asleep on the couch," he said.

The same line he'd given her last night. She'd heard it already, lying against his chest in the dark, and it had sounded like a plan then. In the daylight it sounded like a wall.

"That's not—" She stopped. Started again, quieter. "That's a lie I'd have to keep telling."

"Mm." He reached over and took a piece of her wet hair and moved it off her shoulder, and his thumb brushed the hinge of her jaw on the way back. "So don't go home."

She blinked at him.

"I have a lease," she said. "I have a one-room apartment with a water stain shaped like a bird. I have work on Monday."

"You have all of that." He said it evenly. "And you're going to keep it. I'm not asking you to give anything up." He stood, and crossed to the dresser, and pulled open the second drawer, and she saw what was in it before he said anything — folded, orderly, a stack of clothes that were not his. Her colors. Her size. A sweatshirt she owned, the one with the bleach spot on the cuff, sitting in the drawer of a man's penthouse like it had always been there.

She stared at it.

"When did you—"

"Last month." He didn't look at her. He straightened the stack with two fingers, aligning the edges, the way he'd aligned everything about this room. "You left a bag at your place with laundry in it. Sang Zhi mentioned it. I went by while you were at work."

"You went through my apartment."

"I brought you water." He closed the drawer. "You were out of it. I restocked it. I took the things that were worn out."

She sat on the edge of his bed in his shirt, wet, sore, and looked at the closed drawer, and there was a stack of her own clothes inside it, and she didn't know whether to be frightened or to cry or to laugh, and what came out was none of them — just a long, slow breath through her nose while the city hummed on below the window.

"Sang Yan," she said. "That's not normal."

"No," he agreed. "But you're not going home."

He came back to her and took the towel from around her shoulders and used it on her hair, working the wet out of the ends with both hands, and she let him, because there was nothing to say that he wouldn't simply absorb and hand back to her rearranged, and because the towel was warm and his hands were careful and her legs still didn't want to hold her up.

"Stay today," he said into her hair. "Tomorrow's Sunday. We'll figure out the rest."

"And Monday?"

"Monday you'll go to work." His hands paused. "I'll drive you."

She looked up at him. He looked back down at her, and the yellow light was flat on his face and there was nothing in his expression at all — no plea, no heat, no argument. Just the look of a man who had already placed the first piece on the board and was waiting to see how long it took her to notice the game had started.

"One night," she said. "It was supposed to be one night."

"It was." He dropped the towel on the floor. "It wasn't."

Her phone was still in her bag by the front door. Sang Zhi had texted twice, and the second one — she could feel it sitting out there, small and bright in the dark of the bag — was probably a question mark, or a joke about the charger, or her name, and whatever it was, it was waiting, and Xiao Lie sat on the edge of the bed in a shirt that smelled like him and did not get up to answer it.

She stood up.

It happened before she'd finished deciding to do it — her legs straightening, his shirt falling to mid-thigh, and she took two steps toward the doorway and the bag and the phone and the small bright thing waiting in the dark of it. Behind her, the mattress dipped.

"Where are you going."

"Home." She didn't turn around. Her voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "I'm going to put my clothes on and I'm going to call a car, and I'm going to go home, and we're going to—"

"Xiao Lie."

"—we're going to talk about this some other time. Not now. I need to think."

She got as far as the end of the bed. He caught her wrist without hurry, the way you'd catch a door that was swinging shut on its own, and turned her back around by it, and she let him, which was the first thing she'd let him do all morning that she hadn't argued about, and she noticed that, standing there in his gray shirt with her wet hair on her neck.

"You're not going anywhere," he said.

"You can't just—"

"You're not going to put on your clothes and call a car and go home and think. I know how that ends." He drew her forward by the wrist, one step, until her knees touched the edge of the mattress. "You'll think for three days. You'll decide it was a mistake. You'll stop answering my calls. And then I'll have to start over, and I don't want to start over."

"That's not—"

"Sit down."

"Sang Yan, I'm trying to tell you—"

He sat down himself, first, on the edge of the bed, and pulled her wrist until she had no choice but to come with it, and she ended up standing between his knees with his face level with her stomach, and he looked up at her, and she hated how much smaller she felt from that angle — not small, exactly. Held. Placed. Like something set down on a shelf where it would be safe.

"You want to refuse," he said.

"Yes."

"Say it, then." His hands closed around the backs of her thighs, thumbs on the inside, warm and dry now, and he didn't pull and he didn't squeeze. He just held her there. "Say the whole thing. Say you're not going to live here."

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

It was the strangest thing she'd ever felt — the words were right there, fully formed, I'm not moving in with you, I have my own place, this is too fast, I don't even know what I am to you, and they were sitting in her throat like they'd been nailed there, and she stood between his knees with her mouth open and produced a sound that was not a word.

"That's what I thought," he said.

"Stop."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said it with your face." She pulled at her wrist. He let it go. She took one step back and bumped the bed and sat down hard beside him, which was worse, because now they were side by side and she could feel the heat coming off his shoulder, and she pressed her hands flat on her own knees and looked at the door and the bag beyond it and tried again. "I'm not moving in here. I have a lease. I have neighbors who think I'm a quiet person. I have a life that doesn't have you in it yet, and I'd like to keep it that way for a while longer."

"That's better."

"Don't grade me."

"All right." He stood. He crossed to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer, and she watched him do it without understanding, and then he came back with two neckties in his hand, dark silk, and she looked at them the way you look at a dog that has brought you something from the trash.

"What are those for."

"You."

"Sang Yan—"

He caught her by the waist and turned her onto the bed before she'd finished his name. It wasn't rough. It was worse than rough — it was easy, the way he did everything, one hand flat between her shoulder blades pressing her face down into the sheets while the other gathered both her wrists behind her back, and she heard the silk before she felt it, and then the first tie went around her wrists and pulled snug.

"Wait—"

The second tie went around the first and knotted. She pulled at it immediately, hard, testing, and it held. Silk doesn't cut. It just doesn't give.

"That's too tight."

"It's not." He ran one finger between the silk and her skin, checking, and the touch of it there — the back of her wrist, the inside of her forearm, a place no one had ever touched her — made her whole body go still. "You can feel your hands. You can breathe. You're fine."

"Why are you—"

"Because you keep walking toward that door." He said it without heat. "And I'm tired of watching you do it."

He rolled her over. One hand on her hip, one on her shoulder, and she came up onto her back with her bound wrists trapped underneath her, and his shirt had ridden up to her ribs, and he looked down at her from the side of the bed with his jaw set and his eyes moving over her in pieces, unhurried, like he was reading a page he'd already memorized.

"Get up," he said.

"My hands—"

"You don't need them." He took her by the elbow and levered her upright, and then he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to the headboard and his legs stretched out, and he pulled her over his lap — not onto it, over it, one knee on either side of his hips, and her bound hands behind her meant she had to lean forward onto his chest to keep from falling.

She understood what he wanted a half-second before he moved.

"No," she said.

"Yes."

"Sang Yan, I'm not—"

He lifted her by the waist and set her down on him.

She was still wet from the shower and from everything else, and he was hard and waiting and she took him in one long slide that pulled a sound out of her she couldn't have kept in a locked room. All the way. Down to where he stopped, which was nowhere — she felt the whole length of him fill her, press up against the soreness from last night and push through it, and her forehead came down onto his shoulder and stayed there.

"There." His hands settled on her hips. "Now you can't walk to the door."

"That's—" She breathed. Tried again. "That's not fair."

"It's not supposed to be fair." He rocked her once, a slow roll of his hips underneath her, and her vision went soft at the edges. "It's supposed to make you honest. Lift up."

"I can't—"

"You can. Up."

She lifted. Her thighs were shaking already, and without her hands she had to brace herself against his chest with her forehead, and she came back down because staying up wasn't an option, and the second slide was deeper than the first and she heard herself make a sound against his collarbone that was not a word in any language.

"Again."

"Sang Yan—"

"Again, Xiao Lie."

She did it. Up and down, slow, because slow was all her legs had in them, and every time she came down he was there, filling her, and every time she lifted off him the wet sound of it filled the room, and she was naked above the waist in his shirt and he was still in sweatpants pushed down to his thighs, and they were both half-dressed and it was somehow worse than naked.

His hands moved up her sides, under the shirt, and closed over her breasts.

She felt it before she saw it — both palms covering her, warm and broad, and then his fingers found her nipples and pinched, one on each side, and she stopped moving entirely, hips halfway down his cock, and made a sound into his shoulder that she'd be hearing in her head for a week.

"Keep going," he said.

"I can't—"

"You stopped." He pinched again, harder, rolling both nipples between his fingers, and the wire that ran from them down into her cunt pulled tight and she felt herself clench around him, helpless, involuntary. "I can feel that. Do it again."

He didn't let go. He kept his fingers there, working her, tugging and rolling and pinching while she rode him, and every pull landed somewhere deep and low, and she couldn't decide whether to move faster to get away from it or slower to keep it, and she ended up somewhere in the middle, grinding down onto him with her forehead on his shoulder and her bound hands useless behind her back.

"Look at me."

"No."

He caught her chin and lifted her face. She had no hands to stop him. She was close enough to see the water still drying in his hairline and the small hard line between his brows, and his eyes were black and steady and he looked at her the whole way down and the whole way up, and she couldn't look away because he was holding her jaw.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what."

"That you'll stay."

She tried to shake her head. His grip didn't allow it. "That's not—this isn't how you ask someone to live with you."

"I know how I'm asking." His hips came up off the bed to meet her, hard, and she choked on the air and her eyes watered and her thighs clamped around him. "I'm asking like this. Answer like this."

"You're—" He did it again. "—you're insane."

"Probably." Another thrust, and this one hit the place from this morning, and white flashed behind her eyes and she cried out with her mouth right next to his ear. "Still asking."

He shifted. Both hands left her breasts and took her hips instead, and he started moving her — not letting her set the pace anymore, lifting and dropping her himself with his fingers digging into the soft flesh above her hipbones, and every stroke went deep enough to make her toes curl against the sheets, and her bound wrists ached behind her back and she didn't care, she didn't care, and she hated that she didn't care.

"Sang Yan—"

"Say you'll stay."

He took one hand off her hip and put it back on her breast, and this time he didn't pinch — he took her whole tit in his palm and squeezed, kneading it, thumb dragging across the nipple on every pass, and the combination of that and the hard rhythm he was setting underneath it turned her thoughts to static. She could feel sweat starting on her lower back. She could feel him swelling inside her, thicker than he'd been a minute ago, and she knew what that meant and she knew she was close and she knew he knew.

"I can feel you," he said against her mouth. "You're going to come like this. With your hands tied and my cock in you. And then you're going to tell me you'll stay."

"That's—"

"It's what's going to happen." He pinched her nipple, hard, and twisted, and the pain went down through her like a dropped coin and landed right where he was moving. "Unless you want me to stop."

She didn't say stop.

She noticed that. Somewhere in the back of her head, behind all the noise, she noticed that she didn't say stop, and that he'd given her the chance, and that she'd taken the chance and thrown it away, and that he'd known she would.

"That's what I thought," he said again, softer this time, and his hand on her breast gentled — just for a second, just a slow rub of his thumb across the swollen tip — and then he took hold of her hips with both hands and fucked up into her hard enough to move the whole bed.

The sound she made wasn't a word. It wasn't even close. He kept going, driving up into her with a rhythm that had no patience left in it, and her bound hands bounced behind her back and her hair was stuck to her face and his chest was wet under her palms — no, under her forehead, because she'd given up holding herself up, and he was holding her up now, holding her whole weight on his cock and his hands, and it was too much, it was more than she could hold, and it broke.

She came with her mouth open against his throat and no sound coming out at all, her cunt clamping down around him in long hard pulses, and he felt every one of them and swore under his breath and kept fucking her through it, and his fingers found her nipples again and pinched, both of them, hard, and the second wave came right on top of the first and she sobbed.

"There she is," he said. "Good. Good girl. Now say it."

"Sang Yan—"

"Say it."

"I—" Her voice broke. He was still moving, slower now, riding her down, and his hand had come up to hold the back of her neck and his thumb was stroking the hinge of her jaw, and the tenderness of that against everything else was what did it. "I'll stay."

He stopped moving.

Just like that. Dead still inside her, buried to the root, and she could feel his heartbeat through his cock and her own pulse answering it, and she lifted her head off his shoulder and looked at him and he was already looking at her.

"Again," he said.

"I'll stay."

"Say the whole thing."

She swallowed. Her throat was raw. "I'll stay here. With you. I'll live here."

He kissed her.

Not gently — he caught the back of her neck and pulled her mouth down onto his and kissed her like he was collecting, and his hips started moving again underneath her, faster now, no rhythm left, just chasing, and his hands came off her neck and went back to her breasts and he held them both and squeezed and pinched and pulled while he fucked up into her, and she rode it because she had to, because her hands were tied and there was nowhere to go, and she felt him swell and throb and then he came — deep, in long hard pulses, holding her down onto him with both hands on her tits like he was afraid she'd float away.

His mouth stayed on hers through all of it. She felt the sound he made more than heard it, low in his chest against her own, and when he finally let her go she was shaking everywhere and her bound hands were slick with sweat and the silk had gone dark with it.

Neither of them moved.

She stayed where she was, straddling him, full of him, his cum settling warm inside her, and her forehead came back down onto his shoulder and stayed there, and he didn't say anything for a long time. One hand came off her breast and went around her back and found the knots at her wrists, and he worked them loose — slowly, one tie then the other, and she felt the silk fall away and her arms come free and her shoulders scream with relief.

He brought her wrists around in front of her and looked at them. Red rings. Faint, but there.

"You'll want to wear long sleeves Monday," he said.

She laughed. It came out of her without warning, cracked and short, and she couldn't have said why, and she put her face back into his shoulder and let him hold her wrists in his hands and didn't look at the door.

"The drawer's yours," he said, into her hair. "I'll clear the rest of it out tonight."

"Sang Yan."

"Mm."

"I hate you."

"I know." He turned his head and kissed her temple, and outside the window the city kept humming, thirty-two floors down, indifferent, and her phone was still in her bag by the front door, and Sang Zhi had texted twice, and neither of them got up.

The silk ties lay in a dark tangle on the sheet beside her knee. She looked at them the way she'd look at a receipt for something she didn't remember buying, and then she lifted her arms and turned her wrists over in the light, and there they were — two faint red circles, no thicker than string, already fading at the edges.

"They'll be gone by tonight," Sang Yan said.

"They're not the problem."

"No." He stood, and his sweatpants were still bunched at his thighs, and he pulled them up without any self-consciousness at all, which she found more indecent than the rest of it. "Come on. You need to eat."

"I need to shower again."

"You need to eat first." He held a hand down to her, palm up, and waited there with his face doing nothing, and she took it because her legs had already proved what they thought of her judgment this morning.

He walked her into the bathroom and turned the water on and left her standing under it alone this time, and she stood there with her hands braced on the cold gray stone and let the heat run down her back, and she did not think about the drawer with her clothes in it. She thought about the ceiling. She thought about the water stain shaped like a bird. She thought about how the tile here was warm under her feet, heated from beneath, and how her own bathroom floor went cold at six and stayed cold all night, and then she stopped thinking about that, because it was a trap, and she turned the water off and reached for a towel.

He'd left clothes on the counter. Not hers — his. A sweatshirt, gray, the cuffs rolled twice, and a pair of shorts with a drawstring she had to knot three times before they'd stay on her hips. No underwear. She stood in front of the mirror with her wet hair dripping onto his collar and looked at herself and did not recognize the woman looking back, and then she went out into the kitchen because the alternative was standing there longer.

He was at the stove.

That was the thing she wasn't ready for. Sang Yan, 190 centimeters of him, standing at a gas burner in gray sweatpants with his hair drying flat and a spatula in his hand, and there was a pan going and a cutting board with the ends of scallions on it and a bowl of eggs already beaten, and the kitchen smelled like sesame oil and hot metal, and none of it matched the man who had tied her wrists with two neckties forty minutes ago.

"Sit," he said, without turning around.

She sat. There were two stools at the island, dark wood with a leather seat, and she pulled herself up onto one and put her hands on the counter and watched him work, and he worked the way he did everything else — no wasted motion, the knife going through the scallions in a rhythm that didn't falter, the eggs hitting the pan with a sound that made her stomach turn over and remember it was empty.

"You cook," she said.

"I live alone."

"That's not the same thing."

He glanced back at her, just the once. "It's the same thing if you get tired of takeout."

She watched him fold the eggs with the edge of the spatula, slow, patient, the way you'd fold something that mattered, and she thought about her own kitchen — the one burner that worked, the rice cooker with the lid that didn't seal, the stack of delivery menus in the drawer because it was easier than learning. She'd lived alone for three years and she had never once made anything that required a cutting board.

He slid the eggs onto a plate and set it in front of her and then went back for the rice, and the plate had a rim of dark glaze and a chip on the underside she could feel with her thumb. Not new. Not a set bought for a penthouse. Something he'd had a long time.

"Eat," he said, and sat down on the stool beside her with his own plate.

She ate. She hadn't meant to eat the way she did — fast, without talking, both elbows on the counter — but the first bite hit her empty stomach and something in her chest unclenched, and she finished the whole plate before he was halfway through his, and he got up without a word and scraped the rest of the pan onto her plate and sat back down.

"I didn't ask for more."

"You didn't have to."

She ate the second plate slower. The eggs had scallion in them and a little white pepper, and the rice was the right texture, and she was aware of him beside her in a way she couldn't switch off — the heat coming off his arm, the way he held his chopsticks, the small sound of the ceramic when he set his bowl down. The city was out there doing its Saturday morning and she could hear it faintly through the glass, and the light in here was yellow and flat and ordinary, and for about four minutes it was the most domestic thing that had ever happened to her.

"Your drawer," she said, because she couldn't leave it alone.

"Mm."

"How much of it is mine."

"Enough for a week." He picked up her empty plate and stacked it with his and carried both to the sink. "Underwear's in the top left. You're out of the black ones at home — I got the same kind, the ones with the lace at the hip, but if they're wrong you can tell me."

She stared at the back of his head. "You know which underwear I wear."

"I know which ones were in your laundry basket." He turned the water on. "Same thing."

"It's not—" She stopped. It was, actually, and she didn't have a version of the sentence that survived contact with the facts, so she let it go and watched him wash the pan. His forearms were wet to the elbow. There was a scar on his left one, old and white, running from the wrist up under the sleeve of his shirt, and she'd felt it last night in the dark and not known what it was, and she didn't ask now either.

He dried his hands and came back and stood behind her stool, and she felt him there before he touched her — that particular pressure of a large body deciding to be close — and then his hands came down on her shoulders and he pulled her back against his chest, one slow motion, until her shoulder blades were flat on his sternum and her head tipped back against his collarbone.

"You're tense," he said.

"I'm sitting in a strange kitchen in a man's clothes with no underwear on and my best friend has texted me twice."

"That's not why you're tense."

His thumbs found the knots along the top of her spine, and pressed, and she made a sound she would deny later. He worked them one at a time, slow and hard, up the back of her neck and out to her shoulders, and his hands were warm from the dishwater and enormous and she let her eyes close, which she should not have done, because with her eyes closed she could feel every part of where she was.

"You did this to me," she said, into the yellow light. "The tense part."

"I know."

"You're not sorry."

"No."

He worked down her arms, one at a time, lifting her wrist and pressing his thumb along the tendon, and when he got to the red ring on her left wrist he stopped and held it up and looked at it for a while, and then he turned her hand over and kissed the inside of her wrist, right on the mark, and set it back down on the counter.

She sat very still.

"I need my bag," she said.

"It's by the door."

"I need my phone."

"I know." He stepped back and the heat of him went with him, and she turned on the stool and looked at the small dark shape of the bag on the tile by the front door, thirty feet of wood floor away, and it might as well have been on the other side of the river.

She got up and walked to it.

Her legs held. Barely. The drawstring shorts slipped low on her hips with every step and the sweatshirt hung to her thighs and she was aware of him watching her the whole way, and she crouched down by the door and unzipped the bag and there it was, faceup in the dark with two notifications stacked on the lock screen.

Sang Zhi. 11:42 PM: did you get the charger??

She read it four times. Eleven forty-two. That was — she did the math and didn't like the answer. That was before the second time. Before he'd turned her over and put his weight on her back and she'd stopped being able to hold a thought in her head. Sang Zhi had been sitting up somewhere with her phone in her hand while Xiao Lie was face-down in a stranger's sheets with her wrists tied, and the message had come in then, and she had not heard it, and now it sat there in the dark like something she'd left running.

The second one was under it. 12:19 AM: ok you're asleep. tell me tomorrow. don't forget the charger!!!

Three exclamation marks. Sang Zhi's default setting. She could see her — cross-legged on her bed, phone propped on her knee, typing and deleting and typing, deciding at 12:19 that her friend was asleep on her brother's couch and everything was fine. It was the most Sang Zhi conclusion in the world. It was also, Xiao Lie realized, exactly the lie Sang Yan had handed her last night, still warm, and she hadn't even had to tell it.

She crouched there by the door with her thumb over the screen and did not unlock it.

"You going to answer her."

He hadn't come closer. He was still at the island, or near it — she could hear him, the small drag of a stool, the tap of a cup set down. Not moving toward her. Letting her have the thirty feet.

"I don't know what to say."

"You know what to say. You're just deciding whether you'll say it."

She stood up with the phone in her hand, screen dark, and turned around. He was leaning on the edge of the island with his arms crossed and his ankles crossed too, casual as a man waiting for a bus, and his hair had dried wrong on one side and he hadn't fixed it, and she hated how much she noticed that. Hated that the wrong-dried hair was the thing that made her chest do something complicated. A man who tied her wrists and called her his, and it was the cowlick that undid her.

"I'll tell her I fell asleep."

"On the couch."

"On the couch." She put the phone in the front pocket of the sweatshirt, which was deep enough to swallow it whole, and the weight of it hung against her thigh. "And that I got the charger."

"And the charger."

"Would you stop repeating me."

"You're building a story," he said, straightening off the island. "I'm just checking the load-bearing walls."

She opened her mouth to say something sharp and found nothing behind it, so she closed it and looked past him at the kitchen — the pan drying upside down on the rack, the cutting board propped against the tile, the two plates stacked in the drainer. He'd washed everything. While she was in the shower he'd washed everything and made the eggs and left her clothes in a drawer she hadn't opened yet, and the whole apartment was arranged around her arrival like someone had built it in advance and then waited.

She walked back to the island. Her bare feet made no sound on the wood and she hated that too — the way she moved through his space now, quiet, like she belonged in it.

"I'm going to go home," she said.

"I know."

"Don't do that. Don't agree with me like it means something else."

"It means something else." He picked up the cup he'd set down — tea, she saw now, a tall glass with leaves settled at the bottom — and drank, and watched her over the rim. "You're going home because Sang Zhi's awake and you're scared of your own phone. Not because you want to leave."

"Those are both reasons."

"They're not the same reason."

She hated him. She hated the way he stood there with his glass of tea and his flat morning voice and cut through her sentence like it was paper. She hated that he was right, and that being right had never once made him gentle about it, and that gentleness had never once been what she wanted from him anyway, which was a thing she was not going to look at directly this morning.

"Then give me a better one," she said.

"Stay until noon."

"Sang Yan—"

"Noon." He set the glass down. "You'll text her at ten that you're awake and heading out, and it'll be true, and she'll never ask how you slept because she never asks, and you'll have a whole morning that's nobody's business but yours." He looked at her, and it was the same look from the bedroom doorway last night, the one that had decided something about her before she'd decided it about herself. "That's the better reason."

She stood there with her hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt and the phone against her thigh and the city doing its Saturday morning outside the glass, and she thought about the two texts and the exclamation marks and the drawer in the bedroom with the black lace at the hip, and about the fact that she had never in three years of living alone made anything that required a cutting board.

"Ten o'clock," she said. "I text her at ten."

"Ten."

"And I'm not staying past noon."

"Noon," he said, and there was something in his face that she would have called agreement if she hadn't watched him all night.

He came around the island then and took her by the wrist — the left one, the one with the fading ring on it, and he did it deliberately, she was sure of it, thumb laid right over the mark — and walked her back to the bedroom without a word, and she let herself be walked, because the alternative was standing in the kitchen arguing about a morning that had already been decided. The bed was still unmade. The two neckties were still on the sheet where she'd left them, and he picked them up as they passed and dropped them in the top drawer of the nightstand and closed it, and she watched the drawer close and understood that they lived there now, that they had a place, that this was a fact about her life she was going to have to carry home in a bag.

"Sit," he said, and pointed at the edge of the bed, and she sat, because apparently that was the shape of her now — she sat when he pointed.

He went to the closet and came back with a pair of jeans, dark, folded, and a shirt she didn't recognize, and he set them on the bed beside her and stood there looking down at her for a second with his jaw working, like he was deciding something, and then he crouched down in front of her and took the hem of the sweatshirt in both hands.

"I can dress myself."

"I know." He didn't let go of the hem. "But you can't wear that out, and you can't wear your skirt, and I'm not giving you back last night's clothes until they're washed. So."

"So what."

"So you wear mine." And he pulled the sweatshirt up over her head before she could argue, and she had to lift her arms to let it go, and then she was sitting there in his drawstring shorts with her hair falling out of the collar and her arms crossing over her chest on pure reflex, and he looked at her arms and did not say anything about them, which was somehow worse than if he had.

The jeans were his. Of course they were his — they were four sizes too big and she had to hold them at the waist while he threaded a belt through the loops and cinched it down to the last hole, and even then they sat low on her hips and bunched at her ankles. The shirt was his too, a soft gray thing with the collar gone soft from washing, and he buttoned it himself, top to bottom, his knuckles brushing her sternum on the way down, and then he rolled the cuffs three times on each arm until her hands came out.

"There," he said. "Now you look like something I brought home."

"That's not a compliment."

"It wasn't one." He stood up and looked at her, head to foot, and something moved through his face and was gone before she could name it. "Come on. I'll make you tea before you go."

She followed him back out to the kitchen in his too-big clothes with the belt cinched tight and the phone in the pocket, and the morning light came in flat and yellow over the counter, and he put the kettle on and stood there with his back to her, and she sat down on the stool and watched him and thought — with the part of her that was still keeping score — that this was the second time in twelve hours she'd been dressed by Sang Yan, and that she had not once been the one to decide it.