The elevator doors slid open on the thirty-second floor and the penthouse received her with its bright, expensive silence. Xiao Lie stepped out onto the dark marble in her bare feet, and the cold climbed straight up through her soles, through her ankles, a shock of temperature that made her want to lift one foot and then the other like a child crossing gravel. She didn't. She stood still and let the doors close behind her, and the soft hydraulic sigh of them shutting sealed the apartment around her like a held breath finally let go.

Midday light poured through the glass wall at the far end, white and flat and merciless, and it laid the whole room bare — the low couch, the polished island, the single cup of coffee steaming on the marble where someone had set it down and then not touched it again. The air smelled of that coffee and underneath it the cologne and the faint sour ghost of whiskey from last night, and something else, something that was only him, that had been in her nose since the elevator and would not leave it.

Sang Yan stood at the island with his back half-turned, one hand flat on the counter, the other curled around the cup's handle. He was dressed already — dark trousers, a black shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, his hair slicked back and still faintly wet at the nape. He had been awake for hours, she could see it, had been standing in this kitchen with his coffee and his silence while she was checking out of a cheap hotel in his shirt.

He turned his head and looked at her. He did not startle. He did not ask why she was back, or how she had gotten up here without a key, or where she had been all morning. His eyes went from her face down the length of her — the shirt she still wore, his shirt, the hem of it hanging at her thighs, her bare legs beneath, her bare feet on his floor — and something in his jaw settled, some wire pulled taut and then released, and he set the cup down on the island with a small precise click.

"You came back for your things," he said.

It was not a question. His voice was low and even and it filled the room the way the light did, without effort, and Xiao Lie felt her own breath go shallow at the sound of it. She had prepared nothing to say. On the elevator ride up she had rehearsed a sentence about a charger, about needing her phone charger, and it had dissolved somewhere between the lobby and the thirty-second floor, and now she stood in the middle of his entryway with her mouth closed and her toes curling against the cold stone.

"I don't know," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "I don't know why I came."

He crossed the room. He did not hurry — he never hurried — and the slow weight of his steps on the marble was somehow worse than if he had rushed her, because it gave her all the time in the world to watch him come and none of it to move. He stopped close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep his eyes, and his chest filled the whole of her vision, the black shirt, the line of his collarbone, the pulse moving in his throat.

His hands came down and found the hem of the shirt at her thighs. His fingers brushed the bare skin just beneath it, knuckles grazing the soft inner curve of her leg, and she felt her whole body pull tight and warm at the contact like a wick taking flame.

"You came back," he said, quieter now, his thumb hooking under the fabric and lifting it an inch, "for your things." The hem rose. Cool air touched the tops of her thighs. "So let's get you out of mine."

She could have stopped him. That was the thing she would think about later — that there was a moment, one clear clean moment, when his hands were on the hem of the shirt and her own hands were loose at her sides, and she could have brought them up and closed them over his wrists and said no. She did not. Her hands stayed where they were, and her chin lifted, and she let him draw the shirt up over her belly, over her ribs, and she raised her arms for him without being told, the way you lift your arms for someone undressing you when the undressing has already been decided.

The shirt came over her head and her hair fell loose and heavy around her shoulders, and the bright flat light of midday found her all at once — her breasts, the soft pear curve of her hips, the dark thatch between her thighs — and she felt the heat rush up her throat and into her cheeks because there was nowhere in this whole glass room to stand where the light would not have her. She brought one arm across her chest and the other hand down and he caught her wrist before it landed, easy and absolute, and drew it away.

"Don't," he said. Not a rebuke. Almost gentle. "Not with me."

He walked her backward. Her bare heels met the marble and slid, and his hand came up flat between her shoulder blades and then she felt the door against her spine, hard and cool and unyielding, and he pressed her into it until the cold of it bled through her skin and the wood grain bit into her shoulder blades. His body closed the last of the distance and she had nowhere to go, no room to breathe that was not full of him.

His mouth found her throat. He did not kiss it so much as take it — lips and then teeth, dragging up the tendon, and she heard herself make a sound she did not authorize, a thin high thing that came out of her nose and died against his shoulder. His tongue traced the place where her pulse was hammering and he hummed against it, low, satisfied, and the vibration went down through her chest and settled between her legs like a hand.

His hand was already moving down her belly. Fingers spread flat, palm dragging over the softness below her navel, and then lower, and then his fingers found her and she jerked against the door and her head went back and struck the wood with a small dull sound she barely registered. She was wet. She had been wet since the elevator, since before it, and his fingers slid through it and the sound of it was obscene in the bright quiet room — a wet, easy, gliding sound as he dragged two fingers through her folds and then back, and back again, spreading her open.

"There it is," he said against her throat. His voice had gone rough at the edges. "You came back for your things." His fingers circled her clit and her hips bucked and he pressed her harder into the door with his forearm across her chest, holding her still. "Say it. Say what you came back for."

"I—" Her voice cracked. His fingers were moving in slow deliberate circles and her thighs were trying to close around his hand and he would not let them, his knee pushing between them, spreading her. "I came back for—"

"Your things." He slid one finger into her, slow, all the way to the knuckle, and her whole body clenched around it and a moan tore out of her that she could not have stopped with both hands. "Or this." He pulled the finger out and pushed two back in, and the stretch of it made her rise onto her toes. "Tell me which."

"Both," she gasped. "God. Both."

He laughed, low and warm, and it was the first laugh she had heard from him in a day and it undid something in her chest. His mouth came back to hers and he kissed her hard, his tongue pushing in, tasting her, and his fingers kept working between her legs, slow and deep and curling, and she kissed him back because her mouth had no other idea what to do. Her hands came up finally and closed on the front of his shirt and held.

Then his hands left her and she made a small bereft noise into his mouth, and he was unbuckling his belt. The leather whispered through the loops, the buckle clinked, and she heard the drag of his zipper and then he took her by the backs of the thighs and lifted her off the floor as though she weighed nothing at all. Her legs came around his hips on instinct. The marble was gone from under her feet, the whole world was gone from under her feet, and there was only the door at her back and his body in front of her and the ceiling light above his shoulder.

She felt the head of his cock against her, hot and blunt and wet at the tip, sliding through her folds, finding her, and her breath stopped entirely and her fingers dug into his shoulders.

"Look at me," he said.

She looked. His dark eyes were fixed on her face, and there was no smile in them now, nothing easy, only a flat and burning attention, and he held her gaze and pushed into her. One long slow stroke, and her body opened for him and took him and the stretch of it pulled a sound from her that was almost a sob, her mouth falling open, her eyes wanting to close and not closing because he would not let them.

"That's it," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper and it shook at the end. "Take it. All of it."

He was fully inside her, her back flat to the door, her legs locked around his waist, and for a moment neither of them moved. She could feel him in her, the whole thick length of him, the pulse of him, and she could feel her own body gripping him in slow waves, clenching and releasing, learning the shape of him all over again. His forehead came down against hers. His breath was hot and uneven on her mouth.

Then he began to move.

He fucked her against the door in long driving strokes, pulling almost all the way out and then pushing back in to the root, and every thrust pressed her spine into the wood and drove a huff of air out of her lungs. The door rattled in its frame. The sound of it filled the entryway — the wet slide of him in her, the slap of his hips against the backs of her thighs, the small rhythmic knock of her shoulder blades against the door. She clung to his shoulders and let him have her and heard herself making noises she had never made before, high and broken and shameless.

"You're so wet," he said, his mouth at her ear, and the words were rough and wondering, as though he had not expected it, as though after all his planning she was still a surprise to him. "Listen to it. Listen to how wet you are for me."

She could hear it. She could not stop hearing it. The slick, sucking sound of her own body taking him, over and over, and the heat of it climbed into her face and she turned her head aside and he caught her chin and turned it back.

"No," he said. "You don't get to hide from me. Not now. Not ever again."

His hips drove harder. She felt the angle change, the head of his cock finding something deep inside her that made her whole body jerk and her mouth open on a cry, and he felt it too, because he did it again, and again, hammering that place until her eyes were wet and her hands were fisted in his shirt and she was climbing, climbing, the pressure gathering low in her belly like a fist closing.

Then he shifted his grip. One arm stayed locked under her ass, holding her up, and his other hand came between their bodies and closed over her breast — his palm rough and hot over the whole of it — and his thumb and forefinger found her nipple and pinched. Hard. A bright sharp pain that flashed straight down to where he was buried in her, and her cunt clamped down on his cock so violently that he groaned aloud and his hips stuttered.

"There," he breathed. "You liked that."

"Sang Yan—"

He did it again, rolling the nipple between his fingers, twisting just to the edge of pain, and then he soothed it with the flat of his thumb, and the two together — the pinch and the soothe, the pain and the tenderness — made her sob against his mouth. His hips never stopped. He fucked her through it, steady and deep, and his hand played with her breast the whole time, pinching, pulling, rolling, until the nipple was swollen and aching and every tug of it sent a fresh pulse of heat straight to her clit.

"You like your tits played with," he said. His voice was thick now, losing its evenness, and she could hear how close he was getting. "I'm going to remember that. Every time I have you, I'm going to have these in my hands." He squeezed the whole breast, kneading it, and she arched into his palm. "These are mine. All of you is mine."

She was going to come. It was rising in her, inevitable, a wave she could feel coming from a long way off and could do nothing to stop. Her thighs tightened around his waist. Her toes curled against nothing. Her breath came in short broken gasps against his throat and she heard herself saying his name, over and over, a chant, a prayer, the only word she had left.

"That's right," he said, and his hand left her breast and came down and his thumb pressed flat against her clit, and he fucked her harder, faster, the door slamming against its frame now, the whole entryway loud with them. "Come for me. Come on my cock. Let me feel it."

She came. Her whole body locked and then shattered, her cunt clenching around him in hard rhythmic pulses, her back bowing away from the door, her mouth open on a cry that had no sound in it at all. He fucked her through it, his thumb still working her clit, drawing it out and out until she was shaking and oversensitive and sobbing into his shoulder, and only then did his own control break.

"Fuck," he gritted out, and his hips drove deep and stilled, and she felt him come — the hot thick pulse of it inside her, one and then another and another, and he held himself there, pressed to the root, his whole body rigid against her, his face buried in her throat, a low broken groan coming out of him that she felt in her own chest more than she heard.

Then it was done.

The entryway went quiet. The door stopped rattling. His breathing was loud and ragged against her neck, and hers was worse, and neither of them moved or spoke. He stayed inside her, still half-hard, and she could feel the slow seep of him beginning to leak out around where their bodies were joined, and the marble floor was a long way down, and the midday light lay across them both, flat and white and indifferent, and the city hummed on beyond the glass as though nothing at all had happened in this room.