Chapter 4: The Second Bath
The bathroom was already thick with steam when I pushed the door open. The mirrors had gone blind with it, the amber lights doubled themselves in the fog, and the tub, big enough that I'd once called it a small swimming pool when I was ten, held thirteen women and barely room for the water. The smell hit me first: jasmine soap, the expensive floral kind Katherine bought, and under it the warm animal scent of so many bodies in one enclosed space.
"There he is," Maren said, and the whole tub turned.
Thirteen faces. Six of them I'd finished inside before dawn, and every one of them knew it, and none of them looked shy about it. Naya sat with her braid coiled on top of her head, water to her collarbone. Sef had claimed the corner step. The twins shared a patch of marble lip like they shared everything. Priya was already slicking soap up one arm, watching me with the unhurried shamelessness of a woman who'd had her nipple in my mouth less than twenty hours ago.
"Water's getting cold," Celeste said, and lifted a hand, palm up, an invitation and an order in one. "Get in, Daly."
I stepped over the marble lip and the heat closed around my calves, my thighs, my hips. Someone's hand, small, Maren's, pulled me down by the wrist before I'd finished lowering myself, and I settled into the water chest-deep between knees and shoulders and floating hair, and the tub complained. Water slopped over the rim in a thin sheet across the tile and nobody moved to fix it.
"Back against the middle," Maren said. "I called his hair. It's mine. It was decreed." She said the last word in her impression of Katherine, which is a good impression and a dangerous habit.
"You called it at six in the morning half asleep," Vanessa said. She was wading around my right side, waist-high in the water, and her hands landed flat on my chest, and I felt the heat of them through the bath heat. "Possession requires presence of mind."
"Mom."
"He's not a contested territory," Katherine said from the tiled edge. She'd taken the raised step at the head of the tub like a throne, wrapped in nothing but a towel across her lap and a glass of water in her hand, silver hair pinned up again, and she looked down at all of us with the mild interest of a woman watching a well-run household function. "Sit, both of you. Maren, his hair. Vanessa, everything else. That's a sensible division of labor and I won't hear appeals."
Vanessa's mouth curved. She'd won, and she knew it, and she didn't rub it in except by adjusting my body against her chest with both hands under my arms, settling me back against her breasts the way you seat a guest.
Maren climbed behind my head, kneeling over the edge, and worked her fingers into my hair before the water had even settled. Her nails dragged a slow line through my scalp and my eyes closed without my permission.
"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, he likes it. Look at his face."
"I can't look at his face," Vanessa said, "I'm looking at the rest of him."
"I meant everyone look."
The soap came next, Celeste handing the bottle down the line of bodies, and Maren lathered it between her palms and worked it into my hair in slow circular pressure, and Vanessa, meanwhile, took the washcloth cloth, the washcloth, and started at my shoulders.
I have been washed before. When I was sick at eight, when I broke my wrist at twelve, my mother in the bathroom with her sleeves rolled. This was not that. Vanessa dragged the cloth down my sternum in one long pass and her free hand followed it, flat, spreading the heat, and her chin came to rest on my shoulder.
"You're tense," she said, into my ear. "Twenty-four years old and you hold your shoulders like an old man."
"You'd be tense too."
"I'd be lovely and relaxed if I'd come three times since last night." She kissed the wet hinge of my jaw and went back to work, and the cloth traveled down over my ribs, my stomach, and paused at my navel, and I felt her breath change against my neck. "Shoulders down, Jordan. Let me do everything. That's the whole point of today."
Maren's fingers kept up their slow rhythm at my scalp. Down the tub, Sef had drifted closer, and she was watching Vanessa's hands with a small frown of concentration, like a student.
"Can I do his legs?" Sef asked.
"You can do his feet," Vanessa said. "I'll allow it."
"That's generous of you."
"It's what I'm known for."
Sef took my left foot into her lap under the water and worked her thumbs into the arch, and it hurt, briefly, in the way that meant she'd found a knot I'd been carrying for a week, and I made a low sound and Maren laughed above me and dug her nails in deeper in triumph.
The heat was doing something to me. Not the arousal, that had been a low constant hum since Katherine's mouth at dawn, but something underneath it, a loosening. Thirteen women, one tub, water at my ribs, hands on my scalp and my chest and my foot, and the steam blurring everyone into one warm collective body. I stopped holding my shoulders. I felt it happen, felt Vanessa register it under her palms, felt her hum of satisfaction.
"There he is," she said, quietly, to herself.
Priya moved through the water to my left, displacing a small wave that sloshed over the rim again, and Celeste followed, and then the tub had contracted around me, everyone closing inward, the circle of knees tightening. Celeste's heavy breasts floated at the waterline an arm's length away, dark nipples beaded, and she caught me looking and didn't pretend otherwise.
"Thirsty?" she said.
"I ate first yesterday," I said. "Today I get served. Mom said."
"Your mother decreed you eat first at breakfast." Celeste arched, deliberate, and a bead of white gathered at her nipple and dissolved into the water. "This isn't breakfast. This is an appetizer."
"She's impossible," Maren said, fondly, still working my scalp.
"She's generous," Priya corrected. "The difference matters."
Katherine's voice came down from her step, dry. "Both of you can feed him at breakfast like civilized women. The bath is for washing."
"Are we washing?" Naya asked, from the far side, and there was a ripple of laughter through the water, and even Katherine's mouth twitched.
"We are washing," Katherine said. "Badly, but we are."
Vanessa had abandoned the washcloth somewhere along my stomach. Her bare hands were on me now, slick with soap, working down the flat of my abdomen in slow spirals that went lower every pass without ever quite committing, and I knew exactly what she was doing and so did she, and my cock, half hard since the bedroom, made a liar of my composure by filling under the water where everyone could see the shape of it move.
"There it is," Vanessa murmured, warm against my ear, and her palm slid over me once, full, slow, then lifted away entirely.
"Vanessa."
"Yes?"
"You're teasing him."
"I'm washing him thoroughly. There's a difference." Her hands settled on my hips instead, proprietary, and stayed there. "He's allowed to be relaxed. That's all. Maren's doing his hair. Sef's doing his feet. I'm doing the middle. It's a comprehensive service."
"He's blushing," Sef reported, thumbs working my arch. "He's blushing and he's hard. In the bath. With his whole family."
"I want that noted for the record," Maren said.
"The record is full," I said, and the tub laughed again, and Maren tipped my head back over her arm and poured a slow rinse of warm water through my hair, cupping my forehead with her hand so nothing ran into my eyes, and the tenderness of it, after everything, undid something small in my chest.
She did it twice. The suds ran off into the water and her fingers went back in, gentler now, combing, and I let my head rest back against her shoulder, and her breasts pressed the back of my neck, and the water lapped, and for a few minutes the room was almost quiet. Just steam ticking on the mirrors. Just breathing.
Then Celeste moved.
She crossed the tub in one slow glide and settled at my left side, her hip against my hip, and reached across me, ostensibly to hand Priya the soap, and while she was there her breasts hung over my chest and one heavy nipple dragged a line of leaked milk through the soap-slick on my collarbone, and nobody was fooled by the soap logistics.
"Celeste," Katherine said.
"I dropped the soap."
"You did nothing of the kind."
"I dropped it spiritually." She settled back, unrepentant, and her hand came to rest on my chest, over the chain, under the water. "He's warm. He's got good skin. I'm a tactile person. Sue me."
The water level rose, or it felt like it did. Bodies kept drifting in. Naya slid down my right side below Vanessa, shy about it, her long body folding small until her shoulder rested on my ribs. The twins had appeared at my knees. The tall girl crowded in behind Celeste. The tub went from a gathering to a press, thirteen women packed around one man, and the water began to move in slow sloshing pulses with every shift of weight, licking up over the marble rim in fat bright sheets that ran across the tile toward the drains.
"Everyone stop fidgeting," Katherine said, "you're flooding my floor."
"He's the one radiating heat," Priya said. "He's the furnace. We're just moths."
Maren's hands stilled in my hair. I felt her look down the length of me, over my shoulder, at the press of bodies around my hips where Vanessa's hands still rested, and I felt the exact moment the tenderness in her curdled into want, because her breath went shallow against my ear and her fingers tightened.
"He's ours," she said, to no one, almost to herself. "He's ours and he's right here and it's nine in the morning and I want him again."
"There's a schedule," Vanessa said, but her voice had gone lower too, and her thumbs were drawing small circles on my hip bones, and neither of them believed the schedule was load-bearing anymore.
"Mom," I said.
"Mm." Katherine sipped her water. She'd watched the whole drift of it, the closing circle, the rising water, her daughters' hands, and her face gave me nothing and gave me everything, because the nothing was deliberate, and she wanted me to ask. "You have something to say, Jordan."
"What's the ruling?"
"My ruling." She set the glass down on the marble with a small click. "The bath is for washing. The washing is done. I've watched you be tended for half an hour and you sat still for it, which pleases me more than you know." She rose from her step, towel sliding, and stepped down into the water at the head of the tub, and the displacement of her body sent a wave up over all of us and out over the rim in one long unbroken sheet that hissed across the tile. "But my daughters have been patient since dawn, and I am not made of stone."
"Mom," Maren said, delighted.
"Here." Katherine waded to my side, and Vanessa shifted without being asked, the two of them exchanging my body between them like an heirloom, and Katherine's hand closed around my jaw and turned my face up to hers. Her eyes were dark and unhurried and mine. "The day is yours to hand out, I said. But mornings are still mine, and I say this bath ends the way baths in this house have apparently decided to end." Her thumb stroked my cheekbone. "The floor's already wet. Someone fetch towels. And somebody lock the door this time."
Celeste was already moving for the door, and Maren was already turning my face back to her and kissing me, tasting of jasmine soap, her wet hands framing my jaw, and the tub slopped again, a long bright sheet of it sliding over the marble while thirteen women closed in around me and the water rose to meet the rim like it had given up pretending.
"Breakfast can wait," Katherine said, behind me, low, and I heard her voice catch on the first honest want of the morning. "Nobody's served until I'm done with him."
Celeste answered Katherine before anyone else could move. She climbed onto my lap facing me, knees bracketing my hips under the water, and took my face in both wet hands.
"You heard her," she said. "Nobody's served. So I'm serving myself."
She pressed her chest up out of the water and fed me her nipple, and I closed my mouth on it, and the letdown came instantly, hot and sweet, jetting against my tongue in hard little pulses. Her hips rocked against mine under the surface and I hardened against her belly, and she felt it and laughed low into the steam.
"Oh, there he is."
"That's my brother," Maren said, from behind my head, her hands still in my hair. "Everyone behaves accordingly."
Priya moved in on my left and latched her own leak into the open air, aiming deliberately. The first thin arc hit the water and bloomed. I watched it happen over Celeste's shoulder, white thread curling through the clear bath like ink in reverse, spreading, softening, and Priya saw me see it and squeezed harder and gave a longer stream.
"It's going cloudy," Sef reported from my foot, delighted.
"It's going milky," Priya said. "The whole tub. Everybody in. This is the best bath of my life."
The twins took her at her word. They crowded in at my knees, and one of them caught Celeste's spray in her mouth mid-pulse and shared it back with her sister in a kiss, and the water sloshed a bright sheet over the rim that ran milky-white down the tile to the drain. Naya slid along my right side until her hip pressed mine, and she leaned up shyly and licked a bead of milk off my jaw, then off Celeste's collarbone, then gave up on being shy and put her mouth on Priya's nipple from the side, and Priya swore and let down harder for her.
The bath was no longer water. I looked down the length of it and the whole tub had gone the color of cream, warm and opaque to my ribs, hiding everyone below the waist, and every shift of a body sent slow white waves licking over the marble. The jasmine had drowned in the sweetness. The room smelled like the milk itself, warm and animal, thick enough to taste on the steam.
"Look at the water," Vanessa said. She was kneeling at my hip with her hand moving under the surface, and I couldn't see what her hand was doing and didn't need to. "Mom. Mom, the water."
"I see the water." Katherine stood at the head of the tub, and the opaque white reached her thighs, and she watched the whole press of bodies around her son with her lower lip caught in her teeth, and then she let it go. "Nobody lets down into the floor. The tub only. Floor's been through enough."
Celeste rode my lap through all of it, milk streaming off both nipples now, white rivers running down her own stomach into the cream-colored bath and vanishing. She reached between us under the surface, found me, and guided me in with one long unhurried push that seated me to the root, and we both groaned into each other's mouths.
"There it is," she breathed. "Eleven women watching. Do your worst, Daly."
Her walls were slick and gripping and the milky water added a drag of warmth everywhere our bodies joined, and I gripped her hips and drove up. She braced a hand on the marble behind me and met me stroke for stroke, breasts swinging heavy through the surface on every thrust, spraying white with the impact, and the bath churned around us in thick slow waves that slopped over the rim in sheets.
"Her milk's going everywhere," the tall girl said from the far side, hand between her own thighs.
"Everywhere is the point," Celeste gasped.
Maren's hands left my hair and slid down over my shoulders, my chest, her nails dragging through the film of milk on my skin, and she kissed the back of my neck and bit it. "I'm next after her. I'm keeping count. I'm at two and everyone else should worry."
"You're at two since yesterday," Vanessa said. Her hand was still working under the water, on me where I entered Celeste, two fingers spread around the join, and she pressed there on every stroke and made Celeste cry out. "I'm keeping count too."
"Girls." Katherine's voice came through the churn. She'd waded down into it, waist-deep in white, and she took my jaw again and turned my face to hers and kissed me while Celeste rode me, tasting the milk Celeste had flooded my mouth with, her tongue thorough and slow. "He's close. I can feel it in his hips. It's how he was built."
"I'm close," Celeste agreed, and her rhythm broke into short hard drops, her whole body slapping down on me, milk arcing with every bounce. "Someone catch it."
Priya and Naya caught it. They closed on either side of her and each took a nipple in her mouth as her orgasm hit, and Celeste screamed, loud and shameless, her walls clamping around me in hard rhythmic squeezes while her milk sprayed past the greedy mouths latched on her and the bath surged white and opaque around all three of us and over the rim in one last long sheet.
I was right behind her, hips bucking off the marble, and Katherine felt the change in me and said, "Inside her. It's her turn. You know the rule."
I emptied into Celeste in long blind pulses, deep in the cream-warm water where nobody could see and everyone could feel it happen in the way her body seized around me, and she sobbed out the last of her orgasm with her forehead pressed to mine and Priya still drinking from her and Naya's hand working between her own thighs to her own shuddering finish.
Celeste slumped against my chest, boneless, and I held her there, still inside her, my breath wrecked, while the milky bath settled into slow thick swells.
"Count me," she murmured into my neck. "That's mine for the morning."
"He's not done," Katherine said. She'd stepped up onto the inner seat at the head of the tub, above the white waterline, and she was looking down at me with her hair coming loose from its pins, silver strands sticking to the steam on her skin. "You heard me. Nobody's served until I'm done with him, and I'm not done."
She lifted one foot and hooked it over my shoulder, deliberate, sovereign, obscene, and the whole tub went quiet at the sight of her, spread above her son in a bath gone the color of milk.
"Mom," Vanessa said.
"The floor's already ruined," Katherine said. "Maren, off his shoulders. Vanessa, hold him steady." She lowered herself toward the water toward me, her hand already reaching down between her own thighs. "And somebody get the hot tap. The rest of this bath is going to take a while."
Katherine came down onto me slowly, and the whole tub watched her do it. She held the marble seat behind my head for balance, her hand between her own thighs, guiding me in inch by inch while Celeste stayed seated against my chest, still full of me, watching over her shoulder.
The water was so thick with milk that I couldn't see where my mother's body opened for me. I could only feel it. Heat, then the slick grip of her, then the slow swallow of her sinking until her thighs met mine and she sighed, long and low, like a woman sitting down at the end of a hard day.
"Better," she said. She rolled her hips once, a full slow circle, and my hands found her waist on instinct. "That's better. Everyone else hold on."
Nobody held on. The twins, still packed at my knees, had turned toward each other somewhere in the churn of it, and I realized I'd stopped hearing their giggling. One of them had her back against my thigh and the other was facing her, knees hooked over each other's hips under the cream-colored surface, and the water was moving between them in a rhythm that matched nothing else in the tub.
Jordan couldn't be sure until the taller twin reached up and dragged the shorter one's mouth to hers and kissed her like she was starving. Their hips worked against each other. The sound came up through the water, soft and wet and rhythmic, and Maren heard it before I did and craned around my shoulder to look.
"Oh my God," Maren said. "The twins are fucking each other."
"Keep your voice down," the taller twin said, without breaking rhythm, without lifting her mouth from her sister's jaw. "Some of us are busy."
"You're in my mother's bath."
"We're all in your mother's bath." The shorter one gasped as her twin pressed harder, ground down, and I felt the impact travel through my leg, bone to bone. "You're on his hair. We're on each other. Same thing."
Katherine didn't stop moving. She looked down the length of the tub at the two of them, riding me in that unhurried rolling way, milk leaking from her nipples in slow threads that dissolved into the white water before it reached her stomach, and her mouth curved.
"Twenty years," she said. "They used to share a room and complain about it. Now look."
"We're looking," Priya said. She had migrated around to watch, chin propped on her folded arms on the tub rim at water level, close enough that the slosh caught her in the face and she didn't bother wiping it. "They do this at sleepovers. I've seen it. They think nobody knows."
"Everyone knows," the taller twin said. Her hand slid down between their bodies and I heard her sister's breath catch, a sharp little sound, and the rhythm between them stuttered and deepened. "Knowing is the fun part."
The shorter twin had her eyes half closed, her cheek turned against my knee, and every roll of her hips dragged her sex against her twin's and jostled my leg, so that Katherine's next downstroke and the twins' next grind landed in the same beat, and the tub lurched, milky water pouring over the rim in a bright sheet that hissed across the tile.
"The floor," Katherine said, breathless now, not caring. "Forget the floor."
"Forget the floor," the shorter twin agreed, and grabbed her sister's ass with both hands and pulled her down harder.
The taller twin bent her head and closed her mouth on her sister's nipple, and the shorter one's whole back arched, shoulders blades scraping the marble lip, and she came apart with a high cracked sound that bounced off the fogged mirrors. Her hips kept jerking against her twin's hand, small frantic pulses, milk letting down from her own breasts in twin jets that hit the water and bloomed, and the taller twin lifted her mouth, milk on her chin, and looked around the tub with bright drunk eyes.
"She does that," she said. "Gushes. Worth sitting through the whole bath for."
"My turn," the shorter one panted, and flipped them somehow in the cramped water, displacing a wave that swamped Celeste's shoulder and slopped out over the rim again, and pressed her twin back against my other thigh and got her hand between her legs, fast and ruthless, and the taller twin's laughing gasp turned into something else entirely.
I was losing track of my own body. Katherine rode me at my head, deep and slow, her walls dragging on every stroke. Celeste was still warm and full around the root of me where she'd settled, stirring faintly, murmuring. The twins fucked each other against my knees, one to each side, and every thrust of their hips rocked me up into Katherine, so that the three rhythms braided together without anyone intending it.
"That's it," Katherine said, feeling it, her voice going rough. "The girls move, he moves. Everyone keep doing exactly that."
"Wasn't planning on stopping," the taller twin managed, and then her sister's fingers found something and she stopped talking and started shaking, gripping the rim, thighs clamping my leg, coming hard with her mouth open against the steam.
The shorter twin held her through it, cheek pressed to her wet hair, and looked up at Katherine across the length of my body with her chin still shining.
"We get him after," she said. It wasn't a question.
"You'll get him at breakfast," Katherine said, and then broke her own rhythm and started riding me properly, long strokes now, her breasts swinging through the surface, milk spraying with every drop, "if you can still walk."
"Don't make her come yet," Celeste murmured against my chest, half asleep on me, feeling me swell inside her. "She likes the edge."
"I know what he likes," Katherine said, and leaned down and took my jaw in her hand, her hips never slowing, milk dripping off her nipple onto my throat. "Don't I."
"You do," I said, wrecked, and the taller twin laughed from the floor of the tub, still shuddering against my leg, and the water rose and rose and nobody moved to stop it.
She felt it building in me before I did, the way she always did. Her hips went deeper, slower, each stroke bottoming out with a grind that made my vision swim, and her hand slid up my chest to rest flat over my heart, over the chain, pinning me to the marble.
"You're going to give me one more," she said. "Before breakfast."
"Mom, I've got nothing left. I came twice since midnight."
"You've got exactly one more in you. I've counted." Her walls gripped me on the downstroke, long and dragging, and Celeste stirred against my chest and murmured something approving into my neck. "And this one's not for the rule. This one's special."
I didn't understand until she leaned in close, her mouth at my ear, her hips never breaking rhythm, milk dripping from her nipples onto my throat in fat warm drops.
"I stopped my prescription in March," she whispered.
The words went through me like current. My hips jerked up into her without my permission and she laughed, low and dark, and rode the reaction, matching my thrust with a hard drop of her full weight.
"That's it. That's the face I wanted."
"Mom. Mom, you're talking about."
"I'm fifty-two and my doctor says I'm fertile and I've raised three children and buried a husband and I've never once had something that was only mine." She took my hand and pressed it flat against her belly, warm and taut under the milky water. "This one would be mine and yours."
The tub had gone silent around us. The twins had stopped. Celeste had lifted her head. Vanessa stood hip-deep in white water at my side with her mouth slightly open, and Maren had both hands pressed over her own lips.
"You're serious," Vanessa said.
"I'm serious." Katherine rode me slower now, savoring, her eyes never leaving mine. "Say it back to me, Jordan. Tell me what you're going to do."
"I'm going to come inside you." My voice came out cracked. "I'm going to put a baby in you."
"Good boy." She kissed me, deep and messy, her tongue tasting the milk still on my lips. "Deeper now. Everyone hold onto something."
The tub answered her. Thirteen women braced against marble and each other, and Katherine fucked me in earnest, long hard strokes, her heavy breasts slapping through the surface on every drop, milk spraying off her in thin arcs that streaked her own dark skin and ran white down her stomach to where our bodies joined. My cock ached, raw and spent and somehow still hard in her, and she squeezed down around me with a control that made me cry out.
"There's one left," she breathed against my mouth. "Give me the last one. Empty everything you have into your mother."
"I can't hold it."
"Don't hold it. Hold nothing." She braced her hands on the marble behind my head and bore down, grinding her clit against the root of me on every stroke, and her breath broke apart into short gasps. "I'm coming first. Then you. Then you keep it inside me, every drop. Do you hear me. Every drop."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"Every drop."
Her orgasm broke over her with a low animal sound, her head thrown back, silver hair streaming and soaked, her walls clamping me in long rhythmic waves. Milk jetted from both nipples with every pulse, arcing over my chest, and the tub surged around us, thick white water slopping over the rim in sheets. She rode it out slowly, shuddering, and before the last wave finished she leaned down and put her lips against my ear.
"Now. Flood me."
I came apart. It hurt, almost, the way a last dry well gives up its water, deep pulses from the base of my spine, and I drove up into her and held her hips down and emptied into my mother's body with nothing behind it and my body giving it anyway. She took it seated to the root, both hands pressing her belly down against me, sealing me in.
"Stay," she gasped. "Stay inside. Don't you dare pull out."
She stayed on me through all of it, her forehead against mine, both of us wrecked and steaming in the cream-colored water. She tipped her hips and settled lower, keeping me buried, and her hand moved between us to press against herself, holding everything in.
"It takes," she murmured. "If it's going to. It takes right now."
The tub was still. Nobody breathed loud. Then Maren surfaced at my shoulder with wet hair plastered to her cheek and her eyes enormous.
"Is she," she started. "Did you."
"He did," Katherine said, and there was something in her voice I had never heard in twenty-four years of that voice. Something unguarded. She looked down at her own belly under the white water, my cock still sheathed inside her, and pressed her palm flat against it and kept it there.
Vanessa made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob and waded to Katherine's side and put her hand over her mother's hand over her mother's stomach, and Maren piled hers on top, and Celeste added hers from where she lay against my chest, and the twins came splashing through the churn to lay their fingers on the stack.
"You planned this," Vanessa said, wet-eyed. "You stopped in March. You planned this before the girls even called you."
"I arranged the day," Katherine said. "I let the day arrange the rest." She lifted her chin at me, and her composure came back over her face like a tide, though it never fully closed. "Bathroom. Kitchen. Breakfast. I want eggs and I want him sitting down and I want nobody to breathe a word of this outside this house."
"How long till we know?" Maren asked, still stacked on her mother's belly.
"Three weeks. Maybe four." Katherine finally lifted herself off me, slow and careful, one hand cupped between her thighs, and rose out of the milky water like something out of the mirrors, dripping white. "Until then, he sleeps in my room."
"Mom," both my sisters said at once.
"Reorder the house around it," she said, and held out her hand to me. "Come on. You've earned breakfast, and I need you to walk me to the kitchen while everything settles." Her fingers closed around mine, warm, and low, just for me, she added, "Both of us."