Chapter 5: Round Four: The Morning Claim
You wake before she does. The moon has gone, the curtains gone grey, and her knee is thrown over your thigh, her cheek stuck to your chest with dried sweat. Her hips shift in her sleep, one slow grind against your leg, and you lie there and watch her do it.
"Marta."
"Mm." No eyes yet.
"You've been humping me in your sleep for ten minutes."
"I have not." Her eyes crack open. She looks down at her own leg, betrayed by it, and grins. "Okay, I have. It's involuntary. My body filed a complaint overnight."
"What's the complaint say?"
"That it's sore everywhere and it wants to know whose fault that is." She props her chin on your chest and looks at you with one eye, hair everywhere, dried stripes of you still faintly visible on her collarbone where the blanket didn't cover. "Yours. It's yours. It says it's yours."
"Then it can be sore. Get up. Shower."
"Carry me. I'm a casualty."
You get out of bed and she whines at the loss of warmth, and you come back around to her side and haul her up over your shoulder, ass up, hair hanging down your back. She shrieks, half laugh, then goes quiet, going deliberately limp over your shoulder, and you feel her weight settle, trusting, and you carry her through the doorway into the bathroom.
The light in there is still morning-grey, the mirror fogged at the bottom edge from the pipes. You set her on her feet by the tub and she hisses the second her legs take her weight, one hand flying to the counter.
"Okay. Okay. Everything hurts. Even places that weren't involved."
"Turn around."
She turns, and you look, because you can. The red print of your hand is still on her left ass cheek, faded to a dull rose, and you touch it with the back of your knuckles, light.
"That's from four hours ago," she says over her shoulder.
"I know. It held."
You start the water, test it with your wrist until it's hot but not scalding, and she steps in ahead of you with both hands braced on the tile. The spray hits her shoulders and her whole body drops, an inch of tension leaving her spine, and she stands there with her face turned up into it while you step in behind her and close the curtain.
For a while nobody talks. You let the water run over her hair, matting it flat and dark down her back, and you watch it carry the night off her, the dried salt of her sweat, the last faint ghosts of you on her skin, all of it sliding down her legs and circling the drain. Her shoulders come down. Her breathing slows.
You reach for the soap.
You work it into your hands first, and then you start at her neck, both thumbs pressing into the tight muscle where it meets her shoulder, and she groans, low and honest, and drops her head forward to give you more room.
"There. Right there."
"I know where there is. I've had four years of practice on that spot."
You work down. Her shoulder blades, the shallow valley of her spine, the softness of her waist where your hands fit like they were cast for it. You take your time. This isn't teasing. There's no edge coming, no denial waiting. You just wash your wife, both hands sliding over the curves she spent a week calling flaws, and you feel her go boneless under the touch, every roll and shift of her body unhidden, unguarded, because last night happened and she believes you now.
"You keep doing that," she murmurs, eyes closed, braced with one hand against the tile.
"Doing what."
"Looking at me like that. Through your hands. You think I can't tell."
"Can you."
"I can feel it. Your hands go slower when you like a part." Her mouth curls without opening her eyes. "You've spent eleven minutes on my hips, husband."
"Good part."
"Greedy part," she corrects, but she pushes back into your palms anyway, a slow roll of her ass against your hands, not a dare, not yet. Just an offering. You squeeze the soft weight of her, both cheeks, kneading slow, and she hums. "See. Slow. Like you're memorizing."
"I am. It changes. I have to keep the map updated."
You turn her around by the hips and she goes willingly, blinking water out of her eyes, and you soap her front. Her throat. Her collarbones. You cup her breasts, one in each hand, warm and heavy with the water running off them, and her nipples stiffen under your thumbs before you've even done anything, the way they always do, the smallest effort in the world.
"They're just saying hi," she says, looking down at herself. "They're not making demands. Yet."
"Noted."
You work down her belly, both palms flat, sliding over the soft round of it, and you take your time there too, deliberately, and she watches your hands and doesn't say anything and doesn't look away either. You kneel on one knee in the spray to do her thighs, inside and out, working the muscle with your thumbs where she's sore from being folded open, and she puts a hand on the top of your head to balance and her breath goes uneven, just once.
"Careful down there," she says. "I'm running on fumes and pride."
"I'm washing you, not starting anything."
"That's what worries me. You washing me is historically how everything starts."
You finish her legs, her ankles, the backs of her calves, and you stand and turn her under the spray to rinse, running your hands down her arms while the water does the work. She turns her face up into it and then looks at you, and something in her face has shifted. The wrecked, sleepy softness is still there, but under it, something waking up.
"My turn," she says, and reaches for the soap.
You let her. She does your back first, her small strong hands working the knots out of your shoulders, and then down your chest, and she's thorough about it, methodical, mirroring everything you did to her, and you realize halfway through that she's counting the same way you were. Your waist. Your hips. She takes her time on your stomach, fingers trailing through the hair below your navel, and doesn't go further, and doesn't pretend that's an accident.
"You're doing it too," you say.
"Doing what."
"Spending eleven minutes."
"It's a good part." She looks up at you through wet lashes, water running in rivers off her nose. "Do you know how many times I thought about this exact shower last night? While I was falling asleep on you?"
"Tell me."
"I thought you'd carry me in here in the morning. Wash me slow like you just did. And then I thought, he's going to lose it. Right about the time he gets to my thighs. He always does. He'll be so smug and so in control and then his hands will do that slow thing and he'll break." She steps closer, the water hitting both of you now, her wet belly against yours. "So. Are you going to break, sir? Or is that just me?"
The soap slips out of her hand and neither of you reaches for it.
"You're sore," you say.
"I'm sore everywhere except the one place that isn't." Her hand skates down your stomach, over your hip, and wraps around you under the water, and you're already half hard, have been since her hands hit your lower back, and she feels it and makes a small greedy sound. "See. There he is. Morning him. He's always faster than night him."
"Marta."
"Yes, sir."
You back her into the tile.
The impact knocks a gasp out of her, the cool wall against her hot skin, and you get one hand into her wet hair and tip her head back and kiss her, deep, and she melts into it, both hands coming up to grip your forearms. The water drums down on both of you. You lift her.
She's expecting it, her legs come up around your hips on instinct, arms over your shoulders, and you take her weight against the wall with one arm under her ass, the soft heavy curve of it filling your hand, and she breaks the kiss to moan at the way you hold her, like it's nothing, like she weighs nothing.
"This. This is the part I thought about," she pants into your neck. "Your arm under my ass. Like I'm nothing to carry."
"You're not nothing. You're everything. You're just small." You press her harder into the wall and she tightens her legs, dragging herself against your stomach, leaving a slick stripe that has nothing to do with the shower.
You reach down between you and position yourself, the head of you sliding through her soaked heat, and she's right, she's wet already, swollen and soft from everything last night and ready anyway. You push in, slow, one long deliberate inch, and her head falls back against the tile and her mouth opens and no sound comes out of it for a second.
"Oh my God. Okay. Okay, you're in me. At seven in the morning. In the shower."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a praise report." Her heels dig into your thighs. "More."
You give her more. You sink in until your hips are flush against her, her whole weight settled onto you, and then you start to move, and the water makes everything louder, the wet slap of your body against hers amplified by the tile, echoing off the walls. Her back slides up and down the slick wall and you grip her ass harder to anchor her, fingers digging into the soft flesh, and she claws at your shoulders.
"Hard. You always go soft in the morning, don't you dare."
You go hard. You drive into her, fast, her body jolting against the wall with every thrust, the water cascading over both of you, and she's making those sounds again, the broken continuous ones, her voice bouncing off the tile. Her nipples are hard points dragging against your chest with every stroke.
"Like that, like that, sir, yes." Her hand finds the wall behind her and flattens against it. "I'm going to be quick, I have no, I have nothing left in the tank, it's going to be fast and embarrassing."
"Good. I want fast and embarrassing."
"I want yours too." She grabs your jaw and makes you look at her, wet hair plastered to her forehead, eyes wild. "Inside. This time inside, no pulling out, no marking my stomach, I want to leave this shower with it in me. Please."
"You want my fourth?"
"I want everything you have left." Her teeth graze your jaw. "I want to be your wife and walk around full of you all day."
That does it. Something in your chest goes tight and hot and you lose the last of the control you were still pretending to have, and you fuck her against the wall in earnest, one arm hauling her down onto you to meet every thrust, the sound of it obscene in the small room. Her orgasm hits her fast, exactly like she warned, no build, no slow climb, just her whole body seizing around you, walls clamping down in hard rhythmic waves, and she wails, the sound cracking in half, her nails raking down your back.
"Sir, I'm coming, oh God, I'm coming again, I can't believe I'm..."
Her pussy pulses around you and drags you over with her. You bury yourself to the hilt and come, thick pulses flooding her deep, and you feel her feel it, feel her shudder through a second smaller wave on top of the first, her legs shaking around your hips. You keep her pinned against the wall with your whole body, your face in her soaked hair, both of you breathing like you ran here.
"Holy shit," she whispers, eventually. "That counts. Tell me that counts toward the math."
"That's four and four. Even."
"Even." She sighs the word, deeply, completely satisfied, and doesn't uncross her ankles from behind you. "Don't pull out yet. I asked to leave full. I meant it."
You stay. The water starts to cool a degree, then another, and you slide out slow and she whimpers at it, one hand dropping between her legs to cup herself, holding it in.
"You're going to stand there holding it in like a secret all day," you say.
"Yes. It's my favorite secret." She lets her legs down, wobbles, grips your arm. "Okay. Everything is jelly. Hold me."
You hold her under the cooling spray for another minute, her forehead on your chest, both of you steaming, and then you reach back and turn the heat up and finish what you started.
You wash her again, properly this time, quickly and gently, because she's dripping down her own thighs and her legs are unreliable. You soap the sore spots, her hips, the inside of her thighs where your stubble and your grip left their marks, and you rinse her hair, combing it through with your fingers until the water runs clean off the ends. She stands there with her eyes closed the whole time, pliant, boneless, letting you do it, and when you tell her to turn around she turns around.
You wash yourself fast while she watches with her cheek against the tile and a lazy grin.
"Not fair," she says. "You got the show and the service."
"Sleep in with me today and I'll owe you one."
"We both have the morning off."
"I know. That's why I'm banking the debt."
You shut off the water and wrap her in the big towel, the one she always steals, and she burrows into it, and you rub her down, careful, her hair wrapped in a second towel turbaned up on her head the way she looks ridiculous and gorgeous doing. You dry yourself and hang the towels and she's already shuffling toward the bed, walking like her hips were replaced with someone else's hips, and she looks back over her shoulder and catches you watching.
"Say it," she says.
"You're walking like a pirate."
"I'm walking like a woman whose husband loves her." She flops onto her side of the bed, wet hair and all, and pulls the blanket back in open invitation. "Come here. We're sleeping until noon and nobody can stop us."
You get in. She attaches herself immediately, cold feet finding your calves, her soft belly pressed to your side, her head in the spot on your shoulder she's worn into shape over four years. Her hand settles on your chest, rings cool against your skin, and her fingertips find the bite mark she left and rest on it.
"Hey," she says, quiet, already half gone.
"Mm."
"Four and four." Her voice is a mumble against your skin. "Perfectly even. So tonight I get to start the count over."
"You're going to start it in about three hours, you mean."
"I know." You feel her grin against your shoulder. "I'm just being polite about it first. Good night, husband."
"Good morning, wife."
She laughs once, small and sleepy, and her breathing goes long and even, and outside the window the morning gets brighter, and neither of you moves.