Prologue
"That one was wrong," she said under me, breathless. "The angle. A little to the left."
Even like that — naked, shaking, two months of wanting finally spent — she was proofreading me.
I shifted the way she told me. Her whole body locked down around me, toes clawing the sheet, and the water came out of her in a hot rush across my belly. Afterwards she lay with her forehead against my shoulder, slick and trembling, and whispered, "Hot. It's hot inside."
Two months earlier I had been a stranger hauling two suitcases up six flights of stairs, and she was only the woman in the next room — a woman with a rule for everything, including how many times a bowl had to pass through water before it counted as clean.
Three times. Everything in her life went through the water three times.
In the end, so did I.
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