The soft, deliberate placement of his lips on the side of her face — the intimacy of it, the specific intimacy of a kiss that was gentle from someone who was not, in this context, being gentle about other things.
"'This is the last time,'" he said, against her cheek.
She felt the word 'last' arrive.
She held onto it.
"'Promise,'" she said. Around his fingers. The muffled quality of the word. The word of someone who needed the promise to be real badly enough to ask for it while his fingers were still in her mouth.
"'Promise,'" he said.
She breathed.
The slow, exhausted exhale of someone releasing something.
And then his hand moved.
Not the fingers in her mouth. The other one. The one at his own body, behind her — the shift of him in the water, the repositioning of his hips, the movement that she registered before she could identify it—
"'Wait—'" She felt it. "'Raven— wait— that's— that's not—'"
The cockhead.
