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  I turned my face into the spray, deciding if I should, indeed, be angry. “Did you have a girl picked out, too? Just in case?”

  The words came out more bitter than I’d thought they would. I opened my mouth to let it fill with water, to rinse away their taste. The water pounded in my ears, but I had no trouble hearing his reply.

  “No.”

  I said nothing, then, unable to forget the way it had felt to have Dan behind me and Jack in front. How they’d held me between them and given me pleasure without expecting me to do anything but accept it, and how that had given them pleasure, too. How Dan had done this because he thought it would please me and for no other reason.

  He got in the shower with me, and I made no protest, though I kept my back to him and didn’t make any attempt to share the water. He reached around and slid a hand between my legs. He was gentle there, using his fingers and the water to clean me, not soap as though he understood it might irritate the sensitive flesh. He parted my folds and the water pounded my clit. His finger rubbed me, and my clitoris responded to his touch by getting hard.

  The shower was small enough that even when he pushed me up against the back wall the water still poured over us both. My skin was red from it. His face had flushed. Steam wreathed us and the steady pounding noise masked the sound of our breathing.

  He aroused me again with his hand between my legs and his mouth on my throat. Slippery with soap and water we slid against each other. I reached for his cock and stroked it, making him hard again, and that pleased me, that I should be able to rouse him again so soon.

  “Did you like watching him fuck me?” I asked, looking into his eyes.

  He nodded, hips pushing forward to pump his penis into my fist. “Yes. But I like it better when I’m the one inside you.”

  We had no condoms in the shower, and for the first time with him I wanted him more than I wanted to be safe. That scared me, and he must have seen the fear in my eyes, because he pulled me close and held me under the water for a moment before moving back to look into my eyes. My hand hadn’t stopped moving. Neither had his.

  He smiled and made me smile, too, in the way he had of making everything so easy. “You’re still so wet. Tell me I do that to you.”

  “You do this to me,” I replied obediently.

  “Say, ‘Dan, you make me wet.’”

  I smirked a little, eyes rolling to look up at the water falling around us. “Dan, you make me wet.”

  He circled more insistently and pumped himself harder into my fist. “Say, ‘Dan, I love it when you fuck me.’”

  “Dan…” His name became a moan as his touch sent me closer to the edge. “I…”

  “I love it when you fuck me,” he repeated, his own voice hoarse.

  “I love it when you fuck me.” I shuddered.

  “Tell me you’re going to come.”

  “I am,” I said with a gasp. “Oh, fuck, yes…I’m going to come.”

  I did, a smaller burst of pleasure than when the three of us had been together but no less excellent for being less intense. My fingers gripped his penis harder, and I twisted my wrist, pumping him.

  He muttered a curse and put a hand on the shower wall to support himself as he leaned into my touch. He put his head down. Water parted his hair and ran down the back of his neck, made a river in the seam of his spine and the crack of his buttocks. I stroked him harder. Faster. With a hoarse shout he pushed against me, and I smelled the sea-musk scent of semen for but a moment before the shower washed it away.

  He shuddered against me. “I think I need to sit down.”

  Alarmed, I twisted the faucet to cool the water. “Are you okay?”

  He laughed. “Jeez, Elle, you’re amazing.”

  I didn’t feel amazing. I felt…exhausted. I needed to sit, too, but the shower was no place for it. I turned off the water and hooked the last two towels from the rack, handed him one and wrapped the other around my body before stepping out.

  “Be careful,” I cautioned. “According to the National Safety Council, eighty percent of all household accidents occur in the bathroom.”

  Dan got out and put the lid down on the toilet to sit on it. He rubbed his hair dry. “Can you get me a glass of cold water?”

  “Sure.” I took the paper lid off one of the glasses and filled it with water, handing it to him before filling another for myself. It slid down the back of my throat, refreshing.

  “Thanks.” He drank it down and set the glass on the sink, then stood and rubbed his body dry. He tossed the towel on the floor, lifted the toilet lid and began to urinate.

  This intimacy sent me fleeing from the bathroom with burning cheeks and thudding heart. Why I should be embarrassed to watch him take a piss when I’d just jerked him off, I don’t know, except that his comfort with the act triggered something in me. I recognized it as foolishness but didn’t bother to fight it. Some people have a few buttons. I have many.

  Dan came out of the bathroom a moment later and came up behind me to wrap his arms around me. I let him do it as I’d done all the other times, though I stiffened a little. He kissed my shoulder blade.

  “What is it, exactly, about being hugged that you don’t like?”

  I shook my head with a little laugh, using that as an excuse to move from his embrace and start retrieving my scattered clothes. “Who says I don’t like it?”

  “You do.”

  “I’ve never said that.” Skirt. Panties. Bra. Shirt. I found them all.

  “Your body says it.”

  Dan seemed in no hurry to dress, or to leave. He sat on the bed, leaning back on his elbows, apparently completely comfortable in his nudity. I, on the other hand, had already stepped into my panties and was hooking my bra.

  “Some people are more…tactile…than others.”

  He watched me pull on my skirt. “You don’t think you’re tactile?”

  I shrugged, feigning disinterest in the subject as I put my arms through my sleeves and buttoned up my shirt. Dan got up and came around behind me again, his hands on my shoulders. I looked up, into the mirror that had earlier reflected our triumvirate and now showed only two. His eyes met mine once more in the reflection. He ran his hands up and down my arms to the elbow, then up again to my shoulders.

  “You tense up when I touch you like this.”

  “Do I?” An old trick. Asking a question to avoid giving an answer.

  He nodded, fixing his gaze upon my mirror eyes and holding me there. “Yes.”

  I shrugged again, a little. He moved closer, aligning himself along my back, and put his arms around my ribs, his hands gripping his own forearms. His chin nestled into the curve of my neck and shoulder.

  “You didn’t tense when we were on the bed and I held you this way.”

  I said nothing. He stared at me a moment longer, then let me go with a sigh. I finished buttoning my shirt and tucked it into the waistband of my skirt, doing up the zip and button. I smoothed the wrinkles and reached for my purse to find a comb, which I dragged through the wet weight of my tangled hair.

  Dan dressed quickly and in silence. I didn’t like the awkwardness where there had been none before. I knew it was my fault. I knew he wanted something from me, but I didn’t know how to give it. It irritated me, that he couldn’t just take what had happened at face value. That he wanted more.

  I yanked my comb through my hair, forcing away the snags hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. The comb caught on one particularly nasty tangle, and I let out a curse when I couldn’t seem to get through it.

  Dan said nothing as he took my comb and lifted my hair. I stood still, suddenly incapable of moving, as he worked the teeth through the knot, inch by inch. Strand by strand. Patient, gentle, never forcing the tangle but instead encouraging it to part. When he was done and the comb slid through my hair from crown to ends without catching, he handed me back the comb.

  “I’ll be in the car,” he said, and left me to stand alone and stare at a mirror that had once refl