I learned her slowly despite everything in me that wanted the opposite. Despite the two days of proximity and the towel and the shower and the weight of her on my chest in the night and all of it accumulated into something that made slow feel like its own specific torture. I learned her slowly because she deserved that and because I was not a man who did things without full attention and I was going to give this my full attention if it killed me.
Her breath caught when I found the zip at the back of her dress.
"Matteo," she said.
"I know," I said.
The dress fell.
I looked at her in the low afternoon light coming through the curtains and felt something move through me that was not desire, or was not only desire, was something larger and more permanent than desire, something that had th
