They reached the chair.

Liam lowered her into it carefully, her back finding the carved back of it, her hands releasing from around his neck and settling on the arms.

The wood was dark and smooth under her palms, worn that way from age rather than polish, the carving along the arms detailed and specific, the kind of work that came from someone who had made things like this their whole life and had learned to stop rushing.

She sat in it and looked at him standing in front of her and then her whole body tightened and she came, right there in the chair, her head going back against the high carved back, her hands gripping the arms, a long broken sound leaving her into the quiet of the museum room. Her hips pressed forward and then she was still, breathing, her eyes closed.

Liam stood in front of her and watched it happen without saying anything.

When it passed she opened her eyes.

"Okay," he said. "Rest."

She exhaled slowly, looking at the ceiling of the room, her chest still rising and falling from everything. "I might actually be done," she said.

"You’re not done," he said.

"I might be," she said. "I’m being serious."

He sat down on the edge of one of the display cases across from her, his arms folded, and looked around the room while she recovered. At the cases and the objects inside them. At the maps framed on the wall. At the small portraits lined up at eye level, each one serious and deliberate in the way portraits from that era always were.

After a while Elena shifted in the chair.

She straightened her back and settled properly into the seat, crossing one leg over the other and resting her forearm along one of the carved arms, and the composure came back to her the way it always came back, settling over her like something she had never fully taken off.

Her hair was still undone from everything and she still had nothing on except the bralette and the underwear but she was sitting in a centuries-old Moroccan chair in her family’s private museum with her back straight and her chin level and somehow it all made sense together.

Liam looked at her.

She was looking at the room. Her eyes moving across the cases and the objects inside them with the specific quality of someone looking at things they knew well and still found worth looking at.

"That chair you’re sitting in," she said, not looking at him, "my father brought it back from Marrakech. He was there for a trade negotiation that took three weeks longer than it was supposed to and he came back with that and a rug and very little else to show for the trip." She paused. "The rug is in storage. I kept the chair."

Liam looked at the arms of it, at the carving, at the age of the wood visible in the color of it.

"How old is it," he said.

"Somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred years," she said. "Nobody has been precise about it." She looked at him then. "I’ve wanted to sit in it properly since my father first brought it home. He kept it in his study and I wasn’t allowed to touch it."

"And now," he said.

She looked at him with the expression that lived just on the edge of a smile. "Now it’s mine," she said.

She looked back at the room. Her eyes moved to the wall of portraits and stayed there.

"Those are all family," she said. "The ones on the left go back the furthest. Two hundred years, maybe slightly more." She lifted her hand from the armrest and pointed, the gesture unhurried and precise. "My great-great-grandmother is the third one in.

She ran the family estate for twenty years after her husband died and nobody outside the immediate family knew it was her doing it because that wasn’t how things worked then."

Liam looked at the portrait. A small face, serious, the painting precise in the way portraits were precise when they were the only record that would exist of a person.

"She looks like you," he said.

Elena looked at the portrait for a moment. "People say that," she said. She didn’t add anything to it.

She talked through more of it, the room moving through her voice in pieces.

The document in the case by the window, a trade agreement with her family name among the signatories, the handwriting careful and formal, the paper inside the glass looking exactly as old as it was.

The coins in the smaller case, each one in its own depression in the velvet lining, organized by period, the oldest ones barely legible.

A pair of white gloves behind glass near the door that she mentioned only briefly, saying they had belonged to someone and then moving past it in a way that communicated the subject was closed.

Liam asked about the maps.

She explained the maps, where they were from and why they looked different from modern maps of the same regions, the way geographical understanding had shifted and the borders had moved and the names had changed.

He asked a follow-up question about the trade document and she answered it fully, the information arriving in her voice with the quality of things that had been important to her for a long time.

He was listening and he was watching her and both things were real.

Her posture in the chair.

The way she held her arm along the carved rest. The way her eyes moved across the room when she was looking for the next thing to point to, certain and unhurried.

The composed face and the straight back and the leg crossed over the other and the way none of it was performance, just her being herself in a space that was genuinely hers in a way most spaces weren’t.

’She’s trying to hide it,’ he thought, watching her face as she talked, watching the thing sitting just underneath the composed surface. ’But she’s happy right now. Actually happy. Not performing happiness, not managing it, just having it.’ He watched her point toward one of the portraits and explain something about the period it was painted in. ’She loves this. She actually loves all of this.’

He smiled without her seeing it.

Then she looked at him and caught the tail end of whatever expression he was wearing.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said.

She looked at him for a second longer. Then she looked back at the room and finished what she was saying about the portrait.

When she was done she sat for a moment in the quiet of the room, the cases glowing softly around them, the maps on the wall, the portraits serious and still.

Then she uncrossed her leg and settled both feet on the floor and looked at him directly.

"Alright," she said. "I’m good now."

’She’s a sex lover even more,’ he thought, pushing off the display case and crossing toward her.

He kissed her standing in front of the chair, one hand on the carved arm and one at her jaw, and she kissed him back immediately with the warmth of someone who had been sitting composed for the last twenty minutes and was ready to stop doing that.

He pulled back from the kiss and looked at her in the chair and then at the space and the angle of everything around them.

"Turn around," he said.

She looked at him. Then at the chair. Then she understood and shifted, moving forward and turning so that her knees were on the seat and her hands were on the high carved back, facing away from him, the museum spread out in front of her, the cases and the maps and the portraits all visible from this position.

He moved behind her.

He pushed in slowly.

"Oh," she said, her head dropping forward, her hands gripping the carved top of the chair back. "Oh."

He started moving.

The rhythm built from the first stroke, his hands on her hips, driving forward steadily, the chair completely solid beneath them, not shifting, not complaining, taking everything without moving an inch. Her sounds went out into the museum room, between the display cases and up toward the ceiling, mixing with the quiet of the house around them.

"Mm," she said. "Haa. Oh."

Her hips pushed back against each forward drive, the two of them finding the rhythm together, her sounds climbing with the pace, her hands gripping the carved back of the chair tighter with each stroke.

"Oh god," she said. "Oh. Right there."

He drove forward harder.

"Haa," she said. "Oh. Oh Liam."

Ta. Ta. Ta. Ta. Ta.

She came with her hands white on the chair back and a sound that went through the room and stayed there, her whole body shaking through it while he held her hips and kept her upright.

When she stilled he pulled back and she turned around in the chair, settling into it facing him, her legs finding either side of him, her arms going around his neck.

He pushed back in from this angle.

"Oh," she said, differently than before, the angle producing something new. "Oh that’s."

He started moving again.

From here he could see her face, all of it, every expression that moved through it as he drove forward, nothing hidden or managed, just her responding to each stroke with the honesty that this room and this house and the absence of everyone else had made possible.

"Mm," she said. "Oh. Oh god."

Her arms tightened around his neck and her legs pulled him closer and the carved arms of the chair pressed against his sides from where she was sitting and the portraits on the wall looked seriously at nothing in particular and the display cases glowed softly around them.

Ta. Ta. Ta. Ta.

"Haa," she said. "Oh. Oh I’m going to. Again."

He drove forward and she came a second time, her whole body pulling against him, her sounds going up into the ceiling, everything in her given over to it completely.

He stayed with her through every second of it.

When it passed she stayed where she was, her arms around his neck, her forehead dropping against his shoulder, her breathing slow and heavy.

He looked at her.

"Can you go again," he said.

She lifted her head and looked at him with the expression of someone taking an honest inventory of their own body.

"Yes," she said.

Then her eyes closed.

Her arms loosened from around his neck.

Her head dropped back against the carved back of the chair.

"Elena," he said.

Nothing.

"Elena."

She was out.

Liam stood in front of the chair and looked at her, completely unconscious in a centuries-old Moroccan chair in her own private museum, her chest rising and falling slowly with the deep breathing of someone who had simply used everything up and stopped.

He looked at the door.

Then back at her.

"Okay," he said quietly to himself. "Okay. If I call Odessa for this she is going to actually kill me and they will never find the body."

He looked at Elena again.

He reached down and carefully lifted her out of the chair, her weight settling into his arms, her head finding his shoulder without her deciding to put it there.

He carried her out of the museum and into the corridor, the house quiet and warm and entirely theirs, and went looking for the bedroom.

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