He can tell when she finishes, because it's as if her entire body is a rubber band that's just gone slack. Everything, the tight walls and the straining thighs and the air-starved lungs, goes loose and jellyish, and he gives her a final courtesy stroke as if licking his plate.

He pulls away, a smug, secretive smile on his face, leaving her once again wreathed in the shadows of the dark and no longer so easily mapped by smell, by taste, by touch. And then he pulls close to her face again, giving her a kiss that tastes a bit like herself on her lips, and runs his hand through her hair.

Her calling his name still echoes inside his body, like a caged bird throwing itself at the inside of his ribs, and he loves it.