Marco recovered his breath, lying more or less still in the woman’s broad palm. After a minute it occurred to him to cover his crotch with one hand; he leaned on the other elbow and stared up at her, waiting. What the hell did she want? Why was she just staring at him, after all this time? The skin beneath him was warm and soft, at least. His hips rested in the slight bowl of her palm, between the heel and the calloused pads over the row of first knuckles, and his spine was comfortable against the fleshy pillows between that and the second knuckles.

In a perverse way, this giant woman’s hand made one of the most comfortable couches he’d ever experienced, and this, from a lifetime of making too much money too quickly and throwing it at anything that seemed prestigious or stylish. Some of the more audacious girls he’d brought home had the temerity to point out that, by the looks of his pad, he had no taste. “It looks like a factory outlet threw up in here,” one said. Another suggested the aesthetic center in his brain had burned out or possibly never developed at all. He had sex with them anyway, of course, but it wasn’t as fun as it had been with the more compliant partners. And the more he heard disparaging comments like this, the less he enjoyed future trysts, because he could never know whether they were silently judging him.

He shuddered. Why the fuck was he thinking about furniture and conquests right now.