Stephen's mouth smothers a yelped laugh of pleased surprise, and something lower, and it feels both unreal to be vaulting themselves across this line and impossible that they never have before. She catches him to her with a hand splayed on his back, sliding up from his arm, her free hand pulling at the laces that hold the bulk of her skirts tight to her waist, a lot of undignified wriggling happening underneath him as she uses her heels to catch in layers of underskirts and haul them down her thighs, the bed—

they're not, actually, in a hurry. It just seems so patently ridiculous that there should be this much of anything in between them when she wants to — when she wants him, the release of admitting it making her dizzyingly weightless.

Her skirts are tangled around her feet; her knee finds the inside of his thigh, and higher, an insistent and exploratory pressure; she is, as he has noted in the past, direct.