Many layers of this dress are already scattered around the end of the bed and the floor nearest; the chemise she hauls over her head and makes a mental note of where she's discarded it, and beneath it — just Gwenaëlle, and her stockings, rolling towards her knees now with nothing holding them in place. She loses interest in immediately removing them in favour of stretching her hands above her head, experimentally, to test her grip on the headboard behind her; for so slight a thing, the long line of her is wonderfully lithe, down to where she digs her heel into the bed to shift herself just a little bit higher.

It's quite the view to use as prim a tone as she does to say, “Not all the time,” a recklessly implicit promise of other times, probably.

At some point, she is going to have to think about what this means beyond the fact that there is just no way to contain in one night all the things she's interested in finding out about him. In the moment — it just feels obvious. Of course this isn't ending here. She draws her knees up, slick enough between them to shine in the low light, “Not to hurry you along, but I am considering starting without you—”

And it's all of a piece with their inability to stop bantering even now, except that she slides the hand she'd had down his trousers between her own legs and watches his face very intently.