Violet puts her hand over my mouth. “Do not apologize for loving me hard, Alex.”

“That was okay?” I ask from behind her palm.

“I came like a bazillion times. It was more than okay.”

“I was worried I got carried away.” I ease off the counter so I’m not on top of her anymore. Unfortunately that means I’m also not inside her.

“Carried away? Honestly, Alex, I needed another round of gentle lovemaking like I need your dick to be any bigger than it already is.”

I look down at my cock. He’s at half-mast and slow to deflate. I also have a bunch of those crystal things stuck to my abs.

“Beyond all the coming, my cock-love chanting should tell you I enjoyed myself. A lot. Anytime you feel the need to drill me like a porn star, I’m game.”

“God, I love you.”

Violet smiles, and it’s gorgeous. “I love you, too.” She slides off the counter and makes a face, looks over her shoulder, then gags. “I think I just slid through a puddle of jizz.”

“We should go have a shower. Then we can come back down and have pancakes.”

“I forgot all about the pancakes!” Violet looks down and touches the mess of crystals smeared across her abdomen, the letters no longer readable. “Hmm. I guess hot sex and vagazzling don’t go together.”

“Maybe not.”

“Oh well. It was worth the time if you’re going to sex me like that.”

We have what’s supposed to be a quick shower, but turns into a long one because I get hard again. This time I’m much more careful with my fiancée. Afterward we return to the kitchen to appease the appetite we’ve worked up.

Violet sanitizes the island three times before we eat. The pancakes are dry, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She slathers them in butter and dumps maple syrup over her entire plate, including the bacon.

A faint buzzing sound comes from her purse, which ended up on the floor—no surprise—during sex.

I pick it up and set it on the island as the buzzing continues. Violet glances at her purse, but goes back to eating. And still the buzzing goes on.

“Do you think maybe you should check your messages?”

“I will. When I’m finished eating.” She picks up a strip of bacon, dripping with syrup, tips her head back, and lowers it into her mouth while looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She gets all but one inch in before she bites it off. It’s phallic. And then she moans her maple pleasure.

We only have the real kind of syrup. When Violet and I started dating, she ate the cheap crap that’s mostly corn syrup and food coloring. Then I introduced her to real maple syrup. Now she won’t eat anything else, and we have a pantry full of maple products.

“You know, I have something I think you might like dipped in maple syrup,” I offer.

“That’s one way to get a blow job out of me.”

“Can’t get enough of my dick, eh?”

Violet snorts.

Her phone chimes again, four more times in succession. I shove my hand in her purse and root around for it.

Violet drops her fork and grabs my wrist. “Don’t do that!”

I retract, surprised. “Whoa! What’s the deal?”

She clutches her purse to her chest, her eyes wide, panicked almost. It’s an odd reaction over me sticking my hand in her purse. What’s in there she doesn’t want me to see?

“I, uh…” Her eyes dart around the room. “I have…girl things in here.”

I raise a brow. “Girl things?”

Her phone keeps buzzing. “Uh…yeah…like tampons. And stuff.”

“Violet, I’ve bought tampons for you before.” Darren was with me. I’d never ventured down that aisle on purpose before. There are an awful lot of options.

She’s still clutching her purse to her chest. Something’s going on. She looks way too terrified for this to be about “girl things.”

“What’s going on? What are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing!” The high pitch to her voice tells me without a doubt she’s lying.

“Who’s texting you?”

“No one.” She purses her lips, seeming aware that I know she’s bullshitting.

I cross my arms over my chest, ignoring the twinge of discomfort in my right shoulder. I probably overdid it with the finger-fucking and hard sex, but making Violet come that many times makes me feel awesome. “Really? So no one has texted you fifty times in the last ten minutes?”

“It’s probably Sunny, or Lily, or Charlene. We’re on a group chat, and everyone’s guessing the sex of the baby.”

I might buy that if they hadn’t spent the entire day together and Violet’s face wasn’t an unnatural shade of red.

“I think you’re lying.”

As soon as she loosens her grip on her purse, I grab it and turn it upside down. The contents spill out all over the counter, including her phone. There are a lot of receipts and tissues in there. And pens. A ridiculous number of pens. I don’t see one tampon, though.

I snatch up her phone before she can.

“Alex!”

When she grabs for it, I stand up and hold it over my head. I’m just playing. I won’t actually invade her privacy, even though I know she’s hiding something. She’ll tell me. She’s not very good at keeping secrets.

She puts a hand on my left shoulder and tries to jump up and grab it from me. Violet’s close to a foot shorter than I am, and she has almost no vertical, so she can’t even get close to her phone. But her boobs are rubbing on my chest, so I’m not all that inclined to stop being a dick.