He’s not the only one starving, I think bitterly a little while later when we’re both in the kitchen.

Then I immediately reprimand myself. Because he’s broken, and I’m the medical professional in the wrong. Sex wasn’t your original intention, I remind myself as I place the vegan lasagna in the oven. Meanwhile, my lunches and dinners until my next cooking day on Wednesday are simmering on all four of the stove’s burners. A seeming reflection of my mood, and I can feel his blue gaze following me as I move around the stove, checking and stirring the various dishes.

I try not to be irritated. It’s not his fault that having him watch me cook has my body all riled up. But tell that to my striatum; the section of my brain that controls sexual desire is completely out of control. And I’m glad I chose black yoga pants this morning, because I am dripping. So wet, I’m sure there’d be a visible damp patch at my crotch if they were any other color. So wet, I can smell myself, smell how much I want him inside me again.

“This is new,” he tells me when everything is either simmering in a pot or baking in the oven.

“Cooking?” I ask, looking over my shoulder at him.

Big mistake. He looks so sexy leaned up against the counter. My pussy clenches, sending a yearning ache straight through me.

He nods. “I don’t think I cook. Ever.”

And my stomach knots, wondering if he has someone who cooks for him. Someone he’ll remember any day now.

His expression darkens. “I like how smart you are, Doc. But sometimes I don’t like it.”

“Sometimes like when?” I ask.

“Like right now, when you get to thinking too much,” he answers. “C’mere.”

I go to him, helpless as a marionette, and my body sizzles like coconut oil meeting heat when he pulls me into him for a long, hard kiss.

“You like kissing me as much as I like kissing you?” he asks me.

I nod, too turned on to tell him anything but the truth. “Probably more,” I say.

He chuffs. “Definitely not more, Doc. It ain’t possible for you to like me more than I like you.”

I’m not sure about that. After all, he’s in my home, and unlike him, I don’t have a traumatic brain injury to use as an excuse for my way-too-soon feelings.

“You’re going to have to show me some of those no-meat recipes,” he says, resting his cast against the small of my back. “I want to feed you when you come home to me tomorrow.”

I have no idea how to handle that statement, so I concentrate on the feeding part. “That’s seriously not an issue. I usually just eat leftovers. I mean, there’s not going to be enough for leftovers this week, because I didn’t know I’d be cooking for two. But I’ll stop by the grocery store on the way home. Maybe you can text me a list?”

He stares down at me, his good hand stroking the side of my face like he’s thinking of bringing me in for another kiss.

One of the many timers I set goes off on the microwave, interrupting the moment and releasing me from his spell.

But only for a little while. We eat the mushroom lasagna for an early dinner, and neither of us so much as suggests watching a musical before bed.

“No pajamas,” he tells me before disappearing into the bathroom.

I napped earlier so I’m not tired. I’m something else that my medical vocabulary doesn’t cover. As soon as I strip out of my yoga gear, my core presents with fever. Hotter than I’ve ever felt it, damp all over and slick at the slit at the thought of what will happen when he returns from the bathroom.

I think about, but don’t end up, putting on a set of pajamas this time. Instead I climb into bed, welcoming the feel of the cool sheets on my hot body.

But as turned on as I am, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I have to go to work tomorrow. Look all those doctors and parents of patients in their faces as I pretend to be someone I’m not. Someone with ethics, someone who’s not letting sex overrule her better judgment…

“I swear, Doc, I could hear you thinking all the way in the bathroom.”

The bed dips and I’m pulled backwards into strong arms. He employs the arm with the cast like a sort of weight, using the heaviness to anchor me against his chest while his free hand settles on top of my fevered pussy.

“What did I tell you?” he asks, voice low and mean as he plays with me.

“No thinking,” I answer, drunkenly pushing myself into his hand, though I’ve had nothing to drink at all.

“Hand me a condom, Doc.”

I fumble the nightstand drawer open. Find what he asked for, and hand it to him over my shoulder. He removes his hand from my pussy, and I can feel him putting it on behind me.

With one hand.

I’m giving my body to someone so familiar with sex that even when he loses his memory of everything else, he can still put on a condom single handedly. Seriously, what the hell are you doing, Anitra? my rational brain demands.

But the more sensible part of me shuts right up when he roughly pushes into me from behind. “Remember that talk we had about me being possessive?” he asks after a few lazy strokes.

How could I forget? I want to say, You mean the one that kind of scared the shit out of me and made me doubt my sanity for doing any of this with you? But I just whimper into my cool pillow, unable to form words.

He must take that as yes, because he continues, “I’m trying to give you some breathing room here, Doc. Give you time to catch up to where I’m at on this. But I can hear you thinking. And I don’t want you to go to work tomorrow without a full understanding of what’s going on here. The minute you walked me through that door, you became mine. That means you belong to me. You understand that?”

I clamp my lips closed, because I’m afraid of what will come out of my mouth. But my hips don’t stop moving. Even his outrageous words can’t keep me from pushing back on his dick. So needy, so desperate, so thirsty…

“Let me know you hear me on this, Doc,” he says behind me. His teeth graze but don’t quite bite my ear. “Give me some reason to believe I don’t have to keep you here…don’t have to worry about you not coming home to me because you’ve been thinking too much. Tell me the truth, Doc; do I need to make you take off work tomorrow so I can fuck you all day until you’re too tired to think any more of them thoughts?”

I shake my head. I’m so close, almost there. I think I’d promise him twice what I owe in medical school debt to take me the rest of the way.

But instead of giving me what I want, he pulls out. And then I feel something that I only keep in my medicine cabinet for hook-up emergencies.

Lube. I tense. Lube, which he’s now smearing onto my no-go zone.

“Relax, Doc, relax,” he croons when I start to struggle against the cast. “It’s only going to be this once. But I can’t leave any part of you untaken. You understand that, right? I can’t send you to work not knowing who you belong to.”

He doesn’t do his usual rough push in this time. Instead, he plays with my pussy, moving his fingers in deep. “You think I don’t know how much you want me to take your pussy? You think I ain’t been going out of my mind with the smell of you all day?”

And just like that, I go from struggling to melting. From protesting to helpless. His tox report came back clean, but he’s the drug, I think. And I find myself once again becoming aroused, even as his erection circles into the slit of my ass. He’s a drug, and he’s killing all my willpower.

“You don’t think you know me, but you do,” he tells me. “You’re going to give me what I want, because you know I’d never do anything to hurt you, Doc. You know at the end of it, I’m going to make you feel good.”

I grab on to his words. “But I don’t think it will feel good. No guy’s ever…”

“Yeah, I got that. And that makes me want it even more. Fuckin’ all of you, Doc. I ain’t settling for nothing less.”

He continues to plunge his fingers into me, kneading the top of my pussy until a druggy arousal takes over my core.

“But I want you inside me,” I tell him. “In my pussy. Please…”

A dark laugh erupts behind me. “Oh, you’ll be getting me back in your pussy. Probably about two or three more times before this night is through, but first we got some loyalty to prove.”

This is stupid. So stupid, I have to tell him. “This is stupid. You’re being stupid. I don’t have anything to prove to you.”

“Humor me, Doc,” he whispers in my ear. “Please…”

His rough please is what finally makes me stop fighting him. I find myself curving forward, spreading my buttocks a little wider. Giving him the invitation to get it over with, so we can get back to the other stuff.

In the next moment, I feel my ass being split apart by his cock, pushing in, inch by inch.

As big as he is, it’s not painful. Not at all. He takes it slow, pushing in a little at a time. Giving me a second or two between each push to get used to having him there.

Then I can feel his balls on my butt cheeks.

“Okay, Doc…” he whispers.

His hand finds it’s way between my legs and he starts moving again, this time with deliberate care. And it’s…not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, the only pain I feel is one of bittersweet need as I get closer and closer.

I finally understand what my best friend Sola meant when I worried about the Russian fiancé who followed her abusive ex.

“There’s a difference between dominant and domineering,” she’d told me when we’d flown back to California to attend the funeral of one of our favorite ValArts teachers and met for dinner beforehand.

Ivan Rustanov was so large, so commanding. I couldn’t help but worry. But Sola assured me he was nothing like her ex, and I could see how happy she was with him. So I’d chosen to believe her, stood up at her wedding less than a few months later, still not quite understanding, but somehow accepting in my heart that Ivan Rustanov was a good fit for her.

But now I get it. I know exactly how it feels to give yourself to someone with more trust than you could ever imagine you possessed.

John’s thrusts speed up, and he whispers all sorts of dirty words in my ear. Telling me I’m really his now. That I belong to him. That I’m so fucking beautiful, and I’ve saved him.

The orgasm hits me, unexpected and brutal, ripping through me and tearing me completely apart. I’m incoherent and babbling by the time it’s done, and so far gone that I don’t realize he’s coming until he pulls out of me.

I’ve just come from my first ass fucking. And surprisingly, it’s still not enough. I lie there, battling tears even as my pussy clenches and unclenches, once again milking air it’s so desperate to be filled. The bed rises up again and the next thing I hear, other than my hitched breaths, is the sound of water running in the bathroom.

Then he’s there on my side of the bed, filling up my blurry vision, opening the nightstand drawer again.

“Move over, Doc,” he tells me.

I do, trying to get a hold of myself, as he sits on the bed with his back against the wall. I’m a Pediatric Oncology Specialist at the end of her residency. I’d thought I’d pretty much trained myself out of crying.

But not with him. He unravels me. Completely dismantles me. Scares the everlasting shit out of me.

And he’s putting on another condom.

“C’mere,” he says, voice somewhere between a command and a sigh. “Climb on.”

I sniffle. “I thought you didn’t like women on top.”

“I don’t,” he answers with a hitched smile. “But I’m pretty sure I’ll like it with you.”

You’d think my being close to tears would have diffused everything in the achieving erection department, but on the contrary, his half-flag becomes full-on Viagra when I climb on top of him.

“Your leg… I don’t want to hurt you,” I start.

“Not your patient, Doc,” he reminds me. Voice mean until it gentles to say, “It’ll be all right. Trust me.”

I do trust him. It feels like this entire weekend has been one long trust exercise, culminating in this act which he told me earlier he never allowed.

I sink down on top of him, pussy soaking wet and slovenly grateful to finally be getting what it’s been wanting all day.

He curls a hand around the side of my face and asks, “You still like kissing me?”

No words. No words for how this man makes me feel. I can only silently nod.

“Kiss me, then. Let me know I didn’t break you worse than I did me. No traumatic brain injuries.”

I’m shaken, I realize, but not broken. I lean forward, hips rolling into his, and this time it feels like I’m the one doing all the dominating as I fuck him the way I’ve been wanting to all day.

I can tell he’s holding himself back with me. His hands fall to my hips, but he let’s me enjoy the ride as I kiss him.

I want to go like this all night, but I come faster than a teenage boy in this position, moaning and going wild in his lap.

At first he watches me come with that lazy blue stare, but then he inhales sharply, his head jerking to the side as if he’s been hit with something unexpected and foreign. “Oh, fuck, Doc, I think I’m going to…”

No more holding back now. His cast knocks against my hip as he pulls me into him. Again and again. Until he explodes into the condom, pitching forward against me with a yell.

And now I’m the one lazily watching him as he looks around with the wild disbelief of an ER admit who’s just been resuscitated with a defibrillator.

Then he looks up at me, gaze awed and humbled as he says, “Damn, Doc, I really didn’t think I could come that way.”

I give him an ironic smile. “Think about all the stuff you were missing with those other girls.”

But instead of laughing, his face clouds over. “Why did you say that?” he asks. “Why you bringing other girls into this, Doc?”

I shift, uncomfortable on his lap now. “Because there must have been other girls,” I answer, my tone frank. “Maybe even one who’s looking for you right now, one you’ll eventually remember—”

“No, Doc, there’s only you,” he says. “I’m brain damaged and confused. But you…” He pats his heart with his good hand. “You fill up my chest, and I know there ain’t anybody else but you in here.”

I swallow. Wanting to believe him. Upset because I’m even thinking about taking the word of a man who can’t so much as remember his name.

“Okay,” I say. Voice small. Agreeing with him just to get out of a conversation about disagreeing.

It’s been a long day and I barely have the energy to climb out of bed and go to the bathroom to wash away all the things he’s done to me.

He lets me clean up. But he says, “No pajamas,” his voice sharp, when I return and start to head to the dresser drawer.

I simply reverse direction and climb into the bed without a word of protest. Trusting him to keep me warm. Trusting him more than any woman has any business trusting a man she barely knows. A man who barely knows himself.

No, he definitely doesn’t have to keep me home from work tomorrow. He’s already fucked me out of thinking too much. But still…

I go to bed wondering how bad or possibly good it will be when he finally remembers who he really is.