Gray light came through the glass wall in long bands, the kind of flat autumn light that made the city look like a photograph of itself. Lianna woke with her cheek pressed to the pillow and her mouth dry, and for three seconds she didn't know where she was. Then the pillow smelled like him and the ceiling crack was there in the corner and the whole night came back in one long unbroken rush.
She was alone. The sheets on his side were pulled flat and tucked, the way a man makes a bed when he's already stopped thinking about the bed. She put her hand where his hip had been. Cold.
Her phone was in her coat pocket in the other room, which meant seventeen texts from Maya were still sitting there unanswered. She didn't get up to check. She lay still and listened — water in the pipes, a radiator ticking somewhere, and under it, low and muffled, a voice. Not talking to her.
A button-down hung on the back of the chair by the bed. White cotton, the shoulders still holding their shape from the night before, one cuff turned back where he'd rolled it. She got up and the cold floor hit the soles of her feet and she crossed the room and took it off the chair and put it on.
The hem fell to her thighs. The sleeves went past her hands, so she had to shake them down twice to find her fingers. The collar smelled of him — cedar and something clean and sharp underneath, the starch still in it, and under that, faint, the two of them from last night. She buttoned it to the third button and stopped. The mirror on the far wall showed her a girl in a man's shirt with her hair wrecked on one side and her mouth still swollen, and she looked away from it before she could finish the thought.
The voice came again. Down the hall, through a door that wasn't quite shut. She followed it barefoot.
The office was the second door on the left. She hadn't been in it. She stopped in the doorway with one hand flat on the frame and looked in.
He was sitting behind a wide black desk, a charcoal suit jacket over the sweater from last night, a dark tie knotted and loosened a half-inch at the collar, his phone pressed to his ear. Two monitors. A stack of paper he'd squared with something. A glass of water with a chip on the rim. The window behind him was the same wall of city, gray now, the towers going up into the low cloud.
She had never heard him like this. His voice was low and even and completely empty of her — clauses, numbers, a name she didn't catch, a date in November. He said we'll move on that the way he'd said come here, flat and final, and it landed in her stomach differently than it had last night, and she understood for the first time that the thing he did to her was a small room inside a much bigger house.
He looked up.
The sentence he was in the middle of kept going. —no, the second tranche, not the first— and his eyes came off the screen and found her in the doorway and went down her body and stopped.
Then they went dark. Not angry. Hungrier than angry. His jaw moved once and he didn't say anything into the phone for a beat longer than the sentence needed, and the pause was a thing only she could see, and it was for her.
He lifted his free hand off the desk. Crooked one finger. Not come here — the way you'd move a piece you'd already decided to move. Down.
Lianna's heart went sideways. Her feet were already moving.
She crossed the office. The carpet was warm where the sun had been and then the hardwood started and it was cold, and she felt it come up through her heels and her calves and settle behind her knees. She came around the side of the desk. He watched her the whole way over the top of the phone, and he was saying something about a wire transfer in the same voice he'd used for mine, and the two of them were the same voice, and that was the thing that made her knees give.
She went down. Not gracefully — her palms caught the floor first and then her knees, and the hardwood was a shock against them, cold and hard and completely without give. The shirt rode up her thighs. She felt the draft on the backs of them and knew he could see.
The desk had a modesty panel she hadn't noticed from the doorway, and the space under it was its own small room — dark, warm, walled on three sides, the underside of the desktop low over her head. She crawled in on her hands and knees and the smell hit her all at once. Cedar. Ironed cotton. Coffee gone cold in a mug somewhere. And underneath, close, the smell of him, the one that had been on the pillow and in the shirt and on her fingers last night, stronger here, thicker, because here it was coming off his skin.
She stopped between his thighs. His knees were spread to make room for her and her own knees fit inside them, and the chair creaked once over her head as he shifted his weight. His voice kept going. —if it clears by the fourteenth we take the position, if it doesn't we walk—
She looked up.
The underside of the desk cut the world down to this: his trousers, charcoal wool, the crease still sharp down the front of the thigh. His hand resting on the arm of the chair, the silver watch face turned toward her, the second hand going around. And the seam of his trousers, running up the inside of his leg, and the line of him under it, half-hard already, pressing the wool out of shape.
Her mouth went wet. She hadn't decided anything. Her body had decided and left her to catch up.
She reached for his belt and her hands weren't steady. The leather was warm from his body and the buckle was cold, and she got it on the second try, and the sound of the belt sliding loose was loud in the small space and she froze.
Above her, his voice didn't change. —correct. Send it before close—
The button. The zip. She worked them open with her thumbs and the wool parted and there he was, through the cotton of his shorts, thick and heavy and already pushing the fabric up, and she could see the shape of him and the damp shadow at the head where he'd started to leak, and her whole face went hot.
She'd had him in her mouth once. Once, last night, on the couch, with his hand on the back of her head and his voice telling her slower, take it slower, don't gag yourself. She knew one thing about this and it was that she wanted to do it right.
She hooked her fingers in the waistband of his shorts and pulled them down. His cock came free against his belly and she heard herself breathe out through her nose. He was thick, and the skin was hot and smooth and stretched tight, and the vein along the underside stood up under her thumb when she wrapped her hand around him — carefully, like it was a thing that could break, which it wasn't, which she knew, and she still held it that way.
He was already slick at the tip. She smeared it with her thumb without thinking and his thigh went tight under her other hand.
His voice above her: —I've read the memo. I don't need it read back to me—
She leaned in. She put her mouth on the head of his cock, just the head, and closed her lips around it, and tasted him — salt and skin and the faint bitter thing at the tip — and his whole body went still above her. The chair stopped creaking. The voice stopped. For one full second the office was silent except for the hum of the building and her own breathing through her nose.
Then, level: —No. Continue. I'm listening.
She almost laughed. She didn't. She took him deeper instead.
Slow, the way he'd taught her. Down an inch, back up, her tongue flat along the underside where the vein was, feeling it pulse against her. Down again, further, until he touched the back of her throat and her eyes watered and she pulled back before she gagged. Her spit ran down the shaft and over her knuckles and she used it, her hand working what her mouth couldn't take, and the wet sound of it was obscene in the small dark space and she could hear it and he could hear it and he kept talking.
She got a rhythm. Mouth and hand together, the way she'd learned. Her other hand braced on his thigh for balance and she felt the muscle there jump every time she took him deep. He was getting harder in her mouth, thicker, filling her up, and she could feel his pulse under her tongue and it was faster than the watch.
She pulled off him to breathe and looked up along his body. His free hand was flat on the desk, fingers spread, and the tendons were standing up on the back of it.
—That's not what I asked you to do— he said, and it took her a second to understand he was still on the call, that the flatness in his voice was for the man on the phone and not for her. —I asked what the number was in June. Not what it is now.
She went back down on him. Deeper this time, because she wanted to, because she'd found the angle where the head of him slid past the soft part of her throat and stayed there, and she held it, and her eyes streamed, and her hand kept working the base of him where her mouth couldn't reach.
Above her, his sentence stuttered. One word. He covered it — cleared his throat, said go on in the same flat voice — and she heard the cover and she knew he'd done it for her, that he was protecting the call from her, or her from the call, and the thought went through her like his finger had gone through her last night, and she moaned around his cock without meaning to.
His hips moved. Just once. A short, involuntary push up into her mouth, and then he stopped himself, and she felt the effort it cost him in the way his thigh went hard as wood under her hand.
She pulled off him slowly, dragging her lips up the shaft, and let him fall out of her mouth wet and flushed and standing up against his belly. Her chin was slick. She wiped it on the back of her wrist and then thought better of it and wiped it on his shorts instead, and didn't know why she'd done that, and did.
She ducked lower. Under him, into the shadow between his thighs, and she took his balls in her mouth — one, then both, careful, the skin there soft and loose and hot, and she sucked them the way she'd sucked him, slow, and ran her tongue along the seam behind them, and his whole body tightened from the knees up.
His cock lay against her cheek, thick and wet and hard, and she could feel the heat of it on her face while she worked her mouth lower, and the smell of him here was so strong it made her dizzy, and she closed her eyes and kept going.
Above her, his voice stopped.
Not a pause inside a sentence. The whole voice, gone. She heard him breathe once, slow, through his nose, the way a man breathes when he's putting himself back together. Somewhere on the other end of the phone a man was talking and she couldn't hear the words and she didn't care.
Then, level, unhurried, as if nothing at all had happened: —Right. Let's pick this up after lunch.
And his hand came down and closed in her hair.
His fist closed and drew, and her scalp lit up with a bright, exact pain that pulled her up off her heels before her knees had time to argue. The shirt slid off her thighs. The underside of the desk came at her face and she ducked sideways under it, and then she was rising, dragged up through the dark into the light, and the office opened out around her — gray window, black monitors, the cold coffee, the whole ordinary morning that had been going on above her head the entire time.
She came up bent, off balance, her hands catching the edge of the desk and then the arm of his chair, and he turned the chair with his knees, a short sharp pivot on the casters, and her body followed where his hand told it to go.
He kissed her.
Not the way he'd kissed her in the kitchen at dawn with her mouth still full of his name. This one had the phone in it. It had the whole call, the second tranche and the wire and the date in November, all of it crushed into the way his mouth came down on hers — hard, closed, and then open, his tongue in her before she'd finished the inhale, and his hand still knotted in her hair holding her head exactly where he wanted it.
She tasted herself on him. The salt of her own mouth, the bitter edge of him, all of it mixed and warm, and her hands were braced on the arms of his chair and her knees had gone soft and there was nowhere to put her weight but him.
He pulled back an inch. His forehead came down against hers and stayed, and she could feel his breath coming harder than his voice had all morning, ragged at the edges where he'd kept it flat for the phone.
His hand loosened in her hair. He smoothed it once, palm flat against her scalp, feeling the place he'd pulled, and the tenderness of it after the pull was worse than the pull.
He set the phone down on the desk. Face down. She heard the little click of it against the wood and understood, in a way she couldn't have said out loud, that the call was over and the office was theirs now.
"You could hear me," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Good." He let go of her hair and sat back, and the chair took his weight, and she stood there in his shirt with the hem fallen back to her thighs and her chin still slick and her mouth still tasting of him, and he looked at her the way he'd looked at her in the doorway — down her body and up again, slow, taking inventory. "Turn around."
She turned. The window filled her whole field of view, gray light and towers stacked into the low cloud, and she could see the two of them in the glass, faint, ghosted — her in the white shirt, him seated behind her with his tie loosened and his belt open, and the whole city going on behind them without a single person knowing.
His hands came to the backs of her thighs. He drew her back a step, then another, until the backs of her legs met the edge of the desk, and then he lifted her, easy, one arm under her hips, and set her down on the cold wood with her legs hanging off the front. A pen rolled and stopped. The folder she'd never opened slid an inch under her thigh.
"Look at the glass," he said.
She looked. He stood up behind her and she watched him do it in the reflection — the charcoal jacket pushed off his shoulders and dropped over the back of the chair, the tie pulled loose and left hanging, the shirt cuffs undone and shoved up his forearms. Then his hands came around her front, and she watched his hands in the glass as if they belonged to someone else, one at her throat and one at the third button of the shirt.
He opened it. One button, two, three, four, down to the hem, and the shirt fell open and she watched herself come out of it in the window — the soft rise of her breasts, the small dark scar on her ribcage, the flat of her stomach, the crease at her hip where she'd been sitting on the desk edge. The cold glass light made everything sharper than she wanted it.
"You wore this," he said, and his thumb ran down the open edge of the collar at her throat. "Whose is it."
"Yours."
"Say it properly."
She watched her own mouth in the glass. "It's yours. I'm wearing your shirt."
"Good girl." His hand slid down from her throat and covered her breast, and the heat of his palm after the cold air made her arch, and in the reflection she watched her own back bow and her head tip and she didn't look away this time. His thumb found her nipple and rolled it once, slow, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn't a word.
His other hand went between her legs.
She was wet. She'd known it under the desk — had felt it running down her inner thigh while she had him in her mouth, had pressed her knees together against it and pretended she hadn't — and now his fingers came up slick and he held them in front of the glass where she could see them, two fingers shining in the gray light, and then he put them in his mouth.
She watched him taste her in the window. Her whole body went hot from the scalp down.
"That's the second time today," he said, and his voice was low and close at her ear, and his hand came back down between her thighs and this time his fingers didn't tease. Two of them, straight in, and her cunt took them with a wet sound she heard in the quiet room, and her hips came up off the desk an inch before she had any say in it.
"Oh—"
"Look at the glass."
She looked. She watched his fingers work in and out of her, watched his forearm flex with the rhythm, watched her own face do things she'd never seen it do — mouth open, eyes half shut, hair wrecked on one side where his fist had been. His other arm was banded across her chest holding her up against him, and his chin was on her shoulder, and his eyes in the reflection were on her face, not her body. Watching her watch herself.
He curled his fingers. She knew that curl now. He'd done it last night and she'd come apart on his hand in the dark where she couldn't see it happening. In the daylight, in the glass, it was different — she could see the moment it landed, the way her whole spine went taut like a plucked string, the way her toes came up off the floor.
"Ethan—"
"Not yet." He pulled his fingers out and she made a noise she was ashamed of. He turned her head with his wet hand, thumb on her jaw, and kissed her again with his fingers still tasting of her, and she opened her mouth for it and let him put the taste back in her.
Then he lifted her off the desk.
She came down onto her feet and her legs didn't hold — one knee buckled and she caught herself on his forearm, and he let her catch herself, didn't help past the one arm, watching her find her own balance the way he watched everything she did. The shirt hung open on her. The pen was still rolling slowly on the desk behind her, giving up.
"The folder," he said.
She looked. It had slid out from under her when he'd lifted her, and it lay on the corner of the desk with the edge of the cream page showing. Her initials at the bottom. Her question in the margin, small and careful, in her own handwriting.
"You read ten lines," he said. "You signed ten lines. You asked me how I'd know."
"Yes."
"And then you went to sleep instead of reading the rest."
She said nothing. There was no version of the truth that made her look better than the truth.
"That's fine." He picked the folder up and squared it against the desk, twice, the way he'd squared the stack of paper, and set it down again in the exact center. "It was the right call. You were tired. You were also testing whether I'd make you."
"Was I?"
"You were." He stepped into her, close enough that the open shirt brushed his chest, and his hand came up and closed on her jaw, not hard, holding her face up to his. "And I didn't. Which tells you something about me. Think about what."
She thought about it. Standing there with her shirt open and her thighs still wet and his hand on her face, she thought about it, and the answer came up slow and clear like something rising in water: that he didn't need to make her do anything. That he'd wait. That he could wait forever, because he already knew she'd come back to the page on her own, and the waiting was the leash. She didn't say it out loud. She didn't have to. He watched it arrive on her face and the corner of his mouth moved.
"There it is," he said.
He let go of her jaw and turned her by the shoulders, and walked her out of the office with his hand flat between her shoulder blades, out the door and down the hall past the bedroom and the closed bathroom door and into the kitchen, where the light was whiter and the marble was cold under her bare feet and the coffee she'd made at dawn was still sitting on the counter, gone black.
He picked it up and poured it down the sink. Ran the tap. Filled the glass. Drank half of it standing there with his back to her, the shirt untucked at his waist, the tie still hanging loose, and she stood in the middle of the kitchen in his open shirt with her arms at her sides, dripping, waiting, and the waiting felt like something he'd asked her to hold and she was holding it.
He set the glass down and turned around.
"Eat something," he said. "Then shower. Then read."
"And then?"
He looked at her for a long moment. The city was coming up gray and wet behind him, the first real rain of the day starting to streak the glass, and somewhere down in the street a truck went by with a sound like tearing paper.
"Then you tell me what you want," he said. "Same as last night. Same as always. And this time you'll have read the whole thing, so you'll know what you're asking for."
He walked past her. His hand came out and caught her hair again as he went by — just the ends of it, a light pull, nothing like the fist — and let it fall, and he was gone down the hall toward the bedroom, and she heard the shower start.
Lianna stood at the counter. The folder was on the desk in the other room. The rain was coming down harder now, slanting across the glass, and the kitchen smelled of cold coffee and jasmine tea gone to skin and the two of them, and she put her hand flat on the marble where her first orgasm had happened and left it there, and the stone was cold, and she didn't move.