Chapter 18
Nothing Else Exists
IVY
I wake up to voices.
Low, familiar—Gregory's particular brand of concerned murmuring, Christopher attempting quiet in the way that never quite works for him, Ariana in the doorway with Henderson's hand at her back.
The family has arrived. Of course they have.
The Ravenscrofts close ranks around their wounded the way other families make tea.
Immediately, instinctively, in quantities that can tip from comforting into overwhelming without much warning.
I love them for it, but I feel like I can’t breathe.
Alistair is looking at me.
“Could we —” I start.
“Yes,” he says.
Saying goodbye to Alex takes longer than anything else.
He is awake. Bright-eyed, the dressing on his forehead white and neat, and he’s already working at it with one determined fist—and when I take him from the nurse and hold him against me, I feel the specific gravitational pull of him, that particular warm solid weight, and I don't want to put him down.
“One night,” says the nurse. “He'll be monitored. He's doing very well.”
I kiss the undressed part of his head—the warm soft part that still smells a little bit like him—and hand him back.
I don't look back when I walk out because if I look back, I won't go.
Outside it has started to rain.
It’s the particular fine English drizzle that can't quite commit to being proper rain but also refuses to stop, the kind that makes the pavements shine and turns every streetlight into a smear of amber. We walk to the car through it and neither of us speaks.
Alistair drives. I sit, head throbbing, with my hands in my lap and watch Canary Wharf slide past the window, the glass towers, the lit-up offices, a Pret that is somehow still open, two men in suits sharing a cigarette under an awning outside a wine bar.
A woman in a yellow mac walking a low-slung basset hound who is doing his best against the damp.
Alistair reaches across and takes my hand.
“I'm fine,” I lie.
He says nothing. He knows me too well.
His thumb moves slowly across my knuckles. I watch it and feel something loosen in my chest that has been very tight since I opened my eyes in that ambulance. The rain taps against the window.
I think about Brumilde in surgery. Alex in his cot. The nursery without walls. The email I was going to finish.
Just one more minute.
Alistair's hand tightens on mine. He is watching the road but something in his jaw has changed and his thumb has stopped its slow movement and is pressing into my palm with a deliberate warmth.
I turn my hand over in his and he looks at me then. Just briefly. Just long enough, and pulls over.
The rain drums louder on the roof of the car.
He reaches for me across the centre console, one hand cupping my face, tilting it up, and kisses me. Not gently. Not the careful, checking-in kiss of a man handling something fragile. The other kind. The kind that says: we’re here, we’re alive, and nothing else exists right now.
I make a sound against his mouth and reach for his jacket lapels.
His hand slides from my face to my throat, down my collarbone, across my ribs, unhurried, deliberate, relearning the new version of me, and I arch toward him and he pulls back just enough to look at my face and whatever he sees there makes his eyes turn fierce.
“Ivy.” His hand finds the hem of my dress, what's left of it, creased and dusty from the day, and travels upward along the outside of my thigh, warm and certain.
Goosebumps chase his fingers, my skin prickling under the damp chill seeping through the car windows.
I shift in my seat, turning toward him as much as the car allows.
“Ivy,” he says again, against my jaw, his stubble rasping softly over my pulse point, as if confirming my existence. His fingers find the edge of my underwear. I inhale sharply, the leather seat creaking beneath me.
He slides his finger inside me and I am immediately, embarrassingly ready for him, warm and slick and swollen, and the sound that comes out of me bounces off the interior of the car and probably the window of the building across the road.
I grip his forearm, my nails digging into his shirt cuff.
He circles slowly, two fingers curling just right, the pad of his thumb finding my clit with unerring pressure, and my head falls back against the headrest and my hips roll toward his hand and I am already half gone, already chasing it, the day compressed into this single bright urgent point of sensation. I need it so badly.
“Don’t stop. Alistair, please, I need—”
He withdraws his hand.
I turn to look at him, flushed and breathing hard and genuinely furious.
He’s completely calm, absolutely infuriatingly composed. “I want to take my time with you.” He reaches over and straightens my dress with a matter-of-factness that makes me want to commit a minor crime. “And I can't do that here.”
“I don't need you to take your time,” I say. “I don’t want you to take your time. I need you to—”
“I know what you need,” he says, starting the car.
Alistair pulls into the Ravenscroft Enterprises car park approximately four minutes later.
I look up at the building. The logo. The clean steel and glass of it, lit up against the wet night sky.
“Seriously?” I say, but I’m no longer upset.
“I need something from the safe,” he says.
“Sure you do,” I reply.
I’m going to fuck the billionaire in the building I once threw green paint because I hated billionaires. The irony of this is not lost on me. It is, in fact, so present that I can practically hear Becks laughing from twenty miles away.
The lobby is empty. A security guard nods subtly at Alistair.
The lift is all mirrors and brushed steel.
I look terrible, dusty and slightly torn, the dressing on my temple white against my skin, my hair greasy, and Alistair stands beside me and doesn't say anything, just puts his hand on the small of my back, warm and present through the thin fabric, and the lift rises smoothly, the faint hum vibrating under my feet.
His office.
Minimalist, clean. A room that has been arranged by someone who considers clutter a form of moral failure. Floor to ceiling windows on two sides, the rain-slicked city spread out below in every direction. A long dark desk, almost bare.
Almost.
There is a framed photograph on it. Me and Alex at the wedding, both of us looking at something outside the frame, Alex in my arms, me laughing.
I notice it the way you notice something that was always going to be there, a quiet warmth blooming in my chest alongside the still-present throb between my legs.
I cross to the window and look out at the city. The rain has softened. Down there, somewhere, is the pavement where I bled and he caught me. The spot where all of this started: a blast and a head wound not dissimilar to what I had now, and a man who looked like a god in the low afternoon sun.
Alistair appears behind me, his hands settling on my hips, fingers splaying warm and certain over the dusty fabric. He walks me backwards to the desk.
The city glitters below us and the office is silent save for the rain's steady patter on the glass, and then his hands are on my face, both of them, thumbs tracing my cheekbones, and he kisses me. Slower than the car. Deeper.
My fingers find his shirt buttons and begin opening them.
His jacket goes, shrugged off onto the chair. His shirt untucked, my hands sliding beneath it. Warm skin, the muscle of his stomach tightening under my palms, and he makes a low sound against my mouth that I feel in my knees.
He lifts me onto the desk. My photograph safe to one side, everything else irrelevant, the polished wood cool against the backs of my thighs, and steps between my knees and takes his time looking at me. The city behind him. His name on the building. The rain on the glass.
I don’t belong in an immaculate office like this. I am dusty and wet and there is still a bruise forming along my collarbone.
He kisses the dressing at my temple, carefully, slowly, warm breath fanning my skin, and something in my chest cracks clean open.
His mouth travels from my temple to my jaw, my throat, the curve of my collarbone above the bruise, teeth grazing lightly, tongue soothing the ache, and I tip my head back and let him, the city spread out below us like it belongs to us.
The faint scent of polished leather from the desk chair mingles with Alistair’s cologne, grounding me in the moment.
He killed a woman today, and I was almost killed. It’s too much.
I moan when his hands push my dress up, slowly, the fabric cascading on either side of me, and find bare skin and I inhale sharply at the warmth of his palms against the office chill.
He runs his hands up the outside of my legs, over my hips, along my waist, as if he is taking inventory.
As if he needs to account for every part of me, his thumbs pressing into my hipbones with just enough force to make me gasp.
“Please,” I say, my hips tilting toward him instinctively.
Still, he takes his time.
His mouth finds my throat again, lips and tongue, warm and deliberate, while his hands travel back down, inside my thighs now, parting them wider, and I grip the edge of the desk, the wood biting into my palms. The city tilts slightly in my peripheral vision.
“Here,” he says, as his fingers find me, and he makes a sound that is low and satisfied. The pad of one finger circles my clit, swollen and aching, before two slide deep inside me.
“God, Ivy,” he murmurs. “Still so wet.”
My breath hitches. I never know how to reply to that.
His thumb pressing my clit in firm circles, and my head falls back as the pleasure coils tight, my walls fluttering around his fingers.
He works me slowly, that specific merciless patience he has.
My hands are in his hair as rain drums the glass.
The city glitters twenty floors below. His mouth finds my nipple through the thin fabric of my dress, sucking hard, teeth grazing, and I gasp and arch into it and he increases the pressure of his fingers and I feel the orgasm beginning to gather, enormous, inevitable, the accumulation of this entire impossible day.
“Please,” I say. My voice has abandoned all dignity. “Please, Alistair. I need you inside me.”
He looks at me for a long moment, his eyes dark, his jaw set. And then, instead of giving me what I am asking for, instead of doing the single obvious and merciful thing, he reaches past me and opens the desk drawer, and switches something on. It hums with a fine vibration.
“Alistair,” I say. I wasn’t sure I could bear it. I just wanted him inside me.
His eyes glitter in the dim light. The dildo in his hand looks expensive and is warm to the touch already, a deep rose gold, elegant.
“You had that in your desk—”
He looks at me with those dark, calm, utterly composed eyes. “I had it planned. I just didn’t think it would happen today.”