Chapter 13
BEA
My heart is in my throat.
The glass at my feet is catching the last of the afternoon light. Whiskey has soaked darker circles into the hardwood around the shards, and there are a few drops of something else near the door, a tighter red.
Antonio is gone. His men are gone. It’s been maybe thirty seconds since the elevator took them, and it feels longer than that, and it also feels like no time has passed at all.
Raffaele is three feet away from me.
I’m aware of the window at my back. The space between my shoulder blades and the glass. The fact that I could press myself into it if I wanted an extra inch of distance.
“I should clean this up,” I swallow. “Things can get messy in this line of work. I understand.”
He doesn’t answer.
I crouch down before I can second-guess it. I reach for the silver tray that rolled against the leg of the coffee table. The first shard goes onto the tray, then the next. My hands are shaking a little. Not much. I’m hoping he doesn’t see.
“Are you hurt.”
Not a question, the way he says it. Closer to an instruction.
“I’m fine.” I keep my eyes on the floor. “It’s nothing.”
His shoe slides into my field of vision. Black, polished, just off-center of where I was about to reach next.
“Do you understand what that was about.”
“Respect,” I say. “Putting Martinez back in his place.”
“No.”
I wait.
“That was the end of the workday.”
He takes half a step back. Just enough to make room for me to stand, if I want to. The tray is in my hands, and the glass on it clinks softly as I shift my weight. I reach for one more piece—the biggest one, tucked halfway under the chair—because I don’t know what else to do with my body.
I bend.
There’s a second when I’m folded over, the tray balanced on one hand, the back of my blouse riding up a little against my skirt, and I know—I know before it happens—that this is the moment.
His hand closes around my upper arm.
He turns me. The tray slips from my fingers, and everything I just picked up goes back onto the floor in a sharper second scatter, and I don’t even watch it fall because he has straightened me up and I am suddenly very close to him.
“And the beginning of something else.”
This was supposed to have been a one-time thing.
That’s the sentence. That’s the one I’ve been holding like a talisman since five AM. It was a mistake. A lapse. We agreed. The cufflinks. The coffee he poured and didn’t hand me. The not-looking in the elevator. All of it was supposed to mean once. All of it was supposed to mean never again.
He kisses me.
There’s nothing careful in it. Nothing of the cold man from this morning.
His mouth is open against mine before I’ve figured out where to put my hands, his breath coming faster than I’ve ever heard it, and I can feel the shape of every hour he spent today not touching me coming out of him all at once.
I don’t move away.
A part of me has been clenched all day—a fist just under the ribs, waiting.
It lets go the moment his mouth is on mine, and I hate how much that relief is its own kind of giving up.
I kiss him back before I’ve decided to. My hands have come up and landed on the lapels of his jacket, and one of them is fisting the fabric.
He drives me backward.
My shoulder blades hit the wall hard. I don’t care. The tray finishes falling somewhere under his hands, the last shard going off the silver and onto the floor with a small musical ring, and he doesn’t look at it, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react at all. His mouth hasn’t left my skin since the wall.
He doesn’t care about anything else.
His mouth moves to my neck. My knees go soft.
Buttons. I register them distantly—his fingers working fast and ruthless down the line of my blouse. The cream fabric falls open. Cool air moves across my chest, and his breath follows it, hot and uneven, right at the hollow of my throat.
“Raffaele—”
He doesn’t look up.
“We can’t,” I protest. “Not here. What if someone—”
The blinds come down.
He reaches past my shoulder without breaking his mouth from my skin, catches the cord, and pulls. The slats fall in a single clean drop, and the room dims by half. The office outside is a blur now through the narrow cuts between them. I can still see it. Just barely. Shapes moving. Lights.
His hand slides down my stomach. Past my waistband. Up under my skirt.
I gasp—too loud—and he catches the sound in his mouth and swallows it.
Stop him. Say something real. Push him off.
I’m not going to.
His fingers find me through the thin fabric. I’m embarrassingly ready. He knows it. I hear him exhale against my throat. He pushes two fingers inside me, and I whimper.
“Quiet,” he orders, low against my ear.
Whatever control he usually keeps a fist around is not in this room with us.
I bite down on my lip.
He works me against the wall until my hips are pushing into his hand without my permission. Until my head has tipped back against the plaster and my eyes have squeezed shut. I can hear my own breath. I can hear his, faster than mine.
“Move.”
He turns me. His hand is flat between my shoulder blades, he walks me forward three steps, past his desk, past the chair, and the front of my thighs meet the low cabinet under the window. I feel him come up behind me in the same motion.
His belt is already at the buckle before I’ve braced my hands on the wood.
The blinds are right in front of my face.
Through the slats, I can see into the outer office. A woman from two offices over is pulling a trench coat off the back of her chair. Someone is saying something to someone else by the elevator, both of them turned half away.
I make a small sound that isn’t a word.
He’s behind me. His hand is on my hip. The other is somewhere I can’t see, and then I can hear it—his belt, the quiet click of the buckle, the soft shift of fabric. “Don’t look at them. Look at me.”
I turn my head. He’s right there. Jaw tight, eyes on me, nothing controlled about him now at all.
My skirt goes up. My underwear goes down.
I should be clawing for the door. Instead, I reach past him. My hand finds the lock on the door.
I turn it.
The small mechanical click of the bolt sliding home is the loudest sound in the room.
What am I doing.
He hears it too. Then his hand is in my hair, gathering it, pulling it off my neck, and he’s pushing into me from behind.
I grab the edge of the cabinet. I bite my own lip again.
The first thrust drives me up onto my toes.
The second brings me back down, harder, and my forehead nearly meets the blinds.
He fills me in a way that doesn’t leave room for thought—my hands clamp down on the edge of the cabinet, and my whole body tilts forward on reflex, making space for him, taking him.
The sound that comes out of me is embarrassing.
He doesn’t stop to let me hear it. His grip on my hip tightens, and he gives me another stroke, deeper, and I’m already rocking back to meet it before I’ve told my body to.
The man from last night had time. This one has a list of people he’s angry at today, and I’m the one he’s taking it out on, and the worst and most private thing I’ve learned about myself this week is how much my body wants to be that for him.
His hand comes up over my mouth.
I let it.
Through the blinds I watch the woman with the trench coat find her keys. I watch her sling her bag. She passes five feet from the glass wall of his office. If she turned her head—just turned her head—she would be looking directly at the window I’m pressed against.
She doesn’t turn.
He thrusts harder.
A sound breaks out of me and his hand muffles it flat. I can taste his palm. I can taste my own lipstick. My eyes are wet, not from crying, from something else—from the pressure of not being allowed to make noise while he does this to me.
Another person crosses the outer office. A man this time. He’s on his phone. He doesn’t look up.
I stop tracking them.
There’s only the cabinet under my hands, and the slats of the blinds swaying the tiniest bit from the motion of us, and his breath on the back of my neck, and his grip on my hip so tight I can already feel the shape of it blooming for tomorrow.
There’s only his hand on my mouth and his voice in my ear, not words anymore, just breath, just heat.
I close my eyes.
The office outside disappears. The building disappears. The city. All that exists is the hitch in his breath at the back of my neck. The slap of skin on skin. The small, wet sounds.
Everything I was trying to hold onto today slips out of my hands in pieces and joins the shattered glass on the floor.
I wasn’t built for this.
That’s the thought that comes, clear and stupid. I wasn’t built for this man, for this office, for this afternoon. And yet, here I am.
I may not have been built for this, but one thing’s become certain:
I want this.
Desperately.