Chapter 12 #2
Logan's expression from across the room doesn't change.
But something in his eyes does — the particular sharpening of attention that I've learned to read as his version of impressed.
He looks away before I can hold his gaze too long.
I've learned his language. He's right that he's never said well done directly. He doesn't need to.
I'm in conversation with two conference attendees near the far end of the room when I feel it — the prickle at the back of my neck that means something has shifted in the social geography around me. I glance over my shoulder and see..Sonia.
She's arrived in the way she always arrives — unhurried, deliberate, wearing the conference the way she wears every room, like she designed it.
She's already found Logan. She's standing close to him, her body angled toward his in the way I've noticed before, her hand touching his arm as she says something that makes him respond with the polite, contained expression he gives people he's managing rather than engaging.
I turn back to my conversation, and I don't look back across the room.
I don't need to — the image is already there, Sonia's body angled toward Logan, her hand on his arm, the particular quality of her attention that has never been remotely professional.
I know this. I've known it since the first industry event in San Francisco.
What I didn't know, until this exact moment, is how much it would bother me.
The feeling is specific and unwelcome. It sits in my chest like something with teeth and I recognize it with the clarity of someone who has been trying to avoid recognizing it for weeks.
I'm not supposed to feel this. We don't have an arrangement that gives me the right to feel this.
We have hotel rooms and closed doors and an unspoken agreement not to examine anything too closely, and none of that gives me standing to feel my jaw tighten because a woman is talking to him at a conference.
I feel it anyway.
My conversation wraps up. I excuse myself. I cross toward the bar for a water I don't particularly need and I do not look in Logan's direction and I stand there with my glass and I breathe and I tell myself this is fine.
It's fine. However, it is not fine by the time we get back to the hotel.
We debrief in the elevator — the day's outcomes, the contacts worth following up, the panel session tomorrow morning that needs preparation. Professional. Clean. I give him the notes I made and he reviews them in the elevator and nods twice and that is the extent of the conversation.
At my door I slide my keycard and push it open and I'm halfway inside when I say, without fully planning to, "Sonia was there today."
He's at his own door as he pauses.
"I know. I spoke to her briefly."
"I noticed."
A beat. He turns to look at me fully.
"Is there something you want to say?"
"No," I say. "Goodnight."
I go inside and close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed and I press my hands against my knees and I breathe.
I am being unreasonable. I know I'm being unreasonable.
We have not defined this, which means I have no claim on anything, which means watching Sonia put her hand on his arm at a conference should register as neutral information and nothing more.
It didn't register as neutral information.
Suddenly, there’s a knock at the adjoining door.
I look at it. I don't move for a moment.
Then I get up and open it. He's standing in the frame with his jacket off, his expression doing what it always does — giving me just enough to be dangerous.
I step back automatically to let him in and then wish I hadn't because now he's inside my room and the door is open behind him and I don't know what to do with my hands.
"You noticed," he says.
"I said it was nothing."
"You said goodnight in the tone you use when something is very much not nothing."
I cross my arms. "I don't have a tone."
"You have several." He looks at me steadily.
"Say what you mean, Sutton."
"I'm tired. It was a long day."
His hand comes up and stops the door before I can close it. Not forcefully — just there, palm flat against it, immovable.
"Don't," he says.
I look at his hand on the door. I look at him.
"Logan—"
“—Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Then why have you been somewhere else since we left that room?"
I cross my arms. It's a defensive move and we both know it.
"It doesn't matter,” I say, emphatically.
"It matters to me."
He says it simply. No performance behind it, no agenda I can identify.
Just the words, sitting in the room between us, and I don't know what to do with them because that's exactly the problem.
I never know what to do with the moments when he says something that doesn't fit neatly into what this is supposed to be.
"It was nothing," I say.
“What’s the issue?” he says in his dominant tone.
"I don't—" I stop. The thing with teeth is still in my chest and it's getting harder to keep my voice level.
"I just think it's interesting. That she always seems to find you. At every event. Every conference."
"She's in the industry."
"So are a lot of people," I quip, trying to hide my disdain.
"Sutton." His voice is even.
"Nothing is happening with Sonia. Nothing has ever happened with Sonia."
"I didn't say it was." I say the words, but even I don't convince myself.
"So..you're jealous?" he says with a smirk.
My jaw tightens. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Act like you know what I'm feeling when we don't—" I catch myself. Breathe.
"We don't talk about feelings. That's not what this is."
"What is it then?" He asks.
"I don't know," I say.
I stop talking and I turn away from him. He moves toward me. I take a step back. The backs of my knees find the edge of the bed and I stop. He reaches for my hand. I move it.
"Sutton—"
"Don't." I shake my head. I keep my eyes away from his because I know what happens when I look at him directly from this distance.
"I need you to not do that right now."
"Why?"
"Because I can't think when you—" I press my lips together.
"Because it's not fair. To just—" I gesture between us.
"To just do that when I'm trying to say something."
"Then say it."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
I look at him and the honest answer is sitting right there — that I spent twenty minutes at a conference pretending I wasn't watching a woman lean into him, that it bothered me in a way I don't have the right to be bothered, that Maggie's questions from the other night are still sitting in the back of my chest alongside the teeth of something I haven't named.
That for almost two months I have been telling myself that undefined is fine, that hotel rooms are enough, that the absence of a conversation means we're both equally free, and that standing in that conference room watching Sonia, I understood for the first time that I have been lying to myself about all of it.
I don't say any of that.
"Forget it," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he reaches for my jaw this time — just his fingers, tilting my face up, and the touch is so careful that it does more damage than anything aggressive could.
I see something in his eyes I haven't seen before.
Something underneath the hunger and the dominance.
Something unguarded and quiet that he pulls back almost immediately but not quite fast enough.
My exhale comes out unsteady as his hand slides to the back of my neck. He pulls me toward him and I'm already leaning in before I've made the decision to and when his mouth finds mine there's nothing careful about it. I stop resisting.
His mouth is still on mine when he pulls back just enough to look at me — his breathing uneven, his eyes dark and focused entirely on me.
Whatever was between us ten minutes ago — the resistance, the words we couldn't say, the space I kept trying to put between us — is gone. Burned through. There is only this.
His hands find my arms and he kisses me again, feverish and consuming.
His fingers move to the zipper at the back of my skirt — one smooth pull — and the fabric loosens and falls to the floor.
His hands push my blouse off my shoulders next, sliding it down my arms until that's gone too.
I reach for his shirt — my fingers working the buttons from the top down, my hands spreading against the warmth of his chest as each one comes undone.
I push it back off his shoulders and he shrugs it the rest of the way off without breaking the kiss.
He pulls back long enough to unbuckle his belt. The clink of it. The zipper. He steps out of his pants and kicks them aside and then he's back — his hands on me, his mouth on mine, his skin warm against mine everywhere we're touching.
His other hand slides between my thighs, stroking my clit as we move toward the sofa, and I gasp into his mouth at the contact — already sensitive, already wound tight from everything that came before.
He sits down and pulls me toward him, his hands spreading my legs as he lifts me, positioning me over his face.
I still for one second.
"Logan—"
"Come here," he says. His voice leaves no room for argument.
He cups my ass in both hands and grips my thighs as his tongue drives deep inside me and my eyes roll back.
Every careful self-protective thought I had ten minutes ago dissolves completely.
He slides me up and down his face with a control that makes it clear he has been thinking about this — alternating between sucking my clit and tongue-fucking my pussy until I can't hold myself upright without gripping the back of the sofa for balance.
My body writhes at the sensation. My legs tremble. He lifts me up and down on his tongue like he has all night and intends to use it, and the pleasure is so consuming and relentless that I stop trying to manage any of it.