CHAPTER 13 #3
He moves before I have finished the second word.
He spins me so that my back is to his chest and my hips are against the front of the desk.
He does it gently and without force; my body turns because his hand is at my waist and his other hand at the inside of my elbow, and I am facing the brushed-steel surface of the desk with the lamp's warmth on my collarbone and the slate cuff of his shirt visible to my right.
He sets his mouth at the top of my spine, slow.
The first kiss is just heat. Just the press of his mouth, lips closed, on the small ridge of vertebra at the base of my hairline. Then he pulls back a breath and presses again, lips parted. Then his tongue, brief and warm, where the hairline meets the skin.
My breath comes shallow at the top of my chest. My right hand starts to lift, the old reflex coming up out of the floor of me, wanting somewhere to land — and instead of letting it go where it always goes I spread it wide and press it flat to the desk beside the other, and I count the breath down, in for four, out for four, and give the stillness he asked for back to him on purpose.
"Hands here," he says against my neck. "Keep them. I will tell you when."
"Yes."
He breathes out once against my nape at the yes, slow, the breath of a man who has been quietly bracing for a no he had already priced.
Warm air behind my ear, a pause, then his mouth at the curve where shoulder meets throat — sucking once, lightly, not enough to mark.
The wire-scar on his own throat is six inches from my hair.
I want to turn my head and put my mouth on it and I keep my hands flat on the desk because he has asked me to.
His right hand slides under the hem of my shirt, up the side of my ribs, pulls the shirt off over my head; my hands come up only enough to clear the sleeves and then go back to the desk.
He drops the shirt on the chair. The chip on the left bra strap pulls slight against my skin.
He does not touch it. He has mapped the chip too. He skirts it.
His mouth at my shoulder blade. Then at the inside of the right one. Then he steps back and looks.
"Eliza."
I do not turn my head. I look down at the desk surface where my palms are.
The brushed steel takes the lamp's gas-jet flare and reflects it as a long pale slick under my hands, the slick wavering once as the bulb hums, and a strand of my hair has fallen forward and caught a thread of the same warm gold along its length.
Behind me, he goes still — deliberate and holding, the patience Marcus brings to a room he has learned to wait out until it tells him yes.
One hand finds the small of my back and rests there; the other lifts away from my hip and hangs in the air, unspent.
He is asking the second time without using his mouth.
I lean back, an inch, into the heat of him, and his hand at my back closes warm against my spine.
"You are getting it right."
He goes down behind me. His knees hit the concrete — soft contact through the wood of the desk — and his hands come to the waist of my trousers.
He unfastens them and slides them, with the cotton beneath, down my hips to my ankles, slow.
I step out of one foot, then the other. The floor under my bare feet is cool.
His hand returns to the inside of my right thigh, palm flat, a small inquiry.
"Open for me a little. There — that is the whole of the asking price, and I am paying it."
His mouth lands first at the dimple above my tailbone, where the spine gives way.
Then at the swell of my hip. Then he is between my legs — bent, careful, the angle already solved before he committed to it, his head turned just enough that his mouth can reach me clean — and his right hand comes up and his middle and index finger slide between my folds and into me at the same time his mouth finds my clit.
I make a sound I do not have a name for.
It comes up out of the deep tight pull low in my belly that has been winding since he counted to fourteen.
My hands stay where he put them, palms spread on the steel.
Every fine hair lifts at once in the hollow at the base of my skull in the gas-jet warmth of the lamp, a slow electric prickle from hairline to shoulder.
He is precise, not flashy, and the word that surfaces in me before I can stop it is fluent.
The two fingers inside me curl up, find the slick spot most men miss on the first three passes; Marcus locates it on the second.
He stays there, pad of the finger pressing slow, while his tongue circles the clit narrow and steady, and I have the disorienting sense that he is reading the small involuntary tightenings of my hips the way he reads what a man's hands are doing under a table, faster than I can offer them.
The first orgasm builds at the small of my back and travels up the spine in a slow pull I do not bother to fight.
My left hand, by its own quiet, slides four inches along the warm brushed steel — not toward anything, just for the temperature of the metal that has gone the temperature of his shirt — and presses there.
"There," he says, against me. The word lands as a vibration at my clit and that is what tips it.
The orgasm breaks. I do not bite anything.
I do not muffle. I make a low sound and I keep my palms flat on the desk and the warmth at the inside of my thighs goes liquid and the long muscle of me clenches down hard around his fingers once and then lets go all at once, everywhere.
He does not stop. He gives me a count of three — three slow beats of his tongue, gentling, holding — and then his fingers ease, slide partway out, slide back in, and his mouth resumes.
He is asking for a second one. He is being precise about it, in no hurry, unhurried in exactly the way of someone who has rehearsed this against the back of his teeth for longer than he wants to admit.
The second one comes faster. I had not thought I had a second one in me — I have always been a one-and-done with anyone but myself — and Marcus, on his knees behind me, two fingers in me and his tongue on my clit, takes me through the second one as if he has read a manual for my body that I have not yet written.
I come against his mouth and I say his name. I say it once, quiet, not loud. Marcus.
He stops then, kisses the inside of my right thigh, presses his open mouth there for a long beat, and stands.
The slide of his slacks down the front of my thighs. The brush of his shirt. The contact of his bare hip against the back of mine. He has not undressed at all; only opened the front of his clothes enough to honor the come here the way he made it — surgical, contained, present.
He puts his right hand flat on the small of my back.
His left hand, with the two scars on the knuckles, comes around to the front of my pelvis and settles there, holding me to the desk without pressing, and I can feel his heartbeat through the press of his sternum between my shoulder blades — fast, faster than the still hands and the level voice have been admitting to all afternoon, the one part of him he cannot keep at the empty register.
That heartbeat — the tell he does not know he is giving — goes into the catalogue with everything else I have learned to read off this man in the dark. I do not mention it. Not now.
He stays braced against the back of my hips, held in that careful suspension a fixer keeps when a deal is one signature from closing, waiting on one small motion from me.
I press my weight back into him, deliberate, my answer landing in the body before the breath catches up.
His hand at the small of my back closes once, affirmative, and he slides into me slow.
The angle is perfect. I take him without effort; I am wet from his mouth and from being wanted exactly the way I am, and the size of him is present, specific, a length of body against the soft fluttering give of my own.
I catch a breath at the top of my chest and let it out around the next slow press of his hips.
"Eliza."
"Signed," I say, into the steel, because it is his word turned back at him and the only one that will reach him here. "All of it. Don't read me careful now."
He goes slow first, a measured three-beat in-and-out that gives my body time to remember it has not done this in eleven months and that this is a man who will wait for me.
Then he stops being patient. His left hand at my pelvis tightens, his right spreads wide across my lower spine and bears down, and his hips drive in a faster rhythm and the brushed steel of the desk under my palms goes warm with my own heat.
I am shaking by the time he gets close. The chip pulls against the left strap. He has not touched it once.
"I am — Eliza —" Then he says nothing. He has gone quiet. He has stopped using words. I would not have thought, two weeks ago, that Marcus Cade going quiet would be the language he loved me with. He is being honest with me twice and he is doing it with his hips and his hands and not his mouth.