2. nova #2
"I want an arrangement. You and me. Exclusive.
Physical. Ongoing." He says each word like he has rehearsed this, like he sat in this office and built the sentence from raw materials the way you build a contract — airtight, unemotional, every clause in place.
"In return, I take care of your financials.
Rent. Bills. Whatever your siblings need. Shoes. Tutors. Medical. All of it."
The words land in my chest one at a time, each one heavier than the last.
"You're offering to pay me for sex."
"I'm offering a mutual arrangement with clearly defined terms."
"That's a nicer way of saying the same thing."
"It's a different thing." He takes a half step closer. "I'm not buying a service. I'm proposing an exchange between two people who both get something they need."
"And what do you need?"
The question catches him. I watch it land — a micro-flinch behind his eyes, there and gone, like a door cracked open and slammed shut. He recovers fast. The charm slides back into place smooth as a loaded clip.
"Exclusivity. Availability. Someone who understands what this is and does not confuse it for something else."
"No feelings."
"No feelings."
He says it like a wall. Like a perimeter he is building with his own hands, brick by brick, while his body tells a completely different story.
He is standing close enough now that I can smell him — whiskey and something darker underneath, cedar or sandalwood, the kind of scent that costs money and clings to your skin for hours after.
His breathing has changed. Shallow. Faster at the top of each inhale. He probably does not know I can see it — the slight lift of his chest under that unbuttoned collar, the pulse in his throat ticking a beat too quick for a man delivering a business proposal.
His eyes are on my mouth. He moves them back to mine a half-second too late.
This is not a man offering a transaction. This is a man who saw me in a hallway and could not sleep afterward and built an entire framework of rules and boundaries around the wanting so he could stand in front of me and pretend he is in control.
I know what want looks like when a man is trying to bury it. I have danced for hundreds of them. The difference is that none of them ever looked at me like I was dangerous.
Romeo Rivas is looking at me like I am the most dangerous thing in this building.
And God help me — I am not walking away.
The Math That Breaks Her
I should say no.
Every instinct I have built in two years of keeping three lives running on my own is screaming at me to turn around and walk out of this office and never come back.
I should go home and run the calculator again and figure it out the way I always figure it out — alone, exhausted, one dollar at a time, held together with duct tape and fury.
But Tomás's shoe is split open. He stuffed a napkin in it so I would not worry.
Marisol borrows a calculator from a girl named Dakota every morning and swallows her pride like a pill and I can see it sticking in her throat.
The electric bill is nine days past due and the shutoff notice is in the kitchen drawer and every night I open that drawer for a fork and feel the paper underneath the takeout menus like a bruise I keep pressing.
A hundred and eighty dollars a session for a therapist who might help my ten-year-old brother stop thinking he is dying on bathroom floors.
My mother said I love you on a Tuesday. She kissed Tomas on the forehead and braided Marisol’s hair. Told me she was proud of me. Then she vanished - between a Tuesday and a Wednesday. Left me holding everything.
I am not my mother. I do not leave. I do not vanish.
I stay and I pay. I do whatever it takes.
And if whatever it takes is standing in a back office at midnight, letting a man with green eyes and a dead father’s watch off to solve every problem in my life in exchange for my body — then I do the math.
The math wins. The math always wins.
"I have conditions," I say.
He straightens. Something sharpens behind his eyes — focus, interest, the recognition that I am not refusing.
"Name them."
"My siblings are off-limits. You do not meet them. You do not ask about them. They are mine."
"Done."
"You do not come to my apartment. Ever. This stays in your world, on your side of the city, in your spaces. You do not show up where I live."
"Done."
"If I say it's over, it's over. No negotiation. No argument. I walk and you let me walk and the money stops and that is the end of it."
A beat. His throat works on a swallow. "Done."
"And this changes nothing about who I am to you. I am not your girlfriend. I am not your woman. I do not owe you conversation, or comfort, or anything beyond what we agree to in this room right now."
He holds my gaze. The charm is gone. The performance is gone. Whatever is looking at me from behind those green eyes is raw and honest and it terrifies me more than any contract or arrangement ever could.
"No feelings," he says.
"No feelings," I say.
The word sits between us like a lit match on a gasoline floor.
"Deal," I say.
"Deal."
My voice is steady. My hands are fists inside my jacket pockets and my nails are cutting crescents into my palms and my pulse is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
But my voice is steady. That is the part that matters.
The First Collision
Neither of us moves.
The word deal is still hanging in the air between us and we are standing six inches apart and I can feel the heat coming off his body through the gap like a furnace with the door cracked.
My pulse is in my throat. My fists are still clenched inside my pockets.
Every rational thought I own is telling me to step back, to leave, to go home and count my money and pretend I did not just sell something I cannot name to a man I do not know.
He lifts his hand.
Slow. So slow I can track every inch of the movement.
His fingers reach my chin and the touch is gentle — devastatingly, impossibly gentle — the pad of his thumb tracing my jawline like he is learning the architecture of my face by feel.
It contradicts every clinical word he just spoke.
Every transactional clause. Every wall he built with exclusivity and arrangement and no feelings.
This touch has feelings in it. This touch is drowning in them.
"Tell me to stop," he says. His voice is wrecked. Low and scraped raw, nothing like the rehearsed pitch he gave me sixty seconds ago. This is underneath. This is the thing he was trying to bury with contracts and conditions and it is clawing its way out through his fingertips.
I should tell him to stop. I should enforce the terms before the ink is dry. I should remind him — remind us both — that this is a transaction and transactions do not start with a man's hand trembling against your face.
His thumb drags across my bottom lip. My breath catches. I feel it in my spine — a bolt of heat that drops from the base of my skull straight through my center and lands between my hips like a fist closing.
I do not tell him to stop.
His mouth is on mine before the silence finishes answering for me.
And it is nothing like I expected — nothing polished, nothing practiced, nothing like the smooth operator in the rolled sleeves and the inherited watch.
His kiss is desperate. Bruising. His hand slides from my chin to the back of my neck and he grips my hair at the root and pulls and a sound comes out of me that I have never made in my life.
He swallows it. Drinks it straight from my mouth. Presses me backward until my shoulder blades hit the office door and the lock rattles. His other hand finds my hip, grips hard enough to print bruises through the denim.
"Fuck," he breathes against my lips. "Fuck. I was not supposed to—"
"Shut up."
I grab his collar with both hands and pull him back into me.
My shoulders hit the office door again with a thud that rattles the frame, and the impact knocks the breath from me.
But I don't stop. I can't. "Fuck," he breathes against my mouth.
His hand slides from my hip to the small of my back, pressing me flush against him.
I can feel the hard length of him through the tailored fabric of his pants, and my cunt clenches in response—sudden, vicious, demanding.
I bite his lip.
He groans—low, guttural, wrecked—and his grip tightens. "Nova."
My name in his mouth sounds like a wound.
I'm burning. Eighteen months of survival mode, of numb efficiency, of treating my body like a tool—and now I'm on fire.
His hands find the zipper at the back of my outfit, dragging it down with a sound that cuts through the hum of the fluorescent lights.
Cool air hits my spine, then his palm—hot, rough, possessive—spreading across my exposed skin.
"I called you in here to negotiate," he says, his breath hot against my neck. His teeth graze my collarbone, and my back arches off the door. "Now look at you."
I don't have a response. My brain is static. My body is running the show now, and it wants things I haven't let myself want in years.
My hands shove his jacket off his shoulders. It hits the floor with a soft thump. I'm already reaching for the buttons of his shirt, fingers clumsy with urgency, and he lets me—watches me with glittering eyes as I expose the lean muscle of his chest, the faint trail of hair below his navel.
"Slow down," he says, but his voice betrays him. It's ragged. Frayed.
"No."
I grab his belt, pull him into me, and the friction against my aching clit makes me whimper. His hand shoots up, fingers wrapping around my throat—not squeezing, just holding. A warning. A promise.
"Who's in charge here?" he asks.
I answer by grabbing his wrist, dragging his hand from my throat down to the waistband of my thong. His fingers slip beneath the fabric, and the sound he makes when he finds me—soaked, swollen, desperate—is almost violent.
"Nova. You're dripping."
"I know."