7. Chapter 6 #2
This was the problem, and it was also the thing I could not stop thinking about. Every negotiation I had ever won came down to understanding what the other party wanted and finding the leverage to deliver or deny it.
With Liv, I had the information. I knew about her debt. I knew about her sister. I knew about the fear that lived underneath her competence, the same fear that made her sign the conduct agreement without blinking and keep her own money in her own account and refuse every form of help I offered.
She wanted to trust someone. She was terrified to trust anyone.
I understood this. I had lived some version of it since the day I watched my wife's monitors flatline.
The difference was that I had built walls made of money and security protocols and contingency plans. Liv's walls were made of sarcasm and independence and the certainty that anyone with more power than her would eventually use it against her.
I had more power than her.
This was the fact I kept returning to, the one that made the conduct agreement feel less like a boundary and more like a trap.
She worked in my house. She cared for my daughter.
She depended on me for a paycheck she needed.
Every time I touched her, every time I stood too close in my kitchen, I was leveraging an imbalance she had not chosen.
The right thing to do was maintain the boundary.
The right thing to do was let her finish her temporary arrangement, find a permanent nanny, and return to the careful distance of customer and bartender.
The right thing to do was not grab her wrist in my kitchen and hold on like she was the only thing keeping me anchored to something I could not name.
I put my phone on the nightstand and turned off the light.
Sleep did not come easily.
I shouldn't be thinking about her. But the dark has made liars of better men than me, and alone in bed, sheets cool against my skin and the house gone quiet, I gave up the fight. Let her in.
Coming back to me in pieces—the moment in the kitchen when I'd caught her wrist to stop her from leaving, a reflex before my better judgment could intervene.
The shock of contact. She'd gone very still, the way a caught thing goes still.
The thrum of her pulse against my fingertips, frantic and quick, betraying everything her cool expression denied.
She wanted me too. The knowledge had nearly undone me then. It undid me now.
I didn't talk myself out of it. I was already hard, aching with it, my hand sliding beneath the waistband. I wrapped my hand around my cock and gave her to myself the only way I could.
Her fingers. That was what I imagined first. Not some faceless warmth but hers specifically. Her grip would be tentative at first. Then not. She'd learn what I liked and she'd use it against me, because that's who she is, and the thought of it made my breath catch.
I stroked myself slowly, working through the fantasy with a focus that felt almost punishing.
Thumb dragging over my wet tip, jaw tight, picturing her watching me with those careful eyes gone dark.
How she'd take me—the give of her skin, the weight of her, the specific sound she'd make when I pushed inside her.
I've imagined it enough to have an entire inventory of her.
The small gasp first, then the exhale, then her head tipping back like surrender had finally stopped costing her something.
The thought undid what little patience I had left.
My breathing roughened. I moved faster, fist tight, the sheets twisted, whole body working toward the phantom of her wrapped around me. I let myself have all of it—the press of her mouth, her voice in my ear, the fictional world where she'd stopped locking that door and let me through it.
Say my name, the fantasy version of her whispered, and that was the end of me.
I came hard, hips jerking, spilling over my knuckles with her name caught silent behind my teeth.
After, the ceiling stared back. My pulse counted itself down from something ragged to something that only ached.
Sleep, when it finally came, was an act of mercy.
I woke at two forty-seven. I lay on top of the covers for ninety seconds, waiting for sleep to reassert itself, and when it did not, I reached for my phone.
Marcus’s memo was still unread in my inbox. I had been avoiding it the way I avoided things I already knew the answer to. I opened it now.
The memo was eight paragraphs. The first five were about the government contract review and the stability clause and the legal team’s assessment of risk. I had read those before.
The last three were new. Marcus had attached an invitation: the National Cybersecurity Summit, in three days. Black tie, three hundred of the most connected people in technology and government in one room for one evening.
His note beneath the attachment read: The committee members who matter will be there. Three of them have publicly questioned your social stability in the past quarter. Attending alone reinforces the narrative. I strongly recommend a plus-one.
A plus-one. Marcus meant someone appropriate. Someone from the right circles, with the right background, who would photograph well and answer questions smoothly and give the committee members their narrative of a stable, grounded man who had rebuilt his life after loss.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling until it was light.