Chapter 7
Sloane
I turn the tablet face-down like that fixes anything. It does not.
The wall’s supposed to be up. I rebuilt it on the rooftop two hours ago, brick by brick, in front of him — three years and one charming athlete and a whole career of people who only ever wanted the version of me that performs fine.
Lucas wanted that version most. Got it on record, too, the one time I forgot to keep it up.
I don’t think about Lucas. I have a rule.
The rule is load-bearing and tonight it’s holding about as well as the wall.
Which is to say: not.
I draft a text. We should debrief the rooftop content before tomorrow. A lie in eight words, and I’d know — I write lies for a living. Delete.
Here’s the thing about me. I book a meeting when I feel something. I have never once walked toward the thing instead of away from it, and I’m aware — fully, in real time — that I’m about to.
I get out of bed anyway. Recon, I tell myself, barefoot, in a sleep shirt, fooling no one.
Four doors. Three. I knock before the smart half of me files an objection.
***
He opens it like he was standing on the other side. Sweatpants, no shirt, hair a mess — the tired version, not the one that sells jerseys. The grin starts on reflex, then he sees it’s me and it falls off his face and gets replaced by something with no performance in it at all.
“Sloane.” Not a statement. A question he doesn’t know the answer to.
“Recon,” I say, and step past him, because if I keep moving I don’t have to look at the face.
“There’s no lens up here.”
“I know exactly what that means.” I turn. “I want to be sure you do.”
“Then say it.” He doesn’t move off the door. Gives me the room the way he gave me his hand on the roof — all the space in the world to leave. “I’ll hear it.”
The six cutting sentences die. A man who could have anyone, leaning on a door at midnight, refusing to make the choice for me.
“I want in,” I say. “I want this to not be for anyone. I want to stop pretending I don’t.”
“Okay.” He pushes off the door.
I close it. Me. On the record.
I get a fist in his sweatpants, knuckles dragging the hard ridge of him, and pull his mouth down to mine, and the kiss isn’t careful — three years of careful breaking at once — and he makes a sound into my mouth like I startled it loose.
Spearmint. The gum I handed him across a breadbasket four days ago, which he has apparently been buying for himself since.
His hands fly to my waist, grab the hem of my shirt, and in the scramble his elbow catches me square in the ribs.
The breath goes out of me. “—the hell—” and then I’m laughing, the ugly startled kind, because the golden boy just winded me trying to get my shirt off.
“Shit — sorry, are you okay, I—”
“I’m fine.” Wheezing. Not seductive. Don’t care.
The blush goes up his neck and keeps going. “I had a plan,” he says into his palms. “There were steps, Sloane. A humiliating number of steps.”
“Step one being—”
“‘Be cool.’ We are so far past step one.”
I haul him toward the bed and we go down in a heap, no grace to it, his knee landing between mine, mine nearly catching him somewhere worse. “Careful—” “sorry, sorry—” and we’re both half-laughing into it already.
I get my hand down his sweatpants and he’s already hard, and I close my fingers around him — hot, thick, the weight of him filling my palm — and the first thing out of my mouth isn’t a line, it’s just, “Jesus, Carter.” Blunt.
A little alarmed. My thumb doesn’t quite meet my fingers around him and I don’t think anything clever.
I just want it. Want it in me, now, the wanting so loud it drowns everything else out.
He bucks into my hand. “Okay — hi — okay, that’s—”
“Hi?”
“You took the words, I had words—”
I stroke him, slow, base to the wet tip and back, and whatever he was saying cuts off into a groan.
I do it again just to feel his stomach jump, just to hear the broken sound he makes, and a third time, watching his face the whole way, because I did that, I’m the one undoing the most composed man in any room, and there is nothing in three years that has felt this good.
I’m greedy about it. Clumsy, too eager, grip wrong until I fix it, and I do not care.
He’s trying to get my shirt off at the same time and it snags on my earring.
I yelp; he freezes — “did I—” — “it’s my earring, hang on—” and I have to stop, half-undone, to unhook an earring from my own collar while a naked winger waits, and we both lose it, and somehow that’s hotter than if it had gone smooth.
Shirt gone. I reach back and the bra goes too. He stops doing anything else and just looks.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“I’m absolutely staring.”
It does something low in my belly, the looking. More than his hands.
Then he uses the hands. He cups me first, both of them, holds the weight like he’s been wondering about it, and drags his thumbs slow across my nipples until they tighten and I have to bite down on the sound.
His mouth follows. Not fast. He takes one in his mouth and works it slow, his tongue flat then teasing, and I get a fistful of his hair and hold him there, and he hums against my skin like he’s got all night and intends to use it.
“Tell me if it’s too much,” he says, against me, and doesn’t wait for an answer he can already feel.
His hand starts down. Slow. Over my ribs, the dip of my waist, the flat of my stomach — unhurried, mapping it, like there’s no part of this he’s in a rush to get past. He hesitates at the top of my thigh.
Just hesitates, his fingers right there, not yet, and the not-yet is its own kind of unbearable.
“Carter.”
“I know.” He still doesn’t hurry. He strokes the inside of my thigh, the crease of it, everywhere but where I want him, until I’m pushing up into nothing, and only then does he move his hand the last inch and find me.
I’m so wet his fingers slide. The noise I make is frankly libel.
He circles slow, learning it — too light, then exactly right when I gasp, then keeping it exactly there because he felt the gasp.
One finger, then two, pressing up, his thumb working me, his mouth back at my breast, and there are too many places he’s touching me at once and every one of them is unhurried and sure, and I am coming apart in increments, on his hand, in his bed, with nowhere to be.
He pulls his hand back and licks his fingers clean, slow, watching me the whole time.
“God.” I can’t believe how wet that makes me. I get both hands on his cock and he groans into my skin like it hurts.
“Sloane — four minutes, that’s the real number, if you keep—”
“Lie down.”
“That’s not—”
“Lie down, Reinhardt.” He goes. Of course he goes.
I can’t get the foil open. My hands won’t work, they’re shaking, and I’m not asking for help, so I get it in my teeth and tear, and he watches me do it with his mouth open like I’ve performed a magic trick.
“Okay, that was the single hottest thing I’ve ever—” He props up on his elbows, fully invested now, the way he is about set pieces. “Pinch the tip, there’s a whole—”
“I know how to put on a condom.”
“This is a team sport, Sloane, you’ve gone rogue—” and I get it on him slightly wrong and have to roll it back and start over, and he makes a small wounded sound, and now we are two grown adults — one of us the head of communications for a professional franchise — wrestling over the correct deployment of a condom at midnight.
“The boys have a long season ahead,” he says gravely. “I need them at full—”
“If you call your testicles ‘the boys’ one more time I am leaving this hotel.”
“I didn’t say testicles, you said testicles, that’s on the record—” and he’s grinning so wide it’s split his whole face open, the helpless real one, no jersey in it, and I’m fighting my own mouth because the last thing I will give him is the laugh.
He sees me fighting it. Worse. “There it is. The lip thing. You do it in pressers right before you destroy someone—”
“I do not have a lip thing.”
“You have a tell, Vega. I’ve had a file on it since Wednesday.”
“You have a file—”
“Everyone in comms has a file, you taught me that,” and I lose it — one ugly bark of a laugh, hand over my mouth — and he throws both fists up like he’s scored at the death, silent knee-slide energy, flat on his back with his cock out, and it is the stupidest thing I have ever seen and I want to climb him like a tree.
“Are you finished.”
“So far past finished. That’s the whole problem.”
I line him up. The drag of him makes us both go still, the laugh dying into something with weight.
Then down, slow. There’s a lot of him, and I take him an inch at a time.
Halfway, my knee skids on the duvet and I grab his shoulder. “Smooth,” I mutter.
“I’ve got you.” And his hand comes to my hip, easy, like it’s nothing. He doesn’t push. He lets me take the rest at my own pace.
Oh — oh, fuck —
Too much, for a second — the stretch, the burn of it — and I freeze, full of him, my thighs shaking, and a sound comes out of me I’ve never made. His hands grab my hips. “You okay—”
“Don’t move.” I can’t talk. I’m so full I can feel my own pulse around him. “Don’t — okay. Okay.” And I move.
And it’s — God — it’s so good I forget to be anything, I ride him, chasing it, his hands on my hips and his head back and his throat working, and I get a hand flat on his chest and tip forward for the angle and there, there, and I’m gasping, I’m loud, I don’t recognize the noises, I want more, harder, I want—
“Are you giving me notes.”
“Shut—” I’m laughing, I can’t help it, scarlet, still moving, “—shut up, it’s working, don’t you dare stop—”
and he doesn’t, he’s laughing too and snapping up into me and it’s perfect, it’s so close, the coil pulling tight and tighter and I’m right there, I’m right there—
and it’s gone.
Just — gone. Like a hand closed over it. One second I’m climbing and the next there’s nothing to climb, my body’s a locked door, and I keep moving because maybe, maybe if I just—
Nothing.
“Hey.” He’s slowing under me. “You good?”