Chapter 7 #3
And I want him again. Immediately. But different now — no edge to climb to and fall off, no corner to watch from, just want, clean want, the kind I forgot came without a catch.
I push him onto his back and climb over him and take him in, and this time I don’t go anywhere. I stay. I watch him watch me.
“Hi,” he says, stupidly, undone, like the first time at the door, and something in my chest just — gives.
I don’t have armor for slow. I have armor for everything — the cutting line, the exit, the cold — but not for this, not for a man looking up at me like I hung the hotel ceiling while I move on him in the dark, and I hear myself say a true thing in a voice with nothing on it, no dryness, no defense: “I didn’t know it could be like this.
” Plain. Embarrassing. The most undefended sentence I own. “I forgot. Or I never—”
“I know,” he says, soft, and doesn’t make me finish it, just gets a hand into my hair and pulls me down.
And then it’s not slow. It’s deep and graceless and greedy, the headboard knocking the wall, my hand splayed on his chest over his hammering heart, both of us done being careful.
He’s saying my name like it’s the only word he kept.
I’m taking him hard, chasing it, no part of me up in any rafters because there are no rafters, there’s just this, just the slick heat of it and his hands gripping my hips and the sounds I’m making that I’d die before a room ever heard.
I built a column for you, I say into his mouth, ruined for composure, the worst best thing either of us has put in a bed, and he laughs and it breaks in the middle.
“You’re going to end my whole career,” he says against my throat, hips driving up to meet me, “and I’ve never wanted anything more—”
Closest he gets to the real sentence. Swaps the filthy one in at the last second, the way he always does — the way I now know means the opposite of filthy.
He gets a thumb between us and works me and I’m already gone, already open, and I go over a second time with my eyes open, watching his face come apart, and I don’t leave, not once, not even at the end.
He follows a stroke behind, buried deep, shaking, my name the only thing left in his mouth.
***
After, he rolls us so I’m on his chest and reaches up and does something I’ve never once seen him do in four days of cameras: closes his hand around a thin chain at his throat, a little worn boot charm I never clocked, holds it a second like he’s checking it’s there, then catches himself and lets it go.
I notice everything. It’s my whole job. I’ve never seen that.
I don’t ask. He showed me the rest tonight; he can keep one thing.
He leans over to the mini-fridge instead, cracks a water, hands it to me. “Hydration’s important,” he says, grinning like a complete idiot — the idiot back so fast it’s almost cover. I let him have it. I patented that move.
I drink half in one go. He doesn’t fill the quiet — the one charming man alive who can sit in it — and his hand goes slow up my spine, no agenda, just there.
“You’re not what the brief said,” I tell the dark.
“The brief said manageable.” A laugh he keeps quiet. “You wrote that.”
“I’m revising it.” Half a second. “What was step one again.”
“Be cool.”
“Tragic.”
“I know.” I feel him smile against the top of my head. “To what?”
He doesn’t push. A man who never makes you account for yourself is a man you tell things to, which is the most dangerous thing about him and I’ll think hard about it tomorrow. Tonight I say the smaller one into his chest, where nobody can frame it. “Unmanageable.”
Then my phone buzzes and throws blue across the ceiling. A calendar reminder — Joss’s words, my own thumbs, from an hour I don’t remember agreeing to.
7:30 REMOTE — joint segment. “The couple who spent the night in the same hotel.” One love seat. Be warm, be sleepy, be in love. — Priya
The couple who spent the night in the same hotel.
We did. And there it is, the thing that closes my throat in the blue light: the lie isn’t a lie anymore.
In seven hours I have to go on live television and sell, as a manufactured stunt, the one true thing I’ve done in three years — the exact thing I just spent all night learning how to not perform.
He props up on an elbow. The hopeful look is back, more dangerous than any grin he owns.
“Fake it with me tomorrow?” Soft.
“Go to hell.” But I’m already building it — the love seat, the warm, the sleepy — already drafting how to sell the realest thing I’ve got, and he hears all of it in the two seconds before I say the rest. “Now move over. You run hot and I’m not sleeping on the wet side.”
“You’re staying.” Careful. Like it might spook.
“Don’t make it a speech.” I put my back to him and his arm comes around me like it was always going to, and I let it. That’s the irrational one — the one I’ll never explain to Joss, to Marcus, to the woman who built the wall twice and knows exactly how. Not the sex.
That I fall asleep on the enemy’s chest at 2 a.m. like it’s somewhere I’m allowed to be.