Chapter 15
Sloane
I know the inventory of him by now the way I know my own files. The wattage. The gum.
The grin loaded a beat before anyone needs it. The trick where he asks the room a question so no one gets a turn to ask him one. I have catalogued all of it, color-coded it, run the risk column on every line.
What’s against the wall right now is none of it. It’s just a man with the lights off behind his face, too spent to run a single one of his systems — and the part that stops me in the corridor is that he hasn’t clocked me yet, which means this is the version nobody’s meant to get.
My instinct, the trained one, eleven years deep, is to manage it. Assess, triage, produce the efficient sentence that moves him from the corridor to his room with the least friction and nothing logged. I have the sentence ready. Long day.
Car’s downstairs. Go up — I’ll handle the wrap. Clean. Useful.
The exact species of help that holds a person at arm’s length while appearing to close the distance. I am extremely good at that sentence. I’ve used it on everyone I’ve ever almost let in.
I don’t say it.
Instead I do a thing I have no procedure for — the thing he did for me at a sponsor dinner a lifetime ago, when he set a plate in front of me and asked for nothing in return.
I go and stand against the wall next to him, on the side his sore shoulder isn’t, and I don’t say anything, and I don’t make him open his eyes, and I let the quiet be a place he gets to stand in instead of a problem I’m being paid to solve.
He knows it’s me without looking. “You’re about to tell me the car’s downstairs,” he says, eyes still shut.
“It’s. I’m choosing not to be useful about it.”
A breath that’s almost a laugh. “Bold. Out of character.”
“I’m aware.”
Here’s the most off-script hour of my professional life. I take the things off him that he’s too tired to keep holding — not the metaphor, the actual things. The lanyard he’s still wearing.
The room key he keeps patting his pocket to confirm. The phone buzzing itself off the table of his attention with people who want the bright one for thirty more seconds. I field all of it, the way he fields things before I have to find them out.
I tell the function room he’s done for the night.
I tell the two staffers circling for one more photo that the photo is tomorrow, in a voice that makes tomorrow sound non-negotiable, because it is.
I move the obstacles out of a tired man’s path the way somebody once moved them out of mine, on a night I was too proud to say I needed it.
It costs me something I’ll itemize later — the specific discomfort of being the one who tends instead of the one who’s tended, of doing the caring out loud, where it can be seen and counted, instead of filing it somewhere it can’t be used against me.
He opens his eyes when there’s nothing left in front of him to carry. Looks at the small cleared space I’ve made where the demands were standing a minute ago.
“You just ran interference for me,” he says.
“I ran logistics. Don’t make it a thing.”
“You ran interference.” The ghost of the real grin, the off-performance one I caught in a greenroom once and have been chasing the truth of ever since. “Red. You took the heavy end.”
I don’t know, yet, why those three words do something to his face that the exhaustion didn’t.
The heavy end. He says them carefully, the way you say words that belong to someone else, that you’re only borrowing — and I file the reaction precisely, without forcing the lock — the way you put away a thing you can’t open yet.
There’s a locked room in this man. I’ve known it for weeks.
I’m not going to pick it. He’ll hand me the key or he won’t, and either way the not-picking is the only gift I’ve got that’s worth anything.
“Go to bed,” I tell him. “The car’s still downstairs. I’m still not going to be useful about it.”
“You’re being alarmingly useful. I’m going to lie awake worrying about you.”
“Worry on your own time. Don’t bill me for it.”
He goes. He makes it three steps and turns around — of course he does — and looks at me standing in the cleared space like he’s trying to log me this time, get me down accurately before I move.
“Thank you for the part where you didn’t fix anything,” he says.
“That’s the part nobody knows how to do. ”
“I had a good teacher,” I say, before I can decide whether to.
And then he doesn’t leave.
That’s the trouble. He should leave — the exit is right there, the night is over, I handed him a clean one — and instead he comes back the three steps, and the corridor stops being a place I’m managing.
He’s close now. Too close for logistics.
The exhaustion didn’t take the want out of him; it just stripped the performance off it, so what’s left is the plain unhidden fact of it, at midnight, with no sheet and no camera and no one to perform for.
His eyes drop to my mouth. Mine have nowhere safe to land.
We did this once. That’s the whole problem. We both know exactly what we’re not having, and the not-having has a temperature now, and it’s climbing.
I break first. I always do. The smallest tilt of my head toward the function room behind me — dark, cleared, mine; I’m the one who emptied it — and he pushes off the wall and follows, neither of us saying a word, my heels sharp on the floor against the scuff of his trainers, two people walking very calmly toward a catastrophe.
The door shuts behind us. I get a fist in his shirt and put his back against it.
“This is a catastrophic idea,” I tell him, already going to my knees.
“The worst.” He’s watching me with his head tipped back against the door, breathing like he’s been subbed on in extra time. “Genuinely your worst idea to date. Please don’t stop having it.”
I get his belt open. Get him out. And then I do pause — not from nerves; I don’t get nerves — but from the plain professional duty of assessing a problem before I take it on. I look at exactly what I’ve volunteered for.
“This is a logistical concern,” I say.
A broken laugh punches out of him. “That is the single nicest—”
“I assess risk for a living, Reinhardt. I’m assessing.
” But I’m already leaning in, already done deciding, because the truth I am not entering into any record is that I have wanted my mouth on him since a hotel four doors and one bad decision ago, and the wanting has been living in the same drawer as the sentence I won’t say, getting louder every day I don’t open it.
I take him in my mouth and the sound he makes is not one the golden boy is allowed to make in public.
He’s thick, thicker than my hand remembered, and I take him as deep as I can on the first pass just to feel him hit the back of my throat and hear what it does to him.
The vein on the underside drags against my tongue.
He’s clean — showered after the match, shaved, the skin of him smooth and hot, and he smells like soap and salt and the spearmint that’s going to wreck me in conference rooms for the rest of my life.
I pull off to the tip, spit on him, work it down the length of him with my fist, and the sight of my own saliva slicking his cock in the dark of a room I cleared for sponsors does something to me I’d need a new column to file.
Then I take him again, sloppier this time, on purpose.
I want it messy. I want the wet, obscene sound of it, the slurp of pulling off and going back down, spit sliding down his shaft to my knuckles where I’m working what won’t fit.
I drag my tongue under the head, suck him in slow, let him feel the flat of it and the soft of my throat, and his cock jumps against my tongue — a helpless twitch he can’t control, the most honest thing this controlled man has ever given me.
His balls draw up tight under my other hand.
His hips give a little jerk before he catches them.
I relax my throat and take him all the way down, until my nose is in the hair at his base and he’s buried as deep as he goes, and I hold him there and swallow around him and feel him throb against the back of my throat, and the sound he makes is one I will be hearing in dull meetings for the rest of my life.
His hand finds my hair — not steering, never steering — and tugs the neat knot of it loose, so it spills down over his knuckles, and there’s something about him taking my hair down, undoing the one part of me that’s always pinned, that makes me moan around him.
He’s talking, because he can’t not, half of it filthy and half of it so undefended it’s worse than the filthy: my name, and God, and look at you, look at you doing that, and I have thought about your mouth so much it’s a problem.
Somewhere in the dark I knock a chair and it scrapes and we both go still for a moment and then I do not stop, I go back down with my eyes on his face, because the risk of the scrape just made it better and we both know it.
And I get to do the one thing I never get to do — take this careful, controlled, endlessly-giving man and unmake him, slow, wet, on my clock, for once.
“Sloane—” His voice has gone to gravel. “Sloane, you have to— I’m— I’m going to, you have to tell me if you—”
Even now. Even gone, hips locked rigid trying not to move, he is still trying to give me the out, still trying to be considerate with my mouth full of him, still leaving me the choice — and it is the single most Carter thing he has ever done and it nearly takes me over the edge with him—
And the door shoves against his back.
A knock. Then the handle. Then Priya’s voice, bright and oblivious, three feet away through two inches of wood: “Carter? They said you came this way — we need you for the sponsor good-night, ninety seconds, where are you—”
We go to stone.
His hand goes still in my hair. My own pulse is suddenly very loud.
Two people who have spent entire careers being unflappable, frozen in a dark room a yard from the one person who could end us both, and the only thing moving in the world is the frantic throb of him against my tongue — right there, an inch from the thing we now do not get to have.
“One sec, Priya,” he calls, in a voice I would not have believed he could manufacture. “Tying my shoe.”
“You don’t wear laces,” she says, fond, already moving off. “Weirdo. Ninety seconds.”
Her heels click away down the corridor. Neither of us breathes until they’re gone.
I pull off him slow, and the noise he makes at losing my mouth is the most gratifying thing that has happened to me all month.
I sit back on my heels and look up at a man who is flushed and painfully, visibly unfinished, his head against the door, his chest going like he ran the length of the pitch, looking down at me like I have personally rearranged his understanding of physics and also wrecked his entire night.
“You’re killing me,” he says.
“The job’s killing you. I’m just here.” I get up.
My knees file a complaint. I put him away — gently; I’m not a monster — and zip him back into the version of himself the sponsor is expecting downstairs, and the unfairness of that, of being the one who reassembles him for the machine ninety seconds after this, lands somewhere I will deal with later.
“Go,” I tell him. “Be the bright one.”
“I genuinely cannot walk.”
“You’re a professional athlete.”
“I’m a man, Sloane, there are limits—”
“Ninety seconds.” I straighten his collar, which is the cruelest thing I do all night. “For the record — that was a point to me. The biggest one yet.”
He looks at me, laughing and in real physical distress at once. “I am going to think about that for the rest of my natural life.”
“Good,” I say, before I can stop myself — and we both hear it, the good, the want sitting in it with absolutely nowhere to go — and then I open the door and walk him back out into the campaign, both of us aching, neither of us finished, and that turns out to be the thing I won’t be able to log either.
I should log it. The hour, the breach of every protocol I’ve ever written, the fact that the most disciplined woman in the league just went to her knees for the enemy in a function room she cleared herself.
The readings. The cost. I have logged my whole life into safety, one timestamp at a time, and this is precisely the kind of thing the record exists to catch before it can catch me.
I take out my phone.
I put it back in my pocket without writing a word.
That’s the part that should frighten me more than any of the rest of it.
Not that I did it. That I’m not going to write it down — that the record I built to keep me safe is developing holes in exactly the shape of him, and I am the woman who built the record, and I am not, it turns out, going to be the one who patches it.
I’m still aching when I reach my car. Drive home that way. Don’t fix that either.