Chapter 8 The Roster #2
“That’s not, you can’t just,” she panted, scarlet, outraged, her hips still tilting up after a hand that wasn’t there. “I was being good. I had my hands on the shelf. I held still, mostly, define still…”
“You moved.”
“I breathed.”
“You moved.” I laid two fingers back against her, just resting, no rhythm at all, and watched her fight not to grind down onto them, and watched her lose, and took them away the instant she did.
“Every time you chase it, it stops. Every time you wait, it comes back. You’re the cleverest person in this building. Work out the rule.”
She thumped her head back against the shelves and made a low strangled sound, because she had worked it out, and she hated it, and underneath hating it she was undone by how badly she wanted to pass.
“You’re making me wait,” she breathed, and the word did the same thing to her face it had done at the counter, the brat hearing the promise folded inside the denial. “You absolute. You’re doing the no again. You’re doing it with your hands now.”
“I’m doing it with my hands now,” I agreed.
And then she went still. Deliberately, gorgeously still, hands flat on the shelf, hips held down off my touch by sheer furious will, every freckle blazing, her breath shaking through her teeth, because she’d cracked the rule and decided to win the test if it killed her.
Holding her own composure with nothing ringing, no guest at the desk, no excuse for it at all except that I’d asked her to and she’d decided to give it to me, which I understood was the rarest thing she owned and the hardest for her to hand over.
“Good girl,” I said, and meant it, and watched the words land harder than any touch had.
Then I gave her back exactly what the stillness had earned.
I went to her slow, two fingers sinking deep and the heel of my palm riding her clit, and built her up a third time, watching her face come apart, the blush blazing down her freckled chest, her hips grinding shamelessly down onto my hand now, fucking herself on my fingers, all the heckling gone, just a breathless string of yes, yes, there, please, please don’t, please, her cunt clenching tight and wet around me, and right at the edge, right as her body started to tip and clamp, I stopped.
Pulled my fingers out of her. And held her there, empty, on the brink, shaking, while she made a sound of such pure betrayed outrage that I had to bite down on a laugh.
I kissed her forehead.
“Your turn’s held,” I said, against her hair, while she vibrated against the shelves, ruined and furious.
“I’m holding it on purpose, not taking it from you.
You’ll get it asked-for and earned, not blackmailed, and you’ll get all of it, every bit you’ve been demanding, when it’s your turn.
Tonight you found out I mean my no. That you can push as hard as you like and the fence holds.
That’s the lesson, and I think it’s the one nobody’s ever taught you. ”
She stared at me, chest heaving, and the fury thinned to show the thing under the brat, the old hurt that the fence holding actually answered.
“You absolute,” she breathed, and couldn’t finish it, because it wasn’t an insult anymore.
She made a sound of pure outrage and pure delight, cursing me in both dialects, sliding down the shelves to sit on the key-room floor, flushed and furious and grinning ear to ear.
“You unbelievable,” she said, “you absolute monster, I am going to renegotiate this. Define turn. Define soon. I want SLAs, Keller, written ones, with penalties, you’ve started something and I am going to bury you in paperwork.
” But she was laughing, and her eyes were shining, and something in her had unclenched that I don’t think had unclenched in five years.
She buttoned the cardigan back up herself, badly, and went to the desk, and without a word she took the folder of evidence she’d built, the slips and the logs and the case, and fed it page by page into the shredder by her chair, unprompted, while I watched.
“There,” she said, when it was confetti. “No leverage. Now when I get my turn it’s because I’m worth scheduling. You smug.” She glared at me, fond. “Get out of my hall, it’s after midnight, I have a desk to run.”
I got nearly to the stairs before she called after me, in a different voice, lower, the gatekeeper voice.
“Adam.”
I turned.
She had a single old page in her hand, yellowed, separate from the rest, separate from her own shredded blackmail file entirely.
She hadn’t shredded it. She held it up just far enough that I could see it was a registry page, old, Falk-era, the paper gone soft and brown at the edges, and not far enough that I could read it.
“There’s a name on this,” she said, quietly, no joke anywhere in her now, the fire-alarm mouth gone all the way to the vault she kept under it.
“From the archive. From years back, before my time, before most people’s time.
A guest. From when Henrik was the donor and there was a different name over the office door.
” She looked at the page, then at me, and her quick green eyes went careful, and a little frightened.
“I found it months ago, doing an archive audit nobody asked for because I get bored, and I have not slept entirely right since, and I’ve never breathed a word of it to a living soul.
It’d make your head spin, Adam. It would make your head come clean off.
” She tapped the folded page against her palm, once.
“I’m not going to tell you whose. Not tonight.
Maybe not ever. There’s knowing a thing and there’s spending it, and some secrets, you only get to spend once, and you’d better be very sure it’s worth what it costs the person it belongs to.
” She folded it, careful, along its old creases, and slid it into her cardigan pocket and patted it once, gentle, the pocket where she kept the things that mattered.
“Goodnight, Hausquelle. You held your line tonight. I’m going to be insufferable about it for weeks, just so you’re prepared. ”
She thumbed the desk lamp to its lowest notch, the office sinking to the amber of one bulb.