Chapter 9 The Underlined Rule #2
“Amend it,” I said.
Her dark eyes searched mine, furious, wanting, the control and the wanting at war across that half inch.
She kissed me. Hard, furious about it, prosecuting the kiss like a breach she’d decided to commit herself, her hand coming back to fist in my hair to hold me there, and the careful scene fell apart at once.
I took her harder against the glass, fucking up into her now, the pane shuddering in its frame, her full breasts flattening and squeaking against the cold glass with every thrust, and hauled one of her long legs up over my forearm to spread her open, to get deeper, and she went up onto the toes of the other foot and took it, took every stroke, my cock driving into her as deep as I could drive.
“There,” she breathed into my mouth, the contract cadence gone to velvet and then to nothing.
“God, like that, harder, I don’t, I don’t care about the…
” and she kissed me again to stop the sentence, and again, breaking her own rule over and over like she couldn’t stop killing it, saying things between the kisses she would have fired an employee for saying in a meeting.
And then, for one absurd beat, the machine tried to reboot.
She pulled her mouth a half-inch off mine, got the level managerial voice back into something like working order, and informed me, bone-dry, breath ragged, “This remains within the agreed scope of the engagement,” reasserting jurisdiction over a thing that had left her jurisdiction entirely two minutes ago, and then ruined the performance by hauling me back to her mouth before the sentence had finished cooling.
It was the last complete sentence she had in her.
She came with her forehead pressed to the cold glass, shaking, a long low sound torn out of her, the clench of her gripping and rippling around me, so tight I had to stop and breathe.
“Inside,” she said, gripping my wrist, the boardroom voice trying to return and failing.
“That’s the protocol. You finish inside, that’s what I’m paying for.
” And then, quieter, the contract gone out of it entirely, the words coming against my mouth because she couldn’t make herself stop kissing me, “Don’t you dare make it quick. ”
I let go of her leg, set her foot back down, wrapped one arm across her chest and the other low across her hips, and pulled her back hard onto my cock and finished there, seated deep.
I emptied into her in long hot surges, my cock jerking with each one, while she shook apart against the glass and made a sound she’d never have allowed herself in daylight.
I held her like that, fully seated, the heat of me spilling into her, both of us breathing, and the dawn came up gold over the far ridge and neither of us looked at it.
She didn’t reach for my hand and guide it anywhere.
She did the thing that was hers instead: her fist came back and closed in the front of my shirt and held it, locking me against her, hips flush, not letting me draw out, the grip of a woman who closes a deal by refusing to let the other side leave the table.
We stood like that a while. Her heartbeat was still going hard under my forearm.
The glass in front of her was a fog of handprints and breath.
There was no retreat back behind the suit this time. No adequate, Thursday. She came to the edge of the bed and sat, robe loose, and didn’t reach for the agenda or the phone, and after a minute she asked me something off the script.
“The women who succeed here,” she said. “Do they relax. Or do they surrender.”
I thought about it, because she deserved a real answer.
“They stop performing,” I said. “That’s all it is. They stop performing for everyone, including themselves. The body lets go when the woman does.”
She logged that. I watched her log it, as she logged everything, except this time it didn’t go into the spreadsheet. It went somewhere else, somewhere without a column, and she didn’t say anything else, and I dressed and left her sitting in the grey dawn light with her own broken rule on her mouth.
Yuki charted the session that afternoon.
I came past the lab and she was at the desk with the log open, and I saw her write the duration, and pause, and write a margin note beside it, small, in Japanese, a few quick characters in pencil.
She felt me see it. Pink flooded the tips of her ears. She set the pencil down very precisely.
“It’s a note about scheduling,” she said, to the chart.
“In Japanese.”
“It’s faster.” She picked up the eraser and rubbed the note out, badly, flustered enough to leave a grey smear that the characters still ghosted through. She blew the eraser dust off the page. The duration entry remained, in clean ink, where anyone could read it.
Devereux, S. Session +37 min. Anomalous.
“Plus thirty-seven minutes,” I said.
“It ran long.” Yuki capped her pen. “Sometimes things run long.” She nudged the chart against the edge of the desk, aligning it perfectly, because her hands needed something certain to do. “It’s just data.”
“What did it say,” I asked. “The note. In Japanese.”
She didn’t look up. Her ears, which had been receding toward their usual pale, went pink again, cleanly, instantly.
“It said the session ran thirty-seven minutes over the scheduled allocation,” she said, evenly, which I did not believe for one second and which she did not expect me to.
“That’s a lot of characters for thirty-seven minutes.”
“Japanese is efficient.” She picked up the next chart in her stack and uncapped the pen again and did not give me the door to push on, the auditor’s perfect deflection, and I let her have it, because Yuki gave ground only when no one was reaching for it.
The grey smear where she’d erased the Japanese stayed in the margin, the one untidy mark on an otherwise flawless page, the characters still ghosting up through it for anyone who knew to look.