Chapter 12 The Window #2
I shifted her, gently, onto her front, prone, and she went, boneless, her cheek to the pillow, her ass lifting just enough, and I covered her with my weight and slid back into her from above, deep, and found her hands and pressed them flat into the linen under mine and laced our fingers, and took her like that, slow then deeper, my hips grinding down into her ass on every stroke, the new angle wringing a sound out of her that started high and broke in the middle.
The length of her body was under mine, pinned, held, my cock buried deep in her, and I felt her give up the last of her control into the mattress, felt the exact moment the manager stopped managing and the woman just took it, pushing her hips back to meet every thrust.
“There,” I said against the back of her neck, “that’s it, you don’t have to hold anything tonight, I’ve got it, I’ve got you,” and she made a wrecked sound into the pillow and pushed back into me to take more.
She came the first time loud and shaking, the controlled length of her seizing tight around me, the machine short-circuiting at last, her hands crushing mine.
I didn’t stop, fucked her through it and past it, and minutes later, when she’d climbed all the way back up, she came a second time wordless, her body locking under me, her inner muscles spasming around me, no sound at all because she’d run out of them, just a long silent bow of her spine and her fingers white between mine.
I turned her back over for the last of it, because she’d told me without telling me that she needed to be seen, and slid back into her wet and easy, and she demanded my eyes the moment she could speak.
“Look at me,” she said, and she didn’t frame my face, she fisted one hand hard in the hair at the back of my neck and dragged me down until there was nowhere for my eyes to go but hers, her own face wet, undone, magnificent.
“Don’t you close your eyes. I want to watch it land.
I want to see the exact second it goes in.
” Her ankles locked at the small of my back, drawing my cock in deep, holding me there.
“Now. Finish the contract. The only clause that matters.”
I drove deep and emptied into her, my cock jerking as I spilled into her as far as I could reach, and she held me there with her heels and her arms, her body bowing up to take it, to take all of it, to keep it.
And Simone Devereux, the woman who’d arrived with fourteen pages of penalties, pressed her face into my neck and sobbed, and the thing she sobbed, over and over, into my skin, was thank you, thank you, thank you.
After, I put a pillow under her hips without being asked, and she opened one eye at me.
“The data says it helps,” I said.
“The data says it helps,” she agreed, and then, fierce, wet-eyed, “shut up,” and pulled my arm around her and held my hand flat against her lower belly and kept it there.
And then she talked. For an hour, unbilled, off every chart, she talked the way people only talk in the dark after they’ve been taken apart.
The empire built from one truck her father left her, a single truck and a route nobody else wanted, grown load by load into something the trade press wrote profiles about.
The board that called her the machine, a name she’d earned on purpose, because the name was armor and the woman under it could be hurt.
How she’d learned young that competence was the one thing that never betrayed you, that if you were better than everyone and needed no one you could not be left, and how that had worked flawlessly for twenty years, right up until it was the exact thing standing between her and the one thing competence couldn’t buy.
The marriage that starved to death on her hours and her husband’s resentment of her success, two people in a beautiful flat passing each other at the door, ended a decade ago over a child question neither of them could say out loud, each waiting for the other to want it first, until there was no marriage left to put a child into.
The red line on her calendar, thirty-nine in November, drawn the night a clinic in a glass tower said unexplained infertility with a shrug and a pamphlet and sent her home in a taxi she cried in, the only time she’d cried in years, furious all the way down at her own face in the dark window for doing it.
“Unexplained,” she said, to the ceiling, my hand still on her belly.
“Do you know what that word does to a person who solves things for a living? Give me a problem. Any problem. I will resource it, I will schedule it, I will throw money and rigor at it until it submits. Unexplained. There’s nothing to push against. It’s the only wall I’ve ever met that I couldn’t find the seam of.
” Her hand tightened over mine. “And then I came up a mountain to a building that promised a guarantee, because a guarantee is a thing I understand, a guarantee has a remedy clause, and I find out the guarantee is a man who asks me when I last slept through a night. You unforgivable person. You weren’t supposed to be a person. ”
“I came here with contracts,” she said, drifting, her fingers still laced through mine where she’d anchored them, “because contracts have never once broken my heart.” She was nearly asleep.
“I’m going to be furious about all of this in the morning.
I want you to know that. I’m going to put the armor back on and call it adequate and pretend my heart didn’t just.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t even argue.”
“You’ll come back out of the armor. They always do.” I felt her breathing slow against me. “Sleep, Simone. You’ve got a window to keep open.”
She fell asleep holding my hand to her belly, and I stayed there long after I should have gone, holding, for the first time in my life, a hope that wasn’t mine to hold.
In the morning the suit was back on, exactly as promised.
She did her vitals with Yuki, crisp and professional, fully reassembled, and on her way out the door she said, to no one and everyone, “Same again next cycle. And the cycle after, if required. I prefer redundancy in critical systems.”
Yuki, charting, said, “Logged.”
But in the corridor, alone, before she’d quite gotten the executive face all the way back up, Simone Devereux paused, and a small, terrible, private smile crossed her face, and she pressed one hand briefly flat against her own stomach.
“Two weeks,” she said, to the empty corridor, to the clock she’d decided to hope against. “Two weeks until the test.” The smile flickered, want and fear at war under it. “I hate waiting.”
She set her shoulders and went down to breakfast a machine. Two weeks until the test, and not one thing in the world she could do to make it come faster. I went and checked the boiler pressure on my way past, because it was the only clock on the mountain I knew how to move.