4. Ashton
Ashton
Imogen’s bent over my open refrigerator in a shirt that ends at the top of her thighs, and it hits me like a fist to the sternum.
Eighteen months I’ve had my attention nailed to one thing, keeping my son from coming apart at the seams. Somewhere in there I stopped being a man with a body and turned into a logistics operation with a custody case attached.
I haven’t touched anyone since Sophia. Haven’t wanted to. There hasn’t been room in me for it.
There’s room now. It arrives all at once, the second she straightens with a fork in her mouth and chocolate at the corner of it, bare legs, no bra under that shirt, hair past saving, and I go hard fast enough that it hurts.
I should announce myself. I take a second I don’t have first, watching her while she doesn’t know to look back, then I lean a shoulder into the doorframe and let the dark do the rest.
She still hasn’t heard me. She goes up onto her toes to reach deeper into the fridge, and I decide I’ve used up whatever grace this moment had.
“We own plates,” I tell her. “I could show you where.”
She spins around, fork still in her mouth, and the cake drops off the corner of her lip onto her shirt.
She’s the one staring now, at my bare chest, then my stomach.
I let her. Turnabout is the only fair thing in this kitchen at one in the morning, so I take my own slow trip back up her and stop on her mouth.
Her eyes drop to the front of my pajama pants and stop moving. Whatever she meant to say next dies somewhere behind her teeth.
I’m not hiding it. There’s no hiding it, not with my cock straining the front of thin cotton at one in the morning and her standing there like that.
She sees exactly what she does to me, sees the hard line of it tenting the fabric, and the color comes up her throat and over her face, and that, the blush, the proof it runs in both directions, pulls another throb through me until I’m aching with it.
“My eyes are up here,” I tell her. It comes out rougher than I mean.
“I know where your eyes are,” she blurts out. “I’m aware. Generally. Of eye placement.”
“You’re not looking at them.”
“I’m looking at the cake.” She waves the fork at the stand, at nothing, at a cake nowhere near the height we’re discussing. “It’s an excellent cake. Who made it?”
“Lola ordered it. Luke’s half-birthday. He counts halves.”
“That’s the cutest, most organized thing I’ve heard in my life.” She’s babbling, red to the tips of her ears now, and she sets the fork down on the marble like a woman proving she still has working hands. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Probably wise.”
“This didn’t happen,” she says.
“Correct.”
“We’re agreed.”
“Go to bed, Miss Spencer.”
She makes for the gap to get past me, but because she won’t aim her face anywhere near mine she misjudges it, and her bare arm drags the whole length of mine, skin against skin, warm and total. Her breath catches. I feel it more than hear it.
“Goodnight,” she mutters at the hallway wall, and then she’s gone, her door shutting six feet from mine.
I stand in the dark with my pulse in my throat and the smell of her hanging in the kitchen, and I do the math on the next two months. Sixty days because of a fucking clause I wrote.
“Son of a bitch,” I say under my breath.
Back in my room the problem hasn’t gone anywhere.
Too wired to lie down, my cock still hard enough to hurt, and I’m not seventeen, I don’t plan to make a production of it.
I shove the pants down, wrap my fist around it, and start working it to get the edge off, same as I’d close out anything else keeping me from sleep. Mechanical. A means to an end.
It doesn’t stay mechanical, and I know the exact second it stops.
One stroke I’m just getting the job done.
The next, my fist has tightened around my cock and slowed on its own, dragging it out like it wants more than a quick finish, and that’s the tell, my own body breaking ranks. I stop fighting it.
My brain hands me her legs first, the bare length of them on that cold floor, the chocolate she never wiped from her mouth.
Then it’s her up on the counter where she stood, that shirt shoved past her hips, my hand between her thighs finding her already slick for me.
And of course she hasn’t shut up, because she wouldn’t.
Telling me what a catastrophically bad idea this is even as she’s grinding down against my fingers.
Reminding me she works for me, that I’m her boss, that this is a line we don’t cross, all of it while she’s working my cock free of my waistband.
I want to fuck the last word right out of her, want to feel that smart mouth give up the argument the second I push into her, and I already know it wouldn’t come quick, and I don’t want it to.
My grip tightens, drags faster, my thumb working the head on every pull, and I’m well past pretending any of this is about sleep.
Then I have her against the window, the whole black drop of the city forty floors under us, her palms flat on the glass, my fist buried in that wreck of hair.
I think about how soaked she’d be by the time I lined my cock up and pushed in, how tight she’d take me.
I think about the fog her breath would leave on the glass while I fucked her from behind, the slap of my hips against her ass, her gasping on every stroke, that clever mouth finally fresh out of things to say.
I’m throbbing in my own fist, hurting with it, wanting more even as it begs to finish, and I can’t slow down, won’t, fucking up into my own grip like she’s the one taking me.
Then it breaks. My cock pulses hard and I come in thick spurts up my own chest and stomach, gripping myself through every one of them, wringing it out, harder than I’ve come inside a living woman in years, breath shot, heart slamming like I ran the stairwell.
For a moment there’s only the ceiling and the sound of me trying to get air back.
Then it drops on me how far that went, and who it was about. Harrison took me to lunch the week my divorce went public and told me the only asset that never depreciates is a man’s word. He said it like a gift but meant it like a debt.
I think about that lunch more than I let myself admit.
He’d have given me anything I asked for that day.
The board seat, the introductions, the loan terms no one else would touch.
He had one rule he never said out loud, because men like Harrison don’t have to say the important ones, and the rule was her.
His daughter, who is now asleep six feet from my door because I put her there, and I just came with my fist around my cock and her name in my mind, harder than I’ve managed inside a real woman in years.
“Jesus Christ,” I tell the dark. There’s no relief in it. The man trusted me with everything he had except her. Drew one line in thirty years. I’m already on the wrong side of it with my own hand.
I clean up with a fist of tissues off the nightstand, furious in the quiet, administrative way I do everything, balling them, throwing them at the bin, missing.
She’s the tutor. She’s the one wall between my son and another stranger he’ll never open the door for, and I just used her like that in my own head, a woman I have every reason on paper to leave the hell alone.
There’s no one to be angry at but myself, so I lie there and do exactly that, which is at least ground I know.
My phone lights the ceiling.
Lola. Of course it is. The woman doesn’t acknowledge night as a concept, and one of these days I’ll force the time off on her that she’ll never take, except I need her too much to mean it, and we both know I won’t.
I reach over and open it.
Board confirmed the investor dinner. Three days out. They want the whole family-forward picture in the room.
I’m already running the math, already disliking where it lands, when the next line drops in under it.
That includes the tutor. They want her there.
I put the phone down on my chest and look at the ceiling for a long moment. She agreed to teach my kid. She didn’t agree to be exhibit A at a dinner where men in good suits decide whether my life photographs correctly.
I pick the phone back up and type a single word.
No.
Three dots surface, vanish, surface again. Lola has drafted and deleted enough replies to me over the years that I know what the hesitation means before it arrives.
The dots resolve into one line, the closest she’ll come to telling me I’ve already lost this.
It’s not your call this time. It’s theirs.