12. Ashton
Ashton
Imogen backs up to let me in without a word, and that alone tells me where we are tonight. The sparring version of her needs an audience and a reason to bother. At one in the morning, in a borrowed room with the lamp turned down to nothing, she’s got neither, and neither do I.
“Almost one,” she says. “If this is about the snack rotation, I confess. I ate two of Luke’s crackers off the approved list and felt no remorse.”
“It’s not the crackers.”
“Because page two is very clear that—”
“Imogen.”
That shuts it down. I don’t reach for her first name often, and she notices the change. She climbs back onto the bed, folds her knees up, and waits. I take the edge of the mattress beside her, because I came to make peace, not to loom at her like she’s doing something wrong.
I don’t have a plan, which should’ve been the first sign to turn around, but I came because I couldn’t lie in my own bed another minute with what she said in the kitchen still hanging there.
I’m not afraid of you.
People don’t say that to me. Sophia made fear an instrument. The board plays it like a string section. Even my son learned early that the world has teeth. Then this woman stands a breath off my chest, tells me the ice doesn’t take with her, and turns out to be right.
“The board wants me out,” I tell her. “They’d never say it to my face though. They want a founder who looks good in a photograph, and I keep showing up with a custody war and a boy who can’t make it through a school morning.”
“So you bought a coastline and rented a wholesome tutor and crossed your fingers.”
“The tutor came with strong opinions, which isn’t what I ordered.”
“You ordered quiet and obedient, but you got me instead.” She tips her head at me, studying. “You’re circling. You came down here past midnight, you’re not yelling, and you sat down. What’s actually happening?”
She reads me faster than anyone ever has, and I’ve stopped minding it, which should worry me more than it does.
“Sophia,” I say, and the lightness drains out of the room on the name.
“She knows the one place I don’t recover from.
She’ll take Luke to court the second a story breaks, and there’s always a story, and the IPO is three weeks out.
If she moves at the right moment, I don’t lose just the company. I lose him too.”
It comes out wrong, out of order, the dates and the threats and the rest of it spilling over each other, the whole weight I’ve carried alone since the spring, and I give it to her in pieces because she’s the first person in a year who didn’t look at me like something to handle.
But there’s still plenty I don’t tell her such as how I know who her father is and how important he is to me.
I tell myself I’m keeping it from her so she can do her job without distractions. That’s the version I can swallow, but the real one is smaller, and it’s mine, and it doesn’t go down at all. I prefer not to think about it too much.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asks. “A week of being talked past like a lamp, and now I get the director’s cut?”
“This afternoon I asked you what it would take. You named a kid instead of a number.” I turn my head toward her. She’s close, hair down, none of the dinner-table steel anywhere on her face. “Seemed fair to tell you what it’s costing me.”
It’s the truest thing I’ve said to her, and it’s still a lie by what it leaves out. I’m good enough at this to know the difference and do it anyway. That’s the part that turns my stomach, the skill of it, the practiced hand. I learned it from a man whose daughter is sitting two inches from my knee.
Her face goes through the change I’ve watched it make with Luke, the brightness banking down into a steadier thing with weight behind it.
She doesn’t reach for the reassuring line.
She lets the quiet do its work first, and then she puts her hand flat on my forearm, warm against the cold I tracked in from the hall.
“You don’t have to carry it alone,” she whispers. “Whatever you decided about how this works, you got that part wrong.”
“I employ four hundred people.”
“And here you are at one in the morning telling your kid’s tutor that your ex-wife scares you, so the four hundred aren’t much help, are they.” She doesn’t move her hand. “Doing it all yourself isn’t strong. It’s just a lot of pressure for one guy.”
“I’m fine with pressure.”
“I know you are. That’s the problem.” Her thumb moves once across the inside of my arm, and her voice drops. “Fine with pressure isn’t the same as okay.”
I look at her hand on my arm. Short nails, a callus on the side of one finger from gripping a pen too hard, the least remarkable hand in the world, and it’s pulling knots loose in my chest that men with framed degrees and hourly rates never got near.
A year and a half of this and no one’s hand on me once, and she does it like it’s nothing, no hidden agenda behind it.
“That’s the voice you use on Luke,” I muse
“Is it working?”
“No.”
“It’s working a little. Your jaw stopped doing the thing.”
“My jaw isn’t doing a thing.”
“Your jaw has been doing the thing since you sat down. It’s very busy back there.” She smiles, faint, and her thumb moves once across the inside of my arm without her seeming to send the order, and that one small drag of her skin on mine takes the last support out from under me.
The clean exit is right there. Two words and the door. I used it on her in the hall last night and watched it work. I know exactly how it tastes going out.
But I don’t reach for it.
I turn into her instead. Her hand slides off my arm and lands on my chest. I bring my palm up to the side of her face.
Her jaw fits my hand like it was cut to.
I feel her breath shorten before I’ve moved another inch, feel the small hitch of it under my thumb.
Her eyes drop to my mouth and climb back to mine.
I close the distance and kiss her.
I start soft, bringing my mouth to hers and staying there, hardly pressing.
I feel the shock of it go through her in one jolt, her spine straightening, her hand flattening hard against my chest like the push is coming.
But it doesn’t come. I move my lips over hers, slow, taking in the give of them, and when I catch her bottom lip and draw on it she makes a wrecked little sound deep in her throat that goes straight to my cock, blood dropping south so fast it aches.
Then she kisses me back, and the patience I walked in with is gone.
Her mouth opens and the restraint goes out of both of us on the same breath.
I taste chocolate on her, faint, days old and impossible, and it wrecks me.
I get a fist in that soft hair I’ve thought about on too many times and wind it tight at the root until her head tips back where I want it.
She gasps at the pull, the gasp breaking into a low moan when I don’t ease off.
Her fingers knot in my shirt and drag me in, done being careful about it.
“This is a terrible idea,” she says against my mouth, not pulling back an inch.
“Historically bad,” I agree, and lick into her before she can build the rest of the case.
“There’s a rule. Page two. Conversation between us limited to Luke.”
“This stopped being conversation a while ago.”
“No.” The word splits down the middle because I’ve dragged my teeth along her jaw. “It really did.”
Then she’s up off the mattress and into my lap.
A knee on the bed either side of my thighs, her weight coming down slow, and I get both hands on her hips and haul her the rest of the way down onto me, where my cock’s been straining since she first put her hand on my arm.
She settles right over it through two thin scraps of cotton, the hot soft pussy of her pressing down against the hard ridge of my dick, and I have to tear my mouth off hers and drop my head to her collarbone just to drag in air.
“Christ,” I get out against her skin.
“Also not approved topic to talk about.”
“Add it to the charge sheet.”
She laughs, and the laugh breaks into a gasp because I’ve rolled my hips up into her, one slow drag of my cock right against her clit through the wet cotton, and her whole body jerks before she can stop it.
Her thighs clamp around my hips. Her nails dig into my shoulders.
Whatever filthy thing she meant to say next dies in her throat, nothing left coming out of her but ragged breath.
“Okay,” she manages eventually. “That’s. A development. A rather big one.”
“You sat down on it.”
“I made decisions. I’m living with the decisions.
” She drops her forehead to mine, breath coming fast and broken across my mouth, and grinds her hips down against me, slow, working her wet pussy along the length of what she’s straddling.
I feel every inch of the drag, the soaked seam of her shorts riding the underside of my cock, and my fingers dig into her hips hard enough to leave bruises by morning.
“I owe my best friend an apology. She tried to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Not your business. Quiet.” She grinds down again, harder, one long drag forward that pulls her clit right along my cock where she wants it, and her mouth drops open against mine on a moan she doesn’t bother swallowing.
I let her ride me. I plant my back against her headboard and steer the roll of her hips with my hands and let her work her wet pussy along my cock through the cotton like she couldn’t stop if the building caught fire, the contract and the forty floors of reasons burned off the second my mouth hit hers.
She’s soft everywhere I’m hard, and I’m past anything decent now, my cock jerking up to meet her every time she grinds down, aching to be buried in her instead of trapped behind two soaked scraps of cloth.
“You’re soaked through,” I tell her against her ear, her heat bleeding hot and slick through the front of my pants. “You feel what you’re doing to me?”
“I’m not.” Her voice is in pieces. She rolls down and shudders, nails biting through my shirt. “You can’t even tell.”
“I can feel it on my cock, Imogen. You get wetter every time you grind down. You’re making a mess on me, and you won’t admit it.” I run my hands up under her shirt to bare skin, the dip of her waist, up her ribs, and she arches into my palms with the breath knocked clean out of her.
“You’re,” she gasps, grinding harder, chasing it now, “the most irritating man. Why is that?”
“Because you’ve wanted this since you got caught in the kitchen.” I drag a thumb up under the curve of her breast and she keens, her rhythm stuttering. “Don’t stop moving.”
She doesn’t stop. She humps me faster, harder, forehead pinned to mine, breath punching out of her in short bursts against my lips, her soaked pussy dragging up and down the length of my cock with every desperate grind of her hips.
She finds the angle she’s chasing, because her whole body locks up and a high desperate sound rips out of her and she grabs the back of my neck to keep herself working right there against the head of my cock.
The cotton between us is wrecked, hers soaked through and mine wet with her, and the heat of her bleeding through it is nearly enough to make me come in my own pants with her still fully dressed and humping me like neither of us is old enough to know better.
I want to throw her on her back, rip the soaked shorts down her legs, and burn the rulebook page by page. I want her coming on my cock instead of grinding off against it, that smart mouth finally fucked empty of arguments, want to be so deep in her pussy she forgets her own name and mine both.
Three seconds. That’s the whole of what I get.
Then it all comes back at once. Harrison and his one fucking line. His daughter is humping herself off on my cock with my hands shoved up her shirt and she doesn’t know she’s crossing a goddamn thing, because I never told her, because I’m a coward in a very expensive house.
I take her by the hips and lift her off me.
Hardest thing my body’s done in a year, setting her back down on the mattress while every muscle I own hauls the other way, my cock throbbing and furious at losing the wet heat of her, my hands dragging their feet on the order.
But I do it. I shift back, put a few inches of cold air between us, and reach down to adjust my cock where it’s straining against the front of the soaked pants, because there’s no hiding what she did to me and no reason left to try.
“This can’t happen again,” I tell her.
It comes out shredded, nothing like the line I built in my head. She’s still half over me, lips swollen, hair wrecked by my own fist, her chest going hard under the thin shirt, the front of her shorts gone dark where she rode me, her thighs still loose from where they’d gripped my hips.
For a moment I think she’ll let me have it. She’s quiet long enough that I let myself believe the door’s going to hold like it held in the hall.
Then she laughs, short and mean, and drags the back of her hand across her mouth like she can still taste me on it. The bright thing she wears all day is gone. What’s left underneath has teeth.
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Imogen.” I reach for the standard tools and find the box empty, nothing in my mouth that would work on her and we both know it.
“You fucking coward.” She shoves off the mattress and onto her feet, arms crossing hard over the thin shirt, her chest still going fast, her thighs still trembling from what I lifted her off of thirty seconds ago.
“You come in here, you cry to me about Luke and Sophia and how nobody helps you, you kiss me like that, and then you bolt the second it’s real. ”
“I have reasons.”
“I’m sure you do. Write them on page three.” Her voice cracks on the last word, and she turns away from me so I don’t get to see the rest of it. “Get out, Ashton.”
“Imogen.”
“I said get the fuck out!”