CHAPTER 15 – NELLIE #2
“I want to untangle it.” Sawyer sighed. “All of it. Not in a way that leaves someone hurt at the end of it. I just haven’t figured out how to do that yet. And the kissing… well, the kissing hasn’t left me in my peak problem-solving condition.”
“I hear that.” Nellie chuckled.
Sawyer uncrossed her arms. She moved to the couch and sat down in the space beside Nellie. Not beside as in politely adjacent, but beside as in close, close enough that Nellie could feel the dampness of Sawyer’s jacket start to seep into her sweatpants.
“I know,” Sawyer said quietly, “that I have no right to ask you.”
“For what?”
“Your trust. I’ve earned ambiguity, at best. I know that.”
Nellie considered that for a moment. She thought about the backup generator and the canisters of fuel, the boundary markers reset to their original positions, the knock on the cottage door when the lights had gone out.
She thought about every time Sawyer had walked away and then come back.
She thought about the fact that she was currently sitting in a soaking wet jacket on Nellie’s couch because she’d seen the power cut and grabbed her keys.
“You’re an absolute nightmare,” Nellie muttered.
Sawyer’s mouth curved. “So I’ve been told.”
“You’ve given me about nine different versions of yourself in mere weeks.”
“Possibly.”
“You kissed me.”
“You wanted me to.”
“You moved my survey boundary.”
“I moved it back.”
Nellie laughed. It burst out of her, short and startled, because Sawyer had delivered that line with the very particular conviction that this was a genuinely mitigating factor, which somehow made it funnier and also, inexplicably, made the storm in Nellie’s chest a great deal worse.
Sawyer was watching her laugh. There was something unguarded in her expression, something almost soft, and Nellie recognized it because she’d seen its edges before—in the forest, on the ridge—but this was the whole thing.
No professional armor over the top of it, no careful distance, just Sawyer’s face and what it actually looked like when it wasn’t performing.
“Nellie.” She breathed.
She reached up and took Nellie’s face in both hands. Gently, like she was asking. Her thumbs traced the line of Nellie’s jaw, and her eyes were direct, earnest.
When she kissed her, Nellie didn’t push her away.
Sawyer made a small sound that might have been relief and pulled her closer.
The tentative part of the kiss dissolved fairly rapidly after that.
They made short work of the last of the distance between them, Nellie’s hands finding the lapels of Sawyer’s wet jacket, and then both of them equally occupied with removing said jacket, which had the full weight of a soaking garment and did not cooperate without negotiation.
Nellie laughed again—she couldn’t help it—and Sawyer said, with some exasperation, “You’re supposed to help, not—” then her watch caught on the inside of her mostly inside-out sleeve, and they had to pause operations entirely while Sawyer wrestled it free.
“Got it,” she eventually announced, with more triumph than was warranted.
“My hero.” Nellie giggled.
“Thank you.”
Sawyer was smiling. Actually smiling, with her teeth, and her hair half-dried at all the wrong angles from the towel. Nellie looked at her and decided, comprehensively, that this was the version she liked best. She reached up and pushed a damp strand of hair back from Sawyer’s face.
Then they were kissing again, and the jacket was over the arm of the couch, and Nellie’s fleece was joining it, and the storm continued to conduct itself with great energy as if the moment warranted a crescendo.
Sawyer reached for the hem of Nellie’s shirt.
Her hands were warm despite the rain and moved up Nellie’s ribs with a teasing slowness that produced an involuntary inhale.
The shirt came off. Sawyer’s followed quickly after.
The bra clasp was managed in a single attempt, which Nellie declined to comment upon but mentally catalogued as another of course she’s efficient moment.
Refusing to be outperformed, Nellie managed to peel off Sawyer’s damp bralette just as efficiently, flinging it to the floor.
There wasn’t a spare second to feel smug.
Sawyer kissed her jaw, her neck, the curve of her shoulder.
Then lower. Her mouth closed over Nellie’s nipple and Nellie’s breath went in sharply.
She felt the warmth of Sawyer’s tongue, the slow, agonizing pressure of it, the way she moved between one and the other with the same focused thoroughness she apparently applied to everything, and Nellie’s hand found the back of her head and stayed there.
She was managing the wanton sounds she was making with decreasing success.
Mercifully, Sawyer moved back up to kiss her lips, and Nellie took the opportunity to get her hands on Sawyer’s breasts, full and warm, the nipples hardening immediately under her thumbs, and Sawyer made a low sound against her mouth that went straight to between Nellie’s thighs.
She filed this response for future use, working her thumbs slowly and feeling Sawyer’s breathing change.
Sawyer pulled back with visible effort. She looked at Nellie questioningly and reached for the waistband of her pants.
Nellie lifted her hips in response, and they sorted out the logistics together with some mutual efficiency until the sweatpants and underwear were on the floor and Nellie was lying on the ancient magnificent couch entirely naked.
Sawyer sat back for a moment and simply looked at her, and Nellie felt her gaze the way she felt the fire: blazing on the surface of her skin, everywhere at once.
“Don’t stop,” Nellie said. Sawyer didn’t need to be told twice.
Her hand moved between Nellie’s thighs—not tentative, not rushing, just finding its way—and the first contact of her fingers against Nellie’s pussy made Nellie’s whole body shift toward her.
She was already wet, and Sawyer registered this with a sharp inhale and a fractional close of her eyes that Nellie found significantly more affecting than was sensible.
Her fingers moved slowly, parting, exploring, and then finding the focus of it—her thumb against Nellie’s clit, circling, and two fingers working inward—and Nellie’s hips rolled instinctively to meet her.
The rhythm Sawyer established was thorough.
She attended to both at once with the particular concentration of a woman who had decided this was the puzzle she was solving right now, to the exclusion of all other questions.
Her thumb moved achingly slowly while her fingers curled inside Nellie, learning the depth of her, the pace that made her breath catch and the one that made it stop altogether.
Soon enough, Nellie’s hands were in Sawyer’s hair because she needed something to hold.
Her senses were being overwhelmed from every input, and she didn’t know how to process the competing sensations.
The crackling fire in the grate sizzled across her skin.
The rain hammering at the roof pressed against her eardrums. The building, relentless accumulation of pressure and warmth and Sawyer’s lustful gaze as she watched Nellie fall apart at her own hand.
She came with her forehead pressed to Sawyer’s shoulder, her fingers tight in Sawyer’s hair, the long, shaking arrival of it moving through her in waves while Sawyer held the rhythm steady until the end and then gentled it into something slower and eventually still.
There was a brief interval involving breathing.
Sawyer pushed her back against the corner of the couch and looked down at her with an expression Nellie assessed immediately.
“Don’t,” Nellie said.
“What?”
“Look like that.”
“I have no idea what you mean.” Sawyer smirked.
“You don’t have to remind everyone you’re the boss every second of the day, you know.” Nellie scoffed, which was only met with an even more self-satisfied smirk.
Nellie decided it was high time for a repositioning, which is when the elbow happened—hers, catching Sawyer wrong above the ribs, and Sawyer garbled something brief and possibly not English, until Nellie said “alright?” and she said “fine, yep, carry on” in a tone that precluded follow-up.
The throw cushions required some creative management.
There was the moment involving the side table, both of them freezing, listening for breakage, which fortunately did not come.
The negotiation came next, which was Sawyer, in full, composed possession of her direct manner, explaining with clinical precision what she preferred and where, and this should, by rights, have been odd.
It wasn’t. It was, Nellie thought, genuinely the most Sawyer Alburn thing that had ever happened, and she absorbed the information with gratitude and applied it.
She pressed Sawyer down into the cushions and kissed her lips, her throat, the curve of her collarbone, the full warmth of her breasts.
She sucked one nipple into her mouth and Sawyer made a sharp, cut-off sound, her head dropping back.
Nellie spent time here, more than was strictly efficient, because efficiency was no longer the immediate goal, and because the sounds Sawyer was making with her armor stripped away were something Nellie was inclined to collect.
She moved between Sawyer’s breasts with her tongue and felt the tension accumulating in the long body beneath her before she moved lower.
Knees cushioned by the fireside rug, Nellie settled between Sawyer’s thighs and looked up at her once.
Sawyer looked back beneath hooded eyes and bit her lower lip, nodding once.
As she was certain the CEO was more than accustomed to being obeyed, Nellie dipped her head and put her mouth to the wet heat of Sawyer’s pussy.
This was the kind of fieldwork Nellie Fuller could lose herself in fully.
Sawyer’s taste, the shape of her, the way the hood of her clit felt beneath Nellie’s tongue as she licked her way up this new territory.
Sawyer’s thighs tensed on either side of her head, but Nellie’s hands were at her hips—holding, steadying—as she moved her tongue in the long, flat strokes that the initial debrief had suggested, and then the circles, and then both alternating, and she felt Sawyer’s breathing lose its regulated rhythm completely.
She brought two fingers into it, thrusting into Sawyer’s pussy while her mouth stayed on her clit. Sawyer’s hand found her hair. Her other hand was fisted against the couch arm. The sounds she was making were low and uninhibited and increasingly more breathless.
Sawyer Alburn was a woman accustomed to composure encountering its outer boundary.
Triumphantly, Nellie moved her fingers in a steady, curling stroke and kept her tongue exactly where it was until Sawyer’s grip tightened in her hair and her back arched off the overstuffed cushions and the long, shuddering exhale came, her pussy clenching warm and rhythmic around Nellie’s fingers.
Once the death-grip on her scalp had been relinquished, Nellie eased herself up from her sore knees and came to settle beside Sawyer on the couch.
They lay without speaking for a moment, Sawyer’s chest still rising and falling with the comedown of her orgasm, Nellie looking at the ceiling and feeling, in a way that was entirely pre-linguistic, the deep satisfaction of a job thoroughly well done.
The fire had burned lower and the storm, as if on cue, had begun to settle itself into something quieter. The big gusts were spacing out. Rain still hit the roof but steadily, evenly, without drama.
The full reality of what had just happened settled over Nellie piece by piece, as Sawyer lay beside her, close and quiet.
Nellie could feel the length of her, the intimacy of it, the actual physical reality of the person she had spent weeks wanting to either shake soundly or press her mouth against, and she had now done both, roughly in that order.
She tracked the sensation of every inch where their skin touched and thought about nothing in particular.
This was, all things considered, a nice change of pace from thinking constantly about all the things.
Then Sawyer moved. Just shifted, turned her head, and Nellie watched from the corner of her eye as she stared at the ceiling briefly, then at the dark window, calculating.
“I’ve got—” Sawyer started and then hesitated. “A lot to catch up on. In the morning.”
Something in Nellie’s chest went very still.
It was all she could do to bite back a protest as Sawyer sat up slowly and reached for her shirt.
Nellie pulled her knees to her chest and kept her expression easy—or tried to.
She was suddenly back to being very tired of managing her face around this woman, but asking Sawyer Alburn to stay felt, right now, like reaching for a bird that had just landed.
She was afraid to spook her. She was afraid that saying the wrong thing would send her back out into the rain for good, back to the professional distance that had already cost them both too much time.
So, she said nothing.
She lay on the couch and watched Sawyer reach for her clothes and listened to the rain and waited to see what would happen next.