CHAPTER 18 – SAWYER
It wasn’t the kind of voicemail a person could listen to just once, and Sawyer was only human.
The first time she heard it, she was standing at the kitchen island in her robe with coffee in one hand and her phone in the other.
She’d seen the missed call notification when she woke up and assumed that it was some international business that she’d need caffeine before she was in the mood to handle.
Instead, Nellie Fuller’s voice had come out of her phone speaker, a little blurry at the edges.
The second time was when Sawyer had put the coffee down and pressed play again to confirm she had heard all of it correctly.
She had.
Every minute detail had her grinning wider under her cheeks started to ache.
Agonizing was the word that surfaced.
Not in any of the ways Sawyer usually applied it to a situation; not meaning problem or liability or unbearably complicated. Simply agonizing in the way that Nellie Fuller somehow managed to be eye-wateringly adorable and mouth-wateringly sexy in the same breath.
She pressed play a third time, closed her eyes, and chuckled to herself.
Then, she saved the voicemail before she left her apartment.
Suffice to say, the day was not her best work.
Sawyer was in the office by 6:45, which was well within her normal range; there was nothing unusual in the early arrival, the double espresso from the thirty-eighth floor machine, the stack of overnight correspondence she cleared before Martha had even removed her coat.
The exterior performance was fully intact.
From the outside, she was a CEO with laser focus and a board call at eleven.
What she truly was, on the inside, was utterly, irrevocably distracted.
Why the fuck did she have to mention the vibrator?
She attended the board call mid-morning, which she ran competently, and then a forty-minute lunch she’d agreed to two weeks ago when her mind wasn’t consumed by the rosy color of a certain ecologist’s nipples.
During the meal, she ate approximately a third of a chicken sandwich and managed not to think about Nellie Fuller for stretches of up to seven consecutive minutes.
By two in the afternoon, she had accepted that the day was what it was.
At 4:15, she walked past Martha’s desk. “I’m leaving at five,” Sawyer said without stopping.
Martha’s expression performed a small, contained miracle of neutrality. “I’ll hold your calls.”
“The Nakamura response can wait until tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
The Chinese restaurant was four blocks from the office, a narrow, fluorescent-lit place Sawyer had never eaten at but had walked past three hundred times and once overheard a contractor describe as having the best hangover soup in Phoenix Ridge.
The woman behind the counter regarded her with understandable skepticism when Sawyer pointed at the menu and requested the congee and a large order of won ton soup, then shifted to something more pragmatic when Sawyer paid in cash and asked her to double wrap the takeout containers.
The bakery next door was closing soon, and Sawyer got there with four minutes to spare, scanned the remaining cases, and bought a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting and a single birthday candle already pressed into the top.
Although she was famed in the business world for her forethought and watertight contingency planning, Sawyer had not considered the logistical challenge of transporting soup and a boxed cupcake in a car with any semblance of security.
She managed it by wedging the cupcake box between the passenger seat and the center console and placing the soup bag on the floor mat where it could not slide.
This was, she’d concede, not peak executive transport management. She didn’t particularly care.
She spent the forty-five minute drive imagining what Nellie might look like making herself come.
The cottage door opened before she’d finished knocking.
Nellie was wearing a plaid shirt that had been buttoned incorrectly.
She looked like someone who had celebrated her birthday enthusiastically and was currently paying for that decision.
Her hair was escaping its loose braid from approximately eleven different angles.
Her eyes were bright enough, if slightly shadowed.
She was holding a mug in one hand and looking at Sawyer on her doorstep between slow blinks, as if she had not yet confirmed to her own satisfaction that this was real.
“Hi,” Nellie said, a little hoarsely.
“You look terrible.” Sawyer chuckled.
Nellie blinked again. “Thanks.”
Sawyer lifted the bag. “Hangover soup. From the place on Prentiss. I was told it would help.”
The expression that transformed Nellie’s face was one Sawyer recognized from the ridge, from the couch in the storm, from every unguarded moment where Nellie hadn’t quite managed to dim the full luminosity of what she was feeling before it showed through.
And Sawyer, who had spent almost four decades successfully inoculated against sentimentality, had to swallow around a sharp lump in her throat.
“And…” She cleared her throat while producing the cupcake box from under her arm. “Happy birthday. Belated. By approximately nineteen hours.”
Nellie stared at the box. Then at Sawyer. Then at the box again.
“I suppose you got my voicemail,” she mumbled.
“I did.”
Nellie made a sound that was half laugh, half groan, and pressed her free hand over her eyes. “I need you to know that I did not plan that. My fingers acted independently of my wine-addled brain. And I suppose my tongue too.”
“I figured.” Sawyer laughed sympathetically.
“Though you wouldn’t have had to leave me one at all if you had just told me it was your birthday.
At any point in the last several weeks, using any of the many standard mechanisms of communication available to two adults in near-constant contact with each other. ”
Nellie dropped her hand, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. “Are you telling me off?”
“I’m pointing out an administrative oversight.” Sawyer extended the cupcake box. “Take this before I drop the soup.”
Nellie snorted at that, and stepped back to let her in.
The congee seemed to work. Sawyer watched Nellie eat half of it at the kitchen table while the color slowly returned to her face and declined the offer to share it. By the time the cupcake came out, Nellie had almost all of her usual vibrancy back.
“I can’t believe you got me a cupcake,” she gushed.
“It already had the candle in it,” Sawyer clarified. “I didn’t plan ahead.”
Nellie smiled placatingly, as if she knew Sawyer wasn’t used to making this much effort and was currently trying to minimize the result. “I don’t really need to blow out another one. I already told you my wish.”
“You did.” Sawyer laced her fingers together on the table. “I’ve already been working on it. For what it’s worth.”
Nellie’s eyes snapped up at that.
There was an entire conversation in the look she gave Sawyer: something hesitant and earnest and a little searching. Sawyer held her gaze and let it ask what it was asking.
Then Nellie said, very softly, “Happy birthday to me.”
Sawyer rose from her chair and rounded the table to take Nellie’s face in her hands. “Happy birthday,” she whispered against her lips.
They made it further than the couch, this time. Barely.
Sawyer’s only focus when she tugged Nellie to her feet and pushed her back toward where she knew the bedroom was located, without breaking contact with her mouth the entire time, was that there was a bed in the immediate vicinity which she intended to make full use of.
She made no assessment of her surroundings beyond that and couldn’t have told anyone what said bedroom looked like should she have found herself in an interrogation room.
All that mattered was Nellie, and the way she gazed up at her once Sawyer had successfully planted her on that bed she was seeking.
The hungover, tentative version of her from the doorstep had been completely superseded by something else: clear-eyed and flushed, with her braid coming apart and her shirt now completely unfastened, and she was the most beautiful thing Sawyer had ever stood in front of.
“So, about that voicemail…” Sawyer said, pushing the shirt off Nellie’s shoulders. “You mentioned a vibrator.”
Nellie’s eyes went half-lidded. “Did I?”
“Mmm… you were quite specific about your orgasm-less regret.”
“I was probably rambling.”
“You were.” Sawyer kissed her jaw, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth. “Tell me where it is, Nellie.”
“Nightstand. Bottom drawer.”
Sawyer made quick work of locating it.
“So, uh, it has three settings and the middle one is—”
“I’ll manage,” Sawyer cut her off.
Nellie bit her lip against a grin. “I’m sure you will.”
They worked through the rest of the clothing together, the clumsy choreography of it already easier than before—less negotiation, more fluency.
Sawyer had spent a significant portion of the drive out cataloguing what she’d learned on the couch: the specific catch in Nellie’s breath at certain pressures, the way her whole body arched when Sawyer’s mouth found the curve of her shoulder.
She applied this knowledge now, working her way down Nellie’s throat to her collarbone, and Nellie’s head dropped back with a sound that went straight to Sawyer’s clit.
Once she had peeled off almost all of Nellie’s clothing, Sawyer stepped back a fraction and looked at her properly in the low lamplight. The pale glow of her skin, the curve of her breasts, the flush working its way up from her chest. She was nothing short of extraordinary.
“You’re staring,” Nellie murmured.
“Sue me.”