CHAPTER 25 – NELLIE #2
Sawyer pulled back slightly to look at her. There was something openly delighted about her expression, a rarity that still made Nellie feel like she’d won something significant every time it appeared. “You can’t even see it from over here.”
“I can feel it.” Nellie grimaced. “The absence of ground.”
Sawyer laughed and took Nellie by the hand and turned toward the windows. “Come on.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s a view, Nellie.”
“It is a precipice.”
She was already being walked toward it because Sawyer’s grip was uncompromising and Nellie’s wobbly legs were, apparently, prepared to follow whatever direction they were led in after a good make out session with this woman. She stopped about three feet short and drew the line there.
“You just have to get used to it,” Sawyer insisted.
She was standing right at the glass, entirely unbothered.
Of course she was. The city glittered behind her, a backdrop that should have been in a movie.
She looked, Nellie thought, completely at home suspended above the earth.
The world ethereal had always felt appropriate when it came to Sawyer Alburn.
“Easy for you to say.” Nellie pouted. She was looking at Sawyer and not at the view for obvious reasons. “You’ve been up here so long you’ve lost your perspective.”
“Then come lose yours.” Sawyer offered her hand.
Nellie looked at the hand. At Sawyer’s face. At the windows—briefly, against her better judgment—and immediately registered the soft, lurching wrongness of dozens of floors of nothing below her and made a small involuntary noise. Sawyer’s mouth twitched.
“You chained yourself to a tree and peed in a bucket,” she said. “You can take three more steps.”
“Those are completely different situations, and you know it.” But Nellie was already walking forward because apparently the version of herself that lived in the grip of her feelings was immune to self-preservation instincts.
She reached the glass, pressed both palms flat against it and squeezed her eyes shut.
The glass was cool against her hands. She could feel the faint vibration of the building, the almost imperceptible sense of something alive in the structure, holding itself up against the ordinary insistence of gravity.
“Open your eyes,” Sawyer whispered, directly behind her.
“I can’t,” Nellie whined. She could feel Sawyer step closer, press against her back.
“You can.” Sawyer’s mouth brushed the side of her neck, just below her ear, and Nellie’s breath caught in a way that had nothing to do with vertigo. “Open your eyes, and I’ll make it worth it.”
“That is—” Nellie’s voice had gone slightly unsteady. “That is not a fair negotiating tactic.”
“Perhaps,” Sawyer agreed, against her skin. Her hands settled at Nellie’s hips, teasing the waistline of her pants. “Open your eyes for me, baby.”
Nellie cracked them open.
The valley floor was a grid of orange and white, streets and headlights and the occasional cluster of something denser, and it went and went and went, out to where the dark line of the mountains cut it off at the horizon.
The sky above that was the deep, saturated blue of seven o’clock in a city that never went entirely dark.
Sawyer’s mouth found the curve where Nellie’s neck met her shoulder, and Nellie let go of the notion of trying to breathe normally.
“Feel better?” Sawyer murmured.
“Not even a little bit!” Nellie squeaked.
“Let me help with that.”
Nellie did not have time to formulate a response to this before Sawyer’s fingers found the button of her pants.
“Oh.” Nellie’s hands flattened harder against the glass as those clever fingers worked the fastening loose. “Sawyer!”
“Still looking?”
“I—yes—” Nellie couldn’t have said whether she was answering yes to the looking or yes to whatever question Sawyer’s hands were asking as they tugged her zipper down, slow, deliberate, like she had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
“Good.” Sawyer pressed her lips to the back of Nellie’s neck, between her shoulder blades, right at the top of her spine through the fabric of her shirt. “Keep looking.”
And then she pulled Nellie’s pants down.
The rush of cool air hit the backs of her thighs, and Nellie made a strangled sound that she would have been embarrassed about under any other circumstances.
Sawyer drew the fabric down below her knees in one smooth motion, like undressing Nellie in front of the entire city view was not only acceptable but her natural right. She took Nellie’s underwear with it.
Nellie’s forehead dropped against the glass, it was cold on her burning skin. Below her—far, agonizingly far, in the way that her brain could not stop cataloguing no matter how firmly the rest of her tried to redirect its attention—the city blazed on in total indifference to what was happening.
Sawyer’s hands slid back up the outsides of her thighs to settle at her hips, and Nellie heard the rustle of her sinking to her knees.
I am going to die, Nellie thought. I am going to die in this penthouse, and it will not be from the vertigo.
“Relax,” Sawyer soothed. “I’ll help you calm down.”
“Calm?” Nellie’s breath hitched as Sawyer’s hands pulled, drawing her back, tilting her hips. “Sawyer, the… the height—”
“I know it’s scary.” Her mouth skimmed Nellie’s thigh. The warmth of it made every muscle in Nellie’s body go loose in a way that was very inconvenient given that she currently needed those muscles to stay upright. “But you’re fine. Stay there. It’ll be less scary the more you look at it.”
“That is not… oh—”
Sawyer’s mouth found her pussy, and Nellie’s entire nervous system, which had been running its catastrophe drill since the elevator, immediately reassigned all resources to a completely different emergency.
She moved so slowly. That was the first thing Nellie’s fracturing consciousness registered, Sawyer’s tongue lapping at her folds like she needed to be reacquainted with every part.
Nellie whimpered, though it wasn’t in fear.
Below her the grid of orange and white blurred.
She was hyperventilating slightly, but extremely unsure which of the external stimuli was responsible. Her eyelids fluttered shut.
“Keep those eyes open, Nellie.”
“How did you know?” Nellie yelped.
“I didn’t.” Sawyer chuckled, her warm breath brushing Nellie’s clit. “But I’m familiar with the way your eyes tend to roll back when I have my tongue right here.”
“You’re not playing fair.”
Every input was far too overwhelming: the glass fogging with Nellie’s breath; her palms smearing white patches of condensation against the view; the wet, devastating sounds of what Sawyer was doing with her mouth; the way Nellie’s whole body had reduced itself to the single blazing point of Sawyer’s tongue working her in merciless circles that kept approaching and then retreating from the edge of something explosive.
“You feel better, baby? You’re going to come for me, and then you’re going to be just fine up here. You belong up here.”
“I very much do not.”
“You do.” Sawyer sucked Nellie’s clit into her mouth and grazed it with her teeth. “Right where I want you.”
The phrase went through Nellie like something electrical, shorting out the rational circuitry. She was going to have to examine what that particular combination of words did to her at some later point when she had the cognitive resources available, which was not now, very specifically not now—
Nellie’s whole body arched. She gasped something that wasn’t a word. The city below her and the sky above her blurred into a smear of light and irrelevance as the orgasm she’d been hurtling toward crashed through her, and Nellie’s knees gave out.
She was falling, and then she wasn’t because Sawyer was already there, already sitting back to catch Nellie around the waist with both arms, pulling her back against her chest as her legs forgot how to function.
Nellie clutched at her and held on and breathed, ragged and undignified and not remotely sorry about it.
Sawyer pressed her lips to the side of Nellie’s face, her cheek, the corner of her eye. Held her steady while Nellie vibrated right down to her toes.
Then Sawyer’s mouth moved to her ear. “Let’s take this to my bedroom.”