2. The Direct Pursuit & Pillow Talk #2
She held her thumb over the send arrow for a second, long enough that I thought she might set the phone down again, might turn around and ask me to say something else, something that gave her a way out instead of a way further in.
She didn’t. Her thumb came down. The message went, the little animation sliding it off the screen, and then it was just the two of us standing at the counter with the city noise bleeding faint through the glass, traffic twenty floors down, a siren somewhere blocks away rising and falling.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Her hand was still on the counter, close to mine, not touching.
I could hear her breathing, still a little too fast, still not settled, and I kept my eyes on the dark screen of her phone like there might be something else coming through it if I watched long enough.
The room held its quiet the way a room does right after something has been decided without anyone actually deciding it out loud, and I stood there in it, close to her.
***
By midnight the suite had gone dark except for the phone on the nightstand, its screen dimmed to a low blue glow that lit the underside of the ceiling and nothing else.
Sara lay beside me with the sheet pulled to her waist, her shoulder bare against mine.
She’d picked the phone up again without asking, scrolling back to the three messages like she needed to look at them again before she could sleep.
“Read them to me,” I said.
She did, slower this time, no clip left in her voice at all.
The first one came out almost gentle, her tone dropping low on open door policy extends to spouses, like she was trying the words on for a different fit than the one they’d had in the kitchen that afternoon.
The second one she read with her eyes half-closed.
By the third, her voice had gone quiet and deliberate, each word set down on its own.
“’I expect her insights tonight. Send me your wife’s thoughts at once.’”
“Tell me what he asked you,” I said. “I want every filthy detail.”
She was quiet a second. Then she started talking, and the decorum went out of her sentence by sentence, her voice dropping lower and her words coming looser, until she was just saying it plain.
“He didn’t ask me anything,” she said. “He told me. It’s how he doesn’t ask, Barry.
He just says what he wants and expects it to already be true.
” He doesn’t ask, Barry, he just says what he wants and expects it to already be true.
” Her hand moved under the sheet, low, and I heard the change in her breathing before I saw it, short pulls through her nose, faster than before.
“I keep picturing him saying it in person. Not typing it. Saying it right to my face, that flat voice, no question mark in it at all. Like he’d just tell me to get on my knees and I’d already be moving before I decided to. ”
“Keep going.”
“He wouldn’t ask if I wanted to,” she said, and her voice had dropped another register, thick now, unguarded.
“He’d just say it. He’d say open your mouth.
He’d say get on the bed. He wouldn’t even look at you when he said it, Barry, he’d just look at me like I already belonged to whatever he decided next.
” Her nostrils flared in the dim light, once, then again, and I watched it happen from six inches away, the same tell from the dinner table now unfolding in the dark with nothing left to disguise it.
“I keep thinking about his hands. How big they’d be.
How he wouldn’t be gentle about it, because gentle isn’t something a man like that even understands. ”
She turned toward me then, fast, her whole body swinging around under the sheet, and her mouth found mine before I’d finished processing that she’d moved.
It wasn’t the kind of kiss I knew how to receive from her, wasn’t anything I had a muscle memory for.
Her tongue pushed hard against mine, insistent, and a low sound came up out of her throat, half moan, half something rawer than that, and she pressed her whole weight into me like she wanted to erase the six inches of space the mattress had left between us.
I let her drive it. She climbed over me, straddling my hips, the sheet falling away from her shoulders, and I felt her hands go to the waistband of my boxers, impatient, pulling them down my thighs with a roughness that had nothing hesitant in it.
I was already hard, had been since somewhere in the middle of her filthy monologue about hands and knees and mouths, and she took me in her fist and guided herself down onto me without a word of preamble, sinking her full weight in one slow, deliberate drop that pulled a groan out of both of us at once.
She was soaked, slick enough that I felt it the second she took me, the heat of her sudden and total, and she planted both hands flat on my chest and began to move, rolling her hips in a rhythm that had nothing tentative in it.
I reached up and found her breasts, thumbs dragging over nipples already hard, and she arched into my hands with her head tipped back, throat exposed in the phone’s dim glow, her hair falling loose down her spine.
The sound she made was guttural, unguarded, nothing like the sounds she used to make in the dark with the lights off and the door checked twice.
“Say his name,” I said, my throat tight around the words. “Say what you were thinking.”
“Charles,” she breathed, and her hips slammed down harder on the word, her whole body shuddering. “God, Barry, Charles would fuck me like this and not even breathe hard doing it.” Her nails dug into my chest. “He’d hold me down and not ask permission for any of it.”
I gripped her hips and drove up into her, matching her rhythm, feeling her tighten around me every time she said his name like the syllables themselves were doing something to her body she couldn’t fully control.
She rode me harder, faster, her breath coming ragged, her nostrils flaring wide with every downstroke, and when she came it was sudden and total, her whole body seizing above me, the sound she made loud and unguarded, filling the room without apology.
I followed a few strokes later, emptying into her while her hips kept working, milking it out of me until neither of us had anything left to give the moment.
She collapsed against my chest, damp and boneless, her breath slowing gradually against my collarbone. Within a few minutes her weight went heavy and even, asleep, one leg still thrown over mine, and I eased her gently off to the side without waking her, the sheet settling loose over her hip.
I lay there a long time after that. My pulse hadn’t slowed the way hers had, hadn’t found its way back down into anything resembling calm.
I picked the phone up off the nightstand, the one that was still hers, still warm from where she’d fallen asleep with it near her hand, and scrolled back through Charles’s three messages in order, reading them again the way I’d read a set of quarterly numbers looking for the pattern underneath the noise.
Open door policy extends to spouses.
If she ever needs private strategic counsel.
Send me your wife’s thoughts at once.
Three messages, each one further out than the last, each one landing somewhere in her that had nothing to do with fear anymore.
I set the phone on my chest and stared at the ceiling.
I was already drafting the fourth message in my head, picturing the look on her face when she read it, and calculating just how much more of herself she was willing to lose.