40. Ethan
Ethan
“The efficacy of the new centrifugal separation rates is actually quite—”
Sophie walks into the atrium and I forget what I was saying.
Dr. Yoon is still looking at me, waiting for the end of the sentence. I have no idea what the end of the sentence was.
Sophie is wearing a dark red dress, the neckline sitting just below her collarbone. She’s smiling at someone from marketing, and the strands that have escaped her loose chignon move against her skin when she turns her head.
Every coherent thought I had is gone.
She’s stunning. She’s always been stunning. But tonight—
Then she glances at me across the room and smiles, and I smile back before I can stop myself.
“Mr. Brooks?” Dr. Yoon says, adjusting her glasses. “The separation rates?”
“Right. Yes. Promising results.”
I excuse myself from Dr. Yoon and find Sophie again across the room. She’s moved on to another conversation, her head tilted, listening with that focused attention she gives everyone. I check my watch. Three more hours. Four, tops.
The annual Synthera gala, a necessary evil I helped design years ago and have regretted ever since. Tonight the atrium is all soft light, mirrored windows, champagne, and a string quartet Finn insisted on. The whole place glows gold and slightly unreal.
We’d discussed canceling it after the break-in. But Sophie had looked at the three of us and said, It’s still our best shot—everyone in one room, relaxed, drinking. People say things at parties they’d never say in a meeting. Let me be in the room for that. And so we agreed.
The evening moves and I track her without looking directly at her. I keep thinking about the day she read my half-life model from across the room.
Two years of pharmacology. A long time ago.
Nursing school. That’s how she’d known the notation, why she’d asked all the right questions. None of it had been part of her cover.
She could have been brilliant in a lab.
I look down at my drink and think about the life she would’ve had if she’d finished school. If her stepdad hadn’t taken it from her. And then I think about the library, and the scars, and the way she looked when she said I was twenty-one, and my hand tightens around the glass.
Don’t. Not here. Not now.
After an hour, the noise starts to get to me. The overlapping conversations, the music, the sheer volume of people in one space—my brain tries to process all of it at once, and eventually I hit my limit.
I slip out through the corridor and take the elevator up to the fourth floor.
The music fades behind me as the doors close.
The motion-activated lights flicker on as I walk through the research wing, one strip at a time, illuminating the empty desks and dark monitors.
Everyone’s at the party. The wing is deserted.
My office door is closed. But there’s light coming from underneath it—a thin strip of gold at the base.
What the—?
I push the door open.
Sophie is sitting in my chair.
Her heels are kicked off on the floor, her legs curled beneath her in the oversized seat. In her hands—pressed against her face, her nose buried in the fabric—is my scarf. The gray cashmere one I leave draped over the back of the chair because the office gets cold in the mornings.
She doesn’t hear me open the door.
I stand there and watch her.
She’s breathing it in. Eyes closed and lips slightly parted.
Then she sees me, and the scarf drops from her hands. It lands on the desk between us, a rumpled heap of gray cashmere that might as well be a confession.
“Ethan.” She straightens in the chair. Her hands move to the desk like she’s about to explain something with a spreadsheet. “I was just—”
“Sophie.” I step into the office, and I can’t keep the amusement out of my voice. I close the door halfway. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” The word comes out too fast, and the look on her face says she knows exactly how unconvincing she sounds. Color climbs her neck—I can see it in the lamplight, a flush that starts below her collarbone and moves upward, reaching her jaw and her cheeks.
“I was checking something. In the office. For the investigation.” She pauses, then her shoulders drop. “Okay. I was smelling your scarf.”
“I saw.” I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms.
She closes her eyes for a second, like she’s bracing herself.
“I just needed a minute. Away from the crowd, from all the noise. And your office was quiet, and the scarf was on the chair, and it smelled like you, and I just—” She stops and looks up at me, half defiant, half mortified.
“I picked it up. And I couldn’t put it down. ”
My throat tightens and doesn’t let go.
“Because I like the way you smell,” she admits, quieter now, her fingers picking at the hem of her dress. “Your scent. I can’t always catch it through the suppressants, but it gets into the fabric, and it’s—” She shakes her head. “I like it. I like it a lot.”
“Yeah?” I ask her, softly. I close the door behind me—all the way this time.
She nods.
“Well, if you’re taking requests, the sweater on the couch has a higher concentration. I wore it yesterday.”
She laughs, her fingers curling around the arm of the chair. “You’re not supposed to encourage this, Ethan.”
“On the contrary. I happen to know what it’s like to want someone’s scent so badly it overrides your better judgment.
” I cross the office and lean against the edge of the desk beside her, close enough that the lamplight catches us both in its warm circle.
I can see the faint sheen of sweat at her temples and smell her shampoo, along with something underneath it that isn’t shampoo at all.
“Plus, I’m a scientist. I’m supposed to optimize outcomes.
If the objective is my scent, I can suggest more efficient delivery methods than my scarf. ”
The laughter fades. She looks up at me, and the air between us changes. The flush is still there, but her eyes have gone dark—the pupils widening as I watch, her gaze dropping to my mouth and back up again in a movement she doesn’t try to hide.
“Ethan.” Her voice is soft, barely there.
“Sophie.”
“I wasn’t just smelling your scarf.”
“No?”
“I was thinking about you.” She holds my gaze. “The archive room. Your hands on me. And—” She pauses and wets her lips. “What you told me you’ve been wondering about.”
I’ve been wondering what you’d taste like. What you’d look like. What you’d feel like.
Heat floods my chest, my stomach, lower. My skin prickles like the air pressure in the room has dropped, and every nerve I have orients toward her like a compass needle finding north.
“Sophie...” The word comes out low and rough, barely more than breath. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”
Her eyes widen and the warmth drains from her face.
“Sorry.” She stands up from the chair. “I didn’t mean—”
The embarrassment in her voice cuts through the fog in my head like a blade.
I take her hands. “Sophie, look at me.”
She looks up, her eyes wide.
“Don’t ever apologize for telling me what you’re thinking.
I want to know. I want to know all of it.
” I kiss her cheek. Her lips are right there and I want to kiss her so badly it hurts.
“I should go back to the gala.” I swallow.
“Not because I want to. God knows I’ve thought about nothing but you for weeks. But not here, not like this.”
It takes everything I have, but I step back from her and move toward the door, my heart racing.
I’m at the door when she calls out. “Eth.”
I turn around.
She’s standing behind the desk, and the woman looking at me is not the same woman who was blushing about a scarf minutes ago. Her lips are parted, her chest rising and falling too fast. She looks like she’s made a decision and she’s not going to let herself take it back.
She takes a step toward me. Her hand finds the edge of the desk and holds on, like she needs something solid to anchor herself.
“Sophie—”
She takes another step. This one steadier. Her hand leaves the desk.
“What if—what if I want to?”
Her voice shakes on the last word, but she doesn’t look away.
Another step. Her chin lifts. Her hands go to the top button of her dress and she undoes it slowly, her eyes locked on mine.
My pulse spikes so hard I can feel it in my wrists.
I reach behind me and lock the door.
“Sophie, please.” My voice comes out wrecked, my heart thumping so loud I can hear it.
“Ethan.” The way she says my name—low, like she’s tasting it—goes straight to my cock. Another step, another button. The fabric parts to reveal the hollow of her throat, the line of her collarbone, and my eyes follow every inch of skin she exposes.
She wants me. And this isn’t biology. This is Sophie choosing, walking toward me with her eyes wide open.
Another step. Another button. I can see the swell of her breasts now, the soft curve of them pushed up by a black bra, and my hands curl into fists so tight my nails cut into my palms because if I move them I’m going to put them on her and I’m not going to stop.
Fuck.
My breathing is ragged, fast and loud in the quiet room. I press my back harder into the door, trying to keep distance between us, but she’s getting closer with every button and the fight is already lost.
It’s a surrender in slow motion.
Then she’s right in front of me, her breath warm on my jaw. I can see the pulse hammering in her throat, the flush spreading down between her breasts, and her fingers trembling on the last button.
“Please what, Ethan?” she whispers, and the dress drops to the floor.
She’s in a black bra and underwear and nothing else, and every synapse in my brain fires at once and goes dark.
My hands find her waist and my mouth finds hers and the kiss is violent in its urgency.
She tastes like champagne and something warmer underneath, something that is just her, and I’ve been starving for it.
I grip her waist and lift her and her legs wrap around me and I press her back against the door and the moment my cock grinds against her core through my trousers, a sound tears out of me that I don’t recognize.