33 | Technical Issue
Wednesday
He was waiting outside my clinic at one.
Not leaning against a car this time—sitting on the low wall across the street, phone in hand, like a teenage boy that had nowhere else to be.
I stopped on the steps and looked at him.
He looked up. Lifted a hand.
I laughed before I could help it.
We went to lunch at a place nearby that had good soup and even better bread, and then he said there was a farmer’s market two streets over if I wanted to walk through it before he had afternoon calls, and I said yes before I’d finished processing the question.
He bought things. Methodically, without consulting me, putting items in the bag with the confidence of someone who had a list in his head—the specific pasta I’d mentioned once months ago, the tea that I drank when I was at Haily’s,
the brand of yogurt that he couldn’t possibly have known about unless he’d been paying the kind of attention that people didn’t usually pay.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked, watching him pick up a jar of something.
“You mention things.”
“I don’t remember mentioning—”
“You liked th yogurt in Napa. And you drink this type of soda since we were kids.”
I stared at him.
He put the jar in the bag and kept walking, and I followed him and tried to think of something to say to that and couldn’t find anything.
Back at his apartment he put things away with the same unhurried efficiency he did everything, and I sat on the kitchen counter and watched him and thought about all the years we’d been in the same rooms at the same parties and he’d been—noticing.
Storing things away. Building a map of me without me knowing.
It should have felt strange.
It didn’t.
“I would love you to come tomorrow,” he said, his back to me, putting something in the cabinet. “I’m working from home. You have a day off.”
“I know I’m off, I didn’t tell you—”
“I’ve checked.” He turned around, smiling. “There’s a key on the hook by the door, you could take it. If I’m on a call when you get here, just come in.”
I looked at him. At the easy certainty of it—not asking, not performing, just offering a thing he’d already decided he wanted to give.
“You prepared for this,” I said.
“A little.”
“Theo.”
“Tessa.” He held my gaze and kissed me softly. “Just come tomorrow.”
I looked at the key on the hook. Back at him.
“Fine,” I said. “But if you’re on a call I’m raiding your freezer.”
“There’s a Carmel ice cream,” he said. “Third shelf.”
Of course there was.
Thursday
He was deep into it when I let myself in. I paused at the study doorway long enough to catch his eye and lift a hand.
I stood in the doorway for a moment watching him. Corpo Theo. Sharp and precise and completely in his element, talking about risk assessment with the quiet authority of someone who’d never doubted he belonged in the room.
I mouthed sorry when he glanced up.
He shook his head slightly.
I went to the freezer. Found the ice cream exactly where he said it would be. Changed into his shirt—the one from the hook on the bathroom door, soft and oversized and smelling like him.
For a while I read on his couch. Ate ice cream. Listened to him talk about portfolio exposure through the half-open door, the measured cadence of his professional voice, and thought about how strange it was that this felt like the least strange thing I’d done in months.
Then I got bored.
I wasn’t proud of it. I recognized, on some level, that what I was considering was a terrible idea. I recognized this clearly and thoroughly and then got up anyway.
I appeared in the doorway.
He glanced up. Glanced back at his screen.
I reached down and unzipped my jeans. Stepped out of them. Left them on the floor.
His eyes came back to me—just for a second, involuntary—then forward again. His expression didn’t change. His voice didn’t change.
I crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside his chair.
He shifted slightly—awareness, not acknowledgment—and kept talking.
I rested my hand on his knee.
His sentence didn’t falter.
I slid my hand higher.
A pause. Barely a beat, probably imperceptible to whoever was on the other end. His hand came down and covered mine—firm, stopping.
I waited.
He moved his hand back to the laptop.
I moved mine higher.
The sharp inhale was almost inaudible.
Almost.
I smiled. He couldn’t see it.
“—If I could just—” He stopped. Cleared his throat. “Excuse me one moment. Technical issue.”
He clicked something. The screen went dark.
Looked down at me.
“You,” he said, “are a menace.”
“You have very good poker face.”
“Had.” He pushed back, reached down, hooked his hands under my arms and lifted me onto the desk in one smooth movement.
I made a sound of surprise.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He was standing between my knees now, one hand braced on the desk beside me, the professional version of him entirely gone. He kissed me—not gentle, not patient—his hands sliding under my shirt, palms flat against my ribs, moving upward until I inhaled sharply and gripped his shoulders.
His hands kept moving, unhurried and certain, sliding down my stomach, hooking into my underwear and pulling it off, leaving me sitting on his desk in nothing but his shirt with the afternoon light on my skin and his eyes moving over me in a way that made everything feel warmer.
His mouth moved to my neck. My collarbone. Then lower.
He dropped to his knees.
The sight of him like that—composed, deliberate, completely certain—knocked the air out of me before he’d even touched me.
His hands slid down my thighs, spreading them wider, and then his mouth found me and I stopped thinking—and I bit my lip against the sound that tried to escape.
“The walls,” I managed.
He lifted his head just long enough to say: “Big apartment. Don’t worry about the walls.”
Then he went back.
I let go of the sound.
He was unhurried about it in a way that should have been illegal—no urgency, no shortcuts, just his mouth moving with the focused attention of someone who had decided this was exactly where he wanted to be and wasn’t going anywhere until he’d finished.
I gripped the edge of the desk with one hand and his hair with the other and he let me, his hands spreading warm and firm against my thighs, holding me open and steady while he took his time.
“Theo—”
The sound he made in response wasn’t words. It vibrated through me and I gasped and my grip tightened in his hair and he pressed closer, his tongue moving in slow circles that wound me tighter with every stroke.
The pressure built—slow, inevitable, his hands firm on my thighs when I tried to close them around him—until I was breathing in shallow gasps and trembling against his mouth.
I came with his name on my lips and my head thrown back, loud enough that I would have been embarrassed about it if I could think clearly enough to be embarrassed.
He stayed until the last shudder passed.
Then he rose, unhurried, and looked at me sitting wrecked on his desk and something in his expression was deeply, quietly satisfied.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I managed.
He didn’t let me calm down. Just lifted me off the desk—I made a sound of protest—and we ended up on the floor, the wheeled chair rolling into the wall with a bang that made us both freeze and then collapse into muffled laughter for exactly three seconds before he was over me again,
his weight settling between my thighs.
He kissed me slowly, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other moving under his shirt—still on me, barely—tracing the curve of my waist, my hip, the inside of my thigh. Unhurried. Like we had the whole afternoon and he intended to use every minute of it.
“Theo—”
“Mm.”
“The call—”
He lifted his head. Looked at me—certain, the faintest edge of amusment in his expression.
“You came in here,” he said quietly. “Took your jeans off. Put your hands on me.” His thumb traced along my jaw. “You don’t get to be shy now.”
My face went hot.
“I wasn’t being shy—”
“No?” His mouth curved. Then dropped to my neck. “Good.”
His hands moved over me with the attention. His thumb tracing my collarbone. His mouth at my shoulder. His palm spreading flat against my stomach while he kissed me again, deeper this time, his weight settling warm and certain between my thighs.
I pulled him closer.
When he finally pushed into me I exhaled against his shoulder—slow, full, the stretch of him settling into something that felt less like relief and more like recognition.
No questions this time. No checking. Just the certain unhurried way he moved.
His hands found my hips, tilting them slightly, adjusting the angle until—
“There,” he said.
Oh God.
“Yes.” I wrapped my legs around him, pulling him deeper. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. His mouth found mine between thrusts, hungry and a little desperate now, the careful control starting to fray at the edges. I dug my nails into his back and felt him exhale sharply against my lips.
“Again,” he breathed.
Then did it again.
The rhythm built—deeper, harder, his breath ragged against my neck, the afternoon light falling in long gold strips across the study floor and the faint sound of the still-running call timer somewhere above us, completely irrelevant.
His forehead dropped to mine. His eyes stayed open, watching my face in that focused way that made heat crawl up my throat even now, even like this.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him.
His hand moved between us, pressed exactly where I needed it, and the combination of that and the angle and the way he was watching me—
I clenched around him with a broken sound and he swallowed it with his mouth, his rhythm faltering, his whole body going taut.
When he came it was with my name low and wrecked against my lips, his forehead pressed hard to mine, shuddering once and then going still and heavy against me.
We lay there on the study floor. His hand found mine loosely, fingers threading through without urgency.
The afternoon light had shifted. The room was quieter now.
“Your call,” I said finally.
“Ended six minutes ago.” A beat. “Automatically.”
“So they just waited.”
“Probably.”
I laughed—breathless, a little wrecked—and he turned his head and pressed his mouth to my temple and we stayed there a moment longer than we needed to, neither of us in any hurry to move.
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