9. Cera
NINE
Cera
Passing in Costume: During Carnival you brush past people who know you and feel nothing, your own face hidden an arm's length from theirs. She sits barefaced beside the very man her other self performs for, and neither world admits the other exists.
I wake, and he is still on my skin. None of it is real. There are no hands, only the low voice living in my head and the ache between my legs where his words went last night.
Dusky morning light leaks through the blinds, too bright even at this hour, nothing like the dark room where Peoria comes out to play. My bedroom smells like coffee from the pot I set to brew before I fell asleep. My sheets are twisted around my hips. My body remembers before my brain catches up.
"Peoria."
Granted, it's my fake name, but he said it like he could reach through the screen and tip my face toward his, and something in it made my chest pull.
He asked me for more than the arrangement last night, more than the mask and the lights and the part I know how to play, and I gave it to him before I let myself decide whether it was safe.
That's the part that will not leave me alone this morning.
It's not that I did it. It's that I enjoyed it more than I ever imagined possible.
My chest tightens now, the same as it did then. I do not know what tipped it over, whether it was hearing him come undone or whether it was me, letting myself be that open and not reaching for the script to hide behind.
I press my thighs together and the soreness blooms, proof of what his voice did to me, of how far past the performance I let myself go.
My hand slides down my stomach. My fingers find the heat between my legs and I am already wet, already ready, which is ridiculous because I came apart for him last night and my body has no reason to still be this wound up over a man I have never seen.
I circle my clit, and my hips lift into my hand. The ache spreads insistently, and I bite my lip because the jolt shooting up from my center is so good it hurts. This is a disaster waiting to ruin me.
I hide behind blue contacts over my brown eyes, behind a wig that turns my brown hair platinum.
The mask, a fake city worn like a name, a whole invented version of myself, all of it was built to keep the real me safe.
And the man behind a black screen has gotten further into the real me than anyone who ever stood in front of me in daylight.
My breath catches. My fingers move faster. I think about the sound he made when he finally stopped holding it back, the one I'm fairly sure no one else has ever been given, and I tip over the edge with his name in my mouth and no idea what his face looks like.
I come hard and loudly in my empty apartment, my body clenching around nothing, my thighs shaking. Afterward, the room is still, too revealing, as the light brightens, exposing my foolishness.
I pull my hand away and stare at the ceiling. My heart pounds. The coffee pot beeps from the kitchen.
I need to get ready for work and stop thinking about Midnight. I remind myself that men want what I give them, not what's underneath. What I think I'm getting from him is a farce, a fantasy I've created in my mind.
The slide deck for Ridge's executive briefing sits open on my screen.
I've been adjusting the same pie chart for fifteen minutes, nudging the labels a quarter inch left, then right, then back again, because the small choices keep me from thinking about how I woke up with a stranger's voice in my head and finished what he started last night.
The air shifts behind me, and my spine knows before the rest of me does.
Wells.
I don't turn. I keep my eyes on the screen and my hands on the keyboard while my body lights up like he reached over my shoulder and flipped a switch I did not know he had access to.
The soreness left over from last night flares into something sharper, and my thighs press together under the desk before I can stop them.
Oh, you've got to be kidding me. It's hormones. It's the morning. It's a body that got more attention in the last twelve hours than it has had in months and apparently cannot be trusted in public now. This has nothing to do with Wells.
He stops right behind my chair, and I shift in my seat, trying to will my own body into behaving.
"You all right?"
His voice is flat, the same tone he uses when he asks if I updated the Singapore file or locked the conference room. There is nothing warm in it, nothing that has any business making my stomach drop or my breath catch or my body decide now is the moment to remind me I am a walking liability.
I swallow and turn my head just enough to look at him without actually meeting his eyes.
"Of course."
He watches me. The dark hair, the hard line of his face, all of it works against whatever willpower I am scraping together. I hate that I notice how his shirt fits across his shoulders, how his hands hang loose at his sides.
"You look off."
I am off. I'm extremely off, one poorly timed thought away from excusing myself to the bathroom and reconsidering every life choice that brought me to this desk.
But I don't say that.
"Just tired. Late night."
His jaw tightens. Something flickers across his face, too fast to read, and then it's gone.
"Get some coffee, or something."
"Groundbreaking advice."
The corner of his mouth twitches. It isn't a smile, not even close, but his shoulders loosen, and he shifts his weight. He leans one hip against my desk.
I blink. Wells doesn't lean. He stands at a distance and delivers instructions in sentences so short they could double as Morse code.
"Ridge wants to review my findings on this by the end of the day."
"I know."
Wells nods. His fingers drum once against the edge of my desk, a single controlled tap, and then he goes still again.
Why is he still standing there?
I grip the mouse tighter and put my eyes back on the screen, reminding myself we are in an office with fluorescent lights and an HR department that does not appreciate employees who cannot keep their hormones in check.
He clears his throat. "Leadership liked the presentation you put together."
"Yeah?"
"So I think we stick to it for now."
I blink at the screen.
"Fantastic," I say with a fake smile. I just want him to leave. "That's great."
"It is."
My chest tightens for a different reason now, something steadier than the heat between my legs. His words are few, but this is real validation of my actual skill, my actual work, not the mask or the wig or the version of myself I package for men who pay.
I nod once because if I say too much, he will know it matters.
Wells shifts his weight off the desk and straightens. I think he's leaving. Please God, let him leave. But he doesn't leave.
"Ridge asked me to work on something last week. It just occurred to me it's something you could help me with."
And there it is, the other shoe. "Okay. Just tell me what you want me to do."
"A shipping partner out of Rotterdam wants proof of our operational visibility before they commit. They need something polished, something that shows we can track a container from origin to delivery without guesswork and without exposing sensitive information."
"Okay. How can I help?"
"Ridge wants me to build a website to showcase our cyber abilities and showcase some of what I can do. He thinks that will be more effective than a simple slide show. Something they can click through on their own."
"That's easy. I can help with that."
"It's due Monday."
My stomach drops.
"As in three days, this Monday?"
"Yes."
I lean back in my chair and cross my arms. The movement pulls my shirt tighter across my chest, and Wells's eyes don't flicker.
He doesn't even take a glance, which should be reassuring, but instead annoys the shit out of me.
Apparently, I want him to notice, and also I absolutely do not want him to notice.
"What's the deliverable? And what have you done so far on it?"
"An interactive web page with a live data feed, if we can build it in that short of a time. I've only pulled the data, so not much on the deliverable side."
"That's not a lot of time. Why did you sit on it so long?"
"No, it's not. Because that's what I do."
Wells pulls his phone from his pocket and taps the screen twice. My phone vibrates on the desk. I glance down at a calendar invite for Friday, six p.m. to midnight.
"You want me here tonight?"
"Yes."
He looks at me directly, and my body decides this is the perfect moment to remind me I'm still wet.
"You'll be paid above your salary for this. It's a bonus project, and I acknowledge it's the weekend."
Relief would be the reasonable response. Money is the thing I need most right now. What actually moves through me is a wry twist in my gut, because this is almost funny.
Here's another man paying for my time.
Different work in a different room, but the structure underneath is the same. He wants something, I provide it, money changes hands. At least this time I'll keep my clothes on.
"Okay. I'm in."
Wells nods once.
He pushes off my desk and walks toward his office without another word. The air shifts again, lighter now that he is gone, and I can finally breathe without my body staging a revolt.
The damp heat between my legs is all that is left of whatever my body was doing when he walked up. The timing could not have been worse, and now I have to go clean myself up.
I lean over the screen and scroll through the third iteration of the supply chain visibility map. It's way too dense. There's too much data crammed into a single web page, which defeats the purpose of proving Stone Intermodal can make complexity simple.
"This won't work."
Wells glances up from the notes he is reading. His lips purse into a flat line.
"Why?"
"Because you're asking them to trust all of this data you're throwing at them without giving context. They will get lost in the detail and assume you are hiding something."
We've been at this for two hours now. When he said he'd not done much, he literally hasn't done anything. He ran reports, that's all.
I've spent the better part of this time trying to create a plan for how to disseminate, and then he brings me twenty-five ticker feeds.
His eyes narrow.
"How would you suggest we do it, then?"
I grab the stylus and circle three clusters of tracking data on the screen.
"You need one anchor metric that tells the whole story. Use that as the single example. Then you layer in the supporting proof, only snippets. If you lead with all of it, I think it makes none of it matter."
Wells sets the notes down and stands. He moves around the desk and stops beside my chair, close enough that the air shifts. Something kicks behind my ribs, but I keep my eyes on the screen.
He leans forward and taps the anchor cluster I circled. Cigarette smoke clings to him, the kind of thing that would normally turn me off, and on him it pulls at me for reasons I do not stop to examine.
"Origin to delivery lag."
"Yes."
"That is the metric that matters."
"Exactly. Everything else supports it. I am not saying your data is weak. I am saying pick your white whale and let it tell the story of all the others."
He stares at the screen for three breaths. I can see him running the argument in his head. It amazes me how differently our brains work and how they still lock together into one machine that runs.
"Restructure it. Lead with lag and push the granular data to backup links if they want to see more."
I exhale and pull the slide into editing mode. My hands are steadier than the rest of me.
"Smart choice."
"It was your idea."
"I know. But you agreed. That was smart."
His mouth twitches.
I rebuild the page with lag as the hero metric, pulling the origin points and delivery windows into a clean visual hierarchy that tells the story in five seconds rather than five minutes.
Wells reads over my shoulder. His attention is absolute. He does not fidget or check his phone or drift. He watches the work with the same intensity most men save for the things they actually want.
I save the changes and lean back. My shoulder brushes his arm. Heat flares where we touch, and I pull away fast, professional, pretending I did not notice.
"Next section?"
Wells nods and moves back around the desk. The space between us opens up again, and something in me misses the heat of him before I can talk myself out of it.
We work through the operational security proof, the financial stability markers, the client testimonials Ridge insisted we include. Wells argues for technical precision. I push for emotional clarity. We meet in the middle more often than not.
Another two hours pass.
At some point, I stand to stretch, and Wells does the same. We end up at the window, staring out at the city lights below, the river cutting through downtown in a dark ribbon.
"You're better at this than I expected."
I turn my head. He's already looking at me.
"At design?"
"At being patient and working through all of the minute details."
"That is literally my job."
"Well, you're good at your job, then."
"Thanks."
He holds my gaze for half a second too long, then looks back at the window.
"We should finish."
We return to the desk. I sit, and he stands behind me again, leaning over my shoulder to review the final screen.
His hand braces on the desk beside mine. Our fingers are inches apart.
The ache between my legs is back, and this time I can't blame hormones or the morning or anything but Wells, standing close enough that I feel his breath, taste his cigarettes, close enough that I want him to stay exactly where he is.
I save the deck. The screen dims to idle.
Neither of us moves.
I turn my head. He is right there, closer than I realized. His eyes drop to my mouth for one fraction of a second before lifting again.
The work is done.
Clearly we're not. Fucking hell.