Chapter Nine — Sienna #2
"I'm addicted to your skin," he says, quieter.
"Your voice. The look you get when you think I'm wrong and haven't decided whether to say so.
" His forehead comes down against mine. Slow.
Intentional. "I'm going to ruin you. Or you'll ruin me.
I don't care which." His mouth is right there.
"As long as you're looking at me when it happens. "
"That's a lot of confidence for someone who called it a mistake and left three years ago," I say.
"I know."
"You don't get to just decide you're addicted to me and expect that to fix anything."
"I'm not asking it to fix anything." His thumb moves along my bottom lip, slow, patient. "I'm asking you to know how I feel before you decide what to do with it."
The hope cracks open in my chest. Him, I can handle.
His mouth, his hands, the silk, the fact that he's been watching closely enough to know things about me I've never said out loud.
The hope is different, the way it's already building something underneath this.
A floor, a future, a shape I want so badly I can feel it in my throat.
I trusted permanence before. I trusted it with my studio, with my suppliers, with investors who called me the next big name in American fashion and then went quiet without ever explaining why.
I trusted it once with a man who buttoned his cufflinks in the morning light and told me it was a mistake.
Wanting someone ended in bankruptcy. I know this. My studio door has a padlock on it to prove it.
My hand comes up between us, my palm flat against his chest. Not a push. Just a stop.
He feels it immediately and goes still.
"Sienna."
"I know." My voice comes out steady. Small miracle. "I know what you're saying."
"Then—"
"I'm not ready." The words are honest and they cost something.
"I don't know how to trust that this doesn't end the same way everything else does.
You're standing in the middle of everything I've built in the last three weeks.
You're terrible. You're beautiful. You watched me work and learned things about how I think that people who've known me for years never noticed. " I stop. "That's not fair."
He lifts his head and looks at me. His expression open for once. Just him.
"Yes," he says.
"I need you to not push."
"I'm not pushing."
"You were about to kiss me in a fabric aisle at midnight."
"Yes." A beat. "That's not pushing. That's wanting. They're different."
He steps back. Gives me the space. His hand drops from my jaw, the silk sliding off my shoulder as he moves. He glances at the fabric on the floor, then back at me.
"I'll wait," he says.
"Don't make promises you're going to resent me for later."
"I've had three years of practice resenting the wrong things." He picks up his water glass from where he set it on the shelf and drains it. "I'd rather resent the right one, if it comes to that."
I believe him, and the hope gets a little bigger.
I stand in the narrow fabric aisle watching him walk away with the crimson silk pooled around my feet.
I press my hand flat to my chest. Right over the place where something I don't have a name for yet is insisting, against everything I know, on continuing to grow.
The silk is still warm. I stand there for a long time. Then I pick it up, drape it back over my shoulder, and go back to work.
***
Iwork for another hour. Maybe two.
The crimson silk is perfect. The third look is coming together. The collection is moving the way collections move when you stop fighting them and let them tell you what it needs.
The hope is still there.
I set the shears down and go upstairs.
His study light is on. I can see it under the door. I knock once. Not because I need permission. Because I want him to know it's me.
"Come in," he says.
He's at the desk, papers spread in front of him, exactly as I left him hours ago. He looks up when I open the door and something in his face goes very still.
I cross the room.
I don't say anything. Neither does he. I stop in front of the desk and look at him for a long moment. The controlled stillness of him, the way he's holding himself exactly in place, giving me every option, taking none for himself. I reach across the desk and take the papers out of his hands.
"Sienna—"
"Don't." I set the papers down. "I'm not ready to talk about it. I'm not asking for anything permanent. I'm just—" I stop. "I'm tired of standing in the fabric aisle."
He stands.
He comes around the desk slowly and stops in front of me. Close. His hand comes up to my face. The same gesture from the aisle, his thumb at the corner of my jaw. This time I don't put anything between us.
"Are you sure?" he says.
"Ask me again and I'm going back downstairs," I say.
He doesn't ask again.
His mouth comes down on mine, and it isn't gentle. Nothing about this has been gentle since the fabric aisle. His lips part mine, and his tongue finds me, and I open for him with a sound I don't recognize.
I get his shirt open, one button at a time until I lose patience and just push the rest apart. Buttons scatter. I don't care. His hands find my waist and pull me flush against him, and I gasp against his mouth because I can feel him, all of him, already hard through the wool of his trousers.
His fingers slide into my hair and tighten, pulling my head back, and the stretch of it sends a pulse straight between my legs. I get my hands on his chest and feel his heartbeat. It's faster than I expected. Faster than the controlled stillness suggests, and that undoes something in me.
He walks me backward, mouth still on mine, until the desk catches me behind the knees and papers slide to the floor. I don't care. Neither does he.
He lifts me onto the edge of it, his hands gripping hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow, and I pull him between my thighs. My skirt is already bunched at my waist. Neither of us bothers pushing it any further.
"Now," I say, already working his belt. The leather rasps through the buckle. "Adrian. Now."
He doesn't argue. His hands shove his trousers and briefs down just far enough to free himself, not bothering with anything more than that.
My hand finds his cock hot and thick. Already so hard it has to ache, and a rough groan tears out of him at the contact.
I stroke once, twice, and his hips jerk forward into my grip.
He hooks his fingers in my underwear and pulls it aside.
Finding me already slick and ready for him, he's inside me in one hard stroke, deep enough that I cry out against his shoulder.
My nails dig into his back through the open shirt.
He fills me completely, and my body clenches around him, adjusting, taking him in.
"Adrian—"
He doesn't answer. His mouth finds my throat instead, and the sound he makes into my skin says everything he doesn't. A low, broken thing that vibrates against my pulse.
There's nothing careful about it. His shirt hangs open off his shoulders where I shoved it. My own shirt falls open between us, and his mouth finds my nipple through the thin lace of my bra, teeth grazing, and I arch into it, gasping.
He drives into me like he's been thinking about nothing else since the fabric aisle, a rough sound tearing out of his throat with every thrust. The desk shakes beneath me. Papers crinkle under my palms. I don't care. I grab the edge of it and brace myself, meeting him stroke for stroke.
"Harder," I say, or beg. I can't tell which anymore.
He gives me harder. He gives me everything. His hands grip my hips, fingers digging in, and he fucks me with a rhythm that strips away every other thought. No time for anything but this. No patience for anything but need.
The wet sound of our bodies fills the study, obscene and perfect. My head drops back, and his mouth finds the column of my neck, teeth scraping, tongue soothing.
I come first, sudden and hard, his name breaking out of me. My whole body seizes around him, and the orgasm rips through me in waves that leave me shaking.
He follows almost immediately after, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his whole body shuddering against mine, a guttural sound muffled against my skin. I feel him pulse inside me, hot and thick, and I hold him tighter.
We stay like that. Breathing.
I slide off the desk and pull my shirt closed, my hands not quite steady yet. He stands in front of me, watching, not touching. Giving me the space to decide what happens next.
Neither of us bothers to straighten the rest of it. His trousers still at his knees, my skirt still bunched at my waist. There doesn't seem to be a reason to, yet.
I look at him for a moment.
"I'm going back to work," I say, smoothing my skirt back into place.
He nods, still fixing his belt. One hand comes up anyway and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. Just that. Nothing more.
I leave him to it and go back downstairs.