Chapter 35 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Turn out the light switch / We’ve been awake for days / And no one’s coming ’round here no more”
— “Cold Contagious” by Bush
I stand there for way too long. Long enough that Weston has to clear his throat a few times before I register the sound and turn to look at him.
“You okay?” he asks. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“I’m groovy,” I say, a word I’ve never used before in my entire natural life.
I walk back to my desk on autopilot and sit down.
The zoning filing is still open on my screen.
I scroll down a line and then back up. I highlight a sentence and unhighlight it.
Meanwhile, through the glass wall of the corner office, I can see Kir and Thornton sitting across from each other.
Kir’s ankle is resting on his knee. He’s gesturing with one hand while Thornton nods along, and every few seconds, they both laugh about something.
My pulse won’t come down. I keep replaying the handshake and the total blankness in his face. I was just another stop on the tour, no different than Cheryl or Deborah or Intern Priyanka.
And then that wink. Nobody else saw it; he’d never be that careless. But I did. Another little gift for me and me alone.
My thighs press together under my desk. I hate him. I really, truly hate him.
Except for the fact that I don’t hate him at all.
Thirty minutes later, the corner office door opens and Kir steps out with Thornton right behind him.
More handshakes, more laughing, more Rick this and buddy that.
Then Kir turns to Thornton’s assistant, Linda, and asks, loud enough for half the floor to hear, “Excuse me, could you point me toward the restroom?”
Linda gives him directions. Kir thanks her with that same thousand-watt smile and saunters down the corridor past the copy room.
I know what this is.
An invitation.
But I’m not going after him. Absolutely not.
I have a deadline to meet and also, you know, a shred of professional dignity left to protect.
I’m not going to get up from my desk and follow Kir Lazarev to the bathroom of my own newsroom in the middle of a workday simply because he winked at me and it lit a new fire in my belly.
I’m not doing that…
… until I push my chair back and stand up.
Weston looks over. “Where are you going?”
“Bathroom,” I say.
“You just went, like, half an hour ago.”
“Bladder problems. Mind your business, Weston.”
Legs quivering, I walk down the corridor toward the restrooms.
I’m halfway down the corridor, between the copy room and the supply closet with the busted handle, when a hand shoots out from the old photo darkroom and closes around my wrist.
I don’t even scream. Some part of me was expecting this.
Kir pulls me through the door and shuts it behind us. The darkroom hasn’t been used in years. It’s tiny, maybe six feet by eight, crammed with dusty shelving units and stacks of cardboard boxes that nobody’s touched in decades. There’s no window and no light; the place is designed to keep it out.
“You’re out of your mind,” I hiss.
Kir presses me back against the shelving unit. A box of something topples off the top shelf and lands on the floor with a soft thump.
“You came,” he croons, his cinnamon scent flooding me, easing and exciting everything it touches at the same time.
“I was going to the bathroom,” I insist.
He simply laughs.
“Okay, fine. I was coming to find you. But only to tell you that showing up at my office is—”
He puts his thumb on my bottom lip and drags it down. I stop talking.
“Don’t ruin it by pretending you’re angry,” he says.
“I am angry.”
“You didn’t look too angry last time I saw you.”
His thumb is still on my lip. I can taste the salt of his skin.
In the pitch dark of this tiny room, I can’t see his face, and something about that trips the old wire in my brain, the loophole that makes this work, makes it all okay, that lets me want things without having to look at the person I’m wanting them from.
“You watched,” I whisper. Until this moment, I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. I thought I knew, I knew I knew, but I wasn’t positive. The confirmation makes me feel giddy and high.
Kir’s voice is an unholy rasp. “Every. Fucking. Second. That performance,” he murmurs against the skin of my throat as he leans in and slowly nuzzles the tip of his nose up behind my ear, “was the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me. And I grew up with Lukas Lazarev as a father.”
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it. He catches it with his mouth, kissing me deep and hungrily in the dark.
When we break apart, I’m breathing hard and gripping his tie in my fist. “You can’t just show up here,” I tell him. “This is my job.”
“I had a meeting with Rick.”
“Rick?” I grimace at the unfairness of it all. “I’ve worked here for two years and I’ve never called him anything. I don’t think he knows I exist.”
Kir laughs. “Maybe you should try being more personable.”
I yank his tie in response, but he just laughs again. “You shook my hand out there like I was a stranger,” I snap. “Am I a stranger to you?”
He strokes the inside of my knee with one fingertip. “Would you have preferred I bent you over the copy desk in front of your colleagues? I mean, ask and ye shall receive, but I don’t think your bosses would approve.”
“Is it so much to ask for some acknowledgment that I exist?”
“Why, the wink wasn’t enough?”
“The wink made it worse!”
His thumb traces my jawline in the dark. “You liked it.”
“I wanted to strangle you.”
“That can also be a form of affection, in my experience.”
I let go of his tie and smooth it flat against his chest, which is a mistake, because now, my palm is just resting there and I can feel his heartbeat, steady and sure underneath the fabric.
“You’re the worst,” I say.
“And yet here you are.”
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Here I am. What happens next?”
I can almost feel Kir’s smile, though I can’t see a bit of it. “I was thinking something along the lines of this.”
He spins me around before I can draw my next breath.
My palms slam flat against the metal shelf and a row of chemical bottles chatters. Kir doesn’t pause. His hands find the hem of my pencil skirt and wrench it up over my hips in one savage motion, bunching the fabric up above my waist.
“You had your turn,” he says. “Your rules, your pace, your cute little orders.” His fingers hook into the waistband of my underwear and yank them down to mid-thigh. “It’s my turn now.”
I don’t ask him to put on a mask. I don’t need one.
The darkroom is pitch-black, deeper than nighttime or closing your eyes.
There are no streetlights bleeding through curtains here and no red LED blinking from a vent.
It’s a void. Pure nothing. Absolute, velvet, enveloping nothing, and inside it, his hands are everywhere and his body is a furnace behind mine.
He is nobody and everybody and the only person alive.
The darkroom is a mask.
“You know what you did to me?” He reaches between the V of my legs to palm my aching center. “I didn’t touch myself the whole time you were performing. Not once. You told me to be patient, and I was. I sat there like a good fucking dog while you came all over your own hand and moaned my name.”
Two of his fingers push inside me. I gasp and grip the shelf hard enough that the metal edge bites into my palms.
“And then you fell asleep,” he continues as he starts to pump a thick finger in and out of me.
“I watched you sleep. All night. Like a man who has lost his fucking mind.” He withdraws his fingers almost all the way, then drives them back in.
I’d crumple to the floor if it weren’t for his hips pinning me to the table. “Which I have. Thanks to you.”
“You’re—” I start, but the rest of the sentence evaporates when he adds a third finger and stretches me open.
“I’m what?” He grinds the heel of his hand against my clit, and the sensations rippling outward from it make me stutter and drool.
“Go on. Use your words. You were so chatty on Wednesday. How does that feel, Kir?” He mimics my breathy cadence alarmingly well.
“Are you hard, Kir? Are you leaking for me?”
My face burns in the dark. “That was—”
“Torture,” he finishes. “That’s what that was.
You put on a show designed to break me, and then you went to sleep like a baby while I sat in a puddle of my own cum trying to figure out what the fuck just happened to me.
” He bites the tendon at the side of my neck, not gently whatsoever. “So consider this your receipt.”
I hear his belt. The jingle of the buckle, the hiss of it sliding through loops, the metallic click. I assume he’s just taking it off… until suddenly, I feel that body-warmed leather around my throat.
“Hold still,” he commands.
He threads the end through and pulls until I feel a gentle, even pressure on both sides of my windpipe. My airway narrows and the world gets soft around the edges, cottony and distant. Every sensation below my neck doubles in intensity. I can feel my own pulse thudding against the leather.
“Good?” he asks.
I whimper something that vaguely resembles a yes. Even if I could speak, I don’t want to change anything. The pressure is too perfect, just enough to remind me that he’s here and he’s holding me. If I needed him to stop, he would. But I don’t need him to stop.
I need more.
I reach back blindly and grab his hip, pulling him closer. He exhales against my ear and tugs the belt again, and I melt.
But even then, he doesn’t rush it. Bastard that he is, he lets me stand there anxiously waiting, skirt hiked to my ribs, underwear tangled around my thighs, waiting, listening, while he takes his sweet time.
“Kir,” I whisper.
“Say it again.”
“Kir.”
“Louder.”
“We’re in the middle of my newsroom—”