Chapter 4
NAOMI
Ireach past him and turn the brass lock myself.
The sound it makes is small and enormous. He looks at the lock, then at me, and whatever was holding him at parade rest lets go all at once. I learn what it’s like to be read all the way down.
His mouth comes down, mine comes up, and there’s nothing polite about it, no introductory kiss, no diplomacy.
He tastes like cold vodka and restraint resigning.
He kisses the way he moved on the dance floor, weight exactly where it needs to be, slow even now, which is outrageous, because I’m not, I’m already pulling his shirt loose from his waistband with both hands like it insulted me.
The door is cool against my back. He is not. He’s a wall of heat through linen, one hand flat beside my head, the other finding the curve of my waist through silk like he’s confirming a suspicion he’s had since the rail.
“The dress,” he says against my mouth.
“Bianca’s. Tear it and you answer to her.”
“I’ve faced worse.” But his hands go careful, finding the zip, drawing it down my spine slowly enough that the sound gets its own moment.
The silk goes off my shoulders and down, a green puddle I step out of like a tide pool.
His breath changes. I hear it change. I stand there in heels and very little else in the light strip’s dim gold.
The most unhurried man on this coast goes still in a brand-new way.
“Look at you,” he says, low, a fact entered into the record.
I’ve been looked at my whole life. This puts goosebumps on me in a warm room.
His eyes go down me slowly and everywhere they pass, my body reports in, collarbone, the lace edge, the dip of my waist, the length of my legs.
There’s no pricing in it. It’s the way I read a building I already know I’m going to write about. He’s memorizing.
“You’re overdressed,” I tell him, because if he keeps looking at me like that I’ll say something I can’t take back.
He straightens and unbuttons his shirt, no show about it, cuffs first, the watch staying on. I get my turn, so I take it, because the terms were no last names, nobody said no looking.
The jacket lied. It said big. It didn’t say this.
Wide shoulders coming down into a chest with dark hair across it, a stomach that isn’t gym-pretty, it’s work-hard, muscle laid down by effort that had a purpose.
Along his ribs on the left runs a seam of scar, pale, old, long, the kind with a bad night attached to it.
His forearms are heavy, veins standing against tan skin.
His hands settle on my hips and cover me from hipbone to the small of my back, like I was sized for them.
I put my finger on the scar. He watches me do it.
“Story?”
“Not tonight,” he says. “Terms.”
“That’s my rule.”
“It’s a good rule. I’m borrowing it.”
And that’s the laugh, both of us, quiet in the little marble room, my forehead against his sternum for one second while it shakes through me. His hand comes up to the back of my neck. Then the laugh runs out of air, because his thumb is moving, and my body remembers what we came in here to do.
After that it’s fast.
His mouth is on my throat and my fingers are in his hair.
The marble edge of the counter is cold against the back of my thighs when he lifts me onto it.
The lace comes off, negotiated one-handed while his mouth keeps mine busy.
I get his belt open on the second try, my knuckles brushing the hard line of his cock through the linen.
The sound he makes into my mouth is short and rough.
“Fuck,” I say into his mouth, a finding, and I feel him grin against me for the first time all night.
“Now,” I tell him, heels locked behind his thighs. “You can be thorough later.”
“I’m going to hold you to later.” A pause, foil, his hands quick about it, and then he’s there, pushing into me, the size of him arriving all at once, too much, exactly right, my nails digging into his shoulders. He stays buried for one breath, watching my face.
“There she is,” he says, quiet, wrecked, and starts to fuck me.
The bass comes through the wall, through the marble, through him.
Nothing about it is elegant and neither of us apologizes.
It’s fast and deep, his hand splayed across the small of my back pulling me into every stroke.
My heel drops somewhere on the floor. The mirror fogs at the edge behind me.
When I go too quiet, working toward it with my teeth set, he says, “No. Let me hear the review,” and I laugh mid-moan.
I come with my forehead against his neck, hard, my pussy clenching hard around him. He works me through it, hips still moving, only then letting himself follow with a low sound buried in my hair.
For a while the little room is just breath and bass.
“Well,” I say, when I can. “The facilities are excellent.”
His laugh is nearly silent, felt more than heard, his mouth at my temple.
“The review that matters.” He pulls back to look at me, and his face has changed, the guard not gone but off duty.
Something in me pulls tight and low at the sight of it.
“That wasn’t enough,” he says. Plainly. The way he said dance with me.
“There’s a suite up the cliff. Terms unchanged. ”
Policy says the night ends here, cleanly, a story I get to keep in a drawer. Policy has had a very bad evening.
“Terms unchanged,” I say, and reach for the green dress.
The gray one is waiting in the corridor with a face like unseasoned bread.
A silent negotiation happens over my head, one look each way, and then the gray one simply isn’t there anymore, gone to disapprove at a professional distance.
The club has thinned to its last shift of believers.
Bianca’s cabana stands empty. My phone buzzes as we cross the terrace.
Went home with the boat. Don’t wait up. If you’re seeing this and still there, LOOK AT YOUR OWN POLICY DOCUMENT, darling.
Policy’s under review, I type, and turn the phone off, which I haven’t done in four years.
The suite is five minutes up the cliff in a car that smells like new leather and nothing else.
A terrace over black water, where far below the Lido’s glow is going out section by section, the whole party being folded away like linen.
A bed the size of my apartment’s better half.
He closes the door, and this time neither of us reaches for a lock, because there’s no one left to lock out.
“The view’s supposed to be the selling point,” I say, at the glass, the sea down there doing its slow black breathing.
“It’ll keep.” He comes up behind me, sweeps my hair off one shoulder, puts his mouth to the join of my neck without hurry. In the window’s reflection I watch his hands take the zip down for the second time tonight. “This won’t.”
Thorough, it turns out, was not a figure of speech.
He lays me out on the bed and goes over me like the building he intends to buy.
Slowly. In order. The dip of my collarbone, the underside of my breast, the ladder of my ribs, one hipbone then the other.
His mouth is hot and patient. By the time he settles between my thighs I’m already shaking and my hands are fists in the sheets.
“You said later,” I manage. “It’s later.”
“It’s the middle of later.” His mouth moves down. “Interrupt the audit again and I start over.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m a little funny.” And then his mouth is on me properly.
He takes his time about it, tongue flat, greedy, then settles on my clit with a pressure that arches my back off the bed.
His forearm pins my hips down when I try to move.
He stays there, listening, adjusting, until I’m gasping and pulling at his hair. I come with his name torn out of me.
Khristofer. No last name. It’s enough to shout with.
He comes up over me while I’m still shaking.
This time it’s slow, deep, his forehead dropped to mine, my knees at his ribs, the old watch cool against my thigh where his hand grips it.
I say left, he goes left. I say there, he stays there, obedient in exactly one arena, the gray eyes never leaving me.
When I come again it’s with company, his breath breaking against my mouth, my name inside it, said like it’s pulled out of him.
We surface eventually, because the minibar exists. We raid it standing up, me in the sheet worn as a toga, him in nothing at all with total unconcern, splitting a chocolate bar and a prosecco so small it’s practically a joke about itself.
“Amendment,” I say, around chocolate. “One fact each. Not names, not jobs, not anything I could search.”
He considers me across the little bottle. “You first.”
“I don’t do this.” I gesture at the room, the sheets, the wreckage, him. “There’s no version of me that does this. Ask anyone on the coast.”
“I watched you not do it all night.” He passes me the prosecco. “You made me work through a full hour of no.”
“That was the version of me not doing it.”
“Then I met the only other one.” He says it without any flourish at all, the same way he’s said everything tonight, and it goes through me like the bass did. “My turn. I came tonight for one hour. Work. The hour ended while you were telling me what’s wrong with the kitchen.”
“And you stayed.”
“I stayed.” He takes the chocolate out of my hand, breaks off a square, hands it back. “For the quality control.”
“That’s two facts. You’re over the limit.”
“Fine me.”
“What’s the watch?” I push it, because the prosecco says I can. “That can count as my collection.”
“The watch is a fourth fact, minimum.” He screws the cap back onto the tiny bottle, deliberate about it. “You’d have to stay past morning.”
The word sits on the counter between us, next to the chocolate wrapper. Morning.
“That’s not the deal,” I say.
“No,” he agrees, easy, nothing pushing behind it. “It isn’t.”
We go again after that, lazier, half laughing at the start for no reason either of us explains.
His hand wraps in the toga sheet, pulls it slowly off me like he’s unwrapping something he already knows the shape of, and I lift my hips to help him.
He pushes into me easy and deep while I’m still smiling, both of us moving slow, nowhere to be.
Somewhere in there the sky goes from black to charcoal.
I surface at the gray hour with my cheek on his chest and his hand heavy on my hip even in sleep, like something in him keeps watch over what it holds.
The scar is an inch from my eyes, rising and falling.
In this light it looks older than he is.
I could ask now. The version of him asleep might even answer.
What I want, lying here in the wreck of it all, is the story.
The one he wouldn’t tell. I want to know what the watch is for, who taught him to move like the ground reports to him, why a man who reads rooms full of gorgeous people crossed a terrace for the one woman leaving at two.
I want the morning, is what I want. Coffee, his face in daylight, the whole beautiful disaster of a next time.
Which is exactly how it starts. Wanting the morning is the gateway drug. I’ve watched where it goes, every time, since I was old enough to spell leverage. Someone stays for coffee, someone starts expecting, someone’s whole freedom ends up folded in a stranger’s drawer. Not mine.
I lift his hand off my hip like a bomb tech. He doesn’t wake, or he lets me believe he doesn’t. I dress in the dark with a skill I’m not proud of, heels in hand, and at the door I make the mistake I knew I’d make.
I look back.
He’s face down in the ruin of the bed, one arm flung across where I was, the sheet at his waist, that broad back rising slow, the old watch keeping the correct time for nobody. In the half light he doesn’t look dangerous. He looks like a man who’d be worth the morning.
I stand there long enough to be honest about it. Long enough that if he opened his eyes right now, the policy would lose. He doesn’t open his eyes. The coast gets one more clean getaway.
I take the stairs instead of the elevator, cross the lobby before the night man can offer me a car, and come out into the blue hour with my shoes still in my hand.
The coast is in the one state it never lets me put in the brochures, empty and cool, the sea flat as poured metal, gulls arguing over the club’s dead candles somewhere below.
A street cleaner works the corner by the church and tips his cap at the shoes in my hand, no judgment anywhere in it, a man who has seen every version of this walk home.
I find I don’t mind being one of them. My dress is wrinkled.
My mouth is tender. Every separate muscle reports in, happily, when I move.
One night off the itinerary. Sent back the morning, kept the receipt.
By the time the sun clears the cliff I’ll be Naomi Vale again, luxury copy, deadlines, a woman with a policy and a flight home in three weeks. He’ll be a locked door on a coast full of them, no last name, no number, nothing to find. That’s the whole design. I designed it.
I walk north along the empty road, and I don’t let myself look up at the cliff, which is how I know I’m already in trouble.