Chapter Seven
She walked in the door at six fifteen and he knew before she said a word that something had happened.
Not something bad. Something else. She had a quality he had been noticing more frequently in recent weeks, a heightened aliveness, like whatever happened at that office was turning a dial in her that their life at home had been turning slowly as well.
She kissed him hello and went to change and came back in a t-shirt and shorts and poured herself a glass of wine and he watched her move through the kitchen and felt the familiar pull low in his stomach.
Two weeks of watching her walk out the door every morning in those skirts had done something permanent to how he looked at her even when she wasn't wearing them.
"Good day?" he said.
"Really good," she said. She was looking out the kitchen window. Something in her expression he couldn't read. "I led the presentation. Xavier said the clients were engaged from the first minute."
Xavier. There it was. The name had been coming up more in the last few weeks than he could keep track of. Xavier thought this. Xavier said that. Xavier wants the Velour deck revised by Monday. He had started counting without meaning to.
"He was pleased with you," Jason said.
She looked at him. "He was."
"How did that feel?"
A pause. She turned her wine glass once on the counter. "Good," she said carefully. "It felt good."
He held her eyes for a moment and she looked away first and he felt his pulse pick up and went back to making dinner.
Later, in the dark, her body was urgent against his in a way that had become its own weather system, the closer they got to the weekend the more charged she was, and he had stopped examining the correlation and started simply being grateful for it.
She pulled him close and his cock was hard against her before she finished moving.
Her fingers found his hair and pulled and he felt her hips already rolling against him and lost whatever was left of his patience entirely.
The dirty talk had been escalating. He was aware of that. Each week he pushed a little further and each time he did her body rewarded him so completely that stopping felt like a choice he was theoretically capable of making and practically incapable of making.
"Xavier praised you today," he said against her ear, his cock deep inside her. She whimpered softly and her hips pushed back against him. "Tell me what he said."
"He said I was excellent," she breathed.
He thrust harder. "He's been watching you." Her hips rolled up to meet him. "Watching you walk into those rooms in those skirts."
"Jason." His name in her mouth like a warning she didn't mean.
"He wants you," he said. His voice had dropped to something he barely recognized. "You walk in there every morning dressed for him. He wants to fuck you. Imagine spreading your legs for your boss. Taking his big black cock like this. Tell me you want to fuck your boss Claire."
“Oh fuck, yes. Fuuuck. I’m gonna cum.” Claire came apart completely. Her whole body, her nails in his back, a sound torn out of her that she didn't try to muffle, and he followed her over the edge with Xavier Morrow's name in his mouth like a confession he had stopped trying to keep.
He lay there afterward and stared at the ceiling.
Two weeks ago he had said Xavier would see her in a skirt.
Tonight he had said Xavier wanted to fuck her and told her to admit she wanted to fuck him.
He had watched the distance between those two things close and had done nothing to stop it and his body had betrayed him so completely on the other side of it that stopping felt like a concept that applied to other people.
He had lit something he no longer knew how to put out.
He closed his eyes.
Beside him Claire was quiet and he could feel her still awake in the dark and did not ask what she was thinking and did not want to know.
* * *
The following week had its own rhythm.
He noticed the wardrobe continuing its quiet progression without anyone announcing it.
Tuesday she came home in a skirt he hadn't seen before, darker, shorter than the ones from the boutique, and he registered it the way he had been registering everything lately, with a part of his brain that had stopped pretending it was neutral about any of it.
Wednesday the silk button-down again, this time with heels that added three inches and changed the entire geometry of how she moved through a room.
Xavier's name appeared at dinner both nights, not prominently, just present, woven into the fabric of how she talked about her days now the way a person's name gets woven in when they occupy enough of your thinking.
He said nothing about any of it. Just listened and watched and let it sit in him.
Thursday she came home different.
Not the heightened aliveness he had come to recognize.
Something quieter, turned further inward.
She made dinner with her shoulders slightly drawn in and answered his questions in full sentences and was completely fine in every observable way and was not fine at all and he knew better than to push it directly.
He waited.
After dinner she was quieter still. They watched television for an hour and she sat close to him on the couch with her feet tucked under her and her glass of wine and didn’t speak about work and he let the silence do what it needed to do.
She talked when they were in bed.
The lights were off and they were lying side by side in the dark and he was almost asleep when she said, "He was hard on me today."
He opened his eyes.
"Xavier," she said. Not that he had needed the clarification.
"What happened?"
She told him. A client deliverable, a timeline she had misread, a consequence that had rippled out to two other accounts and required Xavier to make a call he shouldn't have needed to make.
She laid the details out with the precision of someone who had been wrestling with them all day.
Then she described his office. The closed door.
Xavier sitting across from her with that complete and total attention she had described before, except this time it was not approving.
The way he walked her through exactly what she did wrong and what it had cost and what he expected going forward.
His voice never rising. Never needing to.
"I kept waiting to feel defensive," she said quietly. "I had my reasoning ready. I knew what I was going to say." A pause. "And then he just looked at me and started talking and I didn't say any of it."
"What did you feel instead?" Jason said.
A long silence.
"I don't know," she said. "It was just really intense,” her voice lowered. “I don't know how else to describe it."
He believed her. He also believed there was a more accurate word for what she felt in that office and she had decided not to say it.
His hand moved to her hip under the covers. Felt her exhale slowly at the contact. He slid his palm across her stomach and she made a small sound that was not quite permission and not quite resistance and he kept moving until his hand slipped beneath the waistband of her underwear.
He found her warm. Not soaked. Just a slight unmistakable heat that told him everything the careful words she had been choosing all evening had been working to not say.
He went still for a moment.
She went still too.
Neither of them spoke. The dark quiet of the house sitting around them and his fingers resting against her and her body's answer already there, already given, before either of them had decided anything.
"I bet you felt so small," he said quietly against her temple. "Standing there while he looked at you like that."
"Jason." Her voice low. Warning.
"So small and helpless while he told you exactly what you did wrong." His fingers moved, just barely. She drew a sharp breath. "Didn't you?"
"Don't," she whispered.
"Your pussy doesn't seem to mind," he said.
She made a sound that dissolved before it became anything nameable.
"He's so strong," Jason said. His voice had dropped to the register it always found its way to in these moments, something he didn't fully recognize as his own. "So controlled. Just imagine him really laying into you, Claire. Really punishing you the way you needed to be punished."
"Jason, stop—" Her hips pushed toward his hand as she said it. Stop and her body were not in agreement.
"Imagine him taking control of you and deciding you need more than a scolding."
She moaned and grabbed him. Both hands, his shirt, his shoulders, pulling him over her with a force that surprised him, her hips already rising before he had fully shifted his weight, and he understood what she was doing.
Understood that this was the only move she had left that didn't require her to say out loud what his fingers had already found.
She was pulling him on top of her to end the conversation.
To put something physical between herself and the thing she was not going to say.
He let her.
He sank into her and felt her body answer and she buried her face and made sounds she didn't try to muffle and he did not say another word because he didn't need to.
Her body was saying it. Had been saying it since she walked in the door with her shoulders drawn in and her careful words and her glass of wine and her I don't know.
She came hard and fast and quiet against him, her fingers gripping his back, her breathing jagged in his ear.
He followed her and stayed quiet.
Afterward she fell asleep quickly, her back to him, and he lay there in the dark listening to her breathe and thinking about what his hand had found before she pulled him over her.
That slight warmth. Not the urgency of their charged nights recently.
Something more complicated than that. Something that had been sitting in her all evening, building quietly the whole time she had been making dinner and watching television and choosing her words carefully, and she hadn't known it was there until his fingers told her.
Or she had known and had been hoping he wouldn't find out.
He reached for his phone on the nightstand. The screen lit the dark in a narrow band and he turned the brightness down and started searching. He knew what he was looking for.
He found it a few minutes later. A book. The cover showed a woman at a desk and a man standing over her and the title was not subtle and he read the first page of the preview and felt his cock stir against his thigh.
He bought it without deliberating further.
Then he opened his messages and typed her name and pasted the link and wrote: this looks incredibly hot. you should read it.
He set the phone down and closed his eyes and listened to his wife breathe in the dark and thought about Xavier Morrow punishing his sweet little wife.