Chapter Eleven #3
The table was quiet for just a second.
She heard the words in her own voice and felt how true they were.
She was wearing Velour. Her thighs were open under the table.
Her boss's fingers were rubbing her pussy.
She was a good girl who wanted to be very bad and had for months and had just said so out loud at a dinner table and nobody at this table except Xavier knew all the ways in which she meant it.
It was the most charged sentence she had ever spoken out loud.
Jason didn’t speak. She could see it landing on him, the words and her voice and the way they had come out of her, and she watched him reach for his water glass.
Andre looked at her for a long moment.
"Say that again," he said quietly.
She said it again.
"Good girls wear Velour." The briefest pause. "When they want to be bad."
Xavier's fingers moved and she felt it in her voice on the last word, a barely perceptible softness, a slight catch she could not fully control and could not take back. She reached for her wine and did not look at Jason.
Andre tilted his head slightly. Something had shifted in his awareness. He was looking at her the way he had looked at the tagline proposal, like something had just confirmed itself.
"You mentioned you did voice work," he said. Still looking at her. "Early in your career."
"Some," she said carefully.
His smile arrived slowly. The smile of a man whose evening had just become exactly what he wanted it to be.
"Claire," he said. "I want you to say it one more time. Like you are recording it. Like it is the campaign." He held her eyes. "And I want the second half." His voice dropped slightly. "Breathy. Seductive. Like you mean every word of it."
Xavier's fingers slid a little lower.
Waiting.
She felt Xavier's fingers tease her entrance the moment she opened her mouth.
"Good girls wear Velour."
A pause.
His fingers pushed inside her.
She felt them and her breath caught and her eyes stayed on Andre and the pause stretched just a beat longer than it should have and then she kept going.
"When they want to be bad."
His fingers began to move.
Slow. Deliberate. In and out with the same patience he brought to everything and she felt each movement and gripped the stem of her wine glass and kept her face pointed at Andre and her expression as close to composed as she could make it which was not very close at all.
Andre was watching her face with the awareness of a man who understood exactly what he was seeing and was going to say nothing about it.
"That," he said quietly, "is the campaign."
Xavier's fingers kept moving inside her.
She reached for her water glass because she needed something to do with her hand and because she did not trust her wine hand anymore and because the alternative was gripping the edge of the table and she had done that enough tonight.
Jason was watching her from across the table. She could feel his eyes on her face and she looked back at him and tried to look like a woman who was simply pleased that her tagline had landed well.
She did not think she was succeeding.
Andre set his glass down and looked between the three of them with a satisfied expression.
"I have an early flight," he said. "But before I go." He looked at Claire with that warm smile. "I meant what I said. That tagline. That voice." He shook his head slightly. "We are going to do great things together."
He looked at Xavier and something passed between them that Claire could feel without being able to read.
Then he stood.
Xavier did not stand. His hand did not move.
Andre leaned down to kiss Claire on the cheek and from that angle, that close, there was nothing between his eyes and Xavier's hand under her skirt.
Her skirt was too short for any of it to be hidden.
Xavier's fingers against her bare pussy, her thighs open, her glistening wetness visible to a client standing right beside her.
Andre straightened.
He looked at Claire. His eyes warm and direct and completely aware and she felt the flush in her face and felt her pussy flood from the shame of it all.
She held his gaze because looking away would have been worse and felt her whole body burning under that look.
The shame of being caught was real. But underneath it something else entirely, the heat of being seen like this by a man with that kind of presence, a client, someone with power over the account and over the evening, while her husband sat two feet away completely unaware of what Andre was looking at.
The wrongness of it flooded through her and she felt her pussy dripping on Xavier's fingers and held Andre's eyes.
Andre smirked at her. Slow and genuine and entirely without judgment.
Then he looked at Xavier and Xavier looked back at him with nothing on his face at all and his hand still exactly where it was.
Andre said his goodbyes to Jason. Shook his hand. Told him it was a pleasure.
When he was gone Xavier looked at Claire.
"Do you have plans for the rest of the evening?" he said. His fingers moving against her pussy while he asked it.
She felt Jason's eyes on her from across the table.
She thought about what she had said in their bedroom. The date night. Later tonight. Just us. I promise. The way he had let her go and held onto it through the whole evening, through everything he had watched at this table, that promise was the one thing he had been carrying.
Xavier's fingers teased slowly against her and she felt her body respond before her mouth did.
"No," she said. "No plans."
The guilt arrived immediately and sat right alongside everything else her body was feeling and she did not take the words back and did not look at Jason.
Xavier looked at Jason then.
"I have a suite upstairs," he said. "We should celebrate."
His fingers stilled against her. Waiting for Jason's answer. Everyone at the table understood exactly what was being asked and exactly what saying yes would mean.
Jason looked at her first. Just for a second. Then at Xavier.
"Okay," he said.
Xavier slid out of the booth and moved toward the front to settle the bill, leaving them alone at the table for the first time all evening.
Jason stood and reached for Claire's hand to help her up. She slid toward the edge of the booth and took his hand and rose and the micro skirt failed to cover her and his eyes went down before he could stop them.
He went very still.
No thong. Nothing. Just bare skin, her pussy wet and glistening, the evidence of the entire evening coating her inner thighs, completely exposed for the single second it took her to get to her feet and the skirt to fall back into place.
He looked up at her face and she looked down at his pants and saw what she had suspected since she slid into that booth next to Xavier.
He was hard. Visibly, completely, straining against the fabric in a way that left no ambiguity about how he had spent the last hour watching his wife at that table.
She thought about the things he said when he thought his fantasy was safely contained to their bedroom.
He had wanted her like this. Wanted Xavier to want her like this.
He just hadn't known it was quietly pushing her into letting it become a reality.
Neither of them said a word.
Xavier appeared beside them.
"Ready?" he asked.