Chapter 17 #2
Her jeans have a button fly and I work it open one button at a time while she watches me with those dark eyes and her breathing goes shallow and fast. She lifts her hips when I pull the denim down her legs, and the underwear goes with it because I'm done being patient and so is she.
My hands spread her thighs. She tenses, and I feel the hesitation in the muscles under my palms.
Dar is out of her depth here in a way she never is behind a keyboard, and the vulnerability of it, the raw exposure of a woman whose primary defense is competence suddenly stripped of her area of expertise, makes me want to take her apart with a thoroughness that borders on devotion.
My mouth finds her. No preamble. No teasing. Just my tongue against her, slow and flat and deliberate, and the sound she makes is choked and involuntary and so far removed from her usual clinical precision that it rewrites everything I thought I knew about who this woman is with her walls down.
Her hand finds my hair. Grips.
Her hips roll against my mouth and the movement is instinctive, uncontrolled, her body taking over while her mind loses the argument.
I learn her the way I learn systems: through input and response, feedback loops, the specific pressure and rhythm that make her breath fragment and her thighs tighten around my head.
"Higher," she says. Because of course she does. Even here, even with her voice wrecked and her composure in pieces on my floor, Dar gives precise technical instruction like she's directing a system calibration.
I ignore her. Go lower instead, my tongue dragging a slow line that makes her whole body jerk, and then I come back to exactly where she wanted me but at a pace that's mine, not hers.
"That's not what I said."
"It's what you meant." I press two fingers inside her while my tongue works her clit, and whatever she was about to say dissolves into a sound close to a sob. Her fingers yank my hair hard enough that my scalp burns.
"Tommy." My name torn out of her. Not the workspace version. My name as an admission she can't take back. "God, don't stop."
I don't stop. I push her to the edge and hold her there, reading the signals in her body the way I read signal traffic, the tensing, the trembling, the rhythm of her breathing going ragged and desperate.
When she breaks, she breaks quietly, which is the most Dar thing possible. A sharp intake of breath, her body clenching around my fingers, her hand going painfully tight in my hair while the orgasm rolls through her in waves I can feel against my mouth.
I kiss my way back up her body while she's still shaking.
Her hands find my belt, and the coordination is shot but the intent is fierce, and between us we get my clothes off and I settle between her thighs with my forearms braced on either side of her head.
Skin against skin. The full length of my body pressing hers into the mattress, and the sensation of her, warm and trembling and bare beneath me, is so overwhelming that I have to close my eyes and breathe because if I don't I'm going to last about thirty seconds and she deserves more than that.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the part of me that's always running commentary, the part that keeps the team laughing and the tension manageable, offers the observation that this is the first time Tommy has ever needed a loading screen.
I almost laugh. Almost. Then she shifts underneath me and her hips tilt and the blunt press of my cock against her erases every coherent thought I've ever had, and the commentary goes permanently offline.
Her legs wrap around me. Her heels dig into the backs of my thighs, pulling me closer.
I push inside her slowly, watching her face, and her eyes stay open. Locked on mine.
The eye contact doesn't break.
I bottom out and the tight heat of her pulls a groan out of me that sounds like it belongs to someone else.
Her eyes hold mine. I start to move and her breath catches on every stroke, and still they hold.
Her nails drag down my back in lines that sting and burn and I thrust harder because the pain is permission and the permission is everything, and her eyes don't close.
"Eyes open," I tell her when her lids finally flutter. Not a command. A request. Because I need to see her face in this moment, in this light, with this version of me moving inside her. The version nobody knows about. The one she asked for.
Her eyes stay open.
"You feel like something I should have built years ago," I say, and the words fall out unfiltered and raw, and I don't take them back because they're true and because the look on her face when she hears them is worth the vulnerability of saying them.
"You couldn't have built me." Her voice is fractured, barely a whisper, but the precision is still there. Even now. Even like this. "I'm not your code."
"No. You're better."
I brace my weight on one arm and slide my hand between us. Find her clit with my thumb, still swollen and sensitive, and stroke her in time with my hips.
She arches into the contact and her whole body tightens around me and the feeling is so intense that my rhythm falters.
"Stay exactly there," she breathes, and the command in it, the absolute refusal to let me fail her in this, sends a jolt through me that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the fact that this woman trusts me enough to demand what she needs.
I don't stop. I adjust the angle and find the stroke that makes her breath catch and repeat it, building a rhythm between my thumb and my hips that she matches, her body rising to meet mine, her hands gripping my shoulders with a strength that surprises us both.
Her second orgasm hits harder than the first. Her back arches off the mattress and she says my name like she's tasting the syllables for the first time, and the sound of it, stripped of professional context, used only as a summons and a surrender, is what finishes me.
I bury my face in her neck and let go. My hips slam forward, deep, pinning her to the mattress while I come inside her with a force that blanks every thought I've ever had.
My whole body locks, every muscle drawn tight, and the groan against her throat is raw and broken and loud enough that the south corridor might actually hear this one.
She holds me through it. Her legs tight around my hips, her fingers in my hair, her body still pulsing around my cock in aftershocks that drag the last of the orgasm out of me until my arms buckle and I collapse against her with nothing left.
Nothing except nerve endings and breath and the woman beneath me who just disassembled me more thoroughly than any weapon ever could.
Afterward, we lie in the cooling quiet. The bed is wide enough for two but she's pressed against me from shoulder to ankle anyway, occupying my space like she's decided the distance either of us usually maintains is no longer operative.
I find my glasses on the bedside table. Put them on. The room sharpens.
"You ignored my instructions," she says. Her voice is wrecked, but the tone is pure Dar. Flat. Assessing. Like she's filing a post-operation report.
"Your instructions were wrong."
"My instructions were precise."
"Precisely wrong." I trace a line down her shoulder with one finger. "I had better data."
Her mouth twitches. The closest thing to a smile she gives when she's been proven wrong and isn't ready to concede the point. "Your methodology was unorthodox."
"My methodology made you say my name loud enough for the whole south corridor to hear."
"The south corridor is thirty meters of solid rock."
"And I bet it still heard you."
She turns her head to look at me, and the expression on her face is something I've never seen from her before. Open. Unguarded. The analytical mind still running behind her eyes but the analysis, for once, returning a result she doesn't need to encrypt.
Dar is lying on her back, one hand resting on her belly. Her fingers are moving. Tapping a slow rhythm against her own skin, and I watch the pattern and realize it's not code. It's nothing.
Idle motion. Her fingers moving without purpose for maybe the first time since I've known her.
She looks settled. Not relaxed, because Dar doesn't relax, but settled in a way that suggests the calculation running constantly behind her eyes has paused its cycle.
She's lying in my bed, in my mountain, wearing nothing but ambient light and the faint pink lines my stubble left across her collarbone, and she hasn't reached for her laptop. She hasn't checked her phone. She hasn't calculated the distance to the door.
The pendant rests against her sternum, catching light. Whatever it means, whatever it holds, she didn't hide it from me tonight. That's enough. That's more than enough.
I pull the blanket over both of us. She turns into me, her forehead against my shoulder, and her breath evens out into something approaching sleep.
My arm settles around her. In my room, with the server hum steady beneath us like a pulse, I hold the woman who broke into my system and let myself acknowledge the thing I've been refusing to compile.
I'm not the man behind the screen anymore.
I'm the man beside her.
And the difference between those two positions is a word I'm not ready to say out loud, so I say it the way I say everything that matters. Silently. In code. Against her skin, where my thumb traces letters she can't feel and I don't have to explain.