23. Reed
Reed
The women’s bathroom door isn’t locked.
I try it because she’s been gone twenty minutes and Celeste has started doing her silent sweep of the room, eyes moving in a pattern that means someone is missing from her count. I find Mia at the sink, both hands on the basin, her eyes coming up to mine in the mirror.
She’s pale under the makeup. Not the pale that comes from a long night on your feet. White at the mouth, a faint sheen at her hairline, her knuckles bloodless on the porcelain.
“I’m fine,” she says, before I’ve opened my mouth.
“You’re not,” I say.
“Stress.” She straightens up, reaches for the cold tap, and runs the water over her wrists. “Five weeks of this would do it to anyone.”
I lean against the door frame and watch her dry her hands, check her face in the mirror, and press the corner of her lipstick back into place. She’s rebuilding herself piece by piece and she won’t look at me directly, just at my reflection. It’s a small distinction but it matters.
“Mia.”
“Two minutes,” she says. “Go back out.”
I don’t move.
She meets my eyes in the mirror, holds them, then looks away first. “Reed. Please.”
I find Celeste. “Mia needs a few minutes,” I tell her. She makes a note on her tablet without asking why.
Harper materializes at my elbow. “Is Mia coming back?”
“Yes,” I tell her.
She nods and goes back to the corner where two kids her age have been building something out of cocktail napkins for the last twenty minutes.
By eleven the stream is off, the board members have filed out, and Celeste gives me a single nod from across the room that means we held. I find Harper, find Mia, and we leave.
In the limo she takes the far window, shoes off, feet tucked under her, and eyes on the city. Harper falls asleep between us, her head leaning against Mia’s arm.
“Talk to me,” I say, careful not to wake Harper.
“Not here,” she says, not bothering to look at me.
I force myself to wait until we’re home. Once we arrive, Lucia takes Harper, who’s still half asleep, and carries her to her room.
I turn to Mia. “Tell me what happened in that bathroom.”
She sets her bag on the console table and keeps walking. “I told you already.”
“You told me stress. That’s not what I saw.”
“It’s been five weeks of this, Reed. Cameras, hearings, board dinners, and Vanessa appearing in every room I walk into.” She stops in the hallway and turns around, and the color that wasn’t in her face twenty minutes ago is back, high in her cheeks. “I’m allowed to hit a wall.”
“You are,” I agree. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then stop following me down the hall.”
“It’s my hall,” I retort.
She stares at me, her jaw shifting.
“You want to know what’s going on?” she says. “Vanessa found me in a corridor tonight. She told me she filed a supplemental motion this afternoon to restrict my contact with Harper. She called me unstable.”
“I didn’t know she’d gotten to you.”
“You never know,” she says. “That’s the problem. You’re always running the board three moves ahead and I’m the one piece you keep forgetting to cover.”
I start to answer but she’s faster.
“I packed a bag last week,” she says. “After the proposal. Suitcase on the bed, all my clothes inside it, and I sat there for twenty minutes deciding whether to go.” She holds my gaze.
“I stayed because leaving would break Harper’s heart.
Not because of anything you did or said.
Because of your daughter, who doesn’t know just how fucked up any of this actually is. ”
I close my eyes for a moment, taking it all in.
“I’m not a chess piece,” Mia continues. “I’ve been telling myself this is a business deal I can walk out of cleanly but every week it gets harder to believe that.
We’ve been through a rollercoaster of bullshit, Reed, and I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake anymore.
It’s too much. I’m not built for this life. ”
She’s two feet away and she’s shaking, not from cold, but from having said all of that out loud to the one person she’s been trying not to say it to.
I cross to her and kiss her.
She shoves at my chest with both hands, putting real force behind it. I get my arms around her and she keeps shoving, but I hold on, and then her hands stop shoving, grab my lapels, and she kisses me back with everything she’s been holding in.
I walk her backward to my room, neither of us talking, her fingers at my tie, mine finding the zip at the back of her dress.
Door shut with my foot, zip down, the burgundy pools on the floor.
She gets my jacket off my shoulders, goes for my shirt buttons.
I let her work them while I unhook her bra, pull it free, and step back.
She’s flushed throat to stomach, her hair half down, her chest rising fast, and she’s looking at me with her jaw still set like she hasn’t finished being angry and she’s going to be angry about this too.
I get her onto the bed and come down over her, my weight on my forearms, my knee between her thighs. She reaches up for me and I go sideways instead, put my mouth on her throat. She exhales sharp. I drag my lips down to her collarbone, to the curve of her breast, take her nipple into my mouth.
Her back comes off the mattress, and both hands go into my hair and grip.
I take my time. I work my tongue slow against her nipple, feel it harden, suck until her breath hitches in a way that tells me she’s past pretending this is just anger. I move to the other and give it the same, and her hips are pushing up against me while I hold myself deliberately out of reach.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” she breathes.
“Yes,” I confess, against her skin.
I drag my mouth down the center of her stomach. Her muscles pull in under my lips, her hands still in my hair, and I push her thighs apart, settle between them, put my mouth on her pussy.
She makes a sound she doesn’t muffle at all and I take it as instruction.
My tongue moves through her slowly, finding the places that make her pull my hair tighter.
She’s soaking against my mouth, and I push one finger inside her, feeling how tight she is, then add a second and a third before she’s finished adjusting to the first. I curl them forward and work her clit with my tongue in slow circles and her thighs start shaking against my shoulders.
She comes the first time with her hips off the mattress, her fingers locked in my hair, her pussy gripping my fingers in long rolling pulses. I work her through every pulse until she goes loose.
I come up over her. She pulls me down by the face and kisses me, tasting herself on my mouth, and her hands are already at my belt.
“Lie back,” she says.
I go onto my back. She swings over me, straddles my hips, takes my cock in her hand, strokes once from base to tip. My jaw locks and she does it again, watching my face, her thumb dragging over the head. I grip her thighs hard to keep my hands occupied.
She lines my cock up with her pussy and sinks down onto me in one slow stroke and we both go still.
She’s tight, soaking, still clenching from before, and the drag of her taking me fully sends every muscle in my body rigid. I breathe through it, doing my best not to finish in ten seconds like a fucking teenager.
She sits fully on me, both hands flat on my chest, then rolls her hips once, finds the angle, and starts to move.
She rides me slow at first, rising, dropping, her hands pressing into my chest for leverage.
I drive up to meet her on every downstroke and watch her face, her throat, the flush spreading across her chest. She finds her rhythm, picks up the pace, and I get my hands on her hips and drive up into her harder, the headboard hitting the wall on the deepest strokes.
She drops forward, hands on the pillow beside my head, face close to mine, and rides me harder still.
Her pussy clenches around my cock on every stroke, and her breath is coming apart against my cheek, broken pieces of it landing on my skin.
She turns her face into my neck when she comes the second time, biting my shoulder hard, shaking through it while I hold her hips and drive up into her through every wave.
I roll her onto her back and hook both her legs over my shoulders. She sucks in a breath at the angle, her hands going to the sheets. I push back into her pussy and the depth makes her jaw drop open.
I move slow here too, full strokes, watching her face on every one. She can’t look away at this angle, can’t turn into the pillow, can’t muffle anything. Her hands grip the sheets, her back arches on the deep strokes, and every sound she makes now I get to see as well as hear.
I slide my thumb to her clit, press, and feel her whole body jolt.
I keep my thumb moving, keep driving into her, and watch her come apart for the third time with her head thrown back and her hands white-knuckled in the sheets, her pussy clenching around my cock in waves that pull me over with her.
I drive into her twice more and follow her, my forehead dropping to her knee, the release moving through me slow and thorough until there’s nothing left of it.
I ease her legs down, settle beside her, and pull her against my chest, wordlessly making it clear she’s staying with me. Her breathing eventually slows.
I’ve spent two years making sure everything in my life has a contract under it, an exit clause, a defined end. It’s kept a lot of things standing that should have fallen over.
I look at her hand on my ribs and realize that I don’t want an exit clause.
That’s new.