2. Clem
CLEM
He turns the deadbolt.
I hear it click. He flips the sign from Open to Closed and pulls the inside shade.
He does all of this without looking at me.
I’m behind the counter with a tray of muffins half-arranged in the case, and I haven’t moved since he walked in, and I’m not going to move until he tells me what he just did.
He turns around. He puts both hands on the counter between us. He’s careful where his hands go. Off to the sides of my muffins. Even his hands know what to disturb and what not to.
“Marco won’t come back,” he says.
I put down the muffin in my hand. “Okay.”
“Anyone who knew about him won’t come back either.”
“Okay.”
I am, I realize, saying okay like a woman whose whole vocabulary has reduced itself to one word. It’s fine. I have other words. I’ll get to them in a minute, once my brain reboots.
“You don’t have to ask anything. You can ask anything.”
I don’t ask.
I pick the muffin back up. I put it on the plate.
I move the plate two inches to the left, then back.
I have, in the last sixty seconds, become a woman who rearranges muffins under the gaze of a man who just told me he handled my problem.
I am not handling this well. I am also not handling it badly.
I am handling it the way you handle the thing you have been waiting to handle for six months: by mostly not breathing.
I should ask. I should say what do you do for a living, Stellan, what’s your job, what does it mean that you sat in this corner for six months, but I don’t.
I can hear my own pulse in my ears, the radiator clanking, the espresso machine ticking down from the run I just did.
I already know the answer. I’ve been waiting for him to say it out loud.
He looks at me.
His eyes are doing that grey-green thing where they aren’t either color and they aren’t moving. So steady I feel them as pressure. I’ve been looked at by men. None of them have ever looked at me like this—like he’s already decided I’m his and he’s just here checking on me.
“Are you afraid?” he says.
I think about it. I want to be honest. I don’t think I am.
“No.”
“Should I leave?”
“No.”
He doesn’t move yet. He’s giving me time to revise. The silence is the kind he could break and isn’t. I think about saying thank you for the window and you didn’t have to and I should pay you for the lock. I don’t say any of those, because none of them are what’s happening here.
What’s happening here is I’ve wanted him for six months, and he’s just put his hand inside the worst thing in my life and pulled it out. I don’t have any of my normal vocabulary for that.
I take a breath.
“Stellan.”
He looks at me.
“Come behind the counter.”
He comes behind the counter.
It takes him approximately three steps. The bakery isn’t large.
He is. He’s a head and a half taller than me.
He has to angle through the half-door. His shoulder fills the frame.
He doesn’t touch me when he steps in—he just stops a foot away and looks down at me, and the foot of space between us is somehow more loaded than every kitchen counter I have ever leaned against in my life.
His coat smells like cold morning and faintly like soap. No blood on him anywhere. Nothing on him to suggest he’s been doing anything more strenuous than driving into Manhattan. Nothing on him to suggest, looking at his face, that he has just done what we both know he just did.
I tip my head back to look at him. He does not move.
“Tell me what you want,” he says.
The question is so plain it almost knocks me over.
He hasn’t asked me anything before. He has asked me about coffee, the weather, my muffin order.
He has not asked me what I want. I have not been asked what I want by a man in this room before and the difference is so big I have to grip the counter behind me.
“I’d like you to kiss me.”
He does.
His mouth is warm. Not soft—there’s nothing soft about him, and I wouldn’t want him to be—but careful, the way the rest of him is careful. He puts one hand on my jaw, tilts my face up, kisses me like he’s making sure he gets it right the first time.
I make a small sound. I do not mean to make it.
The man has been on the other side of my counter for six months and I have wondered, exactly seventeen thousand times, whether he kisses like he looks at me.
He does. The small sound I make in his mouth is every dumb fantasy I had about this catching up with reality and finding reality worse, in the best possible way.
His hand tightens. The kiss goes from careful to hungry between two breaths and I’m clutching the front of his coat with both fists.
He picks me up like I weigh nothing—the speed of it is what gets me, the lack of effort—and puts me on the prep counter behind the espresso bar.
Stainless steel cold through my apron. He’s between my knees, and his hand pulls my apron string open one-handed, like he’s done this in his head a hundred times. The apron drops.
“Clementine,” he says against my mouth. “Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Don’t say it because I asked. Say it because it’s true.”
“It’s true.”
He kisses me again. Harder. His hand goes up under my shirt, wide and splayed on my ribs.
I’m already shaking. I haven’t been kissed in a year, haven’t been touched by anyone who looked like he meant it in much longer than that.
I’ve wanted Stellan Byrne for six months across a counter and now he has both hands on me and the only thing I can think is don’t be careful with me, please don’t be careful, I’ve been careful enough this year.
“I don’t need you to be gentle,” I say.
His head comes up. He looks at me.
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Say it again.”
“I don’t need you to be gentle. I need you to fuck me.”
His hand goes up under my dress.
He finds my underwear. He doesn’t tear it—pulls it off me clean, no theater, and stuffs it in his coat pocket. He pushes my dress up to my waist. I’m bare on the prep counter. His eyes go down once, come back to mine, and stay.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him.
He puts a hand on my pussy. Just there. Not moving. The heel of his palm against my clit, two fingers low. I make a sound I don’t recognize.
“Wet,” he says, like he’s confirming a fact. “Clementine.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Six months.”
“Same.”
He moves his hand. Two fingers slide inside me—slow, deep—and I clench around him on reflex. He watches my face the whole time. My head goes back against the cabinet. His thumb finds my clit, light, only enough to make me track it.
“You can come on my fingers right now,” he says, “or you can come on my cock. Pick.”
“Cock.”
“Good girl.”
It’s the first time he’s said it. I don’t know how I know that’s going to matter. I just know it’s already true.
He takes his fingers out of me, undoes his belt and his pants. His cock is heavy and hard. I look down at it for one second, then back up at his face. I’m out of my depth and I know it, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not.
“It’s a lot,” he says.
“I see.”
“You’ll tell me if it’s too much.”
“Yes.”
He notches the head of his cock against me, one hand under my thigh, the other flat against my sternum to hold me up. He pushes in.
I make a sound.
He stops halfway. “Breathe.”
I breathe.
He pushes in another inch. My thighs are shaking. He’s still looking at my face—not at where we’re joined—like my face is the thing he’s been waiting six months to read. He pushes the rest of the way in and bottoms out and stays there, fully buried, his eyes still on mine.
“There you are,” he says. “Good. There you are.”
“Oh my god.”
“Take a second.”
I take a second, clenching around him helplessly. He doesn’t move. He holds my whole weight against his palm and waits—nothing to prove, nowhere to be, only the inside of me to think about.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He starts to fuck me.
He doesn’t start slow. I told him what I wanted and now he’s doing it—long hard strokes, deep, the prep counter rocking under me, one hand spread on my back. Every thrust drives the air out of me. The door is locked, the sign flipped, and the sounds I’m making are obscene and getting worse.
“Fuck, you’re wet,” he says, low, almost to himself. “I can feel you running down my cock.” I clench around him and he makes a rough sound. “That’s it. That’s my girl.”
He doesn’t kiss me. He watches my face.
“Look at me, Clementine. Don’t close your eyes.”
“I’m not.”
“There she is.”
The rest of me is gone—just the place where his cock is splitting me open, the wet drag of him in and out of my pussy, his eyes that won’t let mine go.
“Tell me when you’re close.”
“Now. Now. I’m?—“
“Come on me.”
I come on him.
It isn’t a polite orgasm. I come on his cock with my whole body—pussy clenching down hard, a noise I’ve never made before, my thighs trying to close around his hips.
He doesn’t slow down. He fucks me through it, watching it cross my face, like he doesn’t want to miss a second of what I look like coming apart for the first time.
“Good,” he says. Soft. “Again. You’ve got another one.”
“I can’t?—“
“Yes you can.”
His thumb finds my clit while he keeps moving in me, slower now, deeper, and the second one builds harder than the first.
“There it is,” he says.
I come again, a real noise this time, and on the back end of mine he goes—finally—buries himself and comes inside me with a low broken sound, his eyes never leaving my face, his hand low on my belly.
I feel it.
I’ve never felt this before—his cock pulsing inside me, the heat of him going where the heat of him goes, his hand splayed on my belly like he’s confirming something.
He breathes.
He doesn’t pull out.
“Stay there,” he says.
“I—“
“Don’t move yet.”
His phone goes off in his coat pocket.
He pulls it out without moving anywhere else, glances at the screen. His expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t put it to his ear yet. He looks at me first.
“Clementine.”
“Yes.”
“I have to take this. It’ll be short. Don’t move.”
“Don’t move how?”
“Don’t move at all.”
He’s still inside me, still hard, the heat of him and the absurd fullness where he’s pressed against my cervix. He hasn’t pulled back an inch.
He puts the phone to his ear. He doesn’t say hello. He listens for three seconds. Then he speaks, in the same flat quiet I’ve heard for six months, saying things I’ve never heard.
“Yes, both of them, tonight,” he says. “The second one cleaner than the first. Full removal.” A pause. “No. No signature. This is closed.” Another pause. “The bakery on Eighth is mine now. That’s the only point of contact going forward. Anyone with eyes on it answers to me.”
His hand on my belly hasn’t moved. His cock hasn’t moved.
He’s looking at me while he speaks, holding me still with his hand and his cock and the steadiness of his face while he talks about a thing I’m not going to ask him to clarify.
No part of me is afraid. Part of me is shaking. They’re not the same thing.
He shifts the phone to his other ear. His cock shifts in me and I gasp, and his hand presses lower to keep me from moving. “No,” he says into the phone. “The package is here.” My face goes hot. “I’ll call back at noon.”
He hangs up. He looks at me.
He’s been inside me for what might be ten minutes. I’m trembling. He’s hard in me again, and the line between I just got fucked and I’m still being fucked has stopped existing.
“You did so well,” he says. His thumb traces my jaw. “You stayed exactly where I told you.”
I press my face into his hand.
“Stellan. What just happened?”
“You stayed on my cock through a phone call. Your first time. You did very well.”
“That isn’t what I?—“
“I know.”
He puts his hand against my cheek. I lean into it. I’m about to come a third time without him moving, just from the way he’s looking at me and saying my full name like it’s a finished sentence.
“Are you afraid yet?” he asks.
“No.”
“Are you mine?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He moves once. Slow. Deep. My eyes roll back.
“Then we’re going home.”
“My shop?—“
“Stays closed today. I’ll handle it. You don’t open again until I say. Tomorrow. Next week. Not today.”
I open my mouth to argue. He shifts inside me—barely, just a pulse—and the argument leaves.
“Stellan.”
“Are you mine?”
“Yes.”
“Then come home with me.”
He shifts my legs around his waist. He picks me up off the prep counter, still inside me, and the feeling of moving while full of him pulls a gasp out of me.
He carries me through the back hall, past the stairs to my studio—we aren’t going to my studio—to a door I never open, the door to the alley, and through it to a black car with the back passenger door already open.
He gets in with me. Both of us. He sits, my legs around him, the door closes, and the car pulls away from my bakery into the street. I’m still on his cock when we hit the first red light.
I’m somehow even more wet than I was when this started.
I’m not asking where we’re going.
I think I knew where we were going from the first smiley face.