1. Carla #2
The penthouse was fourteen floors of elevator and then the city, all of it, spread floor to ceiling across the south wall, and Indra walked past the view with barely a glance, which Carla approved of, because the view was for investors.
She stopped in the middle of the bedroom and turned around, and the low light found the silver scar again, and her breathing had gone shallow and she wasn't hiding it.
"Ground rules," Carla said, coming toward her without hurry. "Tell me to stop, at any point, and I stop. Everything else, I decide. Does that suit you?"
Indra's pupils went wide and dark. "You've done this speech before."
"Answer the question."
"Yes." A swallow. "That suits me."
"Good." Carla circled her once, slow, close enough that her breath moved the fine hairs at Indra's nape, and watched gooseflesh rise along her arms. She stopped behind her and found the zipper of the green dress and drew it down in one long unhurried line, knuckles tracking the bare spine beneath.
"Off. Everything. Fold the dress over the chair, it's too good for the floor. "
Indra obeyed. That was the first surprise of the night, the manner of the obedience: not meekness, nothing shrinking in it.
She undressed without hurry, hands sure, folded silk over the chairback, unhooked her bra, stepped out of her underwear, and stood in the middle of Carla's bedroom naked and straight-backed and lit up with wanting it, like surrender was a language she'd chosen to be fluent in.
Carla had taken confident women to bed before.
Confidence usually came with negotiation, a low-grade contest over the wheel that she always won and mildly resented having to win.
Indra was another thing entirely. She had looked at the terms and signed them whole, and there was more power in that clean signature than in any struggle.
Carla wanted her past the reach of speech.
"Look at you," Carla said, low. "On the bed. On your back. Arms above your head, hold the rail, and don't let go until I say."
Indra lay back across the dark sheets and wrapped her fingers around the rail, and Carla stood at the foot of the bed still fully dressed and looked at her until Indra's hips shifted against nothing.
"Please," Indra said.
"Not yet. You'll wait, and you'll be good about it."
She was. She was so good about it, and Carla told her so while she took her own time, unpinning her hair, laying her watch on the nightstand with a click that made Indra's stomach visibly tighten.
Anticipation was half the architecture. She let it build until the room felt charged enough to spark off a doorknob, and only then set one knee on the bed.
She started at Indra's ankle, mouth and teeth, unhurried, up the inside of a calf, the soft skin behind her knee, the long trembling inside of her thigh.
Indra held the rail and shook and did not let go.
By the time Carla's mouth reached the center of her, Indra was soaked and pleading in fragments, and Carla licked into her slow, learning her, flat and broad and then focused, and the sounds that came out of Indra were open and helpless and gorgeous.
"There you are," Carla said against her. "You're being so good. You can be louder than that."
She worked her over with her tongue until the pleas lost their words, then slid two fingers into her, curled them, and kept her mouth on her clit as Indra came apart the first time with her heels dug into the mattress and her knuckles white on the rail and Carla's name breaking in half on the way out of her mouth.
Carla gentled her through it and did not stop.
"Again," she said. "You have another one in you. Give it to me."
"I can't, I—"
"You can. Hips still. Let me."
The second one built slower and hit harder, three fingers now, her palm grinding down, her teeth at the crease of Indra's thigh, and when it broke, Indra arched clean off the sheets, silent for two full seconds before the cry tore loose, and then she went liquid, boneless, laughing a wrecked half-laugh into the dark.
Carla knelt up and looked at her, hair stuck to her temples, mouth swollen, eyes glazed and green and fixed on her, and desire pulled through her own body so hard her thighs ached with it.
"Off the bed," she said, standing, shrugging out of her jacket at last. "Kneel. There. Hands on your thighs."
Indra slid to the floor and knelt on the rug at the foot of the bed, still catching her breath, and watched Carla undress with an attention so total it felt like touch.
Carla left her clothes where they fell. She sat on the edge of the bed, knees apart, close enough that Indra could feel the heat of her, far enough that she couldn't reach without permission she wasn't going to get.
"You don't touch," Carla said. "You watch."
She touched herself the only honest way she knew, fast and exact, two fingers working tight circles, and she kept her eyes open and on the kneeling woman the whole time, and what undid her in the end wasn't her own hand.
It was Indra's face. The hunger on it, open and unashamed, lips parted, hands flexing on her own thighs against the order holding them there, obedient to the last. Carla came watching her obey, hard and long and with a low sound she didn't recognize as her own voice.
The city hummed below the windows. Neither of them spoke while their breathing came back.
Sweat cooled along Carla's spine. Somewhere far down, a siren rose and faded, and the candlelight she didn't have here was replaced by the amber wash of ten thousand windows, and she sat on the edge of her own bed feeling scraped clean in a fashion no deal, closed or lost, had ever managed.
Then Indra rested her cheek against Carla's knee, one warm point of contact, and said, "Bad day improved?"
"Marginally." Carla threaded a hand into her hair, allowing it. "Stay the night. Sleep here."
"And in the morning?"
Carla looked down at her, at the green eyes and the silver scar and the mouth she already knew she'd think about at least once next week, and told her the truth, because anonymity made honesty cheap.
"In the morning, this never happened. I wanted you for the night and nothing more. That's all I have."
Indra held her gaze while she weighed it, and whatever she was weighing, none of it reached her face.
"That's all I asked for," she said, and climbed up into the bed of a woman whose last name she didn't know, and was asleep within minutes, easily, like trust was nothing, like it cost nothing at all.
Carla lay awake a while longer with a stranger's breathing beside her and the Meridian email finally, blessedly silent, and the last thing she thought before sleep took her was that she hadn't asked one single question all night that mattered, and that she'd gotten the better end of that bargain.