8. Indra #2
"Since the club I've had exactly one complaint about that night.
" She walked her fingers up the lace, watching goosebumps lift along Carla's stomach, watching the sharp dark eyes lose a little more of their command.
"You kept me on the rug. I watched. I never got my mouth on you.
I've been re-litigating it for five weeks. "
Carla's breathing changed. "That was the design."
"It was a flaw in the design." Indra undressed her slowly, which nothing else tonight had been, trousers, lace, all of it, taking inventory with her palms as she went, the flat muscle of her stomach, the small of her back, the surprising softness under all that tailoring, and Carla let her, let herself be stripped in her own office standing against her own desk, and the letting was the loudest thing in the room.
Twelve floors of control, and she stood there and allowed it, watching Indra's face the whole time as though it was the only view in Los Angeles worth the rent.
"How do you want me?" Carla asked, and there was a rasp under it now.
"Exactly where you are. Against the desk.
" Indra went to her knees on the carpet, and looked up the whole length of her, and the sight from down here, Carla Denver bare in the lamplight, gripping the edge of her desk behind her, chest moving fast, waiting, was one Indra intended to keep in the permanent archive. "Hold on to something."
She kissed the inside of her thigh, up, unhurried now, feeling the muscle jump under her mouth, and above her Carla exhaled through her nose, slow, a woman rationing herself. Indra glanced up. "All right?"
"If you stop to check in again," Carla said, strangled, "I'm restructuring your role."
"Noted for the file." She smiled against her skin, and then Carla's fingers came into her hair, not steering, just holding, and Indra took her mouth to her and learned her properly at last: the taste of her, salt and clean heat, the fine tremor in the iron thighs, the words that came apart above her, her own name in that low voice repeated like it had replaced every other word in the vocabulary.
She worked her slow and then not slow, flat and broad and then focused where the sounds directed, and Carla's control burned down by degrees she could measure on her tongue, hips beginning to move, the grip in Indra's hair tightening, the low voice going ragged, right there, don't stop, Indra, don't you dare stop, and Indra had no intention of stopping, had five weeks of intention behind not stopping, and when Carla came it was with her head thrown back and one hand slamming flat on the desktop behind her, a sound torn out of her that the boardroom on forty would not have recognized as belonging to any known executive, riding Indra's mouth through the whole long shudder of it until her knees gave a degree and she caught herself on the desk and said, breathless, "Enough, enough, God, come here," and her voice was ruined and delighted at once.
Indra rose. Carla pulled her in and kissed her deep, tasting herself, both of them unsteady, and for a while they just stood there against the desk holding each other up while their breathing found its way home.
They ended up on the floor.
It happened by degrees, neither of them willing to reassemble enough clothing to reach the couch by the window, and so they slid down against the front of the desk instead, shoulder to shoulder on the carpet, Carla's suit jacket retrieved from a chair and draped over Indra's legs, Indra's blouse recovered and worn by its owner unbuttoned, and the two lamps burned their quiet ellipses across a term sheet that had gone to the floor at some point and would need to be re-collated with no explanation Monday.
Indra looked at the room from down here.
The famous office, seen from the carpet, at ankle height: the underside of the desk that had held her, the window full of city, the locked door with the closed blinds and the whole dark floor beyond it.
Her thighs still hummed. Her hair had surrendered its last pin somewhere between the door and the desk, and she made no move to find it; let Monday's archaeology sort itself out.
Beside her, Carla sat with her knees up and her head tipped back against the desk drawer, hair down, eyes half closed, and laughed.
Quietly. At nothing. At everything. A low unarmored sound that kept surfacing every few breaths like it had been in a vault so long it needed to walk around.
"What?" Indra said.
"Slide forty-one." Carla rolled her head sideways to look at her, and there was a whole unfamiliar architecture in her face, softness with the load-bearing walls still in place.
"Your first Friday. I stood at the edge of that lamplight for eleven seconds deciding whether to walk back to your desk, and I told myself the coffee was a management technique.
" The laugh came up again, helpless around the edges.
"I have run this company for eleven years without one unbudgeted impulse, and you cost me my entire methodology in five weeks, and I'm sitting on my own floor at midnight with my blouse open, and I can't locate the part that minds. "
Indra had watched this woman across five weeks of rooms. She had seen her flawless, cold, surgical, believed, briefly honest in a moving car.
She had never once seen her like this: loose, lit, unguarded to the walls, twenty years of vigilance stood down for the length of an after.
The sight went into her chest and lodged there, past the lust, into the territory Maria kept asking about, and she noted the trespass and did not evict it.
"For the record," Indra said, "the coffee was a management technique. It's managed me since February."
"It's August."
"It's managed me since the eleventh of July at 9:52 p.m. I have the timestamp."
Carla laughed again, fuller, and then let the laugh go somewhere quieter, and the two of them sat in the lamplight while the building hummed and the city carried on below, indifferent and glittering, and Indra felt the exact moment the weight of it arrived, felt it land on Carla one beat before she said it, the return of the world with all its glass walls.
"This complicates literally everything," Carla said.
"Yes."
Simple, true, no cushion. The org chart.
The vault. The nine hundred people who watched the corner office for weather, the board, the door eleven feet away with her own desk on the other side of it.
Every complication was real and Indra could have itemized them faster than anyone alive, because managing this woman's risks was now, in every sense, her job.
And underneath the itemizing ran the older, quieter alarm, the one with Renata's fingerprints on it: she had just handed a person enormous power over her happiness, again, and the person was also the person who signed her badge access.
Everything she'd sworn off, gift-wrapped in one office.
Except. Except she'd been asked, mid-everything, harder?
, and waited on. Except the terms had been offered to her face with the lights on: choose me knowing.
Nothing about tonight had been extracted from her.
She had spent it, all of it, on purpose, and she could feel the difference in her own body, the way solvency feels different from debt.
Carla turned her head. In the low light her eyes had gone back to sharp, but the sharpness had no wall in it anymore; it was just attention, all of it, aimed.
"I don't want to stop anyway," she said.
The sentence stood there, five weeks in the making. You'd be choosing me, knowing exactly who I am. She had. She was. Both of them, eyes open, on the floor of the seat of power, choosing.
"Good," Indra said. "Neither do I."
Carla reached over and took her hand, laced their fingers, an interlock so ordinary and so enormous that neither of them remarked on it, and they sat a while longer against the desk in the warm lamplight, disheveled, spent, alarmingly happy, two women in a locked office at the top of a sleeping building with the whole complicated rest of it postponed until morning.
"The term sheet's under your foot," Indra said at last.
"Clause eleven has survived worse tonight.
" But she retrieved it, one-handed, unwilling to let go of the interlock, and set it on the desk above them, and that was Denver Tech's chief executive filing the quarter's biggest deal blind over her shoulder, naked under an unbuttoned blouse, holding her assistant's hand on the floor.
Indra started laughing and couldn't fully stop, and then Carla was laughing too, and the sound of the two of them filled the locked room and pressed up against the glass, and the empty floor kept their secret, this once, with all its lights out.