22. Indra #2
She undressed Indra first, and made a liturgy of it: her jacket taken from her shoulders and laid over the chair with ceremony, every button an event, the zipper eased down her spine with a mouth following it vertebra by vertebra until Indra's breath went ragged against the glass wall's cool reflection, the dress pooling at her feet and Carla kneeling, unhurried, to lift each of her feet free like they were made of glass and she had all night, which she did, and intended to spend.
"Look at you," she said, from her knees, hands traveling up the backs of Indra's thighs, voice gone rough and reverent. "Three months I've been patient. I want you to know exactly what it cost. I'd pay it again."
"Come up here and stop being patient."
"No." The old register, velvet over granite, and Indra's knees went loose at the sound of it after so long. "Tonight runs slow. Get on the bed."
But when Indra reached for the buttons of Carla's shirt, a question in her raised eyebrow, Carla did the new thing: she nodded, and stood still, and let herself be undressed in return, arms lifted when asked, breath audibly unsteady while Indra's palms mapped her bare shoulders, her sternum, the fine tremor under all that command.
Receiving had never been Carla's native register.
She was learning it on purpose, in increments, and being handed each increment was its own intimacy, and Indra kissed the notch of her collarbone, tasted the salt there, and felt the tremor go through her and thought: this is also mine. She gives me this too.
The bed had been made with the good linen, and Indra kept that detail with a full heart: planned, then.
Hoped for, at minimum, since morning. She lay back into the pillows and watched Carla watch her, and the watching alone was foreplay of a grade most people never got: those dark eyes moving over her slow as an appraisal she kept passing, and the city light warm on her skin, and the ache between her legs already past polite.
"Tell me a boundary if one arrives," Carla said, lowering over her, weight braced, mouth an inch from hers. "Otherwise tonight I intend to be extremely thorough."
"Noted and welcomed." Indra slid her fingers into the loose dark hair she got so rarely, work-pinned hair, hers now. "Thorough sounds perfect."
Then the bed, and the slow catastrophe of Carla's mouth.
She started at Indra's throat and worked down by centuries, hands and lips and low ongoing narration, the spoken pride that was tonight's whole signature: how good she'd been in the war room, how she'd looked at the toast with the light on her, how patient they'd both been and how done patience was.
By the time her mouth settled between Indra's thighs, Indra was gripping the sheets and past all wit, and Carla took her apart with a slowness that bordered on cruelty, tongue easy and exact on her clit, two fingers curling deep, holding her at the shimmering edge and speaking her through it, "not yet, sweetheart, stay with me, I want you greedy," until Indra's whole body begged and Carla finally let her fall, and the orgasm rolled through her long and rolling and wrenched her name from her in a voice she didn't recognize.
She was still floating when she heard the drawer, and the sound snapped every nerve back online.
The harness. Carla stood at the bedside working the straps with unhurried hands, watching Indra watch her, and there was no first-time electricity to it now, no unopened box; there was history, theirs, and the sight of Carla Denver stepping into it with the city lights sliding gold along her bare shoulders was better than the first time in every measurable way, because now it meant them.
"Come here," Indra said, breathless, reaching, and Carla came down into her arms, braced on her forearms, face to face, and this was the difference from every time before: not from behind, not instruction from altitude.
Eye to eye. Carla notched the length of it against her, slicked it slow through her folds until Indra was rocking up against her, and then pressed in, one endless unhurried inch at a time, watching her face the whole way, and Indra felt herself opened and filled and held all at once and heard the sound she made, low and helpless, absorbed by Carla's mouth.
"There you are," Carla breathed, seated fully, holding still while Indra's body sang around the fullness, adjusting, keeping. "Look at me. Stay right here with me."
Indra looked. That was the act tonight, the real one, underneath the mechanics: eyes open, face to face, nowhere to hide and no wish for one.
Carla began to move and kept looking at her, and being seen like that while being taken like that ran the two closest wires in Indra's body together until she couldn't tell them apart, and didn't want to.
The pace never rose past deep and slow, and the depth of slow turned out to be its own annihilation.
Long full strokes, angled to drag exactly where Indra needed them, Carla's hips rolling with tidal patience, the words never stopping, quiet and wrecked-proud against her ear: how she felt, how she looked, what she was, "the best thing I've ever built anything with, and I've built everything, so I'd know.
" Indra wrapped her legs around her and pulled her deeper and gave herself to it the whole surrender, chosen, again, from strength, on her own ground, her nails mapping the strong plane of Carla's back, and when the second climb began it came from further down than the first, tectonic, gathering the entire evening into itself, and she was shaking before the crest even arrived, and Carla felt it and slowed even further, unbearable, and carried her over at that fatal patient depth, and Indra came gasping her name into the gold dark, wave after wave, and Carla worked her through every aftershock and then stilled, deep, holding, both of them trembling.
Carla eased out of her by degrees, gentling the loss of it with her mouth on Indra's temple, and Indra lay boneless in the good linen, glowing down to the soles of her feet, watching through half-lidded eyes as Carla unbuckled the harness and set it aside.
Then, because fair was fair and because she wanted to, she reached for her, pulled her down, rolled her over into the pillows, and paid the evening back with her hand, slow and knowing, Carla's breath breaking against her shoulder, her hips rising to meet Indra's fingers with none of the old permission-granting hesitancy, just want, given over, until she shuddered through it quietly with Indra's name in her teeth and lay there afterward, one hand over her own sternum, breath still running fast.
"That wasn't on tonight's agenda," she said, when speech resumed.
"I chair meetings now. I amend agendas." Indra kissed her shoulder. "Feedback?"
"Approved unanimously."
Then there was aftercare like liturgy: the warm cloth, water made to be drunk, Indra gathered back against her chest under the duvet with her ear over Carla's heart while it slowed.
Outside, the city held its lights: office towers, the chain of streetlamps, the highway's pulse running south in the far dark.
Neither of them had said much in the landing; there wasn't much that needed the airspace.
"I spent ten years convinced control was the only thing keeping me safe," Carla said at last, into her hair, fingers drawing slow lines up and down Indra's spine.
"And?"
"Turns out it was just keeping me alone." The fingers stilled a moment, flattened, held her closer. "You're the first thing that's ever felt safer than control. I've run the comparison from inside both. It isn't close."
Indra pressed a kiss over the heartbeat under her ear and felt sleep coming for her the good heavy kind, three months of slow and one night of arrival settling her bones into the mattress. She fought it a moment, out of old habit, the vigilance that used to insist mornings needed guarding against.
There was nothing to guard against. That was the whole discovery, months in the making.
"Stay awake as long as you like," she said, already going under, words softening at the edges. "I know you're going to watch me sleep like a gargoyle. I find it romantic. Don't ever tell Maria I said that."
She heard the low laugh in Carla's chest, felt lips press to the top of her head, and the last thing she registered before sleep took her whole was the feel of the arms around her: not gripping, not guarding.
Just holding, unhurried, like a woman who had somewhere decided, all the way down, that she wasn't going anywhere, and had stopped needing to say so, because she was busy proving it every night there was.
She was nearly gone when she felt Carla shift, briefly. A soft sound from the chair by the window, her jacket maybe. Then the arms came back. Indra noted it half-asleep, thought tomorrow, and was gone.