14. Charlotte #2
Serena drew back an inch. Her thumb swept the line of Charlotte's jaw and tilted her face up, and the green eyes had gone dark and entirely certain.
"I have been thinking about this since Tokyo," she said, "and I intend to take my time."
"The door," Charlotte managed.
"Locked itself when I closed it. I checked the mechanism years ago." A breath of a smile. "I check everything."
Then she backed Charlotte against the desk, slow and inevitable, hands at her hips lifting her to sit on its edge, and stood between her knees and looked at her, flushed and breathing hard on eleven years of mahogany, and said, in the voice she used for things that were not requests:
"I'm going to tell you exactly what I want. And you're going to give it to me."
"Yes," Charlotte said, already wrecked on the word alone.
"I want to hear you. You spend all day being composed for me.
Not now." Her hands moved up Charlotte's thighs, taking the skirt with them, slow, certain, and her mouth went to Charlotte's throat, and Charlotte's head tipped back over the desk lamp's warmth and she gripped the desk's edge and gave up the first sound, helpless, and felt Serena smile against her neck. "Better."
The blouse's buttons went one at a time, Serena's eyes following her own hands, and the air of the office was cool on Charlotte's bared skin and then Serena's palms were not cool at all, covering her breasts through the thin bra, and Charlotte arched into them with a sound that came from somewhere pre-professional.
The bra went. Serena's mouth was on her, hot, exact, taking one nipple and working it until Charlotte's whole spine bowed, then the other, thorough, taking her time as promised, a woman conducting due diligence with her mouth, until Charlotte was making sounds continuously and her fingers were buried in silver-streaked dark hair that she had wanted her hands in since week one and had never once permitted herself to imagine properly.
The atlas was gone. The maps, the sightlines, the back room and everything shelved in it, all of it had gone dark, and what remained was Serena's mouth and her own pulse and the edge of a desk under her hands.
"Lie back."
She lay back. Papers went somewhere; neither of them attended the filing.
Serena drew her underwear down her legs without hurry, set it aside on the chair like a coat being taken at the door of somewhere expensive, and ran her hands up the inside of Charlotte's thighs, parting them, and stood there a moment looking at her, spread open on the desk where the Jacobs brief had been demolished, and the look on her face was the look from the garden with all its restrictions lifted.
"You're soaked," she said, quietly, and slid two fingers through her, and Charlotte's hips came off the desk.
"Please."
It was the first time she'd ever asked this woman for anything, and her hands found the desk's far edge above her head and gripped it.
"I know." Serena's fingers moved, slow, learning her, circling her clit until Charlotte's breath went ragged, then sliding inside her, deep, curling, and Charlotte heard herself say her name, her first name, broken in the middle. "There it is. Again."
"Serena—"
The hand on her stomach pressed her down, gentle and absolute, and the fingers inside her curled again, exact, unanswerable.
"Again."
She worked her open with a patience that amounted to mercilessness, two fingers, then deeper, her thumb on Charlotte's clit, her other hand flat on Charlotte's stomach holding her to the desk, reading every shudder like annotation, adjusting, returning.
When Charlotte got close the first time, Serena slowed, exactly enough, and held her there at the edge with an attention that bordered on cruelty and wasn't, and Charlotte swore at her, hoarse, and heard the low warm sound of Serena enjoying it.
"Soon," Serena said, and meant the word as a promise and a demonstration of who set the schedule, and then her fingers found the pace Charlotte's body had been asking for and kept it, relentless, building it with the same attention she gave the things she loved, and Charlotte came apart by degrees and then all at once, saying please and yes and please with nothing held back and no wish to hold anything.
"That's it," Serena said, low, against her ear, fingers driving her through it. "Give me all of it."
And Charlotte did, completely, the orgasm tearing through her with four months of pressure behind it, her cry muffled against Serena's shoulder, her whole body bowing off the mahogany, and Serena held her through every wave of it, working her gently down the far side, murmuring something against her hair that was not words so much as warmth.
The office reassembled itself slowly. The lamp.
The city light. Charlotte lay across the desk of the CEO of the Sharpe Collection, blouse open, pulse still sprinting its way back toward schedule, with the most controlled woman in Los Angeles pressing slow kisses to her collarbone, and started, helplessly, to laugh.
Serena raised her head. "Something funny?"
"I just negotiated a directorship in this office," Charlotte said. "I sat in that chair."
"You exceeded expectations." Serena's mouth curved against her skin, unguarded in a way that no tab of any search engine had ever recorded. "You've been exceeding them for four months."
Charlotte reached up and touched her face, the cheekbone, the jaw, allowed at last, and Serena turned her head and kissed the inside of her wrist, eyes closing briefly, and neither of them was performing anything at all.
"This conversation," Charlotte said, "is not finished."
"No," Serena agreed, helping her up off eleven years of mahogany, steadying her while her legs renegotiated their contract, tucking a curl behind her ear with a precision that had become, somewhere in the last hour, tenderness. "It's not. Come home with me."
Charlotte buttoned her blouse with fingers that mostly cooperated, and looked at her, this woman the tabs called ruthless, standing in lamplight with her own armour set down somewhere around the third button, asking, actually asking, with something underneath the certainty that was younger than forty-four and braver than any acquisition.
"Yes," she said. "Obviously yes."
It was the second time she'd said it in two hours, and they both heard the echo, and Serena's mouth curved, and she reached past Charlotte and turned off the desk lamp on four months, and the city lit them out.