3. Chapter 3 #2
I hold that for a moment, the way he held mine — actually held it, let it exist in the room without rushing to fill the space around it.
"That's a good start," I say quietly.
He picks up his wine again, and this time he drinks, and I allow myself to note that the exercise worked better than I expected and file away the texture of what just happened for reasons I am not entirely ready to examine.
That is when I notice the orchid.
It is sitting on the far end of the kitchen counter — a cracked ceramic pot, cream-colored, with a hairline fracture running from rim to base that someone has reinforced with what looks like a thin line of gold lacquer.
The orchid itself is a single white phalaenopsis, one stem, carefully staked with a thin bamboo rod and a loop of soft green tie.
It is alive. It is, in fact, thriving — the leaves waxy and dark, a new growth spike just beginning to unfurl at the base.
In a penthouse that has been assembled with the cool, deliberate precision of a man who treats his environment as an extension of his professional image, the orchid is the only thing that looks like it belongs to a person.
I do not say anything about it. I make a note in the margin of page two of the agenda, a small asterisk that will mean something only to me, and I look back at Noah.
He has noticed me noticing. Something moves behind his expression — a door closing quietly, not slamming, just easing shut — and then he redirects his attention back to the agenda with the smoothness of a man who has had decades of practice not acknowledging things he doesn't want acknowledged.
"What's next?" he asks.
I look down at the agenda. "Compliments," I say. "Genuine ones. Not flattery."
He picks up the page and reads it with the expression of a man being handed a bill he wasn't expecting.
"We'll start simple," I tell him. "You have until next Tuesday."
He sets the page down. Looks at it for a moment. Then, with the air of a man attempting something he has been told is straightforward and suspects is not: "The Sancerre is excellent."
I stare at him.
"That's not a compliment," I say. "That's a wine review."
"It's genuine."
"Noah." I set my pen down, fighting a smile. "The exercise is compliments. To a person. You just complimented the bottle."
He looks at the glass. Back at me. Something moves across his expression — not embarrassment exactly, but the look of a man who has just realized he misread something fundamental and is recalibrating without wanting it to show. "I was building toward you," he says.
"You weren't. You were looking for something safe to say and you picked the object on the table between us." I fold my hands. "That's what three matchmakers worth of introductions probably looked like. Not cruelty. Just — you aimed at the furniture instead of the person."
He is quiet for a moment. The quality of it is different from his usual silence — less controlled, more like someone sitting with something uncomfortable and not yet sure what to do with it.
"That's a fair assessment," he says.
"It's not an assessment. It's the homework." I pick up my pen. "Two genuine compliments. Delivered to actual humans. Before Tuesday."
That night, in the narrow space between awake and asleep, I dream Noah's hands are in my hair.
The dream doesn't announce itself. One moment I'm suspended in the weightless dark of sleep, and the next, Noah's hands are in my hair.
His fingers work through the strands slowly, deliberately, the way someone might untangle a delicate chain.
I feel the pressure of his palms against my scalp, the slight pull as his grip tightens at the roots.
My head tilts back without my permission, and when I open my eyes in the dream, he's right there — close enough that I can see the individual strands of dark brown hair that fall across his forehead, the way his beard traces the sharp line of his jaw.
He doesn't speak. His dark eyes hold mine, and there's something in them I've never seen in waking life — something stripped of the calculated distance he wears like armor. His mouth curves, just slightly, and my breath catches.
I'm not standing. I'm not sitting. We exist in some undefined space where the only reality is the heat of his hands and the way my entire body orients toward him like a compass finding north.
His thumb traces the curve of my cheekbone, and I feel the callused edge of it against my skin — rougher than I expected, rougher than a man who sits in boardrooms should feel.
My lips part. I don't decide to do it. The air between us thickens, and then his mouth is on mine.
The kiss starts with a question — his lower lip catching mine, holding there, waiting. My hands find the lapels of his suit jacket, fingers curling into the expensive fabric, and I pull. The answer is yes, yes, anything, and then he's kissing me like I'm something he's been starving for.
His tongue sweeps past my teeth, and I taste him — wine and something darker, something warm.
His grip in my hair tightens, angling my head, and the kiss deepens until I can't tell where my breath ends and his begins.
I make a sound against his mouth, something raw and unguarded that I'd never let escape in waking life, and he swallows it like he needs it.
My back arches. His free hand finds the curve of my waist, fingers spreading across the silk of my blouse — when did I change?
— and he pulls me flush against him. The hard press of his body against mine sends a jolt of electricity straight down my spine, and I feel the heat pooling low in my belly, the slick ache of want building between my thighs.
He walks me backward. My shoulders hit a wall, and the impact should startle me, but his mouth is moving down my throat and I can't think, can't process anything beyond the scrape of his beard against the sensitive skin of my neck.
His teeth graze my pulse point, and my hips roll forward of their own accord, seeking friction, seeking him.
"Noah—" His name escapes me like a prayer, and he makes a low sound in response, something between a growl and a groan that vibrates against my collarbone.
His hands move. Down my sides, over my hips, fingers hooking into the waistband of my trousers. He drops to his knees.
The image of him — this powerful, controlled man kneeling before me — makes my head spin.
He looks up, and his eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, and there's a hunger in his expression that makes my thighs tremble.
His fingers find the button of my trousers, and he tugs, and the fabric slides down my hips.
His breath ghosts over my inner thigh, hot and deliberate, and I feel my core clench in anticipation.
His mouth presses against the crease where my leg meets my hip, and I whimper — actually whimper, a sound I didn't know I could make.
His fingers hook into the delicate lace of my underwear, and he starts to pull them down, and his mouth is moving lower, lower, and I can feel the heat of his breath against my —
I wake up with my pulse in my throat.
My chest heaves, lungs working like I've sprinted up ten flights of stairs, and my skin is damp with sweat.
The sheets are tangled around my legs, twisted from whatever my body was doing while my mind was otherwise occupied, and between my thighs there's a persistent, throbbing ache that makes me want to press my legs together and not move.
The ceiling of my apartment is dark and familiar and exactly where it should be. I stare at it for a long moment.
Six weeks, I told myself this afternoon.
Finite, I told myself. Survivable.
I pull the duvet up to my chin and inform myself, with some firmness, that I am a professional, that this is a business arrangement, and that Noah Thomas's hands are not, under any circumstances, something I will be thinking about again.
I think about them for another forty minutes before I fall back asleep.