9. Chapter 9 #2
It has been moved from the kitchen — it was on the far end of the counter when I first came here, in the cracked ceramic pot with the gold lacquer repair, and now it is here in the hallway on a narrow console table, repotted into a clean white ceramic, restaked with fresh green twine, the new growth spike standing upright and unhurried in the afternoon light coming through the hall window.
He repotted it. Sometime between Saturday and this morning he repotted the orchid and moved it to the hall where the light is better and anyone coming and going would see it.
I stop.
Noah has followed me to the elevator — not escorting me, just present, the way he is present, filling the hallway with the quality of his stillness.
He stops when I stop. He looks at the orchid and then at me, and I look at him, and the hallway is very quiet and the afternoon light is coming through the window at exactly the angle that makes everything feel more significant than it probably is.
"You moved it," I say.
"The light is better here."
"Noah."
He looks at me. And the distance between us in the hallway is not very much distance at all.
I don't know who moves first. Maybe we both do.
Maybe the hallway contracts and there was never any distance to begin with, just the illusion of it, just the professional fiction we have been maintaining for weeks that is finally, inevitably, collapsing under its own weight.
His hand comes up and his fingers brush my jaw and I am turning into the touch like a compass needle finding north, my chin tilting, my eyes closing, and then his mouth is on mine.
The kiss is not gentle. It is not the careful, measured thing I would have expected from a man who conducts his life like a board meeting, who weighs his words in fractions of ounces, who has never in the time I have known him done a single thing without considering its implications.
His lips press against mine with a hunger that feels like it has been held back for longer than either of us wants to admit, a pressure that says finally and I have been waiting for this and I did not know how to ask.
His hand slides into my hair, fingers closing around the strands at the nape of my neck, and the grip is firm and possessive.
I make a sound against his mouth that I do not recognize as my own — a small, helpless noise that rises from somewhere deeper than my throat.
My tote bag hits the floor. I don't remember dropping it.
The legal pad spills out, the pages fluttering open, all our careful preparation splayed across the marble, and neither of us spares it a glance.
My hands find the lapels of his jacket and grip, pulling him closer, and he responds by walking me backward until my shoulders meet the wall beside the console table.
The orchid trembles on its new perch. Neither of us reaches to steady it.
His beard scrapes against my chin and I am suddenly, acutely aware of every place our bodies touch — his chest pressed against mine, the hard plane of his thigh pushing between my legs, his hand in my hair holding me exactly where he wants me.
The pressure of his leg against my core sends a pulse of heat through me that is almost unbearable in its intensity.
I should stop this. I should say something about professional boundaries, about the contract, about the fact that I am being paid to find him a wife and that wife is not me.
But his mouth is moving down my throat and his teeth are grazing my collarbone through the thin fabric of my blouse and my hips are arching toward him of their own accord, grinding against his thigh, seeking friction that I have no business seeking, and I cannot remember a single reason why this is a bad idea that carries any weight against the reality of his mouth on my skin.
His hand drops from my hair and slides down my side, fingers tracing the curve of my waist through the blazer, the flare of my hip, mapping the terrain of my body with a deliberateness that makes me shiver.
He finds the button of my trousers and pauses.
His forehead presses against mine, his breath coming hard and uneven, and his eyes are dark and searching, the usual composure stripped away to reveal something raw and wanting underneath.
"Tell me to stop," he says. His voice is rough, stripped of its usual precision, and the sound of it — the crack in his control — makes my stomach clench with desire so sharp it borders on pain.
The words from my dream. I shake my head. Not no — just a small, helpless movement that means I can't, I won't, I don't want to, please don't make me be the one who stops this.
He undoes the button. The zipper follows, a quiet sound that seems impossibly loud in the silent hallway, and then his hand slips beneath the waistband of my panties. I feel his fingers against me, sliding through the wetness he finds there.
I am soaked. I have been soaked for longer than I want to admit, my body responding to him in ways my mind was refusing to acknowledge, and now his fingers are sliding through that evidence of my want and there is no pretending anymore.
He exhales sharply when he feels how ready I am. "Christ, Julia." The words come out broken, reverent, like a man who has found something he did not expect and does not know what to do with it.
His fingers find my clit and I bite down on my lower lip to keep from crying out.
He circles it slowly, deliberately, the same decisive attention he brings to everything else — learning the rhythm of my body with the same focus he brings to board reports and legal filings, reading my responses like data, adjusting his approach based on what he observes.
It is the most thorough, methodical seduction I have ever experienced, and it is destroying me.
My head falls back against the wall. My hands are still gripping his lapels, knuckles white, the expensive fabric crushed in my fists.
"Look at me," he says.
I open my eyes. His face is inches from mine, his jaw tight, his gaze fixed on me with an intensity that makes my stomach clench.
He watches me as his fingers move, as he slides one inside me and then another, stretching me, filling me, his thumb still working my clit in slow, devastating circles.
I am trembling against the wall, my body straining toward his hand, and he is watching every micro-expression, every flutter of my eyelids, every parting of my lips, cataloguing my pleasure like a man who intends to master it.
My hips roll against his hand. I cannot help it.
The pleasure is building in waves, each one cresting higher than the last, and I am drowning in it, in him, in the impossible reality of Noah Thomas standing in his hallway with his fingers inside me and his eyes on my face like I am the most important thing in his carefully controlled universe.
The wet sounds of his fingers moving in me are obscene and unmistakable, a slick rhythm that echoes off the marble walls, and I should be embarrassed by how loud it is, how obvious, but I am past embarrassment, past anything but the coiling tension in my core that is winding tighter and tighter with every stroke.
"Come for me," he says, and his voice breaks on the words, the command fracturing into something closer to a plea, and that is what pushes me over — not the pressure of his thumb, not the stretch of his fingers, but the sound of this controlled, careful man losing his grip, wanting me so badly that his voice cracks with it.
The orgasm crashes through me. My body clenches around his fingers and I moan, a raw, unguarded sound that I cannot suppress, my hips bucking against his hand as the pleasure crests and breaks and crests again, wave after wave pulling me under.
He doesn't look away. He watches every moment of it, his hand working me through the aftershocks, his breath mingling with mine in the narrow space between our mouths, his eyes dark and hungry and so full of want that it makes my chest ache.
When it is over, he withdraws his hand slowly.
I am trembling, my legs unsteady, my back still pressed against the wall for support, my trousers loose around my hips where his hand was.
He raises his hand to his mouth and his eyes stay on mine as his lips close around his fingers, as his tongue slides between them, tasting me, and the gesture is so obscene and so intimate and so far outside the bounds of anything professional.
A soft sound escapes his throat — satisfaction, hunger, something in between — and I feel a fresh pulse of heat between my legs at the sight of it, at the knowledge that he is tasting me and liking it.
He lowers his hand. His forehead presses against mine.
We stand like that, breathing each other's air, his hands braced on the wall on either side of my head, caging me in without touching me.
My heartbeat is slowly returning to something approaching normal, and with it comes the first fragile edges of awareness — of what we have done, of what this means.
The elevator chimes.
The sound is like a splash of cold water.
I step out of the circle of his arms, bend to retrieve my tote, straighten my blazer, smooth my hair.
My fingers are shaking. I do not look at the legal pad on the floor, at the scattered pages of our careful preparation.
I walk into the elevator without looking at him, my spine straight, my chin lifted, the professional mask sliding back into place so quickly it feels like a wound closing.
The doors close behind me and I lean against the back wall and I do not let myself think about what just happened until I am four floors down and I have no choice.