14. Chapter 14 #2
She reaches between us and works at my belt, her fingers quick and efficient even now. The metal clinks. The leather slides through loops. She has my trousers open before I can draw breath, her hand wrapping around my cock with a grip that's almost punitive.
"Fuck," I say, the word escaping before I can stop it.
"Yep," she says. "That's the idea."
She strokes me once, twice, her thumb pressing against the sensitive ridge beneath the head. I'm already hard — have been since she looked at me with that unresolved thing in her eyes — and her touch sends a jolt of sensation through me that makes my hands clench on her hips.
I reach for her blazer, push it off her shoulders.
She shrugs it down her arms, lets it fall to the floor behind her without breaking stride, her hand still working my cock with slow, deliberate strokes.
I fumble with the buttons of her blouse, my fingers suddenly clumsy, and she makes an impatient sound and bats my hands away, doing it herself with quick, precise movements.
She's wearing a pale camisole underneath, thin enough that I can see the darker shadow of her nipples beneath the fabric. I cup her breast through the silk, feel her nipple harden against my palm, and her breath catches — the first crack in her control.
"Turn around," I say.
She meets my eyes. For a moment I think she'll refuse. But something shifts in her expression, a decision being made in real time, and she turns to face the table.
I step behind her, my hands on her hips, and bend her forward over the polished wood.
She braces herself on her forearms, her blonde hair falling forward to curtain her face.
I slide my hands down her thighs, find the zipper at the side of her trousers, draw it down.
The fabric pools around her ankles. She steps out of her heels, then the trousers, with a grace that seems impossible given the circumstances.
I hook my fingers in the waistband of her silky pink panties and draw them down.
She's already wet. I can see it in the afternoon light, the glistening evidence of her arousal. I trace my fingers through the slick heat of her, and she makes a sound — low, controlled, barely audible.
"Tell me you want this," I say.
She looks over her shoulder at me. Her eyes are dark, the blue almost swallowed by her dilated pupils. "You know what I want."
"I want to hear it."
Her jaw tightens. "Fuck me, Noah. Right now. Don't make me beg."
I don't make her beg. I guide myself to her entrance and I press into her slowly.
Inch by deliberate inch. The sensation is overwhelming — the wet clasp of her, the way her body opens around mine, the pressure building at the base of my spine.
I sink into her until my hips meet the curve of her ass, until I'm buried completely, and then I stop.
I hold there. Let her feel the fullness. Let myself feel it too — the impossible intimacy of being inside someone who has every reason to hate you and has chosen this instead.
Then I begin to move.
Slow. Deliberate. Long strokes that drag against every nerve ending, that make her breath catch and her spine arch.
I pull almost completely out before sliding back in, setting a rhythm that's less about urgency and more about endurance, about making this last, about turning this bare conference room into something neither of us will forget.
She pushes back to meet me. Her hips roll in a counterpoint to my thrusts, her body finding its own rhythm against mine. The wet sounds of our fucking fill the room — obscene and intimate, the slap of skin against skin, the soft squelch of her arousal every time I sink back into her.
I curve my body over hers. One hand braces on the table beside hers, my fingers nearly touching hers but not quite. The other hand slides around her hip, finds the swollen bud of her clit, and circles it with my thumb.
She moans then — really moans, the sound pulled from somewhere deep, somewhere she can't control. Her head drops forward and her shoulders shake and her pussy clenches around my cock so tight I have to stop moving or I'll come right there.
"Julia." Her name comes out rough, scraped raw.
"Don't stop." She's panting now, hair falling across her face.
I start moving again. Faster now, but still controlled, still measured.
Each thrust pushes a small sound from her throat — not words, just sensation given voice.
My thumb works her clit in tight circles and I can feel her getting closer, feel the tension building in her thighs, the flutter of her walls around me.
I'm close too. The pressure is building at the base of my spine, my balls drawing up tight. But I hold on. I make myself wait because I need her to come first, need to feel her break apart around me before I let myself go.
She comes with a sharp cry that she cuts off by biting her own hand.
Her whole body shudders, her back arching, her pussy clenching around me in rhythmic waves that drag me over the edge with her.
I bury myself deep and let go, my forehead dropping to her shoulder, my breath coming in ragged gasps against her skin.
We stay like that for a moment. My body curved over hers, both of us braced against the table, the afternoon light striping across our joined hands. I can feel her heartbeat through my palm, or maybe that's my own heartbeat, I can't tell the difference anymore.
I pull back slowly. She makes a small sound at the loss. I watch myself slip out of her, the evidence of our release glistening on her thighs, and something twists in my chest — not regret, not exactly, but something adjacent to it.
She straightens. Reaches for a box of tissues that’s sitting on the table nearby, pulling a few before passing the box to me.
She cleans herself with efficient movements, no more flustered than if she'd spilled coffee.
Then she pulls up her underwear, her trousers, fastens them with quick, sure fingers.
We finish getting dressed. She straightens her blazer. Picks up the memo from the table. "The executor's interview is in ten days," she says, in the voice of a woman who has everything under control and has just chosen, consciously, to have it.
"I know," I say.
"We should probably talk about our answers."
"We probably should."
She picks up her pen and opens the memo to the first page. I pull out the chair across from her and sit down. Outside the courtyard window the afternoon light moves and the city goes on doing what it does, and we get to work.
She walks me to the lobby at one fifteen.
At the elevator she stops and turns, and I wait, because Julia always knows what she is going to say before she says it and the waiting is the part that matters.
"I need the rest of the 2010 file," she says. "Every page. Not for the executor's interview." She holds my gaze. "I'm building a public record of the acquisition history. The coalition I'm putting together needs primary documentation to make the case stick."
I look at her — this woman who went home after the worst night of the last five weeks and, instead of waiting for someone to fix it, started building the thing that would fix it herself.
"I'll have Greer send everything by end of day," I say.
She nods. The elevator arrives. I step in.
"Noah."
I look up.
"The remediation is the right thing," she says. "I wanted you to know that I know that."
The doors close.
I stand in the descending elevator and I think about the orchid on the hallway console table, pushing out its second growth spike, unhurried, doing what it was always going to do.
I think about a woman who does not wait to be saved.
I think about what it means that the first thing she did when she had the information was start building something with it.
My grandfather would have liked her enormously.