18. Chapter 18 #2
I help her, shrugging off my shirt and letting it fall to the floor. Her palms flatten against my chest, and I feel the heat of her touch seep into my skin. She traces the line of my sternum, then lower, across the plane of my stomach, and my muscles contract involuntarily under her hands.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm looking." I frame her face with my hands, tilting her chin up. "There's a difference."
Her expression crumbles—something vulnerable and unhidden in it—and then I am kissing her again, deeper this time, my tongue sliding against hers. She tastes like the wine she's been drinking all evening, crisp and faintly sweet.
I unhook her bra with practiced ease, and she lets it fall away.
Her breasts are small and perfect, the skin here paler than her arms, her nipples are dark pink and already tight.
I bend my head, taking one into my mouth, and she gasps—a sharp, bitten-off sound that goes straight to my cock.
Her fingers tangle in my hair, holding me against her, and I lavish attention on her, tonguing the stiffened peak, then grazing it with my teeth.
"Noah—" My name breaks in her throat.
I lift my head, and her eyes are dark, the blue almost swallowed by the pupil.
I reach for the waistband of her trousers, and she lifts her hips so I can slide them down.
The fabric pools around her ankles, and she kicks it away, leaving her in nothing but a scrap of lace that does nothing to hide the dampness gathering there.
"Beautiful," I say, and I mean it in a way that has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with the way she is looking at me right now, like I am something worth wanting.
I hook my fingers into her underwear and draw it down.
She lifts again, and then she is bare before me, sitting on my kitchen counter with her pages scattered around her like fallen leaves.
I step back just enough to look at her—all of her—and she doesn't try to cover herself.
She meets my gaze head-on, her chin lifted, her expression defiant and exposed and so completely Julia that my chest aches with it.
I step forward again, my hands settling on her knees, parting them slowly.
I press my lips to the inside of her thigh, and she trembles—a fine vibration beneath my mouth.
I work my way higher, tasting the salt of her skin, the faint floral note of her soap, until I reach the crease where thigh meets hip.
She's already wet. I can smell her—musk and heat and something that is purely her—and it makes my cock strain against my trousers. But I don't rush. I drag my tongue along the seam of her, a slow, deliberate stroke that makes her fingers curl against the counter's edge.
"Noah, please—"
I part her with my thumbs and lick into her, and the sound she makes is broken and raw.
Her hips tilt forward, seeking more, and I give it to her.
I tongue her clit in slow circles, then flatten my stroke, letting her feel the full width of my mouth on her.
She's trembling constantly now, her thighs bracketing my head, her hands moving to grip my shoulders.
I slide one finger inside her, then two, curling them upward as I suck gently on her clit.
She clenches around me, her body drawing me deeper, and I work her with a patience I didn't know I possessed.
Each stroke of my fingers matches the rhythm of my tongue, a slow build that makes her breath come in ragged gasps.
"Don't stop—don't—"
I don't. I feel her getting closer, the tension coiling in her belly, her walls tightening around my fingers.
When she comes, it's with a cry that she buries in her hand, her whole body shuddering, her hips grinding against my mouth as I work her through it.
I don't pull away until the last aftershock fades, until she's limp and breathless on the counter.
I stand, and she reaches for me immediately, her hands fumbling with my belt, my zipper. I let her work the buttons free, and then I'm pushing my trousers down, kicking them aside. She wraps her hand around my cock, and I have to brace myself against the counter, my arms caging her in.
"Inside me," she says. "Now."
But I shake my head. "Not here."
I lift her off the counter, and she wraps her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck.
I carry her through the penthouse, past the floor-to-ceiling windows where the city glitters like scattered diamonds, past the expensive art I've never really looked at, into the bedroom where the sheets are cool and white and waiting.
I lay her down on the bed, and she pulls me with her, her mouth finding mine.
I settle between her thighs, and she wraps her legs around me again, hooking her ankles at the small of my back.
I reach between us, guiding myself to her entrance, and then I'm pushing inside—slowly, so slowly, inch by inch until I'm buried to the hilt.
We both exhale. She's hot and tight and perfect around me, and I have to hold still for a moment, fighting the urge to move, to take. This isn't about taking. This is about something else entirely.
I begin to move. Slow, deep strokes that make her breath catch, that make her fingers dig into my shoulders.
I keep my eyes on her face, watching the way her expression shifts with each thrust—the furrow between her brows, the part of her lips, the flutter of her eyelashes when I hit the right spot.
"Look at me," I say.
She opens her eyes, and the vulnerability there is almost unbearable. I see her—the woman who lost her family's restaurant, who built herself from the wreckage, who hates everything I represent and is here anyway, beneath me, wrapped around me, choosing this. Choosing me.
I kiss her as I move inside her, swallowing her sounds, letting her swallow mine. The pace stays slow, deliberate, each thrust a question and an answer. Her hips rise to meet mine, and we find a rhythm that feels like conversation—her body speaking to mine, mine answering back.
She comes again, quieter this time, her breath hitching as she clenches around me. I follow her over the edge moments later, my release pulsing into her as I bury my face in the curve of her neck. I say her name against her skin, and she holds me tighter.
We don't move for a long time afterward. I stay inside her, my weight on my elbows, her fingers tracing lazy patterns on my back. The city hums its low song outside the windows, and the room is warm and dark and still.
Eventually, I shift, withdrawing from her, and she makes a small sound of protest that she immediately tries to hide. I pull the covers over us, and she curls into my side, her head on my chest, her hand settling there like she's claiming territory.
She falls asleep with her hand flat on my chest.
I lie awake. The city does its low, breathing thing outside the windows, and the room is dark and warm and she is here and I have four days left on a six-week arrangement that stopped being an arrangement at some point I cannot precisely locate, and I have not told her about the resignation plan and I have not told her about the ring and I have not told her that whatever I said to Helen Marsh about genuine intent was true before I said it and has been true for longer than I have been willing to admit.
I think about the plan I made six months ago and I think about how it would have felt to execute it — the eighteen-month wind-down, the restructure, the clean exit.
It feels different now than it did then.
Not wrong, exactly, but incomplete. I was planning to leave something behind.
I had not yet understood that staying could mean building something better rather than handing off something safer.
Julia Simmons came into a meeting I expected to last twenty minutes. She is the first person in years who made me want to stay in the room for reasons that had nothing to do with strategy. She made me care that I was the problem in her eyes.
She has been the first person, in a long time, at a great many things.
I think about the orchid on the console table. Second growth spike, fully unfurled. Doing what it was always going to do.
I do not sleep for a long time.
In the morning she is gone before I wake.
There is a note on the kitchen counter in her handwriting:
Gala's in four days. Stay focused!
And underneath it, smaller, in the corner of the page, she has drawn a single orchid.
I stand in my kitchen in the early light and look at it for a long time. Then I fold it carefully and put it in the desk drawer, with the other note, and I go to find my phone.