20. Anika
— ? —
Anika
My show was finally here.
The gallery was packed. Press, collectors, critics, everyone talking over each other with a glass in one hand. The pieces looked better than I’d ever seen them.
And I looked incredible.
The dress was one Neil had bought me years ago, before everything went wrong. Red silk, floor-length, backless. I asked Neil to bring it before the real show, still wrapped in tissue paper, never worn. I’d been saving it for a special occasion that never came.
Tonight felt like the occasion.
Neil stayed in the corner, watching me shine. He’d barely left my side for two weeks, but tonight he’d insisted on keeping his distance.
“This is your night,” he’d said. “I’m not going to steal your spotlight.”
“You couldn’t if you tried.”
“Probably. But I’m going to stand over there and look supportive anyway.”
I was in the middle of an interview with an art critic when I felt the energy in the room shift.
I turned.
Karina walked in.
She was dressed to kill. Black dress and perfect makeup. The kind of composed beauty that made cameras pivot toward her automatically.
And she was crying.
Not ugly crying. Photogenic crying. The tears catching the light, rolling down her cheeks in perfect tracks that didn’t smear her mascara.
She headed straight for the cluster of journalists near the door.
“I just think it’s so sad,” I heard her say. “After everything Neil and I shared. She’s manipulating him into staying. He deserves better than that. They both do.”
My blood went cold.
Neil moved faster than I’d ever seen him move. He crossed the room in five strides and put himself between Karina and the press like a wall.
“Leave,” he said. “Now.”
“I just wanted to apologize.” Her voice was pitched perfectly for the microphones. She sounded so innocent. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“You have a restraining order against you.” Neil’s voice was ice. “You’re within five hundred feet of my wife.”
Karina’s face went white.
“You wouldn’t.”
“You didn’t know? I thought your brother informed you. Mateo backed it. Your brother is done cleaning up your messes.”
For a moment, she just stood there. Frozen. Processing.
Then something shifted in her expression. The wounded innocent disappeared. What replaced it was rage. Pure and unfiltered.
Security was approaching. Two guards, moving through the crowd with purposeful strides. Karina saw them. Her eyes darted around the room, calculating, desperate.
They landed on my painting.
The Table, the centerpiece of my show. The painting that had started everything.
She moved.
Grabbed the palette knife decoration nearby. Pointy and silver in the gallery lights.
She ran to the canvas and time seemed to slow down.
She raised her arm, pointy tip glinting. I saw the trajectory of her strike.
And I moved.
I tackled her from the side just as she slashed. The tip caught the canvas anyway and it tore, corner to corner, a long ugly wound across the surface. We hit the ground together, a tangle of limbs and hair.
She fought like a wild animal. Scratching, biting, and screaming things I couldn’t understand. I grabbed her hair and yanked, and she clawed at my face, and somewhere a pedestal crashed and someone was yelling.
I caught a glimpse of Neil at the edge of the chaos.
He was about to come between us. I gave him a look that said let me have this.
Two weeks of learning when to step back. And now, when every instinct must have been screaming at him to protect me, he was giving me the space to fight my own battle.
I got on top of Karina. Pinned her arms.
“You’re done,” I said. “Do you hear me? You’re done.”
Security pulled us apart. Police materialized from somewhere. Karina screamed and fought and had to be restrained by two officers while a third read her her rights.
Two charges. Assault and destruction of property.
I watched them put her in handcuffs. And then I walked over to her.
“I won’t press this case further against you,” I said quietly. “One condition.”
She looked up at me. Her perfect makeup was ruined, her perfect composure shattered.
“Leave the city. Disappear hundreds of miles away from us. Never come near me or my husband again.”
“You don’t get to say what I should do, bitch!”
“Okay. I hope you enjoy your time in jail.”
For a long moment, she didn’t respond.
Then, slowly, she nodded. “Okay, fine. I don’t give a shit about you anyways.”
The police took her away. The crowd dispersed. Anwesha took charge of the cleanup with her usual terrifying efficiency.
I found Neil standing in front of The Table.
The slash ran from one corner to the other. A wound in the canvas. A scar that would never fully heal.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.”
“I brought her into our lives. I trusted her. And she did this.”
“She did this.” I moved to stand beside him, looking at my ruined painting. “But it’ll be restored. The scar will show. That’s the point now.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he checked his watch.
“Midnight,” he said. “Day fourteen just ended.”
I turned to look at him. His expression was strange, resigned. Like he was bracing for something.
“The two weeks are up,” he said. “And tonight your opening turned into a crime scene because of someone I brought into our lives.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. “The deal was I sign if I failed. So thank you. For the fourteen days. For the chance. I’ll have the papers sent over in the…”
“You’re still counting that?”
He stopped and blinked.
“What?”
“Neil.” I reached up and turned his face toward me. Made him look at me. “I stopped counting somewhere around the weeds.”
His eyes widened. “You…”
“Again. This is not forgiveness, Neil. But I don’t want this to end.”
I took his hand. Laced my fingers through his. “Take me home. For good.”
For a moment, he just stared at me. Like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Then he kissed me.
Right there in the middle of my half-destroyed gallery, surrounded by broken glass and overturned pedestals and the wreckage of the worst night of my professional life.
He kissed me like I was everything.
We barely made it into the car.
Giovani closed the door behind us and the partition rose without a word. The privacy glass sealed us off from the front seat, and Neil’s hands were already under the red silk.
“Look at you,” he said against my ear. “Walking out of that gallery like you own the whole fucking city. My wife. My beautiful, vicious, brilliant wife.”
I pulled him into a kiss that was all teeth and leftover adrenaline. His mouth tasted like champagne. His palm slid up my thigh, slow, claiming, until his fingers found the lace I had worn for him and nothing else.
“No panties,” he muttered. “Fuck. You planned this.”
“You bought the dress. I just remembered how to wear it.”
He groaned and dropped to his knees on the floor of the car. The silk pooled around my hips as he shoved it up. One of my legs hooked over his shoulder. The city lights smeared past the tinted windows in long gold streaks, and then his mouth was on me.
He didn’t ease into it. He licked me like he was dying for this and the only thing that would save him was the taste of me. Broad, greedy strokes. His tongue flat against my clit, then dipping lower, fucking into me, then back up again. I clapped a hand over my own mouth.
“Don’t you dare stay quiet,” he said against my cunt, voice wrecked. “Giovani can’t hear you. I want every sound. Give them to me.”
“Neil-”
“That’s it. Say my name while I eat this perfect pussy. God, you taste so fucking good. Sweet. Wet. Mine.”
His fingers joined his mouth. Two of them, curling, finding that spot that made my hips jerk off the leather.
He sucked my clit between his lips and hummed like I was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth.
I grabbed his hair. My other hand stayed over my mouth anyway, because the sounds coming out of me were obscene.
“You fought for us tonight,” he murmured between licks. “Do you have any idea how proud I am of you? How hard I am just from watching you take what’s yours?”
I came with my heel digging into his back and his name breaking in my throat. He didn’t stop. He lapped me through it, slower, filthy, praising me the whole time.
“Good girl. That’s my girl. So pretty when you fall apart. Look at this mess you made on my tongue. I’m going to wear you on my mouth all the way upstairs.”
He kissed the inside of my thigh, then higher, then my mouth, so I could taste myself on him. I reached for his belt. He caught my wrist.
“Not yet. I want to be inside you when we walk into our home. I want the first time I fuck my wife tonight to be the second we are through that door.”
The car slowed. Giovani’s voice came through the intercom, professional, untouched.
“Penthouse, sir.”
Neil fixed my dress like he hadn’t just ruined me in the back seat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled at me, wrecked and reverent.
“Walk.”
The lobby was empty. The elevator doors opened. He guided me in with a hand on the small of my back, the bare skin the dress left exposed. He hit the penthouse button. The doors slid shut.
He turned me to face them.
“Hands on the wall,” he said quietly. “Don’t move.”
I planted my palms on either side of the control panel. In the brushed steel of the doors I could see our reflection, warped and gold. Me in red silk. Him behind me, already opening his trousers.
He gathered the dress in one fist and lifted it to my waist. Cool air hit my ass, my soaked thighs. He kicked my feet apart. The head of his cock dragged through the wet he had left there, once, twice, not entering, just painting himself with me.
“Neil. Please.”
“Please what? Use your words. I want to hear my wife ask for it.”
“Fuck me. Right here. Before the doors open. I don’t care.”
“That’s my girl.” He pushed in on one slow, thick stroke that stole the air from my lungs. “Fuck. You take me so well. Always have.”
He didn’t thrust hard. He didn’t need to.
Short, deep rolls of his hips, the kind that stayed quiet, the kind that filled me completely and stayed there.
His mouth was on the back of my neck. One hand stayed fisted in the silk at my hip.
The other slid around to my clit, two fingers circling in time with the grind.
“Look at yourself,” he whispered. “Look at how pretty you are stuffed full of me. Red dress around your waist. My cock in you. Anyone could see if these doors opened and I would not stop. I would let them watch me fuck my wife. Let them see who you come home to.”
“You’re insane. I love it.”
“I’m yours.”
“You’re mine. Fuck. Harder. Neil, please, I can take it.”
He gave me harder. Still controlled, still quiet, but deeper, the wet sound of him sliding in and out of me filling the small space. My forehead dropped against the metal. The floor numbers ticked up.
“You feel like heaven. Gripping me like you don’t ever want me to leave. I’m not leaving. You hear me? This is home. You are home. I’m going to fuck you on every surface we missed and then I’m going to do it again until you remember what it feels like to be worshipped.”
“I’m close.”
“I know. I can feel it. This pretty pussy fluttering around me. Come on my cock before we hit the top. Give it to me. Quiet. Just like this. Good girl.”
I came biting my own wrist. He held me through it, buried to the hilt, groaning praise into my hair like a prayer. He didn’t come. He stayed hard inside me, pulsing, breathing like he had run miles.
The elevator chimed.
He pulled out, smoothed the silk down over my ass, and zipped himself with hands that only shook a little. The doors opened on our floor. He took my hand like we had just had a polite ride up.
The second the penthouse door shut behind us he was on me.
Wall first. My back hit the cold marble of the entryway. He hiked the dress up again, lifted me, and drove into me in one brutal stroke that punched a cry out of my throat.
“Home,” he gasped against my skin. “You’re home.”
He fucked me against the marble like he was trying to leave a shape of us in the stone. My legs locked around his waist. His mouth found my throat, my jaw, the corner of my mouth.
“So beautiful. Even with your hair wrecked and your lipstick gone. Especially like this. My fierce girl. My artist. My wife. I am so fucking proud of you I could die.”
“Then don’t die. Stay inside me.”
He carried me to the bedroom still joined, laid me out on the sheets, and stripped the red silk off. He worshipped every inch. Mouth on my breasts, teeth on my nipples, tongue down the line of my stomach. When he pushed back into me it was slower, deeper, his forehead against mine.
“Look at me. I want your eyes. I want you to see what you do to me.”
“I see you.”
“Tell me how it feels.”
“Full. Too much. Not enough.”
“That’s right. Just me. This cock is all yours. Use me and take what you need.”
I did. I rolled him onto his back and rode him until my thighs shook, until he was grabbing my hips hard enough to bruise, until he was babbling.
“Fuck, look at you. Using me. Taking your pleasure like a queen. You’re so wet I can hear you. God, Anika. You’re perfect.”
I came. He followed with a groan that sounded like relief, like breaking, spilling into me in long pulses while he held my face and told me I was everything.
By the time the sun came up we had used the couch, the window, the floor in front of the fireplace. I was wrung out and marked. Thoroughly, completely claimed. I lay in his arms with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow.
He kissed my hair.
“I love you,” he said.
I lifted my head and looked at him. At the hope. The man who had just spent hours telling me I was perfect while he took me apart.
“I know. I can’t forgive you yet,” I said. “But you’re close.”
He let out a breath of relief.
“I’ll take close. I’ll take anything you give me. And I will keep earning the rest.”
I put my head back on his chest and closed my eyes.
Home.