Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EMILY
The drive home settled into the easy silence that had become our new normal.
I had drywall dust in my hair and the residual high of having a group of professional athletes demolish a wall on command while a magazine photographer captured every glorious, ridiculous second of it.
“A good day,” he said.
“A great day,” I corrected, turning my head away from the window to him.
He pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, and we sat there for a second in the dark.
Inside, we split up to shower off the drywall dust. By the time I’d scrubbed the dirt out of my hair and poured a glass of wine, my feet hurt enough that I hopped up on the kitchen counter to wait.
His shower still ran upstairs as I drank my wine and tried not to think about what I was going to do next.
I’d been thinking about it way too much lately.
During truffle tempering and permit applications and supplier calls.
During the exact moments when I should’ve been occupied by couverture percentages and commercial zoning codes, it had instead been running a parallel track devoted entirely to the fact that Finn Taylor had been going down on me every night and would not let me touch him back.
Every single night, when I reached for him afterward, he wasn’t ready for it.
The first time, it was sweet. The second time, it was noble. By night four, I was building a legal case for why the man needed to let me touch his penis.
He came downstairs in sweats and a clean T-shirt, his hair damp, his glasses on.
His glasses made him look like a hot librarian who could also bench-press the reference section.
“Wine?” I offered, holding up the bottle.
“Nah, I’m good.” He opened the fridge, grabbed a water, and rested against the opposite counter.
We were back in our positions. The same ones from that first night, when he’d stood right there and said take off your pants.
He watched me watching him. His mouth twitched.
“You’re making a face,” he said.
“This is my face.”
“I’ve seen it enough times to know.”
Fine. He wanted to skip the opening statements? I could do that.
“Tonight,” I said, setting my wine down with enough force that he stopped drinking, “is about you.”
He went still.
“Em—”
“Nope.” I held up a finger. “You’ve been invoking rule two for a week. Unilaterally. Without opposing counsel’s input. I’m filing a motion to expand the scope of the experiment.”
“A motion?” he asked.
“Grounds: the data set is incomplete. We’ve established that you can—” I gestured vaguely at my own body, because I was not about to narrate what his mouth did to me. “But we haven’t tested whether the full response cycle is operational. In the other direction.”
He set the water bottle down.
“You’re asking if you can get me off.”
“I’m proposing a reciprocal data collection phase. But yes.”
This time he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked, and the casual tone fell away.
The flag had been flying all week. I’d felt the evidence of that pressed against my hip every single night while he held me. He was hard when he went down on me. Hard when he climbed into bed after. Hard in the mornings when I woke up in his arms.
But he hadn’t finished. Not once. Not with me, and—based on the careful way he avoided the topic—probably not alone, either.
“Then we’ll have more data,” I said. “Rule three: no faking it. Honest feedback. That’s what we agreed to.”
The kitchen hummed around us—fridge, the tick of the clock above the stove.
“Okay,” he said as though he was handing me something fragile and trusting me not to drop it. “I’m in.”
I slid off the counter and took his hand, leading him up the stairs.
The bed was unmade from this morning, the sheets still twisted from when I’d rolled into his side around four a.m. and he’d pulled me closer without waking up.
He sat on the edge of the bed. I stood in front of him. The dynamic was reversed from every other night we’d been together.
“You have to tell me if it’s uncomfortable.” I trailed my fingertips along his jawline.
He nodded.
“I mean it, Finn. Rule three.”
“Rule three,” he confirmed. But his voice had gone rough at the edges, and his hands were gripping the mattress on either side of his thighs.
I stepped between his knees. He tracked up my body with a focus that made the space between my ribs feel too small.
I reached for the hem of his shirt. He let me pull it over his head.
I’d seen Finn shirtless approximately nine thousand times in my life—at pools, at barbecues, even on ESPN.
But this was different. This was close, and private, and mine. I traced him with my fingertips without asking first. I followed the hard lines of his chest, the cut of his abs, the faint scar on his left shoulder from a college play gone wrong.
He shivered.
I pulled at his waistband and he lifted his hips to help. The sweats came down and he kicked them away, and then it was just Finn, sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxer briefs with the evidence of this experiment straining against the fabric.
Carefully, I hooked my fingers under the elastic and drew them down.
And then I saw him. All of him. Up close, in the half-light of the bedroom, with nothing between us.
My eyebrows climbed so high they probably left my face.
“Damn, Finn.” I couldn’t look away. “You hang Christmas ornaments from this during the holidays?”
He tilted his head back and laughed. A real laugh—full-bodied and surprised. The sound filled the room and changed the shape of his face.
“Maybe this year,” he said, and his voice was husky and dark and did things to my lower abdomen that were not consistent with scientific objectivity.
I wrapped my hand around the base of him. Gentle. A question.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Okay,” he managed. “Very okay.”
I moved my hand. Slow. Learning the weight of him, the way he responded to pressure, the spots that made his breath stutter. His head dropped forward, his eyes on my hand, watching what I was doing like he needed visual confirmation that it was real.
I used my thumb across the tip and he made a sound that I was going to replay in my head during every boring meeting for the rest of my life.
“Rule three,” I whispered. “Talk to me.”
“No pain,” he said, the words tight. “Zero pain. Em—”
“I’m here.” I licked up the length of him and sucked the tip into my mouth.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, you are.”
I took more of him, using my mouth and my hand.
His hand came to the back of my neck—resting there, his thumb brushing my jaw, like he needed to touch me back even though that wasn’t the assignment.
I kept the pace gentle until he rocked his hips in a motion so instinctive I didn’t think he knew he was doing it. His breathing went ragged. His thighs tensed under my hands.
I worked him, taking him deep and letting him take the lead. I glanced up to check on him and that’s when he looked down at me. Right at me.
“I’m—Em, I’m close.”
I took him deep again.
When he came, his whole body went taut. His hand tightened on the back of my neck and he grunted the sound of a man who had been terrified of this exact moment and was finding out, in real time, that the fear didn’t win.
I stayed with him through it. Milking him with my hand as he finished.
The tension drained from his shoulders and his face and the tight, controlled line of his jaw.
And when he came back to me, our breaths mingled. We stayed like that, breathing together, for a long time.
“Preliminary findings,” I said, my voice a low, shaky thing I barely recognized. “Equipment appears to be fully operational.”
He let out a breath that was half chuckle, half something I couldn’t put a word to.
“I think we need to move on to phase two,” he said, stroking my cheek. “For thoroughness.”
A slow grin spread across my mouth. “Peer review is essential.”
According to my notes, he reciprocated. Twice, actually.
And when we cleaned up it was the kind of easy, unselfconscious way that only happens between two people who’ve seen each other at their worst.
He pulled his sweats back on. I stole the comforter and wrapped it around my shoulders like a cape.
Back in bed, I propped myself on one elbow. The lamp was off but the hall light was doing its usual trick of cutting a stripe across the floor, catching the edge of his face, the frame of his glasses.
“I totally owe you fifty bucks for that last part,” I said. “Worth every penny.”
“You’re such a brat,” he said, grinning like the stud he knew he was.
I tilted my head. “Want me to leave since I’m such a brat?”
Then his expression shifted to the one he got when the jokes ran out and there was nothing left but the truth.
“No,” he said. “Stay.”
I settled back against his side. His arm came around me, and I tucked my head into the comfortable space between his shoulder and his chin.
His thumb drew slow circles on my shoulder. My eyes were getting heavy.
“Em?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
The two words were so simple.
I pressed my lips to his collarbone because I didn’t trust my voice.
He pulled me closer.
I let him.
And the part of me that was always keeping score—the part that used to track billable hours and win rates and every single moment I’d spent pretending Finn Taylor was just my brother’s friend? It went silent.
Not because it ran out of evidence. Because the evidence was overwhelming.