Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Natasha
His hotel suite is four floors up, clean-lined and spare, with Chicago blazing through floor-to-ceiling glass like a living circuit board.
I register approximately none of this because he turns to me the moment the door closes and the look on his face is direct and warm and does something immediate to the air in my lungs.
"Tell me if I've misread tonight," he says. His voice is low and rough around the edge.
"You haven't," I reply.
He crosses to me slowly. He stops close enough that I have to tip my chin up to hold his gaze. He raises one hand and tucks a strand of hair back from my face with a carefulness that winds something tighter in me than urgency ever could.
"Still thinking about the violin?" he asks, his mouth near my temple.
"Absolutely not," I say.
He smiles against my skin, and then his mouth finds mine.
He kisses with the same quality of attention he brought to the argument: unhurried, thorough, generous.
Both palms cradle my face, thumbs tracing the line of my jaw like he is learning something he intends to remember.
I grip his lapels and he makes a low sound that reverberates against my lips and travels straight down my spine.
I reach for his jacket. He lets me push it off his shoulders and it drops behind him. I work at his shirt buttons and he begins on the back of my dress, each small fastening coming undone with a patience I find both admirable and genuinely maddening.
"You could go faster," I say against his mouth.
"I could," he agrees, but does not.
When the fabric finally drops and pools around my feet, the sound he makes is quiet and involuntary. His eyes move over me slowly in the low light from the window. My skin heats under that gaze.
There is nothing performed in how he looks at me. It is the frank, open attention of someone who is genuinely undone by what he sees, and being on the receiving end of it makes my chest do something complicated.
He walks me toward the bed with one hand warm at the small of my back, his mouth skating down the side of my neck. I feel his lips - open and unhurried - press against my pulse point below my ear.
Then lower. My collarbone. The curve where my shoulder meets my neck. The top of my sternum. His hands trace the sides of my waist as his mouth continues downward and my fingers curl into his hair.
"Here," he says against my ribcage, thumbs sweeping inward across my stomach.
"Yes," I say, because it’s the only available answer.
He takes his time in a way that should be criminal. His mouth finds the inside of my wrist, pressing there while his thumb draws slow circles at my hip. I feel my own pulse hammering against his lips. He traces downward, across the flat of my stomach, and I exhale shakily at the ceiling.
"You're incredible," he says against my hip bone. He says it quietly, with certainty, like something he is simply observing. It does more to me than the words themselves. “Your body is fucking art. I'm almost scared to touch you.”
His words are doing something to me. His mouth continues its descent and I stop trying to keep my breathing regulated.
Both my hands are in his hair now. My hips tilt toward him of their own logic.
When he finally closes his lips around the most sensitive part of me I make a sound that echoes off the window glass and absolutely do not care.
He reads every shift in my breathing with a focus that borders on devotion.
Adjusting, learning, responding. Two fingers press slowly inside me and my spine arches clear off the mattress.
He works with his mouth and his hand in concert - patient and thorough - until I am gripping the sheets with white-knuckled fists, my thighs shaking against his shoulders, the release gathering in rolling waves.
"I need you to—" I do not finish the sentence because I can’t locate the rest of it.
“Yes?” He lifts his head, his eyes finding mine in the low light. His expression - flushed, focused, completely certain - does something savage to whatever composure I had left. "Tell me what you need."
"I need you. Now."
He rises to grab a complementary condom from the hotel drawer and does the necessary.
I reach for him, pulling him down to me.
He kisses me deep and slow while his hands relearn the landscape they just mapped with his mouth.
When he eventually draws back, he turns me with both hands on my hips.
He slides them from my hip bones up to my waist in one long, warm pass, turning me until I am on my knees on the bed with my palms flat against the headboard.
His mouth drops to the back of my neck. His hands grip my hips, and I feel the solid press of him against me. My breath stutters out in a rush.
"Okay?" he asks, low against my ear.
"More than okay," I manage. "Significantly more than okay."
He pushes inside me slowly, one deliberate inch at a time, one hand flattened against my stomach, pulling me back into him at the same moment.
The sound I make is entirely unguarded and I cannot bring myself to be embarrassed by it.
He stills completely, his mouth moving along my shoulder blade - warm and open - giving me three full breaths to adjust to the fullness of him.
Then he begins to move.
Long, deep strokes that find a rhythm quickly. Each one rolls my hips forward and back, his fingers tightening at my waist. His other hand slides around to my front, finding the swollen knot of nerves at my center. I drop my forehead against the headboard and breathe through my teeth.
"Right there," I moan out the words. “That feels so good.”
"I know," he says.
He does know. That is the thing that undoes me completely. His hands understand my body the way a musician understands an instrument - with instinct and attention. He’s genuinely invested in my pleasure.
He strokes in circles, unhurried, while he drives deeper, and the dual sensation stacks and compounds until I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
I hear myself say his name. Except I don’t know his name. What comes out of my mouth is not a name but something wordless and urgent, and he responds to it with a low sound against the back of my neck that vibrates through every nerve ending I possess.
The release hits me like a current. Full-body and complete, rolling from my core outward through every extremity simultaneously. I clench around him and cry out sharply and my arms nearly give.
He grips me steady with both hands and drives once, twice, a third time - deep and absolute - before his own rhythm stutters and he shudders against my back with his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, breathing my name against my spine in fragments.
We stay like that. His chest expands and contracts against my back. His hands loosen slowly from my hips, fingers uncurling one at a time. The city blazes silently through the glass.
"Well," I say finally, to the headboard. “That was… unexpected."
I feel his mouth curve against my spine. “Fuck yeah.”
At four in the morning, I dress in the dark. My gown, retrieved from the floor in pieces. My shoes. My clutch. He is on his back with one arm extended across the space where I was, his face turned toward the window, his chest rising and falling in the slow, even tempo of genuine sleep.
I study him for a few seconds longer than I should. The jaw. The wave of dark hair against the pillow. The curve of his hand, open and relaxed. He takes up space the way a person does when they are fully at ease in their own body - settled, no armor required.
I turn and leave without making a sound.
The elevator is mirrored on three sides.
The woman reflected back at me is not a woman I immediately recognize.
Hair loose around her shoulders in dark auburn waves.
Expression open in a way that has no business being visible on a public face.
Something around the eyes that looks like the aftermath of being genuinely surprised.
She looks, frankly, like someone who has just had her most closely held belief about herself interrupted.
I study her for four floors.
Then I straighten my spine, smooth my dress, and arrange my features back into the configuration that functions correctly in the world outside this elevator.
The cab is warm and smells of pine air freshener. The driver has the radio low. Chicago moves past the windows in streaks of amber and white.
My left hand drops to my knee.
I do not notice it for almost a full block. When I do, I look down at my fingers resting against the exact spot where the old injury lives. The one I hide in meetings. The one that only surfaces when my body is saying something my mind has not authorized.
I lift my hand. Put it in my lap.
It was a perfect night, I tell myself, with the clean conviction of filing a completed item. One extraordinary, sealed, beginning-to-end perfect night. No names exchanged. No context shared. No thread left hanging that requires follow-up or management or any kind of emotional inventory.
It is already over.