13. Noelle
— ? —
Noelle
The next three days are stolen.
It’s reckless and it’s stupid and it’s the only thing in my life that feels real, this thing we keep doing in the cracks where no one is looking.
The third morning, I wake up in his bed, tangled in sheets that smell like him, expensive cologne and clean skin and something darker, something that’s just Sebastian. The morning light filters through curtains heavy enough to shut the whole city out.
The other side of the bed is empty.
Noises drift from somewhere deeper in the apartment. Clattering. A muttered curse.
I wrap myself in one of his dress shirts, still on the floor from last night, when he couldn’t get undressed fast enough, and pad barefoot toward the kitchen.
Sebastian is standing at the stove, frowning at a pan full of what might have once been eggs. He’s wearing sweatpants and nothing else, his hair still mussed from sleep, and he looks so unlike the cold, controlled CEO I thought I knew that my chest aches.
“What are you doing?”
He doesn’t turn around. “Cooking.”
“That’s committing crimes against eggs.”
“I’m following a recipe.”
“The recipe says to ruin them?”
“The recipe says medium heat.” He gestures at the stove accusingly. “This is medium heat.”
“Honey, that is high heat. And those eggs are already dead. There’s no saving them.”
I hip-check him out of the way, take the pan off the burner, and survey the damage. Scrambled eggs turned into rubber. At least the coffee looks drinkable.
“Go sit down,” I tell him. “Let me handle this.”
“I can cook.”
“Evidence suggests otherwise.”
He glares at me, but he goes. Five minutes later, there are actual edible eggs on plates, fluffy, seasoned properly. A difficult accomplishment, considering Sebastian has apparently decided he can’t be more than three inches away from me at any given moment.
His hands find my waist from behind while I’m cooking. His mouth presses kisses to my neck while I’m plating. He’s a corporate shark who can’t keep his hands off me, and it’s doing things to my heart that I’m not ready to examine.
“You’re distracting me,” I say, trying to sound annoyed.
“You’re distractible.” His teeth graze my earlobe. “I like it.”
“The eggs are going to be ruined again.”
“We’ll order breakfast.”
“Sebastian-”
He spins me around and kisses me properly, deep and thorough, until my knees go weak and I forget why I was arguing. When he finally pulls back, my eggs are indeed starting to stick to the pan.
“Worth it,” he says, and the smug satisfaction in his voice makes me want to hit him.
We eat at his kitchen island, morning light streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, and for a moment it feels almost normal. Like we’re just two people who chose each other. Like the war waiting outside doesn’t exist.
He hands me coffee. Two sugars, splash of cream. Exactly how I take it.
A thing I never told him.
“How do you know how I take my coffee?”
“I pay attention.”
“To my coffee order?”
“To everything.”
Something in my chest cracks open.
“That’s...” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Terrifying? Wonderful? Both?
“Too much?” He’s watching me carefully, like he’s waiting for me to bolt.
“No.” My hand finds his on the counter. “Not too much. Just... unexpected.”
“Get used to it.”
We finish breakfast in comfortable silence, knees touching under the island, the city waking up outside the windows. For one stolen morning, the world is small and warm and safe.
Later, when I’m getting dressed to leave, there’s a problem.
“Where-” I check under the bed. Behind the chair. In the pile of clothes from last night.
“Left side of the couch,” Sebastian says without looking up from his laptop.
I find them. My underwear, black lace, crumpled between the cushions where they apparently landed when he tore them off me last night. I stuff them in my bag with as much dignity as I can muster.
“How long have you known those were there?”
“Since about 6:00 a.m.”
“And you didn’t say anything?”
“I was enjoying the search.” He still doesn’t look up, but there’s a smugness pulling at his jaw he isn’t bothering to hide. “The way you bent over to check under the bed was particularly entertaining.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You like it.”
I do. That’s the problem.
I’m almost out the door, bag over my shoulder, hair still damp from the shower, when he catches my wrist and pulls me back for one more kiss, slow and unhurried, reluctant to let me go.
“Tonight,” he says against my mouth. “My place. I’ll order in.”
“Pizza?”
“Whatever you want.”
He walks me to the door like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, like I’m not his brother’s wife slipping out of his apartment at nine in the morning, and the ordinariness of it is somehow the most dangerous part of all.
I take the back stairs down to the lobby anyway, out of habit, out of fear, and step onto a side street where no one knows my face.
My phone buzzes as I’m walking to the subway.
Celeste.
Heard you’ve been busy. Mom’s asking questions. Just thought you should know.
The words turn my blood to ice.
My mother. Asking questions. Which means someone told her something. Which means whatever Sebastian and I have been doing isn’t as secret as we thought.
I stare at the message for a long time, standing on a crowded sidewalk while the city moves around me.
Just thought you should know.
That’s not a warning. That’s a threat.
Celeste wants me to know she’s watching. Wants me to know she has ammunition. Wants me to remember that no matter how far I run, no matter how carefully I hide, she’ll always find a way to drag me back into the mess.
I don’t respond.
But I save the message.
I’m learning to keep receipts. Maybe someday it’ll be worth something.
***
The thirty-eighth floor is almost dark when I get there.
Most of the desks sit empty, monitors off, the cleaning crew two floors down.
A single lamp burns behind the glass wall of Sebastian’s office, and I should not be here.
I know I should not be here. This is reckless and stupid and exactly the kind of thing that gets two people caught, and I came anyway, the way I keep coming anyway, because wanting him stopped being a choice a while ago.
Now it just happens to me, weather I can’t talk my way out of.
I hate that about myself. I spent five years being careful. Now I take the express elevator at nine at night in a coat with nothing useful underneath it, and I despise the part of me that’s already wet by the time the doors open.
He’s at his desk when I walk in. Sleeves pushed to the elbow.
I notice the forearms first, the way I always notice the forearms now, the cords of muscle and the vein that runs from his wrist into the roll of his shirt.
He’s been working. There’s a tumbler at his elbow and a tie loosened to nothing and a tightness in his jaw that smooths the second he sees me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
“The floor isn’t empty.”
“You said it would be by nine.”
“Priya stayed late.” His eyes move down the length of my coat, slow, and the look lands somewhere low in my belly and pulls. “She’s printing the Peterson files. Two doors down.”
“Then I should go.”
Neither of us believes it. My mouth has gone dry. My heart is doing something embarrassing against my ribs, and his throat works once when I take a step toward him instead of toward the door.
I should go. I think the words. I cross the room.
He stands as I reach him, and then his hands are on me, under the coat, finding bare skin and the lack of anything else, and the sound he makes is rough and low and goes straight through me.
“Nothing on under here,” he says against my throat.
“I was in a hurry.”
“You’re going to be the death of me.” He turns me, one hand flat between my shoulder blades, and bends me over the desk. The wood is cold against my forearms. His palm drags down my spine, over the curve of me, and I press my thighs together against the ache and it does nothing.
“Sebastian-”
“Quiet.” A warning. His thumb finds me from behind, slides through the slick mess he’s made of me without touching, and I bite down on a sound. “She’s two doors away. You understand?”
I nod into the desk.
He frees himself. I hear the belt, the zip, and then the blunt heat of him notches against me and I forget every reason I shouldn’t want this. He pushes in slow, inch by inch, until my breath stutters and my fingers scrabble for the far edge of the desk.
“There she is,” he breathes. “Soaked already. You walked through my whole building with your cunt out for me.”
He sets a pace that is unhurried and deep and brutal in its patience, one hand fisted in the back of my coat, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise.
The desk creaks. A pen rolls off the edge and hits the carpet.
I turn my face into my own arm to muffle myself and he leans over my back, his chest against my spine, his mouth at my ear.
“You can’t make a sound,” he says. “Can you do that for me.”
It isn’t a question.
The knock comes anyway.
Three soft raps on the office door, and a voice through the wood. “Mr. Sterling? The Peterson files are ready.”
He does not stop.
That’s the part that undoes me. He does not even slow. His hips keep their rhythm, slow and merciless, while his voice comes out perfectly level over the top of my head.
“Leave them on your desk. I’ll review them in the morning.”
“Of course. Do you need anything before I head out?”
“No. Thank you. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Sterling.”
He drives into me on the second syllable of his own name and I make a noise into my arm, small and broken, and his hand comes up off my hip and presses flat over my mouth.
His palm tastes like salt and cedar. Behind us, through the door, I hear her footsteps move off down the corridor, unhurried, oblivious, while her boss fucks his brother’s wife over the wide expanse of his desk and keeps his breathing flat enough to read a contract.
The danger of it lights up every nerve I have.
“Listen to you,” he murmurs, when her steps have gone. His hand stays over my mouth. “All that noise you wanted to make. And you held it. Good girl.”
The praise hits somewhere I’m ashamed of. I clench around him and he hisses through his teeth, his control finally cracking at the edges, his rhythm losing its careful line.
“That’s it,” he says. “That’s it, come on. Quietly.”
His other hand slides around and down, finds my clit, circles it in time with his hips, and the pressure builds so fast I can’t breathe around his palm.
I come with his hand still clamped over my mouth, my whole body locking, the scream he won’t let me have trapped in my chest and ringing in my ears.
He follows three thrusts later, buried deep, his forehead dropping to the back of my neck, a single low groan escaping that he doesn’t bother to swallow now that she’s gone.
For a moment neither of us moves. The lamp hums. The city glitters thirty-eight floors down, indifferent.
He straightens me with a care that does not match what he just did to me, turns me around, and tilts my chin up so I have to look at him. His hair is a wreck. There’s a flush high on his cheekbones I have never once seen in a boardroom.
“You’re insane,” I tell him, still catching my breath.
“You came up here with no underwear.” He almost smiles. “Glass houses, Noelle.”
I should feel cheap. Bent over a desk, hand over my mouth, a witness ten feet away. I keep waiting for the shame to arrive.
It doesn’t.
That’s the thing I can’t say out loud, the thing I’ll turn over later in the dark of Nancy’s empty apartment and hate myself for. With Dorian I spent five years apologizing for taking up space. With this man I just let myself be loud enough to need silencing, and the only thing I feel is alive.
I fix my coat. He hands me the pen that rolled off the desk, like it matters, like any of this is salvageable.
“Tell me you’ll be back,” he says.
“This is a terrible idea.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep meaning it.”
But I’m already planning the lie I’ll tell about where I’ll be Thursday night, and he knows it, and the look he gives me as I leave says he’ll be counting the hours too.