15. Odette
— ? —
Odette
He pulls me down.
The kiss isn’t gentle. It isn’t soft or tentative or anything like the first time in my kitchen. This is desperate and starving, two people grabbing at each other like they might drown if they let go.
My knees hit the cold tile as I straddle his lap, the toilet lid hard beneath us. His hands are everywhere, my hair, my waist, the zipper at the back of my dress. My fingers find the buttons of his shirt, fumble them open, press flat against the warm skin of his chest.
“We can’t,” I gasp against his mouth. “The girls are downstairs.”
“Then we’ll have to be quiet.”
He kisses me again, swallowing my response. His hands find the hem of my dress and push it up around my thighs. I shift on his lap, grinding down against him, and he groans into my mouth.
“Quiet,” I remind him.
“You try being quiet when you do that.”
I do it again, just to hear him groan.
His hand fists in my hair and tugs my head back, baring my throat to his mouth.
Below us, muffled through the floor, I can hear them.
The low murmur of the Solarium below, Lucia’s laugh, the clink of a glass set down, Marisol’s footsteps crossing the hall.
A whole house full of people who love me, any one of whom could climb these stairs and try this door.
I should be mortified. I have never in my life done anything like this. Instead the danger of it floods me, lights me up from the inside, and I grind down against him, shameless, past caring.
His fingers hook into the waistband of my underwear and drag it down, and then his hand is between my thighs, stroking through the wet, testing.
“Already dripping,” he breathes, wonder and filth in equal measure. “Did you sit through that whole dinner like this? Good manners and a wet cunt?”
The crude word out of his careful mouth goes through me hot and shameful, and I have to fight not to grind down on his hand.
“I was thinking about getting out of there alive,” I whisper.
“Liar.” He circles his thumb over my clit, slow, and I have to bite down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound. “You were thinking about my hand up your dress. Say it.”
“Elliott.”
“Say it, or I stop.”
“Fine. I was thinking about it. All through the fish course. Happy?”
He rewards me. Two fingers push into me, curling up against the spot that makes my hips jerk, his thumb working tight circles, and it’s so good and so fast that the pressure gathers almost at once, coiling low and tight, release rushing up to meet me.
And then he stops.
Just stops. Pulls his hand away and leaves me clenching on air, my hips chasing nothing.
“No,” I whisper, wrecked. “No, don’t you dare.”
“Quiet.” I feel him smile against my throat. “You’re the one who said we had to be quiet. People everywhere, remember.”
He does it again. Builds me back up with those clever fingers, murmuring filth into my ear, how wet I am, how tight I’m going to feel around him, how he’s pictured exactly this for years, me coming apart on his lap with a houseful of witnesses one floor down.
And just as my thighs start to tremble, just as I get to the edge, he eases off and leaves me hanging.
I want to scream. I can’t scream. That’s the whole unbearable point of it.
“You’re torturing me,” I breathe.
“I’m taking my time.” Another slow circle, another retreat that leaves me shaking. “Now hold it for me. Don’t you dare come until I let you.”
By the third time he strands me at the edge I’m boneless, my forehead dropped to his shoulder, my whole body drawn wire tight. Downstairs a chair scrapes. Someone starts up the stairs and then stops, and my heart slams so hard I can’t tell anymore where the fear ends and the wanting begins.
“Please,” I whisper, and I mean it, I’m past pride, past shame, past anything but this. “Please. I need you inside me. Now. Before I lose my mind.”
“There she is.” He reaches between us, fumbles with his belt and his zipper. I hear the clink of metal, the rasp of fabric, and then he’s freeing himself, hot and hard, and I sink down onto him in one slow slide that punches the breath out of both of us.
We both go still.
The fullness is overwhelming. The angle is different on this hard surface, deeper somehow, and after all that denial I’m so sensitive that the stretch of him alone almost finishes me. His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise.
“Don’t move,” he grits out. “Give me a second or this is over.”
I give him no seconds at all. I rise up and sink back down, slow, watching his jaw clench, watching him fight it, and it’s the most powerful I’ve felt in longer than I can remember.
“Move,” he says through his teeth. “Please.”
I move.
There’s nothing slow about this. Nothing reverent. This is fast and reckless and slightly insane, the two of us fucking in a bathroom while my friends drink wine one floor below. The toilet lid creaks with every thrust. The tile is cold against my knees. I don’t care about any of it.
“So good,” he gasps. “You feel so fucking good.”
“Shh.” I cover his mouth with my hand. “Someone will hear.”
He bites my palm, gentle enough not to hurt, hard enough to make me gasp. I clench around him and he groans against my hand, the sound muffled but unmistakable.
My other hand braces against the wall. His hands grip my hips, guiding my rhythm, pulling me down harder with every stroke. The pressure is building fast, too fast, but I can’t slow down. I don’t want to slow down.
Footsteps in the hall. Close. Right outside the door.
We both go dead still, him buried deep inside me, my hand clamped over my own mouth, neither of us breathing.
The footsteps pause. A shadow breaks the strip of light under the door.
My whole body is screaming, half terror and half the cruelest arousal of my life, and I’m gripping him so tight that he makes a strangled sound into my shoulder and has to bite down to swallow it.
The footsteps move on.
“Oh my God,” I breathe.
“Don’t stop.” He’s wrecked, pleading. “Please. Don’t you dare stop now.”
I don’t stop. I ride him harder, chasing the release he kept me from for what felt like an hour, and he meets me stroke for stroke, his hand finding my clit again, quick and desperate.
“Close,” I breathe. “Already close, and if you edge me one more time I’ll kill you.”
“Not this time.” His voice is a ruin. “Come with me. Let me feel it.”
A knock on the door.
We freeze.
“Odette?” Lucia’s voice, muffled through the wood. “You in there? Marisol said you came upstairs.”
I look at Elliott. His eyes are wild. His chest is heaving. He’s still inside me, still hard, still right on the brink.
“Yes,” I call back. My voice comes out strangled. “Just, um. Just cleaning up Elliott’s face. He got hurt.”
“You need help?”
“No.” I shift on his lap and he bites down on his lip so hard I think he draws blood. “We’ll be down in a minute.”
“Okay. Hurry up. We’re worried about you.”
Footsteps retreating down the hall.
Elliott looks at me. I look at him.
“She’s gone,” he whispers.
“She’s gone. Now finish what you started.”
He grips my hips and fucks up into me, hard and deep and merciless, the toilet lid creaking under us, and I have to slap my own hand over my mouth to keep from screaming the house down.
He does the same, his palm crushing his groans, his eyes locked on mine the whole time like he wants to watch me fall apart while my friends drink tea one floor below.
It only takes a few brutal strokes. The orgasm tears through me, clenching and pulsing and endless, and I feel him break right after, his hips stuttering, his teeth sinking into the meat of his own hand to stay quiet.
We stay there for a moment, trembling, trying to catch our breath. His forehead rests against my shoulder. My fingers thread through his hair.
“That was insane,” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“We could’ve been caught.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t regret it.”
“Me neither.”
He helps me clean up. We put ourselves back together, straightening clothes and smoothing hair, and when I look in the mirror I’m flushed and bright-eyed and I look like a woman who’s just been thoroughly fucked.
There’s nothing I can do about that now.
“Ready?” he asks.
“No.” I take a breath. “But I have to do this anyway.”
The Solarium is full when we come down. It’s been the most beautiful room in the House since Rafael’s crew rebuilt it, the glass and ironwork restored pane by pane, orchids climbing the framework in every color under the third-floor light.
The first of the Laws is carved into the far wall: the seat belongs to the woman.
Dayana sits at the head of the long table.
Isla and Lucia on one side. Ursula and Cat on the other.
Marisol hovering in the doorway with a tray of tea.
They all look up when I enter.
“Odette.” Dayana’s voice is careful. “What happened? Marisol said there was blood.”
“Laurence happened.” I walk to the head of the table. My legs are still shaking. “He came at Elliott at dinner. Swung first. Grabbed my wrist when I tried to stop it.”
Lucia swears. Isla gasps. Ursula’s face goes cold.
“Elliott hit him,” I continue. “Once. He went down. We left.”
“Good,” Lucia says. “I hope he broke his fucking jaw.”
“I don’t think he did. But that isn’t why I’m here.”
The room goes quiet. I feel them all watching me, waiting, these women who’ve been my friends for years, who’ve kept my secrets and covered my lies and never once asked for anything in return.
I’ve never asked them for anything either. I’m the one who keeps other people’s secrets, not the one who needs keeping.
Until now.
“I need to ask for something,” I say. My voice cracks. I didn’t expect it to crack. “I’ve never asked before. I’ve carried everyone’s secrets for years. I’ve been the vault, the listener, the one who never needed anything in return. But I need something now.”
Dayana’s face softens. “Odette.”
“Please.” The word comes out broken. “I don’t know how to stop him.
I don’t know how to make him leave me alone.
He’s everywhere, all the time, showing up at appointments and family dinners and flower shops.
He grabbed me tonight. In front of everyone.
And I’m scared that next time, it’ll be worse. ”
The tears are falling now. I can’t stop them. Fifteen years of being invisible, of being strong, of never asking for help, and now I’m standing in front of my friends crying like a child.
“I’m Calling the Table,” I say.
The room goes still.
Calling the Table is the most serious thing a member can do. It’s a formal request, a plea for the full power of the Orchid Society to mobilize on your behalf. In all my years, I’ve never done it. I’ve never needed to.
I need to now.
Dayana speaks first. “Aye.”
Isla doesn’t hesitate. “Aye.”
Lucia slams her hand on the table. “Fucking aye.”
Ursula, her baby sleeping upstairs, her face fierce. “Aye.”
Cat, quiet and steady, keeper of the records. “Aye.”
Unanimous. Before I even finish explaining.
Cat opens the Ledger to a fresh page and writes his name in it, Laurence Fairbanks, in the same careful hand that’s recorded every debt this House has ever come to collect.
Dayana stands. Walks around the table. Takes my hands in hers.
“Then the Orchid Society is going to war,” she says.