Gabe
TWENTY-FOUR
Irealize she’s gone quiet a second too late.
I’m still halfway through a thought, mapping out how her suggestion shifts the rollout timeline, where we’d need to adjust positioning to support it, when the silence finally registers as something purposeful rather than incidental.
I look up.
Willow isn’t looking at me.
She’s looking at my desk. More specifically, at the notebook I left open.
There’s a brief, unhelpful moment where I consider whether closing the distance fast enough would make a difference.
It wouldn’t.
She’s already seen it.
“Gabe,” she says softly.
I move anyway, stepping in and closing the notebook with a flat press of my hand.
“It’s nothing,” I say, because it’s easier than explaining.
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
I let out a breath, more controlled than I feel. “It’s something I write.”
She tilts her head. “Like notes?”
“No.”
I hesitate, then open the notebook again before I can overthink it.
It’s already exposed. Containing it now doesn’t serve a purpose.
She leans in just enough to read. “I learned how to be wanted before I learned how to stay, how to hold someone close, then still turn away…”
I don’t look at the page. I watch her. That’s the higher-risk option.
“I built something careful from pieces of noise, made silence feel safer than risking a choice…”
There’s a stretch of quiet while her eyes move across the lines, and I find myself tracking the smallest shifts in her expression. Waiting for dismissal, confusion, polite interest.
None of those come.
“If I give you the truth, do you leave or remain? Do you stay when it’s quiet, or just for the flame?” She sucks in a breath. “You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
She looks up at me then, warmth settling into her expression. “It’s really good.”
“I don’t show it to anyone,” I admit.
“Really? Because it feels honest.”
“Most things I do aren’t,” I reply.
Her mouth curves. “That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“No,” she says. “You’re just used to controlling what people see.”
She’s closer than she was a minute ago.
Her fingers brush mine where they rest on the desk, light contact that lingers just long enough to feel intentional before she stills.
She doesn’t pull away.
Neither do I.
I close the distance between us in a single step.
Her lips part in surprise before I capture them with mine. The notebook falls to the floor, forgotten. Her mouth tastes faintly of coffee and mint, and I drink her in because I’ve been dying of thirst.
My hands find her waist, fingers digging into the soft fabric of her blouse.
She makes a small sound against my mouth and her fingers curl into the front of my shirt. I back her against the edge of the desk, papers scattering. Her shirt rides up as I lift her, exposing a strip of skin that burns against my palms.
When she pulls away to breathe, her pupils are blown wide, just a thin ring of color remaining. Her chest rises and falls rapidly against mine. I watch her throat move as she swallows.
“Is this okay?” she whispers, her fingers hovering at the top button of my shirt.
My voice comes out as gravel. “Never better.”
She undoes one button, then another, her cool fingertips tracing the line of my collarbone. I can’t look away from her face. The slight furrow between her brows, the way she bites her lower lip in concentration. When her nails graze the sensitive skin below my navel, my breath catches audibly.
“Fuck, Willow…” The words escape before I can stop them, raw and honest in a way my poetry never seems to be.
She’s taking her time. My vision blurs at the edges when her tongue traces a path that makes my thighs tense involuntarily.
I grip the edge of the desk behind me, knuckles whitening. With Willow, I’ve never been the one setting the pace.
Her eyes lock onto mine as she sinks down. The sight of her lips stretching around me pulls a sound from my throat I barely recognize. My pulse jumps hard beneath my skin.
My fingers find her hair, tangling in the strands that slip silkily between them. The vibration of her moan travels through me as a current, shorting out rational thought. My breath catches, stumbles, stops altogether when she takes me deeper.
The muscles in my legs tremble. The room tilts. I lean harder against the desk, the edge digging into my palms.
She glances up through her lashes, a question in her eyes that makes my chest ache more than my body. This isn’t just her mouth on me, it’s Willow. It’s the notebook pages she’s seen. It’s everything I’ve kept locked away.
I brush my thumb across her cheekbone. She leans into the touch without breaking stride, and my heart cracks open.
Not yet. I’m not ready to let go.
My fingertips dig into the desk edge until they ache. My jaw clenches. I count backward from twenty, breathing through my nose. The sight of her lips stretched around me blurs as sweat drips into my eyes.
I blink it away, refusing to miss a second.
I grip her shoulders and pull her up. The sudden cool air makes me hiss between my teeth. Her mouth makes a soft, wet sound as it releases me and I crush my lips against hers, tasting myself on her tongue.
She stumbles backward as I walk her toward the wall. Her spine hits the wall with a soft thud, and I lift her by the hips, pinning her there with my weight. It must be cold against her back, but she only arches into me, her fingernails leaving half-moon indentations in my shoulders.
Pale light cuts across her exposed stomach when I push her shirt up. A sheen of sweat makes her skin glisten. Salt blooms on my tongue as I drag my teeth along her neck, leaving a mark that will still be there tomorrow.
She’ll have to wear a scarf.
Her nipple hardens against my tongue. Her gasp echoes in the empty office. A tremor runs through her thighs where they grip my waist.
“Gabe…”
I slide my hand between us, feeling dampness through cotton. My fingertips trace the elastic edge of her underwear.
“Patience,” I say, my voice unrecognizable even to myself.
Her skin burns against my fingertips. I trace the edge where cotton meets flesh, feeling her pulse quicken beneath my touch. Her hips rise to meet me, a silent demand. My thumb circles once, twice, and her teeth catch her lower lip, stifling a sound that vibrates through her chest.
“What do you want, Willow?”
The wall behind her catches strands of her hair as she arches.
“I want you. All of you.”
Cotton tears under my grip. The sound mingles with her quick intake of breath. Heat radiates from her center, drawing me in. My fingers slide through slickness, and the muscles in her thighs contract around my wrist.
Words escape me. Raw and unplanned. Her name, perhaps, or closer to worship.
She trembles when I press deeper. Her head falls back against, exposing the column of her throat. Sweat gathers in the hollow there. I count her heartbeats through the thin skin of her wrist, pinned beside her head.
“Gabe…” My name fragments on her tongue.
“Not yet,” I breathe against her ear.
Her nails leave marks in my forearm. I feel the vibration of need building in her before I hear it. Her body speaks a language more honest than words. The flutter of eyelids, the catch in her breathing, the way she moves against my hand because she’s drowning and I’m air.
My fingers curl deeper inside her, finding the spot that makes her spine arch like a drawn bow.
Her gasp vibrates against my collarbone. The slick heat around my fingers drowns out the distant street noise, the tick of the wall clock, everything but the catch in her breath. Her hips rise to meet each movement, a desperate pace against my palm.
Something changes in the tension of her body. A tightening, a quickening. I adjust my wrist, pressing upward. The wall scrapes against my knuckles as she presses back against it, head thrown back, exposing the vulnerable line of her throat.
“That’s it, Willow.” The words ghost across her damp skin as I finger fuck her harder. “Let go for me.”
Her eyes find mine. Then they flutter closed as her body goes taut as piano wire. The pulse beneath my thumb skips, races. A sound tears from her throat, half my name, half surrender. I feel each wave as it crashes through her, each tremor that follows.
I don’t stop until her thighs begin to shake, until sweat gleams along her hairline. Only then do I withdraw my hand and pull her against me, capturing her broken exhales with my mouth.
She melts against me, but the hunger hasn’t subsided.
I press her back against the wall, harder this time.
My fingers fumble with my jeans, metal button cool against overheated skin as they drop to the floor.
The way she watches my hands, lower lip caught between her teeth, then pushes her pants down until she’s more than half-naked for me.
“I’m gonna fuck you now,” I breathe against her mouth. “And I’m not going slow.”
She’s already nodding, fingers splayed across my chest, thighs parting. Her breath catches when I press forward, the slickness of her earlier release guiding me.
One thrust and the office dissolves into fragments. The space between us vanishes. Her heat surrounds me completely, muscles tensing and releasing around me in waves that match the intensity of her breathing.
“Fucking hell, Gabe,” she grunts. “That feels so fucking good.”
I withdraw almost completely before driving forward again. Her head knocks back against the wall, exposing the mark I left earlier, darkening now against pale skin.
She rises to meet each movement. Sweat pools at the base of my spine, drips from my temple onto her collarbone. Her lips part, forming words without sound.
“Look at you,” I manage.
The muscles in my thighs burn. The pressure builds at the base of my spine, coiling tighter with each thrust.
Her body telegraphs the approaching edge. Eyelids fluttering, breath shortening, inner muscles clenching around me in a pattern as familiar now as my own heartbeat. I capture her mouth, swallowing the sounds she makes.
“Again?” The question vibrates against her lips.
Her answer comes in the arch of her spine, the stutter of her hips against mine. “Yes…”
The single syllable breaks as she contracts around me, trembling from sternum to knee. The sight of her undoing shatters my control. Release tears through me, as fast as lightning splitting a tree, sudden and devastating.
We collapse against the wall, her pulse visible at her throat, matching the hammer of my own heart. Sweat cools on our skin.
I press my lips to her forehead, tasting salt, breathing in the scent of her shampoo beneath the musk of sex. My fingers tremble against her spine. When she shifts to look up at me, her eyes hold something I’ve never seen before.
Her, in a way that she doesn’t normally let herself be seen.