Chapter 7 #2
“I’m fine. Keep—” I grind down, chasing it, furious now, come on, come on, and it’s like reaching for a step that isn’t there. “Keep going.”
He does. His thumb finds my clit and it’s exactly right, he’s good, and I get close again, so close, and I shut my eyes and reach for it and—
gone.
A noise of pure frustration escapes before I can stop it.
He stills. “What’s wrong.”
“Nothing.” I won’t look at him. “Don’t stop, I almost—”
“That’s the third time you almost.” Not unkind. Just noticing — the way he reads a defender’s weight shift a beat before the defender knows it. “You get right there and then you’re gone. Where do you go?”
“Nowhere. Keep going.”
He keeps going. And I climb — his thumb exactly right, his attention narrowed to the single task of me — and I get to the edge, the real one, close enough to taste, and then I feel myself watch myself getting there, the way you watch a soufflé you don’t trust, and that’s it, the cliff dissolves, and I’m sliding back down with my face hot and his hand still moving and nothing to show for it.
The noise I make this time isn’t frustration. It’s smaller than that.
“There. You left.” He’s stopped. “You were right there and then you went somewhere. I felt it.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Sloane. I have spent my entire life reading where a body’s about to be.” His forehead drops, not quite to mine. “You were right there and then you were three counties over. Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt.” And there it is, out loud, in the air of a room I can’t leave. “It just doesn’t finish. I get to ninety percent and the last ten isn’t — available.”
“Available,” he repeats, careful.
“Don’t do the thing where you say my words back to me gently.
I can hear how it sounds.” I press the heel of my hand against my eyes.
Fully seated on the best winger in the league and explaining my own malfunction like an outage notice.
“It works fine when it’s just me. So you can stand down. It’s not a — it’s not a you problem.”
“Okay, but — and I want to be careful here, because you have a knife in your purse—” the joke is soft, it’s a hand held out, “—you said fine when it’s just you. So the variable isn’t the technique.” He lets it sit. “It’s the audience.”
I don’t answer. Which is an answer.
“How long’s it been since the last—” He stops himself. Starts over. “You don’t have to.”
“Since Lucas.” It comes out flat, and saying the name in this bed is so much worse than I budgeted for.
“Three years. He used to watch. Like he was grading it. And somewhere in there my body decided the safest thing to do under observation is — nothing. File a null result. No data for the man with the clipboard.” I laugh, and it’s an awful little sound. “Which is hilarious, given my job.”
He doesn’t laugh. The jokes have dropped clean out of him, which is the tell — Carter goes quiet exactly once, and it’s when something’s landed.
“So we’re agreed it’s not a technique thing,” he says eventually.
“We are not relitigating your technique—”
“I’m just saying I’d like that fully on the record before we move on.
Stamped. Notarized.” And I do laugh this time, wet and undignified, and he catches it on his face like it’s the actual goal, like getting me off was always secondary to this.
“Okay. Here’s what I’ve got, and it’s not much, because I never built a step for this, I built steps for everything else and not this.
” His ears have gone red. “What if there’s nobody to perform for. What if I take the audience away.”
“You can’t take the audience away, you are the—”
“Watch me.” He eases out, slow, and I almost protest, and then he pulls me down beside him so we’re face to face, and I’m not staged on top of him anymore, not on display, just lying here level with him, and the relief of it is so total I could cry, which is its own humiliation I’ll deal with never.
“New plan,” he says. “Two steps. You’ll hate that it’s a plan.”
“I hate that it’s a plan.”
“Step one.” His hand slides down my belly, slow, asking. “You don’t have to get anywhere. There’s nowhere to get to. No result. No—” the grin flickers, “—no deliverable.”
“Do not say deliverable while your hand is—”
“Step two.” His fingers find me, slow, no goal in them, just there.
“Nobody’s watching. Look.” And he closes his eyes, this idiot, lets his forehead drop against mine — takes the audience away by becoming a man with his eyes shut, no clipboard, no grade, nobody scoring it, nobody logging it — and his mouth is on mine and his hand is slow and asking nothing, and there’s no corner of the room for me to float up into because there’s no one in the room to float away from, just his breath and his fingers and the locked thing in me that isn’t being shoved at.
Just left alone. And — quietly, without permission, the way a held breath finally goes — unlocked.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh, that’s—”
“Yeah?” His eyes stay shut.
“Don’t talk. Don’t — keep — there,” and I’m climbing again and this time nothing closes over it, because no one’s grading it, and I grab his wrist — not to stop him, to keep him exactly there — and I hear myself begging, actually begging, please, please, don’t stop, and I am so far from the boardroom voice I’ll never find my way back—
and it takes me, and I don’t leave, I can’t, I’m too far down in it, and it goes through me like something breaking open and I make a sound I will absolutely deny in court and my whole body locks around his hand and God, and he holds me through every aftershock with his forehead against mine, eyes still closed.
The most-watched man in the world, refusing to watch.
That’s the thing that finishes me. That’s the thing I’ll think about for weeks.
When I can talk I say, “...okay. That was step two.”
“Told you you’d love it.” His voice has gone rough. He’s still hard against my hip, ignored, patient. “Efficient.”