Chapter 21 #2
“You can stop managing,” he says, against my collarbone. Not a line. He just felt my hands try to take the wheel and named it.
“I’m not—”
“You’re a little bit. It’s okay. I’ve got it.” He kisses the spot under my ear. “Put them somewhere they can’t do logistics.”
So I do. I twist them into the sheet, then into his hair, and I make myself leave them there, and the not-steering is so strange it’s almost loud — but he has got it, that’s the thing, he’s in no hurry and he’s not waiting on a note from me, and slowly the part of me that always grabs the wheel just — sets it down.
My head drops back. I let him.
He licks into me slow, flat-tongued and filthy, no rush in it at all, and works two fingers in to the knuckle, curling.
He eats me like he’s got the whole night and a point to prove, lips and tongue and the wet obscene sound of it loud in the quiet room, and I’m not managing the pace, I’m not managing anything — my hands are fisted in his hair, my hips are riding his mouth, and I’ve stopped caring how it looks.
He moans against me like I’m the one doing him a favor, and the buzz of it goes straight through my clit and I have to bite down on the sound.
There’s just the next slow drag of his tongue and the next and the build going tight and golden and—
He pulls off. Right at the edge. His mouth is wet with me, his chin slick, and he looks up the length of my body while he licks his lips clean, unhurried, watching what it does to me.
Then he goes back down and takes me to the edge again and holds me there, and the noise I make is half his name and half a curse.
“You’re killing me,” I get out. “On purpose.”
“Little bit.” His mouth, unhurried. He’s wrecked too — I can hear it, his voice gone rough, his free hand knotted in the sheet beside my hip like he’s holding himself back from his own rush. “I’ve thought about this since the bus. I’m not — I’m not hurrying it. Sue me. Circle back.”
“I will end your—”
He doesn’t let me finish the threat. He stays exactly there, exactly slow, until I’m saying things into the dark that belong in no record I keep, pulling at his hair, past pride — and only then, only when I’ve stopped being able to demand anything at all, do I come on his mouth, slow and long and shaking.
I pull him up the length of me and get my hands on him — all that heat, the muscle still jumping.
There are marks the broadcast never shows: a collarbone that set wrong, a pale seam below one knee, small white scars I find with my fingers, and he holds himself open and lets me find every one, which is its own thing, a man this looked-at letting himself be looked at like this.
He gets the condom on with hands that won’t quite cooperate, and that — Carter Reinhardt, who can juggle a ball on the back of his neck on a moving bus, losing to a foil packet — gets me hotter than anything smooth ever could.
“Don’t say it,” I warn him.
“I’m usually smoother than this.” He says it anyway, against my collarbone. “There’s a version of me that’s very smooth. You’ll never meet him now.”
Then he notches the head of him against me and pushes in, slow, one long unbroken drive, and whatever I was going to say back is gone.
I’m so wet he sinks the whole way in on the first push, the thick stretch of him dragging against every nerve I own, and it tips past too much into the thing I’d have begged for if I were a person who begged.
I feel every inch of him settle. I feel him throb once, buried deep, and clench around him just to hear what it does to his breathing.
“Oh.” The word slips out of me. “Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah.” Strangled. He stops, fully seated, forehead dropped to mine, every muscle locked. “Don’t — okay, don’t move, I need a second, you feel—” His breath shakes. “I had a whole plan for this. I had finesse.”
“You planned this.”
“Sloane, I have planned this in detail. Now is not the time to bring up the spreadsheet.”
I laugh, and the laugh does something to him — I feel it, he groans like I touched him somewhere new — and then he can’t hold still anymore and starts to move, and the joking drains out of both of us by degrees.
He’s not smooth about it. He fucks me slow and deep and a little ragged, watching my face the whole time, reading it, missing, finding it again — and when he hits the angle that makes me gasp he stays there and works it, hard, grinding into the spot until I’m clawing at his back and shoving up to meet every drive, both of us slick with it, the headboard tapping the wall in a rhythm anyone in the next room could read.
His arms shake with how much he’s holding back.
I get a hand between us and work my own clit and his eyes go black watching me do it.
He smells like spearmint and the tape still wrapped on his ankle from a game three time zones ago, and I turn my face into his throat and breathe him in, and somewhere underneath us is a hotel that wasn’t on anyone’s sheet and a binder gone useless in the bottom of my bag, and I’m not reaching for the wheel, I’m not even looking for it.
“Say the rest of it,” I tell him, because I’m cruel, because I want him as undone as I am. “The plan. What was the finesse.”
“There were going to be candles. Tasteful ones.”
“In a hotel that wasn’t booked until four hours ago.”
“In the plan, Sloane, there’s always a hotel. There’s always candles. There’s a playlist.” His forehead drops to mine, breath ragged. “The playlist died first. Right around the elevator.”
“You had a playlist.”
“I’m not going to tell you the name of it.”
“You’re going to tell me the name of it.”
“You first.” His thumb drops between us, finds me, circles slow and exactly in time, and my whole body jerks. “Tell me one thing you didn’t script. One. Off the record.”
“This.” It’s out before I can stop it. “This. None of this is in any record I keep—”
“God.” He shudders, hips snapping now, the careful rhythm finally breaking. “Don’t tell me that, I won’t last, I’ve wanted this since the conference room, since the spreadsheet—”
“Then don’t last.”
“I’m trying to make it good—”
“It’s good. Carter — it’s—” I clench around him on purpose, and the rest of his sentence cuts out into a groan, and that — the great running mouth of him finally shut up — is the most powerful I’ve felt all night.
So I do it again.
His thumb works me harder, relentless, and I go embarrassingly fast — heels hooked behind his thighs, hauling him in, every careful thing I am giving way at the seams — and when it hits I hear myself make a sound I’ve never made for anyone, high and broken and in no voice I own.
For one white second there’s nothing in my head at all.
He gets two more strokes and follows me, buried deep, shaking, my name breaking out of him and then again, quieter, into my hair — like he means to keep it.
For a while neither of us moves.
Then, in the dark, his mouth still at my hair, I feel him come up to the edge of a sentence. The breath he takes to say it.
He pulls it back.
“You’re—” He stops. I wait. He doesn’t finish. “I’m really glad the flight got canceled.”
I let him keep the bigger one, the way I let him keep the chain on the balcony.
I wanted the sentence he swallowed. Badly. And there’s no binder anywhere that tells me what to do with it.
***
I can’t sleep. He can — out cold, one arm flung across the warm dent where I was, breathing like a man with nothing on his conscience — so a little past two I pull on his shirt because it’s closest and go looking for something to eat that isn’t room service at enemy rates.
The vending machine in the hallway is the worst-designed object I have ever encountered.
“There’s no logic to the layout,” I tell it, because there’s no one else to tell. Pretzels next to the gummy worms. Chips three rows from other chips. Whoever stocked this should be fired, and I would do it, gladly, with cause.
I feed it a crumpled dollar with the focus I’d bring to a contract. It eats the dollar. It gives me nothing.
“...Okay,” I say.
“You’re losing.” He’s in the doorway in his shorts, hair a mess, watching me with a kind of open delight that should be illegal at two in the morning. “The machine’s beating you. It’s on your face.”
“It is not—”
“Three-nothing.”
I hit it with the flat of my hand, hard, and a bag of pretzels drops. Plus — because the universe occasionally rewards spite — a second one, knocked loose by the first.
I turn to him with what I am aware is naked triumph. “Two bags. I’d like that on the record.”
He doesn’t say anything for a second. Just looks at me — in his shirt, holding two bags of pretzels in a hotel hallway — and something crosses his face that I don’t have a category for and don’t, at two a.m, have the defenses to manage.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“I’m filing it. Color-coded.”
I throw a pretzel at his head. We end up on the hallway floor with our backs against the machine, eating both bags, and none of it matters to anyone or advances anything, and it is, inexplicably, the best hour of the trip.
Then we go back to bed, and I don’t think about the drive home once.
***
I wake before him, gray light through a gap in the curtains, a hotel that still isn’t on anyone’s sheet, and for one suspended hour there’s no campaign and no drive back to being enemies waiting on the other side of checkout.
He’s warm and heavy and asleep, one arm thrown across the space where I was, and I have a choice: be the sensible one, get up, reassemble the head of communications for the New York Sentinels before he opens his eyes. I am, reliably, the sensible one.
I don’t get up.
I put my mouth on his shoulder, the tape-smell still faintly there, and watch him surface — slow, then all at once, the grin arriving before his eyes do.
“Hi,” he says, rough with sleep, delighted by the fact of me.
He’s already hard against my hip — morning and me and last night all working in his favor — and his hand slides down my back like a question.
“Don’t make it a thing.”