Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Max Stevens
Chase and Piper’s housekeeper, Wanda, came to take over and put the kids to bed. So I left. I’m halfway through a beer when there’s a knock on my door. Three knocks.
I’m off the bed before the third one lands, because I’ve been awake for forty minutes, lying on top of the covers in the dark, knowing she was awake too, and running the same math I’ve been running since the dock.
She doesn’t knock as if she’s asking. She knocks like she’s already decided. I already know. I don’t rush it. I should. Every instinct I have says move, go, don’t make her wait. I don’t. I set the bottle down. Walk to the door. Open it.
Toni stands in the hallway, no clipboard.
No blazer. Hair down. Slightly wind-tangled.
Composed is her default. I've spent eight weeks learning what it looks like when neither version shows up. This is that. Her eyes are on mine and they don’t move, and she is not saying a single word, and I understand the terms immediately.
No greeting or explanation. My heart in shifts hard.
“You okay?” I ask. I step back. She steps inside.
Doesn’t answer and she presses closer as if she can outrun her own thoughts.
There’s no rhythm to it at first. No buildup.
Once, she breathes my name under her breath, almost as if by accident, and then deliberately refrains from saying it again.
I catch it anyway. Cherish it. Because I understand its significance for her.
It’s a release, reset, and a mistake she’s already planning to file away.
And me? I’m already past that. That’s the problem.
The door shuts behind her with a small click, and before I can say anything else, she’s in front of me, fingers fisting in my shirt, pulling me down to her.
It’s urgency. Weeks of tension snapping tight all at once.
She pushes me back a step. Then another.
I go easily, watching her, trying to read her face, but she won't let me, won't slow down enough for it. Her mouth hits mine. It is warm and certain. No hesitation. She’s past that, she left it somewhere on the walk between her door and mine. I feel the absence of it immediately. I pull back. One inch. I need to see her face. Her eyes are open. That’s her answer. Decisive. And I? Yeah. I’m gone.
She puts her hand flat on my chest and pushes. My legs find the bed. I sit, and she follows me down, and the part of me that has spent two months respecting every boundary she drew goes completely silent. I slow down. Deliberately. On purpose.
She came here to burn off some energy, and I understand that.
If I let her go at her own pace, she’ll be done quickly, and then it’ll be over.
It won’t matter, and we can resume our professional relationship the next morning.
So I don’t let it be fast. My hands take their time on her.
I take my time with the zipper. No destination, no dawn approaching.
My hands come up automatically to her waist, pulling her closer, and she makes this small, sharp sound against my mouth that goes straight through me.
Not a word. Just the exhale of release. I memorize the sound. I’m going to need it later.
She straddles me, and I answer by pulling her dress over her head.
The heat radiating from her is scorching through my shorts.
We move together without a single syllable exchanged, and it is the clearest she has ever communicated with me.
Her bra is history across the room and those perfect tits that I’ve jacked off to so many times are in my face.
My hands find them both as I sit up to follow with my mouth.
She takes that opportunity to pull my shirt over my head.
And then arches her back in response to my sucking at her breasts.
I flip us over, step back, and get my shorts off.
Her hair fans out on the white bedding; she spreads her legs, moves her thong aside and dips her hand to her pussy.
Her fingers aren’t shy as she rubs her clit, staring at my cock while licking her swollen lips. There’s my An-ton-i-a.
I’m so fucking lost at the sight of her I rip off her lace panties, pull her to the edge of the bed by her ankles, and kneel to taste her sweetness.
I trace my fingertips along her slit. Every sweep of my tongue and inch of my fingers, she trembles and tenses.
Her legs close in more forcefully the higher I go, pressing against my shoulders.
Every sweep of my tongue, she trembles and tenses.
Beneath my touch, she contracts around me.
Her pussy glistens, so wet with need. Even when her mouth can construct an airtight case for the opposite, her body doesn’t lie.
She came to me.
I hold onto that. I hold on to her and the specific way she breathes my name without actually saying it, and I take my time, and I watch her face, and when she finally lets go, it goes all the way through her.
No performance in it. No management. Just Toni, unguarded, for thirty seconds, which might be the most valuable thing anyone has ever handed me.
I position myself at her entrance and slowly push inside.
Her walls around me tighten, and I take in the sight of our bodies perfectly aligned.
Toni closes her eyes, her mouth parting into a moan of pleasure.
I move, my hips slapping against hers in a rhythm that is uniquely ours.
Our sweat-slicked bodies move together toward the high we both crave.
With a final thrust, my eyes fly open as I release myself inside her.
I lean down to capture her lips once more, my heart pounding.
The city hums. Her breathing slows. I wait for her to leave.
I’ve already decided I won’t say anything if she does.
Won’t make it mean more than she wants it to mean tonight.
That’s the deal she didn’t have to say out loud.
After all she came to me and she’s letting me have tonight, and if she leaves at two in the morning that’s still more than I had at ten.
She doesn’t leave.
She is still here in the morning.
I notice the exact moment she wakes up — the change in her breathing, the way her hand tightens fractionally on the pillow before she remembers where she is.
I’m already awake. I’ve been awake for an hour, lying here with my arm going numb under her shoulder because the alternative is moving and I am not moving.
She turns her head. Looks at me. The morning puts her face in real light and she is still the most specific problem I’ve ever had, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“Max.”
“Morning.”
She closes her eyes. “This didn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
I’d prefer not to make things more complicated.
I wait. Waiting with her has become a skill I’ve developed.
“We go back to before,” she says. “This was the dock. I was in a moment. We go back to professional, we finish the season, and this...” She gestures at the space between us, which is not much space at all. “This was one time.”
Every version of that sentence causes a distinct ache in my sternum. I stare at the ceiling and weigh what I want against what she’ll actually agree to, and those are two very different calculations. “Okay.”
She exhales.
“One condition,” I say.
“Max.”
“One.” I turn my head. She’s watching me with the guarded face, the professional face, the one that doesn’t give anything away.
“You eat breakfast with me. Right now. This morning. Actual food at an actual table, and then you can have your professional relationship back and I will be very well-behaved.”
The careful face almost cracks. “That’s a condition?”
“I’m a simple man.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and I hold perfectly still and let her decide. “Fine,” she says. “Breakfast.”
Saying “okay” has a cost. I hand her what she’s asking for and I feel it go, and I know I’ll spend the next three weeks watching her stand on the other side of the glass at practice being very professional and pretending this room doesn’t exist, and it will make me absolutely insane.
Worth it. To have her here for one more hour. Worth it.
I get up to find my phone to order breakfast, and she sits up in my sheets. Hair wrecked. My pillow crease across her cheek. The delivery arrives. We eat at the small table by the window. The Lake visible from here on a cloudless morning, a strip of gray-blue between buildings.
There's honey on the room service tray. A small jar of it, the kind hotels include next to the tea. She drinks the coffee I ordered wrong and says nothing about it, she doctors it with the honey. I watch her do it and I open my mouth. I don't say anything. Close it again.
She's used half of it. In the coffee, I realize, watching her stir. Not a packet. Not sugar. Honey.
"You always do that," I say.
She looks up. "Do what."
"The honey."
A pause. She sets the spoon down with the specific deliberateness of a woman deciding whether to answer. "It has antibacterial properties," she says. “When honey is available I put it in coffee. Tea. Yogurt. Most things." A beat. "Everything, technically."
I absorb this. I think about last night. I say nothing.
She reads my face. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to say something insufferable."
"I was going to say," I tell her, "that you are the most interesting person I have ever been in a room with.” I take a beat. “And that it works because you taste amazing!”
She picks up her mug. Hides her face in it. The tips of her ears go pink, and I file that next to everything else I’m keeping. The word MINE moves through my head before I can stop it and I don't examine that.
The thing I want to say sits in my brain.
All that momentum, nowhere to go. You stayed.
Two words. I couldn't even get them out before I stopped myself, which is not something that has ever happened to me.
I have never once in my life started a sentence and swallowed it.
I chirp. I run my mouth. I say the thing before I've decided whether to say it.
That is the entire architecture of who I am.
She breaks off a piece of croissant. Sets it on the edge of her plate.
I look at the Lake.
“The Bakersfield game Thursday,” she says, because she is already back, already in the role.
“I know.”
“Your focus has to be there. Mine does too.”
“I know, Toni.”
She wraps both hands around the mug. Outside, Chicago is going. Traffic. Somewhere a horn. “What if it doesn’t have to be nothing?” she says. I put down my fork.
“Not public.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the lake. “Not anything that touches work. But not like last night didn’t happen.” Her thumb traces the rim of the mug. “I’m not asking you to pretend.”
I let the silence sit. I know better than to jump at this. “Define the terms,” I say.
“I’m still your compliance trainer. In public, in the building, in front of anyone, that’s all I am. But privately.” She sets the mug down. “Privately I don’t want to act like this is nothing.”
“How privately?”
“Private like two people who are...” She pauses. A subtle tension locks her expression. “Figuring this out. No one knows.”
I should push for more. I know I should.
I should tell her this is not enough, that I have spent weeks watching her from across the ice and across conference tables and across restaurant booths pretending I don’t know exactly how she sounds when she finally lets go, and privately is not what I want.
But she is offering me something she wasn’t offering an hour ago, and Toni Amato doesn’t offer things she doesn’t mean. “No pictures,” I say. “No one knows.”
She meets my eyes. “Yes.”
“Deal.”
She picks up the coffee. Finishes it. Sets it down with precision, the small deliberate movements that are so entirely her. She doesn’t smile. The guarded face opens, just at the edges.
I take it.