10. Torrance #2
"You are a generational architect. You are the most brilliant structural mind I have ever encountered. And I am not a man who says things he does not mean."
Her throat works. A single, hard swallow.
"Do you hear me?"
The vellum flutters beneath my palms. The city hums five hundred feet below. The steel frame groans in the wind like a living thing, this skeleton she designed, this impossible structure that exists because she willed it onto paper.
"Do you hear me, Celebrity?"
"Yes." The word breaks out of her like something structural failing, a beam giving way under a load it was never designed to carry. "I hear you."
Her eyes are wet. Not crying. Pressure release. I've seen it in concrete when you cut a relief joint, that moment the internal stress finds an exit and the material holds instead of cracking.
I reach forward and clear the locs from her face. Tuck them behind her ear, careful, my fingers following the rope of the faux loc instead of gripping it. She spends forty-five minutes on these before site visits. I know what they cost her.
Her breath hitches at the contact. Just my fingertips on her temple and she's vibrating.
"Say my name."
"Torrance."
"Again."
"Torrance."
I pull her by the front of her jacket, hard, and walk her backward off the main beam and onto the plywood deck behind the temporary safety barriers.
The orange mesh netting stretches between the steel columns here, clipped to the perimeter cable, rated for two hundred pounds.
Beyond it, nothing. The whole city laid out like a blueprint rendered in light.
Her back hits a column. The W14 is cold and massive behind her, flanges wider than her shoulders. The plywood underfoot is solid. This section is decked and barricaded for the ironworkers. Safe ground.
The rest of what I'm about to do is not safe at all.
I unzip her jacket. Underneath she's wearing a white fitted tank, thin enough that I can see the rise and fall of her ribs. I open my hand flat against her sternum. Her heartbeat slams into my palm like a pile driver.
"You drew me into your building."
"I drew the client ascending the residential core."
"You drew me. Say it."
Her jaw tightens. That rebar posture. I pin her against the column.
"I drew you."
"Good girl."
The sound she makes is not words. It's structural.
I drop to my knees on the plywood.
Her eyes go wide. Not surprise. Shock. Because men like me don't kneel. Not in boardrooms, not in quarries, not in any room I've ever occupied. But I kneel for this. For the architect who saw what no one else could see.
I unbutton her trousers. Wide-leg, high-waisted, the kind she wears to accommodate the harness on site visits.
They slide down easy. The tank underneath is tucked in, and I pull it free.
Her skin pebbles instantly in the night air, goosebumps spreading across her stomach, the warm bronze of her catching the city light from below like she's built from the same material as the tower.
"Hold the column."
Her hands go back. Fingers wrapping the flange edges. Gripping steel.
"Don't let go."
I hook my fingers into the waistband of her underwear. Black. Simple. Functional. Everything about this woman is built for purpose. I drag them down to her thighs and land my mouth to the inside of her hip bone.
She jerks. The column rings with the impact of her back.
"Torrance."
"Not yet." I grip her thighs. Open her stance as far as the fabric bunched at her knees allows. "Tell me about the cantilever."
"What?"
"The south terrace. Fifteen feet. Post-tensioned slab." I breathe against her skin. My lips dragging across her lower belly. "Tell me how it holds."
"The tendons are stressed to two hundred kips each. Six tendons per direction. The slab is twelve inches with a three-inch topping."
I reward her with my tongue. One long, flat stroke, and her hips buck off the column so hard the steel sings.
"Keep going."
"The anchorage, oh God, the anchorage is at the core wall. Dead-end anchors on the, on the cantilever side. The stressing sequence starts from the core and works outward to control the deflection profile during."
I seal my mouth over her and her vocabulary disintegrates. Her fingers tighten on the flange. I can hear her short nails scraping steel. The sound is industrial. Primitive. Perfect.
The wind screams through the open frame, channeled between the beams, howling like something alive. And underneath it, her. The small, wrecked sounds she's making as I work her open, as I take her apart with the same precision she uses to put buildings together.
I grip her thighs harder. Pull her closer. She's shaking now, her whole body a frequency I can feel through my palms, through my knees on the wood, through the steel frame that transmits every tremor down to the foundation.
"Torrance, I can't."
I pull back one inch. "You can. You're a structural engineer. You know exactly how much load you can take."
A broken laugh. Half sob. I push back in and stop being gentle about it.
Her knees buckle. I catch her weight, hands locked on her thighs, holding her up against the column while I take everything she's offering.
Her head falls back against the steel and her mouth opens and the sound that comes out of her fills the open sky, my name ripped from her mouth and thrown across the skyline of a city we are, beam by beam, bolt by bolt, remaking together.
The wind takes it.
But I heard it.