15. Kira
Kira
I was the one who ended it. He would have sat in that chair with his hand an inch from mine until the sun came up if I'd let him. I was the one who sat back and said something about the hour and let him leave. I was good at letting people go, and I'd never been good at making them stay.
The door clicked shut and suddenly it was too quiet. Next door the couple was still at it, intense and noisy, and I went and sat at the little work table with my laptop glowing in front of me.
My body was still wanting the man standing in the hall on the other side of the door, even though I'd let him go.
He hadn't walked away from the door, I knew that. There were no footsteps. He was probably trying to decide something, like I was. I knew what that quiet felt like. I'd spent weeks learning it, like I'd learned a language I never meant to speak.
I stood up before I'd decided to. I crossed the room before I could think too much about it, which was the only way I was ever going to do it, and I opened the door.
He was still there. Of course he was. His hand was already half-lifted, closer to knocking than either of us would ever say out loud. We looked at each other in the light of the hallway and neither of us could say anything.
Then I stepped back to let him in, and the door shut behind us. That was the last sensible decision I had and I chose not to make it.
For a second we just stood there, close but not touching, both of us knowing where we wanted to go but not going there yet. I could have turned it back into a work night. He could have given me the same way out I'd given him. Neither of us did.
His eyes went over my face, checking one last time that I was sure. I stopped thinking why I'd ever thought I wasn't.
I wanted him with a need that embarrassed me. Not a vague heat, not the blur of a long night, but the exact want of this. His hands, his weight, his careful voice going ragged, and what happened to his control when he finally let go.
I'd had it before, I knew what I was heading for, and that made it worse.
I couldn't call it a mystery when I'd already been there.
I wanted him, and the wanting won, the way it had been winning all night, all week, since London if I was honest about it.
I quit pretending I was going to be sensible.
He kissed me like he'd been holding it all night, which he had.
I kissed him back without a scrap of the discipline I'd held onto all evening.
His hands found my waist and then the base of my spine and pulled me in.
I got my fingers into his hair and made a sound against his mouth that I didn't try to keep quiet.
The strangers through the wall had it right. The raw need was the only thing left between us.
I walked him backward toward the bed the way I'd steered him before. My blouse was open, though I didn't remember undoing the buttons, and his shirt was gone. My palms were flat against him like I'd been trying not to think about across all those conference tables.
He said my name once, low, like saying it out loud cost him something. I felt it travel the length of me and settle somewhere it had no business settling in a hotel room I was supposed to be working in.
I'd created some images of this in my head during the not-sleeping hours of the past week, and the real thing was clumsier and better than anything I'd built in my imagination.
His mouth found the spot under my ear I'd never told him about, and didn't have to.
He'd found it in October and he remembered.
My hands were familiar on his skin. That got to me a little, how much I already knew about him, the plane of his back, the place his breath caught.
We were two people who'd already done the reckless thing and had spent weeks paying for it in restraint.
I pushed him down onto the bed and followed him, and for a long while it was only mouths and hands all over each other.
His breath caught when I set my teeth to his jaw.
His grip tightened when I kissed my way down his chest and his stomach.
I slid his pants down off of his ankles and took him in my hand, and then in my mouth.
I took my time. I'd been wanting this since the plane over the Atlantic, and I liked what it did to him.
His measured voice deserted him completely.
His hips lifted, his hand found my hair without gripping, careful even now.
He said my name and it came out wrecked, nothing left of the man who chose every word before he said it.
I worked him slowly and then not so slowly, and felt him fighting to hold on. I didn't let him.
Somewhere in it a thought tried to force its way to the surface. It wasn't Gabriella yet, just the hint of her, a cold clean feeling there in the dark room, and I put my mouth back on him and pushed it away. I wanted this more than I wanted to be smart. For a few minutes I let the wanting win.
He pulled me up before I was finished with him, both of his hands framing my face, and he kissed me slowly. Everything stopped feeling rushed. That was a real danger with him; he could take a reckless thing and make it feel considered.
He kissed me like we had all the time in the world, like there would be some of this left over for tomorrow, and my heart upped its rhythm to something I had to ignore while his hands were doing coaxing me.
Then he turned us, patient and sure, and it got slower and better.
Somewhere along the way, my pants and underwear came off and I was lying there completely naked for him.
He kissed down my body without hurrying, my breasts, my stomach, the inside of each thigh, until he settled his mouth between my legs.
I let my head drop back and stopped thinking about anything past the next second of this.
His hands hooked under my thighs and held me open to him. He paid the same attention to this that he paid to everything, learning what made my back arch and going back to it, his tongue steady and persistent, until the sound coming out of me had no shame left at all.
I came with my fist in his hair and my back off the bed. Everything else about the committee and the work was a thousand miles from where we were.
For a while after I came, it was easy, and that was a trap. His weight came back over me and I wrapped myself around him and we moved together, slow and sure, toward the next obvious step. We were heading to do what we'd done twice before, and we were both ready to do it again.
He was hard against me and I was way past ready. I was urgently moving toward yes. He reached to the nightstand for the small practical business of what came next, and then he stopped. He looked at me, checking, the way he always checked.
That was the gap when the thought got to the surface in my head.
Suddenly, Gabriella was in the room. Not in reality, but what she said to me at that railing was, as plain as if she'd followed me down the hall to say it again: you built an entire career on not letting anyone compromise your integrity without your knowledge.
We'd done this in London, and I'd let myself call it relief, a one-night collapse, two tired people and a brutal week. I couldn't call it that anymore. Gabriella had called out the reality, and now I couldn't un-hear it.
If I let this finish, if I let him reach that drawer and we did what we were an inch from doing, I'd be admitting I was already the woman I'd promised I would never become.
I'd handed him the access, the strategy, the deal, my name, and now this, knowingly, with my eyes wide open.
The one thing I had left to hold back was how it ended.
It was a ridiculous line and I knew it, my body making no sense against my heart, but it was the last line I had to hold. I flattened my hand against his chest.
"Wait," I said. "I can't. Not that, not tonight."
He went still, all of him at once. He didn't sigh or roll off with the wounded patience some men use to make you pay for saying no.
He came up onto one arm and looked at me, his breathing still a mess, and said, "Okay." Only that. Then, a second later, "Are you all right?"
That was so much worse than anger. Anger I could have used, but kindness left me nowhere to go.
"I'm fine." My voice wasn't. "I want to, that isn't the problem. The problem is how much I want to." I stopped there because the rest of it wasn't something I could say out loud yet, not with Gabriella's voice still in my head. Not when the person I'd betrayed by wanting this was mostly myself.
"I need to keep something back. I can't explain it better than that, and I'm sorry because you deserve better than a woman who can't explain herself in her own bed."
"It's your bed," he said. "You get to keep whatever you want in it."
He looked at me for a long beat. Then he nodded, slowly, like he'd heard more than I'd said, and he probably had. Understanding me had turned into his second occupation somewhere over the past month.
He lay back down, on his side, not reaching, leaving the space between us mine to close or not. That was him, though. He kept handing me the choice back.
We lay there in the raw awkwardness of two adults who'd stopped a freight train with their bare hands. My blouse was somewhere on the floor. His shirt had ended up on the chair.
The couple through the wall had mercifully finished, which left the only sound in the room the two of us breathing and pretending the last five minutes had somehow been graceful, which they had not.
"For the record," he said to the ceiling, "that is the most dignified rejection I have ever gotten."
"It wasn't a rejection."
"I know. I'm managing my ego out loud. It's a whole process; it takes a minute."
I laughed, and it came out unsteady.
"Hey." He turned his head and the laughter went out of his voice.
"We don't need a reason. You said stop, we stopped, that's the whole rule.
I'd rather have you keep something back than have all of you and know you'd given it against your own judgment.
I've been on the other end of that. It doesn't end well for anybody. "
It was, without question, the wrong thing to say to a woman working hard not to fall. It was exactly the right thing to say, and I had to study the ceiling a second to get my face back in order.
He found my hand in the dark and held it. He didn't move it anywhere or use it to argue for something more. He just held on, and what I'd braced against for hours finally, dangerously, came loose.
I lay there and made myself feel all of it. I'd spent too much of my life not feeling the important things and this one was important.
I had stopped, and it was harder than going on would have been. Going on was easy. Going on was only letting my body take what it had wanted.
Stopping meant living in my feelings and choosing the harder thing to do, and I hadn't chosen it because I didn't want him. I'd chosen it because I wanted to still recognize myself when I got out of this bed in the morning.
The worst part, the part I couldn't say to him, was that I wasn't sure the line I'd drawn meant anything at all. I'd already given him everything that counted. I'd given it to him in October and again in London.
I'd been giving it to him a piece at a time everywhere since, in the way I read his silences and finished his arguments and slept better on planes when he was across the aisle.
The finish was a technicality I was holding onto like it was virtue. Whatever it was, it was mine, and I held on to it. I lay in the dark beside the man I was falling for against every rule I'd ever written for myself, and I knew it was already done.
The line hadn't stopped it; it had only given me something to hold onto while it happened.
What frightened me wasn't the deal, in the end.
I could lose the deal and survive it. I'd survived worse and come out intact.
What frightened me was that I'd worked hard to make sure no one would ever be in a position to take something from me that I couldn't rebuild, and I'd walked myself into exactly that position with my eyes open and a pitch deck still glowing on the laptop.
I hadn't been ambushed. I'd volunteered.
Outside the window the mountains were a darker black against the black, and I listened to him breathe and felt him not let go of my hand. I was more frightened than I'd been in years.
I'd stopped because the alternative was admitting what I felt, and what I'd already surrendered in order to feel it. I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him looking at the ceiling, still and open and hiding nothing.
I understood that the stopping had said all of those things out loud, more plainly than going all the way ever could have.
He'd heard them. He was only kind enough not to say so.