Chapter 6 The Client Amendments #2
And I went slow. Slower than she expected. I watched her face throughout, which was not in her terms, and I paid attention to her body with everything the work had taught me, where it tensed, what loosened it, and I did not rush, just fed her the full length of me and drew back and gave it again.
“You can increase the pace,” she said, evenly, a project manager noting a milestone, though her voice had thickened. “The schedule allows…”
“The schedule’s not in this bed.”
I rolled my hips against her at the bottom of the stroke, grinding the base of my cock against her clit, slow and deep, found the angle that snagged the velvet in her voice and dragged the head over the place inside her that made her clench, and stayed there.
Her composed sentence didn’t finish. I did it again.
And somewhere in the third minute her metronome broke.
Her hands, which were supposed to stay at her sides, came up and gripped my shoulders.
Position two was never announced. She just took hold of me and pulled, hard, drawing me deeper, her ankles sliding up around the backs of my thighs, her heels urging my hips into hers, and the composure went out of her face the way the schedule had gone out of the room, item by item, no single line you could point to, the breath going ragged, a sound escaping her that she’d clearly meant to keep.
Her full breasts swayed with every slow thrust, the nipples drawn tight, and I dropped my mouth to one and she arched.
I gave her time, all the time in the world, fucking her deep and unhurried, because the one thing the machine had never been offered was patience, and patience was undoing her faster than anything athletic could have.
“There,” she breathed, and then caught it, and then lost it again. “God. There. Don’t, don’t change it, stay…” An order that had stopped being an order somewhere in the middle and turned into the other thing.
She came once like that, around me, her cunt fluttering and clenching down the length of my cock, her nails biting into my shoulders, her head turning hard into the pillow.
I didn’t stop. I worked her back up while she shook through it, slower now, grinding deep, and the second one built longer and broke deeper, rolling through her while she pressed her face into my neck to muffle a sound she hated making, her body bowing up off the linen, her heels locking at the small of my back to keep me buried in her.
Halfway through, her phone chimed on the nightstand, a session-duration alert, some efficiency she’d set for herself, and without opening her eyes she reached over and swatted it off the nightstand onto the carpet and pulled me back down.
The first crack in the spreadsheet, and she didn’t even know she’d made it.
“Finish it,” she said against my throat, and it was the protocol’s one absolute requirement and it was also, underneath, just a woman asking. “Inside. That’s the, that’s the term that matters. Inside. Don’t pull out, finish in me.”
When I finished, driving deep and holding there, I spilled thick and hot inside her, surge after surge, and she held herself open for it, taking all of it, her breath shaking, her arms tight around my back, her ankles locked at the backs of my thighs to keep me planted as deep as I could go, and for a moment, a real moment, there was no agenda anywhere in the room.
Then she put it back on.
The transformation was almost frightening to watch, how fast she reassembled, the breath steadying by an act of will, the face arranging itself, the warmth she’d let me see for ten seconds in the dark packed away again, as clean and final as inventory struck off a manifest.
“Adequate,” she said, sliding out from under me, reaching for the silk robe and belting it tight, the slate silk and the level chin and the flat managerial voice all snapping back into place so fast it was almost violent.
“Thursday. Same time. I’ll send any revisions to the terms through the desk. Confirm receipt when they arrive.”
“Of course,” I said. I didn’t argue with the word adequate. You don’t argue with a woman mid-inventory. You find where the seam is and you let it be, and hers was the phone on the carpet she’d knocked there without opening her eyes, and the fact that she still hadn’t picked it up.
I dressed. I left, because those were the terms, and the terms were all she could give right now and I wasn’t going to take more than she offered.
But at the door I looked back, because I look back, and Simone Devereux was standing at the wall of glass in her belted robe, her back to me, looking out at the black valley and the scatter of village lights and the far white ridges catching the last of the moon.
Not at her agenda, not at the phone she’d knocked to the floor, and not at me.
Looking at the view.
I’d carried her luggage up that afternoon and she hadn’t glanced at the window once, hadn’t noticed that the best room in the house faced the most expensive sight in the canton.
People who don’t sleep don’t, as a rule, notice views.
They’re too busy running the thing behind their eyes that won’t switch off.
And here she was, an hour later, standing in the dark looking at a mountain like she’d just discovered it was there, and I closed the door quietly and didn’t say anything.
Some cracks you don’t point at. You note them and come back Thursday.
Poppy signed me out of the wing with extravagant ceremony, stamping something that didn’t need stamping.
“Survive?” she said.
“She called it adequate.”
“From her that’s basically a love letter, give it three weeks.
” She slid the guest book around and tapped a name penciled in for Sunday.
“Speaking of which. This one’s different.
Greta Lindqvist. Returning alumna.” Her face changed, the sharp gatekeeper softening into something genuinely fond.
“She’s the one off the brochure, Adam. The one they can’t print.
” She lowered her voice, every trace of the gatekeeper’s banter gone out of it.
“She’s the proof. You’ll see Sunday. The whole house lights up when Greta comes up that mountain. ”
She closed the book.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “You’ve got a CEO on Thursday and a miracle on Sunday. Your calendar’s getting interesting, Hausquelle.”
I didn’t go to sleep. I went down to the boiler house, because the pumps had developed a faint new note under their hum that afternoon, a thing only I would hear, and I’d been worrying at it all evening like a sore tooth.
It was an air pocket in the return line, ten minutes to bleed, and I bled it crouched in the warm dark until the hiss died and the line ran solid under my palm, and the hum smoothed out, and the building above me ran easier without anyone in it knowing it had been straining all night.