Chapter 16 The Falk Ledger #2
Then her body. The hot stones and the ice set aside, and instead the slow slide of her oiled skin over mine, all of it, soft weight and friction and not a single hand, the long length of her dragging up my body.
I felt her breasts press flat against my chest and drag upward, then her thigh slide between mine, then, deliberately, the heavy oiled curve of her ass settling over me and sliding slow, and I had no idea where any of her was until it arrived, warm and slick, and then it was gone again somewhere new.
Blind, I could only feel and wait and want, and that was the instrument, the not-knowing, the next touch always a surprise.
“Knee socks,” she informed me, conversational, somewhere above me in the dark.
“In case you were building a picture. Nothing else, just the knee socks. The white ones, the ones you pretend you don’t look at.
The mirror’s got a very nice view of all of it and you’ve got nothing at all.
Isn’t that sad. The best pair of hands you’ll ever be touched by, naked and oiled and right here, and you, blind as a mole.
” Her oiled breast dragged across my mouth and I turned my head to catch it and she pulled it away, laughing low.
“No. You take what I give you. That’s the lesson tonight.
You’re always reading, always finding the strain, always two steps ahead of everybody’s body. Not tonight. Tonight you wait.”
She rode my mouth at her leisure, lowering her slick cunt onto my face from somewhere in the dark, her thick thighs settling either side of my head, grinding herself against my tongue, and narrated her own pleasure to a man who couldn’t see it, which turned out to be its own filthy thing.
Her husky voice told me exactly what my mouth was doing to her, how my tongue felt dragging through her, how swollen and wet she was, how close she was getting, and then she’d lift away and deny herself the last of it, because the narration was the point and the words came easier when she wasn’t coming, and she wanted the story more than she wanted the end of it.
Then she turned, reverse, and freed my hands by untying nothing, just taking my wrists out of the loose sashes herself and placing them where she wanted them, on her ass, finally, full and oiled and heavy in my grip, and she reached back and guided my cock to her entrance and took me into her slow, settling back until I was seated deep and full inside her, and took complete control, grinding my length at her own languid pace while I held on and saw nothing and felt all of it, the heft of her ass filling my hands, the scalding tight grip of her cunt, the slow filthy roll of her hips, every sensation arriving sharper for the dark.
And she edged me. On purpose. Slow rolls right to the brink and then a stop, again, again, payback delivered with relish.
“This is for Poppy’s stories,” she said, breathless herself but loving it.
“She told me about the key room. The whole desk. You make my meninas wait, querido. Now you wait.” A roll, a stop.
I groaned, and pulled, just slightly, at the loose sash, and she laughed in pure delight.
“No, no. Say my name. Say it like you mean it and I’ll let you. ”
I said her name. Like an answer.
She reached up and pulled the mask off for the last of it, because she wanted me watching, and the room came back, gold candlelight and her dark eyes laughing down at me over her shoulder and the white knee socks and the mirror giving me everything the dark had withheld, her ass rippling as it clapped down against my hips, my cock disappearing into her on every drop.
She rode me hard and fast and finally let me go, her cunt clamping down and fluttering around me as she came, and I emptied into her at the same moment, pumping deep, both of us loud, her volume climbing off the thin walls because the walls were always part of it.
She sprawled on top of me after, sweat and oil and candle smoke, boneless and pleased with herself.
“Better,” she pronounced. “You stopped brooding around the second cube of ice. I clocked it.”
We lay there. The candles burned down. On another night this was the hour she’d have wrapped a real thing in a joke and let it slip out sideways, because that was the only way she ever let one out at all.
She didn’t, tonight. She’d already said the truest thing standing over me with her palm flat on my chest, you are outnumbered by love, and she was too good at her craft to repeat a line and blunt its edge by saying it twice.
What she did instead she did with her hands and no words for it.
She found the old burn scar on my forearm in the dark and set her thumb against it, the rough way she touched the things she refused to make a speech of, and pressed, once, and held it there.
I knew what it was. It was the same currency she’d handed me week one, when I’d asked about her wrists and she’d had no idea what to do with her own face for a day after; it was ten years answered in a single press of a thumb, given and taken back too fast to land hard on either of us.
No floating confession. No sorrow set adrift on the dark.
Her thumb on my scar, and the scars on her I’d never once get her to narrate, and that was all she’d allow, and it was plenty.
“Don’t you dare go lonely in a house full of love,” she said into my shoulder, an order and not a wound.
“It’s rude. We’re the best there is. Ask anyone.
” Then she bit my shoulder, not gently, and rolled up off me to go hunt her wrap in the candlelight, and the moment was over before it could turn into one of those moments, which was precisely how she liked them.
Later, at the desk, restoring my collar before bed, I found Poppy doing her own midnight ritual, and she’d been waiting for me with a face full of a secret she’d been hoarding for days.
“Right,” she said, low, glancing at the stairs.
“You showed me yours, I’ll show you mine.
That archive page I keep not telling you about.
” She pulled it from under the blotter, a photocopy, an old guest registry leaf, Falk-era, the dates more than a decade back.
“I made a copy before I refiled it. Don’t tell Yuki, she’ll have a feeling about the chain of custody.
” She put it on the counter between us and put her finger on one line, on a name written in a careful hand among the heiresses and widows of a season fourteen years gone.
A guest. Not staff. Years before there was a Directress Adler at all.
M. Adler.
I looked at it. I looked at Poppy. Poppy looked at me.
“She was a guest here,” Poppy whispered.
“Before she ran the place. Before she had the coat. She came up that cable car like everyone else, paid like everyone else, signed her name in the book like everyone else.” She tapped the line.
“Whatever happened to her up here, she came back years later with a medical degree and took the building over and scrubbed one name off one magnet and never wrote another into it.”
The logbook, in the locked desk drawer, not the file room. The edelweiss. The one I should not have let leave. The blank magnet at the edge of the board. None of it explained, all of it suddenly sitting in the same room.
I put the page back under the blotter myself, face down.
“This conversation didn’t happen,” I said.
“What conversation,” Poppy agreed.