5. Zuri #2
He unlocked his office. I pushed the door shut behind us, then pulled his face down to mine.
The kiss was not soft. It was furious. It was seven months of restraint colliding at speed. His hands gripped my waist, careful around the curve of my belly. I pulled his tie loose, my fingers working the knot with single-minded focus. My hands worked the buttons of his shirt.
He turned me — carefully, like he was handling something precious — until my back was against the window. The glass was cool through my blouse. His hands were on my waist, thumbs stroking the space between my belly and my ribs.
The baby rolled — a strong movement that made me gasp against his mouth — and his hands tightened on my waist, protective in a way that terrified me.
"Don't," I said, pulling back. "Don't do that thing where you touch me like you're claiming something. Like you think I belong to you."
"Zuri—"
"Move." I turned us both, pushed him against his own desk. He went easily, like he'd let me push him off a building if that's what I wanted.
"Your turn to stand still," I murmured against his neck.
He laughed — a sound like breaking glass — but he did stand still. My hands found the buttons of his shirt. His hands stayed clenched on the desk like he was using every ounce of self-control not to touch me the way he wanted to.
The baby moved again — bigger, almost uncomfortable in its strength — and the reality pressed in. I was nearly there, weeks from due, in his office at midnight, about two minutes from doing something I couldn't take back.
And for once, I didn't want to take it back.
"Don't talk," I told him. "Don't strategize, don't make this about anything except right now."
His jaw tightened. His hands flexed on the desk. He nodded.
Good. My terms. My pace. My decision.
I slid his shirt off his shoulders. His skin was warm, golden, mapped with muscle I remembered from that night at the summit. My hands followed the memory — down his chest, over the ridges of his stomach, to the waistband of his slacks.
"You can touch me," I murmured against his skin.
His hands found my waist like they'd been waiting for the invitation since May. Gentle. So careful around the curve of my belly it made my chest ache.
"Tell me what you want." His voice was wrecked.
"I want to stop thinking." My hands found his belt, worked it open, then the button and zipper beneath. "I want to stop calculating risk and running scenarios and pretending I haven't been thinking about this since you moved my office next to yours."
He caught my wrist — gentle, not stopping me, just slowing me. "Look at me."
I looked at him.
"I see you," he said. Quiet. Like a vow.
I kissed him. Not furious this time. Slower. Deeper. He let me lead.
I unbuttoned my own blouse. My fingers weren't steady, and I didn't pretend they were.
My bra was practical — black, supportive — and I watched him look at me with an expression that made pretty irrelevant.
He reached behind me and unhooked it in one motion, like his hands had been rehearsing, and when it fell away his breath caught audibly.
His mouth found my throat first, then lower, and the sound that came out of me had nothing professional left in it.
"You're staring again," I said, my voice cracking on it.
"I'm always going to stare at you." His thumb traced a new stretch mark along my hip, a shade lighter than the deep-brown skin around it, like he was memorizing it, and then his hand slid lower, past the waistband of my skirt, and I forgot what we'd been talking about entirely.
I pulled him off the desk. Guided him to the leather sofa beneath the window. I straddled him carefully, knees on either side, the curve of my belly fitting into the space we made between us.
"Before this goes further," I said, keeping my eyes on his. "I was tested after May. Everything was clear. No one since."
"Same," he said immediately. "Full panel. No one since you. I can show you the results."
"I believe you."
His hands stayed at my waist. "Tell me if?—"
"I will tell you everything. But right now I am telling you to stop being careful. I'm not fragile. I'm pregnant. There's a difference."
The sound he made — somewhere between a laugh and a groan — was the most honest thing I'd heard him say since May.
I worked my skirt up and my underwear down, and his hands went to my hips like he needed something to hold onto.
When I finally freed him from the last of his clothes and took him in my hand, thick and hard and already slick at the tip, his whole body went rigid beneath me.
"Zuri." Half warning, half plea.
I stroked him once, slow, watching his eyes go unfocused. "I know."
I positioned him at my entrance and sank down slowly, inch by inch, feeling the stretch and the burn of it, feeling him fill me until there was no space left between what I wanted and what I had.
We both went still for a second — just breathing, just feeling the shock of how right it felt, how known.
"Move," I told him.
I rolled my hips first, testing the angle, and his head dropped back against the sofa, his throat exposed, a groan tearing out of him that echoed off the glass. This was the real thing. Him, unguarded, giving me the soft parts because I'd demanded nothing less.
The build was different than the summit. Slower. Deeper. My body knew things now it hadn't known then. I rode him in long, unhurried strokes, my hands braced on his shoulders, his hands guiding my hips without directing them, his hips rising to meet mine every time I sank down.
"Look at me," I said, echoing him back.
His eyes found mine. In the amber light from the city, they were nearly black, pupils blown wide, his jaw slack with the effort of holding back.
I clenched around him deliberately and watched the effort fail — his fingers dug into my hips, his hips snapped up harder to meet mine, and the rhythm turned desperate, skin against skin, the wet slick sound of us filling the silence of the office.
"Zuri." My name in his mouth like a prayer. Not a claim. An offering.
The tension built like a wave, cresting and cresting, my whole body drawing tight around him, and when it finally broke I felt it everywhere at once — a deep, clenching release that pulled a cry out of me I didn't try to muffle.
I pressed my forehead against his and let the sound come out, and I felt him follow a breath later, felt him go rigid and shudder beneath me, spilling into me with a broken sound that was almost my name, his arms wrapping around me like I was the only structural support in a collapsing building.
We stayed like that. Still joined. Breathing. My belly rested warm between us, our daughter quiet for once.
The skyline didn't care. The city kept moving. But inside this glass box, something had fundamentally changed. Not the careful strategy I'd been building for weeks. Something underneath it. The belief that I had to do this alone had cracked, and I wasn't sure I knew how to piece it back together.
After a while, I leaned back enough to see his face. He looked wrecked. Undone. The composure was gone entirely, replaced by an expression so open and vulnerable that men like him spent their whole lives making sure nobody saw it.
"I'm not staying the night," I said.
He almost smiled. "I know."
"And this doesn't mean I've decided anything. This was a moment. Moments aren't decisions."
"I know that too."
"And if you move my office again without asking, I will personally dismantle your entire fiscal strategy and rebuild it in a way that makes you irrelevant."
He did smile then. The real one. "I believe you."
I stood up — awkwardly — and he helped me without making it a thing. I buttoned my blouse. Found my reading glasses on the floor. My hands were shaking, but it wasn't fear.
It was the aftershock of deciding to want something, after months of convincing myself I couldn't afford it.
I gathered my bag, my phone, the container of shrimp and grits — still half-full, gone cold.
He walked me to the elevator without speaking.
At the call button, his knuckles brushed mine.
This time neither of us pretended it was accidental.
His little finger hooked around mine for one breath, then let go when the doors opened.
The silence wasn't empty. It was full of everything we'd just said without words.
At the elevator, I turned to him.
"Want is manageable," I said. My voice was steady. "But this wasn't want."
His eyes held mine. He didn't flinch.
"No," he agreed quietly. "It wasn't."
The doors closed. I pressed my forehead against the cool metal and breathed. The baby rolled — a single, lazy movement that felt like agreement. Or maybe protest.
Need is a cage, I told myself. The words didn't land the same way anymore. They'd been true once — at eighteen, at twenty-three, at twenty-eight. Every time a man's need had been a tool for keeping me still.
But this. Whatever this was. His need hadn't caged me. It had just been there, patient and specific, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.
The elevator descended, floor by floor. By the time I reached my car, I hadn't convinced myself of anything. Not that it was right, not that it was wrong. Just that it had happened, and I'd chosen it, and the choosing was mine.
I drove home with one hand on the wheel and one hand on my belly, feeling my daughter settle into sleep.
The retainer was still in my desk drawer, unsigned, and I thought about it the whole way home — not the twenty-four months or the benefits package, but the fact that some part of me had already decided to stay, and the paperwork was just catching up to a choice I'd made three weeks ago without admitting it to myself.
For the first time in seven months, I didn't drive home alone. Not because he was in the car. But because something between us had stopped being a secret and started being a story. And I was the one writing it.
For now.