The Afterglow
The wanting had split down the middle overnight, and Kaylee carried both halves into Cooper's office at eight on Thursday morning and set neither of them down.
One half was Bruno Drake's thumb, one slow stroke down her forearm, and the fact that the man had flown home without a word to her — she had typed his car service confirmation herself at six and read his name twice on the manifest. The other half sat behind the desk in a charcoal suit, gray eyes steady over his monitor, and had watched the whole exchange yesterday without saying a word.
"IT is servicing your phone today," Cooper said without looking up. "You will work from the low table."
He had projects for her, each one flimsier than the last. The acquisition correspondence wanted reindexing, alphabetical by signer, and every letter with Bruno Drake's initials went into the bottom drawer of his desk, beneath the hanging files, while Cooper watched her kneel to file them.
Any call for her rang his line first, and he passed each one across after his own pause.
Lunch came up from the ground-floor restaurant for two — the first meal anyone here had ever ordered her — and they ate at the low table while the skyline went pale and then gold.
At two he had her recopy the Vane minutes in longhand, three pages, though the originals were typed and clean, and he sat close enough that his knee found her chair every time he turned his own page.
Autumn's coat was gone from the rack by six. By seven the floor was dark and the vents had the building to themselves, and Cooper capped the gold pen and laid it on the blotter. In three weeks the pen had never been capped on time. She put her pen down too.
"The hand on your arm yesterday," he said.
Her stomach dipped. "You were there, sir. Front row."
"I watched it. Give me the words."
"It was a handshake." She crossed her arms over the exact spot and heard how that looked. "The man shakes everybody. He'd shake the copier if it had a sleeve."
"Kaylee."
She uncrossed them. "His thumb moved." It came out quieter than she meant. "Once. It was warm. Nothing in this building is warm, sir. For about a second I stood in the warm. That's my whole crime."
He let the quiet sit until she wanted to fill it, and then he came around the desk, and when he spoke, his voice was lower than she had ever heard it.
"And did you want more of it?"
The door stood ten steps away. Past it, an elevator; past the elevator, a whole city of people who would never count her buttons or cap a pen at seven sharp. She gave the door its honest second.
"No."
"Then say whose arm it is."
Her thumb found her own wrist, right over the spot, and pressed down. She let the easy life have its three seconds. It took them and went quiet.
"I belong to you."
It came out steadier than anything she'd said all week, and he crossed what was left of the room and took her face in both hands.
The kiss was the first since Blue Ridge, and it was all tongue and taking, his mouth open, his tongue licking deep until her lipstick was ruined on him.
She walked backward where he steered her, one hand at her waist, and she got his tie loose one-handed and dragged it through the knot and dropped it on the guest chair.
He walked her back until the desk's edge met the backs of her thighs, lifted her onto the mahogany, and laid her down.
The Meridian contract slid off the blotter and lay where it fell, face-down on the carpet.
Cool wood came through the crimson silk at her back while he pushed the charcoal wool to her waist and dragged the black lace down her legs, past the slingbacks, leaving it to hang off her left heel.
He'd had her buttoned to the throat for three weeks.
Now he stood over her and undid the crimson shell a button at a time until the black lace bra showed, pushed the cups down under her breasts, bent, and took her nipple into his mouth.
He sucked hard, grazed it with his teeth, and her back arched off the wood with a cry she let the empty floor have.
He gave the other breast the same and straightened with her nipple wet and aching in the cool of the office.
Then he dropped to one knee on the carpet and put his mouth on her.
His lips closed over her clit and his tongue went to work, circling through the wet of her, and the sound she made was too loud for the room.
She made it again anyway. Two fingers pushed into the tight grip of her body, curling slow, and a third joined them, stretching her wide, the silver band of his watch lying against her thigh.
Her fingers closed on his hair. Her heel hooked his shoulder.
He ate her with more patience than he had ever shown a document, sucking her clit while his fingers worked, until her clit swelled under his mouth, the third finger's stretch running deeper with every beat of her own voice, and she was saying his name out loud in a building with no one left to hear it.
She came with her back bowing off the mahogany, and he stayed with her through all of it, mouth slowing only when she pushed weakly at his head.
He rose with her wet shining on his lips and chin.
He stood and opened his belt; the buckle was the loudest thing left on the floor.
Trousers and briefs down, and his cock came free, thick and flushed dark, the head slick, one heavy vein ridged up the shaft.
She sat up partway and wrapped her hand around him — hot, alive, the skin moving under her palm as she stroked — and he let her have two strokes before his fingers closed over her wrist, set it aside, and drew her to the edge.
The first push opened her slow, a stretch that burned and then gave, and her head fell back.
He held there, half sheathed, letting her feel the fit.
Then he drove the rest of the way in one stroke and the sound out of her had no words in it.
All of him. Buried to the hilt, huge at the end of her, nowhere left empty, and her body clenched around the whole of it.
Her palm lay flat on the wood an inch from the fallen contract. The door was still ten steps away. She stayed.
"Say it again."
She tried. It came out broken. "I belong to—"
He pulled back and drove in, and the last word landed on the thrust.
"—you."
Then he fucked her. Hard, deep strokes that drove the air out of her in pieces, sharp claps of skin on skin, the desk's edge a blunt line biting the backs of her thighs, a drawer knocking under the mahogany with every one.
His hand took her hip and gripped it, four fingers and a thumb, denting the skin, holding her exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped bracing and gave him her weight and let him move her however he pleased.
Sweat gathered at his temple, and when he bent low over her she tasted the salt of his throat.
The heat crested fast the second time, fed on the first. He pulled her into each stroke by the hip, deeper with every one, and when he seated himself full and ground there, the reach of him pressed at the far end of her, the second orgasm took her under.
Loud, long, her heels digging at the backs of his thighs.
His rhythm broke into short grinds, his head dropping, and then he pushed in to the root one final time and let go, his grip crushing down, his cum pumping hot inside her while she held still around him and felt every pulse of it.
He stayed over her, propped on one arm, breathing rough. The clock on the wall said 7:40. The city was lit river to river, and her shoulders had come down from her ears and sat where they belonged.
She went looking for yesterday's thumb and found only the mahogany at her back, the ache low in her body, his weight still inside her. The spot on her arm was just an arm.
Cooper straightened and did up his trousers, retrieved the Meridian contract, and laid it face-down on the blotter.
He smoothed her skirt down over her thighs with two passes of his hands, placed the black lace on the desk beside her right hand, and poured water from the carafe into one of his crystal glasses and put that beside the lace.
"Go home when you are ready." The tie he collected from the guest chair and folded into his pocket.
She sat up slow and drank half the water. "Yes, sir. Soon as my legs file the paperwork."
The skirt sat where he'd left it and she left it there.
On her right hip, where his hand had held her through the last of it, four small ovals had risen in her skin, pink going plum — two high on the bone, two lower, exactly where his fingers had been.
She pressed her own thumb into the deepest one and watched it whiten, then fill.
She left them to darken.