The Recovery
The smile was holding. Strange, that her mouth could keep its curve while the rest of her sat tuned to a phone she couldn't look at.
The ballroom put her at the center of it, under full chandeliers, two hundred people in black tie moving past in slow shoals.
Her back was bare to all of them. The gown's narrow straps crossed her shoulders and the silk hung off her, a decision Cooper had made about her body, and every stranger in the room was reading it.
The hip seam crossed the four faded ovals at every step, and the ache came up sweet through the silk.
She had stopped pretending she didn't know where he was.
The Meridian knot held him at the north end of the room, black suit, a whiskey he wasn't drinking, head tipped toward some alderman's joke.
Across a ballroom she caught the laugh he gave away to strangers — the vendor's laugh, spent on men whose contracts were closing.
It had never once been for her, and hearing it aimed elsewhere stung worse than being ignored.
The clutch gave up the phone on the first buzz.
Cooper Adams: Smile. The photographers have you.
Three lenses went off in the bank of white roses to her left. She lifted her chin and gave them the smile she'd built in her bathroom mirror, the one that had stopped being hers around the tenth repetition, and the flashes ate it.
Good, said the next buzz. One word, and her knees noted it.
A silver-haired man with a foundation pin was telling her about the year he'd chaired this benefit. She was halfway through telling him what she did at Thorne when the phone buzzed twice.
Stop.
Turn. Slowly.
His sentence hung unfinished between them. She set her shoulders and turned, a full rotation, silk swinging at her calves, and the conversations nearest them thinned to nothing.
That is enough. Answer him.
"—assistant to Mr. Adams," she finished, level. "Events, reports, scheduling." The man nodded, satisfied, while her skin burned under the silk.
He flagged a waiter. Two flutes rode the tray, and he offered her one with the courtesy of long practice. Her hand was already out — thirst, nerves, reflex — when the clutch buzzed.
The champagne is not for you.
Her fingers curled closed in the empty air.
She held a breath and drew it back to her side by inches, fighting it the whole way, then put a smile on the refusal.
"No, thank you." She lifted a water glass from the tray instead, and it trembled, so she steadied it with her other palm and drank half before her fingers would behave.
When a waiter passed again she set it down slowly.
The silver-haired man's stare stayed where the glass had been, and she kept her hands still under it.
A director's wife collected her near the east windows, all silver charm, and said what everyone had been too polite to lead with.
"That dress was cut by a man who knows you.
That isn't flattery, that's tailoring." The laugh she let out was a real one, rings and crinkled eyes. "Hold on to whoever did that."
Kaylee's mouth said, "It was chosen for me," while the rest of her tried to make the picture: her arms getting all the way around Cooper. The picture wouldn't close. Her arms had never been around him. She couldn't find where her hands would even go, or what he would do with his.
The phone buzzed. Walk to me.
She walked. The room made an aisle of itself without meaning to, heels striking marble, and then the carpet took the sound. He watched her the whole way, and gooseflesh climbed her spine before her heels went quiet.
"Gentlemen. My assistant, Kaylee Anderson." The Meridian men shook her hand. The taller one said, "Your summary was clean. Dates, exhibits, all of it."
"I checked them twice," she said, and had the rare pleasure of Cooper's mouth moving a fraction at one corner.
Then he turned back to the men and left her standing at his shoulder, near enough to catch the cedar of him, far enough that touching him would take a decision.
Two hours of his evening went past her. Toasts.
The quartet's second set. Halfway through them a fund manager stepped in close, his hand landing light on her bare shoulder, asking whether she and Mr. Adams were — the phone buzzed against her clutch.
He is not asking about you. She stepped back out of his reach and gave him the smile instead of the answer, and the shoulder burned where his hand had been.
Wrong hand. Wrong weight. Cooper's voice rolled out over a small crowd about Meridian and the long game.
Near midnight the phone buzzed one more time: Stop biting your lip.
Her lip was swollen by then. She let it go and pressed her knees together under the gown.
The lace had gone from damp to ruined somewhere between the toast and the quartet.
"We're leaving." His voice, at her ear, the first words he'd spent on her all night. He was already moving toward the doors. She followed, and the room's eyes followed her out, and she let them.
The town car idled at the curb, dark glass, warm inside. The door shut the valet noise out of the world. Partition up, driver a silhouette, the city sliding by. For four blocks the quiet held, tires on asphalt, and then it came out of her low and fast.
"I hated it." Her voice shook on the second word. "All of it. Standing there like a painting while you—"
His head turned.
And she watched the whole evening land on him at once.
Four hours of her across a ballroom in his silk, obeyed by text, untouched — it arrived on his face with no warning.
Eyes gone dark. Hands not quiet on his knee.
She had never seen him cost anything. He was costing this.
And her arms — the ones that couldn't find anywhere to go at the east windows — went around his shoulders now without needing instructions.
"Enough." The word came out bent in the middle.
Then his hand was at her nape and his mouth was on hers, and the kiss was nothing like his texts — wet, deep, whiskey on his tongue, her lower lip caught in his teeth.
Whatever the rest of her sentence had been, he swallowed it.
The skirt went up her legs in one haul, silk rucked at her waist, the cool leather under her, and his fingers pushed the lace aside and found her soaked.
"Since the water glass," she said, her voice coming apart on it, and he made a low sound that might have been agreement and drove two fingers into her, heel of his hand on her clit, rough, fast, nothing held in reserve.
She arched up off the seat. He pulled his hand away and freed his cock, dragged her half beneath him, and pushed in — one long stroke, deep enough that they both went still with it.
One stroke. Then he pulled back out and his hands closed on her waist and hauled her astride him.
Her knees found the seat on either side of him.
All night she had kept every line he drew and walked out of his game with her pride whole and her body on fire, and none of it felt like losing.
She wrapped her hand around his cock and set it where she was wettest and sank down onto him, inch after inch, while he watched her do it with his lips parted.
She rode him slow, then not slow. His hands found the four bruises and pressed, and the ache turned sweet under his thumbs.
The gown's neckline dragged down and he sat up far enough to take her nipple into his mouth, tongue and teeth, and she cried out loud enough that the partition couldn't have kept it in anyway.
The city strobed over his shoulder, gold, white, gold.
She ground down and held there, and "Christ," he said, half-swallowed, wrecked, and the sound of Cooper Adams wrecked pushed her over.
She came with his name breaking in her mouth. He drove up into her, twice, three times, and stilled with a rough sound torn out of the bottom of him, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, his teeth set in the silk at her shoulder.
For a while there was only the tires and two people breathing.
She lay on his chest, him slipped out of her, the mess of the evening everywhere between them and nowhere she wanted to wipe it.
Under her ear his heart was still working.
His collar stood open and his tie was somewhere on the floor, and she had done that — her hands — and the fact of it sat warmer than the car's heat.
She reached down for the clutch and came up with the phone. The screen lit in her hand.
Cooper Adams: You did well.
She read it twice. She looked up at him — eyes closed, chest slowing — and past his shoulder to the window, where the city had dragged all its lights into long gold smears. She laid the phone on his chest and watched the smears run, quiet all the way through, his.