24. Fran #2
“We have ninety minutes,” I say.
“We have eighty-seven minutes now.”
“Plenty of time.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Plenty of time for what, exactly?”
“For you to stop talking and kiss me.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice.
His mouth finds mine, and it’s different from the other times we’ve kissed, playful instead of desperate, joyful instead of heavy. Like we’re getting away with something, like we’re teenagers sneaking off instead of adults who have every right to be doing this.
“This is ridiculous,” I mumble against his lips.
“Completely ridiculous.” He’s smiling, I can feel it. “We’re in a courthouse bathroom.”
“During a hearing about my attempted murder.” I pull back slightly. “Our attempted murder, really. You were almost a widower.”
His hands settle on my waist. “Is it wrong that I find your dark humor extremely attractive?”
“Probably. Is it wrong that I find your bad timing extremely attractive?”
“Definitely.” He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I stop worrying about what’s appropriate.
It turns messier almost immediately. Still smiling into it, which should ruin the angle and somehow doesn’t. My back hits the door. The lock is a cheap little thing and I have never been so grateful for a cheap little thing in my life.
His hands find my waist, then think about the belly and slide higher, then lower, indecisive.
“If you start a survey I will scream,” I mutter, “and then we will have a very different afternoon.”
“Not a survey.” His mouth at the corner of mine. “Just - counter or door. You pick. I don’t want you on your feet the whole time if your back’s already-”
“Counter.” I’m already turning, already boosting myself with a graceless shove, and he helps, hands under my thighs.
The laminate is cold through my dress. The faucet is a rude little presence at my spine.
In the mirror we look like a cautionary poster: me hiked onto a sink, him in a good suit, the belly front and center like a chaperone who has unionized.
“We look insane.”
“We look like people with a recess.” He steps between my knees. Suit still on. My dress rucked to the tops of my thighs. His forehead against mine. “Tell me to stop and I stop. That’s the only rule.”
“Logan.” I get his belt. The buckle is loud. We both freeze, then dissolve, shaking, stupid. “If someone hears your pants we are going to be a story they tell at Christmas.”
“Then keep it down.” His grin is already indecent.
“You’re the one who groans like a felled oak.” I flatten a palm on his chest.
He bites back a laugh and mostly loses it against my temple.
I get the zipper down. His laugh breaks in the middle.
He’s hard already, heavy in my hand, and the sound he makes when I squeeze is a disaster he swallows against my throat.
I shove the underwear aside because we are not doing a full production in a room that smells like lemon disinfectant.
The elastic bites. I do not care. I am wet in a way that would be embarrassing if I had any dignity left to spare, which I do not.
“Jesus.” He feels it when his fingers find me, a slow slide that’s filthy and careful at once. “You - Fran. That’s-”
“Don’t get reverent. There’s a toilet three feet away.”
“I can do both.” Two fingers. Not deep yet. A question I answer by rocking onto him, by biting his shoulder through the jacket so I will not make the sound that’s crowding my teeth. The baby kicks, offended or enthusiastic, and I snort into wool.
“She has comments.”
“She can file them after.” His mouth at my ear, smiling. “Still good? The angle-”
“If you name the angle I will divorce you in this county.” I pull at him. “In. I want you in. We have a gavel at 2:15 and I am not spending it hungry.”
He huffs a laugh that turns into a groan when I fit him against me and pull him in.
He pushes, I drop, and the stretch of it punches the air out of both of us, a wet sound in the tiled quiet the hand dryer would envy.
He sinks into me until my mouth falls open on nothing.
No mattress. A soap dispenser at my hip.
His tie draped on my chest. The mirror catching the exact second my face stops belonging to a woman at a hearing.
“Don’t look,” I gasp, and then I look anyway, because I am who I am. Flushed. Hair already a lost cause. His hands gripping the backs of my thighs, the dark line of him vanishing into me, the belly wedged undeniable between us. I press the back of my wrist to my mouth and laugh into it, helpless.
“We were somber for two hours.” He bottoms out and stays there, shaking, his breath punched. “I earned this. You earned this. Fuck, you feel-” He cuts himself off, drops his face to my neck. “I am not going to last if you keep laughing on me. It does a thing.”
“What thing.”
“The thing where I want to ruin this dress in a government building.”
“Then move.”
He does. Short and shallow, because the counter is exactly the wrong height and the sink is bolted on by optimism alone and nobody wants to explain a plumbing incident to Judge Halloran.
It’s nothing like the deep unhurried thing from other nights.
It’s meaner and funnier and just as devastating, the wet noise of it too loud, my heel hooking the back of his thigh, his belt still hanging, jingling softly every time he drives in like a tiny confession.
I have to let go of my mouth to hold the faucet so I don’t slide. The moan that escapes is not quiet.
We both freeze.
Footsteps in the corridor. A woman’s shoes. They pass. They do not stop. I bury my face in his collar and laugh so hard I clench around him, and he makes a wounded sound and has to stop moving entirely, forehead hard against mine.
“You cannot,” he whispers, wrecked, grinning. “You cannot laugh like that when I’m inside you. I’ll come. I’ll come and then we have to go listen to a fire investigator and I will not survive it.”
“Then don’t come yet.” I roll my hips because I have decided this day belongs to me. “Hand. I need - your hand, Logan, I’m not going to get there on the ambiance.”
He gets his hand between us, cramped under the curve of me, two fingers finding my clit because that spot he has by heart even when we are committing a small administrative sin.
The circles are tight and filthy and timed to the little snaps of his hips, and I have to bite his jacket again.
Wool in my teeth. His cologne. The industrial lemon.
I am going to come in a courthouse bathroom during a recess in the case of the State versus the woman who tried to burn me, and the wrongness of it is a spice all its own.
I giggle into the bite. He swears, fond, desperate.
“That’s it - let it go, I’ve got you. No one’s getting through that door. Come on.”
“If you pep-talk me through an orgasm I will-”
The sentence never lands. I come with my face crushed into his shoulder, a broken ridiculous sound I try to turn into nothing and fail, muffled in wool and lemon disinfectant.
I shake on the counter. The faucet digs into my spine.
He feels me go and loses the thread entirely, a groan strangled into my hair, his fingers gentling me down until I have to bat his hand away, because a courthouse bathroom is no place to actually perish.
“Decide,” I whisper. “In or not - you’ve got about four seconds of executive function left.”
“In.” Not a shred of hesitation, voice sanded down to nothing. “God, in, if you - yes. Fran-”
“Yes.”
He manages a handful more thrusts, cramped and shallow and somehow perfect, and then he’s coming, a groan crushed into my hair that he only half swallows, spilling hot inside me while I watch the whole disgraceful thing in the mirror like a woman who has misplaced her entire dignity.
One hand stays splayed on the belly the whole time.
The other clamps around my back so I don’t pitch off the sink and into a workers’-comp claim.
The extraction is not elegant.
I climb down off him and the aftermath makes itself immediately, disgracefully known, sliding warm down my inner thigh toward underwear that was never engineered for this. We both stare at the situation. We both lose it again, silent and shaking, biting down on the howl.
“Paper towels,” I gasp. “Something. I have to sit on a wooden bench for the rest of the afternoon. I am not doing it like a crime scene.”
He yanks a handful of those awful brown towels that feel like regret.
We do a job that can only be described as adequate.
I shove my underwear back into a position I will describe to no one.
He tucks himself away, zips, belts. The buckle clinks.
We both wince. My legs have opinions when I try to stand straight. He steadies me. I let him.
We’re both leaning against the sink, slightly disheveled and trying not to laugh.
“You have a situation,” Logan says, nodding at my head.
“Where?”
“Everywhere. It’s a whole situation.”
I turn to look in the mirror and burst out laughing. He’s not wrong. I look like I’ve been through a windstorm, flushed and rumpled and nothing like the composed woman who walked into the courtroom this morning.
“You did this,” I say, trying to smooth it down.
“Guilty on all counts.” He’s fixing his own tie, which somehow ended up significantly askew. “Do I look presentable?”
“You look like a man who just made out with his wife in a courthouse bathroom.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s an accurate thing.” I find a hair tie in my pocket and start wrestling my hair into something resembling order. “We should probably go get that lunch we mentioned.”
“Probably.” He doesn’t move. “Or we could stay here a little longer.”
“We have” - I check the time on my phone - “fifty-three minutes until we need to be back.”
“That’s plenty of time.”
“It’s really not.” But I’m smiling as I say it. “We need food. The baby needs food. Your future child is going to be born hungry because you can’t keep your hands to yourself.”