Chapter Eighteen
~ Kenneth ~
Six months later, the city was still standing and so was I.
Pryce accepted the settlement within a week, his attorney’s signature a barely disguised “fuck you” at the bottom of the page.
He lost his minority stake in the Franklin Center project and paid a number big enough to impress the press, but not enough to make anyone at the table feel they had actually won.
The conspiracy to commit corporate interference charge was filed with the district attorney, and within two days of the discovery deadline both buried partners had folded, their names on the paper trail so clean you could have used it as exhibit A without highlights.
Rosamund Vance lost her license. The bar association’s finding was a cold, mathematical verdict: pattern of ethical lapses, cumulative impact on client interests, permanent disbarment.
She took a position in regulatory compliance at an insurance group in Connecticut, which made sense in the same way carbon monoxide did: odorless, fatal in high enough concentrations, and nobody’s first choice.
Edward Taylor’s voluntary statement to the state’s office, combined with my withdrawal of the personal referral against him, produced a cooperation agreement and a batch of documentation that, according to the DA, was enough to “embarrass a whole table’s worth of business school graduates.”
Edward was no longer my executive assistant, but I didn’t regret the call. He had a good lawyer and, I was told, a standing invitation to reenter the field if he wanted to. I sent him a bottle of his favorite gin as a parting gesture, and he sent back a thank you card.
Carolyn was charged with conspiracy to commit corporate interference, criminal harassment, and assault. The paperweight incident was documented by Miles in a sworn statement, and the full trail of Pryce’s communications was stapled to the indictment.
She didn’t go to trial. Her attorney—no longer Vance, who was then busy learning the actuarial tables—negotiated a plea.
She got a suspended sentence with two years supervised probation, restitution to my firm for documented losses, and a permanent civil restraining order for both myself and Jude.
She gave up the luxury apartment, let go of the borrowed shine, and the friends who had always been rented by the hour.
I did not keep tabs on her, but Miles’s occasional updates suggested she had shifted her operations into a smaller, safer orbit, one with less risk of collision.
Jude read every line of the public filings, then set the phone down on the table and did not mention it again. We made dinner, ate it, and watched a documentary on the world’s most expensive cheese. The word “justice” never came up.
I did not feel triumph. What I felt was a relief so absolute it took a full week to register as anything but exhaustion.
Then, slowly, something quieter: a low, steady sadness for the version of Carolyn that might have existed in a world where she wanted something other than to win at any cost. I did not say this to Jude. He already knew.
* * * *
Saturday night in the penthouse, but it was not my penthouse anymore.
It was ours, even if the lease, the furniture, and the art on the walls all still bore my name.
You could tell it was ours because Jude’s annotated invoices had migrated from his laptop to a designated stack at the left edge of the desk, his backup glasses case lived on the kitchen counter beside the coffee grinder, and two shelves in the study were colonized by his books—shelved by color, not topic, because he’d once claimed that it made finding things “a visual pattern recognition exercise instead of a memory contest.”
There was a new entry in the building’s coffee order system, labeled “Jude, sweet, iced,” which meant the concierge no longer even asked whose cup was whose. None of these things had been discussed. They simply happened, as inevitable as a change in season.
I cooked dinner: one pot, three ingredients, the kind of meal designed for efficiency and minimal cleanup. Jude ate two portions and commented, deadpan, that it was a “landmark achievement in household resource utilization.”
I accepted the compliment with a nod, and poured the wine.
Now, post-dinner, we sat on the couch, legs overlapping, wine nearly finished, the city putting on a light show across the glass.
Jude was reading—or pretending to—one of his battered hardcovers, glasses pushed up on his nose and a pen behind his ear despite the complete absence of marginalia in a pleasure read.
I watched him. Not in the way I watched competitors or clients, but in the way you watch something and realize it is not going anywhere, and that you are happy about it.
He set the book down on his lap, looked at the skyline, and said, “I always thought this would feel like living in a spaceship.”
“Disappointed?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not in the spaceship.”
I took my wine, set it on the table, and reached for the pen behind his ear. I removed it, set it next to the bottle, and ran my hand through his hair. He looked at me. Glasses a little crooked, mouth set like he was about to say something clever and decided not to.
“Come here,” I said.
He did.
He straddled my lap, the fit of his thighs around my hips a silent admission of exactly how many hours he had mapped out the complexity of this move.
The contact was immediate, his mouth on mine, soft and open and tasting of cheap wine and the basil from dinner.
He kissed like a man who knew he was being watched, which was probably true, since I could never look away.
I slid my hands up under his shirt, tracing the line of his spine with my thumbs.
He arched a little, pushing against my chest, which made his shirt ride up enough to expose the soft skin just above his waistband.
I ran my palms over his sides, slow and deliberate, and he made a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughter were measured in decibels and exhalation alone.
He leaned back, looked at me, and asked, “Are you cataloguing this for future reference?”
“Yes,” I said, and pulled his shirt off.
He shook his head, but the smile stayed, bright and present.
His body was the same as it had been every time before, but better for being something I got to see whenever I wanted.
He had gained a little weight since moving in—happy, he claimed, but he also claimed it was because “one of us has the metabolism of a college athlete and the other one runs on coffee and complex carbohydrates.”
He wore it well: the slight softening around his waist, the way his chest went from nothing to everything when I touched it, the curve of his thighs in old jeans.
I wanted all of it.
He pushed me back onto the couch, straddling me with a confidence that would have startled either of us a year ago.
I let him, my hands braced on his hips, guiding the rhythm as he ground himself against me, slow and filthy and so deeply focused that the rest of the world narrowed to the point of a pin.
His hands went to the buttons of my shirt, flicking them open with the dexterity of a man who had opened a thousand spreadsheets and only a dozen actual shirts, and he spread his palms over my chest, pressing in as if memorizing the pattern of my heartbeat.
We kissed until I couldn’t remember the last thing I’d said, until my hands ached to get him undressed, until I couldn’t think past the next inhale of his skin.
I rolled us, gentle but insistent, so that he was under me. He sprawled out, glasses abandoned somewhere behind us, hair already a mess, eyes fixed on mine with a steadiness that left me exposed.
I bent and kissed his neck, slow and methodical, marking the line from his jaw to the hollow at his throat, then further down, tracing the line of his collarbone, then the warm, yielding flesh of his chest. When I closed my mouth over his nipple and bit, just enough to make him curse, he arched up hard and his hands locked tight in my hair.
I worked my way down his body in increments, taking the time to learn every new reaction.
His stomach tensed under my hands, his thighs flexed and relaxed in rhythm with my mouth, and when I slipped my hand beneath the waistband of his sweats he sucked in a breath that sounded like my name.
I let him out, thick and hot in my palm, and stroked him slow enough to make him squirm.
“Fuck,” he said, and I did not correct his language.
I stroked him, eyes locked on his face, and watched the way his cheeks colored, the way his eyes lost focus and then snapped back, the way he pressed up into my hand and then tried to hold himself still.
I did not hurry him, did not speed up even when he begged for it, because I liked the way his composure broke, liked the raw and unscripted noise he made when I kept him at the edge for more than a minute.
When I took his cock into my mouth, he gasped and bucked, but I kept him pinned, one hand tight on his hip, and let him fuck into my throat as much as he wanted.
He tasted sweet and sharp, and I hollowed my cheeks around him, tongue working in the way I knew he liked.
His hands clawed at my shoulders, at my hair, at the couch, until he was cursing in full sentences and I could tell he was close.
I pulled off, and he made a sound that was mostly “fuck you” and partly “please,” which was exactly the ratio I preferred.
I stood, scooped him up, and carried him to the bedroom. He pretended to protest, but did not truly resist. In the bedroom, I tossed him onto the bed, stripped off my own shirt, and watched as he shimmied out of his pants with the efficiency of a man who planned for every possible contingency.
He sprawled back, naked and unselfconscious, arms up and a smile like he had just solved a math problem no one else in the world could solve.
I wanted to devour him, and I did: mouth on his thighs, teeth scraping just enough to make him writhe, then up, up, until I was kissing him again, deep and slow and with the full intent of undoing him.
I went to the nightstand for the lube and the condom, and he watched every movement. He made a show of rolling the condom down my cock, and when he slicked me up, his touch was so knowing it made me shiver.
He rolled onto his back, legs wide, and I knelt between them. I worked a finger into him, slow, and waited for him to breathe, then added another, and he moaned. “Harder,” he said, so I did. He pushed back, greedy for it, and I gave him a third, stretching him open, feeling his body give.
When he was loose, when he was slick and ready and nearly shaking with want, I lined up and pressed in, inch by inch, until I was seated fully inside him. He clamped down hard, making both of us gasp, and for a minute I held there, letting him adjust.
He opened his eyes, met mine, and ordered, “Move.”
So I did.
I started slow, savoring the push and pull, the slide and friction, the way his body took me in and clung.
When I leaned down to kiss him, he bit my lip, hard, then licked it as if in apology.
His hands mapped every inch of my back, dug in when I fucked him harder, and when I wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked him in time, he arched up and swore so creatively I almost lost it.
He came first, hard and with a noise I would have paid money to hear again, clenching around me so tight I had to hold still until I could breathe again. I lost it then, came so deep it felt like it left me hollowed, and I collapsed onto him, both of us sweating and shaking and spent.
We lay there in the aftermath, the only sound the city through the window and our own breathing. He curled into my side, head on my chest, hand on my stomach, tracing slow circles. I ran my fingers through his hair, and when he closed his eyes I kissed the top of his head.
After a long time, he said, “Six months ago I was trying to figure out how to give this back.”
I stilled. “I know.”
He looked up at me. “I’m not going to.”
I looked back, unguarded. “I know that too.”
He put his head down again, hand flat over my heart. “The marriage blunder.”
“Best mistake I ever made,” I said.
He laughed, low and sleepy. “I want that on our anniversary card.”
“It will be,” I said.
He drifted, then, soft and weightless in my arms, and I watched him in the dark, the city’s lights crawling across the ceiling, feeling lucky in a way that bordered on cosmic.
When he finally slept, I stayed awake for a while, thinking of everything I could have lost if I had been less stupid, less stubborn, less willing to risk all of it for one perfect thing.
His hand stayed on my chest, the whole night, and when the sun came up it was still there.
Just where it belonged.
~ The End ~