21. Ryan #2
“I’m just saying.” Cole sipped his drink.
“It’s almost midnight. People are pairing off.
Atmospherically speaking.” He glanced sideways at me with the same satisfaction he’d been wearing for months, the look he got when something he’d been watching develop was finally moving the way he’d predicted. “Just observationally.”
“Cole.”
“I’m being atmospheric.”
“Go away.”
Cole went, grinning, back into the crowd.
I found Maren at the end of the bar three minutes later. She was half listening to something, and she saw me coming. She didn’t look up. That was the tell. In a room where looking at someone was completely normal, she kept her eyes on her drink and left them there for a full ten seconds.
I leaned past her to get a napkin from the bar dispenser and put my mouth close to her ear, just for a second, low enough nobody would catch it in the noise.
“Griffin’s occupied,” I said. “Northeast corner. Not coming back.”
She didn’t move. “How occupied?” she muttered quietly.
“Extremely.”
A beat passed. Cole was still somewhere behind us. The countdown was seventeen minutes out.
“Back hallway,” she said over her drink. “Two minutes.”
I took my napkin and went back to where I’d been before.
I lasted ninety seconds.
The hallway smelled like old wood and cold air and the faint ghost of a kitchen that had closed three hours ago. One overhead light. No windows. The bass from the bar came through low and steady, more feeling than sound.
She was already there. Of course she was. My shoulders settled and I took her in. She was wearing a sparkly dress that was way too short for other men to be able to look at her in, and a wicked grin.
She had her back against the wall and her arms crossed and she was watching me with none of the professional distance she usually wore in this building. Unguarded and direct, a side of her only I got to benefit from.
I met her in only a couple steps and put a hand behind her neck, the other on her face, and kissed her.
Not careful. Not the version I’d been managing all night, or even any night.
I wanted her so fucking bad. She made a sound against my mouth and grabbed the front of my jeans with both hands and kissed me back the same way, and for a moment there was nothing else—just her mouth and her hands and three hours of pretending burning off all at once.
I pulled back enough to breathe. She was already flushed, her eyes dark, her lips kiss-swollen.
“I cannot keep my hands off you,” I said. It came out rougher than I intended. “Three hours. Do you have any idea—”
“I know.” She pulled me flush to her, and she had to feel how hard I was. “I know—”
I kissed her again, deeper, walked her back two steps until she was against the wall and pressed the length of myself against her so she could feel exactly what three hours of watching her across a room had done. She exhaled sharply through her nose.
“Ryan.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a door at the end of this hallway.”
I pulled back and looked. Employees Only sign. Dee’s office. I’d clocked it the first time I’d ever been in this bar and down this hallway. We needed to move before we got caught anyway; the restrooms were nearby and anyone could come along.
I tried the doorknob.
It opened.
She looked at me. “I need you right fucking now.”
I glanced at my watch and then met her feral gaze. “Fourteen minutes.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her through the door with me.
Dark. The only light was a desk lamp in the far corner throwing a low amber circle over a cluttered surface—receipts, a scheduling binder, a small succulent in a terracotta pot.
Filing cabinet against one wall. A corkboard dense with shift grids and supplier notes.
A desk pushed against the far wall. Solid wood.
The kind that didn’t move when you put weight on it.
She looked at the desk.
I looked at her.
I reached behind me, not taking my eyes off her, and locked the door from the inside.
I walked her back to the desk with my hands on her neck, kissing her the whole way.
The faint bass pulse of the music in the bar came through the walls.
Outside that door, the countdown was moving, our friends were partying.
In here there was just the dark and the smell of old paper and cedar and her—just as hot for me as I was for her.
She started to undo my belt as she met my kisses, deepening them, pulling me against her.
I broke the kiss, breathing hard, and turned her around, placing my hands over hers, flat on the desk.
I leaned over her, pressing my hard cock against her ass.
She braced without being told, spread her palms wide, and the line of her back in that dress in the low light made it genuinely difficult to think.
I brought my mouth to the curve of her shoulder, the side of her neck, the place below her ear that made her breathing change. My hands ran the length of her sides, the curve of her waist, and I gathered the hem of her dress slowly—an inch at a time—until it was bunched at the small of her back.
I palmed both cheeks. Took my time. Felt her breathing go uneven under my hands. Her skin was hot. She’d been drinking and dancing across the room from me for hours and it was all right there under my touch.
I put my mouth to her ear. “Can I fuck you like this?”
She turned her head just enough to look at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were dark and her voice came out completely wrecked. “Yes. Please.”
The please undid me. I was painfully hard now and needed inside her.
“Oh, that’s my good girl,” I whispered as I slid her panties down her legs and helped her step out of them.
I pocketed them without comment. Then I moved my hand between her thighs, two fingers through her, slow, and the sound that came out of her went straight to my cock.
She was soaked. I pulled my fingers back and brought them to my mouth before she could say a word.
She watched me do it over her shoulder. Her lips parted.
“Ryan.”
I finished undoing my belt and unzipped my jeans, the sound loud in the silent room as I let my cock free. I stroked myself twice then demanded in a low voice, “Grip the desk.”
She turned back to face the desk and her hands found the edge.
I tapped the inside of her foot so she’d open her legs just a bit more and spread her ass cheeks apart a bit and thrust inside her in one slow, deep push.
We both went completely still—the fullness of it, the relief of it, three hours of pretending condensed down to a single point as her pussy gripped my shaft.
“Fuck, Maren,” I hissed.
Then she exhaled hard and rolled her hips back against me and said, low and urgent, “Fuck me, Ryan. Now.”
I did.
The pace was never going to be gentle and neither of us wanted it to be.
Deep, driving, my hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave a mark, the desk solid under her palms, the bass from the bar pulsing through the wood in time with everything.
She dropped her head forward and her hair fell and I could see the necklace swing with the rhythm of our movements and I nearly lost my mind entirely.
“Touch your clit,” I said against her neck. “Don’t stop.” I needed her to get there.
Her hand lowered between her thighs and she clenched around me so hard I had to stop moving for a second and breathe through it.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she gritted out.
I kept going. Slid one hand up the curve of her ass, spread her wider, and let my thumb drift to the cleft of her—just the pad of it, barely there, light as a question.
She went completely still. Gasped, then shivered.
“Has anyone ever touched you here?” My words were low, steady. A real question as I continued to thrust deep and hard into her pussy.
Her knuckles went white on the edge of the desk.
“N-no,” she said. Quiet. Wrecked.
“Do you want me to?”
The bass pulsed. Four minutes. Maybe three. Her fingers were still moving and I was still buried inside her and neither of us was breathing.
“Yes.” So quiet I almost missed it.
I kept the pressure exactly where it was, then just barely a bit more—unhurried, present, the suggestion more than the act—and felt her whole body respond to the combination of it. What I was doing, what she was doing, that thumb at the spot nobody had ever been before.
“I’m going to fuck you here,” I said against her ear. Low. Certain. Not a question. “Not tonight. But soon.”
She clenched around me so hard I lost my rhythm entirely.
“Oh,” I said. “Does my good girl want that?”
“Yes.” Shaking. Barely a word. “Yes.” She was so fucking close, and I was too. Ready to lose my mind.
“Yeah.” I pressed my thumb deeper, then pulled it out, and back in again—and drove into her harder when I sensed her letting herself go entirely.
“Fuck,” she breathed. “That feels so… Oh god. Don’t stop—Ryan—I’m going to—”
I pressed my mouth to her neck and demanded, “Come on my cock. Right now, baby. Take it all.”
She shattered. Her whole body seized and clenched and she lowered her face to the desk, burying it in her forearm to kill the sound and I worked her through every wave of it without easing up, and when she finally went boneless against the desk I followed her over the edge with my hips flush against her and my vision going completely white and her name in my mouth like the only word I had left.
“Maren—” I groaned as I emptied myself into her, my vision going black at the edges. “Fuck, baby.”
For ten seconds I couldn’t locate myself at all.
I came to and straightened up. My damp shirt clung to my back. The room smelled like cedar and sex and the faint ghost of the hand lotion sitting on Dee’s desk.