Chapter 15 #2
“Why are you so afraid of her?” She comes around the desk, unhurried, a cat crossing a windowsill. “She’s a pipsqueak compared to your size.”
“Everyone who underestimates Cricket regrets it.”
“I’m scarier.”
“True.” I’ll grant her that. “But I know your soft side by now, and it’s inside that perfect pink pussy of yours.”
She stops dead. Then she smiles, slow and delighted, all teeth.
“Ah. So you’ve never banged Cricket.” She nods, filing it. “Good to know.”
“Good. Keep thinking that. I have never fantasized about your sister. Not even once,” I tease, letting my smirk go where it wants. “And you’re calling her Cricket now, too?”
Her face drops into a scowl so fast it’s nearly a flinch. “I will end you, fucker. I’m the only O’Leary woman—no, woman period, you fantasize about from here on out.”
“Possessive much?”
“Unhinged. Savage. Obsessive.” She plants her hands on the arms of my chair and lowers her face to six inches from mine. “And I dare you to test my patience.”
Her breath smells like the peppermints Eden keeps in a dish by the elevator. She has stolen at least forty of them. Purses, Porsches, peppermints—her sticky hands will get me in so much trouble one day.
“I don’t know if I want to fuck you or run from you.”
“You probably want to fuck me right now.”
The zipper of her skirt goes down loud in the quiet. The fabric slides off her hips and lands in a pool on the concrete, and she steps out of it without looking down.
She wasn’t lying. No panties. She never lies about the things that don’t matter.
The tank top goes over her head. There’s nothing under that either. Her dusky nipples are pert, headlining her heavy tits. Damn, do I love her breasts. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better set.
I should protest, but every coherent thought I own leaves the room through the ventilation duct. I can’t hear reason. All I can hear is her steady breathing and my own pulse hammering in my ears.
She glances over her shoulder at the door.
“Quickly,” she says. “Before we’re made.”
“I—”
That’s all I manage, because she’s watching me stall and enjoying it enormously.
She draws one finger up the inside of her own thigh and holds it up to show me how wet she already is.
Opening my mouth, I let her pop the tip in.
I suck on it until I’m satisfied tasting her salty sweetness that I’ve become more accustomed to than anything else.
Then, I nip hard. A little pain to punctuate the pleasure, which happens to be her favorite.
Oh, fuck it. I stop being a man with a job and a chain of command and responsibilities on his shoulders.
I stand up hard enough to send the chair into the filing cabinet.
She doesn’t retreat. Another woman would step back and let herself be caught. Sylvie holds her ground with her chin tilted up, waiting for the collision, because she wants to feel it arrive.
I get a hand around the back of her neck.
Her skin is cool from the vents and her pulse is going fast under my thumb, faster than she’d ever admit, and I turn her by that grip and walk her right into the desk.
She hits it at the hip, hisses, laughs, and I don’t give her the second she needs to say something clever. I fold her over the laminate.
The desk is cold. I know because she flinches when her breasts touch it, a full-body twitch she can’t suppress, and gooseflesh comes up across her back in a wave I can actually see under the fluorescent light.
Everything down here is lit like a morgue.
It makes her look carved. It makes the two thin white scars on her shoulder blade stand out like chalk marks, and I put my mouth on one of them without deciding to.
She flattens deeper onto the surface, arms out, palms braced wide, and she turns her face so she can watch the door.
My cock obediently pumps to life—the way it always has to around Sylvie.
She wants it constantly and I work it to death.
We’re both addicted, and rehab’s not an option. All we can do is use, use, use.
My belt comes open one-handed. It’s a handy little skill I’ve acquired in two weeks. The buckle hits the concrete with a clank that’s far too loud. But that’s not the most distracting sound.
Thump, thump, thump.
“Shit,” I hiss.
Both of us go still when down the hall somebody’s footsteps approach my door, but they pass without pausing, and she laughs into the desk, breathless and vicious.
“Coward,” she whispers.
I smack her ass for the insult, the sound echoing off my office walls. Then, I put my palm flat between her shoulder blades and press her down.
She groans out in pleasure when I bury all the way into her, all at once.
She was not exaggerating about being wet. She takes all of me with a sound that starts as a moan and ends as something bitten off.
“Sylvie, quiet, or I stop.”
She brings her own forearm up to her mouth and bites down on it, hard, to scream in pleasure into her own flesh.
A woman who hates to be hushed is silencing herself for me, in my office, because she’s as desperate for me as I am for her.
Requited, whatever this is. Lust, future love, roasting desire—whatever we are.
It’s we, not me, and after all I’ve been through, it feels so good to not be alone in this.
I lose every ounce of restraint I’d been pretending to have.
I slam into her with a savage rhythm—no courtesy, no hesitation—so hard the desk drags half an inch against the concrete floor each time, grinding in a steady scrape that anyone in the hallway would recognize.
I won’t slow down. That me who’d ever ease off on the throttle isn’t in the building today.
Her spine bows under my hand, every vertebra a note as I chase the curve. I wrap her long, auburn hair around my wrist and yank up just enough to snap her head back. She answers like a perfectly tuned string, a tremor rolling through her body.
The recycled air, her light floral perfume, the sharp bite of toner and metal—it all mingles now with her scent: sweat, sex, the musky heat of her arousal coating the room. The office smells like her now. It will still smell like this in an hour and I have not thought that far ahead.
She breathes ragged gasps, teeth still clenched around her arm, her eyes screwed shut.
My vision fractures at the edges in a white haze.
The stapler flies off the desk. She reaches out blindly, nails whitening as she claws the rim of the laminate, and with her free hand she drags my wrist down against her thigh, guiding me, urging me, showing me exactly how she wants it.
Sylvie never asks politely when it comes to sex. She takes what she needs.
So I give it to her willingly.
A few more aggressive thrusts and she comes on my cock in a tidal wave, teeth digging into flesh, her forehead pressed to the desk as her body clamps down around me in ruthless spasms. I feel every squeeze radiate up my shaft, every shard of her orgasm fracturing through me.
I bury myself to the hilt, hold still, and let go in her, hot and heavy, my release flooding her deep, driving us both to a standstill.
The vent hums low. Her heart hammers under my palm like a trapped bird.
Neither of us moves for a long moment.
Finally, I ease out, my withdrawal a slow, deliberate slide. I zip, buckle, tuck in the waistband of my pants—my hands shaking, and I’m a grown-ass man. Sex shouldn’t make me this weak. This submissive. But whatever I’m doing with Sylvie, it isn’t just sex. It’s something far more overwhelming.
I straighten my tie. “Jesus, Sylvie.” My voice is shredded. “It’s impossible to focus and make good decisions when I’m around you.”
“Good, baby. I like ’em distracted.”
I roll my eyes as I get the baby wipes from my bottom drawer and pass her a few. She takes them without comment. I lean in and put my mouth to her forehead, gently, one sweet thing at the end of our filthy improv.
Finally, she looks at the packet with Winnie the Pooh smiling on the front, then at me.
“Since when do you keep baby wipes on hand?”
I start gathering manifests off the floor. “Because you attack me with your tits at any given moment, and your sexual appetite is near impossible to keep up with. I’m trying to prepare.”
“You expected office sex?”
“It was inevitable.”
She laughs, clearly delighted with herself. “I thought I was being reserved. Trying to respect your elderly age and all.”
“Mean. Just, mean.”
She steps into her skirt, shakes her hair out, becomes a person again in nine seconds flat.
Then she goes still, folding her arms as she contemplates something new. “Wait. You’ll prepare with baby wipes, but not condoms?”
I was heading to the door, but I stop in my tracks, and turn around slowly.
“Oh. I—yeah. You’re right.” I reach for the back of my neck as if I could press away the heat suddenly crawling up it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve offered. It’s just that being with you feels like full surrender, so I don’t… Shit, I’m sorry. We can use protection moving forward if you’re—”
“I can’t have kids.” She lifts a shoulder like she’s reporting the weather. “Bum uterus since I was born.”
“Oh,” I say, but it sounds more like a sigh.
She keeps dressing, brisk, businesslike, so I cross the room and put my arms around her from behind and hold her there. After a second, she relaxes into me.
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair before I plant a kiss behind her ear.
“Does it bother you?”
I take my time because a fast answer will sound like a lie and a slow one will sound like a verdict, and neither is what I mean.
I wanted a family. I’ve wanted one for so long the wanting has worn a channel in me, the way water does through stone, and I used to be certain of its shape.
A house. A wife who stayed. Children who’d run to mama with boo-boos and run to me when they were scared.
I’d protect them like a bear with cubs. I’d take them to the ocean on the Fourth of July. Pink skies behind us.