Chapter 7 #2
“You think I was happy?” The tears come but I don’t stop them.
I grab his collar with both hands and pull him down until his face is inches from mine.
“Every night in that apartment was a prison sentence. Nobody looked at me the way you do. Nobody knew who I was. I’ve been screaming into a vacuum for three years, and the second you touched me last night, I came back to life.
So don’t you dare tell me I didn’t suffer. ”
Mick freezes. The fight goes out of him in one exhale and leaves a want so plain on him it makes my whole body ache.
“Vera.”
“Shut up, Mick,” I say, and pull him down by the collar.
Our mouths collide hard enough to click my teeth.
There’s no finess in it but I don’t want any. His hand comes up the back of my neck and into the knot of my hair, the pins giving and going somewhere on the linoleum. His hands in my hair, he turns my head where he wants it, and the sound I make into his mouth is one I haven’t made in three years.
He lifts me onto the edge of the desk and papers scatter and a stack of folders goes to the floor but neither of us cares.
I wrap my legs around his hips and pull him flush against me. He’s hard exactly where I need him, and I gasp into his mouth.
My hands are on his belt buckle before I’ve decided to move them. Nine years of never once letting my hands get out ahead of my head and here they are, the leather of his belt warm from his body and the tongue refusing to come out of the keeper.
Mick doesn’t help me. He puts his mouth on my throat instead and works down, and my head goes back on its own. The buckle finally gives under my thumb before he takes my wrists and sets them on the desk behind me.
“Not yet.”
“Mick…”
“Three years.” He opens the top button of my blouse with two fingers. “You’re going to give me a minute.”
He opens the next one and the next, but he doesn’t take the blouse off me, just parts of the silk and pushes it off my shoulders far enough.
“Say something,” I whisper as his thumb comes up and settles in the hollow of my throat, on the pulse, and stays there.
“That.” His voice is hoarse. “First day, standing in my office lying to me about margins with your whole neck going like a bird. It’s the only part of you that’s ever told me the truth.”
Then his mouth is on it.
I’ve been audited by three regional directors and a federal inspector and none of them ever found one thing on me, and this man has had my number since Monday, and I have to put a hand back on the desk to hold myself up.
He gets his arm around my waist and drags me forward to the very edge, and I come off the laminate an inch, and he holds me there.
“Now,” I say. “Mick, now.”
He hooks his fingers into my waistband and drags my trousers down over my hips, my underwear with them, and throws them into the corner.
“I need you,” he says against my throat, his stubble scraping my skin.
“Now. Please.” I claw at the hem of his henley and he tears it over his head.
The union pin goes with it. I hear it hit the linoleum and roll, and neither of us looks. The steward of Halvorsen Works, stripped down to a man in a locked trailer, breathing hard between my knees.
He gets his belt out of the loops one-handed and drops it, the buckle cracking against the floor.
His hands come down on my bare thighs, the calluses catching, leaving smudges of carbon on the warm brown of them as his fingers part my legs wider.
He looks down and takes his time about it.
“Don’t you dare stop,” I say.
“I’m not stopping.” His voice has gone low. “Three years I’ve had you in my head exactly like this. I got it wrong every single time.”
He puts one hand flat on my sternum and lays me back against the desk, and the cold of the laminate hits my shoulder blades, and my hair spreads out across it.
Then he touches me.
It’s not tentative and it isn’t a question.
He knows exactly where, because he learned it at nineteen and apparently never gave it back, and the first pass of his fingers takes the whole room out from under me.
My hips come up off the desk and he lays his other hand flat on my stomach and holds me down.
“Breathe.”
“I can’t,” I tell the ceiling, and he laughs low against my thigh and does it again, slower, until the argument goes out of me entirely.
I don’t do this. I don’t come apart in a room with a shift running underneath it. I have a spine and a plan and a division and a mortgage, and he circles two fingers and my hand finds his forearm and holds on, and every one of those things gets very far away.
He works me right up to the edge of it and stops.
I make a sound that isn’t dignified. He brings his fingers to his mouth and I watch him do it, and he holds my eyes the whole time, and that’s what finishes off what’s left of me.
“You said I couldn’t look at you without remembering how you taste,” he says. “You were right about that too.”
Then he stops. Even like this, he stops, reaches back for his wallet, and I hear the tear of foil.
Three years gone and he still takes care of it before I have to ask, and a knot I have been carrying under my ribs since Tuesday comes undone all at once.
I sit up. I put my forehead against his while he handles it, and I get my hands on him, on the shoulders, on the heat coming off him like a machine that’s been running all day, and neither of us says a word, and the presses go thump-hiss under the floor.
His hand finds my ankle then, thumb on the tendon, the same one he went down on one knee for on the floor of Line Three while we both pretended it was about swelling. He runs his thumb over it once, slow, the way you’d check a repair you made yourself.
Then he hooks my knee over his arm.
“Look at me, Vera.”
I look up, and he drives into me in one slow, heavy thrust.
The fullness of it pulls a cry out of me and my eyes close.
“No. Stay with me.”
I open them. He sets a pace three years in the making, the frame groaning under us in time with the thump-hiss of the floor outside.
He doesn’t rush it and he doesn’t gentle it either. He works into me at a depth that makes my breath catch every time and he does not once let me look away, and I am pinned in place by the two things I have spent three years running from, which are his body and his attention.
The desk shifts a half inch on the linoleum. Then another.
I get my heel into the small of his back and pull, and he swears into my hair, and the pace breaks and comes back harder.
“You’re mine, Vera,” he says against my ear. “You’ve always been mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours,” I gasp, my nails leaving red tracks down his back.
He makes a sound like he’s been hit. His arm goes under my shoulder blades and he hauls me up off the desk and into him, and now I’m sitting in his hands with my mouth on his shoulder and my whole weight on him, and he takes it easily, and he doesn’t slow down.
“Again.”
“I’m yours.”
“Again, Vera.”
“I’m yours, I’m yours.”
It coils tight and golden and then it snaps, and I come apart around him with my mouth open against his shoulder, and he finishes with a shudder that goes all the way through him, and then he holds still and holds me.
For a while there’s nothing in the room but our breathing and the plastic clock on the wall, four minutes fast since 1998.
“Fuck. We’re in trouble, Ms. Warden,” he says into my skin, a dry trace of his old humor sneaking back into his voice.
I let out a shaky laugh and look at the ruined efficiency logs scattered across the floor. “The timeline is definitely ruined, Mr. Hayes.”
So much for professional boundaries.