8. Conrad
Conrad
I knelt before her as her plush thighs bracketed my face, the sweet taste of her on my tongue as she looked down at me.
“Lili.” I stood, knees shouting, and I kissed her.
She tasted herself on me and made a sound that jumped straight to my cock, which had been aching since she pushed me against that wall.
“I haven’t been with anyone since I moved here,” I whispered, kissing her as I told her the necessary information. “Passed my physical to get the job in Forge Creek.”
She sighed, a smile tipping the corners of her pouty lips I couldn’t wait to plump with fevered kisses. "Good." Her hands were at my belt. "I want you. Just you. No barriers. I've had enough of those."
I helped her with the buckle because her hands were shaking. She freed me and wrapped her hand around my cock and I had to brace one arm on the desk to keep standing. Her grip was firm and curious and she pumped once, twice, and I caught her wrist.
"If you keep doing that this is going to be over before it starts."
"Then don't make me wait."
I lifted her off the desk. She wrapped her legs around me and I felt the wet heat of her against my stomach and nearly lost it right there.
I lowered us both to the floor, her back on the carpet, my body over hers.
The emergency light put a red stripe across her throat and collarbone and I followed it with my mouth.
She arched up into me, the glorious expanse of her smooth skin pressed against my body like I’d never thought I’d feel.
Her hands found my shoulders, my back, my arms. She was mapping me the way I'd mapped her, learning the terrain, and every place she touched left a mark I was going to feel for days.
I settled between her thighs. The head of my cock pressed against her entrance and I stopped.
"Look at me," I said. "Tell me if anything hurts. There is no world where I cause you pain.”
She nodded, smiled, eyes sleepy yet eager. “Conrad,” her lips forming my name started to feel necessary. “I want you.”
I pushed into her. Slow. Watching her face for any flinch, any tightness. Her lips parted and her eyes went wide and her fingers dug into my shoulders and she exhaled. I watched as she became mine, as the stretch of velvet around my cock gave way to beautiful fulness for her.
"Okay?" I managed.
"More."
I pressed deeper. She was tight and hot and slick from coming on my mouth and I had to hold completely still once I was fully inside her or it was going to end before my Lili came a second time.
My arms shook. My jaw clenched so hard I could hear my own teeth.
She was everywhere — her scent, her warmth, her hands on my back, her breath against my neck.
She moved first. A small shift of her hips, testing. Then again. I groaned and dropped my forehead to hers.
"Does it hurt?"
"No." She rolled her hips and I saw stars. "It feels like you were supposed to be here."
That undid me.
I pulled back and thrust into her and she gasped and I found a rhythm — slow at first, reading her the way I'd read her with my mouth, watching what made her breath catch, what made her fingernails dig in, what made her say my name in that broken way that was going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
She said "harder" and I gave her more. The desk above us rattled. Something fell off the edge — a pen, a folder — and neither of us cared. I hitched her thigh higher on my hip and the angle changed and she cried out and I felt her clench around me.
"Right there," she said. "Right there, don't stop —"
I plowed on, reaching between us and stroking her clit with my thumb.
I worked her while I drove into her, claiming her as she claimed me, uniting us both in this closeness we could not sever.
I felt her pleasure building, the flutters against my cock.
I swelled impossibly huge inside her as she pulsed and screamed and I lasted three more strokes before I buried myself deep and came so hard my vision went black at the edges.
I caught my weight on my forearms so I wouldn't crush her. We stayed like that, breathing, tangled, my face in her neck, her hands in my hair. The storm was still going but it had shifted — the gusts were spacing out, the rain steadier, less violent. The building had stopped creaking.
After a while I rolled to my side and pulled her with me. The carpet was industrial and not kind but she tucked against my chest like she'd been fitting there her whole life. I pulled my henley off the desk chair above us and draped it over her shoulders.
"Conrad."
"Yeah."
"I have a pilot's license."
I went still. “Oh yeah?”
“I snuck to flight school in upstate New York, paid out of a bank account my family doesn't know exists." She said it into my chest, her breath warm on my skin. "Four hundred and twelve hours logged. That's how I knew about the wind shear. That's how I knew Daley was in trouble."
Everything about her made sense now, especially the part where my woman could fly the machines I knew how to keep running.
“Nobody knows," she said. "You're the first person I've told."
I pulled her tighter against me. This woman had been flying in secret while her family decided what she couldn't have.
"What are you going to do?"
"I had a plan when I came here.” Lili pushed up on her elbow, hair skirting across my chest. “I was going to bide my time, get my trust fund, and open a stupid tourism flight company flying my father’s rich friends above the range at sunset.
” She paused. “Then I met you, saw the work, felt the weight of these flights in the mountains.” Her voice got quiet. "Sunset flights felt small after that."
"What's the new plan?"
Her finger traced a path on my chest and she smiled in the semidarkness. “I don’t know the shape of it yet. But not tourism. Maybe I can find a job with search and rescue.”
We lay on the floor of her office, holding one another, thinking about how to use what we know to make a difference.
I thought of Wolf grounding his bird after the crash, swearing he’d never fly again.
Atlas walking out of the OR and not walking back in.
The people we couldn’t pull from the mud. The wind raged on and Lili shivered.
I pulled her close. "When the power comes back on," I said, "the phones are going to start. Denver. Your father. FAA, maybe, about the medical transport delay."
"I know."
"There are things I need to tell you about Raptor Creek. About the crash, and the bearing that failed, and what your father's company did to the men who survived it."
She pulled back far enough to see my face. “I want to hear.”
I believed her. I'd watched her find the rot in her own family tree and decide to hack it down. She was already mine in so many ways and I felt ready to face what was next.
She settled back against my chest. Her breathing slowed. The storm was moving east, dragging its noise with it, and the silence underneath was the kind of peace I hadn't heard in years — not empty, just still.
We fell asleep, woke up in the dark as the rain hammered the roof, and I made love to her again. She cleaned up in the bathroom, her curves glowing in the red emergency light as I watched my woman move with confidence.
For two years, I had been rusting here, paying penance without an endpoint. Guilt over a system too big to fail. And then came her.
Her breath against my chest. Her heartbeat slowing into sleep.
When the power came back on, the outside world would barge through that door wanting answers from both of us. Raptor Creek and Boston and everything between.
I'd be ready, too.