14. Public Pressure #3
I freed myself from my trousers and stroked once, twice, watching her watch me. Her tongue touched her lower lip. Her knees tightened against my hips.
"Tell me you want this," I said, the words sounding like they were scraped from my throat. "Not that you need it. That you want it."
I pressed against her entrance, every muscle in my body screaming to take what she was offering. One last coherent thought cut through the haze.
"Protection."
"I'm on birth control." Her eyes locked on mine, impatient and certain. "And I'm clean."
"Me too."
"Then stop talking."
She pulled me closer, and I pushed into her in one deep stroke, stopping when her breath broke against my mouth. She was tight and hot around me, gripping me like she could keep me from leaving if she simply held on hard enough.
I stilled, buried to the root, and felt her pulse around me, her body adjusting, her breath coming in jagged bursts against my neck.
"Move," she whispered, desperate. "Please. I need you to?—"
I pulled out and drove back in, setting a rhythm that was too fast, too rough, our bodies finding the angry edge where pain and pleasure blurred together. The desk creaked beneath us. A pen rolled off and clattered to the floor.
Somewhere down the hall, Ava slept inside the fragile quiet we were supposed to be protecting, but I was lost in Riley, in the way she met every thrust with her own urgency, refusing to let me consume her without consuming me in return.
Her blouse gaped where buttons had surrendered to pressure, and I pushed the fabric aside to find her breast, cupping the weight of her in my palm before grazing my thumb over her nipple. She cried out, arching into my touch, and I felt the first tremor of her orgasm building where we joined.
"Not yet," I gritted out, though I was already losing the fight against my own release, her heat dragging me toward the edge with every stroke. "Stay with me. Just?—"
"Can't." She was unraveling, I could feel it, her internal muscles fluttering around me in prelude. "You've already—I'm already?—"
I captured her mouth to swallow the sound of her coming apart, and she broke beneath me with a violence that felt like accusation.
Her body seized, milking me in rhythmic pulses that tore the last of my control from its moorings.
I followed her over, burying my face in her neck and groaning her name like it was the only word I knew, spending inside her with a force that left me shaking against her, weak and exposed and suddenly, horribly aware of where we were.
The silence that followed was worse than the argument.
Riley's breathing slowed against my shoulder, her fingers still tangled in my hair, but I felt the moment she returned to herself—the slight stiffening of her spine, the way her thighs pressed together as if remembering modesty too late. I was still inside her. I should have moved. I couldn't.
I eased away first, because one of us had to remember how to move.
Riley slipped off the desk with her back to me, hands trembling as she tugged down her skirt and pulled the parted edges of her blouse together.
Fabric rustled. Our breathing filled the silence. Beneath the scattered papers, my phone kept buzzing like the world had been waiting for us to remember it.
"Riley."
She shook her head once. The anger was gone from her face.
Somehow, that was worse.
I reached for her, then stopped before I could touch her.
Riley stepped away anyway, as if even the possibility hurt.
"That meant something," she said.
Hope struck before I could stop it.
"And that's what makes it feel awful."
I had taken punches that cracked bone and dropped me to my knees. None had landed like the knowledge that I had done this to her.
"I'm sorry."
Her laugh broke. "For which part?"
All of it. Victor. Ava's flinch. Zoe's name in my mouth like a weapon. The way I had reached for Riley with panic under my ribs and called it need because need sounded less selfish than escape.
The truth formed too late. By then, my silence had already answered for me.
She wiped beneath one eye, furious at the tear more than at me. "I can't be the place you disappear into whenever you don't know how to survive."
Then she grabbed her shoes from beside the desk and crossed to the door.
"Don't go."
She stopped with her hand on the lock. For one second, I thought she might turn back.
"You already left," she whispered.
The door opened. A blade of dim hallway light cut across the wrecked office.
Then Riley stepped through it and pulled the door closed behind her.
I stood alone until my gaze landed on the framed photo I had knocked from the shelf. Zoe, Ava, and me, caught in sunlight and the innocent belief that love made anything permanent.
I crouched and reached for the frame. A shard caught beneath my palm. I closed my hand around it anyway.
Pain cut bright across my skin, but I barely felt it. I was too busy staring at Riley's empty reflection in the broken glass.
On the desk, my phone lit again.
Victor Raines.
Forty-eight hours to save the relaunch.
Riley had needed less than one to make me understand it was not the only thing I could lose.