Chapter Eight
Archer
Her building looks better than I expected and worse than she deserves, a boxy three-story thing with a courtyard light that's out and a mailbox bank somebody keyed in its history.
I park across the street and sit there a minute with the engine off, doing something I haven't done since basic. Talking myself into a door.
Not complicated, what I'm walking into. My dream woman sent me her address.
I'm delivering myself to it. It should be the easiest thing I've done all week, easier than the parking lot, easier than the six months before that where I stood at a door every night and didn't let anybody past it, myself included.
Doesn't feel easy. Feels like the first time I ever ran an op brief that mattered, pulse loud enough I can hear it in my own ears, hands steady because hands are always steady, that part of me never asks permission. It's the rest of me that's a mess tonight.
I get out of the truck before I can build a longer list of reasons not to. Maya's not the only one who does that, apparently. Give me enough silence and I'll find my own way to stall.
Third floor, her text said. No elevator, which is its own small mercy, gives my legs something to do besides carry me straight into a decision I already made the second I read her address and typed back, ‘You sure?’ Wasn't really a question.
Was me giving her one more chance to change her mind before I stopped being able to.
Her door's the last one on the left, dented at the bottom like somebody's moved furniture through this hallway more than once and not carefully.
I raise my hand. Stand there a second with my knuckles an inch from the wood, and for a man who's breached actual doors under actual gunfire, this one's giving me more trouble than it has any right to.
I knock twice. Clean, even, no hesitation left in it once I've committed.
It takes long enough on the other side that I run through the ways this could go wrong, which is its own kind of training I never turn off. Then the lock turns, and the door opens, and every single scenario I built falls out of my head at once.
She's in black. Silk, thin straps, the kind of thing that isn't trying to be subtle about what it's for, and it's doing nothing to hide the curves I've been rationing myself thinking about since I saw her in the bar.
Her hair's down, a little wild, cheeks flushed like she ran here from somewhere, even though she's been standing in this apartment the whole time.
She's got one hand braced on the doorframe and the other holding the door like it's the only thing keeping her upright, and she's breathing like she just finished a sprint she didn't plan on running.
"Hi," she says, and it comes out breathless, comes out like she's been rehearsing something smoother than that and abandoned it the second she saw my face.
I say nothing for a second. Can't. My whole body's decided this is the moment to stop cooperating with the rest of me, and I stand there in her doorway looking at her like a man who forgot every word he ever learned.
"You gonna say something," she says, "or should I just close the door and we both pretend this didn't happen."
"Working on it." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to, rougher than I've heard it come out in longer than I want to admit. "Give me a second."
She steps back to let me in, and that's when I notice the rest of the apartment past her shoulder, and it's its own kind of evidence, laid out clear as a crime scene, the way she likes to call things.
Boxes tipped open, one on its side, clothes strewn across the couch and the floor in a trail that reads like a woman going through five outfits at speed and discarding four of them somewhere between DO NOT OPEN UNTIL EMOTIONALLY STABLE and here.
A hairbrush abandoned on the kitchen counter.
One shoe on, one shoe given up on entirely, sitting by itself near the window like it lost an argument.
"Don't," she says, catching me looking, color climbing up her neck. "Do not comment on the state of this apartment right now."
"Wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to."
"I was going to say it looks like a woman fought a war in here and the nightgown won." A corner of my mouth moves without my permission. "Solid system, though. Efficient."
"Oh my God." She drags both hands down her face, laughing despite herself, the sound catching somewhere between mortified and relieved. "I panicked. There wasn’t a complete plan. It’s very out of character for me, but I want it so I went for it.
And then you texted back ‘you sure’ like that, like I might not be sure, and I lost my mind a little and went through every single box looking for something to make it look like I planned this, and this emerged from the wreckage, and I need you to know I do not typically operate like this. "
"Could've fooled me." I close the door behind me, and the apartment goes quiet in that way rooms do right before something in them changes for good. "For what it's worth. Spontaneous is hot on you.” And it is.
"I wanted to be, but this isn’t me." She says it like a confession. "I panicked my way into a nighty, Archer. I planned there to be a robe or a cardigan or something."
I laugh. An actual laugh, short and real, and it catches her off guard enough that whatever nerves were running through her a second ago ease back half a step.
"You're gorgeous," I tell her, because it's true and because it needs saying before either of us gets ahead of ourselves.
"Gorgeous enough that I came up three flights of stairs faster than I've moved in years.
" I reach out, tuck a piece of hair back from her face, let my hand rest against her jaw the way it's been wanting to since the parking lot.
"But we don't have to do this tonight. We can wait.
I want to take you on a real date first. Dinner, a table, you in something you didn't fight a war to get into. "
Her breath catches under my palm. "That's..." she stops, starts again, voice gone quieter. "That's a really good offer."
"It's the only offer I've got that doesn't involve me embarrassing myself in your doorway."
"Noted." Something shifts in her eyes, a decision landing in them the way it does right before she commits to a thing, the same look she had making that first Old Fashioned like it owed her an apology.
"I'd love to go on a date with you." She steps closer, close enough that her hands land flat against my chest, close enough that I can feel her heartbeat working overtime through the silk. "But first."
She kisses me before I can ask, “First what?” and there's nothing careful left in it, nothing like the parking lot's five-second preview. Her mouth is soft and hungry and certain all at once, and whatever control I walked in here with goes up like dry kindling.
I growl low in my throat, hands finding her waist, then her hips, then the small of her back, hauling her in until there's no daylight left between us.
She fists both hands in my shirt the way she did outside the bar, except this time there's no car waiting, no five minutes, no reason on earth to pull back.
"Archer." My name comes out of her like a plea, like she's been holding it in since a text with just one word. "I've thought about this since the bar."
"Thought about a lot of things since the bar." I walk her backward, careful of a box, careful of the abandoned shoe, until we clear the wreckage and hit the hallway that has to lead somewhere with a bed in it. "None of them polite."
"Good." She laughs against my mouth, breathless and a little wild. "I was worried you were too much of a gentleman for this."
"Gentleman enough to offer a date first." I find the doorway, kick it open with my boot, find the bed and lay her down on it like she's something I've been waiting a long time to earn. "Not gentleman enough to leave now that you've kissed me like that."
Her eyes darken, pupils blown wide, chest rising fast under thin black silk. "Then don't."
I don't.
I take my time with her, more time than either of us has patience for at first, mapping every inch the fabric's been hiding since she opened that door.
Her skin's warm under my hands, softer than the photos in my head ever guessed at, and every sound she makes goes straight through me and settles somewhere I've been keeping locked up for years.
"You're staring," she breathes, when I slide both straps of the nightgown down her shoulders and just look at her for a second, cataloging every curve like it's information I need to survive on later.
"Can't help it." I press my mouth to her collarbone, feel her shiver under the touch. "Told you. Gorgeous."
I work my way down her quivering body, unhurried, deliberate, every stop along the way earning a gasp or a whispered version of my name that I intend to keep hearing for a long time.
By the time I settle between her thighs, she's already trembling, already saying please in a voice that's lost every trace of the woman who once color-coded a spreadsheet for spite.
"Archer, I swear to God, if you're slow about this—"
"Wasn't planning on slow." I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh, feel her hips buck up in response, unable to help herself. "Was planning on thorough."
Thorough is exactly what I give her. I lick up her slit, avoiding the pleasure button she’s desperate for me to caress.
She’s wet and moaning, making me growl as I can’t get enough of her taste.
I’ll never get enough of her. I flatten my tongue and give her what she wants and swirl around her clit.
She gasps. Her hands fist in the sheets, then in my hair, her back arching off the mattress, and I suck, lick, and caress her while I sink one finger and then two inside of her.
She clasps them tightly and my cock swells to the hardest I can ever remember being in my life.
“Archer,” her voice climbs while her pussy pulses around my fingers.
She’s almost there. She yells my name and turns it into something wordless and desperate.
The single best sound I've heard in longer than I've had words for.
Maya comes; it's fast and total, her whole body drawing tight and then shaking loose again, my name breaking apart on her lips like it's the only word she's got left.
I stay right where I am, licking her gently, keeping my fingers inside her, stroking softly until the last of it fades out of her, until her hand in my hair goes slack and her breathing settles into something almost human again.
"Well," she manages, once she's got enough air back to talk, staring up at the ceiling like it owes her an explanation. "There goes my whole plan for playing it cool."
I crawl up beside her, pull her against my chest, feel her heartbeat still going double time under my palm. "Didn't want cool," I tell her, meaning it more than I've meant most things I've said out loud in years. "Wanted this."
She turns into me, presses her smile against my jaw. "Good," she says. "Because I've got a whole night left."