“You brought a folder,” Sienna said.
“Interview protocol.” She held up the folder as evidence.
Sienna leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. “At seven o’clock on a Friday night.”
Adriana’s grip tightened on the folder’s edge.
“The timeline requires it.”
Sienna leaned against the doorframe and smiled. The smile was knowing, patient, and entirely without judgment. It said:I see through you. I will accept whatever story you need to tell yourself to be here. The important thing is that you’re here.
“You better come in,” Sienna said, and stepped aside to let Adriana through.
The apartment looked different in the evening light than it had in the midnight darkness of their last visit. Warmer. More lived in. Sienna had turned on two floor lamps that cast pools of amber light on the wooden floors, and the windows were open to the evening air that carried the sounds of Echo Park settling into its Friday rhythm. A guitar played somewhere nearby, muffled and imperfect and human.
The bookshelves that lined the far wall were visible now in a way they hadn’t been the night before. Densely packed, organized by a system that appeared to be half-alphabetical and half-emotional, with photography collections shelved next to legal thrillers shelved next to a dog-eared copy of a Maggie Nelson book that had Post-it notes protruding from every third page. Sienna’s library told her more about the filmmaker in thirty seconds than three weeks of collaboration had.
There were photographs on the shelf between the books. Sienna and Dani in front of a camera rig, grinning. A woman who might have been Sienna’s mother, holding a much younger version of Sienna on her hip. A sunset over what looked like the New Mexico desert. Private things. The geography of a life that existed outside of the investigation and the alliance and the complicated, charged space between them.
They sat on the couch. Close but not touching. The distance was intentional on both sides and fooling neither of them. Adriana opened the folder. She presented the interview protocol with the same thoroughness she brought to client consultations, and Sienna listened with the same focused attention she brought to source interviews, and they maintained the pretense for approximately twenty minutes.
At the twenty-minute mark, Adriana realized she had read the same paragraph of the interview protocol three times because her attention kept drifting to the warmth of Sienna’s thigh beside hers on the couch. At the twenty-two-minute mark, Sienna’s hand brushed Adriana’s while reaching for a page, and neither of them pulled away.
At the twenty-four-minute mark, Sienna said, “Can I tell you something?” and Adriana said, “Yes,” and Sienna said, “I don’t care about the interview protocol right now. I haven’t cared about it since you walked through the door with that folder and that jacket and that look on your face that you think is professional and is actually the most transparent thing about you.”
That was the last professional sentence either of them spoke.
Adriana kissed Sienna first. She set down the folder, turned toward Sienna on the couch, and kissed her. Her mouth found Sienna's with a slow certainty that said she had come here knowing exactly what she wanted.
The couch cushion was warm beneath her palm. Sienna's hand rose to her jaw, thumb skimming her cheekbone, and the gentleness of it opened a place in Adriana's chest that had been sealed since Rachel. Outside, the guitar from the street had gone quiet, and the apartment held only the sound of them.
They moved to the bedroom. Slower this time than last night. Adriana walked Sienna backward through the hallway with her hands on Sienna's hips, her mouth finding the sensitive spot beneath Sienna's ear that she had already learned made Sienna's breath catch. Sienna's hands worked the buttons of Adriana's shirt one by one, patient and sure, and Adriana understood that this was not going to be the urgent collision of last night. This was going to be more dangerous. This was going to be chosen.
She let the shirt fall. She reached behind her back and unclasped her own bra and stood in the amber light of the hallway letting Sienna look at her without hiding or performing. Sienna's gaze moved over her with a reverence that made Adriana's throat tight, and then Sienna stepped forward and pressed her mouth to Adriana's collarbone and Adriana's hands came up to cradle her head and they stayed like that, breathing together, for a long time.
Sienna undressed herself slowly, watching Adriana watch her. The dark shirt over her head. Her jeans. Her underwear last, stepping out of it without looking away from Adriana's face, and Adriana's expression in the hallway light was the least guarded thing Sienna had ever seen on a human face — open want, undisguised, making no attempt to be anything other than what it was.
They moved to the bed.
Adriana laid Sienna down and knelt over her, and for a moment she simply looked. Sienna let her look. The city light moved across her skin and Adriana's eyes tracked it, unhurried, taking inventory of what she had been given.
Then she lowered her mouth to Sienna's throat and began.
She was different tonight. Last night had been urgency — two people who had wanted each other for weeks finally allowed to show it. Tonight Adriana moved with the deliberate patience of someone who had decided that thoroughness was the point. She kissed Sienna's throat, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin inside her elbow. She pressed her lips to the inside of Sienna's wrist and felt her pulse hammering there. She kissed her way down Sienna's side, following the line of her ribs, pausing at the hollow beneath them where the skin was thinnest and a slow kiss made Sienna's stomach contract.
"Adriana." Sienna's voice was low, unsteady.
"I know." Adriana pressed her mouth to Sienna's hip. "I'm getting there."
She wasn't getting there. She was taking her time in a way that was specific and deliberate and making Sienna's breathing increasingly difficult, and the unhurried quality of it, the sense that Adriana intended to do this for as long as she wanted and would not be rushed, was its own particular undoing.
Adriana kissed the inside of Sienna's thigh. Dragged her mouth upward slowly, stopping just short of where Sienna needed her, then turned and kissed the other thigh with the same maddening patience.
"You're doing that on purpose," Sienna said.
"Yes." No apology in it. Just confirmation.
Adriana looked up from between Sienna's thighs and the eye contact lasted long enough that Sienna's hands tightened in the sheets. Then Adriana lowered her head and put her mouth on her onto her swollen clit.
