She came in Sawyer’s lap with a muffled cry, her whole body shuddering, her head dropped back against Sawyer’s shoulder, her breath ragged and uneven through her nose. Sawyer kept her hand moving, kept the pace, kept her anchored, until the trembling peaked and broke and Nellie went boneless and slack with a long, barely-voiced exhale that was half laugh and half something slightly pained.
Tracing her lips down Nellie’s hairline, Sawyer waited until the last tremor had faded. Then she withdrew her hand, brought her fingers to her mouth, and tasted her handiwork.
Nellie turned her head, watched this, and the look on her face was something between scandalized and undone, which was, Sawyer had found, her favorite combination.
“You are,” Nellie said, after a considerable pause, “genuinely unhinged.”
“Mm.” Sawyer kissed her jaw. “I’m fine with that.”
Nellie laughed—fully, helplessly, covering her face with both hands—and then slumped back against Sawyer’s chest and stared at the ceiling. The open email draft was still on themonitor in front of them. The cursor blinked patiently at the end.
“You know,” Nellie said, still slightly breathless, “I’ve been inside a lot of offices in my life. Mostly to argue about land rights and environmental law with men who thought I was there to read the meter.” She tilted her head back to look at Sawyer. “None of them were anything like this.”
“I should hope not.”
Nellie grinned again and Sawyer kissed the corner of it.
Then she reached past her and deleted the email.
“Hey—”
“It was never going to get sent.”
“I could have framed it.”
“You could have started an HR investigation.”
Nellie sulked, briefly, magnificently, and then relented, the thin moral ground giving way faster than she’d probably like to admit. She tugged down the hem of her sweater and ran a hand over her braid as if her thoroughly pleasured state could be concealed by good grooming, which it absolutely could not. She looked thoroughly, visibly, impeccably ravished, and Sawyer was not remotely sorry about it.
21
CHAPTER 21 – NELLIE
The view from Sawyer’s lap was, objectively, excellent.
Nellie had no bones left, which was probably the technical explanation. They’d dissolved at some point in the last several minutes, slipped quietly out of her body while she was too occupied making muffled sounds into her own palm to notice. She was essentially a warm pile of Nellie-shaped feelings, draped over a billionaire, staring blankly at the email application they had recently desecrated for posterity.
“I could get used to this,” she announced. It came out slightly raspier than she’d expected, still carrying the faint evidence of effort.
“Get used to what, exactly?” Sawyer’s lips grazed the top of her head—not exactly a kiss, more of an acknowledgment, the equivalent of a hand on the small of her back, but significantly better.
Nellie gestured with one arm at the general atmosphere of the office. The desk. The carpet. The skyline. “This. All of this. The billionaire CEO lifestyle. Writing strongly worded emails.Occupying a chair so expensive it should have its own LinkedIn profile.” She shifted slightly and skimmed her nose along Sawyer’s jaw. “The orgasms… I’m genuinely reconsidering my career path.”
“You’d last four days before you unionized the building.”
“Three, probably. I work fast when I’m motivated.”
“Mm. And Nellie Fuller is famously motivated.”
She settled further back against Sawyer’s chest, tipping her head to rest against her shoulder. The warmth of her was extraordinary, not in terms of temperature, but more because she looked so outwardly cold with her ethereal sort of beauty that it was surprising to feel how human she is to touch. Nellie felt like she had earned it. The warmth of seven weeks of orbiting, of circling closer and getting burned and circling back anyway, concentrated now into the simple fact of being allowed to rest against her and stay.
Life was genuinely strange and mostly wonderful. Though it struck her squarely in the chest that life currently wasn’t making much sense.
Nellie had a van called Dolores and approximately zero retirement savings and a very loud opinion about the mycorrhizal network, and she had, against all reasonable expectations, ended up in the lap of one of the most powerful women in the United States. She supposed the universe operated on its own agenda. She supposed the mycorrhizal network might, in this metaphor, be made of something like this: unexpected connections routing through the dark, finding a way through because the right path existed whether anyone had thought to look for it or not.
She suspected Paloma would have something to say about that metaphor. Probably something involving the words “unhinged” and “you are absolutely feral for this woman,” and “Nellie, I need you to hear me.”
Nellie smiled to herself through the entire fictitious conversation.
