His thumb finds the side of my grip. He moves my thumb a quarter of an inch with the precise pressure of a man who knows exactly where my thumb belongs. The movement is slow. The movement is professional. The movement is not professional. Both are true. I cannot tell which one his hand believes.
Then he stops moving.
It is a stillness I feel in three places at once. His thumb, on the grip. His chest, against my back. His breath, at my neck.
And then I become aware of him against my lower back.
Not pressed. Present. The heat there is the heat of a body that has answered the body in front of it, and the body in front of it is mine, and the body of Lex Konstantinos has decided what it has decided despite forty minutes of teaching-floor discipline, and I am feeling the decision through two layers of merino and one layer of his trousers.
I am, very specifically, not moving.
Then I hear it.
It is the smallest sound a man can make. The catch of an exhale that didn’t finish, the breath he was about to releasestopping at the back of his throat because he’s just remembered there is something he’s not allowed to do with it. Then he swallows. The motion is at the side of my neck, where his throat is, and I feel the swallow against my skin the way I feel the sound of it in the fine bones behind my ear.
If I move backward, I close the distance.
If I move forward, I lose the support of his chest at my back, which is the only thing keeping my legs under me, because my legs are not under me anymore. They have gone soft at the knees.
His mouth, at my ear, says one word. "Breathe."
I breathe. He breathes.
He takes it slowly. He takes it into a chest pressed against my back so that I feel the lift of his ribs against my spine, and the lift expands me forward by a quarter of an inch, and then the breath leaves him and I come back, and we have just done a single shared breath cycle in the dining room of his brownstone with a Glock pointed at the wall and his body around mine and his thumb on my thumb and his lips two inches from the side of my neck.
It is more intimate than the night I made our daughter.
Lex breaks first.
He does it the way he does everything physical, without making a sound. His thumb leaves the side of my grip. His right hand leaves my right hand. His left hand leaves my forearm. His chest leaves my back. He steps backward, one step, then a second, the heat of him retracting from my spine in a slow gradient that goes cold against the place where he had been.
He’s six feet behind me.
He says, in a voice that is dry and rough. "Good. Try again."
I try again. I get the grip right. He doesn’t come back behind me. He stands six feet away from the table and givesme corrections in words for the rest of the lesson, and his voice doesn’t return to the teaching register, and we both know it.
The lesson ends at 11:06.
The lesson is over. My body did not get the memo. I am standing in his dining room with my pulse still up and my skin still lit, and the ache that started low in my belly has spread, in the last twenty minutes, into a heavy, wet throb between my thighs that no amount of standing very still is going to talk down. He wound me tight for forty minutes and never once did what his body was so clearly asking to do, and now the wanting has nowhere to go. It just sits in me, hot and unspent. I have to act like a woman who has learned to clear a Glock, and not a woman who is, right now, embarrassingly and achingly ready for the man putting it in the safe.
I put the Glock on the table. He clears it. He picks it up. He put it in the safe in the dining room cabinet that I had not known was a safe until this morning.
"You are going to be fine with a weapon if you need one."
I set it down with both hands, the way he taught me, and I do not look at him. "I do not want to need one."
"I know."
He turns and walks out of the dining room. He doesn’t look back at me.
? ? ?
Petrov calls Lex at 11:41.
I’m at the kitchen island with a cup of tea I made myself, working on the wheat-motif trademark dispute that has stopped being interesting and become, in the last thirty minutes, a thingI am pretending to focus on. Lex is across the room at the dining table. The phone rings. Lex picks up. Lex listens for ninety seconds.
Lex says, “Thank you,” and hangs up. He looks at me. "Maeve?"
