My shoulder blades hit the wall hard. I don’t care. The tray finishes falling somewhere under his hands, the last shard going off the silver and onto the floor with a small musical ring, and he doesn’t look at it, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react at all. His mouth hasn’t left my skin since the wall.
He doesn’t care about anything else.
His mouth moves to my neck. My knees go soft.
Buttons. I register them distantly—his fingers working fast and ruthless down the line of my blouse. The cream fabric falls open. Cool air moves across my chest, and his breath follows it, hot and uneven, right at the hollow of my throat.
“Raffaele—”
He doesn’t look up.
“We can’t,” I protest. “Not here. What if someone?—”
The blinds come down.
He reaches past my shoulder without breaking his mouth from my skin, catches the cord, and pulls. The slats fall in a single clean drop, and the room dims by half. The office outside is a blur now through the narrow cuts between them. I can still see it. Just barely. Shapes moving. Lights.
His hand slides down my stomach. Past my waistband. Up under my skirt.
I gasp—too loud—and he catches the sound in his mouth and swallows it.
Stop him. Say something real. Push him off.
I’m not going to.
His fingers find me through the thin fabric. I’m embarrassingly ready. He knows it. I hear him exhale against my throat. He pushes two fingers inside me, and I whimper.
“Quiet,” he orders, low against my ear.
Whatever control he usually keeps a fist around is not in this room with us.
I bite down on my lip.
He works me against the wall until my hips are pushing into his hand without my permission. Until my head has tipped back against the plaster and my eyes have squeezed shut. I can hear my own breath. I can hear his, faster than mine.
“Move.”
He turns me. His hand is flat between my shoulder blades, he walks me forward three steps, past his desk, past the chair, and the front of my thighs meet the low cabinet under the window. I feel him come up behind me in the same motion.
His belt is already at the buckle before I’ve braced my hands on the wood.
The blinds are right in front of my face.
Through the slats, I can see into the outer office. A woman from two offices over is pulling a trench coat off the back of her chair. Someone is saying something to someone else by the elevator, both of them turned half away.
I make a small sound that isn’t a word.
He’s behind me. His hand is on my hip. The other is somewhere I can’t see, and then I can hear it—his belt, the quietclick of the buckle, the soft shift of fabric. “Don’t look at them. Look at me.”
I turn my head. He’s right there. Jaw tight, eyes on me, nothing controlled about him now at all.
My skirt goes up. My underwear goes down.
I should be clawing for the door. Instead, I reach past him. My hand finds the lock on the door.
I turn it.
The small mechanical click of the bolt sliding home is the loudest sound in the room.
