What am I doing.
He hears it too. Then his hand is in my hair, gathering it, pulling it off my neck, and he’s pushing into me from behind.
I grab the edge of the cabinet. I bite my own lip again.
The first thrust drives me up onto my toes. The second brings me back down, harder, and my forehead nearly meets the blinds. He fills me in a way that doesn’t leave room for thought—my hands clamp down on the edge of the cabinet, and my whole body tilts forward on reflex, making space for him, taking him. The sound that comes out of me is embarrassing. He doesn’t stop to let me hear it. His grip on my hip tightens, and he gives me another stroke, deeper, and I’m already rocking back to meet it before I’ve told my body to.
The man from last night had time. This one has a list of people he’s angry at today, and I’m the one he’s taking it out on, and the worst and most private thing I’ve learned about myself this week is how much my body wants to be that for him.
His hand comes up over my mouth.
I let it.
Through the blinds I watch the woman with the trench coat find her keys. I watch her sling her bag. She passes five feet from the glass wall of his office. If she turned her head—justturned her head—she would be looking directly at the window I’m pressed against.
She doesn’t turn.
He thrusts harder.
A sound breaks out of me and his hand muffles it flat. I can taste his palm. I can taste my own lipstick. My eyes are wet, not from crying, from something else—from the pressure of not being allowed to make noise while he does this to me.
Another person crosses the outer office. A man this time. He’s on his phone. He doesn’t look up.
I stop tracking them.
There’s only the cabinet under my hands, and the slats of the blinds swaying the tiniest bit from the motion of us, and his breath on the back of my neck, and his grip on my hip so tight I can already feel the shape of it blooming for tomorrow. There’s only his hand on my mouth and his voice in my ear, not words anymore, just breath, just heat.
I close my eyes.
The office outside disappears. The building disappears. The city. All that exists is the hitch in his breath at the back of my neck. The slap of skin on skin. The small, wet sounds.
Everything I was trying to hold onto today slips out of my hands in pieces and joins the shattered glass on the floor.
I wasn’t built for this.
That’s the thought that comes, clear and stupid. I wasn’t built for this man, for this office, for this afternoon. And yet, here I am.
I may not have been built for this, but one thing’s become certain:
I want this.
Desperately.
14
RAFFAELE
She’s close.
I can already tell. She’s bent forward over the cabinet, my hand still clamped over her mouth, and every thrust I give her is one she’s trying not to let me hear. Her whole body is working against itself.
I slide my hand off her mouth. Slip my fingers between her legs instead.
She breaks.
Her thighs shake. Her forehead drops forward onto the cabinet with a small, dull thud. She clenches around me so hard it almost takes me with her, and I have to hold still for a second, teeth set, to keep my own body in line. The sound she makes when she comes is low and wrecked and entirely involuntary. She’d be mortified if she could hear herself.
I want her to hear herself. I want her to listen to that sound all the way home tonight. Whatever apartment she thinks she’s going back to, whatever bed she plans to lie in, I want that noise to be in her ear when she closes her eyes.
