I think about all of that clearly while I fuck my assistant against a cabinet with her boss’s deputy standing six feet away behind a locked door.
“And there’s a new file that came in,” Marcy says. “Marked urgent. I’ve left it with the others.”
Bea’s nails dig into my wrist. She’s rocking back into me now, the tiniest movement, not something she’d ever admit to later. Her body has made the choice her mouth hasn’t. She is going to come a second time and it’s going to happen in the next thirty seconds whether either of us wants it to or not.
I want it to.
“I’ll just leave everything here. Let me know if you need anything else tonight, Mr. D’Amico.”
The soft whisper of paper. A folder sliding under the door.
“Have a good evening.”
Footsteps retreat. Measured. Unhurried.
The elevator chimes. Doors open and slide shut.
I wait another two seconds. Just to be sure. Then I take my hand off Bea’s mouth and grip her hip with it instead, two-handed now, and I stop being careful.
She gasps out something that isn’t a word.
“You were quiet,” I tell her. “Good girl.”
I drive into her. Her hands search for purchase on the cabinet. A pen rolls off the edge and hits the floor. I watch the back of her neck, the flushed skin there, the damp strand of hair curling against it, and I think about the fact that Bea didn’t make a sound because she didn’t want to be heard—which means she could have, which means somewhere in her head she chose me over a scream.
That thought runs through me like a current.
I bend forward. Put my mouth against her ear.
“Tell me you wanted them to hear you.”
She shakes her head, furious.
“Liar.”
She comes again before I’m done with the word. Her knees give out and only my grip on her hips keeps her upright. She bites her own forearm to keep the sound in, and that’s when I go, too. With my forehead against the nape of her neck, my breath completely out of rhythm for the first time in a day.
For a second I can’t think at all.
That’s the part I don’t get from anyone else.
Then the thinking comes back, and it comes back wrong. Not the guilt I keep waiting for. Not the cost-benefit calculationI’d usually be running by now. Just a cold, clean satisfaction and a kind of stupid, unfamiliar amusement at myself—and, ridiculously, the beginning of a smile I can’t quite get rid of.
There’s a stretched, quiet beat after.
Then she moves.
Her hand finds my chest and pushes.
I let her.
She straightens up, off the cabinet, off me, in one clumsy motion. She catches herself on the corner of the desk on the way. One of her heels has come half off. Her skirt is a mess. She pulls it down with shaking fingers, turns her back to me, and starts on the buttons of her blouse.
I lean back against the edge of the desk and watch her.
Her fingers miss the first button, and she has to start over. Her hair is catastrophic—and when she reaches up to deal with it, she gets distracted and starts on the blouse again instead.
Cuteisn’t the word either. But it’s closer.
