The feel of her body on mine is strangely addicting. That hot, wet, tightness, gliding up and down my shaft. The way she leans onto me, her breasts on my chest, her mouth devouring mine. The damn feel of this woman might be enough to kill me. She rides me like she’s enjoying this just as much as I am.
In the dark, between kisses, she sweetly whines, “Dario, fuck.”
I grab her ass over the sheets and squeeze, making her buck on me harder. Faster. I sit up, forcing her to do the same, then wrap my arms around her waist to bring her against me. I like it this way—her on top, our bodies as close as possible. Her scent is heady, and I tear through her lace with my teeth so I can taste her tits.
She squirms against me, riding for all she’s worth right before she’s coming on my cock, a dance of pleasure. Her voice cracks when she pours curses on my ears. When she shakes this time, it’s for all the right reasons, and one of them makes me come too.
Afterward, she stays close, her hand flat on my chest, and her breathing slows and evens out. I lie in the dark and let it be exactly what it is.
In my professional life—both of them—the categories overlap frequently enough that I stopped tracking the boundary a long time ago. It was cleaner not to. If something is useful and I want to do it, fine. If something is useful and I don’t want to do it, I do it anyway. Most of the time.
If something is useless and I want to do it—that’s the category I’m least practiced at, the one I’ve kept the smallest, and it’s the one that seems to be expanding.
There was no profit in what I did tonight. And I did it anyway.
I don’t examine it further. I close my eyes and fall into a dreamless sleep.
ELEVEN
LENA
I’ve thoughtabout Dario’s busted knuckles more than I want to. I can’t stop thinking about what he did for me. Looking away never makes anything easier. It just makes it take longer.
By any reasonable measure, I should be more disturbed than I am. The man I’m sleeping with beat up my boss on my behalf. Disturbed is the proportionate response. I know this.
And then I think about Reggie’s hand on my jaw. Two reports that went nowhere. The look of a man who has decided the rules don’t apply to him because nobody has ever made them apply.
When I think of him and what he did and how HR screwed me over, I’m not disturbed anymore.
What I actually feel is relieved, and—this is the part I’m sitting with honestly—a little lit up. Not proud of the lit-up thing. But there’s a part of me that has been navigating the world alone for five years, and that part is profoundly grateful to have been shown that I don’t have to manage this one alone. Someone enforced the rules. I’m going to let that be what it is.
I’ve decided what that says about me is that I’m human. Or a cavewoman, since I couldn’t stop thinking about Dario beating the shit out of Reggie, and I got so turned on that I went to him, unprompted, to show my gratitude.
There’s another piece of this that I can’t stop thinking about over my morning coffee. The version of Dario I first met and the version with the bruised knuckles are not different people.
One person, one center of gravity. The ice pops for a sick child and the knuckles busting on Reggie’s face reside in the same man.
I find that more interesting than I should.
I’m also working out the fact that I find it attractive, and I want to be honest with myself about that. I’ve been making decisions based on math for five years—what Opal needs, what I can provide, what the numbers allow—and if I’m going to make a decision that involves something as inconvenient as actual feeling, I want to do it with my eyes open.
I know what he is and roughly what his life contains, even if I don’t have all the details. I know the arrangement has a built-in end. I know all of this.
And I’m still here, in this apartment that isn’t mine, and it’s starting to fit anyway. That’s the thing I’m least sure what to do with. The fitting. The way I stopped having to think about where the mugs are. The way Opal and I have a routine in this space now that doesn’t feel provisional, even though it is. The way I’ve started doing my job hunt at the kitchen counter because the light is better there, which is a very small thing to notice, and somehow the thing I keep noticing.
I’ve wedged into Dario’s life more comfortably than I ever expected to. He’s done so much for me in the short time I’ve known him. Even him beating someone up for me… I’m starting to feel a little like a gangster’s moll, and even though I roll my eyes at myself for the dramatic thought, it’s still there.
A letter of recommendation arrives on Friday morning. I read it at the kitchen table with my coffee, then again, and a third time, because it’s so genuinely good that I keep thinking I must be misreading it.
Reggie has apparently spent years watching me work—my resolution rate, my escalation percentage, the feedback loop I built for difficult calls, the informal coaching I’ve been doing with newer staff. He writes about leadership in a way that’s concrete and nothing like what you’d get from someone going through the motions. He says I should have been promoted eighteen months ago and that the delay reflects a failure of management judgment, not capability.
I sit with that sentence for a while. I’m utterly speechless. When I tell Dario about it, he coolly says, “Took him long enough.” Then he walks away. I have no idea what that was about.
HR calls on Monday. They’d like to discuss a settlement, Judy says, in the careful neutral tone of a department in containment mode. I say yes, I’d like to discuss that too. We schedule a call for Wednesday. When I hang up, I stay at the table and feel something shift—that particular chapter closing.
Wednesday’s call goes well. The offer is more than reasonable given the circumstances.
“That’s generous. But I’ve been told I’m entitled to more compensation than that for the hell I experienced at his hands,and the breach of HR’s policies.” Truth is, I’m the one telling me that. But I’m happy to let them think I’ve seen a lawyer.
