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Then I shove my boxers down and get my fist around my cock, and she’s in the room before I’ve finished the first stroke.

I don’t fight it. I don’t even slow down long enough to be ashamed of not fighting it. I just build her out of the parts I’ve been stealing all week, the way I’d build anything, from the ground up.

The office, because that’s where she lives in my head. Late, dark outside the window I fixed, her still at that desk with her hair up and a pen behind her ear, working an hour nobody’s paying her for. And me coming through that screen door knowing exactly what I’m going to do about it.

I clear the desk with one arm.

Her grids, her piles, her day planner, four days of work straight onto the floor, and in my head she doesn’t flinch. She looks at the mess. Then at me.

“That was alphabetical,” she says, in the voice she uses on freight invoices.

“I know.”

“You’ll be sorry Monday.”

“Shut up, Daniels.”

My hand’s going too fast already, too tight, so I ease off and make myself slow down, because in here, I’ve got all night and I’m not wasting her.

I get my hands under her thighs and lift her onto the wood, and she weighs nothing, and she’s so small against me up close that I have to stop and breathe before I can do anything else. Her knees open around my hips without me asking, and my grip changes without me deciding anything, slower and heavier, thumb dragging over the head on every pass, my hips already working up into my hand in a rhythm I’d be embarrassed by if there were anyone here to see it. She reaches up and takes the pen out of her hair and drops it, and that’s when I get her jeans open, working the button and the zip with my mouth already on the back of her neck, on that strip of bare skin I’ve been staring at for ten days, biting it, licking it, feeling her whole spine go loose under my mouth, hearing the first uneven breath she has ever taken anywhere near me, while she says my name in a voice that isn’t brisk anymore.

“Mr. Cole.”

“Don’t.”

“Mr. Cole.” Perfectly level. Enjoying herself.

My hips come up off the mattress on their own. I plant a heel against the footboard and shove up into my fist, and it’s not enough, so I spit in my palm and start again slower, and slower is worse, slower means I have to stay in there with her.

I get the jeans off her. In my head she helps, lifting her hips off my desk, kicking them away, and then she’s sitting on the wood in nothing but that sweater with her thighs open and her chin up, waiting for me to catch up.

“Tell me what you want,” I say.

And she does. In her ordinary voice, in complete sentences, in the same tone she uses to tell me a warranty department has folded, she tells me exactly what she wants me to do to her, and I lose about a year of my life listening to it.

I have to stop. Hand off, breathing through my teeth, gripping the base of my cock hard enough to hurt to keep this from being over, sweat coming up along my hairline in a cold room, both heels dug into the mattress now, everything below my waist locked tight and taking no instruction from me at all. It’s the voice that’s doing it. She could read me a parts order in that voice, and I’d be in this exact condition.

“Say it again.”

“You heard me.”

“Say it again, Daniels.”

She says it again.

That’s when my hand quits behaving. I go hard and fast and mean, working myself with my back arched off the bed and my other fist twisted into the sheet, the noise coming out of me loud enough that I’d care if anybody lived within a mile of here. My balls are already drawing up tight. Too soon. Way too soon.

So I put her mouth on me instead, because that lasts longer and because I’ve been thinking about her mouth since the day she stepped down out of that truck. In my head she gets off my desk and onto her knees on that filthy office floor without me having to ask, and she takes her hair down herself, and she’s got one hand pressed to my thigh to hold me still, and that’s the thing that nearly ends it before it starts. Her hand on me. Holding me where she wants me.

“Look at me,” she says.

I look at her.

She keeps her eyes on mine the whole time, and every noise she makes goes straight up my spine, and in my head, I’ve got both hands in her hair and half a plan for the rest of the night.

None of it survives.

The office disappears. The desk disappears. Her voice disappears. Everything I built comes down at once and there’s nothing left but her hand on my thigh and my fist and the sound of my breathing, and then it’s on me with no warning at all, no climb, no working for it, rolling up out of the base of my spine and taking my whole body with it, hips driving off the mattress, heel jammed against the footboard, jaw locked so hard it cracks, spilling hot over my fist and my stomach in long pulls that keep coming after I’ve stopped moving.