It was completely savage and lacking in finesse. It was wild and hard. It was wonderful.
She cried out his name right before he lost control, and the two of them went over the cliff together.
His forehead was pressed against hers. “There. You had two to my one. I’m already practicing keeping your commandments.”
She couldn’t believe it happened again. Except of course it had. If they could think about it, they wouldn’t be in this place. If they could control themselves, they wouldn’t have been here to begin with.
Now that they had acknowledged it, now that they’d done the paperwork, it seemed like there was no more restraint left.
She looked at the paperwork sitting there at his end of the table. They would sign that, and she had a feeling there was almost no point pretending that it wouldn’t end up here again. But those amendments wouldn’t matter. But maybe they…
Maybe she could find someone else. Maybe this was just the discovery of sex. As she lay there on the glossy boardroom table, with that place between her legs still throbbing, it felt entirely disingenuous. But she wanted to hope that it was possible. Wanted to believe that it could be true.
But then the obverse would also be true. He would have other women.
And just the thought of that made her feel violent.
“You look angry. Which is not unusual when you are around me, but it is unusual for a woman I’ve just thoroughly ravished.”
“I’m just thinking about logistics,” she said, getting up off the table and putting herself back in order as he did the same.
“Then I didn’t do my job correctly.”
“You did just fine. It’s only that we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation.”
“Is there any chance you’ll ever speak to me like I’m a human being?”
The question, asked with such gravity and sincerity, shocked her. She met his gaze. “I…didn’t think you wanted that.”
“It isn’t a matter of wanting—it seems that it would be a better way for us to be.”
“We have a zero percent success rate not shagging each other’s brains out when a table is near recently, and I’m not really sure what to do with that. So being human or not human is sort of the least of my worries right now.”
“Understandable.”
She had the sudden, disorienting thought that they had done absolutely everything backward. She hated him, down to the very marrow of her bones, but it didn’t even come from a deeply realized place. She had sex with him, but she didn’t really know him. They had negotiated this entire marriage on paper. She understood why they needed it. She had even been part of insisting on it. But they had always had something between them. Whether it was the baggage of what had happened in his parents’ marriage, or the reality of their relationship because of their parents’ marriage. Now the baby. She didn’t know what it was like if they were just Heather and Romeo. She had no idea at all.
He looked…not softer now, but perhaps a little bit more human. His hair was a mess now, his tie loose…
“When I called you, you hadn’t just had sex with another woman, had you?”
“Excuse me.”
“Did you? Because you looked a lot like this.”
“I haven’t touched anyone since you and I were together. How could you think that I would?”
“I don’t know you. And even more crucially, I have no reason to believe that what happened between us meant anything to you.”
He moved over to the boardroom table again, and rested his knuckles on the top of it. He looked down at the surface of the table. And then up at her. “What happened between us was more than ten years in the making. What happened between us stole my ability to think critically. And I am not a man who— Of course you don’t even know that. Because you think of me as someone who is driven by emotion, because when I’m around you it is nothing but sparks and anger, but that is not how I am in my life.”
Well, that didn’t fit her narrative and she didn’t like it at all.
“How would I ever know that?” she sputtered.
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “You would never know. Just as I know nothing of you other than your petulance, your vindictiveness. Your…softness when you are naked. The way that you taste.”
It made her want to kiss him. There had been no kissing this time. Funny how they fell upon each other with such ferocity, but didn’t engage in any of the tenderness. Or perhaps not funny at all.
