He walked me gently back against the railing, one hand braced beside mine on the cold iron, his mouth still tracing patterns against my throat while his other hand slid down, gathering fabric at my thigh until his fingers found bare skin. The city glittered below us — a hundred thousand lights indifferent to the fact that I was forty floors up and losing ground fast.
When his fingers slipped beneath the lace and found me, his exhale was slow and reverent.
“God,” he breathed. Just that. Like the word cost him something.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said faintly.
“Em.” My name in his mouth—rough and amused and something else underneath. “I can feel exactly how flattering it is.”
I made a sound that was absolutely not a laugh and absolutely not a moan, somewhere humiliatingly between the two.
He worked me with devastating focus—unhurried, attentive, two fingers curling deep while his thumb traced slow, knowing circles, learning what made me gasp and returning to it withthe precision of a man who paid very close attention. His lips moved against my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw. His free hand palmed my breast again, fingers finding the peak through silk and rolling gently until I arched into him with a sharp inhale.
“Still want me to introduce myself?” he murmured.
“I want you to—” The thought dissolved. “Don’t stop.”
“That wasn’t an introduction.”
“I will push you off this balcony.”
He laughed—warm and quiet, pressed into my hair—even as his fingers coaxed me higher. When I came it built slowly then broke all at once, and I muffled the sound against the side of his neck, my nails pressing crescents into his shoulders through the wool of his jacket.
He held me through it. That surprised me—the steadiness of his hands, the way his lips pressed briefly to my temple like punctuation.
Then he was turning me gently, one hand splayed warm and firm against my stomach, and I felt him—the hard, insistent press of him against me, the barely-leashed restraint in the way he was breathing.
“Still thinking about pushing me off?” he said against my ear.
“Jury’s still out.”
His lips curved against my neck. Then: “Tell me to stop.”
I reached back and found him instead. Felt him shudder. Felt the restraint in him crack, just slightly, at the edges.
He entered me slowly—one hand still pressed flat and warm against my stomach, the other braced on the railing beside mine, his forehead dropping to rest between my shoulder blades. The stretch of him pulling a soft, fractured sound from my throat that the wind took before I could regret it.
Below us, Chicago glittered on—relentless and indifferent, a hundred thousand lives in motion. Up here there was only thecold iron under my hands, the heat of him at my back, and the devastating, disorienting feeling of being completely undone by a man whose name I didn’t even know.
He began to move.
Deep. Deliberate. Each thrust rolling through me like a tide, unhurried and consuming, his lips pressed to the curve of my neck like he was trying to memorize something he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to keep. When I tipped my hips back to take him deeper, he groaned quietly into my hair—low and unguarded, nothing like the controlled voice he’d used all evening—and the sound of it did something to my chest I didn’t have words for yet.
“You feel—” He stopped. His hand tightened on my hip. “I can’t?—”
“I know,” I breathed. Because I did. Because whatever this was—this reckless, nameless, spectacular mistake—I felt it too.
When I finally fractured, it was with his name on my lips—except I didn’t know his name, so it came out as nothing, just a breathless sound swallowed by the night. He followed, one arm wrapping around me, pulling me back against him, his release quiet and undone, his mouth pressed into my hair like a secret.
For a long moment there was only our breathing and the city below.
His forehead rested between my shoulders. His lips brushed my skin—barely a touch, softer than anything else about the night. I turned my cheek against the cool railing and opened my mouth to ask?—
The glass door behind us swung open.
Laughter spilled out first, bright and careless, followed by the sharp click of heels. “Oh god—sorry, I didn’t realize—” The voice cut off in embarrassed retreat, the door swinging shut behind her.
But the spell was broken.
