“I’ve been thinking about this,” I said against her stomach, moving lower, “since you walked through that elevator.”
“You’ve been — oh god—” The sentence dissolved as my mouth found her, and I felt her hips buck upward, her fingers threading into my hair.
I took my time here too. Learned her with the same focused attention she brought to everything she cared about, reading her responses, finding what made her gasp and returning to it with the precision of a man who had decided this mattered. Her thighs trembled against my shoulders. Her breathing came in ragged pulls. When she finally came apart it was with my name torn from her throat, her whole body shaking, her grip in my hair tight enough to hurt in a way I didn’t remotely mind.
I worked her through every wave until she was pulling weakly at my shoulders, oversensitive and undone.
“Come here,” she managed.
I moved up her body, and she reached for my belt with hands that weren’t entirely steady — I noticed, and the sight of her like this, undone and reaching for me anyway, did something to my chest I had no clean language for.
When she freed me and wrapped her hand around me I groaned against her neck, my hips pushing forward involuntarily.
“Now,” she said. Not a request.
“Look at me,” I said.
Her eyes came to mine. Dark and certain and entirely present, the way she always was when she’d made a decision she believed in.
I pressed into her slowly — unhurried, deliberate, feeling every inch of her adjust and accept, her hands gripping my back hard enough to anchor us both.
She exhaled my name against my shoulder — not a question, not a direction, just the specific sound of someone arriving somewhere they’d been trying to get to for a long time.
I moved with more care than I felt — slow, deep strokes that had her head falling back against the pillow, her nails dragging down my spine. I could feel all of it — the warmth of her surrounding me, the way she moved to meet me, the specific give of her body learning mine like something it had been waiting to know.
“Emilia.” Her name came out rough, stripped of everything I’d been trying to hold back. She pulled my mouth back to hers before I could find the rest of it.
The pace built gradually, both of us chasing something deeper than urgency — something that had been building for a month of late nights and sharp arguments and careful restraint finally given room to be what it actually was. I felt her clench around me, heard the broken sound she made against my mouth, felt her come apart the second time with my name on her lips and her whole body arching into mine.
I followed her over the edge with my face buried in her neck, her name said against her skin like the prayer it had been since a service corridor at a charity gala, when I’d looked at a woman with ink on her thumb and decided she was going to be a problem.
I’d been right.
She was the best problem I’d ever had.
We lay tangled together afterward in the city light, her head on my chest, my hand moving slowly through her hair. Neither of us spoke for a long time, and the silence was the comfortable kind — the kind that didn’t need filling.
“Your board is going to want answers in the morning,” she said eventually.
“I know.”
“And Hartley is still out there.”
“I know that too.”
“And the article publishes in—” she checked the time on her phone, “—nine hours.”
“I’m aware.” My hand stilled in her hair. “Are you going to keep listing problems, or are you going to let me have twenty minutes where none of that exists yet?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
“Twelve.”
“Done.”
She laughed — soft and genuine, pressed against my chest — and I felt it move through me like something I’d been waiting a long time to feel.
