The stretch is slow, perfect, the full-body exhale of a fit that I'll never get used to and never want to. He fills me slowly and I take all of it, my thighs burning, my hands braced on his shoulders, until I'm seated flush against him and we're both breathing hard and neither of us is moving.
"Look at me," he says.
I look. His face is inches from mine. His hands are on my hips, fingers digging in, holding me still while he adjusts to the feel of me around him.
"This," he says. "This is what I fight for. Every folder on that desk, every call, every decision I make in this room. It's for this. For you."
I start to move, a slow roll of my hips that makes his head tip back against the chair. Then faster, finding the rhythm, the angle that drags him against the spot inside me that makes my vision swim. His hands guide me, lifting and pulling, setting a pace that's just on the edge of too much.
The chair creaks with every thrust and I lean back against the edge of his desk. A pen rolls off the edge and hits the floor and neither of us gives it a thought because his mouth is on my chest as he feasts on my tits and nipples.
"Harder," I breathe. "Nick, harder."
He straightens, my nipples pebbling as the cold air touches wet skin, and grips my hips harder driving up into me. The force lifts me off his lap on every stroke, gravity bringing me back down onto him with a slap of skin that echoes off the walnut shelves. His thumb finds my clit and presses and circles. The dual sensation, him inside me and his thumb on me, builds the pressure so fast that I'm already close, already climbing, already clenching around him in pulses that make him groan.
"That's it," he says, his voice wrecked. His eyes flit from my bouncing tits to the space between us where his cock slides in and out of me. "I can’t wait for you to come on my cock, Sadie. Right here in this chair. You’re going to milk my balls dry of every drop with your hungry pussy."
I begin to tremble as the coil tightens, tightens. I bring one hand from his shoulder and roll my nipple between my thumb and index finger as I squeeze firmly on the soft flesh.
“Look at how perfect you are,” he says before swiping his tongue over my other nipple. “Look at how well you take my cock. Look, Sadie—”
I look down and see exactly what he means. His ridged cock, rock solid and so thick I can see how stretched I am, my labia framing it with every thrust. I do take it well. I take it like I’m the only person in the world who can.
The orgasm tears through me. My head drops back as I cry out, my body seizing around him with tight rhythmic contractions that I feel in my spine and my toes and the backs of my knees. He rides me through it, one hand still on my hip, the other pressing his thumb against my sensitive nub. His hips are still moving, drawing it out until I'm shaking and twitching and gasping his name.
Three more thrusts, deep and hard, and he follows me. Burying himself to the hilt and holding there as his cock pulses inside me, the heat of his release filling me in waves. His eyes never leave my pussy and the sound he makes is low and broken and private, something meant for me.
We sit in the chair. Connected. Breathing. His arms around me, his face in my neck, the desk lamp still throwing its warm circle across the work that will still be there when we're done. His cock stays firm inside me. There’s a slow trickle of him leaking from where we're joined, warm and sticky, and I don'tmove. I don't want to move. I want to stay in this chair in this office with this man inside me and the door closed and the world on the other side of it doing whatever the world does while Nikolai Zhirinovsky holds his future wife in his lap.
I close my eyes and breathe him in and let the sadness and the joy exist in the same space. Because that's what life is, both things at once, and I'm done pretending otherwise.
Epilogue
Sadie
The locket is warm against my collarbone.
I keep touching it. My fingers find the chain and follow it down to the small oval of gold that sits against my breastbone, and I press it there, feeling the metal, feeling the hinge, feeling the tiny clasp that holds the two halves together around the photograph inside.
He left it on the pillow this morning. I woke up alone in the bed, which almost never happens, and there it was, a velvet box on the dark cotton where his head should be. No note. No card. Just the box, and inside it, a gold locket on a chain so fine it looked like thread, and inside the locket, my parents.
Their wedding day. The same photograph from my album, from the drugstore sleeve with the yellowed plastic, except this version has been restored. The colors are true. The fading is gone. My mother's face is clear and sharp and smiling. They are young and certain and alive.
He had it restored. He took the photo from my album without telling me, had someone clean it and reprint it and fit it into a locket small enough to rest against my heart, and he put it on the pillow for me to find alone because Nick understands something about grief that most people don't. He understands that themoment you need to feel it is the moment before you do the thing that makes their absence real.
I cried for ten minutes in the bathroom with the shower running so no one would hear. Then I put the locket on and got dressed, did my hair and make-up, and got in the car.
Now I'm standing in the antechamber of St. Elias with my hands clasped in front of me and my parents with me even though they can’t be here.
Ivory silk sheaths me, clean and simple. My mother would have approved. She had no patience for excess. She'd have run her hand down the skirt and said, "This is the one," and then she'd have fixed the single tendril of hair that has slipped free of the pin behind my left ear.
I fix the strand of hair myself, my hand quickly returning to the locket.
Through the closed doors I can hear the murmur of people. The pews filling. Voices I recognize and voices I don't, all of them layered over each other in the low, expectant hum that churches produce before ceremonies.
A knock. The side door of the antechamber opens and Dr. Mehta steps in.
She's wearing a deep green dress with a gold border, her hair is swept back, her reading glasses absent for once. She looks different outside the clinic. Softer. The authority is still there in the set of her shoulders and the steadiness of her gaze, but it's wrapped in something warmer today.
