He goes still for half a second.
Then his arm sweeps the desk.
The crash of materials hitting the floor is enormous. I barely have time to register it before his hand meets the center of my chest, pressing me down. I’m left flat on the desk, him above me, the angle that much deeper.
I stop being capable of language. I stop being capable of forming thoughts. The orgasm builds from deeper than previous ones.
We shatter together. I feel him, the shudder that moves through his body, the low growl he buries against my shoulder at the exact moment my own release crashes through me. My fingers dig into his back, my spine arches, and the only coherent thing left in my mind is his name repeating itself like a pulse.
The office is quiet afterward.
My legs are still shaking. He withdraws, and I stay on the desk, too spent to move.
He picks up the card from the floor and holds it out. I take it with a hand that is not entirely steady.
“Pleasure doing business,” he says.
I look at the card.
“You are,” I sigh, “genuinely unbelievable.”
The corner of his mouth lifts.Almost there.
Anya has opinions.
This turns out to be the most significant discovery of the room project.
She wants blue. Not baby blue, not navy. But the blue of the sky twenty minutes after sunset, she explains, which she shows me by pulling up an image on the tablet. It’s a photograph of a coastline at dusk, the water dark and the sky above it the exact shade she means.
“That’s a grown-up color,” I say.
She looks at me with a face that says,I know, and?
We order the paint, bedding, and a few other bedroom staples from the laptop in the sunroom. The total that appears on the screen is a number I would previously have needed six months to earn.
The painting takes most of the following day.
I tape the trim. Anya mixes the paint with a seriousness that suggests she’s been watching renovation content somewhere. We put on the first coat and stand back.
“It needs another,” Anya says.
“It does,” I agree.
After rolling the second coat, we start the details with the brush: flowers, clouds, and butterflies. Anya’s section is, arguably, better than mine — steadier, more even. She seems to have a natural understanding of the way the brush wants to move. I make a note to ask Mikhail whether there are art supplies somewhere in the house already, and if not, to add them to the next order.
Rolan appears twice.
The first time he stands in the doorway for a moment, looking at the walls, says nothing, and leaves. The second time he comes further in, surveys the progress, studies Anya’s section, and then mine with an expression that strongly implies he can tell the difference, and says, “It looks good.”
Anya beams at her wall.
I look at mine and feel approximately the way I felt in second grade when my art project came back with a C-plus.
“It’s a process,” I say.
“Evidently,” he says, and leaves.
We’re nearly finished with the project when my phone illuminates on the floor beside me, the screen cutting through the comfortable mess of paint-stained newspapers and scattered brushes.
