Her hands come up to my jaw. Both of them. She pulls me down into her mouth like she's been thinking about this, planning it, running the scenario the way I run operations.Her lips are warm. She tastes like the Barbaresco. Her tongue finds mine and the sound she makes, low, involuntary, barely audible, goes through me like a current through copper wire.
I pull back enough to see her face. Her eyes are open. Watching me.
"Tell me to stop," I say.
"No."
My mouth goes to her neck. The spot below her ear where the skin is thin and the pulse lives close to the surface. I can feel it against my lips. Fast. Faster than mine. I drag my mouth down the tendon of her throat, slow, feeling her swallow against my lips. She tilts her head back. The mirrors on both sides multiply her, this girl in midnight blue with her head back and her throat exposed, reflected infinite times in gold glass.
My hand slides down her hip. Finds the slit in the dress. The fabric parts over her thigh. My fingers trace the inside of her leg, moving up, slow enough that she has time to stop me.
She doesn't stop me.
Her skin is smooth. Warm. My hand moves higher. The inside of her thigh, the soft skin there, and my fingers brushsomething I don't expect. A raised line. Then another. Old scars, healed into smooth ridges beneath my fingertips. A map of something I don't understand.
She tenses. A full-body contraction, brief, controlled. She catches my wrist. Not to remove it. To pause it.
"Don't ask," she says. Her voice is steady but her eyes are not.
I hold still. My fingers resting against the scars I will not ask about. She grips my wrist firmly.
"I won't," I say.
She releases my wrist.
My hand continues.
Higher. The silk of her underwear against my fingertips. I trace the edge. The elastic at the crease of her thigh. She inhales through her teeth. A sound like a door being opened against resistance. I press my fingers against her through the silk. She's warm. Wet through the fabric.
"Dimmi cosa vuoi,"I say against her ear. (Tell me what you want.)
Her breath catches."Toccami."(Touch me.)
I pull the silk aside. My fingers slide against her, slick, bare, her hips tilting forward into my hand. She gasps. Her nails dig into my shoulder through the suit jacket. I find the rhythm she wants by listening to her breathing. Slow circles that tighten as her legs begin to shake.
"Così?"I ask. (Like this?)
"Sì. Non fermarti."(Yes. Don't stop.)
I don't stop. I press closer. My mouth on her neck, my voice low in her ear, words in Italian I don't plan, that fall out of me the way they used to fall out of my mother when she sang to herself in the kitchen. The language of unguarded moments. I tell her she's beautiful and how she feels against my fingers. I tell her I've been thinking about this since the first dinner when she corrected my tip, standing in the middle of the dining room with her apron and her glasses and her mouth half-open like she couldn't believe the number on the receipt.
She grips the brass railing with one hand. My shoulder with the other. Her head falls back against the mirror. Her legs are trembling. Her breathing fractures into short, hard bursts that fog the gold glass behind her.
I add pressure. My thumb on her clit, two fingers inside her, curling forward. She bites her lower lip hard enough to whiten the skin. Her hips rock against my hand. The railing squeaks against the wall.
"Niccolo."
My name. In her voice. In this elevator. The sound of it dismantles something inside my chest I didn't know was load-bearing.
She comes with her back arched against the mirror, her mouth open, both hands gripping the railing behind her. The sound she makes is quiet. Controlled. Like even in this, even with her body shaking against my hand, she is managing how much of herself she lets out. She allows a moan. One. Low. Then she presses her lips together, breathes through her nose, rides the last of it against my fingers in silence.
I feel her pulse through my hand. The flutter of it. Hummingbird-fast. Then slowing. She opens her eyes.
We look at each other.
My hand is still between her legs. Her dress is pushed up around her thighs. Her hair is displaced across one shoulder. My suit is wrinkled where she gripped my shoulder. The mirrors around us hold the image from every angle, a man inblack and a woman in blue, breathing hard in a box between floors.
She reaches past me. Presses the button for four.
