Page 26 of The CEO’s Assistant

Wren was wet, completely soaked through her underwear, the cotton clinging to her. And when Cordelia's fingers pressed against her through the fabric, Wren's forehead dropped to Cordelia's shoulder and she made a sound that was not composed but was the most honest sound Cordelia had heard all night.

"Please," Wren begged.

Cordelia pushed the underwear aside and slid her fingers into Wren, and Wren whispered a low, “Fuck,” against her shoulder. The swear sounded different in Wren's mouth than it did in her own. Wren said it easy, said it like breathing. She fucked Wren on her desk with her hand between Wren's legs. Wren's face was against her neck, and Wren's breath was hot and ragged on her skin. She could feel Wren getting close, the way her thighs tightened around her and her breath shortened, the way her hips lost their rhythm and started chasing Cordelia's hand. Cordelia turned her head and kissed Wren's temple. "I've got you."

She came with a sound that was almost a keening sob, her body curling forward on herself, her hand gripping the edge of the desk hard enough that Cordelia heard the wood creak. Cordelia held her through it the way Wren had held her and watched as the waves of pleasure coursed through Wren’s small frame.

After Wren’s body slackened, they stayed like that for a moment. Wren's weight on top of her, her face against Cordelia’s neck, Wren's breath slowing by degrees, finding their natural rhythm. Cordelia's hand was still between her legs, still inside her but not moving, and she slowly slipped her fingers out. They were coated in Wren’s juices, and she licked each finger in turn, savoring Wren’s taste. Cordelia could feel the moment when Wren came back to herself—the slight shift in weight, the deep breath, the way her hand released the edge of the desk and her fingers found Cordelia's hip instead and rested there.

"Okay?" Wren said, still slightly winded.

"Yes." More than okay, she thought.

There was an expectant pause. Wren lifted her head and looked down at Cordelia. Wren’s hair was a mess, her shirt was gone, and her pants were undone. She looked utterly wrecked and beautiful and exactly like herself.

"This is going to happen again," Wren said.

It wasn’t framed as a question. Cordelia looked at her. At the gray-green eyes that missed nothing. At the mouth that had been on her, lapping up every drop. At the watch on the too-big leather strap, the face turned sideways now.

She thought of a million replies, all deflections, all designed to avoid having a real conversation with real emotions. She thought about sitting up and straightening her pants, of having the same conversation they had had on Monday about how some boundaries just can’t be crossed. Yet they had already had that conversation and they were still here. She came back. And somewhere, deep down, Cordelia knew she would be back again. She didn’t make a habit of outright lying to herself when she already knew the truth, and she wasn’t going to start now. "Yes," Cordelia said, her voice softer than she had planned for it to come out. "This is going to happen again."

She knew this was more than a lapse of judgment. It was becoming a pattern, a choice—now a series of choices—she was making with full awareness of the hidden costs. And she didn’t think she had the strength to close that door again. Not yet, anyway.

Wren smiled a small, crooked smile, the kind of smile that knew what it was receiving. "Good," Wren said. She pressed her lips to the scar at Cordelia's temple, then pulled back and looked at her with an expression that was tender and amused and certain all at once.

Cordelia let her keep the look. Whatever Wren saw in her face just then seemed to be doing her good, and the rest of the truth was more than Cordelia could hand anyone tonight, herself least of all. She had built a life on saying things out loud. You named a problem and you closed it; you said the words in plain daylight, where you couldn't unsay them, and after that they were true and yours to manage. It had never once failed her. Tonight, she had said the truest thing she felt, out loud, to Wren: this is going to happen again. And nothing in her settled. If anything, it was worse now because she could not pretend later she hadn't heard herself say it aloud.

That was what frightened her. Not that she wanted Wren; she could survive wanting, and she had, more than once. What she couldn't get past was how little of tonight had been hers to decide. She had stood on the sidewalk with options, yet she came here instead anyway. Her body had chosen it four blocks before her mind caught up. And the exit she had spent months building, her careful way out of all of it, was in a drawer three feet from her head, and not once all night had she remembered it was there.

Wren watched her, loose-shouldered and easy, a woman who had waited a long time and finally gotten what she waited for. She thought this was settled. Cordelia could see it on her, the softened mouth, the certainty of someone who believed a door had been opened for good. Cordelia let her have it, because it cost her nothing to give that to Wren tonight and because Wren had earned one night of believing she was safe.

But Cordelia knew what she would be in the next couple of days. She could feel that woman already, waiting just under her skin, waiting for the part of her that had walked four blocks in the dark to go quiet, as it always went quiet, so she could tell Wren one more time that this could not happen. And she would mean it this time. She always meant it. That was the trouble: she would mean it and it would be a truth and a lie, both at once, and she had never in thirty years learned to be only one thing at a time.

Her blouse draped open where Wren had unbuttoned it. The small shell buttons she did up so precisely every morning, her one steady proof that she still ran some corner of her own life, were loose down the front of it now, and she left them that way. Later, she would do them up again, one at a time in the mirror, and put herself back together. She would rebuild the wall exactly as she had so many times before. She knew it even now, even with Wren warm against her looking out at the city beyond. And Wren, poor Wren, did not know it at all. It almost made her feel guilty.

14

Chapter 14: Wren

The rhododendrons were out along the cliff road, past their prime, the heavy heads of them rust-edged and shedding onto the shoulder where the wind had been at them. Seven weeks ago, she had driven this same road in clearer light. She took the curves slower than she had to and left the radio off, as she'd left it off the first time and every time since, and gave the road her attention.

It was only one day's work. She'd known it Monday afternoon, reading the dates twice: leave Friday, home Sunday. Two days for a job she could finish in one. She hadn't written back to ask why Cordelia had booked two days, and instead, Wren had accepted the invitation in less than an hour. It was the honest answer, truer than anything she would have typed into a reply.

Why two days? Why the coast, two hours north, when the file lived on a server she could open from her own desk? Why choose her at all, when the room was built and a second-year could run the refresh? Three questions with a single answer beneath them, and she'd been reading rooms since before she could drive, so she didn't pretend not to have it: Cordelia wanted her there. The rest was staffing.

Except that didn't line up with the last two days. She kept going back over them, the same handful of small things: the good-mornings that landed a half-second short, the mail that came down to just the task with nothing else, the door shut when it used to stay propped open. Any one of them was nothing on its own, small enough she couldn't have pointed to it for anyone else without hearing how it would sound. She'd read people for a living once, and it was the one thing she had never been wrong about. She couldn't tell now whether she was reading Cordelia or making her up.

She was doing it already. She knew this pattern in herself too well to miss it: her weekend already bent around what Cordelia might want, her car already two hours up a road no one had ordered her onto. She'd left a whole life to stop doing exactly this. Three months later and here she was. Again. Her thumb found the inside of her wrist, the soft old leather of Mildred's strap, and pressed once where her pulse point was, then she put both hands back on the wheel.

The larger thing she left where it sat. For months, the work had run bigger and more guarded than a reorganization needed to be, more of it than usual crossing her desk alone. She knew that feel from the old job, the particular hush a thing took on when it was further along than anyone would say. She didn't follow the thought down the road to wherever it went. Following it was not what she was about and never had been.

She passed the inlet on her right, the pull-off where she'd stopped once on a hike the spring before Mildred went into hospice, to stand and watch the water and put off turning back. She didn't stop today. Past the headland, the sea was still bright, the fog a low gray line far out where the water met the haze, nowhere near the land.

The private road broke off at the fir tree. She turned in under the trees, into the tunnel they made, the light coming down through the canopy thinner than she remembered, the wind working the branches up there. The trees thinned and the clearing opened out on the low headland, the house at the end of it, cedar gone silver, its windows open to the afternoon. Cordelia's car was in the driveway. From somewhere inside came the small sounds of a person moving through rooms.

Wren pulled in behind the other car and cut the engine. She sat for a moment, hands in her lap, the tick of the cooling engine the only thing in the quiet. Then she got out. The wind off the water had a colder edge to it than seven weeks ago and went straight through her shirt. She lifted her bag and the laptop case from the passenger seat, left the binder in the trunk, and crossed the gravel walkway to the door.

She raised her hand to knock but stopped short and stood there long enough that the wind got through her shirt again. She took a deep breath, then she knocked. Footsteps, unhurried, and then Cordelia opened the door with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and a dish towel over one shoulder. Whatever crossed her face was gone before Wren could read it.