Page 31 of The CEO’s Assistant

"Hold out your hands," she directed, her voice steadier than she expected it’d be.

Wren wrapped the silk around Cordelia’s wrists until it was secure and tied them together with an overhand knot to make a single-column tie. She slid her index finger between the rope and Cordelia’s wrist to make sure there was enough space and it wasn’t too tight. Satisfied, she placed Cordelia's bound hands above her head against the pillow. Then the blindfold. She slid it over Cordelia's eyes and adjusted it, and when it was secured in place, Wren could see Cordelia slacken as she surrendered.

Wren stepped into the harness. She adjusted the straps against her hips, the leather pulling snug, and fitted the dildo. It felt strange and right, the weight of it between her legs, the way it changed her center of gravity. She climbed back onto the bed and put her hand on Cordelia's knee, pushing her legs apart slowly. Cordelia opened for her without resistance. She could see how wet she was, could see the come from her first orgasm still caked on her thighs, and she felt a rush of something ferocious and tender at once.

"I'm going to fuck you now," Wren said. "Slowly first."

Cordelia's breath caught. She nodded. Wren guided the dildo to her entrance and pushed in, inch by inch, watching Cordelia's face for any signal of discomfort. Her mouth opened, and her bound hands pulled against the silk, though it stayed knotted. Her body took the length of the dildo with a shudder that moved through her like a wave.

"More," Cordelia said, a low moan slipping out of her.

"You're taking it so well," Wren cooed at her. The words came from somewhere she didn't know she still had in her, somewhere that knew how to do this, that had been waiting for this moment. "You feel incredible. I'm going to go deeper now." She pressed forward until she was fully inside, and she stayed still there. Cordelia made a sound that was close to a sob.

"Please," Cordelia said. "Please, harder."

Wren built a rhythm that started slow but became something more deliberate, each thrust pressing Cordelia into the mattress. She put her hand on Cordelia's bound wrists, pinning her in place. Cordelia arched under her, her back completely off the mattress now, and came apart a second time, her voice loudly breaking open in the dark room.

Wren didn't stop. She kept the rhythm consistent through Cordelia's orgasm and after it, and Cordelia was shaking and saying things that weren't words. Wren reached for the vibrator and turned it on. She pressed it against Cordelia’s clit, and Cordelia made a raw, unguarded sound, almost pained from the sudden sensation but not quite, and Wren had never heard that sound come from another person before. She came a third time. Then a fourth, or maybe it was one long one that kept cresting. Wren lost count, but she kept moving, kept the pressure, kept her voice low and steady, telling Cordelia what she was doing, telling her she was beautiful, telling her to let go. And Cordelia did, letting go of everything.

After, Wren reverently untied her wrists and removed the blindfold. Cordelia's eyes were wet and wide, and she looked at Wren with an expression that was so transparently vulnerable it frightened her a little. She had never seen this woman this way. She had not known this was in her.

"You…" Cordelia said.

Wren waited.

"Let me," Cordelia said as she sat up. She reached for Wren, her hands trembling, though she didn't try to hide it. "Let me take care of you."

Wren almost said no. The word was right there, a reflex so deep. She had spent her whole life being the one who gave all of herself to others, the one who was grateful to receive whatever leftovers were offered. No one had ever taken care of her in bed. She had never let them. This time, though, she lay back.

Cordelia's mouth on her was a revelation. It wasn’t just her technique, though clearly she knew what she was doing, but because of the quality of attention. Cordelia licked into her pussy slowly and thoroughly, like she had all the time in the world and intended to use it. Her hands gripped Wren's hips and held her still. Wren felt her orgasm building from somewhere deep inside her core, and for the first time in her life she let it build without trying to manage it or turn it into something else. Cordelia lapped her folds, then pressed the broad, flat side of her tongue against her clit. The sensation was so unexpected and overpowering that she came with her hands in Cordelia's hair and her own voice loud in the room. Cordelia teased the nub of her clit through the orgasm as wave and wave crashed over her.

Cordelia came up to lay beside her. They were both breathing hard, but the storm raged harder. For a while, they just listened to the rain pounding on the roof and the distant sound of thunder. Lightning lit up the sky, illuminating the furniture in the room. Wren could feel the length of Cordelia's body against her back, her arm across her waist, her breath slowing until it was even against Wren's neck. Wren stared at the ceiling. She could feel Cordelia was awake behind her, even though she said nothing. She had never been a stranger to silence, no matter how awkward it felt, but this one was full of something, like a presence, a thing being held out that was not quite the thing Wren needed but was close enough to make her ache.

Wren was warm from the inside out for the first time in a long time. Cordelia's arm was heavy across her, and her breath had slowed against the back of her neck. Wren's whole body had loosened, even in places she hadn’t even noticed were tight. The thought—I could stay right here—arrived simply. And then, right behind it, the old thought, quiet and reflexive: don't.

Don't get used to the weight of the arm. Don't start needing the breath on your neck. She knew how this went. You let yourself sink into a thing like this and you started to want it, and that’s when things fell apart. She didn’t want to be the one left picking up the broken pieces. Not this time. So she did what she always did. She took the good part she didn’t want to forget and folded it like a love note until it was a size she could keep with her without taking anything emotionally vital with it. She turned her head to look out the window and stared at the darkness, letting herself have exactly as much of this as she could afford, which was not very much. It was more than she had ever let herself keep. Cordelia's arm tightened around her, just a little. Wren shut her eyes and hated how much she wanted to stay.

15

Chapter 15: Cordelia

Cordelia made it two steps into her office, still turning over the auditors' last question, before she noticed that Wren was in the room and not at her desk in the antechamber. She sat very straight in one of the guest chairs at the desk, a blue folder closed and squared in front of her.

Cordelia stopped. She had left that folder open on her desk not twenty minutes before. She'd had it out since half past six, going over a last change to the contract before her attorney called, and she'd been gathering the pages to lock it away when Veronica peeked her head in to let her know that the auditors were waiting for her down the hall. She had gone, leaving the papers there, because she was only going to be a few minutes. Ten tops. And ten minutes was all it had taken.

She had spent a long career learning to read a room in the second it took to walk into one, and this one was an easy read. Wren had her thumb pressed into the inside of her own wrist, over the strap of the old watch, hard enough to whiten the skin, the thing she did when she was keeping herself very still. Her face was expressionless, and that was what told her everything she needed to know. Wren's face was the most expressive thing about her; it moved ahead of her words, and now it had been shut down and swept blank.

She knows, Cordelia thought, suddenly. The folder was closed now, but Cordelia knew what had been lying on top of it: the signed term sheet. Northstar's name in the header. The closing date set in October. Her own signature at the foot of the last page, and beside it a date from last autumn, months before Wren had ever interviewed for the job.

Wren wouldn't have gone digging. That wasn't like her, and she hadn't needed to. She had spent weeks organizing the papers that informed the information on this one, every one of them dressed as a restructuring, and a single look at the real thing—the word sale where the word restructuring should have been, the buyer with a name, the date that came before her own first day—would have told her the rest in one glance. She had probably understood the whole situation while standing up, right there at the desk. And then she must have closed the folder and sat down in the chair across from Cordelia's to wait because she was too honest to pretend she hadn't seen it and too careful to be the one to say she had.

Neither of them spoke. Out in the larger office, a phone rang twice and stopped, the only sound that broke the silence. Cordelia stood four feet inside her own door with her hand still on the strap of her briefcase and felt the words and emotions swelling in her chest, complete, needing only to be let out of her.

She knew every word of what she would say. That it was real. That she had signed it in November and said nothing, all through the winter and the spring, through the weekends at the coastal house when they worked together. That she was sorry for the silence, for making Wren the one who found it without hearing it from her directly first. It would have taken twenty seconds, and there was no one to overhear. The only thing in the room that could stop the words was Cordelia herself.

For eight years, she had been unable to reach for a true thing when it mattered; grief had made her that way, slowly, until reaching for someone had stopped being something she knew how to do. She could have told herself that was all this was, and she could have believed it.

But it wasn't. She could feel the words sitting in her mouth. She could feel, underneath them, exactly how it would go if she crossed the four feet of carpet and spoke them aloud: how Wren's face would break open, the relief in it, and then the worse thing waiting behind the relief, which was that none of it would change a thing in the end. The page was already signed, and she was still leaving. The truth would only hand Wren the grief early and set Cordelia's own guilt down on top of hers. That was the reason she gave herself, standing there. It was even partly true. She let it be enough.