I came apart with a broken little moan that got swallowed by steam, my body shuddering around emptiness, pussy clenchinghard at air like it was looking for a thick dick that wasn’t there. My thighs shook. My stomach seized. I kept rubbing myself through it because the pleasure had turned almost too intense to bear and still wasn’t enough to make me stop.
Then it reached that edge. That oversensitive, almost painful sweetness that made me snatch my hand back with a hiss.
After that, there was only water, my breathing, the cool tile under my feet, and the city still alive somewhere beyond the bathroom walls.
The orgasm had been real. Good too. My legs were still weak from it. My skin too tight. My pussy still pulsing from the aftershocks.
But my body knew the difference.
Fingers from fullness.
Fantasy from flesh.
Relief from being answered.
I stood there a minute longer and let the water run over me while my heartbeat settled.
Micah Sutton was still very much a problem.
four
. . .
I slept,eventually.
Not well—but enough to take the sharpest edge off before waking with my body feeling heavy in that strange, oversensitized way a good orgasm sometimes left behind when it had not really been about satisfaction so much as survival.
Morning came pale through the bedroom windows.
For a second, before my eyes fully opened, I lay there with one arm over my stomach and let myself be still.
Then memory came back in pieces. The way my body had come apart under hot water with his eyes in my head like they had every right to be there.
I dragged a hand over my face and groaned into the pillow.
“Embarrassing,” I muttered to the room.
The room, as usual, offered no help.
My phone sat on the nightstand, screen dark until I picked it up. One glance told me everything I needed to know. A few routine notifications. Kendra had sent me two messages sometime after midnight.
Kendra: You got home?
And then, twenty minutes later:
Kendra: You were quiet and that’s how I know it was serious.
I smiled despite myself.
Monarch Row sat downtown in the kind of building developers loved to describe as reimagined. Exposed brick. Old steel bones. Expensive glass and a lobby that smelled like hotel aromatherapy mixed with coffee.
The company wasn’t mine, even though some days it felt like I carried enough of it on my back to claim a few square feet by adverse possession.
Monarch Row belonged to Porscha Whitaker, a brilliant woman with a calendar full of flights, board meetings, donor lunches, panels, and selective appearances that reminded everybody why people still wrote checks when she walked into a room. She was the vision. The name. The woman who could make a client believe their event, campaign, or brand partnership was about to become more elevated simply because she had blessed it with her attention.
She was also rarely in the office long enough to know which vendor was lying, which client was panicking, and which internal deadline had started smoking behind the curtain.
That part usually landed with me.