Just Friends - Pt. 03

The kid who brought up room service had a name tag that said MATEO and the calm, faraway eyes of someone who had worked the penthouse floor before.

He wheeled the cart in without looking at anything above waist height. Not at Chris in a hotel robe with the belt tied in a knot a Boy Scout would have been embarrassed by. Not at the silk tie coiled on the marble by the door, or the white shirt in a heap by the couch, or the pair of four-inch black patent stilettos sitting side by side on the bedroom carpet, the kind of shoes that only meant one thing in a hotel room, perfectly visible from the hallway. He lifted the silver domes one at a time, named what was under each one like a sommelier, and asked if there would be anything else this evening.

"No," Chris said. "Thank you. This is great." He'd decided on a tip in the time it took the kid to cross the room, and he doubled it on the way to handing it over. Mateo took it without looking at it either. That alone was worth the money.

The door clicked shut. From the couch, Britney said, "You tipped that kid like he pulled you out of a river."

"I was tipping for discretion and service. Like any good client with a sex worker in the penthouse should."

She was folded into the corner of the sectional in the other robe, knees up, the terry cloth swallowing her to the wrists. Behind her the city went on for miles through the glass, full dark now, office towers standing in their own light, the river a black ribbon with the bridges strung across it in white. Down on the avenues the traffic moved in slow red and gold lines, all of it silent from up here, like watching an aquarium.

The onion rings came stacked on a wooden dowel like a carnival game. She took the bottom one first and the whole tower came down across the plate.

"Every time," Chris said.

"It's the best one. It's been sitting in all the others' grease. That's science."

They ate with her cold feet jammed under his thigh and his hand around her ankle, and it was the best burger Chris had ever had, which he was fairly sure had nothing to do with the burger.

The thing he kept coming back to, while she stole his fries with the whole city lit up behind her, wasn't any of the parts he'd have predicted. Not the hallway, or the fishnet, or the sound she made the first time he really pulled her hair. It was the end. Her in his lap, and him telling her to look at him, and her reaching up and putting both hands on his face. Holding it still, like she wanted to see it better. And then saying his name like she was finding out what it was.

"You're doing a thing with your face," Britney said.

"I'm eating."

"You're eating and doing a thing with your face." She licked salt off her thumb and studied him over the wreckage of the onion rings. Then, more quietly: "Can I ask you something?"

"Always."

"When did you start thinking about me like that?"

He thought about lying and let it go. After tonight, what was the point?

"Honestly, a long time ago."

"How long?"

"High school, a little," he said. "But that wasn't when I knew."

"When did you know?"

He looked past her at the city, at all those lit windows with people living their lives behind them.

"Harlan," he said.

She put the onion ring down.

* * *

It had rained the whole way down.

Three years ago this October, give or take. She'd been living in Harlan then for the county job, ninety minutes away on a stretch of highway with nothing on it but grain elevators and one Sinclair station with a green dinosaur on the sign. She'd called at one-forty in the morning and he'd been awake by the second ring, because nobody calls you at one-forty with good news.

"Hey," she'd said. "Sorry. It's nothing. I just wanted to hear somebody. I'm fine."

He knew every way Britney said the word fine. The busy one, the annoyed one, the don't-ask-me-in-front-of-my-mother one. He had never heard this one. It was flat all the way through. Nothing in it at all.

He was in his truck by two. He drove the whole thing with the wipers on high and the radio off. He stopped once at the Sinclair for coffee that tasted like it had been brewed during the Bush administration, and stood under the awning drinking it while the rain came down sideways through the parking lot lights, reading a text that had come in while he drove.

*you get there ok? let me know* and a little red heart.

Sara. Three weeks in. Pretty and funny and put together in a way he'd found kind of dazzling. She'd said that's so sweet when he told her he had to go check on his best friend, and he'd liked that she said it.

Britney opened the door in a gray hoodie two sizes too big, from a college that wasn't hers. Devin's. She looked down at it like she'd forgotten she had it on, then walked out into the hallway in her tank top, dropped it down the garbage chute by the elevator, and walked back inside without a word.

He'd never loved her more than he did right then. It was a thought he had no idea what to do with.

They sat on her floor with their backs against the couch and ate Cinnamon Toast Crunch dry out of the box while she told him about the girlfriend in Omaha that Devin had forgotten to mention for seven months. Around four she put on the Great British Bake Off because it was the only show on earth where nobody was ever cruel to anybody. Not long after that she fell asleep on his shoulder, and sometime after that she slid slowly down until her head was in his lap.

He sat there for two and a half hours.

His leg went dead in forty minutes and he didn't move it. The episodes kept playing on their own. A woman from Leeds cried about her sponge. A retired dentist built a gingerbread cathedral. Somewhere around five, a comedian presented the judges with a wreck of a cake and said, "Started making it. Had a breakdown. Bon appétit," and Chris had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing and waking her. Britney slept with one hand fisted in his jeans at the knee like she was worried he'd leave, and he watched her breathe in the blue light of the TV, and knew he was in trouble. Not all at once, but a little more every time he looked down at her.

It would have been so easy. She'd wake up and he'd still be there, and she'd look up at him with her face creased from his jeans, and he wouldn't even have to do anything. He'd just have to not look away.

And he thought: I'm the guy who showed up in the middle of the night when she was sad.

Everybody knew that guy. He waited for a woman to be at her lowest and called it being there for her. He thought about her waking up six months later wondering if she'd ever really wanted him or just the first warm thing in the room. And his phone lit up on the carpet by his dead leg, *hope she's ok, call me tomorrow?* and another heart.

A little after seven the window went from black to gray. He slid a throw pillow under her head one inch at a time, the way you'd pull a block out of a Jenga tower. He made coffee in her tiny kitchen and poured the rest of the cereal into a bowl, and tore a page off the grocery pad on her fridge and wrote in his all-caps, slanting uphill the way it always did.

THERE'S COFFEE. YOU'RE NOT FINE. THAT'S ALLOWED. CALL ME WHEN YOU WAKE UP.

He drove home in the gray morning with his leg still tingling and called Sara later that afternoon and asked if she wanted to get dinner.

* * *

"I sat there for a long time," was all he said. "After you fell asleep. And I'd just started seeing Sara, and you'd just been through all that, and it felt like the wrong time to be the guy who wanted something from you." He shrugged. "So I made you cereal and went home."

Britney had gone very still at the other end of the couch. Her feet had stopped moving under his thigh.

"I was so mad at you," she said finally, quietly. "When I woke up. I was mad at you for like a week and I couldn't figure out why."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She looked down at her hands. "I figured it out eventually."

He waited for her to say more, and she didn't, and he didn't push.

Okay. Here it is. This is it, stupid.

She's sitting right there with fries in her lap and mascara on her chin, fuck, she's cute, and she just told you she was mad at you for a week. You know exactly what that means. Britney does not stay mad at people unless they matter to her more than she wants them to.

So say something. Say the thing. Say it!

You've been working this sentence over in your head all week. In the truck at lunch. On the line at work, where Donny caught you mouthing it at a pallet jack and asked if you were having a stroke. In the shower so many times you ran out of hot water.

Just say it, dummy. What's the worst that can happen?

Well. No more best friend, for starters. No more pizza on Fridays. No more snort-laughing at the same old Brooklyn Nine-Nine episodes until one of you falls asleep on the couch. And no more of the hottest woman you will ever see naked in your entire life, who just let you do things to her that you didn't know you were allowed to want.

So, you know. Nothing major. It's just the rest of your life, no big deal.

The easy thing is right there. Make a joke. Say something about the onion rings. Order pepperoni for the rest of your life. Pepperoni is safe. You always know exactly what pepperoni is going to taste like.

Two hours ago you pulled her hair and told her what she was and she said yes sir. You can do that, and now you can't get one honest sentence out?

If you make a joke right now, you'll be making jokes at her wedding. In a rented tux. Toasting some guy with a boat.

This means too much to you. Don't be careful. Not this time. Not with her. Say it!

He put his burger down.

"I don't want this to be casual," he said, trying to get all seven words out before he thought better of it, but without sounding like he was vomiting them.

Britney looked up.

"I don't want to go home and be your friend who you fuck sometimes. I don't want to be the guy who brings the beer on Friday and pretends tonight was a fun thing we did once." He made himself keep looking at her. "I want to be your boyfriend. I know that's a stupid word. I want to try this for real, you and me, all of it. And I know we could blow up the best thing either of us has ever had. I'm not pretending I'm not scared of that. But I'm more scared of spending the rest of my life pretending this wasn't real, and pretending I'm happy without you." He let out a breath. "I'm all in, Britney. If you want it. I'm all in."

Her eyes filled. She blinked and the tears went straight down through what was left of Crystal's mascara.

"Yes," she said.

"What? I mean. Yeah?"

"Yes. Obviously yes, you idiot. Give me one second." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and laughed, wet and shaky. "For the record, I thought about you too. For a long time. I just always decided the friendship mattered more."

"And now?"

She lowered her hands and gestured at all of it. The robe. The suite. The heels down the hall.

"Now I think we're a little past protecting just the friendship."

He reached for her and she was already coming, crawling down the couch on her knees, knocking a cone of fries onto the carpet, and she took his face in both hands the way she had in his lap. Holding it still. Like she wanted to see it better. She kissed him slow and salty and a little bit shaky, and when she pulled back her forehead stayed on his.

"We're really doing this," she said.

"We're really doing this."

"We're going to be so bad at it."

"Probably," Chris said. "But we'll be bad at it together."

She laughed and sniffed and didn't move, and he looked at her from three inches away, the whole wrecked, beautiful mess of her.

"Also," he said, "and I say this with love, you look like a raccoon that lost a bar fight."

Her hand went straight to her cheek. "No."

"Mascara. All the way down to your jaw. The crying really added something."

"How long have you known?"

"Since about the living room floor."

"You let Mateo see me like this."

"Mateo didn't look at anything. That's why I tipped him."

She was up and heading for the bathroom before he finished, robe flapping, and a second later he heard the light click on and then a long, horrified silence.

"You just asked me to be your girlfriend looking like this!" she called.

"I think I should get points for asking you looking like that," he said, and took the last of her fries, and went to see about getting a bath going.

* * *

The bathroom was bigger than his first apartment. White marble everywhere, veined in soft gray like smoke in water, lit from hidden places so nothing threw a shadow. The tub sat under its own window, one long slab of stone clearly designed for people who did not have a mortgage.

The faucet had three handles and none of them were labeled.

Britney was at the vanity, leaning into the mirror, scrubbing at her left eye with a makeup wipe, jaw set, not blinking. A small drift of black-smudged wipes was piling up on the marble beside her.

"The woman at the counter said I needed primer," she said, without looking away from her eye. "I said, that's what they all say, that's how they get you. And now it's welded on. I'm going to have Crystal's left eye until Tuesday."

Chris turned the middle handle. Nothing. He turned the left handle. Nothing. He turned the right handle and the whole ceiling over the tub opened up like a monsoon.

"Oh, shit..."

He dove for the controls, got his robe soaked to the shoulder, shut everything off, and stood there dripping. In the mirror, Britney hadn't stopped working on her eye. She'd just started shaking.

"Don't," he said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're laughing on the inside."

"I'm laughing on the outside, Chris, look at me. My boyfriend just got waterboarded by a faucet."

He got it on the second try. There was a row of little bottles on the ledge with labels in French, and he picked one that smelled like eucalyptus and something green he couldn't name, and dumped in more than was probably intended. The water went milky, then started to foam, and the steam came up smelling the way he assumed an expensive spa smelled, having never been to one. It was nothing like the Irish Spring in his shower at home.

He sat on the edge of the tub while it filled and watched her.

She was about halfway back. One eye done, the lashes bare and pale, her real eye, the one he'd been looking at for ten years. The other one still smoked out and dramatic. Half Britney, half Crystal, a before and after taken on the same face. There was something about watching it that got to him. She'd built that face in this mirror a few hours ago, for him, and now she was taking it apart for him too, and he was the only person on earth who would ever see both halves.

"You're staring," she said to the mirror.

"I'm supervising."

"Get in the tub. I'll be there in one eye."

He shed the wet robe and got in, and the heat found every place he hadn't known was sore, the backs of his thighs, the small of his back, his knees, his shoulders, and the sound that came out of him was one he had never made in front of another adult.

When she came around the tub a few minutes later her face was scrubbed pink and bare. He'd seen her without makeup ten thousand times. Hungover on her couch, sunburned in Maine, at six in the morning in an airport. But tonight, after the other face, after everything she'd just said on that couch, this one did something to him he didn't have a name for yet. Freckles across her nose he'd forgotten about. Her hair pinned up in a knot that was more hairspray than hair. She looked about nineteen.

She dropped the robe and stood there a second, completely unbothered, letting him look. The faint pink marks his fingers had left on her hips. The flush that hadn't fully left her chest. All of her bare and smooth, still a little swollen from what they'd done.

"Scoot," she said.

She could have taken the far end, which had room for all six feet of her and then some. Instead she stepped over his legs and sat down between them and leaned back against his chest, and the water came up to the very lip of the tub and somehow didn't go over.

She made a long low noise, like somebody easing into a hot tub at a ski lodge after eight hours on the mountain, and let her whole weight go back into him. He wrapped his arms around her waist under the water. Her head settled into the hollow of his shoulder.

For a while neither of them said anything. The foam crackled faintly as it popped. Through the window over the tub the city blurred behind the steam.

"Okay," Britney said eventually. "Notes."

He laughed into her hair. "We've been dating for forty minutes and you're already grading me."

"Total clarity. Inside and outside the bedroom. You signed off on it." She tipped her head back against his shoulder. "And I take my boyfriend's professional development very seriously."

"Fine. Hit me."

"I'm going in order." She said it like the first line of an agenda, and he could hear her smiling. "The door. You standing there in that suit, with that haircut, looking at me like you'd forgotten how mouths work. I'd spent all week planning what you were going to see. I never once thought about what I was going to see. That's on me. That's a planning failure."

"You were the one in fishnets."

"You were the one who looked like that. You looked unfairly good, Chris. I wasn't ready. You were wearing a tie you clearly watched a YouTube video to knot."

"Two videos," he admitted.

"I could tell." She traced a slow line along his forearm under the water. "The kiss in the living room. You froze for about a second with your hands full of my fishnet, and then you kissed me back so hard I had to catch myself on your shoulder. I liked the second part more. Don't freeze next time. Just do the second part."

"Noted."

"Then the floor." Her voice dropped a little. "You put your thumb on my mouth and smeared my lip gloss and told me to open my mouth. You didn't ask. You told me." She shifted against him. "Chris, I've known you for ten years and I didn't know you had that voice. It was like finding a room in a house I'd lived in my whole life."

He didn't say anything. He wasn't sure he could.

"And when I put my hands behind my back," she went on, "and you understood what I meant? I could feel it go through you. Both your hands came into my hair and you held me there and just watched me. One beat. Two." She let out a breath. "Look at me while you choke on it. I'm going to be hearing that in my head at very inappropriate times for the rest of my life."

She tipped her head back to look at him upside down. "But I have a complaint."

"Of course you do."

"You pulled me off." Her eyebrows went up. "I was right there. I had you. Your knees were shaking. And you pulled out of my mouth before you came."

"If I'd cum in your mouth," Chris said, "I'd have been done for an hour. And I wanted to fuck you more than I wanted anything I've ever wanted in my life."

She stared at him for a second, upside down, and then turned back around very quickly.

"Okay," she said. "That's a good answer. That's an annoyingly good answer. I'm still taking points off."

"How many points?"

"Some. I'll let you earn them back." She was quiet a second, and when she went on her voice had gone softer. "I'm only grading you because it was the best night of my life. I want more of it. That's all the notes are."

He tightened his arms around her and didn't trust himself to say anything.

His hands had drifted while she talked. They'd been resting on her stomach and now his thumbs were just under her breasts, barely touching, and he didn't remember deciding to move them. She noticed. She didn't stop talking, but her breathing changed.

"The part where you picked me up off the floor with one arm," she said, slower now. "I'm going to be in a budget meeting on Tuesday thinking about that."

"That was like one second."

"It was a very good second." She pressed back into him. "And then you told me to take the fishnet off and you watched me do it, and it's not a graceful thing to take off, Chris, it's like peeling a grapefruit, and you just stood there and watched me like it was a striptease."

He let his thumbs trace higher, along the curve of her, not quite reaching her nipples. Her breath caught and she kept going anyway, stubborn.

"Keep the shoes on," she said, doing his voice, low and flat. "And I said Yes sir. Which was not on the list. I don't know where that came from. That came from somewhere very deep and I would like to investigate it further."

"You liked saying it."

"I loved saying it. That's the problem." Her voice wobbled as his thumbs brushed her nipples, and she arched into his hands. "And then you bit me. Not a little. You bit my nipple like you were mad at it, and I made a noise I've never made in my life."

"I remember the noise."

"The whole hotel remembers the noise."

He cupped her breasts fully then, and the weight of her in his palms made him groan. Heavy and full, slick from the water, overflowing his hands when he squeezed. He rolled her nipples between his fingers until she squirmed, then pinched, harder, when she moaned.

"Keep going," he said into her ear. "I want to hear the rest."

"You're making it really hard to give a presentation."

"Then give it faster."

"Bossy." But she was smiling. "Putting me on top in front of that mirror. God, Chris. Watching myself ride you. Watching you watch me. And then you spanked me while I was bouncing on you and made me say what I was." She swallowed. "Good little whore. I've never said anything like that out loud in my life. I said it to you and I came."

"I noticed."

"I know you noticed. You looked so fucking pleased with yourself."

"I was very pleased with myself."

"The hair," she said. "Finally. When you put me on my hands and knees and took my hair in your fist and actually pulled, like I asked you to. Last Friday you held my hair like it was a library book. Tonight you pulled it like you meant it. My scalp is still sore. I keep touching it to check." She took a breath. "Ten out of ten. Whatever changed between last Friday and tonight, keep it."

"Last Friday I didn't know you really meant it."

"I always mean it." She caught one of his hands and held it against her breast. "The spanking was a strong eight. Generous. You're allowed to go harder. I was never once in danger of dying."

"A strong eight," he repeated.

"I'm grading on a curve."

"Okay," he said, and something in his voice made her go still for a second. "What else?"

She was quiet. When she spoke again it was smaller, more careful.

"You didn't use the list."

He waited.

"Last week I gave you a whole list," she said. "Lying in my bed. I was mostly messing with you, but I wasn't only messing with you. And tonight you did the slut and the whore, and the hair. But you didn't call me a fucktoy. You never touched my throat." She swallowed, and he felt it under his hand. "Neck untouched, Chris. Still. And we never left the bed except for the floor, and the floor doesn't count."

"The floor counts a little."

"The floor counts a little," she allowed.

He didn't answer right away. He was thinking about the list. He'd lain awake Saturday night with it running in his head like a song he couldn't shut off, and he'd read up on about half of it on his phone in his truck at lunch with the windows fogged, and he'd walked into this suite tonight with every single item on it sitting in his chest. And then he'd been so busy being the client, being careful about being careless, that he'd left most of it there.

"Is that a note?" he said finally.

"That's a note."

"Okay," Chris said quietly. "I've got some notes too."

She turned her head. "Yeah?"

"The wrists behind your back. You didn't say anything, you just did it, and you looked up at me like you were handing me something." His thumbs moved over her slowly. "When you said Yes sir, I almost forgot my own name. And the sound you made when I pulled your hair for real. I want that sound again. I want it every time."

She was breathing faster now.

"And I want," he said, and stopped, and decided not to be careful. "I want to give you the rest of the list. Not because it's written down somewhere. Because I've been thinking about doing it to you since you read it to me." He put his mouth by her ear. "And your face. You put that on the list too. That one's for me."

"Chris," she said, and his name came out unsteady.

"That's my note."

She was quiet for a long moment, her hand still pressing his against her breast.

"Can I tell you something about Crystal?" she said, her voice not quite steady anymore.

"Always."

"She isn't somebody I made up." Her breath hitched as he pinched again. "She's me. Just the parts I don't let out. The costume made me brave enough to walk in here in those heels. But everything after that? I wasn't acting. I just finally stopped filtering."

He was quiet for a second. "It helped me too. Being the client." He kept his hands moving, slow. "If I'd walked in here as just Chris, with just Britney, I'd have been careful. I'd have spent the whole night asking if you were okay. Being him let me just want you."

"You stopped being him, though," she said softly. "Toward the end."

"Yeah."

"I noticed."

"I noticed you noticed."

She settled back against him and he felt her ass press into him under the water, felt her shift, slow and deliberate, grinding back against his cock, which had been paying close attention to this entire conversation and was now fully hard.

"Oh," she said, extremely innocently. "Hello."

"You're doing this on purpose."

"I'm just getting comfortable." She did it again. "My feet are killing me, though. Those heels looked amazing but Jesus Christ."

"Want me to rub them?"

She turned her head. "Really?"

"Come here."

She slid off him and moved to the far end of the tub and stretched her legs out toward him through the water, and Chris got the full unobstructed view. Her breasts above the waterline, water running down them, nipples still hard and flushed from his hands. The faint definition of her stomach. And under the clear water between her thighs, bare and pink, parted slightly.

"You're staring," Britney said, smiling, knowing exactly what the position showed him.

"I'm allowed now. It's in the boyfriend contract."

"Foot massage, Romeo. Focus."

He took her foot in both hands and pressed his thumbs into the arch. He could feel the knots in it from hours in those stilettos, the small tight muscles all locked up, and he worked them slowly, deliberate, firm. Her eyes fluttered closed.

"Oh God," she said. "Oh, that's obscene. Don't stop."

He didn't. He worked the ball of her foot, her heel, each toe, then up into her calf, kneading, and he watched her start to come apart. The flush spreading down her chest again. Her breathing going fast and shallow. Little sounds in her throat, soft hums and sighs, the same sounds she'd made riding him. Her hands came up and gripped the rim of the tub.

He switched to the other foot and gave it the same treatment, arch, calf, the soft inside of her knee. Her head went back against the marble and her throat was long and exposed and he could see the pulse jumping at the base of it.

When his hands reached her knees, she opened her eyes.

"You know," she said, breathless, "you still owe me something."

His hands stopped.

"I believe," Britney said, "that the client paid for three items. And we got through two." She lifted one foot out of the water and set it, very gently, against his chest. "I'm a professional. I'd hate for anybody to say I didn't deliver."

"Crystal's off the clock."

"Crystal is," she agreed. "I'm not."

She slid her foot down his chest, slowly, under the water, until it was pressed against his cock, and held it there.

"Item three," she said. "I've been thinking about it since the coffee shop. I want you to fuck my ass, Chris. Tonight. And I want you to know it's me you're doing it to."

He'd been waiting all night for her to say it. He was out of the tub so fast that the water finally went over the edge, a whole sheet of it slapping onto the marble floor, and neither of them looked at it.

* * *

He didn't bother drying her off properly. He wrapped one of the big hotel towels around her shoulders and walked her backward out of the bathroom with her still dripping, his mouth on her neck, steering her by the hips, and she let him. The backs of her legs were heading for the bed and she was already reaching behind her for it.

He turned her.

Not toward the bed. Toward the desk by the window. A long slab of dark walnut, polished to a low shine, set right in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass, and beyond it the city, forty floors down, the towers and the bridges over the black river, all of it scattered with light like somebody had dropped a jewelry box.

"Hands on the desk," he said.

She looked back at him over her shoulder, startled.

"You said we never left the bed," he said. "Hands on the desk, Britney."

Her mouth fell open a little. Then she let the towel slide off her shoulders to the carpet, turned around, and put both palms flat on the wood.

In the window, over the city, he could see her reflection. Faint, like a ghost laid over the lights. Her bare shoulders, her wet hair coming loose down her back, the swing of her breasts as she leaned forward. Her face, looking back at him in the glass with her eyes very wide.

He stepped in behind her and put one hand flat between her shoulder blades and pushed, slow, until she was bent all the way over with her cheek nearly on the desk and her breath warm against the polished wood.

He'd never done anything like this in his life. He waited for the voice in his head, the one that had been asking, is this okay, is this too much, since he was seventeen. It didn't come. What came instead was something steadier. It felt like him, not the client or a guy in a suit he'd put on for the evening. Just him, finally saying what he wanted with his hands, to a woman who'd said yes to him an hour ago.

"Anything's wrong," he said, "you tap the desk twice. Anything. I stop. I don't ask why."

"Twice," she said, her voice already gone low. "I know."

"Good." He ran his palm over the curve of her ass, slow, almost gentle. "A strong eight."

She laughed, breathless. "Chris..."

The first one cracked across her ass hard enough to rock her forward onto her toes.

She cried out. It rang off the window.

"Was that an eight?" he said.

"That was a nine," she gasped.

He did it again, the other side, harder, and watched the pink bloom up under his handprint. She moaned and pushed back toward his hand instead of away from it.

"Ten," she said. "That was ten. Oh, fuck."

"I'm not grading on a curve." He gave her two more, letting each one land and spread, until her ass was flushed and hot under his palm and her fingers were spread white on the wood. Then he smoothed his hand over the heat he'd made, slow, and she shuddered all the way down her spine.

"Get the lube," he said.

She turned her head, cheek on the desk. "It's in my..."

"I know where it is. I'm telling you to get it."

He had just ordered Britney to go fetch lube. Britney, who had once made him redo an entire lab report because his margins were wrong.

He watched her straighten, walk to the gym bag on the bench at the foot of the bed, her ass pink, and come back with the little bottle. She held it out to him.

He didn't take it. "Now ask me."

She blinked. "What?"

He held her eyes. "Ask me what you want, properly."

She stood there in the city light with the bottle in her hand and her chest heaving, and he watched her decide.

"Please," she said. "Please fuck my ass, Chris. I've been thinking about it all week. I want you to bend me over this desk and stretch me open and fuck me. Please."

He took the bottle.

"Turn around," he said. "Bend over."

She bent over.

He took his time. That was the part he'd decided on, sitting in his truck at lunch with his phone. Not because she was glass. Because he wanted to watch every single thing it did to her. He warmed the lube between his palms and circled her, slow, patient, and felt her whole body go tight and then, a breath later, start to give. One finger, and she pressed her forehead to the desk and breathed out through her mouth. He talked to her while he did it, low, right at her ear.

"Look at you. Bent over a desk, ass all red, begging for my cock. You know what you look like?"

"Tell me," she whispered.

"You look like mine."

Her breath broke on a sound that was half a sob.

Two fingers. She went up on her toes. He slid his free hand into her hair at the root, close to the scalp, and closed his fist, and pulled her head up off the desk, hard, so her back arched and her face came up into the window and she could see herself.

"Watch," he said.

She watched. Her own face over the city, mouth open, eyes huge and dark, his fist in her hair behind her.

"You said I never called you anything but slut," he said into her ear. "My fucktoy. That's what you are tonight. Not Crystal's. Mine."

Her knees buckled. He caught her with the arm around her hips and held her up against the desk.

He slid his fingers free, lubed his cock, and pressed it against her tight ring. In the glass, he could see she'd stopped breathing.

"Breathe," he said.

She let it out and he pushed, and the head of his cock breached her, and she made a sound so low and raw it seemed to come up out of the floor. Her hands slid across the polished wood. He held still, his fist in her hair, and watched her face in the window: the burn first, sharp, and then, behind it, something opening.

"More," she said. "Oh God. More. I can take it. Don't you dare go easy on me."

He didn't go easy on her. He didn't go fast, either. He went steady, inch by inch, pulling her back onto him by the hair and her hip, until he was buried all the way and his hips were flush against the hot skin he'd spanked red, and they both groaned at the same time.

"Look at that," he said, rough. "Took every inch. Fuck, Britney, look at you."

"I'm looking," she sobbed. "I'm looking, I'm looking..."

He started to thrust. Long and slow at first, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in, and every time he bottomed out she cried out against the desk. Then shorter. Harder.

"Look at my little overachiever," he said. "Even this you want an A in."

The desk shook under her.

Chris realized he wasn't thinking. Not about whether it was too much, or about tomorrow, or whether he'd ever be able to look at her across a pizza box again without remembering this. He was just here. And what he wanted and what she needed had turned out to be the exact same thing.

"Chris," she was saying. "Chris, Chris, I want to see you. I want to see your face. Please. Not in the window. Please."

He pulled out of her slowly and she cried out at the loss, and before she could straighten he had her. One arm under her knees, one behind her back, and he picked all six feet of her up off the carpet like she weighed nothing. She clung to his neck, gasping and laughing at once.

"One arm," she managed. "Again with the..."

"Two arms," he said. "You're tall."

He was carrying his naked, spanked, six-foot girlfriend across a penthouse suite so he could finish fucking her where he could see her face. Three hours ago his biggest worry had been his tie. He had no idea who this guy was. He liked him.

He laid her back across the edge of the bed with her ass right at the edge of the mattress, and stood between her legs, and she rolled her hips up to him without being asked. Offering. Her face was flushed and tear-streaked and her hair was a dark tangle on the white duvet, and the city light from the window lay across her body in one long silver band.

He pushed back into her. Easier this time, and deeper, and she wrapped her long legs around his waist and pulled him in the rest of the way with her heels.

"Harder," she said. It wasn't a demand. It was a plea.

He gave her harder. One hand gripped her hip and the other slid down between them to find her clit, and she jolted under him like she'd touched a live wire.

"Oh God. Oh fuck, Chris, that's... both of those, I can't..."

"You can."

"I can't think."

"Don't think," he said. "Just take it. Look at you taking it. My cock in your ass and you're dripping all over my hand."

She cried out, high, and her legs tightened around him.

Then her hand came off the duvet. She caught his wrist, the one on her hip, and pulled it up her body, slow, over her ribs and between her breasts, until his palm was resting flat at the base of her throat. She held it there with her own hand over his.

"You promised me the whole list," she whispered. Her eyes were dark and steady on his. "I trust you."

"Tap my arm," he said. "Twice. Same rule."

She nodded.

He closed his hand.

Just the sides of her neck, under her jaw, a slow steady pressure. Her eyes went wide. Her lips parted. Her breath went shallow and quick, catching high in her chest, and all at once her whole body clamped around him so hard he had to stop moving or cum right there.

She smiled. With his hand on her throat and her eyes watering, she smiled up at him like she'd just won something.

He held her there for a few long, deep strokes, watching every flicker on her face. Then he let go, and she dragged in a long ragged breath, and he left his hand resting lightly at the base of her throat, not pressing, just there, his thumb moving along her jaw.

"There it is," he said, low. "That's what you wanted."

She nodded, frantic.

"Me too." He pushed deeper and her heels dug into the small of his back. "I've always wanted it."

A choked sound came out of her, half moan, half laugh.

"That's my girl," he said. "That's my girl."

"Don't stop," she sobbed. "Chris, don't stop, it's so good, it's so fucking good..."

He didn't stop. The bed creaked under them. The sounds in the room were filthy and neither of them cared. The slick drag of him moving in her, the wet circles of his fingers, her breath coming in broken sobs. Her eyes never left his. He'd thought the eye contact would be the hard part. It turned out it was the only part that mattered.

"You're so fucking beautiful like this," he said.

It came out of him. Not hot, not sexy. Beautiful. Britney's eyes filled and spilled over at the corners, and he brushed his thumb along her jaw where the tear ran down.

"I'm close," she gasped. "Chris, I'm so close, I..."

"Me too. You feel too good. I'm not going to last."

"Then don't." Her hand came up and caught the back of his neck and pulled him down so their foreheads nearly touched. "Look at me. Look at me when you cum."

He looked at her.

"Chris," she said. On purpose this time. Clear and deliberate, right into his face, eyes open.

And then she came.

He felt it before he saw it. A flutter first, deep inside her, like something catching. Then her stomach went tight and trembling under his fingers, and her thighs locked around his waist, and her whole body bowed up off the bed. She clenched around him in long rolling pulses, one after another, each one tighter than the last. A flush raced up her chest and into her cheeks. Her mouth fell open on a cry that broke in the middle into his name, and her nails dug into the back of his neck. Through all of it she held his eyes, her pupils blown so wide they were nearly black, like letting him watch was the point.

It was too much. The grip of her, the rhythm of it pulling at him.

"Britney," he groaned, and buried himself as deep as he could go.

It started at the base of his spine and drew up tight through his balls, and then he was coming. His legs shook and he locked his knees to stay standing. He felt every pulse, each one distinct, filling her, and he felt her feel it, her mouth falling open on a soft gasp, her eyes going wide and then slowly, completely soft. She held his neck and held his eyes the entire time, like she was making sure he knew she was there.

When it finally let go of him he was lightheaded and trembling, every nerve in his body lit up and humming.

"Fuck," he breathed, still standing between her legs.

"Yeah," she said, her voice shaky, her legs still locked around him. Her toes were curled so hard she was going to have trouble uncurling them.

He leaned down over her, bracing himself on his hands on either side of her head, and kissed her. Soft and slow, nothing like any of the kisses before. When he pulled back she was smiling at him with her eyes half closed.

"Don't move," he said.

"Wasn't planning to. I don't think my legs work anymore."

He scooped her up, one arm under her back and one under her knees, boneless and heavy and warm, and laid her down properly on the pillows. He brought her a glass of water from the bar, and she drank the whole thing without opening her eyes and handed it back to him empty. Then he went to find the shower.

* * *

The tub had been through enough. He got the shower running warm, not hot, and figured out which of the three rainfall heads was the monsoon and avoided it, and then went back and carried her in because she claimed, with total conviction, that her legs had filed for divorce.

He stood her under the spray and she leaned her forehead on his collarbone and closed her eyes.

"Turn around," he said quietly.

She did, and he reached for the expensive shampoo and worked it through her hair slowly, his fingers massaging her scalp. The hairspray fought him every inch. He rinsed it, careful to keep the soap out of her eyes, and did it again.

"That feels amazing," she murmured.

"Good."

He soaped his hands and washed her, not trying to start anything: her shoulders, her back, down her arms. He was gentle over the places where he'd gripped her, the faint marks on her hips, the pink handprints still fading on her ass, and gentler still lower down, and she let out a long, contented breath.

"You okay?" he asked. "I wasn't too rough? Anything hurt that shouldn't?"

"Nothing hurts that shouldn't." She smiled without opening her eyes. "Some things hurt exactly as much as they should. I'm going to be walking funny tomorrow and I'm going to be very smug about it."

He washed her breasts, tender now, and her stomach, and her thighs. When he knelt to wash her legs and her feet, she steadied herself with a hand on his head.

"You don't have to..." she started.

"I want to," Chris said, and looked up at her, and meant it.

When he was done she pulled him back up and took the soap out of his hands. "My turn."

Her hands were gentle on him. His chest, his back, working the knots out of his shoulders with her thumbs. She found the little crescent marks her nails had left at the back of his neck and touched each one and said, "Sorry," in a voice that made it extremely clear she was not sorry.

They stood under the water for a long time after they were both clean. Just holding on. The steam filling the room, the rest of the world forty floors down and very far away.

They didn't close the curtains. The windows ran the whole length of the bedroom wall beside the bed, and the city filled them, and neither of them wanted to give it up yet. She lay with her head on his chest and her leg thrown over both of his, her hair damp and smelling like eucalyptus. Her fingers drew slow circles on his sternum.

"Boyfriend," she said into his chest, testing it.

"Girlfriend."

"It's a stupid word."

"It's the worst word," he agreed. "I love it."

She laughed softly, and a few minutes later her breathing went slow and even against him. He lay awake a little longer, watching the city lights move across the ceiling, and then he was gone too.

* * *

Chris woke to sun.

It came through the whole wall of glass like a flood, white and early, straight into his face, which was apparently what happened when you slept in a penthouse with the curtains open. For a second he didn't know where he was. Then he felt the weight on his chest and the warm leg thrown over his, and it all came back at once.

Britney was still asleep, hair everywhere, her breath warm against his ribs. Out past her shoulder the city had become a completely different place in daylight. All glass and steel and hard bright edges, the river gone from black to a flat sheet of silver, a barge sliding slowly under the bridge.

He watched her sleep. His best friend. His girlfriend, apparently, which his brain kept trying out like a new word in a foreign language.

Her eyes fluttered and caught him staring.

"Creeper," she mumbled.

"Can't help it. You're my girlfriend. It's allowed."

She smiled and stretched like a cat, pressing closer, her bare leg sliding along his, and winced halfway through it. Then she grinned at the ceiling.

"Oh, I can feel that."

"Bad?"

"Good," she said, very pleased with herself. "Extremely good. I asked for this. I'm going to think about you every time I sit down for a week." She yawned. "What time is it?"

"Early."

"Do we have to leave the bubble yet?"

"Not yet."

Someone knocked on the door.

"I ordered breakfast before we passed out," she said. "I'm a genius."

It was Mateo again. He wheeled the cart all the way to the window without looking at the bed, or the wet towel on the floor, or the lube still sitting on the desk, and set everything up exactly as calmly as he had the night before. Chris tipped him again. Mateo took it without looking.

They climbed back into bed with the food. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, a bowl of berries that looked like a still life. They ate like animals, stealing off each other's plates, and she fed him a strawberry and then took it back halfway and ate the rest herself.

But something was going on with her. She kept glancing at her phone on the nightstand and then away from it, like it was a dog that might bite. Her laughter came out half a step too bright.

"Okay," he said, putting his fork down. "What?"

She looked at him. Then she reached past him to the nightstand and picked up her phone.

"I need to show you something." She thumbed at the screen for a second. Then she held it out to him. "Turn the sound up."

He took it. On the screen was his own face, puffy and swollen, cheeks packed with gauze, in a paper gown and a mint-green compression wrap that made him look like a very sad Easter egg.

He groaned. "Not the pigeon video. Not before coffee."

"Just watch it."

He hit play.

"... they just have the feet," video Chris was saying, in his gauze voice, tears running down into the wrap. "They just walk around. On the feet. And they can't hold anything. They can't hold a sandwich, Britney. They can't hold a little sandwich."

Off camera, Britney was wheezing. "Oh my God."

"It's not funny. It's so sad. Nobody even helps them."

He'd seen this part two hundred times. His thumb was already moving to close it when video Chris stopped crying and looked right past the camera. At her.

"You'd help them," he said.

"What?" Britney's voice, still laughing.

"You'd help the pigeons. You'd make them little thumbs. You'd make a spreadsheet. And a little schedule." He sniffed enormously. "You're my favorite person. Did you know that?"

The laughing off camera stopped.

"Not Sara," video Chris went on, with the ruthless honesty of the heavily medicated. "You. You're my favorite person. I think about you all the time. That's bad, right? That's bad. I'm not supposed to. Don't tell Sara." He frowned, working something out. "Don't tell you, either. Don't tell you. Is this recording?"

There was a long pause. The camera wobbled.

"Okay, buddy," Britney's voice said, very gently, in a voice Chris had never heard her use. "Let's get you some pudding."

The screen went black.

Chris sat there holding the phone. Across the bed Britney had both hands pressed flat against her knees, and he realized she was holding her breath.

"I don't remember that," he said.

"I know." She tried to smile.

"Britney."

"You were with Sara. I was with Tyler. You were so high you told me not to tell me." Her voice was shaking now, but she kept going. "So I cut it at forty-one seconds and sent the funny part to everybody. And I put the rest in a hidden album and I've watched it about fifty times."

He opened his mouth and she held up one hand.

"And Harlan," she said. "I was awake."

He stared at her.

"Ten minutes before you moved me. I woke up with my head in your lap and I didn't move, and I lay there thinking, I wonder what happens if I just don't get up." Her eyes spilled over. "And then you started sliding that pillow under me so carefully, like I was a bomb, and I thought, okay. He doesn't want that. I was wrong. And I kept my eyes shut until I heard the door close, because I didn't want you to see I'd been waiting."

The room was very quiet. Out past the window a plane drew a slow white line across the sky.

"I still have your note," she said. "It's in my passport. It's been to Mexico."

He put the phone down on the duvet very carefully, like it was something that might spill.

"We're so stupid," he said.

She laughed, and it broke in the middle. "We're so stupid."

"Three years," he said. "Both of us being so careful."

"So polite."

"So considerate."

"So fucking considerate," Britney said, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. "You asked me last night and I said yes. I just wanted you to know I've been wanting to say yes for two years, Chris. I just kept it in a hidden album."

He reached for her and she was already coming, climbing across the breakfast tray, knocking a fork onto the carpet, and she landed in his lap and took his face in both her hands. Holding it still. Like she wanted to see it better. She kissed him with tears on her face and syrup on her mouth, and it wasn't like any of the kisses in the dark. It was slow and certain and in full daylight.

When she pulled back her forehead stayed on his. They sat there for a while like that, holding on to each other in the sunlight. Then Britney snorted.

"Oh God."

"What?"

"We're going to have to tell people."

He dropped his forehead onto her shoulder. "Oh, fuck."

"My mom is going to lose her mind. She's been trying to set me up with her friend's son for six months. Brandon. He's an accountant. Zero personality, zero chemistry." Britney grimaced. "She keeps saying I need to give him a real chance. He has a boat. He kept inviting me out on it. I never went."

"Why not?"

"Because of the implication."

"Right," Chris said. "The implication." He grinned at her. "Well, now you've got an excuse. Though telling your mom you're dating me might be worse than Brandon. She's going to have opinions."

"She's going to be so polite at you," Britney said darkly. "You have no idea."

"I've eaten a lot of her Ritz crackers. I know exactly how polite she can be."

That got a real laugh out of her. "Your mom's going to have opinions too. She loves me as your friend. Dating's different."

"Your brother's going to kill me."

She grinned. "Worth it, though."

"Yeah?"

"Definitely worth it." She thought about it. "How do we even explain this? Hey everyone, remember how we've been best friends for years? Well, we fucked in a penthouse and caught feelings, so."

"We could ease them into it. Start holding hands at group dinners. Let them figure it out."

"Or we just make out in front of everyone at the next game night."

"You're evil."

"You like it."

"I really do."

"Jay's going to be smug and say she called it."

"Jay says she calls everything. She said she called the Chiefs losing and it turned out she meant a different game."

"And Marcus is going to be weird about it," Britney said. "He's going to make that face where he looks like he hates it but says he doesn't."

They finally dragged themselves out of bed and packed up. Britney put on the jeans and sweater she'd worn in yesterday. Chris watched her change back, and this time it didn't feel like she was leaving anything behind. She stuffed the fishnets into the gym bag, then held up the heels by their straps, one in each hand, and raised an eyebrow at him.

"Keep them," he said.

"I was always going to keep them. I'm asking if you want me to wear them to Thanksgiving."

"Please don't wear them to Thanksgiving."

"I'll think about it." She zipped the bag, then paused with her hand on it. "You know what you never did? From the list?"

"Not this again."

"You never spit in my mouth."

He blinked. He thought about it. He thought about it a second too long, and something must have happened to his face, some combination of horror and genuine consideration.

"Really?" he said. "I mean. Well. Maybe next time?"

Britney burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the bed with the gym bag in her lap.

"Oh my God. Your face. You're actually thinking about it."

"You put it on the list!"

"I put it on the list to watch you squirm!" She was wiping her eyes. "That's adorable. That's genuinely so sweet, that you'd even consider it for me. But no. That one's too far, even for me."

"Thank God," Chris said, and meant it, and she laughed even harder.

At the door she stopped and looked back. The windows. The white couch, with the collapsed onion ring tower still on the coffee table. The desk by the window, which neither of them was ever going to look at the same way again. The bathroom, with its water stains on the marble that they had agreed to leave to professionals. The bed, a total wreck in the sun.

"Think we'll come back?" she asked.

Chris took her hand and laced their fingers together. "Maybe for our anniversary."

She squeezed his hand. "I like the sound of that."

They made out in the elevator the whole way down like a couple of teenagers. When the doors opened on the lobby her hair was even worse and his collar was crooked, and the woman at the front desk who had called her Ms. Crystal the evening before looked up and smiled with perfect professional blankness.

"I hope you enjoyed your stay," she said.

"We did," Britney said. "Very much. Please tell Mateo he's our hero."

They walked out through the revolving door into the cold bright morning. It was November and the wind came down the avenue hard and clean and smelled like the river, and he walked her to her car in the hotel garage, parked in a spot that had probably cost more than the car.

She threw the gym bag in the back. Then she turned around and leaned against the door with her arms crossed and one eyebrow up, exactly the way she'd leaned on her door frame eight days ago, before any of it.

"Pizza tonight?" she said.

"You're not sick of me?"

"I've been sick of you since the eleventh grade. That's not the question." She tilted her head. "Pepperoni?"

He thought about it. One bowl of cereal on a counter in Harlan. Ten years of always ordering the thing he knew he'd get.

"Artichokes," Chris said.

Britney stared at him.

Then she reached out and laid the back of her hand against his forehead, very seriously, like she was checking him for a fever. He laughed and caught her wrist and kissed her up against the car, the concrete echoing around them, somebody's alarm going off two levels down, and neither of them cared at all.

"One day you're going to surprise me," she said against his mouth.

"I just did."

"Yeah," Britney said softly. "You really did."