CHAPTER 21 - BOTH

Knox’s fingers are still inside me when I read the text, and the collision of the two sensations – his hand between my legs and Dominic’s name on my screen – short-circuits something in my brain that I don’t think is going to reconnect anytime soon.

I pull Knox’s hand away and slide off his lap and grab my bag and he watches me leave the study room with his wet fingers resting on the table and an expression that says he knows exactly where I’m going and exactly who summoned me, and the fact that he doesn’t stop me is more unsettling than if he’d pinned me to the chair.

Dominic’s office is on the third floor of the humanities building, at the end of a hallway that smells like old carpet and printer toner, and the door is closed when I get there, which is different because it’s usually open during office hours. I knock and his voice comes through the wood – “Come in” – and I push the door open and he’s behind his desk with his glasses on and his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a stack of papers in front of him that he’s pretending to grade.

I sit in the chair across from him and my heartbeat is so loud I’m convinced he can hear it, and maybe he can because his pen pauses for a fraction of a second before resuming its path across the paper.

“How is the partner project coming along?” he asks, and his voice is the same measured instrument it always is and the question is so aggressively normal that it sounds rehearsed, like he practiced asking it in a tone that wouldn’t betray whatever is actually happening behind his expression.

“Fine,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expected given that I was cumming on his son’s fingers in a glass-walled study room approximately four minutes ago and I can still feel the echo of it pulsing between my legs.

“Good.” He writes something on the paper in front of him. Doesn’t look up. The silence fills the room like water rising, and I can smell his cologne from here – woodsmoke and that darker thing underneath – and it’s settling into my clothes the same way it did the last time I was in this office, and I think about Knox saying “you smell like his cologne” and I wonder if this is deliberate, if Dominic knows his scent clings to people the way his son knows, and if this is his version of marking.

He sets the pen down. He takes off his glasses and folds them and places them on the desk with that precise, unhurried motion that makes everything he does look like a decision that was made hours ago.

He stands, and the chair rolls back silently on the carpet, and he walks past me toward the door.

I hear the lock click.

The sound is small and metallic but it changes the molecular structure of the air in the room because a locked door in an office is just privacy but a locked door in THIS office with THIS man standing between me and the exit is a declaration of intent so loud that my fingers go cold in my lap.

He turns around and leans against the door and looks at me, and for the first time since I’ve known him his expression isn’t composed or measured or controlled. It’s cracking. The surface is intact but something underneath is pressing upward against it the way water presses against a dam, and I can see the strain of keeping it together in the way his jaw is set and the way his hands are flat against the door behind him like he’s holding himself in place.

“We need to discuss boundaries,” he says, and the irony of the word BOUNDARIES coming out of the mouth of a man who just locked me in his office is so thick that I almost laugh except that nothing about his face suggests this is funny.

He walks toward me. Each step is measured and slow and I can feel the weight of his approach in my chest like a countdown, and he stops in front of my chair and puts both hands on the armrests and leans down until his face is level with mine and his cologne fills my lungs and his eyes are close enough that I can see the flecks of amber in the brown that I’ve never noticed before, amber that catches the light from the desk lamp in a way that reminds me of something I’ve seen recently in a different pair of eyes.

“Tell me to unlock that door.”

I don’t say anything.

My mouth opens and nothing comes out because my body and my brain are at war and my body is winning the way it’s been winning since the night Knox stood at the foot of my bed, except this is different because Knox takes and Dominic is ASKING and the asking is somehow worse because it puts the choice on me and I don’t trust myself to make it.

His hand comes up to my jaw. Not gently – his fingers grip the bone and tilt my face up toward his, and his thumb traces across my bottom lip in a slow drag that pulls my lower lip down slightly before releasing it, and he studies the result the way he studies everything, with that clinical precision that makes me feel like a specimen being examined under glass except that the glass is cracking on his end too because his hand is trembling.

He holds me there. Five seconds. His thumb on my lip. His eyes on my mouth.

I can feel his breath against my face and the restraint coming off him like heat from an engine, and every second he doesn’t kiss me is louder than a kiss would be.

Ten seconds.

His eyes are dark and the amber flecks are brighter than they were a moment ago and his grip on my jaw tightens by a fraction and I think he’s going to do it, I think this is the moment the dam breaks and his mouth is going to be on mine and I’m going to let it happen because my body has already decided.

He lets go.

He straightens up and sits back down behind his desk and picks up his pen and his glasses are back on his face before I’ve taken my next breath, and the composure is reinstated so completely that I almost believe I imagined the last thirty seconds except that my jaw is still warm where his fingers were and my lip is still tingling where his thumb dragged across it.

“Get out.”

I stand on legs that feel like they belong to someone else and I walk to the door and my hand is on the lock and I turn it and step into the hallway and close the door behind me, and I’m halfway to the stairwell when I hear something through the wood that stops me dead.

A low sound from inside his office. Not a groan, not any sound I can categorize within the range of human vocal production. A growl – deep and vibrating, the kind of sound that travels through solid surfaces and settles into the bones of anyone close enough to feel it, and it’s the same sound I heard through the wall of Knox’s bedroom the night we got each other off through drywall, except this one is coming from behind a locked office door and the man making it wears a suit and reading glasses and grades papers with a fountain pen.

I stand in the hallway with my heart hammering and my underwear wet and I don’t know which man did it to me – the one who had his fingers inside me twenty minutes ago or the one who just held my face like he was deciding whether to kiss me or consume me – and the not knowing is the most terrifying part of all of this.

Both.

The answer is both, and I walk to my car with shaking hands and drive home and don’t look in the rearview mirror because I’m afraid of what my own face looks like right now.