Emily After the Review

The brand offices on the high floor had emptied the way they always did in Los Angeles in summer, the last assistants gone by nine and the air conditioning still fighting the heat that clung to the glass. I was Adrian Cole, thirty-two, creative director, and I had kept Emily Thompson at my desk long after the campaign review should have ended because I did not want her walking out with only the presentation boards between us. She was twenty-five, the face of the summer drop, billed as talent in every email, and she sat with her legs crossed in that silk blouse as if the fluorescent lights were a set she already knew how to work. Ben Hale, my partner on the account, thirty-four and still in his open collar, had closed his laptop twenty minutes earlier and had not left.

I told myself I was finishing notes, though what I was really doing was watching her mouth.

“You can take the rest in the morning,” Ben said from the doorway, and his voice had the easy courtesy of a man offering an exit he did not intend to use. He stayed where he was, one shoulder against the frame, looking at her the way I had been looking at her since the first wardrobe fitting.

Emily smiled the small professional smile she used on clients, and I saw the joke forming, something light that would have let all three of us pretend this was still work. Then she stopped. She looked at the boards, then at me, and she did not say anything at all. The quiet sat on the desk between us like a decision she refused to name. That pause was the only yes she gave, and I felt it in my hands before I stood.

I came around the desk and kissed her without any of the care I might have used on a first date. My mouth found hers. My fingers slid into the hair at the back of her neck, and she made a sound that had nothing to do with a campaign. Ben stayed in the doorway and watched us while I tasted the coffee she had been nursing and felt her lips open under mine. The power of the room sat there between us, my name on the contracts and her name on the call sheet, and neither of us pretended it was absent. We wanted that imbalance in the air. I wanted her to know I was choosing her with the lights ordinary, and I wanted Ben to see me do it.

I broke the kiss only far enough to speak against her mouth.

“Stay,” I said, and I was not talking to Ben, though he heard it. “Not for the boards.”

Emily’s eyes were dark and still a little amused, the way they got when she was testing a room. “Is that a note for the campaign,” she asked, turning it back on me so I would have to keep talking, “or are you off the clock?”

That was her, and I did not answer with words. I slid the first button of her blouse open with my thumb. She let me, her breath catching, and Ben came in from the doorway without being asked a second time. I had asked him earlier, in the kitchen by the espresso machine, whether he would stay if she wanted the room to hold more than me. She had never asked him. I had.

---

We undressed her between us at my desk while the city burned its night lights against the windows. My hands worked the rest of the blouse open, one button at a time, until the silk hung loose at her shoulders. Ben’s fingers found the zipper of her skirt and drew it down with a patience that made her shiver. She stood in the space we made and lifted her arms when we asked, warm and willing and still not naming what she wanted. Her bra came away in my fingers. I put my mouth on her breast and felt her nipple tighten against my tongue. Ben’s hand slid up the inside of her thigh until she made that sound again, unguarded this time, and I knew we were not going back to the boards.

Her panties were already damp when Ben hooked them aside. I watched his fingers part her, slow, and I watched her face while he did it, because her face was the part I had not been allowed to study under ordinary light. She looked at me, not at him, and her mouth opened on a breath that had no polish left in it. I kissed that mouth while Ben worked two fingers into her cunt. She rocked onto his hand with a small helpless roll of her hips that she would never have given a camera.

“On your knees,” I said, and I heard how it sounded, the director in it, the man who signed her checks. She went down anyway, between my desk and my chair, and she looked up at me as if she had chosen the floor herself. I opened my belt. She took my cock out with both hands and put her mouth on me without being told the rest, and the wet heat of her tongue along the underside made my knees go stupid. Ben stayed standing behind her, still dressed, still watching, and he kept his fingers in her while she sucked me, curling them until her throat fluttered around the head of my cock and a sound came out of her that I felt more than heard.

I put my hand in her hair, not to force her, only to feel her moving. She took me deeper. Her eyes watered and she did not pull off. Ben’s other hand spread her ass so he could see what he was doing, and the voyeur in him, the man who had stayed to watch me kiss her, had his whole attention on the place where his fingers disappeared into her. I wanted him looking. I wanted her knowing he was looking. The imbalance was the point, and she was wet enough to prove she had agreed to it with her body long before she had agreed with her mouth.

“You feel that,” I said to her, my voice gone rough. “That is me wanting you. Not the booking. Do you understand me?”

She made a sound around my cock that might have been a yes. Ben said, quietly, that she was soaking his wrist, and she pushed back onto his hand as if she had heard a compliment she intended to earn.

---

I pulled out of her mouth because I was going to come if I stayed there, and I was not finished choosing her. Ben withdrew his fingers, shiny with her, and I watched him put them in his own mouth like a man tasting a decision. Emily stayed on her knees a moment longer, lips wet, looking from my cock to his face. Then she let me help her up and turn her over the desk.

The campaign boards were still spread under her palms. Her name was on one of them. I swept the nearest sheets aside so she would not have to brace herself on her own face. Ben stepped in behind her and opened his trousers with the unhurried calm of a man who had been hard since the doorway. He rubbed the head of his cock along her cunt until she pushed back for it, impatient, and then he fed himself into her in one long slide that punched a broken sound out of her throat.

I stood at the side of the desk and held her face in my hands while he fucked her. I wanted her looking at me. I wanted her to know I had put him there, that I had asked him to stay, that this was not a client using a model after hours unless she needed that story in order to bear how much she liked it. She looked at me. Her mouth was open and her eyes had gone soft and greedy, and every time Ben bottomed out she made a little punched noise that I kissed away and then let happen again because I liked hearing it.

“Tell her,” I said to Ben, without looking away from her.

He did not pretend not to understand. He held her hips and drove into her harder, the wet sound of it filthy in the empty office, and he told her she was not a job. He told her he had stayed because I had asked and because she had gone quiet instead of joking, and that quiet had been clearer than any yes he had heard in a year. Emily’s laugh broke on a moan. She reached for my cock with one hand and stroked me while Ben used her over my desk, and the two of us, her creative director and the man I had invited, kept her pinned between looking and being taken until her thighs started to shake.

I could have come on her mouth then. I did not. I wanted her on the conference table. I wanted the long polished surface and the city in the glass and the two of us making it last until she stopped sounding like talent.

---

We moved her down the hall with her clothes in a messy trail behind us and the motion lights coming on in embarrassed little pools. The conference table was a dark slab that had held every dull meeting of my year. I sat her on the edge of it and kissed her while Ben stepped between her knees and put himself back into her cunt. She wrapped her legs around him. She kissed me through it, messy, her tongue in my mouth every time he thrust, and I swallowed the sounds she made as if they were mine to keep.

“Look at me,” I said against her lips. “I am not shooting you. I am here.”

She did look. Something unguarded moved through her face, and then Ben found a rhythm that made her drop her forehead against mine and swear, softly, like a woman and not a booking. I got my cock in my hand and stroked it against her hip while he fucked her. She reached down and helped me, her fingers wrapping mine, greedy for both of us at once.

When I sat in one of the leather chairs and pulled her into my lap she came with me easily, turning, sinking down onto my cock with a long shaking exhale that I felt in my ribs. She was so wet from Ben that I slid into her without resistance, buried, and she started to ride me with her hands on my shoulders and her breasts in my mouth. Ben came around to her side. She turned her head and took his cock between her lips without being asked, the same quiet yes she had given at the desk, and I watched her cheeks hollow while she used me.

The sight of it almost undid me. My talent, my campaign face, stuffed full of both of us in a conference room that still smelled faintly of dry-erase markers, and she was the one setting the pace, dropping onto my cock and taking Ben deeper each time I thrust up. I held her waist and told her I wanted her. I said it again so she would hear it with her mouth full. Ben’s hand was in her hair, gentle, and he told her the same thing in a voice that had none of the account in it.

She laughed.

It was not the polished laugh. It happened with my cock in her cunt and Ben’s cock on her tongue, a real startled sound, as if she had only just noticed how filthy and how simple this was, and the vibration of it made Ben curse. I heard a woman in that laugh. Not a model. Not a call sheet. A woman who had decided we were worth the unguarded version, and I felt something in my chest turn over, hard, toward a future I had no business naming yet.

---

We took her together after that, the way I had been thinking about since she went quiet. I stayed in the chair and she stayed in my lap, impaled, and Ben stood over us and fucked her mouth in slow strokes she met with a willingness that made my hands shake on her hips. Then we laid her out on the table on her back. I stood between her legs and pushed into her cunt while Ben fed her his cock from the other end, and we used her that way until her mascara had given up and her throat was making those wet little sounds I was going to hear for the rest of the week.

“Both,” she said, when Ben pulled out of her mouth, and it was the closest she had come to asking. She still did not name the whole of it. She looked at me, waiting to be found.

I understood her. I lifted her, turned her, got her on her hands and knees on the table with her ass toward me, and I worked two wet fingers into her hole until she pushed back and swore again. Ben lay down. She climbed over him and sank onto his cock, filling her cunt, and I spat and pressed the head of mine against her ass and waited until she nodded, small, impatient. Then I pushed.

She took me. Inch by inch, shaking, her mouth open on Ben’s shoulder, and then I was inside her ass and Ben was inside her cunt and we were both in her at once, the thin wall of her between us, and she made a noise I had never heard a person make in an office. We moved. Careful at first, then less careful, the intensity of it all friction and heat and the knowledge that I had asked for the second body and she had let me. No tearing, no cruelty, only the stretch she wanted and the two of us telling her, over and over, that this was her, not the job.

She came like that, stuffed full, with my chest against her back and Ben’s mouth on her throat, and the clench of her around both of us dragged me over. I spilled in her ass with my teeth in the meat of her shoulder, not hard enough to mark her for a fitting, hard enough that she felt claimed. Ben followed, buried in her cunt, his hands locked on her waist, and for a long minute the three of us stayed piled and breathing on a table that would have to be wiped down before Monday.

I told her I wanted her. I said it into her hair while we were still inside her, because I needed her to hear it when she could not pretend it was a note on a board.

---

We did not spend the night. I knew we would not, even while I was still softening in her, because she had a call in the morning and I had a reputation I had already risked, and because she would not be the one to ask for a bed. We cleaned up with the gym towels from my office drawer and the sink in the executive washroom. Emily put her blouse back on without finding all the buttons. The silk looked ruined in a way I liked too much.

Ben left first, with a kiss to her temple that was almost brotherly after everything, and a look at me that said he understood I was not going to share her as a habit unless she went quiet again. The floor was still empty. The summer night pressed against the glass as if it wanted in.

I walked her to the elevator in the ordinary light, her campaign still hers, her name still billed as talent on the call sheet I would send at dawn. In the reflection of the doors I looked like a man who had gotten away with something. She looked like herself, warm, a little wrecked, the unguarded laugh still somewhere in her throat.

“Have dinner with me,” I said. “Not a fitting. Not a review. I keep seeing a life when I look at you. I keep getting as far as a wedding, which is insane, and I am saying it anyway.”

She smiled, and she did not correct me, and she did not tell me the thing I would have needed in order to stop. The doors opened. She stepped in still billed as talent, still letting me be the one who had picked the second body, and I stood in the lobby of my own building and watched her go as if I had already started to fall and had not yet learned the shape of what she would not say.