Sophia's Lunchtime Affair

I had asked Sophia Alves to meet me at noon in the unused conference room on the twelfth floor, the one with the long table nobody booked and the glass that looked out over late spring Rio de Janeiro. The city was a smear of pale buildings and heat haze beyond the glass, traffic a distant glitter, the kind of noon that made the air conditioning feel like a secret. She was twenty, still new enough that half the floor treated her like decoration, and I was thirty-three, a senior account manager with a wedding ring I had not taken off and a marriage I had no intention of explaining. I had watched her all week in the open plan, the way she bent over printouts, the way she laughed too easily at other people’s jokes, the thin straps of that dress cutting into her shoulders. She came in on time, the door whispering shut behind her, and I reached past her shoulder and turned the lock until it clicked. Her perfume was something citrus and cheap and already warm on her skin. I noticed the small gold hoops in her ears, the faint shine of lotion at her collarbone, the way her pulse moved in her throat as if she had taken the stairs instead of the lift.

“You locked it,” she said, and her mouth curved as if she had been waiting to see whether I would. I put my hands on her waist through the thin office dress and felt how warm she already was. The fabric was almost nothing, a pale blue that showed the darker line of her bra if you looked, and I looked. Rafael had a rule about her not fucking anyone else in this building, and she had come here anyway, which I took as the only permission I needed. I kissed her the way I had been thinking about since the elevator that morning, slow at first and then not slow at all, my tongue in her mouth while she rose onto her toes and held my tie like she meant to keep me. She tasted of coffee and mint. Her teeth caught my lower lip once, not an accident. When I drew back she was already breathing harder, and she said, very quietly, “I thought you might not.” I told her I had thought about it since the elevator. She said, “I know,” and that was all, as if knowing were enough.

I lifted her onto the table. The surface was cool under her thighs. I pushed the dress up to her hips and found the lace already wet, and I dragged it down her legs and dropped it without looking where it landed. She watched me do it. She did not cover herself. I spread her knees and put my mouth on her cunt like I had been starving for it, and the sound she made went straight into my spine. I had time, in that first second, to notice the neat dark hair, the way she was already swollen, the small tremor in her inner thigh when my breath hit her. She said my name again, just once, as if testing whether I would answer with my mouth instead of words.

I licked her open with the flat of my tongue, slow enough that she had to feel every pass, then I sucked her clit and held it while she tried to keep her voice down. The glass behind us threw a pale square of noon light across the table. I could taste how ready she was, salt and heat, and I pushed two fingers into her while I kept my mouth working, curling them until her hips lifted off the wood. She was tighter than I had expected, or maybe she was only holding on. I felt her clench around my knuckles and I stayed there, patient, until she had to let go of that too.

“Daniel,” she said, and my name in that room sounded like a secret she was daring me to keep. I fucked her with my fingers in a steady rhythm and licked her in time with it, and she put one hand in my hair and the other over her own mouth. I did not let her hide. I pulled her hand down and looked up the length of her body while I ate her, and her eyes were dark and furious with wanting, as if being chosen like this was the only proof she would accept. The dress was bunched under her breasts. I could see the hard points of her nipples through the fabric, the flush climbing her throat. She said, “Don’t stop,” and then, smaller, “Please don’t be careful.” I was not careful. I added a third finger when she could take it and I kept my tongue on her clit until her hips lost their rhythm and found a worse one.

She came on my tongue with her thighs shaking against my ears. I stayed there through it, licking her through the clench, swallowing what she gave me, until she tugged at my hair hard enough to mean stop and also do not stop. I kissed the inside of her thigh and stood, my cock aching against my trousers, and I watched her try to find her breath on that table with her dress rucked up and her cunt still wet from my mouth. A sheen of sweat had gathered at her hairline. She looked wrecked and pleased with herself at the same time, which I found more dangerous than the wetness.

“You taste like you have been thinking about this all morning,” I said, and she laughed once, low, and reached for my belt herself. Her fingers were sure. She said, “I have. Since before the elevator. Don’t look so surprised.” I was not surprised. I was only hungry in a way that had nowhere honest to go.

She got my cock out with both hands, no fumbling, and she stroked me while she looked at my face as if she were taking inventory. I stepped in between her knees and rubbed the head of my cock through the slick she had left on her own skin, and she hooked her heels behind my thighs and pulled. I pushed into her in one long slide that made both of us go still. She was tight and soaked and I could feel her pulse around me. For a second I could not think of my wife, or of Rafael, or of the corridor. There was only the heat of her and the way her mouth opened without sound.

I fucked her face to face on that table with my hands under her ass, lifting her into every thrust. She held my shoulders and watched me. That was the part that undid me more than the heat of her, the way she kept her eyes open as if looking would make it mean something the desk had not meant. I wanted her and I wanted my life untouched, and both of those things were true in the same stroke. I drove into her harder and she took it, her mouth open, a small broken sound on every inward push. The table creaked once. She laughed against my mouth, breathless, and said, “Someone will hear the table before they hear us.” I told her I did not care. It was a lie I wanted to believe for as long as I was inside her.

“Look at me,” I said, and she did, and for a few filthy minutes I almost believed I was different. She clenched around my cock when I said it, as if the words themselves were a second kind of friction. I kissed her while I fucked her, messy, our teeth catching, and I could feel how close she was again already, her cunt fluttering, her nails in my shirt. She said, “Daniel, I am going to,” and then she did not finish the sentence because she did not need to. I felt her start and I did not ease off. I wanted her to come looking at me. I wanted the proof of it on my cock.

A shadow moved in the corridor beyond the half-drawn blinds. Neither of us stopped. I kept my rhythm and she kept her legs around me, and we chose, together, not to pull apart. Her eyes flicked toward the glass and then back to my face, and something like a smile, mean and bright, crossed her mouth. “Don’t you dare stop now,” she whispered. I did not.

I turned her. I pulled out only long enough to set her on her feet and bend her over the table with her palms flat on the wood, then I pushed back into her from behind and seated myself to the root. The glass was a metre from her face. The blinds were only half drawn, slats open enough that anyone walking the twelfth-floor corridor could, if they looked, see the shape of a man behind a woman and the motion that did not belong to a meeting. I could see the city over her shoulder, indifferent, and the pale line of her spine where the dress had fallen open at the zipper I had not even noticed her wearing down.

Sophia pushed back onto my cock anyway. She wanted the filth to mean she had been chosen, and I gave her the filth without promising the rest. I held her hips and fucked her in long deep strokes that made her breasts drag against the table, and I reached around to rub her clit with two fingers while I filled her. She was so wet I could hear it. The office hummed on the other side of the glass, printers and voices and the ordinary noon of people who were eating sandwiches. She said, “Harder,” and then, when I gave it to her, “God, Daniel, like that,” as if my name were the only filthy word she needed.

An adult coworker passed the corridor, a man from accounts I recognised by the set of his shoulders, and he glanced toward the glass the way people glance at unused rooms. Sophia’s breath caught. I did not pull out. She did not tell me to stop. I kept fucking her, slower then, deep enough that she had to bite her lip, and the man kept walking. We had both decided the risk was part of what we wanted. I felt her go tighter around me, as if the almost of being seen had done more than my fingers had.

“He saw the glass,” she said, short, then the rest of it lengthened into something that made me answer. “Did you slow down because of him, or because you like me this close to being caught?”

I told her the truth as I drove back in to the hilt. I liked her this close. I liked that she stayed on my cock while the building moved around us. She moaned into her own wrist and I felt her start to come again, that hard involuntary squeeze, and I had to lock my jaw not to follow her over. I kept rubbing her clit through it, two fingers slick, and I told her she was beautiful like this, which was another kind of cruelty because I meant it and I would not keep her for it.

I did not last much longer after that. I fucked her through the end of her orgasm and then I took what I needed, my hands braced beside hers on the table, my mouth at her ear, telling her I was going to come inside her and feeling her nod like she had already decided that too. The public edge of it, the half-open blinds, the wet sound of my cock in her cunt, all of it stacked until I could not hold the line. She said, “Do it,” against the wood, and then, softer, “I want to feel it.” I gave her that. I had nothing else I was willing to give.

I came hard, buried in her, pulsing, filling her while she pushed back to take it. I stayed in her through the last of it, my forehead against her shoulder, breathing like I had run. When I finally pulled out, I watched my come slide down the inside of her thigh, white against the late-spring tan she still carried from the beaches, and I used two fingers to push some of it back into her because I was not finished looking at what we had done. She made a small sound at that, not protest. I kissed the back of her neck once, which felt more intimate than the rest of it, and I regretted it immediately.

She straightened slowly. She pulled her dress down over the mess and found her underwear on the floor and did not put it back on. She looked at me while she did these ordinary things, and I saw the story she had been telling herself start to wobble, the one where being used this thoroughly might still mean being kept. Her lipstick was gone. Her hair had come loose at one side. She looked like someone who had been well fucked and was already deciding what that was allowed to cost.

I cleaned myself with a tissue from the sideboard and put my cock away and fixed my tie. The room smelled like sex and cold air. Outside the glass, Rio went on being bright and indifferent. I could still hear the printers. I could still feel the lock under my fingers from twenty minutes ago.

We sat for a minute on opposite sides of the table like colleagues who had just finished a review. I could still feel her on my skin. She could still feel me inside her; I knew it from the way she sat, a little careful, a little proud. She crossed her ankles. She did not look at the blinds.

“I will not leave my wife,” I said, because leaving that unsaid would have been a different kind of cruelty. I watched her face while I said it. She did not name whatever it cost her. She reported what she had watched me do instead. A muscle moved in her jaw. She looked at my ring, then at my mouth, then at the glass.

“You looked at me like it was different,” she said. “Then you came in me and you said that. Which one am I supposed to keep?”

I did not have an answer that would make her smaller and also keep my marriage where I wanted it. I wanted her. I also wanted my life at home untouched, the packed lunches and the ring and the story I told in the evenings. Both things sat in the room with us, ugly and honest. I said her name, which was not an answer, and she smiled as if she had expected that too.

She stood. She was twenty and she had broken a rule for a man who would not keep her, and I saw her understand that she had tried to turn being used into being kept. The Christmas party was already on the floor calendar, a night when the whole office would watch who stood next to whom, and I thought of it and said nothing. She smoothed her dress and checked her mouth in the dark glass, and when she spoke again it was almost teasing, a test of whether I would keep up with the damage I had just done.

“You can still taste me,” she said. “Are you going to sit in your next meeting like that, or are you going to pretend this was lunch?”

I told her I would pretend. She nodded as if she had expected the performance and had only wanted to hear me admit it. “Good,” she said. “Then we both know what this was.” She did not wait for me to disagree.

She unlocked the door herself. I stayed in the chair a moment longer, married, still hard in the memory of her, and I watched Sophia Alves walk back into the corridor as if she had only been looking for a stapler. The last claim she might have made, that the boss had been a one-time mistake, had just cost her something she would not say out loud. Her heels made a small, ordinary sound on the carpet. No one looked up.

My phone stayed dark. Hers lit as she reached the lift. I saw her pause, read, and the set of her mouth change. A peer from her team had asked if she was staying late this week, the kind of ordinary request that could become a room with a closed door if she let it. She looked back once, not at me so much as at the glass we had used, and I understood she would not leave the feeling where I had put it. Daniel Costa would not leave his marriage. A coworker had asked her to stay. She wanted to burn it off after hours, and the building, patient as ever, would give her the lights and the empty floors to do it.