I got a hand under her thigh, palm on skin above the boot, and slid it up until the pleated skirt gave way and gathered. She was warm. She was shaking. She was also glaring at me from four inches away like she intended to file a complaint about it.
"Tell me to stop."
"No."
"Say the words."
"I don’t want you to stop." She said it flat and then heard how it sounded and her whole face went crimson to the hairline. "Obviously I don’t want you to stop, I have been thinking about your hands specifically, do you understand how much that has cost me in productivity."
"You’ve been keeping a number."
"Of course I’ve been keeping a number." Her legs came up and locked around the back of my thighs. "Eleven hours. Approximately. Distributed across nineteen nights."
I laughed against her mouth and she bit my lower lip for it, hard, and then made a broken little sound when my hand went the rest of the way up.
Lace. Expensive, soaked through, and the second my knuckles brushed it her spine arched off the table and every ounce of Lang composure in the building evacuated the premises.
"Ah. Ahhn. Mm, ah, wait, wait, I need to." Her nails went into my shoulders through the shirt. "I need to know that this isn’t."
"It isn’t."
"You don’t know what I was going to say."
"You were going to ask if this is because of what you did in the meeting." I pushed the lace aside and she made a sound with no consonants in it at all. "It’s not. This has been on the table since Building C and you know it, you’ve had a number for it. Eleven hours."
"That was distributed."
"Distributed."
"Nnh, fuck, don’t stop doing that, don’t, mmm."
She got loud. That was the thing nobody would have predicted about Petra Lang from watching her sit in the top row with her planner closed. She got loud and completely unguarded, high broken little cries with her forehead against my collarbone and her hips chasing my hand, and the table creaked under her every time she moved, and about ninety seconds in she stopped forming words in English entirely and switched to something that might have been French.
Maribelle had said this room was soundproofed. I remember being extremely grateful to Maribelle.
"Belmont. Belmont, I’m." Her thighs clamped. Her voice broke into pieces on the second syllable of my name. "Ah, ah, hah, I’m going to."
"Look at me."
"I can’t."
"Look at me."
She did, and it cost her something enormous to do it, and she came apart with her emerald eyes wide open and locked on mine and one hand crushing the back of my neck. It went through her in waves that made the table legs knock against the floor, and she rode every one of them out loud, and at the end she dropped her forehead onto my shoulder and just breathed, wet and ragged, with little aftershock whimpers coming out every few seconds like hiccups.
〘 Petra Lang · 34% → 52% · ATTACHED 〙
〘 Subject has now surrendered control in the only context where she has never surrendered control. Advisory: she will require this to be your fault. 〙
I dismissed it. I have gotten very good at dismissing it.
For about eleven seconds she stayed exactly there, small and shaking and warm, with her fingers moving in the hair at the back of my neck in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with someone who has not been held very much.
Then Petra Lang came back online.
She sat up. Straightened her shirt. Located the missing button on the table beside her hip, picked it up, and set it in her palm like evidence.
"Two twenty-two," she said, checking her watch with a hand that was still visibly unsteady. "You have Combat Theory with Dravid at three. It’s a nine-minute walk from this building. You need thirteen minutes to make yourself presentable and you smell like me, which will be a problem, because Kennedy has functioning olfactory perception and no discretion whatsoever."
"She has some discretion."
"She has selective discretion, which is worse, because it means she chooses." Petra slid off the table and her legs did not entirely hold, and she caught the edge with two fingers and pretended that had been the plan. "Turn around. I need to fix my skirt and I’m not doing it while you watch."
"I’ve just had my hand"
"Turn. Around."
I turned around. Behind me came the sound of fabric being put back into compliance, and one small hitched breath that she probably thought I didn’t hear.
"This changes nothing about the arrangement," she said. "Every inquiry that lands on your file, docket number and requesting party, within twelve hours. Your signature on any cohort language before it goes to faculty. I write the Crucible brief and you deliver it, and when Reyes is standing on that floor in two weeks watching your trauma numbers, you will save people and you will not be clever."
"Everybody keeps telling me that."
"Because it’s the only correct instruction anyone has given you all semester." Her boots came around into my field of vision. She had the blazer back on, buttoned, and her hair rearranged, and if you saw her in a hallway right now you would notice nothing except that her mouth was swollen and her eyes were too bright. "And this."
She held up the button between two fingers.
"You’ll get it back when I decide."
"That’s my button."
"It’s leverage." She put it in her blazer pocket and the flush came back across her cheekbones as she did it, which ruined the entire performance and she knew it. "Wednesday. Fourth floor, after four, when it’s empty. I’ll have the brief drafted and you’ll have opinions I’ll pretend to consider."
"That’s what you’re calling it."
"That’s what I’m putting in the planner." She stopped at the door with her hand on the frame and did not look back at me, which was the only mercy either of us got out of the last twenty minutes.
"You said when it was safe you’d tell me what you are."