Page 19 of Her Ice Queen

"The bread," Indra said, half a laugh, mostly air. "At dinner. You lost your own story mid-sentence."

"You counted."

"I count everything about you. It's become a full-time position."

Carla pulled back far enough to look at her, and what was in her face made Indra's knees consider resigning: want, open and unmanaged, on features that managed everything, the fortress with its gates standing wide and its owner not caring who saw. One night five weeks ago Indra had been given orders by a beautiful stranger. This was not that. This was Carla Denver, fully identified, letting her watch the control burn down.

Carla kissed her again and walked her backward as she did it, away from the door, past the low table, steering by hip and mouth, until the backs of Indra's thighs met the desk and stopped them both.

The desk. Twelve feet of dark wood, the leather blotter, the white porcelain cup aligned with its corner, the monitor where a two-second widening of eyes had once been the only crack in a flawless Monday. Carla moved the cup, unhurried, a woman clearing a runway, and then looked at her, and the look had the old register in it now, the one from the club, low and total.

"Tell me to stop and I will."

The words were the same words from the first night, the same ground rules offered in the same voice, and they landed entirely differently, because this time the woman offering them had a last name and a company and everything to lose, and was offering anyway.

"Don't you dare," Indra said.

It was all the permission Carla needed. It was, evidently, all the permission she'd been waiting five weeks for, because her mouth came back down and her hands went to work and the remaining formality between them died without ceremony, buttons, the zip at Indra's hip, the blouse gone to the floor with none of the first night's fold-it-over-the-chair theater, urgency winning over choreography, and Indra pulled at the silk shell of Carla's top until Carla dragged it off herself, one-armed, impatient, and the sight of her in the lamplight in the black lace she wore under the armor emptied Indra's head of language.

"Turn around," Carla said against her ear. "Bend over the desk."

The instruction hit the base of her spine and detonated there. She turned. She bent, forearms on the cool leather of the blotter, the city upside down in the window glass beyond, her own reflection ghosted over ten thousand lights with Carla a dark shape behind her, and she heard the sound Carla made at the view of her, low, proprietary, hungry, and pressed her forehead to the leather and shook.

Hands moved her underwear down off her hips, let it drop. A palm ran the length of her back, nape to base, one long slow claim, and gooseflesh chased it the whole way; then Carla's body came over hers, lace against her bare shoulder blades, the heat of her everywhere at once, mouth at her ear.

"Five weeks," Carla said, "of watching you run my floor," and slid two fingers into her from behind.

Indra's cry hit the blotter and died there, muffled. She was so wet there was no resistance at all, only the long full slide and the shock of finally, and Carla exhaled against her neck like the finally was mutual, and began to move.

It was nothing like the club. The club had been architecture, anticipation built course by course, orders and stillness and the exquisite discipline of waiting. This was greed. This was five weeks of withheld arriving all at once, Carla's fingers driving into her at a pace that had abandoned all pretense of patience, deep and curling and exactly right, her free arm wrapping around Indra's hip, reaching down, finding her clit slick and swollen and rubbing tight circles that matched the rhythm inside her, front and back at once, no mercy anywhere in the arrangement, and Indra stopped being a person who managed rooms and became a body bent over a desk making sounds she'd deny to God.

The leather was cool under her cheek and her breath fogged it. Her hips had started moving on their own, pushing back to meet each thrust, and Carla adjusted for it instantly, reading her the same as she read everything, recalibrating angle and pressure off each sound until every stroke landed square on the spot that whited out thought. The desk didn't move. Of course the desk didn't move; she'd have specified a desk that didn't move. The absurd observation floated through on the flood and drowned there.

"Harder?" Carla asked against her shoulder, and it was a real question, the check-in threaded seamlessly into the rhythm, and the fact of being asked, mid-ruin, undid Indra almost as much as the hands.

"Harder. Please. Don't stop asking, and don't stop."

"Finally." Carla's voice at her ear, frayed at its edges, triumphant. "The whole floor thinks you're unshakeable. Look at you. Five weeks of unshakeable and you're soaked and shaking on my desk."

"Your fault." She got the words out in pieces. "Entirely. Your fault."

"I accept full liability." A twist of her fingers, deeper, and the pressure of her hand tightening, and the coil at the base of Indra's belly wound past the last safe number. "You feel like the best decision I've made all quarter. Come for me. Loud as you want. There's no one left in the building to be professional for."

Indra came with her knuckles white on the far edge of the desk and her cry breaking loose entirely unprofessional into the empty office, the orgasm rolling through her in long hard waves while Carla worked her through it, fingers slowing, gentling, her mouth pressing at the nape of Indra's neck, and the city lay upside down and glittering in the glass and Indra lay on the leather blotter of the most feared desk in downtown Los Angeles, gasping, lit up, laughing on the exhale, helpless with it.

"That sound," Carla said, easing her fingers free, turning her around by the hips, "was worth the quarter."

Indra came upright unsteadily and looked at her, and had to take a second just for the looking. Flushed, dark hair down and disordered by Indra's own hands, lace and suit trousers and bare feet, she'd shed the heels somewhere, and her eyes running over Indra with unfinished business in them. Nine hundred people reported up to this woman and not one of them would have recognized her, and Indra held the exclusive and felt it go to her head faster than the scotch had. And Indra, sated and buzzing and greedy in a fashion she was done apologizing for, took a fistful of the trousers' waistband and pulled Carla against her.

"My turn," she said, "to allow for something."

"Is it."

"Since the club I've had exactly one complaint about that night." She walked her fingers up the lace, watching goosebumps lift along Carla's stomach, watching the sharp dark eyes lose a little more of their command. "You kept me on the rug. I watched. I never got my mouth on you. I've been re-litigating it for five weeks."

Carla's breathing changed. "That was the design."

"It was a flaw in the design." Indra undressed her slowly, which nothing else tonight had been, trousers, lace, all of it, taking inventory with her palms as she went, the flat muscle of her stomach, the small of her back, the surprising softness under all that tailoring, and Carla let her, let herself be stripped in her own office standing against her own desk, and the letting was the loudest thing in the room. Twelve floors of control, and she stood there and allowed it, watching Indra's face the whole time as though it was the only view in Los Angeles worth the rent.