Chapter 72: Off the Record

Victoria stepped past him into the apartment and stopped two paces in, as if she had walked into a meeting room and needed a second to find the exits.

Lucas closed the door. He did not put the chain on.

His place had never been built for visitors. One room that was a kitchen at one end and a living room at the other, a short hallway, a bedroom with the door half open. The bag of rice still sat on the counter beside the stove.

Victoria looked at the rice.

"You were going to cook," she said.

"Two nights ago."

"And then?"

"And then your ex-husband started texting me."

She nodded slowly. She took her coat off and held it for a moment as if she did not know where it was supposed to go. He took it from her and hung it on the hook by the door over his own jacket.

"Sit down," he said. "Do you want water? I have water and a bottle of wine I’ve been saving for no reason."

"Water."

He filled two glasses at the tap. When he turned around she was sitting on the arm of the couch instead of the cushion, the way she sometimes sat on the edge of the conference table in 2B when she wanted people to know she would not be staying long.

He gave her the glass. She drank half of it.

"I want to say some things first," she said. "Before anything. If I don’t say them now I’ll say them at the wrong time and ruin it."

"Okay."

"I haven’t decided I trust you again." She held the glass with both hands. "I decided this afternoon that you didn’t know about Helen. That’s a fact. I decided tonight that I’m tired of making every choice about you through counsel. That’s a different thing. I don’t want you to think one of them is the other."

"I don’t."

"Reed told you the instruction gets revised tomorrow," she said.

"He said tonight I’m a man going home."

"He told the GC the same thing, in nearly the same words." She put the glass on the side table. "I’m not here because a lawyer gave me a technicality. I’d have come anyway. I’d just have felt worse about it."

Lucas sat down on the coffee table across from her, close enough that their knees almost touched.

"Why did you come?"

"Because I sat in a suite at the Harbor Grand and listened to my lawyer tell me Richard was in handcuffs, and the first thing I wanted was to tell you. Not the board. Not my sister. You." Her mouth tightened. "That annoyed me so much I called a car."

The apartment was quiet enough that he could hear the refrigerator running and someone’s television through the wall, a laugh track rising and falling.

"I need to say something too," he said.

"Go ahead."

"Last time, you asked me once if I wanted this. I said yes. That was true, and then I spent weeks keeping things from you while you were in my bed and I was in yours." He kept his voice level. "I’m not going to tell you it won’t happen again because you wouldn’t believe me and you shouldn’t. I’ll tell you I don’t have anything else right now. No page, no account, nothing about tonight I haven’t said."

"And if you did?"

"I’d tell you before you took your shoes off."

She looked down at her shoes. Then back at him.

"That’s a very specific promise."

"It’s the only kind I trust myself with."

For a while she did not answer. Then she bent, unbuckled one shoe, then the other, and set them side by side next to the couch with the heels lined up.

"Ask me," she said.

"Ask you what?"

"What I asked you. Ask me the same thing. I want to hear you say it, because I’m the one who walked into your hallway tonight, and I don’t want you wondering tomorrow if I came here because I was frightened and you were convenient."

"Do you want this?" he said. "Not because of Richard, not because you’re tired, not because I was the one sitting in Reed’s office. This. Me, tonight."

"Yes," Victoria said. No hesitation in it at all. "I want you. I’ve wanted you every day I sat across a table from you with a lawyer between us. I’m sober, I’m not scared anymore, and I’m forty-four years old, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make me say it twice."

"I won’t."

"And you?"

"Yes," he said. "I want you. I never stopped."

She stood up from the arm of the couch. He stood with her.

She put one hand flat on his chest, over his shirt.

"Your heart is going," she said.

"Yours?"

"Worse."

He kissed her.

It was careful at first, almost polite, two people checking that the door was still where they had left it. Then she made a quiet sound against his mouth and her hand closed in his shirt and the care went out of it. She kissed him like she had been holding the thought for weeks and had only now given herself permission to finish it.

A soft chime sounded at the edge of his hearing.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Current Status: Suspended / Under Review.]

[Target Receptivity: Very High. Residual Guardedness: Low. Primary Tension Zone: Shoulders, base of the neck.]

[Note: The target initiated contact outside all professional channels.]

He let the overlay fade. He did not want to read her tonight. He wanted to listen.

He found the pins in her hair and drew them out one by one. When the last one came free her hair fell over his wrist, and she leaned into him.

He kissed the side of her neck, just below her ear, and pressed his thumb into the knot at the base of her skull. She swore under her breath and her knees gave a little. He held her up.

"Bedroom," she said into his shoulder. "Before I fall down in your kitchen."

His bedroom was small. A double bed with plain blue sheets, a lamp, a chair with yesterday’s shirt over the back. The window looked out at the brick wall of the next building and a strip of orange streetlight.

He turned on the lamp. She turned it back off and switched on the one in the hallway instead, so only a long wedge of yellow fell across the bed.

"Better," she said.

She reached for her own buttons out of habit. He put his hands over hers, and she stopped, and this time she did not need to think about it. She let her arms fall.

He took off the charcoal jacket first and laid it over the chair on top of his shirt. Then the blouse underneath, one button at a time. Her skin was warm.

She pulled his shirt up and over his head with less patience than he had shown her and dropped it on the floor. Then she undid his belt and his trousers and pushed them down, and he stepped out of them.

He unzipped her skirt. It fell around her ankles. She kicked it away toward the chair without looking.

She stood in front of him in dark underwear and nothing else, with her hair down over her shoulders and the hallway light along one side of her body.

"You’re staring," she said.

"Yes."

"Good."

He drew her down onto the bed with him. The mattress dipped and she laughed under her breath at how much it creaked, and then he kissed her and she stopped laughing.

He unhooked her bra and slid it off her arms. Her breasts were heavy and soft against his chest, and when he lowered his head and took a nipple in his mouth she pushed her fingers into his hair and held him there, her breathing gone short. He spent a long time on her, one side and then the other, until her hips were moving against his thigh without her seeming to decide it.

[Target Arousal: High.]

[Guardedness: Dissolving.]

He moved lower. He kissed the soft skin under her navel and the line of her hip and the inside of her thigh, and she lifted her hips so he could draw her underwear down and off. Then he settled between her legs and put his mouth on her.

She made a sound he had not heard from her before, low and surprised, and her thigh pressed against his ear. He went slowly. He paid attention to what made her breath catch and what made her swear and what made her go perfectly still, and he gave her more of the last one. One of her hands gripped the sheet.

"Don’t stop," she said. "Don’t you dare stop to be clever."

He did not stop. He slid two fingers inside her, curling them, and kept his mouth where it was, and a minute later she came hard with her back arched off the blue sheets and her hand clamped over her own mouth because the walls were thin. She shook for a while afterward. He stayed where he was and kissed her thigh until she pulled at his shoulders.

"Up here," she said. "Now."

He came up over her. She reached between them and wrapped her hand around him, and the touch was so sure that he had to close his eyes for a second.

"Condom," he said.

"Nightstand?"

"Top drawer."

She leaned over, found the box, and handed one to him with a look that was almost amused. "You keep them by the bed."

"Optimism."

"Hm."

He rolled it on. She pulled him back down by the neck and guided him to her, and he pushed into her slowly, all the way, and they both went still at once.

She was hot and slick and tight around him. She hooked one leg over the back of his thigh and held him there, deep, and looked up at him in the yellow light from the hall with her lips parted.

"Stay," she said. "Just a second. Stay like this."

He stayed. He could feel her pulse around him. He could feel his own in his throat.

Then she moved her hips under him, once, and he started to move with her.

It was not like the riverside apartment. That night had been about her letting go of something. This felt more like the two of them finding each other again in the dark, adjusting, getting it wrong for a stroke and then right. He kept it slow and deep at first, and she met him every time, her heels pressing into the backs of his legs. The bed creaked steadily. Neither of them cared anymore.

"Harder," she said against his jaw. "I’m not going to break."

He gave her what she asked for. She pulled him down until his weight was on her and wrapped both legs around him and held on, and her breath turned into short broken sounds against his shoulder that got louder no matter how she tried to swallow them. He slid a hand under her lower back and lifted her hips into him, and she said his name the way she never said it at work, without the second syllable fully finished.

She came again with her nails in his back and her whole body tightening around him. He lasted maybe three more strokes. He buried his face in her hair and came deep inside her with a groan he could not keep quiet either.

For a long time afterward neither of them moved. The television next door had gone silent.

Victoria laughed, very quietly, under him.

"What?"

"Your neighbor," she said. "They definitely heard."

"They play game shows at one in the morning. They owe me."

She laughed again and pushed at his shoulder until he rolled off her. He dealt with the condom and came back, and she had pulled the sheet up to her waist and was lying on her side facing the door, looking at the wedge of hallway light.

He lay down behind her. After a moment she reached back, found his arm, and pulled it over her.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Relationship Status Updated: Suspended / Under Review → Intimate Partner (Probationary).]

[The target has reopened the personal connection by her own choice, without the Host asking. Trust is not restored. Access is.]

[Reward: 250 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 4200.]

Probationary. Lucas read the word twice in the dark and found he did not mind it. It was more honest than anything the system had told him about her before.

"You’re reading something," Victoria said without turning over.

He went still.

"You do this thing with your eyes," she said. "Like you’re checking a screen nobody else can see. You did it in 2B every time someone said a number."

"I’m thinking."

"You’re doing both." She was quiet. "I said eventually, once. That I’d want to know how you see what you see."

"I remember."

"It’s still eventually. Not tonight." Her thumb moved over the back of his hand. "But I noticed. I want you to know that I noticed."

"Okay."

"That’s all you’re going to say?"

"You told me to tell you things before you took your shoes off," he said. "Your shoes are already off."

She snorted into the pillow, which he had not known she was capable of.

Her phone buzzed in the pocket of the jacket on the chair. Once. Then again.

She did not move to get it.

"That’ll be my detail," she said. "They’ll want to know if I’m coming down."

"Are you?"

Victoria was silent for long enough that he thought she might have fallen asleep. Then she reached over, took his phone off the nightstand, and handed it back to him over her shoulder.

"Text this number." She recited it from memory. "Tell them Ms. Sterling is staying until morning and they can take shifts. Use those words."

"From my phone?"

"From yours." She settled back against him. "If I’m going to do this, I’m not going to hide it from the people I pay to know where I am."