“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
No, she shouldn’t have. Because now I was mad, and it was stupid and petty to feel so, and also it wasn’t. The truce between us had calmed the conflict but it hadn’t erased it. The secrets still stood between us like a clear barricade of teflon. There was no getting through them no matter how transparent they appeared, and still the illusion that it was possible kept me beating my hands against the walls.
“There’s good reasoning to it,” I said, pushing her with my words as well as my brutal thrusts. “Because if you don’t know, you can always assume the worst. Then you can still pretend I scare you whenever you want.” I reached around her body to pinch her clit. “Or is it not my secrets that scare you the most, but rather what I’d do with yours?”
She cried out, on the verge of orgasm, I suspected, but she managed to hang on, and a moment later she was collected enough to speak. “Even without the secrets, you scare me.” It was quiet, a confession of sorts. “You’re the only person who has ever loved me exactly like I am. The only person I’ve ever trusted entirely. That means you are more capable of hurting me than anyone who has hurt me before, and that’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever imagined.”
My tempo stuttered as I digested her words. Knowing everyone who had hurt her, knowing the ways they’d hurt her—that was a mighty declaration. It rocked me at my core. Made me off balance. That was a form of submission, wasn’t it? Being vulnerable like that. Making me aware of my power.
Then if the problem between us wasn’t her inability to submit to her equal then it was me who couldn’t dominate mine. All that time ago when she’d said I always had to win? She’d been more right than either of us had known. Because when I’d given in, when I’d dropped my pursuit of her past, and committed to loving our child as she’d demanded, I lost hold of something I’d taken for granted as permanently mine. I’d lost hold of my authority, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
Taking advantage of my slowed pace, she turned around again to face me. She cupped my cheek with her palm and wrapped her leg around my hip, guiding me back into her heat. I pressed into her, all the way, as far as she could take me.
Sighing, she pressed her forehead against mine. “So good,” she said. “You feel so good.” Then, “We’re good too, aren’t we?”
Once again, I turned her around, this time pivoting so I could bend her, and she could brace herself against the bench. I shoved inside her, moving in and out with increasing speed.
“How can you ask that?” I gritted out. “How can you even ask?”
Then I fucked her with savage stabs, over and over and over, until her question was long lost to the friction and the frenzy and the orgasms that shuddered through us both. Until even I could believe that I’d ignored responding because the answer should have been obvious and not because I didn’t know what it was.
Ten
Celia
Hudson: I need to see you.
The text popped up at the top of the Atlantic article I was reading while feeding Cleo. It was early, still. Just after six, and it was a Saturday. But Hudson was always up at the crack of dawn so that wasn’t the surprising part of the message. The surprising part was that he’d sent it at all.
Of course I’d see him. I’d told him what we wanted, and if he was reaching out, it meant he wanted to negotiate. What else could he want? And he wouldn’t want Edward there. I knew that as sure as anything, so meeting when Edward was at work was my best option.
Before I could overthink it, I typed a one-handed response.
My Monday is open. Where?
His next text came almost immediately.
Hudson: It needs to be sooner. Today. At my office.
“He thinks he’s out of The Game, but he still tries to control every situation,” I said, mostly to myself, though Cleo looked up at me with her bright blue eyes and smiled around my nipple. “Right? We won’t let him do that, will we?”
Tomorrow, I typed, just to hold some ground. In the restaurant at my hotel. Five pm.
The baby was usually sleeping then. A good time to slip away.
Hudson: The Sky Launch. At six.
“Oh, please.” I was not meeting at his nightclub. I didn’t usually care about his turf or mine, but since it so obviously mattered to him, I was reluctant to give in. Though, maybe being amiable was the way to go. I was the one who wasn’t in the position that he was. He was the one with the stocks we wanted, not the other way around.
But if I’d learned anything from the men in my life—my father, Edward, Hudson himself—it was to never take the weaker stance. If anything, that was when to be even more firm. Besides, Hudson didn’t hold all the cards here. I’d meant it when I told him we’d pursue purchasing stocks elsewhere. I didn’t have to be as amiable as he demanded.
I pulled up WhatsHalfway, an app that found a middle location between two spots, and entered in the hotel and Hudson’s office address.
Randall’s, I texted back. It’s a bar halfway between you and me. Six pm will be fine.
His response didn’t come as quickly, which meant he was thinking it through. And if he was thinking it through, it meant he’d come to the same conclusion as I did—we’d have to compromise.
Sure enough, his next text settled the matter.
Hudson: See you then.
I dropped my phone in my lap with a sigh. It had been almost two weeks since I’d talked to him about letting Edward and me buy those stocks. Hudson did like to think things through, and it had been enough time for him to have done that, but it wasn’t like him to have a total one-eighty without much prodding. Had something—or someone—changed his mind?
Or was this meeting about something else entirely?
No. It had to be about the shares. I wouldn’t know any more than that until we talked. But there was still one issue I had to deal with before then. I rubbed my hand over Cleo’s fuzzy head. “Now we just have to figure out what we’re going to tell Daddy.”
She broke away from my breast so she could smile again. “You’re not really interested in eating anymore, are you?” I pulled her away and reattached the cup on my bra then sat her up on my lap. She was getting strong. Soon she’d be sitting on her own. It felt suddenly like it was all moving too fast, that any second she’d be asking for her own phone and locking herself in her room with her music blaring. I hugged her to me, as though that could somehow hold the moment, as though it might slow time down and keep her mine for longer.
The door between our two suites creaked open, pulling my focus.
“If that’s not an adorable sight,” Edward said from the doorway, wearing nothing but his pajama bottoms. “We need to get a photographer in here. Before she’s too wiggly to pose.”
“I was just thinking she was growing up too fast.” I brushed my lips across her forehead, making her grunt with frustration since the action had blocked her from tugging at the open drawstring on my nursing nightgown.