And as I focused on making her feel good, I imagined how she looked from outside this room, with my fingers in her and my mouth devouring her and her back arching up from the couch. I was so used to seeing her with the mask now that it wasn’t jarring or distancing; the way she looked at me from behind it made me feel like I’d just been given the entire world. The silky black wig framed her face, made her skin paler, her lips redder. Those same lips parted as she began to beg quietly, instructing me to move faster, to not stop sucking on her, to fuck her harder with my fingers.

As she began to fall, her hand moved up her torso, over her breast and up her neck to her face, where she slipped her mask off, exposing the last bit of her skin that had been covered.

Her huge brown eyes were trained on my face, her lips still parted in a quiet pant.

When she came, she never once looked away, never once even blinked her attention to the windows behind me.

Someone was on the other side of that glass. I could feel it. But I don’t think we could have been any more alone in this room even if we really were at my flat. Nothing in this world existed other than the way she pressed into my mouth, crying out when she came.

Then she sighed, tugged on my hair, and laughed. “Holy shit.”

So maybe if I ever met this Andy twat I wouldn’t actually punch his smug face after all. Maybe I’d shake his hand for messing things up with Sara so epically that she moved to New York and stopped being the woman who did what she was supposed to do, and started to be the woman who did what she bloody well wanted.

I kissed my way up her torso, let her suck her taste from my mouth, my tongue, my jaw. Beneath me she was warm and slow; her arms curled lazily around me, her laugh faded into my neck.

“I think that was the most fun I’ve ever had,” she whispered.

And I suspected I’d do almost anything to spend the rest of my life making this woman happy.

Fifteen

I knew it wouldn’t be good to have every night of the week filled with Max, because it would shatter my ability to think about anything else. On my morning run, I thought back on what we’d done together, and came up with some of the wildest fantasies I’d ever had in my life: crawling under Max’s desk and sucking him off while he spoke on the phone, or having him in the elevator on the way up to his apartment.

It was fun to finally let myself indulge in these sorts of daydreams, and I was starting not to care that he disrupted so much of my structured life. And after what he did for me at the club, I was beginning to realize I’d walk across flaming coals for the man.