Carrigan pulled back and cupped my face in between his hands. “Don’t cry,” he said, his eyes soft. He leaned in and kissed my forehead, my nose, my mouth again, sweet sipping kisses that left me cold. The tears continued to flow, and I could feel him start to harden against my hip. I resisted the urge to bite down on his tongue, draw blood. I knew this man. A trauma junkie. The man who wants to know all about your broken pieces without ever asking about what made you strong.

I let him propel us back to the couch, didn’t argue when he started to tenderly undress me from the top down. I feigned little sounds of appreciation every so often, but Carrigan was lost in his own world, a world in which he was healing a broken woman with his magic cock. But none of that mattered if it got me what I wanted. That thought brought a vigor back to my kisses.

Carrigan curled one hand around my ear, stroking the folds, pushing his face into my hair, everywhere at once. I tilted my head into his hand, thinking about Jackal hearing us upstairs, wondering, vaguely, if it turned him on the way it had for me to watch him with that girl, that nothing, on his desk. I closed my eyes and Carrigan kissed me and I was thinking, then, only Finish it, finish it, finish it.

“Touch me, touch me, please,” I gasped and he did, his face buried in my neck and moving slow, so slow, until he wasn’t anymore. Lou’s face peeked out at me from the picture over his shoulder, the tendons on her neck bulging as she gasped for breath, laughing hard. Jackal might have run out of battery for all the show that we were giving him. I made sure my head was never in the way. I made sure he couldn’t miss the shot.

Afterward, still caged between his arms on the couch, listening to his ragged breathing as he came down, I reached up and kissed his throat. I didn’t say anything to him, and he mistook my silence for being moved by the moment. He stroked my face once, then moved off of me, wiping himself off on one of my throw pillows. Carrigan started tucking himself back into his clothes, one sympathetic kiss absentmindedly shotgunned into the side of my head to show it was more than an afternoon fuck that got carried away. Already making his excuses about how he needed to get going, how he’d be missed at the office already.

I wasn’t listening. I was still lying there, staring at Lou’s face. I wondered if I would ever tell Lou about this. I wondered if I would have performed differently if it had been her behind the camera.