Claimed as the Wrong Bride

Chapter 4 Part 2: The Gallery

The service corridor was dim and smelled like packing materials and old wood and the faint mineral smell of stone that had been cold for a long time. The courtyard beyond it was small, enclosed on three sides by the building's exterior walls and open to the Tripicity sky above, which was doing its usual violet bruised thing, the city's light pollution giving it that color that she had never successfully captured and was thinking about again now because she was an artist and the occupational hazard of being an artist was thinking about color at inopportune moments.

He had followed her out and the door had closed behind them and the noise of the gallery dropped to something distant and ambient and the courtyard held them in its particular quiet, which was not silence but the specific sound of a city heard from a sheltered space, everything present and nothing immediate.

She turned to face him.

He was looking at her the way he had been looking at her since the conversation at the canvas, with that precise focused attention that she had decided was not a performance. She was close enough now to see the details the gallery lighting had not provided, the specific architecture of his face up close, the way his jaw was set with a kind of habitual control that she suspected went all the way down.

She reached up and loosened his tie.

Not all the way. Just the first inch, just enough to communicate the direction of the conversation, and she watched his expression do something that was not surprise but was adjacent to it, the recalibration of a man who was accustomed to being the one who set the pace and was finding himself in different territory.

"You're not what I expected," he said.

"You didn't know I existed an hour ago," she said. "You didn't have expectations."

"I formed them quickly."

"And now you're revising them."

"Continuously."

She pulled the tie loose another inch and his hand came up and caught her wrist, not to stop her, the pressure was too light for that, more like punctuation, like he was marking that he knew what she was doing and was deciding whether to let it continue. She looked at his hand on her wrist and then at his face.

"Well?" she said.

He released her wrist. She finished with the tie.

What happened next was not elegant. Elegant was for people who had more space and more time and more interest in the performance of the thing than the thing itself, and she had none of those and neither, it turned out, did he. What it was instead was immediate, the specific chemistry of two people who had been paying very close attention to each other for an hour and had run out of reasons to keep the attention theoretical.

She pushed his jacket back off his shoulders and he let it fall and his hands found her waist with the particular certainty of someone who had decided something and was not going back on it. She was against the wall a moment later, the cold stone of it through the back of the dress a sharp contrast to the warmth of him in front of her, and she pulled at his shirt with both hands while he worked on the dress with a focused efficiency that impressed her more than she intended to let on.

He was built under the suit in a way the suit had been designed not to advertise and she appreciated the architecture of it with both hands in the way an artist appreciated good structure, which was to say thoroughly and without pretending she wasn't doing it.

His mouth found her throat.

Not tentative. He pressed his lips to the curve of her neck just below her jaw and she felt his tongue trace the line of her pulse, slow and deliberate, the specific patience of a man who understood that the neck was not a stop on the way to somewhere else but a destination with its own considerable merit. She tipped her head back against the stone wall and let out a sound that was lower than she intended, something that came from somewhere below conscious decision-making, and felt him note it. The slight change in the pressure of his mouth. The way he stayed exactly where he was rather than moving on, which meant he had filed the information and intended to use it.

She grabbed the front of his shirt.

"The dress," she said.

"I have it," he said against her throat, and he did, his free hand gathering the fabric at her hips with a precision that suggested the patience he had referenced earlier applied in every context he chose to bring it to. The dress went up and his hand slid up the inside of her thigh, unhurried, the kind of unhurried that was its own form of torment, and she tilted her hips toward him because she was not a person who played games about wanting things she wanted.

His fingers slid the fabric of her thong aside and found her and she made a sound that the courtyard walls took from her before it reached anyone outside them.

He started with the flat of two fingers, just pressing, learning the shape of her through that initial contact, feeling how wet she already was, and she heard him make a low sound at what he found there, something satisfied and not entirely composed, which she noted because it was the first crack in the composure and she filed it immediately. Then he began to move, slow strokes from bottom to top, parting her, his fingertips finding her c**t on each upstroke with a precision that was not accidental and drawing a sharp breath out of her every time.

She grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and held on.

He circled her c**t with two fingertips, unhurried, varying the pressure in a way that felt like he was learning her responses the way he had learned everything else tonight, reading what made her breath catch versus what made it stop entirely, what made her hips push forward versus what made her go very still because the sensation was too specific to move through. When he found the stroke that made her do the latter, the particular angle and pressure that turned her legs uncertain, he stayed on it. Did not move off it. Just kept doing exactly that thing with the focused patience of a man who had no intention of being anywhere else.

"Oh," she said, which was not a word so much as a reflex, and she felt his mouth curve against her throat.

His mouth moved from her throat to just beneath her ear and she felt his lips part against her skin, felt the warm graze of his teeth, and made another sound, louder this time, that genuine involuntary sound that her body produced when something was very good and her mind had not yet caught up with the volume of the response.

Then he pushed one finger inside her, slowly, curling forward as he did it, and she made a sound that was considerably louder than either of the previous ones and her hips rolled down onto his hand seeking more of the pressure and finding it.

He added a second finger and she felt the stretch of it, the full specific weight of two fingers inside her moving in that same unhurried rhythm, his thumb finding her c**t now and working it in small circles while his fingers curved and pressed against the place inside her that made thinking difficult. The combination was methodical and devastating and she was making sounds she could not have stopped if she had wanted to, continuous and unstudied, her face pressed against the side of his neck because she needed to be against something solid.

He lifted his head and looked at her. Those pale eyes close, expression composed in a way that was somehow worse than if he'd looked undone, and she could feel his fingers still moving between her thighs, still working that same specific pressure, while he watched her face with that precise unruffled attention and she had the specific furious thought that he was enjoying this more than she was going to be comfortable with later.

"I'll have to cover your mouth when you come," he said. His voice was very level. "The gallery is not that far."

She looked at him. His thumb circled and his fingers pressed simultaneously and her breath caught audibly and came out as something that was almost his name.

"So confident you'll make me come," she said.

The corner of his mouth moved. "You have no idea, chérie."

He said it the way he said everything, without performance, like it was simply the correct word for the thing he was saying. She had a fraction of a second to decide how she felt about that and then his fingers curled and pressed harder and his thumb moved faster and she stopped deciding anything at all.

She came with his hand over her mouth, his palm warm and firm against her lips, muffling the sound she made into something the courtyard walls absorbed without complaint. The orgasm moved through her in waves she felt in her thighs and her stomach and the tight grip of her hands in his shirt, his fingers still working her through every second of it, drawing it out past the point she thought it would end, and she was shaking against him by the time it finished, properly shaking, her knees having made exactly the decision she had warned them against.

The only thing keeping her upright was the wall at her back and his body in front of her and the arm he had looped around her waist at some point without announcing it.

He watched her the whole way through. That was the part she was going to think about later. Not the hand or the mouth or the specific devastating patience of his fingers. The fact that he watched her with those pale composed eyes and did not look away for a single second, like she was the most interesting thing he had seen all evening.

Which, she suspected, she was.

He removed his hand from her mouth slowly. She straightened.

She pulled at his belt.

"Your turn," she said against his ear.

He looked at her for one moment, those pale eyes very close, and then he did something with his expression that was not quite a smile and not quite surrender and was somehow both, and then he helped her with the belt.

She got his trousers open and her hand wrapped around him and stopped.

She had not been unprepared for him to be well built. She had clocked the suit and the body under it and had formed reasonable expectations. The reality was somewhat beyond reasonable expectations. He was thick and heavy in her grip, already fully hard, and she stroked him once slowly just to confirm what her hand was telling her and heard him exhale against the side of her face in a way that sounded like the first genuinely uncontrolled thing he had done since they walked into the courtyard.

"Well," she said.

"I did tell you," he said, "that you had no idea."

She tightened her grip and stroked him again, slower this time, learning the specifics, and felt his hand flex against her thigh. She could feel how wet she still was from before, the aftermath of his fingers, and she was going to need every bit of it.

"You're going to make sure I'm ready for that," she said. It was not a request. It was an instruction delivered in the same direct tone she used for everything.

"I know what I'm doing, chérie." He said it against her jaw, already moving his hand back between her thighs, fingers sliding through the slick heat of her with a thoroughness that made her hips roll forward involuntarily. He worked her open for him, two fingers this time, stretching and stroking until she was making sounds she could not have stopped if she had tried and her thighs were shaking against his hips, and only when she was desperately, undeniably ready did he pull his hand away.

His hands found the backs of her thighs and lifted her and she went with it, legs wrapping around his waist, the wall at her back taking her weight as he settled between her thighs. She reached between them and guided him and he pressed forward.

Slowly.

Not because he was being cautious. Because he was being deliberate, and those were different things, and she understood the difference the moment she felt the thick press of him working into her in increments, her body stretching to accommodate him, the sensation sitting right at the edge of too much before resolving into something that was unambiguously the opposite of too much.

She made a sound.

Then another one, higher, as he pressed deeper, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her head tipping back against the stone wall. He was filling her in a way that was specific and distinct and unlike the ways she had been filled before, not just the size of him but the fit of him, something about the angle and the thickness and the particular way he pressed that made her feel it everywhere, made her aware of every inch of the process in a way that was making it very difficult to stay quiet.

She was not staying quiet.

The sounds she was making were unstudied and continuous and she was dimly aware that she was going to be walking with a certain consciousness of her body tomorrow and she was going to be thinking about exactly why, and she couldn't find it in herself to be bothered by either of those facts.

"Chérie," he said, and there was something in his voice that was different from the composed levelness of everything else he had said tonight. Something underneath it. He buried himself fully and held there, his forehead dropping to her temple, both of them still for one moment with the city above them doing what it always did, indifferent and electric.

She could feel her pulse everywhere.

Then he moved.

He rolled his hips in a slow deep rhythm that was nothing like the gallery they had come from and everything like the conversation they had been having since the canvas, focused, deliberate, the patience of a man who understood that pace was information and was using it. She grabbed his shoulders, his back, the fabric of his shirt, whatever her hands could reach, and moved with him because she was not a person who received things passively when she could participate.

His mouth found her throat again, that same place below her jaw, and she gasped when his teeth grazed it because the combination of his mouth there and the rhythm of him inside her was a specific kind of overwhelming that her body had not been prepared for despite having had adequate warning. She was louder than she had been before and she knew it and did not particularly care, the sounds leaving her throat at intervals that matched what he was doing, each one pulled out of her by a specific cause rather than performance.

He responded to every single one. Not by speeding up, he was maddeningly controlled about the pace, but by adjusting, the angle, the depth, the pressure of his hands on her thighs, every sound she made processed and answered with a precision that made it very clear he was paying the same quality of attention to her body that he had paid to everything else about her tonight.

It was infuriating.

She bit his shoulder through his shirt, not hard enough to mark, hard enough to communicate, and felt his breath punch out against her skin and his rhythm stutter for exactly one beat before he found it again, and she filed the location of that reaction for future reference because she was an artist and she paid attention to the things that worked.

"Look at me," she said.

He lifted his head. Those pale eyes, very close, entirely present. His jaw was set with that habitual control but there was something underneath it now that the control was not completely covering, something that looked like want stripped of its usual patience.

She held his gaze and moved her hips to meet him and watched his expression do something that made her feel considerably more powerful than was probably advisable given the circumstances.

His hand came up and covered her mouth and she understood immediately, the gallery not that far, the corridor door not that far, and she let him, let his palm press warm against her lips while he drove into her with a focused intensity that had finally shed the patience and she came apart against him with her sounds muffled into his hand and her fingers locked in his shirt and her whole body shuddering with an honesty she had not planned to show a stranger in a gallery courtyard on a Thursday night.

He followed her close behind, his face pressed to her hair, her name, the name she had given him, Ash Vane, the constructed thing, said low against her temple as he finished, and she decided she would think about the significance of that at a later time when her nervous system had reconvened.

He held her against the wall for a moment after, both of them catching breath, the city continuing its business above and around them with complete unconcern.

Then he set her down carefully, which she also noted, and stepped back, and they looked at each other in the dim courtyard light with the specific acknowledgment of two people who had just done something that could not be undone and were both deciding how they felt about that.

She fixed the dress. He straightened his shirt. He retrieved his jacket from the courtyard floor and put it back on with the same unhurried efficiency he had removed it, and she watched him reconstruct the presentation of himself with the specific interest of someone who understood that how a person put themselves back together after being taken apart was information.

He was very composed. She would have expected nothing else.

She was composed too, which was her natural state and had nothing to do with him.

Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a small flat box and held it out to her. White packaging. Clean sans-serif text.

A morning after pill.

She looked at it. She looked at him. He was watching her with that same composed precision, the expression of a man who had handled this detail the same efficient way he handled everything, and she understood in that moment with complete clarity that she had not been special tonight. She had been available. She had been appealing and present and the timing had aligned and he had come to a gallery with a pill in his pocket because this was something he did, a man who moved through rooms and found women in them and was prepared for the encounter in advance, and the preparation was its own particular kind of information.

She took the box from his hand.

Not because she was grateful. Because she was practical and it was the sensible thing to do and she was not going to let the cold feeling moving through her chest affect a decision that was actually about her own body.

She put it in the clutch without comment.

He said nothing. He was watching her in a way that suggested he was aware that something had shifted and was assessing whether to address it.

She saved him the trouble.

"You should go back in first," she said. "Different times."

He looked at her. "And if I want to find you again after tonight?"

She looked back. The bruised violet sky above the courtyard held its light. The city hummed its constant hum.

"You know where the Carmine Gallery is," she said. "Sol knows how to reach me."

She went back through the service corridor without looking back, which was not indifference but something more specific than that. Something she would think about later, in whatever parking structure she found tonight, looking up at the concrete ceiling with the city's light on the underside of the level above and the black canvas waiting in the warehouse and the name Bastien sitting somewhere in her filing system in the section marked interesting and nothing further.

The gallery received her back the way the gallery had received her the first time, which was warmly and without comment. She took a fresh glass from a passing tray and found a position near the north wall and looked at her roofline piece with the gold leaf catching the ventilation and flickering very slightly and felt the particular complicated satisfaction of a night that had gone several directions she had not planned for.

She did not see him come back in.

She did not look for him.

She did not think about the way he had looked at her canvas and understood immediately what it was becoming, which was something most people did not manage even when she explained it to them.

She thought about it anyway.