Beautifully Compromised

I had kissed men before. I knew what a kiss was supposed to feel like, the mechanics of it, the brief warmth of it, the way it started and ended and left you more or less the same person you were before it happened. Sebastian Vance did not kiss me like that. He kissed me like he had been thinking about it for a long time and had finally run out of reasons not to. Like every controlled, careful, deliberate thing about him had been slowly coming undone for weeks and this, me, here, in this dark hallway at midnight… was where it all finally gave way. And God help me, I kissed him back like I had been waiting for it too. --- It started with the rain. We had been in his office for four hours going through a crisis that had needed both of us at our sharpest, phones ringing, documents everywhere, the particular electric pressure of a situation that could detonate by morning if we made a single wrong move. By the time we contained it the city outside was dark and wet, rain running in long silver lines down the floor to ceiling windows, and the building around us had gone completely quiet. Just us. Just the rain. Just the strange suspended stillness that follows an adrenaline crash when your body doesn't quite know what to do with itself yet. I started packing up my things. Coat. Bag. The careful reassembly of Reagan Cole; professional, composed, untouchable, that I performed every time I was in this man's presence and felt the edges of myself start to blur. I had almost made it to the door. Almost. "Reagan." I stopped. He never called me Reagan. In four weeks of late nights and crisis calls and conversations that lasted longer than they needed to, he had never once used my first name. It was always ‘Ms. Cole’ precise, appropriate, the correct professional distance maintained with the same deliberateness he brought to everything. But that night he said ‘Reagan’ and it sounded like something he had been holding in his mouth for a long time and had finally let go of. I turned around. He was leaning against his desk with his arms folded and his jacket long gone and his shirt sleeves pushed up and his tie hanging loose, the undone version of him that only existed after midnight when the performance had run out of fuel. His eyes were on me with an expression I had been pretending not to recognize for weeks. I recognized it. I had just been refusing to call it by its name. "You should go," he said. "I know," I said. Neither of us moved. The rain filled the silence between us, steady and indifferent, and the city glowed wet and gold through the glass behind him and I stood in the doorway of his office and looked at Sebastian Vance and felt the last of my carefully constructed resistance go quietly and completely to pieces. He crossed the room slowly. Not rushed. Not uncertain. The way he did everything, with the full, unhurried weight of a decision already made. He stopped in front of me, raised one hand and pushed a strand of hair from my face with a gentleness so unexpected and so unbearably careful that my breath left my body entirely. His fingers traced the line of my jaw. Barely touching. Like I was something he wasn't sure he was allowed to have and was trying to be worthy of the having. "Sebastian….. " His name came out wrong. Too soft. Too much of what I wasn't supposed to be feeling folded into the two syllables of it. "I know," he said quietly. "I know all the reasons." "Then you know we can't…." "I know," he said again. And then he kissed me anyway. It was slow at first. Tentative in a way I never would have expected from a man like him, like he was giving me every opportunity to pull back, like he was asking a question with his mouth and leaving the answer entirely to me. I answered. God I answered. My hands found the front of his shirt and his arms came around me and the coat I had been holding dropped somewhere and the careful professional distance I had maintained for four weeks collapsed all at once like it had never been anything more than paper to begin with. He kissed me like I was the only thing in his very controlled, very calculated world that he hadn't been able to strategize his way out of wanting. Like I had gotten somewhere inside him that nobody else had reached and he had stopped pretending that was something he could fix. His hands were in my hair. My back met the wall. The rain kept falling outside, like the city had no idea what was happening in this building, in this hallway, between these two people who had no business being this close to each other. When we finally broke apart we were both breathing harder than we should have been. His forehead dropped to mine. His eyes were closed. One hand still cradling the back of my head like he wasn't ready to let go of the last few minutes entirely. I could feel his heartbeat. Fast. Unsteady. Not so controlled after all. "This is a terrible idea," I said against his mouth. His lips curved. Barely. "I know." "I mean it Sebastian. This is….there are a hundred reasons why this…. " "Reagan." His thumb traced my cheekbone and I lost the sentence completely. He pulled back just enough to look at me, really look at me, in that way he had that made you feel like the only thing in the room worth looking at. "I know every reason." "And?" He looked at me in the dark for a long moment. "And I've been trying to care about them for four weeks," he said quietly. "I'm done trying." The words landed somewhere low and devastating in my chest. I should have pushed him away. I should have picked up my coat and my bag and my eleven years of rules and walked out of that building and put three miles between myself and Sebastian Vance and never looked back. I should have. I didn't. I reached up and pulled him back to me instead. And the last coherent thought I had before the rain and the dark and the warmth of him swallowed everything else was this….. ‘I am in so much trouble.’ --- My name is Reagan Cole. I was the best crisis strategist in Washington D.C. ‘I had one rule that mattered above all the others… never get personally involved with a client.’ ‘I broke it on a rainy night in a dark hallway with a married man who kissed me like I was the best secret he had ever kept.’ And this …. all of this… is how it happened. From the beginning. ---