No Overnight Rule

The blind date had been Fiona's idea, and Valerie had agreed mostly because the restaurant was three blocks from her apartment. That was the kind of calculus her thirties had reduced romance to: proximity, convenience, the path of least resistance. Fiona had pitched the guy the way she pitched everything — trust me, you'll love him, he's perfect for you — and Valerie had listened the way she listened to everything Fiona said, which was with half her attention and a lot of patience. High income. Good personality. Very suitable. Sure. She'd done her hair. Put on a full face of makeup, the kind that took forty minutes and looked like it took ten. She wore the green dress that hit just above the knee, because she believed in basic courtesy even when she didn't believe in the outcome. She arrived at 7:55, five minutes early, which was the most generous thing she was prepared to offer the evening. The hostess found the reservation under Fiona's number and pointed her toward table fifteen, near the window. Valerie spotted him before he spotted her — a man sitting in the shadow of a heavy wooden ceiling beam, profile clean, hair thick enough, shoulders broad enough that she revised her expectations upward by maybe twelve percent. Which still wasn't saying much. The relatives who'd tried to set her up over the years had sent some truly spectacular disasters her way. By that standard, this one was practically a renaissance painting. She crossed the room and stopped across from him. "Mr. Packard?" He looked up. Something moved through his eyes — quick, genuine, then carefully composed into politeness as he stood. "Ms. Chapman." He smiled. "Your photos were beautiful, but — I have to say, you're even more so in person." Half flattery, half truth. She could tell the difference by now. "Thank you." She sat down. "Sorry to keep you waiting." He'd been there longer than she had — she hadn't kept him waiting at all — but it was the kind of thing you said. He seemed pleased by it. They ordered. The conversation that followed was exactly what she'd expected: the careful, purposeful exchange of two people conducting an interview they were both pretending wasn't one. Most first dates did this. Blind dates just skipped the pretense faster. "So you're a lawyer," he said, not long after the menus disappeared. "That must be nice — you guys get weekends off, right?" She'd stopped being surprised by this particular misconception years ago. People got their ideas about lawyers from television, where everyone was glamorous and had time to fall in love in conference rooms. "Not exactly," she said. "When things are busy, it's close to six days a week. And I travel a fair amount." "Huh. Civil litigation, or—?" "I don't do litigation." She kept her voice even. "I'm a transactional attorney. Corporate counsel — legal review, contract negotiation, business advisory work." "Oh." He processed this. "So you work for companies. You must make good money." "It's fine," she said. It was more than fine. But she'd learned not to say so. * * * An hour later, he walked her to the entrance of her building, waved goodbye with the practiced warmth of someone who'd already decided, and she rode the elevator up alone. She'd barely gotten her shoes off when his text arrived. Made it home okay? Yes, she wrote back. Just walked in. She set her phone on the counter and went to wash off her makeup. When she came back, there was another message — longer this time, carefully worded in the way that meant he'd drafted it twice. The gist of it was: lovely evening, but I don't think we're quite right for each other, hope we can stay friends. Valerie read it standing in her kitchen in her socks and felt nothing she hadn't felt before. She knew how this worked. Men in the dating market — the ones actually looking to settle down — wanted someone they could feel solid next to. A woman with her job, her network, her face: she made a certain kind of man feel like he was already behind, and nobody proposed to a person who made them feel that way. But they always wanted to stay friends. Because having a lawyer in your contacts was genuinely useful, and they weren't wrong about that. She typed back: Tonight was fun. Next time dinner's on me. Sent it, and meant it, and thought nothing more about it. She pulled a sheet mask from the refrigerator, peeled it open, pressed it against her face, and called Fiona. "How'd it go?" Fiona answered on the second ring, voice bright with the particular energy of someone who'd been waiting. Valerie gave her the short version. Silence on the other end. Then: "He has no taste." "He was fine," Valerie said, which was true. "He was perfectly nice." What she didn't say — because she had no interest in being cruel about it — was that within the first fifteen minutes, she'd clocked the slightly unfocused way he'd moved from topic to topic, the way he'd lost the thread of his own sentences twice, the way his questions had all been aimed at her résumé rather than her. He wasn't a bad person. He just wasn't particularly sharp, and Valerie had spent enough years in rooms full of sharp people that she couldn't unknow what that felt like. She hadn't been interested. The rejection had just gotten there first. "Oh — did that guy ever add you?" Fiona said, pivoting. "Trevor's coworker, from the wedding? I can't remember his name—" Valerie remembered him vaguely. A face at a reception, someone who'd apparently asked Fiona to pass along that he was interested. "The twenty-five-year-old?" "He's twenty-seven." "I'm almost thirty, Fiona." "Three years is nothing. It could be something. And even if it's not, you've been alone too long. It's not healthy." "I'm not alone. I'm single. There's a difference." "You know what I mean." "I really don't." "Valerie." Fiona dropped her voice to the register she used when she was about to say something she thought was important. "You need a s*x life. Seriously. It affects your hormones. I read an article." Valerie pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. The sheet mask crinkled. Here was the thing about Fiona's concern: it was genuine, and it was sweet, and it was also based on a premise that wasn't quite accurate. She glanced at her phone screen. One notification she hadn't opened yet, timestamped twenty minutes ago. Just landed. Should be at yours around eleven. * * * She hung up with Fiona at ten-fifty, peeled the mask off, rinsed her face, and came back to find a new text waiting. Here. Valerie put the phone down and opened the door. Dominic Prescott stood in the hallway with his carry-on still over one shoulder, jacket slightly rumpled from the flight, looking exactly the way he always looked: like a man who'd walked directly out of a problem he'd solved and into the next one. He was unhurried. He was always unhurried. "Good trip?" she asked. "Productive." He came in, dropped the bag, shrugged off his jacket and folded it over the arm of her couch with the ease of someone who'd done it a dozen times. Because he had. "You have the weekend?" "Both days, actually." "Good." He said it the way he said most things — simple, certain, no ceremony. "We can sleep in." He moved toward her as he said it, closing the distance between them with the same unhurried confidence, and then his body was against hers and she felt the warmth of him through the thin fabric of her sleep shirt — the solid weight of his chest, the specific smell of recycled air and his skin underneath it. His chin dropped to her shoulder. His hands settled at her hips, and she felt him already hard against her lower back, and then one hand slid down and gathered a handful of her, and his fingers found the hem of her shirt, found the bare skin of her thigh, found the fact that she had nothing on underneath. He went still for a half-second. "Nothing?" "Nothing." His grip tightened. "Give me ten minutes," he said, and released her, and disappeared into the bathroom. She heard the shower start. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened to the water run and didn't think about Mr. Packard's careful, diplomatic text message at all. * * * He came back with a towel around his waist and water still on his shoulders, and he was already looking at her the way he looked at things he intended to take apart slowly. "Bed?" she said. "Bed." She didn't have time to move before he picked her up — one arm under her knees, one at her back — and she felt the floor leave and then the ceiling tilt and then she was on her back in the dark and he was kneeling over her, and his hands were already moving. He pushed her shirt up slowly. Not rushed — Dominic was never rushed about this part. His hands moved over her chest first, thumbs tracing circles until she felt her breath change, and then down: the curve of her waist, the soft plane of her stomach, the flare of her hips. He bent and put his mouth to her stomach, dragging upward, tongue tracing a slow line to her sternum, her collarbone, the underside of her breast. When he finally took her n****e into his mouth, she arched before she could stop herself. He was extraordinarily good at this. She'd known it the first time and it had not stopped being true. He knew where to put his mouth and how much pressure to use and when to ease off just enough that the next time landed twice as hard. He worked at her until the bud was tight and flushed and aching, and she had one hand braced against his shoulder and the other fisted in the sheet, and a sound came out of her throat that she hadn't planned. "That fast?" He lifted his head. His voice had dropped into that low, rough register she only ever heard in this room. "One week and you're already—" She didn't answer him. She reached down and found the knot in the towel and pulled. He let her. The room was dark except for a thin line of moonlight through the curtains, and she wasn't looking at his face anymore anyway — she was looking at the ceiling, because he'd moved down her body and his mouth was between her legs and the first slow drag of his tongue made her thighs clench involuntarily around his head. He worked her open with the patience of someone who genuinely enjoyed it — not performing patience, actual patience, the kind that meant he was paying attention to every small shift in her body and adjusting accordingly. His tongue traced the outer edges first, unhurried, then pressed closer, and when he finally found the center of it she made a sound she'd be embarrassed about later and her hips lifted off the mattress. Her thighs were shaking. She could feel herself getting wetter with every pass of his tongue, the sensation building in tight, concentric rings, and she was close — embarrassingly close, given that he'd barely started — when he lifted his head. The cold air hit her and she nearly swore at him. "Relax," he said, against her inner thigh. His breath was warm and she felt every word of it. She reached blindly toward the nightstand, found the unopened box she'd put there earlier, and held it out to him. He took it. She heard the tear of foil in the dark, the practiced efficiency of a man who didn't fumble with these things. Then his hands were on her hips, adjusting the angle, and she felt the blunt pressure of him at her entrance. He pushed in. They both exhaled at the same moment — the specific, involuntary sound of something finally clicking into place. She felt the stretch of him filling her completely, that first overwhelming fullness that made her breath stutter, and then he started to move. "Easy," she managed. He slowed. "A week," he said, with something that might have been amusement if his voice weren't so rough. "You shouldn't still be this tight after a week." She didn't tell him the obvious answer to that. She just shifted her hips and focused on breathing through it, on letting her body adjust, on the slow withdrawal and the careful return, and gradually the sharp edge of it softened into something else — something that moved up her spine and pooled low in her stomach and made her tilt her hips up to meet him. He felt it when she did. She knew he did, because his grip on her tightened. He picked up the pace. The headboard was quiet — she'd thought about that when she'd moved in, chosen a bed that didn't make noise — but the sounds they made were something else. The wet, slick rhythm of him moving inside her, the soft collision of his hips against hers, her own breathing coming apart in the dark. He drove into her steadily, finding the same spot with an accuracy that made her wonder, not for the first time, how he knew her body this well. She was making sounds she couldn't quite control. The composed, put-together woman who'd sat across from Mr. Packard and discussed the billable-hour structure of corporate law was entirely gone. In her place was someone with her legs spread and her fingers twisting in the sheets and her back arching off the mattress every time Dominic hit that particular angle. "That good?" He palmed her, slick and deliberate, then pressed his hand flat against her breast. She couldn't form words. She made a sound instead, something that went up at the end. He went deeper. The sensation spiked so sharply she clenched around him and felt him shudder — she was too close, too tight, and he pulled out before either of them finished what that had started. She was still catching her breath when he tapped her hip. "Turn over." She rolled onto her stomach. His hands found her hips and pulled her up onto her knees, and then he was behind her with one hand at the small of her back pressing her down, and when he pushed back into her from this angle she felt it in an entirely different register — deeper, fuller, every thrust sending a shock of sensation all the way up to her teeth. The moonlight came in at a low angle through the curtains and caught the lines of his shoulders, the flex of muscle in his arms. She watched him over her shoulder for a moment — the focused, deliberate way he moved, like he was taking something apart and putting it back together — and then she couldn't watch anymore because the angle had shifted and he was hitting somewhere that made her vision blur at the edges. She pressed her face into the pillow. The sounds coming from the two of them were obscene and she didn't care. She was past caring. She was past everything except the relentless, building pressure of him moving inside her, the slick friction of every withdrawal and every return, the way her body had gone completely liquid except for the one place where she was clenched tight around him. When the tears came, she didn't notice at first. Then she did, and she laughed at herself, silently, into the pillow. His hand came around and covered her mouth. She turned her head and took his fingers between her lips instead, and felt him go rigid for a moment above her — a full-body pause — and then he was moving again, faster, and she worked her tongue against his fingers in the same rhythm, and the sound he made was the least composed she'd ever heard from him. She came apart around him less than a minute later. He followed her down. * * * After, they lay in the dark without talking. His arm was across her stomach. Her breathing was still unsteady. Outside, the city made its low, constant noise — traffic, a siren somewhere far away, the particular hum of a building full of people who didn't know each other. She thought about Fiona's voice on the phone, dropped to a whisper: You need a s*x life, Valerie. Seriously. She stared at the ceiling. She was fine.