Chapter 1: The Distance Between Two People
The ballroom smelled of lilies and expensive champagne, and Carol Ruiz stood in the middle of it holding a glass she had not sipped from in twenty minutes. Across the room, past two crowded tables and the glitter of the bar, her husband threw his head back and laughed at something a man in a grey suit had said. His laugh was loud and well-timed, the laugh he used with people who mattered.
Chatura's hand had come to rest on the small of her back an hour ago, when they'd greeted the management team together. It was still there, or it had returned there at some point, she couldn't say which. His palm lay flat against her spine the way a bookend holds up a row of novels, and she felt it as pressure, not touch. Ten years of that hand. She had stopped feeling it somewhere around year six, though she'd only admitted it to herself last month, alone in a hotel bed in Leeds while he slept with his back turned.
"Carol, you remember Daniel, of course." Chatura drew her a half-step forward. She shook Daniel's hand and smiled and said something pleasant. The conversation moved on to quarterly projections without needing her again.
She drifted toward the windows. The disco lights had come on as the evening deepened, washing the dance floor in slow pulses of violet and blue, and couples had gathered out there in ones and twos. Carol watched them without seeing them. Her reflection in the glass looked composed, elegant in her emerald dress, the silk of her new red underwear a secret she'd worn for nobody in particular, just because she'd wanted to feel like a woman rather than a wife for one evening.
He was by the edge of the dance floor. She had noticed him twice already and made herself stop counting.
Lean, sandy-haired, dressed all in black against thecolourful room, he stood with a drink untouched in his hand and watched the dancers without dancing. When she glanced at him, he was already looking at her. Not the embarrassed flick of a man caught staring. A steady look, unhurried, that began at her collarbones and followed the neckline of her gown down to where the fabric gathered at her waist, then came back up to her eyes as if he'd finished reading something and found it worth a second pass.
Carol's pulse jumped, a hard single beat against her throat. She turned back to the window. In the reflection she could still see him, and he could still see her, and neither of them moved.
Chatura's phone buzzed on the table behind him. He checked it, frowned, excused himself to Daniel with a hand on the man's shoulder. "Important call, sorry. Carol, entertain Daniel, won't you?" But Daniel had already been claimed by someone else, and Chatura was already walking, already talking before he reached the corridor, his free hand cutting the air the way it did when he closed a deal.
The space where her husband had been was suddenly very large.
"You look like a woman counting exits."
Carol turned. He was beside her, closer than a stranger had any business standing, near enough that she caught something warm under his cologne, tobacco and amber. His eyes were grey and deep-set and they did not apologize for anything.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Counting exits." He nodded at the window, at the door, at the corridor where Chatura had gone. "That's three looks in ten seconds. Nobody counts exits when they're happy."
"I'm perfectly happy."
"Of course you are." He smiled, and it was a sharp, angular thing that suited his face. "Happy enough to wear that dress for a man who left you standing alone at a window."
Heat climbed her neck. "That's a bold thing to say to someone you've never met."
"Caolain." He didn't offer his hand; he simply said his name as if it were a gift she should be grateful for. "And I've seen enough. You laugh when you're supposed to laugh. You drink nothing. You wear red silk under green silk and you think nobody can tell."
Her breath caught. "You can't possibly know that."
"The strap shows when you reach for your glass." His voice had dropped, a low vibration that she felt more than heard, a register meant for a distance smaller than the one between them. "It's a lovely detail. Wasted on this room."
Carol should have walked away. There was a version of her, the version that had existed for ten unbroken years, who would have walked away, would have found Chatura in the corridor and pressed herself against his shoulder and told him the party was dull and she wanted to go home. That version was quiet tonight.
"How do you know him?" she asked, to be saying something. "Chatura."
"I don't. I know everyone the way you know a menu. You read it, you order or you don't." He turned to face the dance floor, shoulder almost brushing hers, and the space between them narrowed by an inch that felt like a mile. "He'll be on that call another fifteen minutes. Men like him take the call and then find someone more important to talk to before they come back for you."
"That's not fair."
"No. But it's accurate." He looked at her again, and the possessiveness in it was so plain, so unashamed, that she felt it land somewhere low in her belly. "You've been standing at this window twenty minutes. I've been watching you twenty minutes. So we're even."
"You were watching me." Her voice came out lower than she intended.
"The whole room watches people. I notice them." His grey eyes held hers, and he let the silence sit there until it grew heavy. "There's a smoking terrace through the doors on the left. It's cold, it's quiet, and nobody from this party has any reason to stand in it."
"I don't smoke."
"Neither do I." He set his untouched drink on the window ledge. "Ask me a better reason."
Carol's heart was beating in her ears now, loud and irregular, and underneath the fear of it ran something hot and unfamiliar, a current she hadn't felt since she was twenty-five and reckless and single. She looked through the glass. Down the corridor, past the coat racks, she could see the glow of Chatura's phone screen as he paced and talked.
"If I go out there," she said, "people will talk."
"People in there are talking about quarterly projections." He was already moving toward the doors, unhurried, and he paused with one hand on the frame. "Ten years is a long time to keep the red silk a secret, Carol. Come and tell someone it exists."
He pushed through the door and was gone, and the cool draft of the corridor reached her across the empty stretch of floor. Carol stood at the window with her untouched champagne, and she thought about the doors on the left, and the cold, and how long fifteen minutes could last.
She put the glass down. She didn't decide, exactly; her feet decided somewhere in the space between the window and the coat racks, and she found herself walking past the bar, past the noise and the violet light, following the narrow carpet toward the doors.
The terrace was half dark, lit only by the spill from inside and the low amber of a wall lamp. Cigarette smoke hung in a thin blue veil near the ceiling vent. The cold hit her bare arms at once and she crossed them, and Caolain was leaning against the stone balustrade with his sleeves pushed up, watching the door as she came through it, as if he had known, the whole time, exactly how this would go.
"You came," he said.
"Don't flatter yourself. I needed air."
"Then take it." He straightened, and the distance between them was nothing, three feet of cold terrace air, and he made no move to close it. He just looked at her the way he had looked at her from across the room, patient and certain, as though he had all night and she had already spent it.
The door swung shut behind her with a soft click, and the music inside dropped to a muffled pulse.
"So," Carol said, hugging her arms against the chill, her breath fogging faintly in the lamp light. "Here I am."
"Here you are," Caolain said, and stepped forward.
The cold stone was at her back before she realized he had moved her. His hands found her waist, both of them, fingers spreading over the silk of her dress as if they had always known the shape of her.
Carol's breath left her in a small white cloud. She put her hands on his chest, not to push, just to feel something solid under her palms, the soft weave of the black turtleneck and beneath it the quick, patient beat of his heart.
"This is insane," she said.
"Yes," Caolain agreed. His thumbs settled into the hollows of her hips. He didn't kiss her. He looked at her mouth while he held her, and the looking was somehow worse, somehow more.
"My husband is forty feet away."
"He's sixty feet away, and on the phone." His hands drew her an inch closer. "You can do the maths or you can stop doing the maths. One of those feels better."
"I've never done this. Ever. Ten years, never once."
"I know." He said it the way other men said you're beautiful. "That's why you're out here."
The first kiss was soft, almost cautious, and it undid her more than any boldness could have. His mouth was warm after the cold air, and he tasted faintly of the whiskey he hadn't drunk. Her fingers curled into his sweater. When she made a sound against his lips, low and involuntary, something ten years deep, he made one back, darker, and the kiss turned hungry.
The wall lamp threw their shadows long across the terrace stones. His hand slid up her spine and found the zip of her dress, and he paused there, two fingers resting on the little metal pull, waiting.
"Here?" she whispered. "Someone could come out."
"Someone could." His mouth moved along her jaw, down her throat, and she tipped her head back over the balustrade to give him room, her black hair swinging into the cold. "The door's heavy. We'd hear it. You'd have time to decide if you wanted to be caught."
"I don't want to be caught."
"No?" His teeth grazed her earlobe. "Then be quiet."
He drew the zip down slowly, an inch at a time, and the night air slipped into the opening like a finger. Carol shivered, and not only from the cold. The dress loosened and slid off her shoulders, pooling at her elbows, and then she let it fall, emerald silk crumpling around her heels on the stone. She stood in her bra and knickers in the November dark, her breasts heavy in the red silk, her skin pebbling, and she watched his face while he looked at her.
"You're staring," she said.
"Yes." His voice had gone rough. "You bought these for tonight. Some part of you knew."
"I bought them for me."
"Even better." He bent and pressed his mouth to the top curve of her breast, above the red lace, and her hand went into his sandy hair and held him there.
Her bra came off with a flick of his fingers at the clasp, practiced, and the cold air found her nipples and hardened them instantly. He took one in his mouth, slow, his tongue circling, and Carol bit her own lip to keep from crying out. The muffled bass of the party thudded through the door. Her husband's voice was somewhere behind it, saying something about projections.
Caolain's hand slid down over her stomach and inside her knickers. His fingers were warm and certain, and when he found her she was already wet, embarrassingly, undeniable wet, and he smiled against her breast.
"Don't," she breathed.
"Don't what? Don't say it out loud?" Two fingers slid into her, deep, and her knee buckled against his. "You're soaked, Carol. Ten years of being soaked."
She kissed him to shut him up, and it worked for a while. She got her hands under his sweater and pushed it up, and he broke the kiss to pull it over his head, leaving the thin silver chain against his pale skin. His body was lean and hard, all tendon and flat muscle, nothing like the broad groomed bulk of her husband. He looked like a man who did things rather than a man who planned them.
His trousers dropped. She wrapped her hand around him and he groaned, openly, shamelessly, and the sound went through her like a current. He was long and hard and unguarded, and she stroked him twice and felt him swell in her grip.
"I don't have anything," he said. "I didn't come here to plan anything."
Carol heard what he was really saying. The thought of it, of nothing between them, of a stranger, hit her like a second heartbeat. She should have said wait. She had a coil in her bathroom drawer at home, unopened for years.
"I can't get pregnant," she heard herself say. "I'm on the pill. For my cycles."
"Then turn around," Caolain said, "or don't. Your choice, right up to the last second. That's the only rule."
Her choice. Ten years of Chatura's plans and bookings and reservations, and here was a man offering her the only thing she'd been starved of. She turned, gripped the cold stone of the balustrade, and looked out over the dark gardens with the party's light spilling past her shoulder.
He pulled her knickers down her thighs and off, and then his cock pressed against her, hot and blunt against her swollen opening, and he stopped there.
"Carol."
"Yes. God. Yes."
He pushed in slowly, and she felt every inch of him, bare, nothing between her body and his, the full strange thickness of a man she had met an hour ago. Her mouth opened on a silent cry. Her fingers dug into the stone. He sank into her to the root and held there, his chest against her back, his breath ragged at her ear, and she could feel him pulsing inside her, alive, unprotected, real.
"You feel unbelievable," he whispered. "So tight. You're gripping me like you never want it out."
"Move," was all she could say. "Please move."
He drew out slow and pushed back slow, again, again, finding a rhythm that ground against some spot deep inside her that made her vision spark. The cold air on her bare breasts and his heat along her back, the stone biting her palms, the muffled music, all of it blurred to a single point where their bodies met. She pushed her hips back to meet him and he groaned her name into her hair.
"Harder," she said, and he gave it to her, driving into her with long deep strokes that shook a small gasp out of her with every thrust. Her orgasm built fast, shocking in its speed, a coil tightening low in her belly.
"I'm close," she warned him. "I'm going to..."
"Come on my cock. Come on it."
The words broke something loose. She came with her teeth in her own wrist, shaking, and he swore under his breath and fucked her through it, and she felt her own wetness running down her thigh in the cold air.
"Where do you want me?" His voice was wrecked now, strained. "I can pull out."
She didn't answer. She reached back and pulled his hip against her.
Inside her, then. He groaned something wordless and spilled into her, hot pulses of it, deep, and she felt each one, felt him throb and empty himself bare inside her body while she held the stone and shook. It went on for long seconds. Then he was still, both of them heaving, his lips pressed to her shoulder blade.
His hands found her waist again, softer now. He stayed inside her, softening, his cum beginning to slide warm down her inner thigh.
"Well," Caolain said at last, breathless, "that's the best conversation I've had at one of these things in years."