Chapter 7: Sunlit Sacrilege
The city’s hum was a low, persistent engine rumble, a sound so constant it became a kind of silence. Rio swam up through layers of it, through the warm, lavender-scented dark of sleep, into the sharp, glittering reality of morning.
Sunlight cut through the gaps in the lace canopy, painting shifting bars of gold across the rumpled sheets and Agatha’s sleeping face. She looked younger in sleep, the lawyer’s precision softened, the architect’s calculating lines smoothed away. Rio watched the slow rise and fall of her chest, the pulse in her throat. The memory of last night was a physical ache between her legs, a hollow echo in her stomach.
Then Agatha’s eyes opened. No drowsy confusion, just immediate, clear awareness. Her gaze found Rio’s. She didn’t smile. Her hand, resting on her own stomach, shifted. Her fingertips, cool and dry, began tracing the sharp ridge of Rio’s hipbone, following the dip into the shallow bowl of her pelvis.
The touch was speculative. A cartographer redrawing a now-familiar coast.
Rio’s breath hitched. Agatha shifted, turning onto her side, and closed the small distance between their mouths. It wasn’t a good morning kiss. It was slow and deep and tasted of sleep and stale whiskey and the lingering ghost of each other. Agatha’s tongue slid against hers, lazy and possessive. Rio could feel the scratch of the older woman’s pubic hair against her thigh, a gritty, intimate reminder.
They broke apart, breathing into the shared space between their faces. Agatha’s eyes were dark, unreadable pools. “My mouth is a warzone,” she murmured, her voice gravelly with sleep.
“Mine too,” Rio said, and the words felt like a confession.
Without another sound, they moved. It was a silent, practiced rearrangement of limbs, a wordless understanding. Rio shifted onto her back, sliding up the bed until her head was level with Agatha’s stomach. Agatha mirrored her, turning, sliding down until they were aligned head-to-toe, a perfect, mirrored symmetry of need.
Rio’s world narrowed to the view before her: the dark, neat triangle of hair, the glistening, swollen lips beneath, still flushed from last night’s attention. The musky, essential scent of Agatha filled her nostrils, damp and potent. Above her, she felt the heat of her own body hovering over Agatha’s face, the older woman’s breath warm on her inner thighs.
Agatha’s hands gripped Rio’s ass, pulling her down, and Rio did the same, guiding Agatha’s hips to her mouth.
There was no preamble, no teasing. Agatha’s tongue speared into her, a hot, blunt invasion that made Rio cry out, the sound muffled by the flesh in her own mouth. She returned the favor, licking into Agatha with a starving urgency, her nose buried in coarse hair. The position was obscene, vulnerable, overwhelmingly intimate. They were each other’s feast and famine.
The room filled with the wet, sloppy sounds of mutual cunnilingus, of desperate suction and lapping tongues. Agatha groaned, the vibration against Rio’s clit making her hips stutter. “Fuck,” Agatha panted, pulling away for a gasping breath, her voice thick. “You taste like last night’s sins. You taste like my fucking mistakes.”
The words, filthy and true, ignited something in Rio. She redoubled her efforts, sucking Agatha’s clit into her mouth, flicking her tongue hard and fast. Agatha’s thighs tightened around her head, a vise of pleasure. Above her, Agatha was relentless, her tongue a precise, ruthless instrument. She didn’t just lick; she dissected. She found the spot just inside Rio’s entrance that made her see white and worried it with the tip of her tongue. She traced the length of Rio’s slit before zeroing back in on her throbbing clit, sucking it so hard Rio whimpered, her own ministrations faltering.
“Don’t you stop,” Agatha commanded, her voice a guttural rasp against Rio’s soaked flesh.
Rio obeyed, diving back in, fucking Agatha with her tongue, drinking her down. She was losing herself in the taste, the texture, the overwhelming feedback loop of sensation—the pleasure she gave syncing with the pleasure she received in a dizzying, breathless circuit. She came first, a sudden, sharp climax ripped from her by Agatha’s unwavering mouth. Her body convulsed, her thighs shaking, a broken scream tearing from her throat as she ground herself against Agatha’s face.
Agatha rode her through it, gentling but not stopping, until the last tremor subsided. Then, with a fierce growl, she pushed Rio’s legs wider, buried her face deeper, and chased her own finish. Rio felt it happen—the stiffening of Agatha’s body, the internal fluttering against her tongue, the hot gush of fluid—and she sucked and lapped until Agatha’s strangled cries faded into ragged, wet sobs against her thigh.
They collapsed apart, boneless, breathing in ragged unison. The sun was higher now, hotter, dust motes dancing in the beams that slashed across their slick, spent bodies.
A long time passed. The city’ hum reasserted itself.
“The interview is in three hours,” Agatha said finally, her voice flat, staring at the lace canopy above them.
The real world crashed back in, cold and harsh. Miranda Colson. The internship. The lie. Rio’s stomach twisted. “I know.”
Agatha sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her back was to Rio, a landscape of graceful vertebrae and tense shoulders. She reached for a robe, shrugging into the silk. When she turned, her face was the lawyer’s face again, composed, but her eyes were bruised with something deeper than lack of sleep.
“You need to shower. The navy blazer is pressed and hanging in the closet. Not a hair out of place, Rio. Not today.” She walked to the window, looking down at the street below. “Ellie is having breakfast with her father at The Marigold. He flies back to Chicago at noon.”
The information was delivered like a legal brief. These are the facts. This is the terrain. Rio understood the subtext: the coast is clear for you to leave. The daughter is occupied. The other life continues unabated.
Rio got out of bed. Her body felt used, deliciously sore, and filled with a leaden dread. She gathered her clothes from the floor, the fabric smelling of sex and the bar from two nights before. As she dressed, she watched Agatha at the window, a silhouette against the bright light, robed and untouchable.
“What happens after the interview?” Rio asked, pulling her sweater over her head.
Agatha didn’t turn. “If it goes well, you begin the internship in two weeks. You work harder than anyone has ever worked. You become indispensable.”
“And this?”
Finally, Agatha looked over her shoulder. Her expression was impossible to read. “This is a separate annex. A private residence. It doesn’t appear on the official blueprints.” She offered a faint, hollow smile. “Architect’s privilege.”
Rio finished lacing her boots. The intimacy of minutes ago felt like a dream, already fraying at the edges. She was the dirty secret again, being ushered out the back door before the family returned.
She walked to the bedroom door, pausing with her hand on the frame. The words stuck in her throat, childish and urgent. Do you feel anything? Or am I just a taste you needed to try?
She didn’t ask. The architecture of their lie was too precise, the load-bearing walls too clearly defined.
“I’ll be exceptional,” Rio said, echoing Agatha’s words from the night before, but they sounded like a challenge now.
Agatha held her gaze for a moment longer, then gave a single, slight nod. A dismissal and an acknowledgment all at once.
Rio walked down the stairs and out into the blinding morning, the taste of Agatha still on her lips, the scent of her still on her skin, feeling like a ghost wearing the clothes of a promising young student, already rehearsing her lines for the performance ahead.