Chapter 11: The Red Carpet Disguise
The gown arrived in a garment bag at three in the afternoon, and Tessa looked at it the way she looked at bombs.
"Silk," Aiko said, lifting it out. Floor-length, black, heavy enough to hold its own shape. It slid over Tessa's body in a hiss of fabric and pooled around her feet. "You look like a weapon."
"I feel like a hostage." Tessa looked down at herself. Shoulders bare, cleavage displayed, legs sealed into a column. The heels standing on the carpet had six-inch spikes, lacquered red. "Five days of nothing and now I get to wear a tent and stilts."
The gown arrived in a garment bag at three in the afternoon, and Tessa looked at it the way she looked at bombs.
"Silk," Aiko said, lifting it out. Floor-length, black, heavy enough to hold its own shape. It slid over Tessa's body in a hiss of fabric and pooled around her feet. "You look like a weapon."
"I feel like a hostage." Tessa looked down at herself. Shoulders bare, cleavage displayed, legs sealed into a column. The heels standing on the carpet had six-inch spikes, lacquered red. "Five days of nothing and now I get to wear a tent and stilts."
She reached back and tried to find the zipper. Her fingers walked down her own spine, fumbling at the little metal teeth above the swell of her ass. The gown was cut so she couldn't see her own feet, couldn't see her legs at all, and her whole body kept registering the loss like a phantom limb.
"I can't feel the air," she said. "Aiko. I can't feel the air anywhere. It's like being wrapped in a body bag with a view of my own tits."
"It's a good view, at least." Aiko circled her, bare, unhurried, her golden skin drinking the afternoon light. She hooked one finger under Tessa's collar and tugged the zipper the rest of the way up, sealing her in. The silk settled against Tessa's nipples and she flinched.
"That. That right there. I hate that." Tessa pressed a palm flat against her own sternum, trying to feel through the fabric. "My nipples have been free since I was nineteen. Now they're trapped under a hundred dollars a yard of someone's ego."
"Six hundred a yard." Aiko was grinning. "Veronica's tailor invoiced it to the production."
"Wonderful. I'm a hostage in an expensive body bag." Tessa turned on her, arms crossed under her breasts, which only pushed them up and made the neckline do exactly what it was designed to do. "And you. You get to walk into the premiere of the century with nothing but your tits out and Carol on your arm. Explain how that is fair."
"Simple physics." Aiko drifted to the mirror and checked her hair, lifting the black fall of it off her shoulders so it slid down her bare back. "Carol's date has to be nude. It's the brand. Wonder Woman doesn't do fabric, and her date doesn't either. I'm not even working, technically. I'm decoration."
"You left me alone with her for one hour. One hour, Aiko. I was in a hidden room getting thrown out by a British woman in a robe, and I come back and you're squatting on a rubber mat with a machine sucking your nipples like a calf."
"That's exactly how I got to be her date." Aiko turned, entirely pleased with herself. "You left me alone with Carol, if we're being precise. She watched me come standing up and decided I was premiere material. There's a lesson in there about delegation."
"The lesson is that you're a hazard." Tessa sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the heels. The strap fought her. The angle fought her. Her calf cramped on the first spike and she hissed through her teeth.
Aiko knelt in front of her, naked knees on the carpet, and took her ankle in both hands. She worked the strap through the buckle, then paused, her thumb resting on the arch of Tessa's foot.
"You're shaking," she said.
"I'm furious." But Tessa's voice had gone quieter. Aiko's hands were warm, and the only part of Tessa the gown had left her was her shoulders and her neck, and Aiko's mouth was suddenly very close to her knee.
Aiko looked up at her from the floor, dark eyes steady. "You've been undercover before. This shouldn't rattle you."
"It's never been my body that's the cover before." Tessa ran a hand down the silk over her thigh, feeling nothing. "My whole method, my whole life, is being seen. Every inch, every scar, everything the enemy can see, I show them, and it works because there's nothing to hide in it. Put me in this thing and every guard in that hotel is going to look at a woman in a gown and wonder what's under it. I've spent ten years learning how to be invisible by being naked. Clothes make me visible. They make me a question."
Aiko's thumb traced a slow circle on Tessa's ankle. "So the gown isn't a tent."
"The gown is the worst kind of lie. It's a lie with a zipper." Tessa tipped her head back, throat bare, and let out a long breath. "A caterer's uniform is better. Shapeless. Boring. Nobody questions a woman pushing a service cart, because nobody looks at catering. That's my whole trick with a layer of polyester on it."
"You'll hate the hairnet."
"I'll hate everything." But she was smiling a little now, down at Aiko on her knees between her silk-covered legs. "God, look at you. Not one thread on your body. Oiled up, nipples out, going to a party full of film people who are going to lose their minds over you."
"Jealousy is beneath you, Webb."
"It's not jealousy. It's taxonomy. You're a weapon tonight and I'm a covered dish." Tessa leaned forward and caught Aiko's chin in her hand, tilting her face up. "Get up here before I ruin the zipper."
Aiko rose, slow, letting her breasts drag up Tessa's silked thigh on the way, and Tessa's breath caught at the one point of contact her body could actually feel. Aiko kissed her once, deep, her hand finding the bare hollow of Tessa's shoulder where the gown ended, thumb stroking the skin there like an apology.
"Nadia's bringing the caterer uniform at five," Aiko said against her mouth. "Service entrance, dock three, the crew badge will scan under your accreditation. Tanaka's movers booked a freight elevator for tonight, eleven forty. Whatever lab she's moving goes out through that dock."
Tessa pulled back. Her grey eyes sharpened, the sulky hostage falling away. "Eleven forty."
"So you have four hours of being a covered dish." Aiko stepped back, checked her own reflection, and grinned at the mirror. "Try not to enjoy the heels too much."
Tessa stood, tested the spikes, and hated every centimeter of them. "If I fall in this dress, tell Odette it was your fault."
"Told her already," Aiko said, and grabbed her phone. "Time to go be decoration."
The red carpet outside the Phoenix Grand ran half a block, walled in by barriers, floodlights, and a screaming row of photographers. Aiko heard them before she saw them, a wall of sound that rose when the car doors opened and Carol Conners stepped out into the light.
Carol went first. Six feet of nothing but skin and muscle, she planted one bare foot on the crimson fabric and the crowd noise doubled, then tripled. Flashbulbs strobed off her oiled shoulders, off the heavy swing of her breasts, off the confident set of her jaw. She turned once, slow, arms loose at her sides, and gave them the full Wonder Woman stance.
Then she reached back into the car for her date.
Aiko took her hand and rose out of the seat into the light. The sound changed. The photographers had known Carol was coming; they had not known about this. A naked Asian woman, long black hair down her bare back, sun-kissed skin glowing under the floods, stepped onto the carpet with her chin level and her nipples hard in the cool night air, and the barriers shook with the noise.
"Who is that?" someone screamed.
"Look right here! Give me the profile!"
Carol laughed and pulled her close, and they walked the carpet together, hips nearly brushing. Aiko had walked into gunfire with less adrenaline in her blood. Every flash felt like a small explosion on her skin. She let her shoulders roll back, let the light hit everything, because that was the job tonight. Decoration.
"You're doing great," Carol murmured through her smile. "Don't look at the cameras. Look just past them."
"I was aiming at the roof line." Aiko flicked her eyes left, right, cataloguing while she posed. Service dock beyond the barriers, east side. Two hotel security men at the freight entrance. A catering truck backing in with its doors already open. "You're popular."
"I'm a product." Carol turned for the cameras, one hand on her hip, and her breasts caught the light like oiled bronze. "You're the mystery. They're going to be running your name through every database in Bangkok by midnight and finding nothing. God, that's fun."
They reached the carpet's end. Carol leaned in and kissed Aiko's cheek, slow enough that fifty cameras caught it, and whispered against her ear. "Movers arrived an hour ago. Freight elevator's been running all evening."
"Eleven forty," Aiko said, smiling for the lights. "I know."
A handler waved them inside. Carol went, trailing scent and noise, and the doors swallowed them both.
Four minutes later a second car stopped at the carpet, halfway down, past the barrier where the photographers had thinned to a bored handful. The door opened and Tessa Webb stepped out in six hundred dollars a yard of black silk.
Nobody screamed. One photographer lifted his camera, took two frames of a beautiful blonde in a gown, and lowered it. That was the whole fanfare. She could have wept with gratitude.
She strolled the carpet the way she'd strolled a thousand hallways, unhurried, barely visible. The gown did its job. She was a question nobody in this crowd cared to ask. Heels struck the fabric with small sharp clicks, and she counted her steps to keep her balance honest, and she smiled at the doorman like a bored investor's plus-one.
"You're with the Diaz party?" he asked.
"Diplomatic accreditation." She showed the card at the angle Aiko had drilled into her, wrist turned so it caught the light and nothing else. He waved her through without a second glance.
Inside, the lobby had been converted. A giant screen played the trailer on a loop, Carol's digital double spread on the X-frame, and guests in gowns and, increasingly, in nothing stood beneath it with champagne. The nudist contingent of the production had their own cluster near the bar, all skin, all confidence, and more than one head turned as Tessa passed in her gown. She felt the looks like insects. One woman in a gold chain at her hip winked at her.
Tessa found a pillar, leaned against it, and did her job. She watched the freight dock doors across the lobby floor. She watched the two security men beside them. She watched a caterer push a cart of clean glasses through a service door and leave it slightly ajar.
Her earpiece crackled. Aiko's voice came through low, layered under party noise.
"Tell me you're inside."
"Three minutes ahead of schedule. Nobody looked at me twice. Being a covered dish has privileges." She kept her lips barely moving, champagne flute raised as cover. "Dock doors, east side. Two guards. Catering truck's still running."
"The freight elevator log shows eleven forty on the booking. Movers are already staged somewhere inside the hotel." A pause, and the sound of ice in a glass. "Tanaka's moving early or the booking is a decoy."
"Or both." Tessa watched the dock doors across the busy floor. "I'm going to need that caterer's cart to get a look at the dock. There's a service door left open, thirty feet from the guards."
Aiko's laugh came through warm. "Five days of nothing and now you get to wear a tent and push a cart."
"Don't enjoy this."
"I'm at a premiere with Carol Conners's hand on my ass. I'm enjoying several things. You get one."
Tessa drained the champagne and set the flute on a passing tray. She straightened the gown at the hip, checked the zipper's seated pull against her spine, and crossed the lobby floor toward the ajar service door with the rolling, disinterested walk of a woman looking for the ladies' room.
The security men never moved. The gown moved instead, black silk gliding between the flood of guests, shoulders bare, blonde hair catching the chandelier light, and by the time anyone thought to look twice she was a memory of a stride and a click of heels fading past the door.
The service door opened onto a narrow corridor lit by fluorescent strips, the party's bass dropping to a muffled thump behind fire-rated walls. Tessa followed the smell of warm stainless steel and stepped into the catering staging bay. Racks of clean glasses. Stacked trays. A long steel counter littered with crate labels and a catering crew badge in a plastic sleeve, exactly where Nadia's intel had promised.
No one was there. The bay emptied toward dock three on the far end, and the crew itself was out pushing carts into the glow of the party.
She stood for a moment, one hand flat on the cold steel counter, and listened. Water running somewhere. The freight elevator humming two floors down. A voice on a radio, tinny and far away.
Then she reached back for the zipper.
Her fingers found the little metal pull above the swell of her ass on the first try this time, five days of practice counting for nothing and everything. She dragged it down. The teeth parted one by one, a small metallic ratchet in the quiet bay, and the gown loosened around her ribs like a fist opening.
She pushed it off her shoulders.
The silk slid down her arms, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, and pooled at her feet in a black circle. Cool air touched her skin everywhere at once, and Tessa's whole body registered it like a drink of water after a week in the desert. Her nipples hardened in the first seconds of exposure. Gooseflesh raced down her thighs. She closed her eyes.
"Oh, thank God," she said out loud.
The heels came next. She braced a hand on the counter, unstrapped the left, then the right, and stepped off the six-inch spikes onto bare concrete. Her calves ached with the release. Her toes spread against the cold floor and she flexed them, once, twice, feeling every degree of the temperature through her soles.
She looked down at the gown collapsed around her ankles. Six hundred a yard of lie with a zipper.
"Never again," she said. "I mean it this time. Never. Clothes are over. If Odette orders me into a tuxedo she can have my resignation in writing."
She kicked the heels free of the silk, picked the whole ruin of it up off the floor, folded it badly, and stuffed it into an empty crate labeled GLASSWARE with a vindictiveness she usually saved for turret systems. The badge she clipped to nothing at all, because there was nothing to clip it to, and she held it in her hand instead. The plastic was warm from the counter.
Her reflection waited in the polished side of a stainless refrigerator. A tall woman, pale, blonde, entirely bare, grey eyes bright with something that had nothing to do with tradecraft. She looked like herself again. She looked like the only version of herself that had ever worked.
She pressed both palms flat to her own stomach and just breathed for ten seconds. The air moved over every inch of her. Her skin drank it. Somewhere under all that silk she had spent forty minutes forgetting she had a body, and now every nerve she owned was awake and reporting in, and it was the best feeling of the mission, better than the purge redirect, better than the rooftop gliders, better, she admitted, than a few things she would not say on an open channel.
Her earpiece crackled.
"Status." Aiko's voice, threaded through bass and crowd noise.
"I'm naked in a kitchen and I've never been happier in my life."
"You're supposed to be pushing a cart."
"I am naked, I have a badge, and there are four empty service carts within arm's reach. The system works." Tessa picked a long white cart by the door, its shelves stacked with champagne flutes, and rolled it in a slow test circle. The wheels were silent. "The gown is in a glassware crate. If anyone finds it before eleven forty, I was never here."
"How's the inventory? Skin check."
"Everything's still where I left it." She glanced down the length of herself, one hip cocked. "Nipples at combat readiness. Ass fully operational. It's good to be back."
A pause on the line, and then Aiko's laugh, low and warm. "You're going to make this whole party sound boring, and I'm standing here with Wonder Woman's hand on my ass."
"Is she."
"Her palm is on my left cheek right now. Firm grip. Very promotional." Aiko's voice dropped half a register. "Focus, Webb. Dock three. The movers are real, I just walked past two of them in the corridor by the freight bay. Grey coveralls, no production badges, and they were carrying crates with the same shipping labels as Tanaka's laptop cases. Serpent Freight. Same shell company Phantom used in Macau."
Tessa's brightness cooled into something sharper. She checked the bay door to dock three. A steel push-bar, a round window fogged with condensation, and beyond it the yellow square of loading lights.
"Then I'm not just sightseeing," she said. "I'm going through that door with a cart of champagne and no clothes on."
"That's the spirit." A beat. "Tessa. If the elevator leaves before you're on it, do not get in a crate. We get her at the premiere party, that's the fallback. You are not cargo."
"Copy. Not cargo." She looked down at herself once more, at the pale lines of her body under the fluorescent strips, at the badge in her hand. "But I'm telling you, if they load me into one, it'll be the most comfortable crate in the history of freight, because I will be completely naked in it."
"Go, you lunatic."
Tessa tucked the badge into the cart's upper shelf, checked the corridor beyond the window, and pushed the bar. The door swung out onto loading lights and the smell of diesel and river air. Down the dock, past a parked catering truck with its engine running, the freight elevator doors stood open, interior lit, waiting.
Two men in grey coveralls had their backs to her, wrestling a crate onto a pallet.
She rolled the cart forward, bare feet on warm concrete, hips loose, shoulders easy, and felt the night air move over every inch of her like an old friend putting an arm around her. A caterer with a cart. Invisible. Exactly as designed.
One of the men straightened up and turned, and his eyes went straight past her face to a naked blonde pushing champagne, and then, like any red-blooded mover in Bangkok, they stayed there.
"Party's on four," he said, flushing. "You're lost?"
"Champagne restock for the penthouse level," Tessa said, serene, already rolling past him. "They told me to use this elevator."
He hesitated. Her body did the talking, six hundred a yard of silk nowhere in sight, and his hesitation died of embarrassment.
"Whatever. In and out. We're on a schedule."
"I know," Tessa said, and stepped into the elevator with her cart. "Eleven forty."
The elevator climbed in silence, cables humming somewhere above. Tessa stood beside the cart, one hand resting on the upper shelf, badge tucked between two stacks of flutes. The fluorescent light in the ceiling made her skin look bleached. She counted floors by the numbers painted on the passing doors.
Eighteen. Nineteen.
The car stopped. The doors slid open onto a private corridor, thick carpet, a single gilt sconce, and a man waiting with a clipboard. Grey coveralls. No production badge.
"You the penthouse restock?" He looked at the cart, then at her, and his clipboard hand dropped an inch. "They said nothing about you."
"They said nothing about a lot of things." Tessa stepped back from the cart and gestured at it with an open palm, letting him draw his own conclusions. "Suite 1904. The Diaz overflow suite. I was told to leave it and go."
He checked his list, found the entry, and grunted. Then he took the cart's handle, because of course he did. A naked woman was decoration; a cart of champagne was his problem. He rolled it out of the elevator and down the corridor, and Tessa followed at his shoulder, watching the numbers on the doors.
The coveralls were the wrong cut for hotel staff. Serpent Freight, stitched small on the breast pocket. She filed it.
1904. He tapped twice, used a keycard, and pushed the cart inside. Tessa slipped in behind him before the door finished closing, bare feet silent on the marble.
The suite was dark. Tall windows gave the Bangkok skyline in full, a carpet of gold light running to the horizon. Silk drapes half drawn. A grand piano under a dust cover. She rolled behind a chaise as the man pushed the cart deeper into the room, toward a wide archway leading to what had to be the service kitchen, and she dropped to a crouch and stilled.
He left the cart at the archway and turned back toward the door, toward the light switch by the entry. His radio crackled. "Two minutes, we're clear," someone said through it.
Tessa went flat behind the chaise and waited. His footsteps crossed the marble. She could hear the creak of his boots, the rasp of his breath. The cart sat three feet from her, its lower shelf a solid black panel with a small circular vent hole punched through it, half an inch wide, meant for airflow around chilled bottles.
She moved to it on her knees and put her eye to the hole.
Nothing. The suite behind her sat empty in the frame, piano, drapes, dark windows. The man was somewhere out of her sightline, and that meant he was somewhere out of his own team's sightline too, for exactly as long as this took.
She heard him stop. Heard the radio hiss again. "Hold at the dock. Give me four."
Four minutes. Tessa measured her breath and slid her hands to the floor.
The man came back around the archway, moving toward the cart, and his eyes swept the room once, lazily, because nobody questions a restock. He never finished the sweep. Tessa came out of her crouch in one explosive line, bare legs driving off the marble, and her foot snapped up in a rising arc that caught him square under the jaw with the full snap of her hip behind it.
His head went back. He was conscious for one more instant, long enough for his watering eyes to drop and fix on the last thing they would ever record: Tessa Webb, naked, airborne, her legs split wide in mid-kick, everything she had on open display, the smooth pale seam of her sex and her exposed clit dead center in his vision at a range of two feet.
He went down like scaffolding. A heavy, boneless crash onto the carpet, clipboard spinning away across the marble, radio skittering after it.
Tessa landed light on both feet, weight forward, hands up, and held the position for a three-count while the room stayed quiet. Then she straightened and exhaled.
"He saw heaven," she said to the room.
She crouched over him, two fingers at his throat. Pulse strong, breathing slow. Out for ten minutes, maybe fifteen if she was lucky. She dragged him by the coveralls into the shadow behind the piano's dust cover, folded his limbs out of the traffic line, and plucked the keycard from his pocket. Serpent Freight, the pocket said, and beneath it a laminated schedule. She read it in two seconds.
Freight elevator. 23:40. Suite 1904. All crates staged, dock after.
The lab was coming here first. Not the dock. This suite was the staging room, and the movers were due with the crates in under an hour.
Her earpiece crackled. "Talk to me."
"A mover is unconscious behind a piano." Tessa knelt by the cart, already pulling the vent panel's clip and swinging the false lower shelf open. Empty. Built for cargo. "Second mover just told his dock team to hold. The crates come to this suite at eleven forty. Tanaka's moving the lab in here before it goes anywhere."
A pause on the line. Bass from the party thumped faintly through the walls.
"You knocked a man out with your vagina."
"With my foot, Aiko. The vagina was incidental. He happened to be looking at it at the time." Tessa pulled the cart fully open, checked its hidden depth, and measured it against her own shoulders with a flat, assessing stare. "Which, for the record, was the last thing he ever saw. I consider it a mercy."
"You're the most disturbing woman alive." Aiko's voice had gone tight, half laugh, half worry. "Tessa. If that crate schedule is right, Tanaka's people walk into this room in forty minutes and find their man asleep on a piano. You need to not be there."
"I'm not going to be there." Tessa lifted the cart's top tray out and set it aside, then looked at the deep black cavity underneath, padded on all four sides, big enough for a body. She smiled at it without humor. "I'm going to be exactly here. Built in. They'll wheel me out themselves."
"Absolutely not. You said not cargo. You wrote the rule."
"I wrote the rule about getting in a crate, Aiko." She lowered herself into the cavity, knees drawn up, and found it fit her perfectly, bare skin against padded walls, the airflow vent at her eye. "This is a cart. Completely different class of equipment."
"Tessa."
"Nadia's backup team is at the premiere. Tell her to have two women ready at the freight elevator at eleven thirty-eight. When the movers come down with an extra cart, they take them in the stairwell, quiet, and I walk out with the delivery." She pulled the top tray back over her head and the suite went to a thin band of light through the vent hole. "And Aiko. Keep Carol on the red carpet as long as you can. Photographers love her. Nobody loves her more than she does."
Silence for a moment. Then Aiko, low and resigned. "If you suffocate in there I'm telling Odette it was your idea."
"Take the wig, wear my gown to the after-party. You'd look better in it anyway."
The earpiece clicked off. Tessa settled her spine against the padding, put her eye to the vent, and watched the dark suite beyond the archway. Her body was warm in the enclosed air, every inch of her skin alive against the smooth lining, and she was, she had to admit, comfortable.
Somewhere below, the freight elevator started to move.
The elevator climbed, and then it didn't matter. It passed nineteen without stopping, some other call, some other floor, and the hum faded away beneath her. Tessa settled deeper into the padding and waited.
Minutes crawled. The vent gave her a band of dark suite, the silver edge of the piano's dust cover, the tall windows with their carpet of gold light. Nothing moved. Her radio in the mover's pocket was silent behind the piano. The party's bass came up through the marble as a heartbeat too slow to count.
She checked her watch by feel, thumb finding the crown against her wrist. Eleven oh-two. Thirty-eight minutes to kill in a padded box the temperature of blood.
Her body, at least, was having a wonderful time. The air in the cart was warm and close, and it moved over her skin with every breath she took, along her ribs, into the crease of her thighs. Naked and hidden. Invisible and completely exposed. It was, she thought, the finest cover she'd ever occupied.
Except for the forty minutes of silk. Her mood curdled a little at the memory. Five days of gowns and heels and zippers, five days of strangers seeing the fabric first and the woman second, when the whole principle of her career was the opposite. Clothes made her a question. Tonight she'd been an answer nobody asked.
And her breasts. God. Bound up in black silk for a red carpet, weight compressed and lifted by seaming she hadn't asked for, nipples flattened under a lined bodice like an embarrassment to be concealed. She was one of the best shots in the agency and she'd spent the evening being a covered dish.
Her hand drifted down almost without her permission.
She started with her collarbone, tracing the line of it, then lower, until her palm settled over her left breast. It filled her hand generously, warm and heavy against the padding beneath, and her nipple was already hard against the center of her palm. She gave it an idle flick with her fingertip.
The sensation cracked up her chest like static. She did it again, slower, watching the dark vent hole while her body did the work.
"You're sour," she whispered to herself. "You're sour and bored and alone in a box, and this is what that looks like."
Both hands now. She cupped her breasts, lifted them, felt the weight shift and settle. The nipples were stiff, pale pink, aching slightly from hours of imprisonment under silk, and she pinched the left one between thumb and forefinger and rolled it. A short, sharp pleasure, bright as a struck match, pooled low in her stomach.
Squeezing. She worked the soft flesh, kneading handfuls of her own tit until the heat built properly, then pinched the nipple hard and held it, feeling the pulse tick in the trapped tip. Her breath went ragged in the enclosed air. The sound came back off the padded walls, soft and obscene.
The right one now. She pulled it outward, tugging the small peak away from her body until the ache ran a line straight down to her clit, then released it and flicked it again, fast, three flicks, four. Her hips shifted against the padding. She let her knees fall open wider in the cavity, thighs parting in the warm dark, though nothing down there was getting touched yet. This was an apology to her breasts. The rest could wait.
"Forty minutes of coverage," she muttered under the crackle of her own breathing, pinching both nipples at once, twisting gently. "Six hundred a yard. For this."
For this being the soft, heavy weight of her own tits in her own hands, freely displayed to nobody, nipples drawn up hard and sensitive and hers. She squeezed them together until they touched, held them there, dragged her thumbs across both tips at the same moment. A moan slipped out of her, quiet, and she let it. Nobody could hear. Nobody was coming for thirty more minutes.
She got into a rhythm. Flick, squeeze, pinch and roll, both hands moving in counterpoint, the pleasure stacking in tight layers under her sternum. Her skin flushed down her throat and across the upper curves of her breasts, heat blooming pink in the dark. She could smell herself faintly under the padding's clean lining, arousal and warm skin, and the smell only sharpened things.
One nipple she pinched firm and held; the other she pulled, out and out, until the stretch burned sweetly, and her free hand slid down the plane of her stomach at last, over the dip of her navel, into the trimmed heat between her thighs. She was wet. Properly, embarrassingly wet, the folds slick under her fingertips, and she wasn't sure when that had happened, only that the silk had stolen the whole evening from her and her body was collecting interest now.
Her fingers circled her clit once, twice. Her back arched off the padding, breasts lifting, the held nipple dragging against her grip.
Eleven oh-six. She had thirty-four minutes and no intention of spending them productively.
She let the held nipple go and gave her full attention to both, squeezing and rolling them in time with the slow circles between her legs, breath coming shorter, the small sounds growing less careful. Her thighs trembled against the cart walls. The pleasure coiled tight and low, all the sourness of the last five days folding into it, the gowns, the zippers, the covered dishes, the photographers who'd lowered their cameras because she wasn't worth a second frame.
Naked, she thought, fingers working, nipples straining under her own hands, naked was the only thing she had ever been worth anything at.
The elevator hummed again, far below.
Her hand stopped. She lay still, chest heaving, one nipple glistening and reddened between her fingers, listening. The hum rose. It didn't stop at nineteen.
She exhaled, released her breast, and pressed both hands flat to her stomach, waiting. Then she heard the number painted on a passing door, and the cables kept singing upward.
Twenty. Above her. Coming down or coming up, and she had ninety seconds to decide whether she finished first.