“Is that what you’re hoping for?”
She pushes herself to her feet, thoughtlessly smooths her skirt. Starts pacing.
“I don’t think I’ll get one,” she admits. “I think he’s gonna… honestly, I have no idea.”
Kat turns, keeps pacing, arms folded in front of herself.
“I know it’s nothing,” she says. “Maybe some misguided attempt to ‘clear the air’”—she uses sarcastic air quotes— “between exes before he leaves, but mostly, I think it’ll be nothing and then I’ll never have to see him again. Hopefully.”
“You don’t have to go,” I point out.
“I know. But I’m going to.”
I stay still and watch her pace back and forth across my office, angry and anxious and stubborn as hell. I know she doesn’t want to have a public conversation with her ex and I know she’s going to anyway, to prove to him and God and everybody that she can. She’s sharp and alluring and dangerous as a dagger, and woe to anyone who doesn’t understand that.
I don’t let myself think about what I do next.
“Close the door,” I tell her. She stops pacing, looks at me. “Please?”
There’s a moment where I know she’s going to refuse. She should refuse. We both know why I want the door closed.
Then Kat closes the door, turning the knob so it doesn’t click.
“Lock it,” I say, voice already rough. “Turn out the lights.”
She does. I pull the shade on the windows behind my desk and suddenly my office doesn’t look like my office anymore: shadowed and dark, the sunset trickling in around the blinds. It feels like an alternate version of the world. I feel like an alternate version of myself: a reckless, mindless one who’s all impulse and desire. A version I thought I’d buried ages ago.
Then we’re kissing again, my hands locked in her hair, and it’s slow and soft and filthy, all at once. Her teeth sharp against my lip. Her tongue curling against mine, the softest sigh escaping her.
“There are people still in the office,” she murmurs, but she’s got one hand fisted in the front of my shirt.
“You’re right.”
“I’m supposed to be there at seven,” she says.
“Are you telling me to stop?”
She tugs on my shirt, pulls me down. Presses a kiss to the corner of my mouth, the spot right under my jaw.
“Just hurry,” she says.
“I wouldn’t want you to be late,” I say, and now her other hand is in my hair and she’s pulling me in two directions at once, like she might split me open, her teeth scraping along my neck. “I wouldn’t want you walking in with your hair wild and my name practically still on your lips.”
She nips at me, and I gasp.
“That,” she says. “Would be terrible.”
“You wouldn’t want,” I start, “to still have teeth marks on your neck.”
She bites me a little harder, then jolts. I’ve backed her up against the side of my desk without even realizing it.
“I wouldn’t want to still be thinking of you at all,” she says, and licks the hollow of my throat, the frame of her glasses bumping the underside of my chin.
Suddenly, I understand: this is armor, too. It’s stupid, and it’s reckless, but I can give her this. Let me be her armor against a bad year. Let me give her what she wants because she gives me what I need.
I take her mouth again, because I can. I grab her hips and push her against the desk because I can, and because I like the way she bends slightly backward when we kiss.
“Kat,” I say, very quietly. “You know you’re the brightest thing in every room, don’t you?”