There was a second of dead silence. Worth stared into my raw and naked face, and then he wordlessly opened his desk drawer and got out his checkbook. I looked to Birdwine, and I found him looking back.
Really looking, seeing everything that had come roaring joyfully out from behind my civilized demeanor. The air sparked between us. My teeth caught my own bottom lip, so badly did I need something to bite. We were together in this moment, him and me, held in the music of this victory, the song caused by the scratch of Worth’s pen against the paper check.
It was hard to drag my gaze away, but when I did, I saw Worth was writing my name in the line by Pay to the order of. I rapped my knuckles hard against the desk.
“Do you think I need a cut of my brother’s tender little pennies?”
Worth paused, then voided the check and started writing a new one, properly, to Julian.
Birdwine’s gaze had not shifted. I could feel it on me. When I looked back, he was grinning. I was not pretty in victory, but Birdwine liked it. Birdwine had always liked me this way, and how had I forgotten? Birdwine liked it plenty. I felt his gaze on my skin, and it had gone as hot as Worth’s had gone cold.
Worth ripped the check out of the book and held it wordlessly toward me.
I took it, and in lieu of good-bye, I said, “He’s going to take this to the bank on Monday. There’s not a god above the earth or under it who can help you if it bounces.”
His eyes twitched in their sockets as he ran some calculations in his head. Finally, he gave a faint, propitiating headshake, and I knew it wouldn’t bounce. I could see how much it hurt, though, and that hurt made the air taste sweet against my tongue.
I walked out, and Birdwine followed, closing the door gently behind us. The old, familiar rush from the win was roaring through me. I’d missed this high, missed feeling there was no soft place on my entire body. I was made of bone and teeth and iron blood.
I backtracked down the filthy hall, and when I came to the empty office, it was the toothy, rock-hard me that paused, that turned back to face Birdwine. I was hungry for a vulnerable pulse point, for any soft place I could set my teeth. I looked at him, and I didn’t see one. Birdwine wasn’t scared of me or soft at all. His face had set in an expression I had not seen since he quit me. We’d been working together again on my pro bonos, but he hadn’t looked at me like this. Not once, though he knew I was quite often up for some nostalgia with my exes.
I put my hands flat on his chest. I could feel his heart, thumping fast, a huge reverberation in the broad span of his chest. My hands pushed him toward the open door, and he went through, as though my push had sent him. But it hadn’t. Birdwine was a mountain, not some small, soft thing that I could move. My push sent him because he wanted to be sent. I kicked the door shut behind us, and then we were alone. I reached for him, and found him already reaching, too. He picked me straight up off the floor, right out of my shoes.
I swarmed up him as he dragged me, wrapping my legs around him, my skirt riding up onto my hips. I grabbed deep fistfuls of his hair. He brought my naked face up to his face. Eye to eye, I breathed his breath in for a single blinding-hot second, and then our eyes were closed and our mouths were open to each other. His hands were on my hips now, grinding me into him, and I would have paid ten thousand dollars, cash, to have us both animal naked, with no cloth blocking our bodies at their most essential points.
I rubbed my cheek down his, tucked my face into his neck and bit at him there, running my tongue down to where it met his shoulder. I whispered words into his skin. “Let’s go to your place.”
The second after I spoke, I knew I shouldn’t have. I should have let it happen, fast and sweet, right here. We should have crashed around the room, knocking down the flimsy cubicles. We should have had each other in the wreckage.
As it was, I felt him forcefully relax his grip.
“Just like old times,” he said. He took a shuddering breath and set me on the desk. He pulled back, and I let him go. His eyes were open again, and almost angry. When he spoke again, it came out flat, not mad at all. Almost matter-of-fact. “We won’t work out, Paula. If we start, we’ll hit the same wall we hit last time, and you’ll break my fuckin’ heart again.”
It was like being punctured. All the sex ran out of me. Now I saw the grime streaking the carpet, the peeling paint. I smelled burnt cumin. It was that last word, again, that got to me.
I hadn’t known he’d been in love with me. Was that what he meant, when he said we’d hit a wall? That he had loved me? When he quit me, citing lack of communication, I’d assumed I’d done something to piss him off. When he stopped taking my calls, I’d assumed I’d pissed him off a lot. My focus after that was fixing our working relationship. I didn’t give my personal relationships with men a lot of brain space. I specifically looked for relationships with men that didn’t require any.