Page 54 of Orc'd At A Wedding
CHAPTER 15
BLISS
The knife is barely on the nightstand before my hands find his lapels.
I don't think about it. There is no internal committee meeting, no anxious cost-benefit analysis running in the background of my skull. My fingers curl into the dark wool of his jacket and I pull, which is a largely symbolic gesture given the physics involved, but Olog reads the intention with that uncanny, precise attention he gives to everything I do, and he comes down to me like he's been waiting for the signal.
His mouth finds mine in the dark and it is nothing like the careful, choreographed performances of the last two days. Those kisses had an audience. They were designed. This has no design at all. It is immediate and honest and thorough, his broad hand cupping the side of my face with a gentleness that is genuinely at odds with the size of him, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw while he takes his time, and I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about in any context that still involved performance or pretense.
There is no pretense left in this room.
"Bliss." My name in his mouth, low and deliberate, the same measured weight he gives to everything, except this time it isstripped of the professional cadence. It is just his voice. Just my name.
"Still here," I say against his jaw. "Fully present. No notes."
The sound he makes is low and warm and a little wrecked, which is possibly the most satisfying thing I have ever heard in my twenty-eight years of existence, and I file it immediately for future reference.
He stands from the bed in one smooth motion and I reach out before I can stop myself. He's already sliding the jacket off his shoulders, the same efficient precision that got us through every choreographed cocktail hour, every staged photograph. He drapes it over the chair. Smooths a nonexistent crease.
I set my knuckles against my sternum where something warm and stupidly tender has lodged itself.
He unbuttons his cuffs. Rolls each sleeve twice, slow and methodical, exposing the black ink that crawls up the dense muscle of his forearms, his grandmother's soup recipes, his family tree, rendered in sharp, sweeping lines. My throat clicks when I swallow.
"Are you cataloguing me?" he asks without looking up from his sleeve.
"I'm appreciating you," I say. "There's a distinction."
He looks up then, silver eyes steady on my face, and there is something in them that is not professional and not restrained and not filtered through any version of client management. It is direct and warm and entirely focused on me, and it sits somewhere behind my sternum and refuses to move.
He crosses the room and I lean back across the bed, making space, and he follows me down onto it with careful, deliberate intent. The mattress concedes completely to his weight. The whole architecture of the bed shifts and resettles with him in it, and I am acutely, viscerally aware of the sheer fact of him, the broad solidity of his chest above me, the warm bergamot-and-linen scent of his skin, the way he braces himself on one arm to keep the full weight of himself from simply flattening me into the expensive hotel mattress.
"Hi," I say.
"Hello, Bliss."
"We're doing this."
"We are." He dips down and drags his mouth along the line of my throat, slow and deliberate, and my entire nervous system briefly resigns. "I have, for the record, wanted to do this since approximately the welcome mixer."
"The welcome mixer was twelve hours into the gig."
"Yes, I know." His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder. "I spent a substantial amount of internal energy that evening reviewing the ethics."
"And?"
"The contract is cancelled." He lifts his head to look at me. "The ethics are resolved."
I laugh, actual and unguarded, and something in his expression softens in a way that is entirely private, entirely for this room, and I reach up and trace the line of his jaw with my fingers and feel the muscle there work as his eyes close briefly.
He pulls the zip of my dress down my spine with one slow, careful motion, and the silk falls away. His hands trace the new geography of me with the same focused attention he brings to threat assessment and hors d'oeuvre logistics, which should be clinical but is instead the most seen I have felt in recent memory. His palms are enormous against my skin, spanning the breadth of my ribcage, the curve of my waist, mapping me with a thoroughness that makes my breathing shift into something irregular.
"You have been," he says against my collarbone, the words measured and low, "occupying a significant percentage of my cognitive bandwidth since Thursday morning."
"What percentage?"
"Inadvisably high." He lifts his head and looks down at me, and the silver of his eyes is very dark in this light. "I had a rate card. I had a protocol. I had a five-star professional reputation built across two years of impeccable service delivery." A beat. His thumb traces a slow, thoughtful line across my hip. "You have done considerable damage to my operational framework."
"I'm going to need you to stop talking about your operational framework while I'm lying here like this."
