Terminal Velocity

The airport was the cruelest architecture Jason had ever built nothing in.

Leigh walked through security at Athens International and didn't look back. Not because she didn't want to—her body twisted with the effort of not turning, every nerve ending firing in the direction of the man standing on the other side of the glass partition, watching her leave with that face she'd spent four days learning to read and would spend the rest of her life trying to forget. She didn't look back because she knew that if she did, she'd fold. She'd drop the bag, push past the security guard, walk straight back into his arms, and let whatever life she'd built in New York crumble into irrelevance. And she wasn't ready for that. Not yet. Not until she understood what had happened to her on that island.

The flight was six hours of agony. She sat in her window seat with her forehead pressed against the cold plastic and the Aegean shrinking below her and the phantom ache between her thighs throbbing in time with her pulse. She could still feel him—the stretch of him, the weight of him, the specific way his hips had driven into hers like he was trying to anchor himself inside her body permanently. Her underwear was soaked through by the time they reached cruising altitude. She excused herself to the bathroom, locked the door, and stood with her palms flat on the tiny sink and her eyes closed and her breath coming in short, shallow gasps and she thought about his hand on her throat and the way he'd said *don't answer yet* and how the word *yet* had done something to her chest that the word *yes* never could.

She did not touch herself. That was the deal she made in that bathroom, standing in the fluorescent light with her dress wrinkled and her hair wrecked and her panties clinging wet to her skin. She would not touch herself on the plane. She would save it. She would carry the wanting like a live wire inside her body until she couldn't stand it anymore, and then she would decide what to do with it.

She landed in New York at 10 p.m. local time. Her apartment was exactly as she'd left it—clean, sparse, the kind of space that looked like a photograph in a magazine and felt like a hotel room. She set her bag by the door. She stood in the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and looked at the organized rows of condiments and the filtered water pitcher and the wilted kale she'd bought before the trip and she thought: *I left a man who fucks like he's building a cathedral inside me to come back to wilted kale.*

Her phone buzzed.

**Jason:** You landed?

**Leigh:** Yes.

**Jason:** I can still smell you on my hands.

She stared at the screen. Her cunt clenched. She sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and her knees drawn up and she typed: *Tell me.*

**Jason:** You're on your kitchen floor aren't you.

**Leigh:** How did you—

**Jason:** Because that's where I'd be.

---

Two weeks passed like water torture—slow, relentless, each day a drip of contact that kept her alive and starving at the same time. They FaceTimed every night. His face on her screen in the dark of her bedroom, the island behind him, the stone walls and the open sky and the sea she could hear through the phone's tinny speaker. She told him about work. He told her about the construction. They talked about the room he was building—the dimensions, the materials, the way the afternoon light fell through the gap in the cliff face at exactly the right angle for exactly forty-seven minutes a day. He talked about it the way other men talked about love, and she listened and felt the wanting pool low and hot and insistent and eventually one of them would say something that tipped the conversation over the edge and she'd pull her shirt off or he'd pull his off and they'd be there again, but through glass, through screens, through the cruel mediation of technology that let her see his face and hear his voice and watch his hand move on his own cock but couldn't let her feel the weight of him or the heat of him or the specific way his fingers curled inside her when he wanted to make her come so hard she forgot language.

The first time they did it on FaceTime she was sitting against her headboard with her legs spread and her fingers inside herself and he was watching from six thousand miles away with his jaw tight and his hand wrapped around his dick and he said *add another finger, I know you can take it* and she did and the sound she made was not a sound she recognized. He told her exactly what he'd do if he were there—his mouth on her, his tongue flat against her clit while his fingers worked her open, his teeth grazing the inside of her thigh until she grabbed his hair and held him in place—and she came so hard her phone slid off the pillow and landed on the floor and by the time she picked it up he was laughing, actually laughing, and the sound of it did something to her chest that the orgasm hadn't.

But it wasn't enough. She knew it wasn't enough and he knew it wasn't enough and the knowing made it worse.

By the end of the second week she was climbing the walls. Her body had developed a specific, localized hunger that centered on the space between her hips and radiated outward—a persistent, low-grade fever that spiked every time her phone buzzed with his name. She was wet at work. Wet in meetings. Wet on the subway with her thighs pressed together and her mind replaying the sound he'd made when she took him in her mouth in that Athens hotel room. She'd never experienced anything like this before—the way her body had been rewired by his hands, his mouth, his cock, the way every nerve ending she possessed now seemed to route through the memory of what he'd done to her.

On a Thursday night, three days into the third week, she told him.

"I want to go to the club," she said.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with the laptop open and his face filling the screen. He was shirtless, leaning against the doorframe of the villa, the Aegean dark behind him. His expression didn't change.

"Which club?" he said.

"Verdant. The one in Midtown. You know which one."

"I know which one." He studied her. "You want to watch."

"Yes."

"Without me."

"I'm telling you. That's the difference. I'm telling you before I go."

He was quiet for a moment. She watched the muscle in his jaw work. "What do you want to see?"

"I don't know yet. I just—" She pressed her palms against her thighs. "I need something. The screen isn't—I can't touch you. I can't feel you. I need to be in a room where something is happening and I can feel the air change."

"You could go and not touch anyone," he said. "You could sit at the bar and drink something overpriced and watch and come home and call me and tell me what you saw and I'd be here."

"Or?"

"Or you could let someone touch you and I'd have to decide how I feel about that."

"How would you feel about that?"

He looked at her directly through the screen and the look was so raw, so stripped of the careful composure he usually wore, that she felt her breath catch. "I'd feel like I should be there. I'd feel like the only hands on you should be mine. But I'm not going to tell you what to do from six thousand miles away. That's not ownership. That's a cage."

"I don't want anyone else's hands."

"Then go watch. Come home. Call me."

She went on Saturday. Verdant was exactly as she remembered—low ceilings, dark wood, the specific atmosphere of a place where the rules of the outside world had been quietly suspended. She sat at the bar. She ordered a drink she didn't touch. She watched.

The couple in the corner booth were the ones who caught her attention—the woman straddling the man's lap, her dress pushed up around her hips, his hand between her legs moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm that made the woman's head fall back and her mouth open. Leigh watched and felt her own body respond—the tightening of her nipples, the heat pooling between her thighs, the involuntary clench of her cunt around nothing. She watched the woman's hips grind against the man's hand and she thought about Jason's fingers and the way they curved inside her and the specific pressure of his thumb against her clit and she realized that watching wasn't helping. Watching was making it worse. Watching was pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning out of control.

She went home. She called him.

"I didn't touch anyone," she said.

"I know."

"I wanted to. Not them—I wanted you. I wanted you to be the one in that booth with your hand between my legs making me lose my mind in front of strangers."

"Show me," he said.

She set the phone against the lamp on her nightstand. She stripped—fast, rough, pulling her clothes off like they'd offended her. She lay back on the bed with her knees bent and her legs spread and she didn't warm up, didn't tease, just pushed two fingers inside herself and arched off the mattress and the sound she made was the sound of someone who had been holding back for fourteen days and had nothing left.

"Another," he said. His voice was rough.

She added a third. The stretch burned. She fucked herself with her hand and he watched and she watched him watching and his hand was on his cock, moving slow, controlled, and she hated that control, hated the distance, hated the screen that kept her from reaching through and grabbing him and pulling him on top of her.

"I want your mouth," she said. "I want you to put your face between my legs and not come up until I've come on your tongue at least twice."

"Three times," he said. "I'd make it three."

"Jason—"

"When I see you again," he said, and his voice dropped into that low register that made her cunt clench around her own fingers, "I'm going to eat you until you beg me to stop. And then I'm going to keep going."

She came so hard her vision blurred.

It wasn't enough.

---

Four weeks and two days after she'd left him in Athens, there was a knock on her door.

It was 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. She was on the couch in an old t-shirt and underwear with a glass of wine and a deposition summary spread across the coffee table and she almost didn't answer because no one knocked on her door at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. But something—instinct, or the specific frequency of the knock, or the way her body had learned to recognize his presence through walls and doors and six thousand miles of ocean—made her get up.

She opened the door.

Jason stood in the hallway of her apartment building with a duffel bag over his shoulder and a bruise on his jaw and his hair longer than it had been and his eyes doing that thing—that slow, deliberate sweep of her body from bare knees to messy hair to the wine glass still in her hand—that made her feel like she was being disassembled and cataloged for reconstruction.

"Emergency at the club," he said. "Structural issue in the basement. Had to come oversee the repair."

She looked at him. She looked at the duffel bag. She looked at the bruise on his jaw.

"That's a lie," she said.

"Complete lie," he said. "The basement is fine. I couldn't—" He stopped. Shoved his free hand in his pocket. "I couldn't be away from you anymore."

She grabbed his shirt and pulled him inside and the door slammed behind him and his bag hit the floor and her wine glass hit the entryway table and his mouth was on hers before either of them could breathe.

This kiss was not like the Athens kiss. That one had been claiming, marking, desperate. This one was violence. His teeth caught her lower lip and she gasped and his tongue pushed into her mouth and his hands grabbed her hips with a grip that would leave fingerprints and she bit him back—bit his tongue, his lip, the corner of his mouth—and he groaned into her and the sound vibrated through her chest and down her spine and settled in her cunt like a detonation.

"I've been losing my mind," she said against his mouth.

"I know. Me too." He pulled back just enough to look at her. His eyes were dark, blown wide, the architect's precision completely gone. What was left was the raw, feral thing she'd glimpsed in Athens—the thing behind the control, the thing that wanted to consume her. "I watched you on FaceTime and I couldn't touch you and I couldn't taste you and I couldn't feel you come on my hand and I've been hard for two weeks straight and I'm done."

"Then be done," she said. "Be done being careful."

He pulled her shirt over her head in one motion. Her underwear was next—he hooked his fingers in the waistband and dragged them down her thighs and she stepped out of them and he didn't even stand back up. He dropped to his knees in the hallway of her apartment and pushed her against the wall and put his mouth on her.

The first touch of his tongue was a shock—hot, wet, flat against her clit, and her knees buckled. He caught her, one hand on each hip, and held her against the wall and ate her with a focus that made the last four weeks of phone screens and fingers and imagination feel like a pale sketch of something that had just become technicolor. He was precise and ruthless—his tongue circling her clit, then pressing flat, then flicking in a rhythm that made her grab his hair with both hands and grind against his face because she couldn't help it, couldn't control it, her body had been waiting for this specific sensation for a month and it wasn't going to be polite about receiving it.

"Three times," he said against her, and the vibration of his voice on her wet skin made her shake. "I told you three."

The first orgasm hit her fast and sharp—his tongue on her clit and two fingers pushing inside her and curling up against the front wall of her cunt in exactly the way he knew she needed and she came with her head back against the wall and her fingers twisted in his hair and a sound coming out of her mouth that was closer to a sob than a moan.

He didn't stop.

His tongue stayed on her through the aftershocks, slowing but not lifting, and when her breathing steadied he started again—slower this time, broader strokes, his fingers still inside her but barely moving, just pressing, just present, letting her body decide when it was ready for more. She looked down at him and his face was wet with her and his eyes were closed and the expression on his face was something she'd never seen on another human being—not hunger, not conquest, but devotion. A man on his knees with his mouth full of her and his eyes closed like he was praying.

The second orgasm built slow and broke hard. He sucked her clit into his mouth and pressed his teeth against it—not biting, just pressure, just the edge of danger—and she came so hard her vision went black and her legs gave out and he caught her, stood up in one fluid motion, and carried her to the bedroom with her legs wrapped around his waist and his mouth on her throat.

He set her on the bed and stripped. She watched him—watched the body she'd memorized in Athens emerge from his clothes, the chest, the stomach, the V of muscle above his hips, the cock jutting hard and thick and flushed, and the sight of it made her mouth water and her cunt clench around nothing and she reached for him and he caught her wrist.

"Three," he said.

"I can't—"

"You can."

He pushed her back on the bed and spread her legs and this time he used his fingers—three of them, deep, stretching her, his thumb grinding against her clit while his other hand pressed flat on her lower belly, holding her in place. She writhed against him and he held her down and fucked her with his hand with a steady, relentless rhythm that made the wet sounds of her body fill the room and she heard herself saying things—*fuck, yes, there, harder, don't stop, Jason, please*—and the please was the thing that surprised her because she didn't beg, she never begged, but his fingers were hitting something inside her that made her whole body light up and she was past pride, past composure, past anything except the raw animal need to be taken apart.

The third orgasm was different. It started somewhere deep—behind his fingers, below her navel, in a place she didn't know could feel like this—and it built and built and built and when it broke she squirted against his hand, a hot rush of wet that soaked his wrist and her thighs and the sheets beneath her and she heard herself scream and the sound was unrecognizable and she didn't care.

He didn't give her time to recover.

He flipped her over. Pulled her hips up. She braced herself on her elbows and felt the head of his cock press against her and she pushed back because she needed him inside her more than she needed oxygen and he slid in and they both made the same sound—a broken, guttural, relieved sound, the sound of two bodies returning to the configuration they'd been designed for.

He fucked her hard. Not the slow, deep strokes of Athens—this was urgent, primal, his hips slamming against her ass with a force that shoved the bed forward on its frame. She braced herself against the headboard and pushed back into every thrust and the angle was deep enough that she felt him in her stomach, felt the head of his cock dragging against the spot his fingers had found, and the pleasure was so intense it was almost pain and she wanted both, wanted the pleasure and the pain and the feeling of being so completely filled that there was no room for anything else.

His hand came down on her ass—sharp, stinging—and she yelped and clenched around him and he groaned and did it again, same spot, harder, and the heat of it bloomed across her skin and merged with the heat building in her cunt and she was close again, impossibly, after three orgasms she was close again.

"Come with me," she said. "I need to feel you come inside me."

His rhythm faltered. His fingers dug into her hips and he drove into her deep and held and she felt him throb inside her—felt the pulse of his cock and then the heat, the spreading warmth of him filling her, and she came with him, her cunt milking him in waves that went on and on until they both collapsed.

They lay in the wreckage of her bed—sheets twisted, pillows on the floor, the room smelling like sex and sweat and the specific combination of their bodies that she'd been trying to recreate with her own fingers for a month and could never get right because it required both of them.

"How long can you stay?" she asked.

"A week."

"A week."

"I told them I needed a goddamn week," he said, his voice rough as gravel, his hand already sliding down her belly, fingers tracing through the slick mess he'd left between her thighs. "A whole week to fuck you until neither of us can walk straight. No interruptions. No phone calls. Just you and me and every filthy thing I've been thinking about since I left."