Part 27
Her mind was lost in memory and her stomach was acting as if the floor was being struck by an earthquake dropping, rising, and shaking it under her wobbly legs.
'Get yourself together. You don't need to prove to everyone that they were right - that you can't handle this. You've handled more than this. This is easy.'
The elevator stopped and caused her insides to flip again, her hand settling flat against her turbulent stomach. She was trying to convince herself that she was afraid, nervous, worried, but none of it was true.
She wasn't afraid. She hadn't been afraid of him since the fifth day in that room.
She wasn't nervous to see him, she was nervous about what she was going to say. Would she yell and scream? Go in and beat the hell out of him? Kendall had already explained that the door would never be opened and security would be monitoring everything.
Would she actually hurt him if she got the opportunity? Could she?
The 'just one punch; one satisfying punch,' mantra came rolling back into her mind.
A smirk hit her lips as she stepped into the hallway.
Sydney felt none of those things everyone feared she would. She felt excited.
Truthfully, Sydney only wanted to give him knowledge as her revenge. She wanted him to know that she was alive despite his efforts. She wanted him to know that his ego had gotten the better of him leaving her the victor. Most importantly, she wanted to be the one to tell him that he'd lost everything because of her.
'Just one punch; one satisfying punch!'
The mechanical grinding of the gates as they lifted one at a time left her to stand for a few extra moments lost in her own thoughts. She had plans to stop and see her mother for a pep talk before moving deeper into the holding area.
The relaxed angle of her shoulders, the sleek, black, button-up blazer snug around her tapered middle with the collared work shirt underneath, Irina took in how rested, healed, and confident her daughter seemed compared to the last time they'd spoken.
"Any advice?"
The mother copied her stance, hands folded gently, and shook her head. "Whatever you want to say, you've earned the right to say it, sweetheart. You certainly don't need anyone else's advice. I imagine you know exactly what he needs to hear."
The mother placed her hand against the inner pane of glass, and the daughter matched on the opposite side with a nearly identical smile.
"Make sure he understands."
The genuine moments she had with her mother made Sydney forget that there was an almost thirty-year gap in their relationship. Turning away and looking to the end of the corridor, she headed toward the last cell in the row.
A few steps and nothing else separated her from looking at the man that had permanently altered the course of her life, and she found herself preparing the breath in her chest with each step. Her memory slipped back to this morning to seek solace in the advice of her psychologist.
"Sydney, I know this is going to be hard, but I think it's a step that you have to take. I mean, not many victims get to hold their abusers accountable."
The brunette paced the room as the doctor casually leaned against the desk. "It's just," Sydney paused trying to find the right way to express how she was feeling, "what if I...I can't help it?"
Sarah let out a singly airy chuckle. "You'll help it."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're you, Sydney. You literally embody good."
She shook her head. "I don't know how to be good when I think of him. I just...I..."
"Keep going," the doctor prodded.
Her fingers fidgeted nervously with her ring before she stopped pacing and let her arms fall to her sides as if she'd been defeated. "I wanna kill him."
"We all want to kill him, Sydney. You could do a man on the street survey in every city across a dozen countries and find people that, if given the chance, would say they want to kill him."
The former agent shook her head as tears filled her eyes, her left hand hitting her fingers over her sternum. "I...want to...to..." she stopped and let the threat fall away.
"Say it."
She shook her head. "I shouldn't."
"Say it anyway," Sarah ordered, knowing how close her patient was at breaking through a barrier she hadn't known existed before today.
"I want him to hurt. I mean, I want to make sure he hurts, and...and I want to be the one that does it."
Sarah gave a sad smile. "I know you like to think you're so different from everyone else, but that's really normal, Sydney."
The shake was vigorous. "No. Not for me."
The doctor held up her hands defensively. "Believe me when I say that you are extraordinary at so many things, but having this reaction isn't one of those things."
The tears that had been threatening spilled down her cheeks. "I don't know what I'm going to do when I'm standing there looking at him. I know that...that I won't feel like he felt when I was in that same room, but-"
"It - is- not the same room. It's not the same room; you're not who you were back then."
"I know that," Sydney growled and rolled her eyes.
"But you just said 'when I was in that same room', so I need you to really understand that distinction."
"But it should be. He should get his turn in that room." Sydney growled as her chin quivered.
Sarah's voice had stayed low and calm. "Why is that?"
"Because he deserves it. Look," she ordered and stalked to the box sitting to Sarah's right. "This is...literally a box of his murders. There are over twenty people in here that were killed, eleven of them tortured beforehand."
"Are you counting yourself in either of those numbers?"
Sydney stilled as her breath came out in harsh pants through her nose. "Twelve."
The doctor nodded and took the lid, placing it symbolically over the top. "You're always too hard on yourself. We have spent days together trying to help you understand that what he did doesn't get to define who you are going to be. And you're so close, Sydney. So close."
The agent sighed and hung her head low, her hands resting flat against the desk. "I just...I don't want to end up saying something I regret. Or worse...end up regretting that I didn't say what I wanted to in the first place."
"Honestly? I don't think you're going to feel what you think you're going to feel. Roles have been reversed here, and he is the helpless one. You may be right about one thing though," she said with an air of finality in her voice.
"What's that?" Standing tall and sliding her hands into her pockets, Sydney felt her shoulders sag a bit under the weight of the last few days as well as what was to come.
"You are the only person that can look that fear in the eye."
"I've told you before that I'm not afraid of him," she grumbled, and Sarah laughed quietly.
Grabbing her patient by the shoulders, the doctor moved her to face the stand-up mirror in the corner of the room. Pointing at the reflection, "that fear."
Her feet had nearly taken her to the window at the last cell as her mind had been clouded by a myriad of coping mechanisms, and she found herself only two steps away. A sweeping resolve settled her soul for the first time in days and she moved forward, eyes peering through the barrier.
He was sitting on the metal cot with his elbows propped on his knees and his face zeroed in on the glass. She almost didn't recognize him. Nothing about him was the same as the last time he'd been in front of her, and she wasn't sure how four and a half months could change someone so much. As she took in every aspect of him, from the bare feet up to the thin shoulders, the overall difference was that he'd lost most of his lithe physique.
The man was downright scrawny. Her eyes made it to his head where she saw a scraggly short beard around his chin and pursed lips, the overhead fluorescents brightly showing off a hint of strawberry blonde in the facial hair. The mop on his head was longer as well, hanging down in oily locks over his ears and neck with the bangs swept to the left away from his eyes.
Those eyes; those icy blue eyes.
They were exactly the same - a narrowed fierce glare, and she could tell he was having a hard time deciding if she was real or if he'd started losing his mind.
She decided to reassure him.
"You're a long way from hundred-dollar haircuts and three-piece suits."
He stared. That was all. His frosty blue eyes didn't leave hers, however, and she took a moment to study his body language. His shoulders were now pushed forward, the collar bones sticking out at gross attention to the right and left of his neck, and the muscles in those skinny arms flexed as much as they could. His hands that had been lightly clasped between his knees where his forearms were propped were now tightly woven as the knuckles turned white with the squeezing strain.
A grin tilted her lips as she maintained her casual pose, hands still lightly clasped in front of her as she rocked forward and then back on the balls of her feet. Her hair was loose and hanging behind her shoulders, long and flowing after months of no haircut much as his, though her room had a shower she could use whenever she felt the need.
Caramel burned into ice as silence was exchanged between them, one pair filled with surprise and contempt as the other swirled with curiosity and something else. Sydney expected him to hit her with a witty comeback, surprised that he was content to duel her with just his stare.
She wasn't angry that nothing came out of his tight lips, quite the contrary. She was ecstatic that something she'd done had finally made him shut the hell up.
"I...I spent a long time hating you. Hating what you did, what you said," she paused a moment to choose her words, "who hired you and why. The strange thing is that...now I have to thank you."
A minuscule twitch of his left eyebrow caused the eye to momentarily squint. A tiny motion that others likely would have missed, but not someone as trained as her.
"I've had an uninterrupted four and a half months to bring them to their knees, and it's all thanks to you."
She broke eye contact, not because she was overwhelmed with emotion or that his cold glare was too much to bear - it was because she didn't want to rush through this moment. This was her 'I told you so' moment, and it was as sweet and delicious as she'd imagined.
So her words were calm and calculated. "The first couple of weeks after I woke up, I couldn't move. I'd spent forty-two days in a medically-induced coma and my muscles almost couldn't remember how to function. Both from the time lost and from the damage that you'd done." She switched her hands clasped at the front to the back, looking down at the tops of her toes before they pinched into the front of the shoes. Her voice was light and airy hovering just above monotone.
Stopping at the other end of the window, she turned back and continued her slow trek. "On my back with nothing but time. I imagine you know what that's like." She looked back into the cell, the scene much the same.
Flynn hadn't moved, though she could see a small nervous wiggle in the toes of his right foot as they gripped and loosened over and over again against what she assumed was cold cement flooring. His fingers were still tightly woven, knuckles still white, and a faint tremor in his wrists gave away the fatigue in his now seldom-used muscles. Scanning back up to his face she saw that his cheeks had begun to turn pink and his jaw muscle was tense and rhythmically bulging as he ground his back teeth together. Still, he remained silent.
"I'm the last person you thought you'd ever see again, aren't I?" Circling her hands back around, her fingers danced at the buttons of the blazer over her stomach, undoing them slowly one by one until the front was open. Shrugging her shoulders, the jacket slipped down her back to catch at her bent elbows, and she methodically slid her arms out the rest of the way one at a time. Taking a moment to fold it, much as he had in the cold cement room on day three, she walked it to the edge of the window and carefully set it to the floor before righting and moving back to the center of the window.
The feminine button-up hugged her trim waist ending just below the beltline of her dress pants at the top of her hips, the dark blue accentuating her pale skin.
"What was it, twenty-two times? With that crappy little knife," she chuckled, a soft yet masochistic sound, and the fingers of her right hand undid the small button at the cuff of her left sleeve as she talked. "That was probably one of the most painful parts of recovery - getting past the awkward healing of those muscles from that stupid little knife."
Sydney's eyes bored into his as she finished with the left side and moved to the right, her gaze swiveling down to guide the fingers of her left hand to pinch the miniature silver button through the tiny hole, the fabric loosening and opening around her wrist. Looking back up, she'd caught his eyes watching the process, the only movement insofar she had spotted. Wiggling the fingers of her left hand, she caught his attention.
"The doctor here was good at his job of putting them all back together, though the tips of a couple are still a bit numb." She switched arms again, her right moving to the cuff on the left and beginning to slowly roll the satin sleeve up her forearm.
As she rolled, she continued. "Do you know what happens when you die?"
No answer, but that eyebrow twitch was back. This time, on the right side.
"It was only for a few minutes, don't get so excited." Curiosity hit her face as her dancing eyes squinted with the change of subject, her hand stalling mid-way up her forearm, "did they pick you up in a windowless van?"
No answer, but now the toes of the left foot were now curling against the floor in time with the right.
She shrugged and finished the sleeve before slipping her hands into her pockets and restarting her casual pace from one side of the window to the other. "There isn't a white light." A pause accompanied by a small nod. "At least...there wasn't for me. And as fascinating as having your life flash before your eyes sounds, that...didn't happen either."
Stop, pause, turn, walk back. "All there is," she halted, her fierce gaze returning to pierce his flashing blue eyes, "is feeling. The moment you slip away," she swallowed, "you...feel...everything. Everything you've ever felt, all in one ball that replaces your heart before dropping into your stomach."
In her left pocket, her thumb twisted the engagement ring around her finger. Despite the subject, the look on her face was serene and her skin glowed even in the aggressive fluorescent lighting. Her voice, however, was changing. Emotion bubbled up from her stomach, Sydney thinking she'd gotten it under lock and key before leaving her room. Realizing that it wasn't a detriment like she assumed, she decided to use it for what it was - a weapon she expertly knew how to wield.
"The feeling you get from disappointing a parent," she said and began walking slowly back to the opposite side, her head tilting a bit as her eyes focused on a random water spot on the outside of the shiny glass.
Her mind slipped away. "The first kiss, and the first time, and the first person you thought you loved merges with the last kiss, the last time, and the last thing you felt with the person you love."
Her voice had quieted and had a slight tremor at the finish. Turning at the far end, she met his eyes, "the first moment of pain you felt as a child dissolves into the last moment of pain you experienced before it all goes-" the air at the back of her throat cut off and her mind came back to the present.
The hallway.
The glass window.
The trembling, furious man behind said glass window.
Fixing her eyes back on his, "goes black."
Antagonistic to the conversation, a dimpled smile brightened her features as she looked up with an airy chuckle as if she just remembered a funny joke. "At the time I really thought the good part was going to be dying."
Silence.
His lack of participation was fine with her, though she felt that everything was winding up to a sudden and inevitable change. The nervous wiggle that had previously inhabited his toes was now marching up his leg, the knee bouncing and cascading a wobble through his arms up to his shoulders. Even the oily strands of hair moved at the ends and the muscles where his shoulders connected with his sternum were twitching. She knew that her demeanor, along with the simple fact of her living presence, was driving him crazy.
Focusing on his eyes, she remembered every moment that they had probed her mind and soul, and this was the first moment she felt nothing for those eyes. She expected hate, but it wasn't there. She expected pity, but that too was absent. She felt...nothing for him any longer.
Despite it all, his cerulean stare didn't waver under the hooded brow as dark circles deepened above his thin cheekbones. If anything, his eyes had gotten darker, the color going from the center of an iceberg to the surface of a tumultuous patch of ocean.
Her face dropped into a mask of seriousness, "do you know what it feels like to come back to life?"
The leg bounce intensified, but he maintained his new mute persona.
She felt nothing negative for the first time in months. "It feels exactly the same, with only one exception," she paused, a small fearless smile tilting her lips. "It comes with the unending joy of knowing that I beat you."
The rubber band snapped. Finally tightened past the point of no return, the microscopic imperfections in the surface exponentially expanded and broke the loop. His feet slapped against the floor, his springing motion hurtling him toward the glass - toward his enemy. Balling both hands into fists, his fingers resonated as a muted pang against the bullet-proof barrier the moment he could strike.
She had no idea why her fight or flight lizard brain didn't force her to flinch and back away, but she was thankful it was taking the night off. Standing firm and unyielding, everything faded away as she watched him through the glass. Everything but him.
Once, another dull thud.
Twice, the sound of his fingers breaking despite the thickness of the glass.
Three times, the splitting of one or more knuckles as blood squished and spread from his purpling red fist.
A fourth, the blood splashing against the glass as a raw, unrestrained howl tore from his throat. Voices called from the other end of the hallway, the security guard trying to get her attention, but she was transfixed - unmoving. Hands in her pockets, collected, composed, distant, she stared.
Sydney wasn't focused on the bloodstained glass, drops now coalescing enough to leave behind red trails under where his hand rammed a fifth, sixth, and seventh punch.
It was his eyes that held her. Azure blue flame and filled to the brim with tears, she watched as time seemed to slow, the drops spilling over the eyelids to move down his gaunt cheeks and disappear into his untrimmed beard. His nose ran into the equally unkempt mustache, and a ribbon of blood splattered across his face, a thick drop landing on his upper lip.
She couldn't keep from watching that droplet's journey as it fell from the upper lip to bounce off the lower, mouth open with tongue low and rippling between his teeth. He was still screaming, the guards were still yelling, but something had changed inside her, and she realized that fact as she watched that drop of blood stagger through the stiff hairs on his chin.
From her peripheral she saw a hand slowly reach out, the touch gentle as it rubbed the soft skin of her forearm above where her hand was still tucked in her pocket. Unable to take her eyes off of the irreparable damage Flynn was undoubtedly doing to his hands, her mouth repeatedly opened and closed without sound, the new person shushing her quietly.
"It's okay. Let's go back upstairs."
It was Vaughn.
Sydney nodded emotionlessly and let him lead her back to the elevator. She didn't remember the ride back to the bottom floor.
Michael was at a bit of a loss. She wasn't crying, she wasn't yelling, she was having no reaction whatsoever, which was not a very 'Sydney' thing. He sat her on the edge of the bed as she stared blankly ahead. He could tell by the movement of her eyes that her mind was going a mile a minute and that wherever she was, it wasn't here.
Collecting what he needed from around the room he returned to kneel in front of her. With slow, gentle movements he removed the shoes from her feet before working to undo the buttons of her shirt, slipping it from her shoulders and replacing it with a soft cotton tank top. Standing, one hand took hers as the other cupped her elbow to pull her up and keep her steady.
"Can you stand?"
No answer. He let go, however, and she didn't tip over, so he quickly had the dress pants pooling at her feet before sitting her back down so he could pull them aside. Replacing them with running shorts, he turned down the bed and helped her in before killing all but the lamp on the desk and climbing in beside her.
The soft glow of said lamp across the room illuminated the side of her face as she lay on her back staring up at the ceiling with wide brown eyes. All had been silent for the last hour, and the erratic movement of her eyes had mostly stopped though she still hadn't said anything. Michael ran the pads of his fingers in soft lines from her shoulder to the back of her hand in hopes that she would begin to feel relaxed enough to sleep, but it hadn't yet worked.
A few moments later, "tell me how you're feeling," he asked in a whisper.
She didn't answer, his request mixing with the tumultuous cacophony of everything else in her head. She gave a mini shrug to her shoulder and he went back to spelling insanely elongated letters of the alphabet with his fingers along her arm.
A few minutes went by until she said something, her voice below the hint of a whisper. "Nothing."
Vaughn didn't know what to say. Again. For the hundredth time that hour. His mind fired off a dozen things he wanted to say, but he decided against that whole mess and focused on letting her take the lead, hoping she would expand on 'nothing'.
When she didn't, his mind jumped back in.
'Nothing? Like...you feel nothing?'
Moments pass.
'You feel everything right now and should talk to me about it before it eats you up.'
Silence.
'Damn it, Sydney, we've come too far these last few months for you to shut me out now.'
Slowly blinking, staring eyes still looking up.
"Please tell me how I can help you." He knew his whisper sounded like a beg, but by this point, he was begging.
"Shouldn't...shouldn't I feel something?" She surprised herself with her response.
"Like what?"
She sighed and he could almost feel her confusion. "I stood there looking at him, and I felt...everything. Just," shaking her head slowly as her right hand snapped her fingers, "all at once. Every moment in that chair and...every muscle ache and bone throb. But I was calm. I...I was so calm."
She expected tears, but there were none. "Seeing him took me right back there, but it didn't come with the fear. It came with hate. I genuinely wanted him to hurt with every word I said," she paused and swallowed expecting the lump of emotion at the back of her throat, but it was also missing. "I don't know where it all went."
"Maybe you're just coping with it better than you thought you would."
She surprised him by sitting up and sliding out from the blankets, and he followed her lead to a point. While she carefully walked to the other side of the room, back halfway, and then out again, he moved to sit on her side of the bed with his elbows on his knees trying to be as open as possible.
"I wanted to scream at him."
"I know," he whispered.
"I mean, I...all I felt in that moment was the anger...and the hurt."
Slow pacing.
"What he did," pause, "how he did it," turning to head back the other direction, "how much he enjoyed it. I wanted him to hurt because of that."
"I know," he repeated, but as she kept talking he wasn't sure she was even aware that he was chiming in on her suddenly outside thoughts.
'If this is where her mind has been the last hour, I should have interrupted 59 minutes ago.'
She knew she was acting manic, but she didn't feel that way. She was still trying to put her finger on what and how she felt, and wasn't sure if she was any closer now than when she'd started. So she kept moving, her steps slow and steady as she pathed around the room, one arm akimbo as the other gestured each bit of articulation.
"So where did it go? I...I broke him. I won. Where did the feelings go?"
"You're dealing with them," he reminded her.
She wobbled her head, neither agreeing or otherwise, Michael finally getting some sort of confirmation that he was a participant in this discussion. "But I should still feel something like that, right?"
Sydney's eyes turned to his as she stopped in the middle of the room, and the uncertainty swirling in those almost-black depths took his breath away.
"I don't know, Sydney. What do you feel?"
She honestly looked like she was thinking as hard as she could, her eyes unfocusing and looking down to his feet against the woolly rug soft under their toes and warding away the chill of the laminated flooring. When she met his gaze again, she was nowhere closer to answering that question than before.
"Nothing."
He'd tried before to keep his frustration at bay, but Vaughn's patience finally ran out as, "that's not possible," slipped from his throat.
Her normal response would be to get mad. He expected the instantaneous anger to flash in her eyes, the frown to crease her forehead, and the purse of her lips to all take place before she fired back at him, but instead, he got an emotionless shrug.
Looking down to her hands, she pinched the skin behind her pointer finger with her nails and felt the bite. Shecould feel something; that wasn't the issue. She just wasn't able to care. She was emotionally exhausted, exhausted in that she was empty.
"You're not empty, Sydney," he chided, and she realized that she must have said that part out loud. He stood and moved to stand before her. "You're just...it was a lot. We knew it would be a lot."
"But where did it all go?"
Her question was genuine and neither knew the answer. Instead, Vaughn reached out and took her hand, placing it flat over his chest. "I'm here, sweetie. You don't have to feel everything every moment of every day. You can let it go with me; no obligations. You don't have to feel anything right now, it doesn't mean that you're broken. And if you are? I'll fix you."
She felt the warmth underneath her hand, the heat seeping through the thin cotton shirt from his chest into her palm. She felt the steady and elevated rhythm of his heart. She realized that the tempo thudding in her ears matched what she felt against her hand.
The two steps she took toward him caught him off guard, as did the feeling of her mouth crashing over his. The gasp that parted his lips enabled her tongue to dart forward and duel with his, his mumbled words of surprise turning into a groan as he grabbed her hips and pulled her tight against his body.
Sydney's hands fisted the shirt behind his back as she clung to the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Walking him backward toward the desk, not realizing they were closer than she thought, she felt the bite of the wooden edge against the back of her thighs. Letting herself fall to sit, she lifted her legs and hooked them over his hips as their mouths broke apart. This pulled his straining lower half into contact with the warm juncture of her thighs, Michael's hands moving from her hips to cup her cheeks and force her eyes to meet his.
"Tell me this is what you need," he begged, "I gotta hear you say it."
"I need you to fix me," she panted.
Vaughn stared deep into her eyes, their proximity to the room's only light source allowing him to see the darkness creeping away as it backfilled with light brown and the telltale hint of purple circling the inner ring of her iris. He nodded, his lips smothering hers once more, hands back at her waist to somehow slip the shorts down to her knees currently wrapped around his hips keeping them only inches apart.
Flattening his palm against the underside of her right thigh, he pushed it into her body and slid the one side down and off, letting it and her limb wrap back around before doing the same on the left. He couldn't feel the bare skin of her thighs around his hips due to the boxers, but she'd looped her ankles around his backside and he felt lucky enough that he'd removed the shorts without them both toppling over, so they'd have to skip the rest of the undressing.
Beginning to seep like warmth into her limbs was the familiar intimacy she shared with him. Though her hands still clung to the back of his shirt and her legs wrapped tightly around his waist, she was starting to care again. That feeling was settling low in her stomach and charting a path of fire to her center.
Though they were both hungrily claiming one another's mouths, he was gentle with his nips and his hands weren't roughly squeezing her hips. The only problem was that she didn't want gentle. She wanted rough, hurried sex that could shock her mind back into her body.
His mouth broke from hers as they gulped air between their swollen lips, and her hands left the now wrinkled spots of his shirt. One dug fingernails into his bicep as the other dove into his hair and pulled his head to her throat.
"Don't be gentle right now. That's not what I need," she begged, her voice sultry and low.
"Syd, I-" he protested with his mouth close to her ear, though he was beginning to feel the hurried pressure her body was pushing into his.
"Michael," Her growled warning sent a rush of excitement from his stomach to his erection, and her complaint was cut off by the love bite she sucked against the junction of neck and shoulder above the collar of his shirt. It stung a little and he instantly knew there would be a raised purple mark there in the morning, if not later this evening.
She also knew that it was one of his buttons, and the way his fingers tightened against her hips and the deep rumble she felt and heard from his chest told her that it worked. His lips were hard and his tongue commandeered hers. The hand at his bicep skimmed over his shirt and down his stomach, fingernails scratching against the jumping muscles until she reached the waistband of his boxers.
She felt the fingers of his right hand slide over the soft fabric of her panties as hers dove into the opening at the front, each sharing a groan into the mouth of the other as her hand circled his hardness and his sneaked inside the cotton to tease at her folds. She guided the tip toward her cloth-covered opening, but could still feel him holding back.
Her pouted lips brushed the lobe of his ear, "I need you to help me feel, Vaughn. Being gentle won't do it. I need-" she gasped as he brushed his finger over the sensitive button of nerves, her hand squeezing his shaft and making him hiss behind clenched teeth before laving his tongue against the pulse point of her throat.
"I know what you need," his gravelly tone sent a spark of excitement to her sex, Vaughn deciding that if she was going to hit his sexual buttons that he would return the favor.
Roughly pushing her panties aside he aligned the tip with her core, one hand flattening against her lower back and sliding her forward to the edge of the desk to meet his swift entry. For once, his body wanted to take its time while his mind was pushing him to hurry, and he willed his head to win the war. Her wanton moan in his ear helped as he pulled back and thrust hard into her once more.
He missed the feeling of their bodies molding together as the clothes they still wore acted as a barrier between their hot bodies, and he could feel the undershirt stick to his muscled shoulders as sweat began to seep into the threads. The desk below them creaked with each rough push, his hands at her backside pulling her to meet his eager hips.
Sliding her hands beneath his shirt, her fingernails dug into the muscles over his shoulder blades as she tumbled off the cliff into her first orgasm with a cry, Vaughn slamming to the hilt and stopping for a moment as she caught her breath against his throat.
Unfortunately, that was the moment the corner leg of the desk had decided it was tired of their misuse. It buckled, and Vaughn suddenly found himself holding her weight on less than sturdy legs as she reactively tightened herself around him to avoid tipping over. The desk tilted to the floor and landed with a bang. He redirected their bodies and she felt the breath leave her lungs as her back thumped against the cement wall, his hardness still firmly tucked inside her core.
"Shit," he growled and turned to look at the damage, though her hand roughly cupped his jaw and yanked his attention back.
"Who cares." Punctuating her breathless words with as much of a hip swirl as she could do given her pinned position between him and the wall, he nodded and captured her lips as both hands moved to cup her backside to hold her up.
His biceps strained and he pushed against her chest with his upper body as his hips took over, and he knew his thighs would be very sore the next day. At the moment, neither of them cared about anything but the finish line. The feeling of her now wet panties rubbing against the side of his shaft was new and exciting, and the slightly different angle of their coupling was causing the bulbous head of his arousal to slam against her G-spot. Both were different amounts of delicious friction that set everything in their lower stomachs to a boil.
His explosion triggered hers, Michael's hands at her hips pulling her down to meet the last few thrusts until he was spent, the throbbing of her nerves grounding her slowly from her climax as she pulsed around him. She could feel the trembling in his arms as his body fought to keep her up, so she unwrapped her legs and found the floor on her own, two, wobbly feet.
What threw him off guard was the quiet giggle that came from her panting throat, and he followed her eye line to the broken and awkward angle of the desk to her right. Her laugh grew and he found himself joining as the mixed emotions of the evening began to wear off.
Her hand again cupped his jaw to turn his gaze, this time gently, and he saw the familiar purple-hued eyes bright and focused, a chocolate-brown again instead of the swirling near-black.
"Thank you," she whispered, her lips brushing a soft kiss to his mouth. He responded by wrapping an arm around her back and pulling her in, his tongue softly sweeping against hers before breaking away and resting his sweaty forehead against hers.
"I love you," he mumbled. He wanted to ask if she felt better, but that would ruin the moment.
Wherever she'd gone, he'd dragged her back from that place with his love, and that's what she'd needed from him.
"You've rescued me so many times, and I'll never really be able to thank you."
He smiled at her honesty, eyes closing at her sincerity. "Believe me; I feel thanked," he grinned, Sydney chuckling as he pulled away from her. She straightened the twisted tank top around her stomach as he yanked the cotton tee over his head and breathed a sigh of relief as the cool basement air chilled his overheated skin.
"I'll fix your desk tomorrow," he promised as she padded away.
"Well, you did break it," her voice called out from the bathroom across the way, and he scoffed.
"I broke it? Huh-uh. We broke it."
Her light laugh made his heart feel full. "Semantics," she argued, walking back into the bedroom and crossing to the bureau to redress.
Michael crouched down and examined the leg, seeing that it wasn't fixable. The metal was bent beyond saving, the bolt holding it together sheared and the wood splintered. Deep inside he was proud. His brain then reminded him that he would probably have to help lug a new desk to the elevator and into the basement from an upper floor, but pride was still in the lead.
With a sigh and a shrug, he rose and turned to see Sydney propped up on her palm watching him with sated eyes as her long hair fanned behind her on the pillow. A new top hugged her curves as the blanket lay over her hip. She wore a soft smile though he could see hints that things from earlier were still swirling around her head.
Leaning down and running his hand through the silky tresses, he pressed a kiss to her temple and moved to join her, spooning against her back and sliding his arm underneath the back side of her pillow. She sighed and looped her fingers through his.
"Do you actually believe that we can do tomorrow?"
Michael pressed a kiss to the back of her ear as his body began to relax. "You, my wife, can do anything."
…
