🔥 Through Her Eyes

An exclusive bonus scene from The Glass Composure
Vivian’s POV — Their First Night Together

This scene takes place during Chapter 7. You’ve read Jessa’s side. Now hear what Vivian was thinking, feeling, and deciding while she was on her knees making Jessa Bell fall apart.

Vivian’s hands were steady when she poured the Sancerre, and that was a lie.

Everything else about her was in revolt. Her pulse was running a pace she hadn’t authorized. Her stomach was doing something that felt like freefall. And the woman standing in her kitchen—dark hair, soft mouth, smelling like bergamot and looking at Vivian like she was the answer to a question she’d spent her whole life asking—was three feet away and closing, and Vivian was holding a wine glass and pretending that her entire nervous system wasn’t screaming touch her touch her touch her.

She handed Jessa the glass. Their fingers touched on the stem and the contact—index finger to index finger, a half-second of skin—sent a volt through Vivian’s body that she felt in her teeth.

Six weeks. Six weeks of sitting next to this woman in a wine bar, maintaining the composure, performing the control, being the steady one, the careful one, the one who said the right thing at the right time while her body screamed for contact. Six weeks of reading Jessa’s responses—the flush, the catch in her breath, the way her thighs pressed together under the bar when Vivian said something that landed—and filing every response into the expanding archive of things I know about what Jessa Bell’s body does when she’s being praised, which I will use later, in detail, extensively.

Later was now. The door was closed. The bar was gone. And Jessa had just set her wine glass on the counter without drinking, which was a sentence, and the sentence was I didn’t come here for the wine.

She crossed the distance. Placed her hand on Jessa’s jaw—gently, precisely, the way you handle something you’ve been thinking about handling for a very long time and refuse to get wrong. Her thumb on the cheekbone. Fingers curling behind the ear, into the dark hair, against the pulse point where Jessa’s heart was hammering so hard Vivian could feel it through her fingertips.

There you are, she thought. I can feel what I do to you. Right here. Under my hand.

“Tell me to stop,” Vivian said. Because the exit being offered and refused was itself a form of consent that mattered more than anything that came after.

“If you stop, I will never forgive you.”

Vivian kissed her. And the first touch of Jessa’s mouth obliterated every simulation she’d been running for six weeks, because none of them had accounted for the sound Jessa made—that helpless, opening sound, the latch releasing—or the way Jessa’s hands grabbed the front of Vivian’s blouse and pulled, and the pulling said I am falling and you are the only solid thing.

In the bedroom, Vivian’s control held. Barely.

She undressed Jessa slowly because slow was the plan. She had spent six weeks building a hypothesis about what specific, patient, narrated attention would do to a woman who had never received it, and tonight she was running the experiment, and the experiment required rigor even though every cell in her body was demanding she abandon the rigor and simply devour.

She pulled the green top over Jessa’s head and looked at what was underneath, and her brain short-circuited. Vivian Shaw, who could maintain a strategic argument while a CFO screamed at her across a conference table, looked at Jessa Bell’s bare collarbones and forgot how to construct a sentence.

She unclasped Jessa’s bra. Watched it fall. And something in Jessa’s face changed—a tightening. The shadow of Morgan’s ghost whispering: You try so hard. It’s exhausting to watch.

Vivian saw the ghost. Dismissed it. Cupped Jessa’s breast in her palm and thought: I am going to spend the rest of tonight erasing every lie that woman told you about yourself.

When Vivian knelt between Jessa’s thighs, she was not thinking about technique. She was thinking about the sound Jessa made when she said please. The way it came out broken and whole at the same time.

She was thinking: You have never demanded enough. And I am going to give you more than you know how to ask for.

The first taste of her was a revelation. Salt and heat and the intimate, devastating specificity of another person’s body, and Vivian’s eyes closed and a sound came out of her—a low, rough hum of satisfaction that vibrated against Jessa’s skin, and Jessa responded with a cry that went straight through Vivian’s sternum and lodged there like a shard of glass, beautiful and permanent.

She worked slowly. Reading Jessa’s body with the complete, undivided attention that was her most powerful instrument. She learned that a slow, flat stroke made Jessa’s hips roll. That focused circling made her thighs shake. That a gentle suck made a sound come out of her that Vivian would think about every day for the rest of her life—a high, helpless keen that was not controlled and not performed and was the most honest sound she had ever heard.

And she talked. Because talking was the hypothesis. Jessa Bell would come undone not from touch alone but from touch accompanied by words.

“You’re so responsive. Every time I touch you, your whole body answers. Do you know what that’s like for me? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Jessa’s hand fisted in her hair. Vivian felt the pull and her own arousal spiked so hard she pressed her hips into the mattress, chasing friction she wasn’t going to get tonight because tonight was about Jessa, only Jessa, and Vivian’s own want could wait.

“That sound you just made. I want to hear it again. I want to hear it every night. I want to be the reason you make it.”

Jessa was close. Vivian could feel it—the tightening, the staccato breathing, the body at the edge where it takes over and the mind lets go. And Jessa was fighting it—holding back, maintaining a last thread of control, because she’d been controlling her own responses for so long she’d forgotten how to stop.

“Let go. You’re safe. I’m right here.”

And then, softer: “You’re so good, Jessa. You’re doing so well.”

The hypothesis was confirmed.

Jessa came with a sound that was Vivian’s name and something wordless and the most open, undefended thing Vivian had ever heard. Her body arched off the bed. Her hand gripped Vivian’s hair hard enough to hurt and Vivian didn’t care, wanted it, wanted the proof that this woman’s body was so overwhelmed by pleasure it had lost the ability to moderate its own strength.

Vivian held her through it. And when the shaking subsided, she pressed her lips to the inside of Jessa’s thigh and thought: I have never in my life felt this much. I have spent thirty-nine years building a life designed to manage feelings exactly this size, and this woman has destroyed the management system in six weeks, and I am not going to rebuild it.

Afterward, Jessa cried. And Vivian held her. Because holding someone while they cry is the simplest and most important thing one person can do for another, and this simple thing was what she had been missing.

“No one’s ever—” Jessa started.

“I know,” Vivian said. And held her tighter. And thought: I am going to do this every chance I get. I am going to make you come and hold you while you cry and tell you the truth about yourself until you believe it without my help. And then I’m going to keep telling you anyway, because the telling is not a project. The telling is a language. And I intend to speak it fluently.

Jessa fell asleep in her arms. Vivian lay in the dark and thought about the first night at The Alderly. The nod. The two seconds of eye contact that had contained the entire future.

I’m in trouble, she thought. And for the first time in her careful, controlled, meticulously managed life, the trouble felt like exactly where she was supposed to be.

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