🔥 Launch Night 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Damage Control by Tessa Valehart
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place on the night of the Desai Bell launch, after the epilogue of Damage Control. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Max’s side of the launch night: four hours at the back wall, a locked glass door with her name on it backwards, and one instruction he asks for himself. Explicit content — 18+.
Launch Night
There are forty-one people in an office built for six, and one of them is a dog.
I’m the forty-second. I don’t count myself, because I’m not here in any capacity. That was agreed at the bottom of her stairs at half past six, when she tied my bow tie on the landing with the street door open behind me and said, “This isn’t an appearance. This is a bow tie. Go and stand at the back.”
So I’m stood at the back, between the sash window and a secondhand filing cabinet, holding a plastic cup of warm white wine and doing nothing at all. It’s harder than Monaco.
Across town, Meridian’s table at the season-end gala has an empty chair with my name on it and a menu with no prices. Adrian rang at five to ask whether I was ill. I told him I was attending a launch. He said, “Whose?” and I said, “My girlfriend’s firm,” and there was a long pause, and then he said, “I find I’m content,” and rang off before I could make him repeat it.
The glass door’s propped open with a fire extinguisher. The names are on it now, gold leaf, small and square, done by a signwriter with a squirrel-hair brush and very steady hands. DESAI BELL. I stood on the pavement on the Monday they did it and watched him for forty minutes, and he asked if I was from the council.
The cyclist is in the corner telling the heptathlete about his bike deal, which is now the best in the peloton. The heptathlete is listening with the face of a woman who has already read his contract. The rower is six foot six and keeps hitting his head on the light fitting. The rally driver has brought the dog. The dog is under Priya’s desk, eating a canapé it has been told not to eat. The tire company’s name is not on it.
Simone is stood on a chair.
“Footnote one,” she says, and forty people go quiet, because Simone in a post-box-red suit on a chair has that effect. “When Priya rang me on a Sunday morning in Monaco and asked me to take over a negotiation, I asked what she’d done. She said, and I quote, nothing I couldn’t put in a file note.” A pause. “Footnote two. I have since read the file note.”
Laughter. Priya, by the window, puts her hand over her eyes.
“Footnote three. This firm has four clients, none over thirty percent, one dog, and a strict policy of not representing anybody she’s sleeping with.” Simone raises her cup at me over forty heads. “Footnote four. He pays in seven days. I’d like that in the minutes.”
I lift my cup back. Somebody claps me on the shoulder. Nobody photographs anything, because there’s a handwritten sign on the street door that says NO PHONES PAST THIS POINT, and under it, smaller, I will know. P.D.
I don’t watch the room. I watch her.
She’s in black, the dress from Park Lane, with her hair up in the knot and her father’s watch on her wrist. She doesn’t make a speech. She was asked to and she said no in four words. She works the room instead, the way she worked a boat in Monaco, a quarter step and a word at a time, and every so often she looks across forty people to the back wall to check I’m still stood where I was put.
I am. She wrote it down for me once: look where you’re walking. Tonight I’ve nowhere to walk to.
By eleven they’ve gone. The rower last but one, ducking under the light. The dog, protesting. Simone goes last, with the remaining bottle under her arm and her shoes in her hand.
At the door she stops and looks from Priya to me and back.
“Footnote twelve,” she says. “Lock it.”
The fire extinguisher goes back by the radiator. The glass door swings shut.
From in here, the names read backwards. LLEB IASED. The streetlamp on the landing window lays them across the bare boards in a long gold smear, and across my shoes, and across the hem of her dress where she’s stood in the middle of her own office, with forty plastic cups on every flat surface, looking at nothing.
She turns the key. Then she leans her back against the glass and breathes out for what I think is the first time since six o’clock.
“Well,” she says.
“Well.”
“You stood at the back for four hours and fifteen minutes.”
“Four and eleven. You keep your watch fast.”
Her mouth goes. She comes off the door and across the boards and stops in front of me, and she takes hold of the ends of the bow tie she tied on the landing, and pulls. It comes apart in her hands. She drapes it over the back of my neck and leaves it there.
“Thank you,” she says. “For missing your gala.”
“It’s a ballroom.”
“It’s your ballroom. You’d a table.”
“I’d sooner have the back wall of yours.” I put my hands on her waist. Not where I’ve been told. Where I like. “Can I ask you for something?”
She tips her head. She knows that tone. She’s been reading it since a corridor at the Carrow.
“You may ask.”
“One.” I can feel my pulse in my mouth. It’s daft. I’ve had her every way two people can have each other, and I’m stood here asking like it’s a lift in London. “Give me one. An instruction. I know we stopped. I know it’s not required. I’m not asking because it’s required.”
She goes very still under my hands.
“Why?”
“Because it was never the rules I liked.” I say it to her collarbone. “It was you deciding. You. Looking at me like a clause, and choosing. I miss it. Not in public. Not on a page. In here, with the door locked, because I asked.”
For a long moment she says nothing. Then she reaches up and takes the pins out of her own hair. Three. She lays them on the corner of the oak desk in a row.
“One,” she says. “And then you get one back. That’s the term.”
“Agreed.”
She steps back from me. One pace. Then she looks over my shoulder at the glass door, at her name written backwards on it in gold, and her voice drops to the one I’ve heard in a lift, and on a desk in Monaco, and in my head at two hundred miles an hour every weekend since.
“Hands on the glass,” says Priya. “Either side of my name. Flat. They don’t come off it.”
The glass is cold.
I put my palms on it, wide, one either side of the gold leaf, the way I’d put them on the wall of a garage if a steward told me to. In front of me there’s the dark landing, the stairs going down, the street door, the sign that says I will know. Nobody’s on the stairs. Nobody’s coming. I know that. My body doesn’t seem to.
Behind me, I hear her heels come off. One. Two.
Then her hands come round my waist from behind and start on my shirt.
She takes her time. She undoes it from the bottom, one button and then the next, with her chest against my back and her breath on the nape of my neck, and when it’s open she pushes it back off my shoulders as far as it’ll go with my arms where they are, so it hangs at my elbows like a harness. Her palms go flat on my stomach. They slide up over my ribs, slow, to my chest, and her fingernails drag back down, and every muscle I own jumps under them in order.
“You’re shaking,” she says, into my spine.
“It’s cold.”
“It isn’t.”
Her hands go to my belt.
I watch my own breath fog the glass between my hands and clear and fog again. The zip. My trousers go down my hips, and my shorts with them, and she draws them all the way down my legs and taps my ankle, and I step out of them, still facing the door, still with my hands flat on her name. I’m so hard it’s like a second pulse. The cool air of the office gets at me and I hear myself make a noise.
“Don’t move,” she says.
“I’ve not.”
“I know.” She kisses the back of my thigh. “I’m just telling you.”
Then she comes round the front of me.
She slides between me and the door, under my arms, without touching my hands. She’s still in the black dress. She puts her back against the glass, right where her name is, so the gold lettering sits behind her head like a halo spelt backwards, and she looks up at me with her hair down and her mouth soft, and she goes down onto her knees.
Christ.
“Priya—”
“Hands,” she says, and puts her mouth on me.
I nearly come off the glass. I don’t. I keep my palms flat either side of her, and I lean my weight into them, and I look down, because I can’t not, and watch her take me. Slowly. Her lips stretched round the head of me, her eyes on my face, her hand wrapped round the base and the other one flat on my hip, holding me exactly where she wants me. She goes down until I hit the back of her throat. She stays there. She swallows.
The sound that comes out of me bounces back off the glass an inch from my mouth.
“You should see this,” I tell her, and my voice has gone to gravel. “You should see you. On your knees in your own office with your name on the door behind you. Forty people drank wine in here an hour ago. You shook every one of their hands. You told the rower where to stand.” Her tongue moves under me and I lose a word. “And now you’re— Christ— Priya—”
She pulls off me with a wet sound and looks up.
“You don’t get to be smug,” she says. “Your hands are on the door.”
“I’m not smug.”
“You’re narrating.”
“I always narrate.”
“I know.” Her thumb slides over the head of me, slick, and my hips jerk. “Keep going. I like it.”
So I keep going. I tell her what her mouth feels like. I tell her I’ve thought about this since a lift, since the half inch, since the second she said not lower and I went hard in front of three mirrors. She takes me deeper while I’m saying it, faster, her hand working what her mouth can’t reach, and I feel it start low in me, in my thighs, gathering the way a car gathers on the limiter when you hold it there too long.
“I’m going to,” I get out. “If you don’t— I’m—”
She stops.
She sits back on her heels with her hand loose round me and her lips shining, and she watches me pant against the glass, and she doesn’t say not yet. She doesn’t have to. We’ve both said it to each other enough times that it lives in the room on its own now.
“That’s your one,” she says, a bit hoarse. “Hands off.”
I take my hands off the glass. There are two prints on it, either side of her name, fogged at the edges. I’ll leave them. The cleaner can have a field day.
I pick her up.
She makes the noise she made at Silverstone, half outrage and half a laugh, and wraps her legs round me with the dress rucked to her hips. I turn us. I put her feet back down on the boards facing the door, and I step in behind her, and I put my mouth by her ear.
“Mine,” I say. “My one.”
“Go on.”
“Hands on the glass. Where mine were. Flat.”
She lifts them. She lays them over the prints I left, exactly over, her small hands inside the outlines of my big ones, and I watch the gooseflesh go down both her arms the way it did in my kitchen in Monaco.
“Don’t move them,” I tell her. “Not for anything.”
“I know how it works.”
“I know you do. I’m just telling you.”
She laughs. It goes into a breath when I find the zip of the dress. I take it down slowly, an inch at a time, and put my mouth on every inch of spine I uncover, the way I did in a low bed with white sheets the first night I had her. The dress drops. She’s got nothing on under it.
“You did that on purpose.”
“I’m a strategist,” she says to the glass.
I go down behind her on my knees.
I put my hands on the backs of her thighs and spread her, and she braces on the door, and I put my mouth on her from behind. She’s soaked. She’s been soaked since she sent the dog home, by the taste of her. I lick her slowly, the long way, front to back, and she says my name against the glass and fogs it.
“Flatter,” she says, out of habit.
I laugh against her. “It’s my one.”
“Then— oh— then do it however you— yes. Like that. Max.”
I do it however I like. I do it the way she taught me, because the way she taught me is the way I like. Tongue flat, steady, the same stroke over and over in the same place, two fingers sliding into her and curling, and she starts to rock back onto my face with her palms pressed white to the door. I can see her reflection over her shoulder in the dark glass. Her mouth open. Her eyes shut. The gold letters across her forehead, backwards, like the name’s been signed on her.
Her right hand lifts an inch.
“Ah,” I say into her. “Flat.”
She puts it back. And she clenches round my fingers so hard I feel it to the elbow, and a sound comes out of her I’ve only heard once before, in a kitchen at nine in the morning with a pen lined up on an electricity bill.
I don’t stop. She comes against my mouth with both hands flat on her own name and her forehead on the glass between them, crying out so loud the landing must ring with it, and I stay with her through every pulse until she’s pushing back at me with her hips and saying enough, enough, Max, come here.
I stand. I fit myself to her from behind, and I put my left hand at the small of her back.
Flat. Not gripping.
“Half an inch higher,” she says, without turning round.
I move it.
“There,” she says, very quietly. “That’s correct.”
I push into her.
Bare, slow, from behind, with her palms on the glass and her name between them. She’s still tight from coming and hot as anything, and she takes me inch by inch with her back arched and her breath going ragged against the door, and when I’m all the way in I have to stop and put my forehead between her shoulder blades and just breathe.
“Move,” she says. “Please.”
The please still does it to me. It always will.
I move. Long strokes, nearly out and all the way back, my hand flat on her spine and my other arm round her ribs, holding her up off the door enough that she doesn’t have to hold herself. The glass shudders a little in its frame on every push. The fire extinguisher’s a foot away. Forty plastic cups watch from the desk.
“I watched you all night,” I tell her ear. “Four hours eleven. Every time you looked at the back wall to check I was still there. Every time you turned somebody a quarter step. I watched you shake the heptathlete’s hand and I thought, she’s going to be on her knees for me in an hour, and nobody in this room knows it.”
“You didn’t know it.”
“I hoped.” I push in deep and hold. “I came to the launch with hope.”
She laughs and moans in the same breath. Her hands are slipping on the glass. They don’t come off it.
“Faster,” she says. Then, before I can ask: “It’s a request.”
“Then ask me nicely.”
She turns her head. Her eyes find mine in the reflection, black and wet and laughing, and she says it into the dark glass like she’s dictating it for the file.
“Please fuck me harder against my own door, Max. I’d like it in the minutes.”
I give her what she asked for.
Hard, deep, the whole door rattling in its frame. My hand slides round between her legs and finds her, flat and steady, and I rub her in time while I drive into her, and she goes quiet the way she does just before, and then not quiet at all. I feel it take her. I feel her clamp round me from root to tip, pulse after pulse, her hands sliding down the glass at last, leaving long smears through the gold reflection of her name.
It takes me with her. I can’t stop it and I don’t try. I bury myself in her to the hilt and come with my face in her hair and her name coming out of me in pieces against her neck, and I hold her up off the door with my arm round her ribs, and I don’t let go.
We end up on the floor.
Not by design. My knees go, so we go, and she ends up in my lap on the bare boards with her back against the oak desk and my bow tie still round my neck and her dress somewhere under the radiator. The streetlamp has moved round. It’s not on the door anymore. It’s on us.
From down here I can see the glass. Two sets of handprints, one inside the other, either side of LLEB IASED, and two long smears running down from hers.
“The signwriter’s going to have words,” I say.
“The signwriter is very discreet. I checked his references.”
“Course you did.”
She’s quiet for a bit, with her ear on my chest. Then she reaches up onto the desk behind her without looking, and finds the visitors’ book Simone made everybody sign on the way in, and a pen. She opens it on her knee. Forty names, forty signatures, the rower’s taking up two lines.
She writes at the bottom, in the small square hand.
Launch night. Attendance: forty-one (incl. one dog).
Under it, after a moment:
After hours: two.
She looks at it. Then she adds, because she’s thorough, the date and P.D., and holds the pen out to me.
“Yours,” she says.
I sign next to hers. My hand isn’t completely steady. Nobody mentions it.
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