Every Surface

A Hot Desking Bonus Scene

This bonus scene takes place after the epilogue of Hot Desking. It contains explicit sexual content and major spoilers. Read the book first.

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PIA

The last box is labeled MISCELLANEOUS (PIA — DO NOT ORGANIZE).

Jordan labeled it. Jordan labeled everything — fourteen boxes, color-coded tape, a spreadsheet with contents and destination room, and a sticky note on the outside of each one that says things like KITCHEN — UTENSILS (DUPLICATES IN BOX K-3) and BEDROOM — LINENS (WINTER). She built a packing system with the structural integrity of a doctoral thesis, and the only reason I didn’t make fun of her for it is because I was too busy watching her forearms while she carried things.

It’s nine o’clock. The movers left at seven. Pri left at eight after assembling the bookshelf with a competence that made Jordan visibly jealous, which made Pri visibly delighted, which made me open the wine early. The apartment is ours — Jordan’s lease, my cat, everybody’s compromise — and it smells like cardboard and the lemon cleaner Jordan used on every surface before my things were allowed to touch them.

Every surface. I’m going to think about that phrase for the rest of the night.

Mango is asleep on the one piece of furniture that’s been here longer than today — Jordan’s grey reading chair, the one she brought from her old apartment, the one that still smells like her. He claimed it in the first eleven minutes. She pretended to object. She’s been feeding him treats when she thinks I’m not looking.

“That’s the last one,” I say, setting MISCELLANEOUS on the kitchen counter.

Jordan is standing in the middle of the living room with her sleeves rolled twice and her hair tucked behind her left ear and a box cutter in her hand like a surgeon holding a scalpel. She’s looking at the apartment the way she looks at a blank page — like she’s about to write something permanent.

“We should unpack the kitchen tonight,” she says. “If the espresso machine isn’t operational by morning I’ll become a person I don’t want to be.”

“You’re already a person you don’t want to be. You labeled a box of my underwear.”

“I labeled it BEDROOM — INTIMATE APPAREL.”

“You called my underwear intimate apparel.”

“Would you have preferred chaotic textile situation?”

I walk to her. She’s standing between two stacks of boxes with the overhead light catching the silver ring on her right hand and the fine, sharp lines of her collarbones visible above the neckline of her white t-shirt. She’s wearing jeans. Jordan Kai is wearing jeans. I’ve seen this woman naked more times than I can count and the jeans are still destroying me because she never wears them and they sit low on her hips and there’s a strip of skin between the hem of the shirt and the denim that I want to put my mouth on.

“We could unpack the kitchen,” I say. I take the box cutter out of her hand. I set it on the counter. I put my palms flat on the surface — the cool granite she picked, the surface she cleaned with lemon spray two hours ago. “Or.”

“Or.” Her voice drops. Not much. Just enough. The register she uses when she knows where this is going and has decided to let me take us there.

“You cleaned every surface in this apartment.”

“I did.”

“Every counter. Every shelf. The bathroom vanity. The bedroom floor.”

“The bedroom floor needed it. The previous tenant had a dog.”

“You cleaned every surface, Jordan.” I lean back against the counter. I look at her. “Seems like a waste not to break them in.”

Her eyes do the thing — the dark-pupil thing, the thing where the brown goes almost black and her breathing changes and her mouth parts just enough that I can see the edge of her bottom teeth. Five months and it still hits me like a power surge every time, the moment Jordan Kai stops editing and starts wanting.

“Define break in,” she says.

“I think the phrase is self-explanatory.”

“I think the phrase is deliberately vague and you want me to ask for specifics so you can say something filthy.”

“Is it working?”

She takes one step toward me. Her hand finds my hip. Cold fingers on the strip of skin above my waistband — the same strip I was staring at on her thirty seconds ago. She presses. Pushes me back against the counter until the granite edge hits my lower back and her body is flush against mine and her mouth is an inch from my ear.

“Specifics,” she says.

I put my hands on her waist. I slide them under her shirt. My warm palms on her cold ribs — the temperature of us, always different, always meeting in the middle — and I feel her inhale.

“I want to fuck you on every surface in this apartment,” I say. “Starting with this counter.”

She lifts me onto the granite like I weigh nothing, which I don’t — I’m 5’2″ and she’s got four inches and years of carrying boxes of manuscripts and the kind of lean, corded strength that comes from a woman who does everything precisely, including this.

My legs wrap around her. My hands go to her hair — down tonight, loose, the blunt ends brushing her collarbones. I pull. Not hard. The exact amount that makes her gasp and grip my thighs and press her hips between my knees.

“Rules?” she asks. Against my mouth. Her lips on my bottom lip, teeth grazing.

“No rules.”

“There are always rules.”

“Fine. One rule.” I pull back enough to look at her. Her eyes are black. Her cheeks are flushed. Jordan Kai, undone in a kitchen full of labeled boxes, in an apartment with both our names on the lease. “Don’t stop until we’ve hit every room.”

Her mouth takes mine. Not soft. Jordan doesn’t kiss soft when she’s like this — she kisses like she writes, precise and relentless, every movement deliberate, her tongue against mine with the kind of focused attention that makes me feel like the only sentence in a language she invented.

She unbuttons my flannel. One button at a time. Methodical. I’m wearing nothing under it because I dressed for moving, not for modesty, and when the shirt falls open her hands go to my breasts and her thumbs drag across my nipples and I arch on the counter hard enough that my elbow knocks a box labeled KITCHEN — SPICES (ALPHABETIZED) onto the floor.

“That was alphabetized,” she says.

“There were twenty-six spices in there.”

“Jordan, if you stop touching me to pick up cumin I will divorce you.”

“We’re not married.”

“Preemptive. We’ve discussed this.”

She grins. The real one. The one I unlocked in a Fishbowl five months ago that still makes my chest do something structurally unsound. Then she drops her head and her mouth is on my breast and her tongue circles my nipple and her hand slides down my stomach, past the waistband of my leggings, past the elastic of my underwear — my intimate apparel — and finds me wet.

“Already,” she says, against my skin.

“I’ve been watching you carry boxes in a white t-shirt for six hours. I’ve been ready since the second trip up the stairs.”

Her fingers slide through me. Slow. Exploring, like she hasn’t mapped every inch of me already, like this is research and she’s thorough. Two fingers press against my clit and move in a circle — tight, unhurried — and my head falls back and hits the cabinet and I don’t care.

“Harder,” I say.

She goes harder. Her other hand pins my hip to the counter — cold palm, firm grip, holding me still while her fingers work. She knows exactly how I like it because Jordan Kai pays attention to everything, catalogs everything, remembers every sound I’ve ever made and what caused it.

She pushes two fingers inside me and curls them and I make a sound that the neighbors are going to hear through the walls of this apartment we’ve lived in for two hours.

“We have neighbors,” she says.

“Then they should invest in earplugs.”

“Or you could be quieter.”

“Have you met me?”

She laughs. Low, rough, into my neck, and fucks me harder — her fingers deep, her thumb on my clit, her other hand in my hair pulling my head back so she can bite my throat. I grip the edge of the counter and her shoulder and the fabric of her shirt and I come so hard my vision goes white and my legs shake against her hips and I say her name in a voice that is definitely audible through at minimum two walls.

She holds me through it. Cold hands on my hot skin. Her forehead against mine. Her breathing ragged, uneven, the sound of a woman who’s been holding herself together with editorial discipline and is starting to lose the punctuation.

“One,” I say, when I can speak.

“I’m sorry?”

“One surface. Kitchen counter.” I push off the counter. My legs are unsteady but my hands are sure. I grab the hem of her shirt and pull it over her head. White cotton. The body underneath — lean, pale, the faint shadow of muscle across her stomach, her small breasts in a plain black bra that looks like it was chosen for efficiency and is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. “How many rooms in this apartment?”

“Seven, if you count the closets.”

“I count the closets.”

The hallway wall is next.

I push her against it. She goes. Jordan — who controls everything, who edits everything, who has never in her life surrendered a sentence without checking the grammar — lets me push her against a wall in a hallway with moving boxes on the floor and her bare back against the paint she picked (Quiet Fog, Benjamin Moore, she agonized for three days).

I drop to my knees. I unbutton her jeans. I pull them down her hips — the low-slung jeans, the ones that have been ruining me all day — and she steps out of them and she’s in black underwear that matches the bra and her thighs are trembling.

“Pia—”

“Hands up.”

She puts her hands up. Palms flat on the wall behind her. Fingers spread. The position we invented in a glass room five months ago that has become ours — the signal, the shorthand, the gesture that means I’m yours and I know it.

I hook my fingers in the waistband of her underwear and pull them down. I press my mouth to her inner thigh. I feel her legs shake. I press higher. Higher. Until my mouth is on her and her hands are on the wall and she’s saying my name in a voice that has lost every comma.

I eat her out against the hallway wall. I’m thorough. I’m slow. I lick her clit in the flat, steady rhythm that makes her hips rock and her breathing fracture, and when I push my tongue inside her she makes a sound — low, desperate, a sound that Jordan Kai has never made in any professional setting — and her hands come off the wall and find my hair and pull.

“Hands,” I say.

“I can’t—”

“Hands up, Kai.”

She puts them back. She’s shaking. I suck her clit into my mouth and press two fingers inside her and curl them against the spot that makes her voice break, and she comes with her palms flat on Quiet Fog and her head thrown back and my name in her mouth, last, the way she always puts the important word.

“Two,” she says, breathless.

“I wasn’t sure you were counting.”

“I’m always counting.”

The bathroom vanity.

She lifts me onto the marble. The mirror is behind me and she watches us in it while she fucks me with her hand and whispers in my ear — not dirty talk exactly, because Jordan doesn’t talk dirty the way other people do, she talks precise, she narrates, she tells me what she’s doing and what she’s about to do and what I look like while she does it, and it’s worse than dirty talk because it’s accurate.

“You’re close,” she says, and I am. “You make a sound before you come — not a moan. Smaller. Like a catch. Like you’re holding your breath and it slips.”

I come. The catch, the slip, exactly like she said. She watches us in the mirror and I watch her watch us and the marble is cold under me and her hands are cold inside me and I’m burning.

“Three,” I manage.

The bedroom floor.

We don’t make it to the bed. The bed is buried in boxes — BEDROOM — LINENS (WINTER) and BEDROOM — BOOKS (OVERFLOW, WILL NOT FIT SHELF, JORDAN PLEASE DON’T THROW THESE AWAY). We end up on the hardwood floor, the floor she cleaned on her hands and knees this morning, the floor that smells like lemon and wood and is cool against my back when she spreads me out on it.

She’s above me. Naked now — both of us naked, our clothes a trail from the hallway through the bathroom — and the overhead light catches every line of her. The collarbones. The silver ring. The way her hair falls forward and curtains her face when she looks down at me.

“I love you,” she says.

Not a transition. Not a lead-in. Just the fact, stated plainly, the way Jordan states everything that matters — no embellishment, no adjectives, just the sentence.

“I love you,” I say back. “Now get down here.”

She gets down. She lies on top of me — her cold body on my warm one, the differential that never equalizes, the contrast that makes everything between us feel like friction and relief at the same time. Our legs tangle. Her thigh presses between mine and mine between hers and we move together, grinding, the slow rolling pressure that builds from the hips.

I grip her ass and pull her harder against me. She braces one hand on the floor beside my head and rocks — her clit against my thigh, mine against hers, the wet heat of us sliding together — and she drops her head into my neck and bites and I arch off the floor.

“Harder,” I say.

“You always want harder.”

“You always have more to give.”

She gives it. Her hips drive into mine. The floor creaks. The boxes rattle. Somewhere in BEDROOM — BOOKS (OVERFLOW) a hardcover falls and neither of us stops. I dig my nails into her shoulders and she hisses and I feel her come — feel it in the stutter of her hips, the way her whole body locks and shakes, the sound she makes into my neck that is raw and unedited and mine.

I’m not there yet. She knows. She pulls back just enough to get her hand between us, to press her fingers to my clit while her thigh is still between my legs, and she works me — fast, focused, the same precision she puts into every sentence she’s ever written — until I shatter on a bedroom floor surrounded by boxes I haven’t unpacked in an apartment I’m going to live in with the person who just made me come four times in forty minutes.

“Four,” she says, into my collarbone.

“We haven’t done the closets.”

“The closets can wait.”

“You said you counted them.”

“I’m reassessing the scope.”

I laugh. She catches it with her mouth.

We do not, in fact, do the closets. We do the couch — a twenty-minute intermission that turns into her riding my hand with her back against the armrest and her legs over my shoulders. We do the reading chair — my idea, because she loves that chair and now it’s going to smell like both of us, and Mango relocated to a box of sweaters an hour ago with the dignity of a cat who has seen enough.

The couch is five. The reading chair is six.

At midnight we’re on the bed. The boxes are on the floor now — shoved, pushed, one of them tipped by an elbow or a knee, BEDROOM — LINENS (WINTER) spilling a flannel sheet across the hardwood. The mattress is bare — just the fitted sheet Jordan put on this morning before I arrived, white, crisp, the only surface in the apartment she didn’t clean because it was already clean.

It’s not clean anymore.

Jordan is on her back. I’m between her legs. My mouth on her, again, the second time tonight, because the first time was against a wall and this time I want her spread out and relaxed and slow, I want her to feel what it’s like to be taken apart by someone who has memorized every part of her and chooses to stay.

I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and she arches. Her hands find the headboard — our headboard, the one we bought together, the first piece of furniture that’s ours and not hers or mine — and she grips it the way she grips a pen, too tightly, like she’s suspicious of the whole instrument.

“Pia.” My name. Low and wrecked. “Pia, I’m—”

“I know.”

“I need—”

“I know what you need.”

I add a third finger and press deeper and suck her clit and she comes so hard the headboard hits the wall and neither of us cares because this is our wall now and the mark it leaves is ours.

Seven.

I crawl up her body. I lie on top of her. Her arms come around me — loose, exhausted, the arms of a woman who has been taken apart seven times on seven surfaces and has lost the ability to construct a compound sentence.

“We missed the closets,” I say.

“Tomorrow.”

“And the balcony.”

“We’ll get a noise complaint.”

“We’ve been getting noise complaints since the day we met. It’s our brand.”

She laughs. The real one. The tired, wrecked, beautiful one that I’m going to hear in this apartment every day for as long as she lets me stay, which — based on the lease, and the way she’s holding me, and the fact that she alphabetized my spice rack before I even moved in — is going to be a very long time.

“I love this apartment,” I say.

“You’ve been here four hours.”

“Best four hours of my life.”

“You said that about the lock-in.”

“That was the best night of my life. These are the best four hours. I’m diversifying my categories.”

Her cold hand on my warm back. My face in her neck. The smell of lemon cleaner and sex and cardboard and the beginning of something that doesn’t have a label on it yet, which is fine, because I’ll peel the label off anyway and draw a cartoon frog on it and she’ll stare at it for thirty seconds and say the frog stays and I’ll know — the way I’ve known since the first time she said noted — that she means I love you in every language she’s ever written in.

“Go to sleep, Moretti.”

“Make me, Kai.”

“I have. Seven times.”

I laugh into her neck. She tightens her arms. Mango jumps onto the foot of the bed — the bare mattress with the single fitted sheet, in the apartment with our names on the lease and our mess on every surface — and settles between our ankles with the air of a cat who has found his final arrangement and intends to keep it.

I close my eyes. Jordan’s heartbeat under my ear, steady and precise and mine.

Every surface. Broken in.

Home.