Trapped Together After Ten Years of Wanting
Jett Harlan stood with his back against the bolted stairwell door. The heavy steel pressed cold through his shirt, humming faintly with the force of the storm outside. Across the drafting studio, Liora Fenn braced against the wide oak table. Ten years. They’d been university partners a decade ago and had kept a rigid, careful distance ever since. Emails. City surveys. Client files. Nothing else, because she’d had a ring on her finger. But the freight elevator had died with the power, this door had locked behind them, and that ring had been gone for exactly six weeks.
Liora stared at the corded muscle along Jett’s right forearm. His sleeve was shoved up, baring the heavy veins she’d spent years pretending not to notice. She used to tell herself it was clinical, the same way she’d assess a load-bearing line on a blueprint. She’d had a life mapped out, a fiancé waiting at home. Tonight the studio felt suffocatingly small in the dim gray light. Rain hammered the single high window, loud enough to drown out the erratic thud of her own pulse.
“Backup generator should kick in for the emergency lights,” Jett said. His voice came out low, rougher than it ever sounded in boardrooms. “Until then, there’s a flashlight on the low shelf.”
Liora didn’t move. Her palms stayed flat on the oak, fingers splayed as if anchoring herself against a fall. Three feet of floor between them. Jett’s gaze dropped to the hollow of her throat, to the frantic flutter of her pulse where her collarbones met—a spot he’d wanted to put his mouth on since their first mapping project. The silence stretched, thick with a decade of swallowed words and forced professional smiles.
She finally pushed off the table. “We should signal the street,” she said, her voice thin. She stepped toward the metal shelving unit at the exact second he did. They both reached for the heavy aluminum flashlight. Knuckles brushed. The side of her thumb dragged across the sensitive skin of his inner wrist, and they both went still. Jett didn’t pull back. He let his hand hover over hers, the heat radiating between them.
“I’ve been redrawing the same coordinate set every night for two years,” he said, the words tearing loose before he could stop them. He wasn’t looking at the flashlight. He was looking at her mouth. “It matches your home address. I stopped pretending it was work the day I saw you without the ring.”
Liora’s breath hitched. The admission landed like a struck nerve. She backed up a half-step until her hips met the edge of the table. Nowhere left to go. Jett closed the gap—one deliberate stride, then another—until his thighs caged her knees against the heavy oak. He lifted his hand, hesitated for one agonizing second, then pressed his rough palm flat to the side of her neck. His thumb settled exactly over that pulse at her collarbone. She let out a shattered exhale, gripping the table edge so hard her knuckles whitened.
Then her hands left the wood and found the front of his shirt, hauling the fabric up in a rough pull that caught under his arms. He had to twist to free it, the cotton scraping his back as she dragged it off and dropped it. The motion pinned her harder to the table edge, and his belt buckle jammed against her hip when he leaned in. She fumbled with the leather, the metal tongue catching twice before it gave, her knuckles grazing his stomach. His jeans only slid down after she shoved at the waistband; the denim bunched at his knees, and he had to kick one shoe off before he could step out of one leg, then the other, cursing under his breath when the second lace tangled.
Her blouse buttons resisted under his hands, the fabric stretched tight from how far she’d leaned back. One popped loose and skittered across the floor. She reached behind herself to unhook her bra, the clasp snagging on a thread before it gave, her breasts loose against the sudden chill. Her skirt zipper stuck halfway; he worked it down with both thumbs while her hands shoved at his briefs, the elastic catching on him before it cleared. Her underwear came off in one impatient tug that left a faint pink line on her hip, the cotton damp where it had clung.
He turned her with a hand at her waist and guided her down over the table. Her palms slapped flat on the oak, the wood cool and unyielding. His chest pressed to her back as he reached past her, one hand braced beside hers for leverage, the other lining himself up against her. The head dragged through wet heat, the smell of rain and old paper thick around them. He pushed in slow, the stretch wringing a broken sound from her, her forehead dropping toward the surface.
“Ten years I’ve thought about this,” he said against her ear, voice strained. “Every line I drew. Every time you leaned over those maps. Feels like you’re pulling me in.”
Liora’s fingers curled against the wood, nails biting as he sank deeper. She clenched around him in tight pulses, the friction building with each thrust that walked the table legs an inch across the floor. Sweat slicked the small of her back where their skin met. She pushed back hard, breasts sliding against the grain. “Don’t stop. I need to feel this—need you to fuck me like you’ve wanted to.”
His grip tightened, thumbs digging into her hips as he drove harder. The wet slap of their bodies filled the gaps between rain strikes on the glass. Her shoulders locked, a sharp cry breaking out of her as her thighs began to shake. Her grip slipped, one hand sliding forward while the other stayed clamped to the edge, her whole body seizing in hard, rhythmic waves that gripped him. His own release hit at the same moment, deep, his muscles locking and trembling against her back.
For a few seconds neither of them spoke. Then Liora let out a short, disbelieving laugh into the wood, half a wince in it. “Your buckle’s still digging into my leg.”
“That’s the table,” Jett said, breath uneven. He eased back enough to look. “No. That’s the buckle.” He pried the trapped belt out from between them with a wince of his own and let it drop. The flashlight had rolled against his bare foot at some point; he nudged it away.
She straightened slowly, one hand pressed to the red line the table edge had pressed into her ribs, and turned to face him. Her hair was a mess across her face. She didn’t bother fixing it. “Six weeks,” she said, like she was still doing the arithmetic. “And you waited until we were locked in to say something.”
“I’m an idiot. We established this with the coordinates.” He reached for his shirt off the floor and handed her the blouse before his own. A practical gesture, his hands not quite steady. “Generator’s still not on, by the way.”
“I noticed.” She pulled the blouse around her shoulders without buttoning it and leaned back against the table, watching him hunt for his second shoe in the dark. The rain hadn’t let up. Somewhere below them the building groaned. She found she didn’t care how long the power stayed out. “Find the flashlight,” she said. “Slowly.”