Page 24 of Dial F for Finance

“Jenna,” he says, his voice taking on a slightly commanding note that snaps my eyes to his. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t make a thing of this. It’s just a tattoo.”

“There are a lot of muscles too.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have those.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to.”

I nod and he stills. Then he leans down, hands braced on the bed on either side of me, and he puts his mouth, deliberately, against the soft inside of my upper arm. The part I don’t look at in mirrors. The part I have spent twenty years dressing around.

His mouth opens against the skin. He kisses me there. Slowly. Like it’s a place he’s been thinking about kissing for a long time.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve seen you without a shirt on too,” he says into my arm. “I like you naked, and I fucking love that you’re soft.”

I close my eyes.

His mouth moves to my collarbone. To the hollow at the base of my throat. To the curve of my breast above the cup of my bra. He undoes the bra with one hand, behind my back, with a competence I refuse to find time to interrogate, and then it’s gone, on the floor, and his mouth is on me without it.

I make another sound I’ve never made.

“Fuck, Jen. Look at you.”

“Stop talking.”

“I’m never going to stop telling you what you do to me,” he says, his mouth at the underside of my breast now, his hand splayed across my ribs.

“Dominic—”

“You can yell at me about it tomorrow.”

He slides down my body.

Down past my breasts, past my ribs, past the dip of my waist and onto the curve of my hip and the soft swell of my belly. He kisses all of it, openly and without commentary, like it’s a place he has chosen on purpose. His hands are at my hips. His mouth moving lower. He gets to the line of my underwear and stops. Then he looks up the length of my body at me, and raises his eyebrows.

I can’t speak.

I nod.

He hooks his fingers in the elastic and slides them down.

I’m bare under his gaze. Bare under his hands.

Somehow, in my head, this was supposed to be fast and brutal. Rip the tension off like a Band-Aid and roll away from it in the morning, both of us restored to factory settings.

Instead, I’m pinned to the bed by the sheer force of how much he wants this and how much I want to watch him want it.

“Jesus, Jen,” he says, low and raw. “I cannot wait to get my mouth on you.”

He kisses the inside of my thigh, right at the place where my skin turns soft and liquid, and for the first time, I stop caring whether he’s going to notice everything I spent a lifetime trying to compress into less space. His hands are steady at my legs, holding them open, and he looks at me like he’s about to do something sinful and philanthropic at the same time.

When he finally sweeps his tongue through my center, my hips come off the bed. He groans, low and vulgar, like he’s been hungry for years and has no intention of pretending otherwise. My hand flies to his hair, meaning to push him off or pull him closer, but I get nowhere because he is fucking diligent about this—tongue, lips, pressure, pace—like he’s been analyzing my patterns, taking notes, and this is his oral defense.

I could keep my composure, but what for? I let my wrist buckle and find the bedsheets instead, clutching whatever I can hold while he does things to me I’m not prepared for. He’s so good at it I start to suspect he’s been practicing, and then remember who I’m dealing with and realize sex is most likely how this man gets his cardio.