Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Fifty-nine.
Then sixty.
My breath caught. “Sixty,” I said, louder this time, unable to help it. My whole body jolted on him. “Sir—”
“I see it.”
His voice had changed very slightly. Porter never seemed to lose control, but something had deepened in his tone, some note of satisfaction and intensity that went straight through me. The bill would pass. After all the ugliness, all the bargaining, all the humiliations and calculations and nights of him coming home with that taut stillness in him from another difficult day, it was actually going to pass.
I forgot my movement for one second in pure astonishment. Porter’s hand came to my hip and guided me down again.
“Don’t stop now,” he said quietly.
“Yes, sir.”
The board kept changing. Sixty-one. One more, then another, and with each green little light my heart beat harder, in some rhythm partly political, partly sexual, and partly something I had no name for at all. I felt absurdly close to tears. Porter must have sensed it in the way my body tightened around him, because his mouth brushed once against the back of my shoulder.
“That’s your work too,” he said.
The words nearly undid me.
I rode him harder after that, with a rising desperation that matched the climbing count on the screen. His hands moved over me with a proprietary confidence that only made it worse—one at my breast, one at my belly, then lower, fingers finding my clit while I gasped and tried to keep my eyes on the vote.
Sixty-four. Including, to my astonishment, Hathaway and the rest of her bloc.
Passed. It had passed with votes to spare. The number seemed to blaze on the screen.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
At exactly the same moment Porter thrust up hard beneath me and held me down on him. I cried out as his cock pulsed deep in my pussy, hot and flooding, and the shock of his climax inside me while the board confirmed the bill’s passage seemed to fuse the whole mad sequence of our lives together into one unbearable instant. My own orgasm tore through me with it. I came shaking on his lap, my head falling back against his shoulder, seeing the green lights blur on the television through sudden tears.
For a little while I could only breathe.
The chamber still moved on screen in its stiff, ceremonial way, but for me the world had narrowed to the feel of him inside me, still full and softening only gradually, and his arms around me. My skin felt too tight for my body. My heart still raced. I realized then that I was crying in earnest, though not hard.
Porter touched my face, turning it slightly. “Alex.”
I wiped at one cheek with clumsy fingers and gave a breathless, embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous.”
“No,” he said.
Something in his tone made me go still.
He did not move me off his lap. He did not let me gather myself or put distance back into my body. He simply held me there, one arm around my waist, while I sat naked and sated and tear-streaked on the cock that had just come inside me. Then he reached to the side table.
For one wild second I thought he meant to retrieve some object of discipline, and a confused shiver of response went through me before my mind caught up. What he took up was a small dark box.
I stared at it.
My breath stopped.
“Porter?”
He looked at me, directly at me, with an expression I had almost no practice reading because I had seen it so rarely. A kind of gravity that seemed to come from a deeper place than control, and had a softness to it that made a complicated glow rise in my chest.
He opened the box. The ring caught the office light in one white flash.
“I love you,” he said.
The words hit me with a force almost as physical as the orgasm had been. For one second I simply could not fit them into the world as I knew it. Porter loved me. Porter, who arranged and calculated and controlled. Porter, who had acquired me with such cool competence and then trained me with patience, for his sexual pleasure. Who spanked me and whipped me and made me ask to go to the bathroom.