Chapter 23: Every Light On, Again

I turned on the last lamp, and the Lantern blazed above the dark park.

Every pendant, every sconce, every strip along the ceiling was on, and the long room hung in the night as bright as a stage.

There were helicopters over the park and cameras on the lawn, and I did not care.

I stood at the long window in my red silk with my back to Leighton.

"Zip," I said.

He drew it down the whole length of my spine in one slow pull.

The dress fell off my shoulders and my hips and lay on the stone in a red ring.

I stepped out of it, naked, and walked to the glass.

I put both palms flat on the pane at shoulder height, the way I had on the first night.

Below me lay forty-eight floors of air and the whole bright city, and I knew that somebody out there was looking up.

"Let them see," I said. "All of it."

He came up behind me.

He didn't touch me.

For a long moment he stood there, breathing, and I felt his eyes on me.

Then he went to his knees.

His hands closed on my hips.

He spread my cheeks with his thumbs and put his mouth on me from behind.

I cried out and my forehead dropped against the pane.

His tongue was hot and flat and unhurried.

It stroked me from my clit back through the wet and further.

When it flicked over my entrance, my knees buckled, and he held me up with both hands.

"Leighton. Oh, my God."

He made a low sound against me.

He licked me slowly, over and over, until my legs shook, and he slid two fingers into me from behind and curled them forward.

"Don't stop. Don't stop."

He pulled back for one breath.

"Tell me what you want me to do."

"Everything. Put your tongue inside me. Fuck me with your fingers. Make me come on your face while they watch."

He groaned against me, and he did all of it.

His tongue slid inside me, hot and flat and rude, and his fingers worked my clit from the front.

He held my hips in an iron grip when they tried to run.

He didn't stop.

I rode his face against the window with my breasts pressed to the cold glass and my nipples aching.

I heard myself telling him how good it was, in words I could not stop.

"Your mouth. God, your mouth. Right there. Harder."

I came with a drawn-out cry, my palms slipping on the pane.

My whole body clenched around his fingers, and my breath fogged the glass.

He licked me through it.

He stood, and I turned and pushed his shirt off his shoulders.

I undid his belt and his trousers while the whole city shone behind him, and I dragged them down his legs.

"Everyone can see you too," I said.

"Let them."

He stood naked in front of forty-eight floors of glass.

He was a long pale man with silver hair and a hard cock curving up at his belly.