Chapter Text
The pitch
Emily had been at the table for fifteen minutes, which was, by the standards of their standing Friday arrangement, nothing — Andy was late to most things and had never once seemed to suffer for it — but fifteen minutes was long enough for Libertino's sommelier to have approached twice, retreated twice, and begun to look at her with the wary sympathy usually reserved for the recently stood-up, and Emily had decided, somewhere around minute ten, that she hated him. She had ordered a Riesling she had no intention of sharing, sent one email and drafted a second; and she had, at minute nine, taken the small white suppressant tablet from the enamel pillbox in her clutch and swallowed it dry with a mouthful of water, as she had every evening for the better part of two decades, an act so unremarkable that she barely registered doing it, which was rather the entire point of the pharmaceutical enterprise. And then, at minute sixteen, the whole front of the restaurant turned its head toward the door as a figure barreled in, and Emily did not need to turn hers to know why.
"I know," Andy said, arriving in a rush of cold October air and apology, dropping into the chair across from her still half in her coat. "I know, I'm sorry, don't give me that look, I already feel awful."
"I'm not giving you a look, this is my face."
Andy grinned at her, unrepentant, still half in her coat, her hair coming loose from whatever she'd done to it that morning, sleeves rolled to the elbows because Andy rolled them the moment a workday tipped past the tolerable, and Emily catalogued all of this diligently, reflexively, filed it under irrelevant, and returned to her wine. There was a warmth that came off Andy at close range, clean and warm, but Emily's suppressants were very good, the best money could buy, four hundred dollars a month of the best, and so she noted the warmth and dismissed it, a fact about the room and nothing to do with her.
"You smell like a printer," Emily said.
"That's the toner. Nigel made me sign off on the December proofs and the machine ate three of them and then it, sort of, gave up on life, and I had to — it doesn't matter." Andy finally got the coat off, draped it over the chair back where it immediately began its slow slide toward the floor, and reached across the table to steal a sip of the Riesling Emily had explicitly ordered for one. "God, that's good. What is that?"
"That is mine."
"It's really good."
"It is a two hundred and forty dollars Riesling and it is mine. Stick to your Aperol like it's a soft drink, I've never once understood why you go for that horrible drink."
"I like it, it's orange and pretty. Leave me alone."
"It is a hen party in a glass. Put my expensive wine down, Andrea, you’ve not the palate to appreciate it."
Andy put the glass down, but she did not stop smiling. She had, over two years of them, developed a genuinely offensive immunity to Emily's better material, which Emily found intolerable and had never once told her, because that was the arrangement, and Emily's whole life these days was a well-managed portfolio of arrangements — the ex-husband, the shared custody, the standing Friday dinner, the pillbox, the C-suite, the two children currently being fed dinner by a sitter named Diana who charged forty dollars an hour and was worth every cent of it — and the arrangements endured, they always did, because Emily made them endure.
Which was rather the trouble, actually. Because she had come here tonight to disturb one.
They ordered dinner. Emily went for their signature pasta and Andy ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, which was wagyu that arrived with a small lit candle made of rendered beef fat and a hunk of bread you were apparently meant to anoint with it. Andy looked at it like it was the best thing that had happened to her all week, while Emily rolled her eyes: She ran brand for Coach; she approved collections and killed worse ideas than this before lunch, and she could spot a gimmick the second it was set on fire in front of her.
"You spread the fat on the bread," Andy said, already reaching for the bread, giddy. "Em, this is genius."
"I'm aware of the mechanism, thank you, I have eyes and a functioning sense of shame."
"I'm putting the fat on the bread."
"I can see that. I’d like to point out that you are an animal."
"I'm an animal having a lovely time," Andy said, anointing the bread with melted cow, entirely sincere, and Emily drank her wine and let her, and for a stretch of about four minutes it was easy — it was always easy, that was rather the trouble — Andy chewing and grievancing about the proofs and Miranda's tyranny and a features writer who had turned in eight thousand words on the semiotics of the loafer when Andy had commissioned five hundred. Emily contributed the occasional surgical remark, and the candle burned down, and the whole thing was so comfortable and so long-established that she almost forgot she was about to ruin it.
She did not forget for long.
"I have something to tell you." she said.
Andy looked up mid-anoint. Something in Emily's demeanour must have shifted, because Andy set the bread down and gave Emily the whole of her attention, which no one else in Emily's life did — this total unembarrassed focus, like there was nothing besides Emily worth looking at — and Emily had never decided whether she found it flattering or alarming. Probably both.
"Okay," Andy said. "Is everyone okay? Are the kids —"
"Everyone is alive, the children are fine, Bronwyn is on a hunger strike over a matter of screen time and Roark has taught himself to whistle and will not stop, so 'fine' is doing a great deal of work, but yes. This is a professional matter."
"Okay." Andy sat back. "Professional matter. Go."
Emily fidgeted with the napkin, which was something she did when she was buying herself a moment, and which she was aware Andy had noticed she did, because Andy noticed things about her with a diligence that was useful in a features editor and was, in a friend, faintly unnerving, and she made herself stop doing it.
"Prada want to see me," she said.
Andy blinked. "Prada."
"Yes, Prada."
"Like — the Prada. Miuccia. Milan. The —"
"No, Andrea, the other Prada, the sandwich shop in Hoboken. Yes, the Prada! There's a role, Chief Brand Officer for the group, all of it, Prada and Miu Miu and everything underneath, and it is — " Emily heard her own voice take on the small ascending tone it did when she wanted something badly and was pretending not to, and she flattened it. "It is the job. It's the one after which there is no better one — it is the job, Andy."
"Em." Andy's whole face had opened up. "Em, that's — that's huge, that's —"
"It's between me and two others."
"You'll get it."
"I might not get it."
"Emily, look at you. Look at what you did to Coach, with Coach, you took them from a bag your aunt has, no offense to your aunt —"
"I don't have an aunt."
"— from a thing at the outlet mall to a brand influencers get in a fistfight over, that was you, everyone knows that was you, of course you'll get it."
"They're hesitating," Emily said, bitter, and Andy stopped.
The restaurant went on around them, glossy and loud and full of people laughing with each other. Emily looked at the fat candle, it had nearly gone out.
"They're hesitating," she said again, more evenly, "and I know exactly why, everyone does. It is because Miranda and I are — you know what Miranda and I are."
"You're not anything. You haven't spoken in years."
"We are on dire terms, Andy. Actually, we are on terms that would need to improve considerably to be called dire; and Prada knows it, everyone in the industry knows it. Prada does not want to hand the entire brand narrative of the group to a woman who is at war with the single most powerful editorial voice in the business, because the day I sign, that voice can decide, quietly, over an ordinary lunch, that Prada is tired, that Prada is trying too hard — and it costs them nothing to think it, but it costs me everything. They are not wrong to hesitate, frustratingly enough, they are being entirely rational."
Andy, when she was thinking, went still, which most people never really noticed, because most people only ever got the public Andy. Emily had learned over two years that there was a second Andy underneath, slower and sharper, the one that ran a features desk and knew where every body in the building was buried, and it was this Andy who said, carefully:
"But that's not the only thing they're hesitating about, is it?"
Emily said nothing.
"Em."
"It is largely the Miranda thing."
"It is largely the Miranda thing," Andy agreed, "but it’s the other one too. You're unbonded, and they're going to have you being the face of the group at every dinner and every gala for the next ten years, and you I know both know there's a certain kind of old money on that board that still thinks an unbonded omega at the top is a — I hate this, I want to be clear that I despise it, but they think it's a liability, they think you're a flight risk, they think one bad heat and a nice alpha and you'll —"
"I have not had a bad heat since I was eighteen, Andrea."
"I know that —"
"I have been on suppressants since then. I run a division, I run a household, I have never once in my life been a flight risk, I don't have anywhere I'd rather fly than to Prada."
"I know, Em, I'm telling you what they think, I'm not —"
"I know what they think." Emily picked up her wine. "I've known what they think since I presented. It is a thing I have carried in the overhead compartment my entire career, it is very well packed, I don't need you to describe the bag to me."
"Okay, sorry." Andy said, gently, and shut up, which was the correct thing to do, and one of the reasons Emily liked her so much.
Dessert came, a tiramisu Andy ordered for both of them to split. Emily did not touch it yet. She had, she realized, arrived at the part of the evening she'd been walking toward for a while now, the plan whole and finished in her head like a slide she had rehearsed, and now that she was here she found she did not want to say it out loud to Andy specifically, which was interesting, but she chose not to interrogate why.
"I'm going to fix it." Emily said.
"Good. How?"
"Alex Deschamps."
Andy chewed, swallowed. "I don't know who that is."
"Alex Deschamps is a fifty five year old widower who sits on the LVMH board, never bonded — beta, so no complications — and he is, and this is the operative word, pay attention: unimpeachable. He is old money that likes to be seen with new money. He used to come to all the Dior events in New York, and he’s been to all my Coach flagships two years running; during the last one he asked me to dinner and I said no because I was busy and frankly not interested. He was gracious about it, and the point is, Andy, that if Alex Deschamps is seen to be courting me no, publicly, warmly, over a reasonable number of months, then the entire industry — including Prada, including Miranda, including the old money on that board who think I'm a flight risk — understands, without a word being said, that I have goodwill and I have leverage and I have somewhere to land that is higher than where they're standing, and suddenly the omega with the enemy is a woman the LVMH board would like to keep close, and Prada stops hesitating, because Prada does not hesitate over a woman other giants want."
She'd said it all in one breath, and sat back, mildly pleased with herself, looking at Andy for a response, which she expected to be admiration, possibly reluctant, and possibly with a joke about the widower's age.
Andy had gone very still.
Not the thinking-still, a different one. Andy was looking at her across the table with an expression Emily had never once seen on her in two years, and the warmth that came off her had changed, had gone from radiator to something with an edge in it, something Emily noted as a low static at the back of her neck, and she thought, dazedly, oh.
"No," Andy said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"No, you're not doing that."
Emily set down her fork, which she had only just picked up. "I'm sorry, I don't recall the part of the plan where I asked for your permission."
"Em." Andy leaned in. Her voice had dropped, which was somehow worse than shouting. "You'd be manufacturing a relationship with a fifty five year old board member you don't even like, so that a bunch of ancient bastards who think you're a liability will think a man has vouched for you, that's — do you hear it? Do you hear how that sounds? You'd be doing exactly the thing they already think you'll do, you'd be the omega who needs an alpha's —"
"He's a beta."
"— who needs a man's say-so to be taken seriously, and it's — Em, it's beneath you, it's beneath you by a mile, and also he's going to expect —"
"He is going to expect nothing, because I will structure it so that I won’t have to do much, I am extremely good at structuring things, it is in fact my entire job —"
"What does much mean? He's man and he asked you to dinner, Emily, he's not going to structure —"
"I'll manage Alex Deschamps —"
"You should not have to manage Alex Deschamps!"
It came out too loud, and Emily saw quite a few tables glance over. Andy sat back, jaw tight, a flush coming up her neck, and put both hands flat on the tablecloth as if to physically hold herself in the chair. Emily watched all of this with her heart going at a pace she elected to ignore, and thought, again, more slowly this time, oh.
"You're being territorial." Emily said.
"I'm being — no I'm not. I'm being your friend, Em, I'm allowed to think it's a bad plan without it being a — I don't even get territorial over the people I date, it is a very –"
"Then you’re being a know-it-all, which you cannot deny. This is the job Andy, I cannot afford to miss out on it because of some stupid – "
"After Benji you told me you hated every single second of it, I will not let you do this again Em–"
"I have no choice! I cannot –"
"Date me." Andy said.
Emily stopped.
The restaurant went on. Somebody's fat candle, somewhere, guttered out. Emily looked at Andy, who had said the sentence fast before she could talk herself out of it, and now looked slightly stunned by her own mouth, but she didn’t take it back.
"I'm sorry," Emily said. "What?"
"Fake-date me, instead." Andy sat forward, and now the reasonable voice was back, the features-editor voice, the one that could sell a cover, and Emily hated that she was already, some traitor part of her, listening. "Think about it, Em. Think about it for just one second before you make that face. What's the actual problem? The actual problem is Prada thinks you're at war with a fashion giant and also thinks that an unbonded omega's a risk. Right? Both of those. So. You get seen, for real, over months, warm and public and believable, with a senior editor at Runway — with the senior features editor at Runway, which, God, that's — Em, my name means something now. And I'm Miranda's right – wait, that’s Nigel – I’m her left hand, everyone knows that. So if I'm with you, if it's clear as day that I'm with you, then there is no war, is there? There's no bad blood between you and the biggest editorial voice in the business, because the biggest editorial voice in the business's left hand is in love with you, publicly, and nobody — not the board, not Prada, nobody — is going to whisper that Miranda's going to torpedo the brand of a woman her own person is bringing to Thanksgiving. It kills all the worries, it kills them dead. And —" Andy's voice snagged, just slightly, but she pushed through it, "and you're not the unbonded flight risk anymore, you're an omega that an alpha like me is publicly, seriously, courting, and that fixes the — that fixes both, in one move. Without you having to go and — without Deschamps."
Emily sat very still.
She was aware, distantly, that the plan was good. It was more than good; it was, she could see already, better than her own plan, cleaner, with fewer moving parts and no fifty five year old widower to be managed across a series of increasingly touchy dinners, and it solved the second problem — the one nobody said out loud, the overhead-compartment one — more completely than Deschamps ever could, because Deschamps was a beta vouching, and Andy was an alpha choosing, and there was a difference, an old and stupid and industry-deep difference. Emily knew exactly how much it was worth in the currency she'd have to spend at Prada, and she declined, firmly, to think about why the number sat so warm in her chest.
"That's insane, I’m not doing that." she said.
"It's not insane."
"It's completely insane, we're friends, everyone we know knows we're friends."
"People fall for their friends all the time, Em, it's the most believable version there is, that's the plot of every second book in your shelf —"
“Do not finish that sentence. And Nigel will know, and Serena will —"
"So we tell the ones who'd guess anyway. Nigel, Lily — you tell Serena. Small circle. Everyone else believes it because it's true enough to feel true, Em." Andy reached out, and for a second Emily thought she was going for the wine again, but she wasn't, she just put her hand down on the tablecloth near Emily's hand, not touching, close, and said, in the quiet under-voice, the second-Andy voice: "I'm not going to let you go date some board member to prove you're worth a job you already earned twice over. I'm just not. So this is the deal I'm offering instead, take the better deal Emily, please."
And Emily, who had not in the last couple of decades taken a deal she hadn't constructed herself, who ran a division and a household and a portfolio of arrangements, looked at Andrea Sachs's hand on the tablecloth an inch from her own, and heard herself say, in a voice that was almost steady:
"We’ll have to go over the plan, so that it is satisfactory and airtight."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is not a yes. It is a I will consider the offer."
"That's a yes."
"It is consideration, Andrea, and if you say the word 'yes' one more time I will dump the rest of the Riesling over your head."
Andy grinned, wide and stupid, and picked her spoon back up to dig into her half of the dessert, almost slumping in with relief in her chair. Emily watched her and drank the last of the Riesling and thought: this is a good plan, it changes nothing, and I feel absolutely nothing about it, and she believed roughly two of those three things, and was fairly sure she knew which two, and chose, as she chose most nights, not to interrogate her feelings towards Andrea Sachs.
The terms
Andy's apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a glass tower in the West Village with a doorman who called Emily and her children by name and a view of the river that Andy had blocked, on one entire wall, with bookshelves, because Runway money and an ex-boyfriend discount had bought her a very expensive apartment and not one atom of interest in behaving like someone who owned one. It smelled like Andy, like warm cognac and vanilla, and whatever she'd cooked, which tonight had been something with a great deal of basilic. Emily was on the sofa with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her and a glass of the wine she'd brought, because Andy's wine was a personal insult to anyone with tastebuds and her fridge usually only housed beer. It was gone eleven on a Saturday, the children were at their father's for the weekend, and Emily had a notebook.
"Oh no," Andy said, from the floor, where she was sitting with her back against the sofa and her legs stretched under the coffee table. "I’m dealing with serious Emily tonight."
"It's a notebook, Andrea, not a summons."
"Is that a header? Did you write a header?"
"Yes." Emily uncapped her pen. "It says Rollout. We are going to do this properly, because if we do it improperly it will look like precisely what it is, and the entire point is that it must not do that. I have thought about it, and I have phases."
"How many?"
"Five, we will not need a sixth."
Andy tipped her head back against the cushion and looked up at Emily, upside down, and Emily looked down at the open, hopeless ease on her stupid face and thought about nothing whatsoever, on purpose.
"Okay," Andy said. "Phase one."
"Phase one: We establish a visible pattern of arriving at industry functions together. Not everything, but a consistent, legible cadence, so that when anyone finally thinks to ask, the answer is already obvious. They've been turning up together for months, where have you been?"
"Emily, I have bad news."
"What?"
"We already do that."
"We do not do that, we occasionally overlap."
"Em, we went to the CFDA dinner together, and the Frick exhibition, and Donatella’s birthday you weren't even invited to because you were beefing and I got you in and then helped you two make up, and then Nigel's birthday, and that gala you dragged me to where the entire menu was foam and textured air. That’s just the last three months, we came together and we left together at all of those, in front of everyone." Andy said all this without care, cheerfully. "So. Phase one. Done. We've been doing it already for more than a year."
Emily wrote Phase 1 — cadence on the pad, and then, after a moment, drew a small line through it, and did not examine why her stomach was starting to unsettle.
"Fine," she said. "Phase two. Pictures. There need to be photographs of us, in the right places, that read as —"
Andy already had her phone out. She thumbed at it, turned it round, and held it up. Emily leaned in and looked at a picture of the two of them at the CFDA awards, Andy in a skintight dress that Emily had made her buy and Emily with two fingers hooked into the straps of it, straightening them, her face tilted up and mid-sentence, and Andy looking down at her, an idiotic smile on her face.
"Patrique from The Social posted it," Andy said. "It's got four thousand likes."
"Four thousand people liked a picture of me adjusting your dress?"
"Four thousand two hundred, there's comments too."
"I don't want to know what the comments say."
"The top one says 'the way she looks at her, ma'am please.'" Andy squinted at the screen. "I don't know which one of us is the ma'am."
"Put it away."
"There's a second one that just says 'WIVES.', all caps."
"Put it away, Andrea." Emily wrote Phase 2 — photographs and drew a line through it as well, harder this time, and had a small horrible thought, which she declined, and reached for her wine instead.
"Phase three," she said, once the wine had done its work. "This is the one that matters. If we are going to be convincing, you will need to know things about me for when we are making conversation in front of our audience. Small specific stuff, anyone can be photographed, but you cannot fake knowing that someone takes their coffee —"
"Two shots, oat milk, a truly deranged amount of foam, in the blue cup only at your office and the porcelain one with the shaun the sheep motif at home. You don't drink it after four pm or you don't sleep, and on the weekends you have the kids you don't have it at all because you don’t want to encourage them to have a caffeine addiction later in life." Andy said it to the ceiling. "What else?"
Emily had opened her mouth to stop her, but Andy was already continuing.
"Bronwyn's allergic to wasps, not bees, her teacher once got it backwards and you were really upset. Roark's middle name is after your grandfather and he doesn't know that yet. Your mother's called Beatrice and you don't talk about her and I don't ask. You hate coriander like it did something to you personally, you cried at the end of Paddington 2 and made me swear I'd never tell or else you’d shave my eyebrows in my sleep. Your ex is Frank, and he's a nightmare, an actual clinical narcissist, and it costs you something at every single handover and you never once let the kids see it cost you, and that’s why you’re a great mother, but I wish you didn’t have to do that." Andy brought her head back down and looked at Emily, still easy, still not understanding what she'd just done. "That kind of thing? That's phase three?"
The apartment was very warm; the cognac and vanilla underneath it. Emily's suppressants held, four hundred dollars a month worth of holding, but something moved under them anyway, at the back of her neck again.
"Yes," she said. "That's phase three."
"Cool. You know enough about me to know you should bring your own wine if you want to drink anything acceptable, so that’s also covered. What's four?"
Emily put the pen down.
"Four is touch," she said, and made it sound as administrative as she could, a line item, a deliverable. "We have never been — we're not a very tactile friendship, we've never needed to be, and that's fine, but the entire thing collapses if we get to a room full of people who are watching for it and we stand two feet apart. So we should establish what's — in bounds. In advance. So it's not a decision anyone has to make in front of a photographer."
"Okay." Andy got up off the floor, unfolding to her full irritating height, and stood there in the low light in her socks looking willing, looking game, and Emily wished, briefly and sincerely, that she had brought a second notebook to hit her on top of the head with. "Show me what's in bounds."
"Sit down, I'm not going to demonstrate."
"How else are we gonna know? Em, you can't spec it on paper, come on. Stand up. It'll take a second."
Emily stood up. It was, she told herself, the pragmatic thing, and she was nothing if not pragmatic.
"A hand," she said. "At the back. Here." She took Andy's wrist — it was warm, everything about Andy was always slightly too warm, an alpha ran hot and this one ran hottest — and set Andy's hand at the small of her own back, above the waistband, correct and legible and minimal. "That. Guiding me through a room. It reads as intimacy and it commits to nothing. We shouldn't need more than that."
"Okay," Andy said, quietly, and did not move her hand.
They stood there. Andy's hand was flat and warm against the small of Emily's back and Andy was close enough now that her scent was not just a fact about the room anymore, it was now a fact six inches away in front of Emily, and Emily's neck did the static thing again, the low unlovely hum of a body noticing what her four hundred dollars a month had spent more than two decades teaching it not to notice. She stood absolutely still and thought, this is fine, this reads, this commits to nothing, and across the small warm distance Andy was looking at her with none of the warmth left in her face, none of it, just the second Andy, the sharp one, looking.
Emily's phone buzzed on the coffee table.
"That'll be Frank," she said, and stepped back. The hand fell away, and the room was just a room again. "About the — Roark won't sleep without his stuffed bear, I have to – Yes. That reads, by the way. Phase four. Fine."
"Yeah," Andy said. "Fine."
Emily did not look at the phone. It had been Serena, asking if they could go for brunch in the morning. She sat back down and picked the notebook up like it was a life raft.
"Phase five," she said, brisk, "the actual reveal, is that there is no reveal. We don't announce it. Announcing is a stunt. We simply — appear, and stand close, and let the pictures and conversations happen, and when someone finally asks either of us directly we say nothing useful but we don't deny it, and we let the industry do the announcing for us, because the industry would so much rather feel clever for having noticed than be told. By March it will be established fact that we've been together for ages, and no one will be able to point to the day it started, because there won't have been one." She capped the pen. "Soft launch. Deny nothing. That's the strategy."
"That's a good strategy," Andy said. She'd sat back down on the floor and was looking at Emily.
"It's an excellent strategy. Nigel will need to know, and Lily, and I'll tell Serena — a small circle, people who'd clock it anyway." Emily looked down at the notebook, at Rollout, at the five phases, three of them crossed out because they were already, apparently, her entire life. "God, we've basically been doing this for two years and forgot to tell ourselves."
She meant it as a joke. It came out as a joke. Andy laughed, the little huff she did, and reached over and stole Emily's wine. Emily let her, and neither of them said anything for a minute, which was itself a thing they were good at.
The rules were solid. Emily had written them down, numbered them, made Andy read subsection two back to her twice — a hand at the back, and nothing that isn't a hand at the back.
They lasted six days.
On the seventh, at a benefit at Cipriani with two hundred guests and a photographer from WWD and a man Emily had once, briefly and disastrously, in another life, nearly married, Andy Sachs would look at that man's hand landing familiarly on Emily's bare arm and forget, all at once and completely, that she had ever agreed to anything at all.
The seventh day
Cipriani on 42nd Street had been a bank once and had never entirely gotten over it — the ceilings went up forever, the marble ran for miles, the whole cavern was built to make a person feel that somewhere out of sight a ledger was being kept and money was being handled with enormous seriousness. Emily had always found it a touch on the nose, but it photographed like a European cathedral, and tonight photographing well was the entire objective. She arrived at 7:57, which for Emily was eight minutes into the danger zone, and she did so on Andy's arm, literally, which was new, and which she had spent the whole ride not thinking about with such discipline that Andy had twice asked her, with real concern, whether she was going to be sick.
"I'm not going to be sick, I'm going to be calculating and cunning."
"They kind of look the same on you," Andy said, and handed the coat-check girl both their coats and got, for it, a smile that came free with Andy, standard issue, like the toy in a kid's meal, then turned back and offered Emily her arm again. Emily took it, because that was subsection one, and looked, briefly, sideways, at the dress Andy was wearing.
The plan, for the first hour, was immaculate.
They did the cadence and they did the pictures. They stood close, they moved through the room as a single unit, Andy's hand settling at the small of Emily's back exactly when the timing called for it and leaving exactly when it didn't, and Emily performed being at ease; the performance running so close to actual ease that she kept forgetting it was one. Serena's dress did what Serena's dresses did. A WWD photographer named Kip, whom Emily had cultivated a relationship with for a decade precisely so that on a night like this he could be pointed at to fire his camera, caught them mid-laugh by the auction tables and said gorgeous, hold that, and they did. Somewhere near the silent auction a woman Emily knew to be very close to the Prada search committee looked at the two of them across the room, and then did a double take. Emily watched the double take and felt the machine she'd built click one notch forward, quietly, on schedule.
It was going, in short, exactly to plan. Which should have been the first sign something was about to go wrong.
"You're smug," Andy whispered, near her ear, plucking two glasses of something off a passing tray. "You’re radiating it."
"I am vindicated, Andrea, and it's earned, look at her —" a tilt of the head toward the search-committee woman — "she's already telling someone. It's working."
"It's working," Andy agreed, and clinked her glass against Emily's, and grinned at her, wide and stupid and pleased,m. Emily thought, for one unguarded second, that this was the easiest performance of her life.
Then Jude Ferrano put his hand on her arm.
She knew it was him before she turned, because the touch sent a shiver or disgust up her spine, and there he was, silver at the temples now. Jude Ferrara, whom she'd dated for the better part of a year a lifetime ago and hadn't laid eyes on in more than fifteen, and who had been the sort of mistake a woman makes exactly once and spends the following decades quietly relieved she survived.
"Emily Charlton," Jude said, delighted. "God. Look at you. You look exactly the same!"
"Jude." She let him kiss her cheek because peeling him off would have made a scene. "You don’t."
"She's still vicious," Jude said, to no one, delighted, and his hand did not leave her bare arm, it had settled there, proprietary and fifteen years out of date. Emily was already composing the graceful three-sentence exit — lovely to see you but you must excuse us — she had it loaded, she was a professional, she handled men like him with ease nowadays.
And then Andy was there.
One moment Andy she had been at the next table over being adored by a passing waiter she was chatting with, and the next she'd walked straight through the distance the rules had spent the entire night regulating. She did not come stand besides her and put her hand at the small of Emily's back, she stood at her back and put an arm all the way around her and pulled her in flush against her front. And then, she did the unspeakable: she bent her head and put her nose to Emily's neck — not her cheek, not her hair, her neck, up under the jaw, at the pulse, the one square inch of Emily that decades of suppressants had been paid a fortune to keep quiet — and breathed in, slow, without lifting her head.
In public.
Her mouth was an inch off Emily's pulse and a low sound was running somewhere in her chest that Emily felt in her own sternum rather than heard. The scent that came off Andy was a hot dark wave that no compound sold in any pharmacy on earth had ever been built to ignore, and it went straight past the four hundred dollars a month and crashlanded at the base of Emily's spine then unpacked its bags. Emily stood dead still and thought:
Nothing. Not one single word formed in her head.
Jude's hand had come off her arm immediately, she didn’t even notice the withdrawal.
"Hi," Andy said, into her neck. Then she lifted her head, finally, arm still locked around Emily, and turned the full wattage of herself on Jude: every tooth, not one of them friendly. "Sorry, didn't mean to barge in. Andrea. And you are?"
"Jude, Uhh… Emily and I, we go way back, we used to —"
"Oh," Andy said, "I know you! The ex wet the bed till he was thirteen." She stopped, then appeared to really realize what she’d said and had the decency to briefly look appalled at herself. She did not, however, unwind her arm by a single degree. "Sorry. That was — it's nice to meet you, Jude. You should come find us later." Us. She'd founded a nation in eight seconds, drawn the border, and put Emily's name on the flag.
Kip's flash went off somewhere to Emily's left.
Emily was aware, in the detached corner of her mind that was still taking minutes, that this was a catastrophe. It was the opposite of the plan, which was subtlety, deniability, a soft slow leak the industry could feel clever for noticing. Andy had just, in front of more than two hundred people and the most reprinted camera in American fashion, put her nose to Emily's throat and breathed in like the two of them were a fortnight out from a bonding. It was mortifying. Emily wanted to die, but she also wanted, at this moment, several other things she had every intention of never once naming or addressing.
Emily did the only thing left to a professional whose careful plan has just been set alight by her own accomplice, which was to lean into the fire as if it didn’t burn. She let her hand settle flat on Andy's chest, over the lapel,and she looked up at her; she let her whole face go soft and sweet in a manner she never showcased in public. And she said, for Jude, for Kip, for the search-committee woman, for the entire room:
"Darling, be nice."
"I'm always nice," Andy said, looking down at her, and had the audacity, the sheer infuriating audacity, to smile.
Jude excused himself as the camera’s flash went off again. And into the small ringing aftermath, arrived Miranda Priestly, who had been watching. She stopped in front of them for exactly as long as it took to give both of them an appraising onceover.
"Emilys." Miranda said.
One word, then a small inclination of the head. The first syllable Miranda Priestly had aimed in Emily's direction since Milan, delivered in front of the entire room. And then she was gone, into the crowd, having uttered one single word and rearranged Emily's entire professional future with it, never once breaking stride.
Emily stood there with her hand still on Andy's chest and understood immediately that the plan had just worked. Not despite the catastrophe, but because of it. The soft launch would have taken until March to buy what Andy had just bought in one reckless second.
"I'm sorry," Andy said, eyes downcast, once they'd got themselves to the relative dark of a marble alcove near the coatroom. She looked like a kicked puppy. "Em. That wasn't cool — I broke, like, every rule. I’m so sorry, it’s just that his hand was on your arm and I just, I don't know, I remembered all the awful stories you told me about him and I just couldn’t help it."
"We said hand at my back and you put your entire face in my neck, Andrea."
"I know, I’m sorry."
"In front of a very large camera. That picture is going to be everywhere tomorrow."
"I'll fix it, I can find Kip, I can —"
"You will not touch Kip." Emily sighed, forced herself to keep talking just so that the woman in front of her would stop looking so sad. "It worked, you enormous idiot. Miranda acknowledged me, she said my name because you — " Emily stopped, reset, because she didn’t want to think about Andy’s face in her—. "The plan worked, that is the only thing that matters."
"Okay," Andy said, finally looking up at her. "I’m still really sorry, do you forgive me? Please forgive me."
“Ugh, yes. Just stop looking so pathetic.”
Neither of them addressed the elephant in the room, the real why. They were, it was turning out, very good at denial; they had years of practice. It was, after all, the foundation of the friendship.
The worst-kept secret
The picture ran on the WWD site at 6:15 the next morning. Emily saw it at the moment it was posted because she had been awake since 5:30, refreshing the page. By 7:00 her phone had begun to vibrate incessantly with the back to back messages she started receiving.
She had looked at the picture exactly once, as a professional leading a PR campaign, and then closed the tab. As a professional she could confirm that it was a triumph. Kip had caught the highlight: Andy holding her from behind, face nuzzled in her neck, both eyes shut; and Emily with one hand flat on top of the arm encircling her, head tilted to give access. The picture read exactly as intended, and then a good deal further, into dangerous territory; and under it WWD's Eye column had run three sentences:
Seen at Friday's gala, cozy at the silent auction: Coach's Emily Charlton and Runway's Andrea Sachs, in what one guest called the industry's worst-kept secret. Charlton — tipped for a large move to a certain Italian house — wore Serena Kaur. Sachs wore the look of a woman in love.
"She is not in love." Emily said, to no one, and put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
The texts came shortly afterwards: Nigel first, at 6:47, a single line — Congratulations on the ceasefire. — which meant the thaw was real. Her assistant at 7:02, three exclamation marks and six hearts, followed immediately by a second text apologising for the first. A former colleague she loathed, at 7:31, inserting himself where he shouldn’t. Frank at 7:44, a paragraph that opened with We should talk and went on to explain, at length, that Emily was of course free to do as she liked, but that he'd have preferred to be consulted before she paraded a new partner in front of his children, and that this was, frankly, rather a lot of attention to be courting, and had she really thought about how it looked — which was so Frank, three hundred words of concern for the children that were in fact three hundred words about him. Emily read it once, felt the specific tightening at the base of her skull that a decade of Frank had installed there like a fixture, and gave all of his messages a thumbs down.
And Serena at 7:12, 7:13, 7:13, 7:15, and 7:29, in a rising sequence: I dressed you. / I put aside that dress for you for MONTHS and told my assistant no one else could have it / Emily. / EMILY YOU CUNT / Get dressed and meet me at KafKaf in an hour, we're getting coffee and you're going to explain what is happening line by line or I will style you exclusively in beige for the rest of your life.
Emily got dressed. Some fights were worth having and this was not one of them.
Serena’s favourite brunch place was a café with marble tables and a fifteen-dollar cortado, and she was already at a table in the window when Emily walked in, wearing enormous sunglasses and munching on a pastry.
"Hello, traitor." Serena said.
"Stop being dramatic."
"My best friend went behind my back and let an alpha she’s been gaslighting me about put her stupid mouth on her neck in front of two hundred people and Patrick Demarchelier's second-favourite photographer and did not send me so much as a warning; so forgive me if I feel betrayed." She took a small vicious bite of the pastry. "You look like you slept beautifully, by the way. It's disgusting, marked women always sleep like the dead.."
"I am not marked, and lower your voice, it was not — it’s not what it looks like."
Serena put down the pastry and took off her sunglasses; this was, Emily realized, serious now.
"Explain," she said, "what it is."
So Emily explained, over the fifteen-dollar cortado: the Prada opening, the two other candidates, the hesitation, the Miranda problem, the second problem underneath the Miranda problem, the Deschamps plan and Andy's refusal of it, then the counter-offer, the phases, the rollout, all of it. She unveiled it end to end, and explained out loud to another adult, it was an extremely good plan. She was rather proud of it, proud of Andy, and she waited for Serena's face to transform into admiration.
It did not. It instead transformed into bafflement — real bafflement, as if Emily was the stupidest person Serena has ever come across.
"Wait," Serena said. "Wait. So it's — you're telling me it's fake?!"
"Fake and strategic, yes."
"You are pretending to be with Andy, for a job? And Andy — Andy agreed to this? To pretend?"
"Andy proposed it. It was her idea, she wouldn't let me go the Deschamps way, she got all… you know how she gets. She offered this instead, as a favour, because her name is worth something now and it’s tangled up with Miranda; and the plan fixes both of my problems at once, and it's working, Serena, Miranda said my name and –"
"Pull up the picture."
"You've already seen it."
"I want to see it again."
Emily got out her phone, and put it on the marble table between them. Serena did not touch it, she just looked at it for a long moment, and then she looked up at Emily. Her face had gone gentle, almost pitying, which was way worse than the teasing.
"We’ve been to so many events together, you and I." Serena said. "I know every angle you have, every fake face you make, we used to practice them together. And I am telling you that this —" one lacquered nail, not quite tapping the phone, just pointing, "is a face I have never once seen. Never."
"She startled me. I told you, there was Jude, he put his hand on my arm, and Andy's an alpha, they do that, it's reflex, it doesn't mean anything."
"What about you, though? You leaned in."
Emily said nothing.
"You can fake a hand," Serena said, "You can fake a smile, you can fake the whole phases — that part I believe. But she put her nose in your throat, and your body did not react like a body enduring an unwanted touch." She sat back. "I know bodies, it's my entire job.”
"Serena." Emily heard her own voice climb and hauled it down. "Andy and I are friends. That's all it is. We've been friends for two years, good friends, the best — and this is a favour between friends and there are no — I don't have feelings for Andy, and Andy does not have feelings for me. It's the whole reason the plan works, actually, because there's nothing there to get in the way, if there were something there it would be a catastrophe."
Serena looked at her for a moment. Then she picked her pastry back up, and took a bite, and chewed it, entirely at her leisure.
"I believe," Serena said, once she stopped chewing, "that you have a very good plan. I believe it is working. I believe you are going to get your dream job, and I am happy for you, you know that." She reached across and, with one finger, turned off Emily's,"I also believe that the day this stops being a favour, you are going to call me, and you are going to be very freaking out, and it is going to take you at least an hour to get to the actual sentence. And when you do, I will clear my afternoon and we will talk. "
"There will be no such day."
"Whatever you say." Serena agreed, warmly, not believing her in the slightest, and pushed the untouched half of the pastry across the table at last, because the interrogation was apparently over. "Eat something. You've been marked, you'll be starving by noon, it's science."
"I am not marked."
An ordinary Sunday
The children came back from Frank's slightly off, as usual — Roark too quiet and Bronwyn gone stomping and a full inch more guarded than the daughter Emily had handed over on Friday. Frank himself did not come up, he texted downstairs from the car and let the doorman handle the rest, because coming up would have meant standing inside the home Emily had built without him, and he hated anything where he was not the center of affection. Emily met them at the lift and hugged them both, dropping a kiss on top of Bronwyn’s head as her daughter said, before her coat was even off:
"You're on the internet."
"I'm on the internet a great deal, darling, it comes with the job. Take your shoes off, you're tracking the whole of Manhattan across the floor."
"Dad showed us." Bronwyn stepped out of her shoes without looking at them, holding Emily's eyes with the clever stare she'd got from her and turned, over eleven years, into a weapon Emily had no defense for. "He said it was 'quite something.’"
That was the whole weekend in one sentence: Frank looking for the picture, or rather getting it delivered to his inbox because she was quite sure he had a google alert with her name on it, and deciding it was a thing that had happened to him, gathering the children round the screen to narrate his own magnanimous wounding, quite something, until a ten year old and a twelve year old understood that the correct response to their mother's face in a newspaper was to worry about their father's feelings.
"It's a nice photograph," she said, breezily, taking Roark's coat. "Andy and I were at a work event. Now, she’s coming for lunch, so I need one of you to — "
"ANDY," said Roark, and whistled, a single piercing note he'd added to his repertoire a few weeks ago, and went off down the hall to prepare, God only knew how, for Andy.
Bronwyn looked at her mother for one more second, twisting her mouth, and then padded off to her room in her socks, leaving Emily standing in the hall holding two coats.
Andy knocked at 12:30, despite having a spare key, holding a bakery box with her hair wet from the rain. Roark answered the door before Emily could get to it and started talking her ear off with no preamble, Andy crouching down to hug him, asking follow-up questions, requesting a demonstration, wincing gratifyingly at the volume of his voice. Emily stood in the kitchen doorway and watched an alpha who ran a features desk give her silly son the undivided attention Frank had never once given him in ten years, and had to bite the inside of her cheek for a moment.
Then Andy stood up and spotted Emily, and something went slightly wrong with both of them at once.
It was the scent, the warm cognac and vanilla, and Emily's body remembered exactly where it had last taken it in — a throat, a pulse, two hundred people — and Andy clearly remembered hers too, because she stopped in the doorway a beat too long and then came into the kitchen too carefully, and said, "Hey," in a voice that was very unsteady..
"Hello," Emily replied, formal..
"I brought éclairs, the ones Bronwyn likes."
"Lovely. Thank you. There's coffee, if you —"
"Thank you, but I’d rather have some of your tea today, if that’s okay."
They stood in the kitchen, four feet apart, being polite, and it was awful. Two years of the easiest thing in Emily's life and they were passing each other the sugar like strangers. Andy reached for a mug at the same moment Emily reached to move the box and their hands came near each other over the counter; both of them pulled back as though the counter stung, and Andy laughed, a small mortified sound. Emily did not, because she was too busy being furious at both of them.
"About Friday," Andy started, low, "I really am sor– "
"You have already apologized, it’s fine."
"I know, I just — I don't want it to be weird, and it's a little weird right now, so I want to say —"
"Andrea, it is not weird, we are two adults executing a strategy, a PR campaign, and you simply identified the KPIs —"
"Oh god, not the KPIs. Do you want to circle back too?"
"You are the one who keeps circling back when I’ve already said it’s fi—"
"Why are you both being so weird?" Bronwyn asked, from the kitchen’s doorway.
She had come in silently, in the socks and pyjamas Andy had given as a joke, for a glass of water or for reconnaissance, she herself didn’t know which. She stood there with her arms folded and her head tilted at the exact angle Emily's own head went when Emily had caught someone in a lie, and she was looking between the two of them — the four careful feet, the pulled-back hands, the box of éclairs sitting between them — and squinting.
"Your mother," Andy said, straightening up, easy again, all of it gone, "is refusing to admit she loves the chocolate éclairs as much as you do. She keeps saying they’re just fine.'"
"They are just fine."
"They're your favourite. I've watched you have three last time, and then–"
"I have never in my life had three of anything, take that back."
"Bronwyn, back me up, is your mom a person who admits when she likes something?"
"No," said Bronwyn, perking up at the stupid argument, her arms uncrossing, the suspicion draining out of her posture as the ordinary music of the two of them going back and forth and her mother getting irrationally worked up washed the strange mood away. Because this was normal, this was the sound of every Sunday she could remember in the last few months, her mum and Andy going at each other over nothing at the kitchen counter and then laughing. "She once told Serena a dress was 'acceptable' and then wore it to three things."
"Thank you. See!" Andy pointed an éclair at Emily. "Your own child."
"My own child is a traitor and will get nothing." Emily took the treat out of Andy's hand and gave it to Bronwyn, who took it and rolled her eyes and went back to her room. It was fine, it was over, the danger had passed, the two of them had papered the whole cracked wall over in nine seconds flat with the oldest wallpaper they owned: harmless arguing.
It was only afterward, loading the dishwasher while Andy taught Roark a board game at the table that Roark was flagrantly cheating at with Andy pretending not to notice, that it occurred to Emily that they had still not gone anywhere near the real why.
She put the plate on the rack. Across the kitchen Roark laid down his dice with a flourish and a whistle and Andy said "you cannot possibly have had that," delighted, betrayed, alight, and Emily watched the two of them and felt something.
Bronwyn caught her eye from the hall. She had, it turned out, not gone as far as her room; opting instead to hide and look at her mother looking at Andy. Emily had to turn back to the sink, outnumbered now, in her own kitchen, by people who noticed everything.
A month of it
By the end of the month the lie had a life of its own, and Emily, who had built it, found herself increasingly in its employ rather than its authorship. It went to parties, it got quoted, it turned up in a Business of Fashion round-up of "power couples reshaping the industry conversation," an article Emily printed out and put in a drawer for no reason at all. Prada moved a callback interview from possibly February to a firm date two months out and sent, via their best talent acquisition specialist, a note that used the word excited twice. The machine ran better than any machine Emily had ever built, and the only maintenance it required was that she keep turning up to dinner with Andrea Sachs, which she had been doing for two years for free.
She started bringing Andy lunch at Runway on Wednesdays, for the optics of course: a senior editor's partner sweeping in with lunch on Wednesdays was exactly the kind of tiny, thoughtful, and repeated intimacy that sold a lie far better than any grand gesture. It was low-key and proprietary, and if the optics happened to require Emily to walk the length of the Runway floor at 1 p.m. while people who had once watched her run to fulfill every one of Miranda’s whims now watched her arrive as the senior features’ editor’s beloved, well, that was simply a plus.
Andy, being Andy, had amassed a legion of appreciators via simple acts of kindness, who had decided to root for them the moment that cursed/blessed WWD picture had run. The interns held doors for Emily, the closet girls sighed as she walked by, and a beauty editor she had never met told her, in the elevator, that she was "obsessed with her whole thing,".
Andy's office had, additionally, begun to fill up with Emily. Not on purpose, of course. But now there was a scarf of hers on the coat rack she'd left three Wednesdays ago, one of her favourite mugs – she was very particular about mugs, and everything else, really – which had migrated from her office to here. There was also a framed drawing on the desk, small and messy, that Roark had made at school and given to Andy unprompted. Andy had framed it, and Emily had seen it the first time and had to go stand by the window and pretend to look at the view.
"I need to start bringing you breakfast or something. I feel like a leech." Andy said, from the desk, unwrapping the sandwich Emily had gotten her.
"You already do that on Sundays. I’d like it if you stopped actually, you’re going to wreck my waistline."
"Never. Nigel says hi, by the way. He also says, and I'm quoting, 'tell Emily her fake relationship is the most functional thing on this floor,' which — he’s been beefing with the new stylists."
"Nigel should mind his business."
"He's not wrong though." Andy said it casually, not looking up, and there was a small awful pause in the office. She could not bear it, and continued "The sandwich is incredible by the way. They really don’t skimp on anything, and the sauce is –” Andy kept rambling, and Emily let her do it. They left Nigel’s comment on the window ledge, next to everything else.
Andy took her to dinner on Fridays now, every Friday, with the primary goal being enjoying themselves and the secondary one being seen. She took her to loud places with photographers loitering out front and a maître d' who knew to seat them where they'd be noticed. They always wore their best outfits, sometimes matching, – not egregiously like those corny couples, more subtle, Andy wearing a dress with a gold clasp and Emily matching it with her jewelry; or one of them wearing black trousers while the other opted for a black blouse – and they performed. They were, it had to be said, extraordinary at it; Emily had watched real couples do worse. Andy's hand at the small of her back, Andy's whole face beaming at her while she talked, Emily laughing at everything Andy said — it was a masterclass.
The trouble came in the parts with no audience. One Friday a man from the Prada orbit stopped by the table, and they performed for him: six minutes of in-love, after which he left charmed and useful. It was a full four or five minutes after he'd gone — after there was no one left to sell anything to, no camera, no committee, no reason on God's earth to keep doing it — that Emily noticed Andy's thumb was still moving, slowly, along the inside of her wrist, on the table near their glasses of wine. She herself had not moved her arm; they had been sitting like that, performing for an empty room, for some time.
Emily looked at the thumb, then at Andy, who was telling a story about the stylists Nigel hated and who was paying no mind to what her hand was doing.
"You can stop," Emily said. "He's gone."
"Stop what?"
Emily did not answer, and she did not move her arm. Neither did Andy, who went on with the stylist story while her thumb went on with what it was doing. Emily drank her wine and let her, and hated, furiously, how much she was not hating any of it.
The rules eroded slowly. There was no longer a regulated touching subsection; there had been no meeting to repeal it, it had simply stopped being a rule and became a habit. The hand at her back settled now whether or not anyone was watching, the scent-mark at the neck that had started as a thing they did for cameras had become, a ritual Andy did at the door on the way in or while they hugged hello or goodbye, and Emily now, God help her, tilted her head for it.
On top of that, Andy became a fixed addition to their Sundays. Bronwyn watched them with increasingly suspicious eyes, and Roark simply and loudly loved Andy without complication. And when Frank sent his monthly paragraph — this one about how he wasn't sure it was appropriate, how the children shouldn't be "props in a an attention-starved woman’s publicity arrangement," a sentence that had been so accurate that Emily read it three times looking for the leak before deciding he'd simply guessed cruelly and well, as was his habit — she made the mistake of mentioning it out loud at the Friday dinner, and watched the smile on Andy's face turn to a sneer.
"He called them props?" Andy said.
"It's Frank, he’s said worse. He needs the children to be about him at all times."
"He called the kids props." Andy's voice hadn't risen at all, but Emily felt the chill present in it. "Roark drew him a whale he tossed and Bronwyn made him a bracelet at school and he — Em, he called you attention starved and I'm just supposed to sit here and —"
"You are supposed to sit here and eat your dinner and not, under any circumstances, do anything. I have co-parented with that narcissist for six years and the one thing that works, the only thing, is starving him of the reaction. You glowering at me across a restaurant like you want to go and find him is not helping, it's — " Emily stopped, because Andy was still looking at her like that, furious on her behalf, wholly on her side, and no one besides Serena had ever once in Emily's adult life been simply on her side against Frank without an angle. It turned out she did not have an appropriate reaction ready for that; when Serena had done it, she had felt grateful. With Andy doing it, she clenched her legs.
"Okay," Andy said, gentler. "Fine. I'll eat my dinner."
"Thank you."
"I still think he needs his ass beat." Andy frowned. "Threats of violence are a no-no, I know, but let me have this."
"I'll allow it," Emily said, and drank the wine.
Like all good things in Emily’s life, there comes a time where they go wrong: Her heat was due.
She worked it out mid-biweekly meeting, counting back through weeks, something she had never had to do because the suppressants made the calendar a formality. She found that the formality had a date on it, and the date was close, and that her body had known it was close for a while without giving her a heads up, because something in her it had been keeping its own count since the whole Jude fiasco had happened, underneath the four hundred dollars. Months of a warm scent at every door door and a thumb on her wrist and a face at her neck saying goodbye, and her body, dutiful, suppressed, twenty-odd years obedient, had apparently decided to mount a revolution. Or rather, have the revolution mount it.
It was fine, she was not worried. The suppressants would hold, as they always did. She upped nothing and told no one and simply chose to put the whole ordeal out of her mind, which she was excellent at; she had put a great many things out of her mind in her life and had the technique down cold.
She could not, however, ignore that on Friday, when Andy leaned in to say goodbye and put her nose to Emily's neck out of a habit, that Andy went still for a fraction of a second longer than usual. Andy breathed in, paused, and drew back with a small strange look, an alpha catching the very first far-off edge of something in the air that the suppressants had not quite, this time, kept all the way quiet.
"You smell —" Andy started, and frowned, and didn't finish.
"New Eau de parfum, very expensive, very niche." Emily said, briskly, doing up her coat. "Goodnight, Andrea. I’ll be busy next Wednesday, so get your own lunch." And she left, quickly, before either of them could stand in the doorway and find out what the end of Andy's sentence was.
The coup
It hit her in the middle of a slide deck, a small personal insult from her own body — after more than twenty years of exemplary, medicated, invisible service, her body chose to stage its return on a Wednesday, at 2:15, in the twelveth minute of a presentation to the Coach bag designers about spring accessories.
She noticed it first as heat, which was accurate to the name the whole phenomenon was given. It was a flush that started at the back of her neck and rolled forward, up over her jaw, down her spine, gathering and rolling. She signaled to her assistant to adjust the thermostat with the little remote she kept by her water glass and kept talking: Handbag margins, regional rollout, etc… She was so good at this she could do it in her sleep; she realised, however, somewhere around the second flush, that she was going to have to do it a little more awake, because her attention had begun to come loose from her sentences and drift. The room started to feel very suffocating, the light too bright, and her blouse — silk, expensive, chosen that morning by a woman who'd had no idea — rubbed against her skin almost abrasively.
And then, with no warning whatsoever, in the middle of a sentence about leather sourcing, she thought about Andy.
Just Andy, not a memory of her, but the fact of her: her warmth, her scent which always made Emily both relaxed and more alert, the specific broad line of her shoulders under a nicely tailored coat. It all crashed into Emily's chest with a force she lost the sentence about foundries and ethical sourcing entirely. She stood at the head of the table with a clicker in her hand and eight people waiting, her mouth open around a word that had left the premises; and for one appalling second the only thought in her head was I want my Andy.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to hand the rest to Devon," she said, setting the clicker down, her voice giving away nothing, while her hand clenched into a fist behind her back. "Something's come up. Robert has the numbers on outerwear, he'll walk you through them; if you have any questions you can address them to assistant. Thank you all."
She got out of the room, past her assistant, who half rose and was waved back down. She got into her own office and shut the door, standingwith her back against it. Only then did she let herself understand what was happening: It was a heat. A real one. The first in over two decades to get past the wall she paid four hundred dollars a month to keep standing.
It was not politely announcing itself; it was already through the door and up the stairs, laying in her bed with its legs crossed. It was deep restless ache that had set up somewhere between her legs, an insistent ache, an emptiness with an opinion about how it wanted to be filled, or rather, by who. Her skin had gone hypersensitive, every seam of her clothing feeling like sandpaper.
And under all of it was the pull; a specific, undeniable, humiliating pull toward the one thing years of pharmaceuticals had taught her body to stop wanting and had, apparently, only ever managed to teach it to shut up about. An alpha. Not the idea of one, but a particular one, whose name the ache kept repeating, over and over again.
She texted her assistant to reschedule her meetings shortly after texting her doctor for a note of dispensation. Then she stood in her office at half past two in the afternoon, gripping the edge of her own desk, trying to get herself under enough control so that she could leave before it got worse.
She kept the window down in the car on the way home, and kept her spine very straight, because she was Emily Charlton and she would sit up straight through the apocalypse. There was one thing she had to do before she stopped being able to do things properly: cancel all of her plans with Andy for the first time since they reconnected two years ago. And so she sent a text.
I can't do dinner either today. Very busy, I’ll see you this weekend.
She deleted the don't worry about me she had typed because Andy would read that and worry immediately and probably crash through her door with soup, then she sent the message and shoved her phone in the depths of her bag.
The children were with Frank until Sunday, it was the one uninterrupted week he was entitled to once every three months. She had, at least, that — a mercy so large she nearly sat down on the floor of her own kitchen out of gratitude for it, because the alternative, the version of this afternoon that contained Bronwyn and Roark's noise, she was not sure she could survive without crying.
She was alone. She could manage this alone in the same way she had always managed everything else including raising two children; it was practically a pillar of how she experienced things.
She would manage this too.
She tried a cold shower first, because trying a cold bath and then moving on to despair.
The bath worked for the length of time she sat submerged in it. The cold was clarifying and it made her shiver violently, but throughout it she thought there, manageable, fine. Then she got out of it and reached for a towel, and her own skin flared immediately, worse than before. She stood dripping in her bathroom and laughed at the sheer futility as her phone started ringing in the other room. She knew, without getting to it, who was on the other end.
She let it ring out, and then it started again almost at once. She let that go to voicemail too, and then she padded into the bedroom in the dark — she'd drawn every blind, some animal part of her wanting the flat dim and small and den-like— and she looked at the screen, at Andy and a little photo of Andy that Roark had taken, laughing, mouth open. She held the phone and did not answer, because to answer was to speak, and to speak, in the state she was in, was to be heard, and she could not be heard right now, not by anyone, and least of all by her.
The messages came immediately after.
hey what do you mean you’re busy till the weekend? can i help?
em? everything ok?
ok you're not answering i feel like ur sick again and avoiding me like last time.
my assistant texted urs and apparently u left the office mid meeting??????!!!
She turned the phone all the way off after that one.
The emergency suppressant was in the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind all the meds, in a box she had never opened since they day she came home with it. Her doctor had given them to her years ago — just in case, they're brutal, you won't like how they feel, but if you're ever mid heat cause you forgot a pill these will do the job most of the time. She dry-swallowed one standing at the sink, watching herself in the mirror, a flushed and glassy stranger with her hair wet from the bath, and gripped the edge of the basin as she waited for the wall to come back up.
She gave it forty minutes. Nothing happened. Somewhere in the first ten minutes she understood that the pill was not going to work, that whatever her body had going through was past the reach of anything she could take, and that the little pill sitting uselessly in her bloodstream was a fire extinguisher in a house that was already turned to ashes. She sank down to the cool bathroom floor with her back against the tub and her knees drawn up and pressed the heels of both hands into her eyes and, for the first time in a very long time, cried.
She sat on a bathroom floor with her whole competent mind gone soft and useless and singing one name at her over and over, and the terrible truth was that she knew exactly what would help. She knew precisely what her body wanted, and it was not a cold shower or a pill; and it was across the city losing her mind because Emily was not answering her texts.
She did not call her.
That did not mean she didn’t come.
At seven in the evening, the buzzer went off. By then, Emily was curled up on the sofa, wrapped in one of Andy's shirts that the alpha had forgotten on one of their grown-up sleepovers. She had spent the entire afternoon riding a pillow until her thighs shook with Andy’s name on her tongue, and the only thing the entire endeavour had rewarded her with was one subpar ruined orgasm.
The sound of the buzzer kept going, but she did not move. She lay very still and heard it go again, and then, after a silence in which she let herself believe she'd won, she heard the front door open; because of course Andy had a key for when she helped Emily out with the kids. She heard Andy's voice come down the dark hall, worried:
"Em? It's me, don't get up — I brought the ginger ale you like and some noodles from the Sichuanese place down the street. I'm not staying, I just want to see your face, because your texts were extremely concerning and the last time you texted me like that it turned out you were trying to hide pneumonia. I'm just going to look at you for my own sake and then I'll—" Andy stopped, mid-sentence.
Emily knew exactly what had stopped it, because she felt the shift in the air the moment Andy came far enough in to breathe what Emily had been breathing alone for five hours, and understood.
The bag of soup was set down on the floor.
"Oh," Andy said. Not gentle now. "Oh, you have got to be — Emily."
"Don't start."
"How long?"
"Go home, Andrea."
"I am NOT doing this with you, how long."
"Since half past two." Emily kept her face tucked in the blanket. "It's fine. I left work, I came home, I took an emergency suppressant, it's being handled —"
"You left?" Andy's voice had gone somewhere Emily had almost never heard it go. "You were at your office in the middle of Manhattan when your heat broke through and your first move was to get in a car. Alone with a driver? You went out into the city like this—"
"I got home perfectly fine."
"Do you have any idea —" Andy stopped, and Emily heard her drag in a breath, and when she resumed speaking she was furious. "An unbonded omega, in heat, alone in a car with a stranger and then alone in a flat for five hours with her phone turned off — do you understand what that is? Do you understand how that could have gone? Any fucked up alpha in this building, in that lift, on that street could have — oh my fucking god Emily! You'd have been on your own, and nobody would have known where you were, because you turned your phone off, Em—"
"I am not a child, Andy.” She almost yelled. “I have been managing this body without your supervision for forty-three years—"
"Not this. Not once— you told me yourself you've never once let it break through, so don't stand there and tell me you had it handled, because you didn't, you have never done this before in your life—" Andy took a step into the room. "You should’ve called me! Instead you switched your phone off and sat here alone in the dark. Why didn't you call me?"
Emily, who had lain in the dark for five hours not calling her precisely so as never to have to answer that question, sat up and glared at Andy. The room tilted and steadied. But she sat up and turned and looked at Andy across the dim flat.
Andy looked wrecked, furious and frightened in equal measure; and Emily, because she was cornered, because she was in agony, because the only defence she had ever had was to attack, went for her.
"Call you for what, Andrea?" There was no almost about the yelling anymore. "Go on. Say it. What exactly was I meant to call you for? What did you imagine you were going to do about it — drive across town with your soup and hold my hand? Read to me? You want me to have rung you up and said what, precisely — Andrea, I'm in heat, come round?" She was on her feet now, her whole body shaking. "Is that the call you're upset I didn't make? Because you and I both know exactly what that call would’ve turned into, we have both known it for a while, so don't stand in my flat and pretend you're angry about a phonecall, have the decency to be angry about the actual thing bothering you."
"I'm not angry about a phonecall!" It tore out of Andy, at last, and she crossed the last of the room in two strides. "I'm angry because you could have been hurt, and you'd rather have been hurt, alone, than pick up a phone and let me —"
"Let you what? Fuck me?"
They were close now — too close, not even a foot apart, both of them breathing hard, the argument having walked them straight into the one place the argument had been about the whole time. Andy's mouth was still open around the rest of the sentence she didn’t get to finish. She didn’t answer, because the answer was already in the six inches of hot dark air between her mouth and Emily's, and the scent of her was everywhere now, making Emily's whole body surged forward. Emily watched the fight go out of Andy's face and something far more dangerous come into it, and understood that they had run entirely out of things to shout.
"Em," Andy said, low, wrecked, barely anything. "Tell me to go."
"No." Emily said.
She got a hand in the front of Andy's shirt, and pulled until the last inch closed. Andy's mouth crashed against hers, two years and three months and five hours of want unraveling. Emily felt Andy's hands finally, finally stop holding themselves back — one at her jaw, one at the small of her spine, pulling her in — and felt the whole restless unbearable ache of the last five hours turn, at last, toward the only thing that had ever been going to answer it. The relief of it almost took her knees out from under her.
In Emily fashion, she bit Andy's lower lip — not playfully, but with intent, aiming to take back control, because she was not a person who received things passively. The kiss was a fight for about four seconds before Andy's hand came up and closed around her jaw and held her still and took the upper hand, and Emily's resistance dissolved into something she didn't have a name for.
That was new.
Andy walked her backward down the hall, hands on the waistband of the shorts Emily had been wearing — Andy's shorts, actually, a pair of cotton ones left behind on a Sunday that Emily had put on without thinking and then thought about for five hours — until Emily's back hit the bedroom doorframe.
"Bed," She hissed as Andy pulled back. "Now."
They made it to the bed, barely. Emily got her shirt off and Andy pulled hers over her head in the same graceless tandem, and Emily looked at her — bare, flushed, the lines of her shoulders and stomach lit by soft golden lamp — and the heat inside her clenched like a fist.
"Off," Emily said, reaching for Andy's belt. "All of it."
"Bossy."
"Are you complaining?"
Andy wasn't. Andy was shoving everything down and off, kicking it away, and then they were on the bed and Emily was on her back and Andy was over her, between her legs, and the first press of her against Emily — bare, hard, hot, thick — dragged a sound out of Emily that she had never produced in her life. It came from low in her chest, raw and involuntary, and she felt Andy still against her.
"Jesus, Em," Andy said, against her neck, and her voice had dropped into a register Emily had never heard from her, low and rough, the alpha underneath the harmless puppy finally standing up. "You're so wet, I can feel you."
"I've been wet for five hours, it’s not for you, so unless you want a written report —"
"Turn over."
Emily looked at her. Andy looked back, and her face was not the face Emily knew. The easy grin was gone, the soft second-Andy focus sharpened into something with teeth in it, something that held Emily in place without touching her. Her hand was on Emily's hip and her grip was not gentle, and Emily's body — which had been running the show since 2:15 — said yes before her pride could object.
She turned over. Hands and knees, on her own bed, amidst her own sheets, in her own dark bedroom, with Andy's hands on her hips from behind and the warm cognac-and-vanilla scent of her so close and so concentrated that Emily could taste it at the back of her throat.
Andy's mouth landed on the back of her neck. Emily expected a kiss, expected softness, but instead she got teeth — closed, firm, just under the hairline where a collar would cover it — and her arms buckled. Andy held the bite for three seconds, then released, and Emily felt the indent of it throb in time with her pulse, a dull warm ache that radiated down her spine.
"Did you just bite me, you savage?"
Andy didn't answer. Her mouth moved down — the knob of Emily's spine between her shoulder blades, a bite at the curve where her neck met her back, harder this time — and Emily pressed her forehead to the mattress and breathed through it. Andy's tongue followed each bite, flat and hot over the marks, and then another bite, lower, at the top of her shoulder blade. Emily realized, distantly, that Andy was working her way down her back the way a person reads a page, top to bottom, leaving notes in the margin.
"Stop — marking me —"
"No."
"Andrea —"
"Mine." Andy's mouth was at the dip of her lower back now, teeth grazing the skin, and the words vibrated against Emily's skin.
"I am not —"
Andy's mouth went lower. Hands on Emily's hips, pulling her up and back, and then Andy's tongue was between her legs from behind and Emily's entire body seized and forgot whatever protest had been forming.
She ate Emily like she was starving, like the five hours Emily had spent alone had been Andy's five hours too and she was making up for every minute. Her mouth was hot and wide open and her tongue was everywhere — flat and broad over Emily's clit, then narrow and pointed, pushing inside, then back up, and Emily's elbows gave out entirely and her chest hit the mattress, her hips stayed up because Andy's hands were holding them there and she was not letting go.
"Fuck —" Emily's hands fisted in the sheets. "Andy —"
Andy's tongue found her clit and stayed, and two fingers pushed inside — not enough, not what her body was screaming for, but enough to make Emily's hips jerk forward and then grind back, chasing the pressure. Andy fucked her with her mouth and her hand, and Emily could hear it, wet and obscene, could hear Andy's breathing coming ragged through her nose, could hear the low continuous sound in Andy's chest that never stopped, a vibration Emily felt against the backs of her thighs more than heard.
"Don't stop — don't —"
Andy didn't stop. Her mouth sealed over Emily's clit and she sucked, fingers curling upward, and Emily came with her face buried in the pillow and her hips grinding back against Andy's mouth. The sound that came out of her was one she didn't recognize — high, broken, continuous, muffled by cotton but not by much — and her thighs clamped around Andy's head and shook.
Andy kept going. Through it, past it, tongue still moving, and Emily's thighs were trembling so hard the whole bed seemed to vibrate with it. She tried to pull away, tried to crawl forward, but Andy's hands tightened on her hips and held her exactly where she was.
"I can't — too much — Andy —"
"One more."
"What don’t you understand —"
"One more, Baby. Give me one more."
Andy's tongue went flat and slow, and her fingers pushed deeper and curled, finding the spot that made Emily's spine lock, and worked it. Emily's second orgasm hit like she'd been denied for decades instead of minutes — her whole body arching, every muscle pulling taut, a sound tearing out of her that was closer to a sob than anything else — and Andy rode it with her, mouth on her, fingers inside, drawing it out until Emily's thighs were clenching and unclenching involuntarily and her breath came in sharp punched gasps. Only when Emily collapsed fully onto the mattress, boneless and shaking, did she pull back.
Emily heard her hum as she sucked her own fingers. She could feel the wetness on her own thighs, could feel the marks throbbing on her back — four, five, six bites in a line down her spine, each one a bruise already forming.
Then she felt Andy's cock press against her. Not inside yet, just pressed, the head of it sliding through the wetness, and Emily's hips tilted back before she could stop them.
"Em," Andy said, and her voice was destroyed.
"If you ask me if I'm okay —"
"I'm going to fuck you now."
"That's what I've been —"
Andy pushed in.
One stroke, all the way, and Emily's voice broke. The sound came from under her ribs — ugly, strangled, nothing she'd choose to make — and she didn't care. She was full, so full, the stretch of it bordering on too much before her body opened and took it, and Andy was pulling back and pushing in again. The angle was right, perfect, the exact thing her body had been screaming for, and Emily's arms gave out. She caught herself on her elbows, but Andy's hand came down flat between her shoulder blades and pressed until her chest was flush against the mattress, and the new angle let Andy sink deeper. Emily felt it in her stomach.
Andy's mouth was on her neck again, leaving a bite at the junction where her shoulder met her throat — hard, deliberate, the kind that would go purple — and Emily's whole body clenched around Andy's cock making Andy groan against her skin.
"You feel that?" Andy said, mouth still on her neck. "We could’ve been doing this since two if you had just fucking called."
"Shut up."
"You spent five hours in here alone, riding a pillow, and it wasn't enough, was it?" She kept thrusting, relentless, each stroke shoving Emily forward on the sheets until Andy's hand in her hair pulled her back. "Nothing was enough, because what you needed was an alpha's cock so deep you can feel it in your throat."
Andy's teeth found the back of her neck again — the same spot, always the same spot, the place where a bond mark would go — and bit down, not breaking skin, not yet, but hard enough that Emily felt it in her own teeth, a radiating ache that went straight down her spine and pooled between her legs.
"Mark me again and I'll —"
"You'll what?" Andy's hips snapped forward and Emily's objection dissolved into a moan that she couldn't catch in time. "You'll what, Em? Come on, baby, speak up — or did I fuck you stupid already?"
Emily came. She'd been close — she'd been close for five hours — and she saw white, her whole body locking and shaking. Andy fucked her through it without slowing and Emily sobbed into the pillow and pushed back into it because her body wanted more even as it broke.
Andy didn't stop. Still hard, still thick, driving in and out with a rhythm that had found its groove and wasn't deviating. The wet sounds of it were obscene — skin on skin, the slick noise of Emily's body taking her — and Emily didn't care. She was past caring, in a place where caring had been left behind with the four-hundred-dollar suppressants and the emergency pill and the cold bath and the notebook with all the rules.
"Again," Emily said, into the sheets, her voice muffled and ruined.
"Yeah?"
"Again. Don't stop."
Andy's hand moved from her hair to her hip, gripped hard enough to bruise — another mark, another bruise Emily would find tomorrow — and pulled Emily back onto her with each thrust. Emily braced against the headboard and met her thrusts, and the sound of their bodies coming together filled the room.
"Like that," Emily gasped. "Right — there — don't —"
"You take it so well," Andy said, and her voice was wrecked, barely a voice. "Em, you feel — God — you're clenching around me, I can feel you —"
"Don't stop talking."
"What do you want me to —"
"Tell me what I feel like."
"Tight. So tight, and wet, I can feel you dripping on me, I can —" Andy's rhythm stuttered. "I'm close."
"Not yet."
"Emily."
"I said not yet." Emily reached back and grabbed one of the hands that was gripping her hips, and Andy shuddered. "Make me come again first."
Andy's hand slipped from hers and came around her hip, and her fingers found Emily's clit. The redhead nearly came off the bed.
"Like this?"
"Yes — oh god!"
Andy fucked her in short, hard strokes, fingers working in tight circles, and Emily's third orgasm built fast and broke faster. This time she felt Andy follow her — a full-body shudder, a sound low in her chest that was barely human, and then the hot pulse of her coming inside Emily, deep, and the sensation dragged Emily's climax out until she was nothing but shaking and noise, face wet against the pillow, hands fisted so tight in the sheets her knuckles ached.
They collapsed. Andy's weight on her back, both of them breathing like they'd sprinted, chests heaving in tandem. Andy was still inside her, softening, and neither of them moved to separate. The heat, which had been screaming for five hours, quieted by exactly one notch.
Emily could feel the marks. Her back, her neck, her hips — a constellation of bites and bruises that Andy had laid down possessively, each one placed where Emily would see it in the mirror, where she'd feel it when she moved, where she'd remember.
"Round two," Emily said.
"Give me —"
"Now."
Emily pushed up onto her hands, clenched around Andy deliberately and felt her twitch, felt her start to harden again inside her. Andy swore against her shoulder and bit the muscle there, another mark, and Emily's hips rocked back.
"You're going to kill me."
"I'm in heat. You're the one who broke down my door to help, so bloody help. Lie back."
Andy pulled out — Emily made a sound at the loss that she would deny under oath, a small involuntary thing that betrayed exactly how much she'd needed it — and rolled onto her back. Emily turned, straddled her, took Andy's cock in her hand and stroked her slowly, feeling her thicken and harden under her palm, the weight of her, the heat of her, the way she pulsed when Emily's grip tightened.
Andy's hands came up to Emily's thighs and her thumbs dug in, marking, always marking, and Emily looked down at the red half-moons her nails were leaving and thought: good.
"Emily."
"Stop being whiny." Emily shifted her hips, positioned herself, and sank down in one slow stroke that took Andy to the hilt. They both groaned — Emily at the fullness, the stretch, the way Andy filled her at this angle differently, hitting something deep and anterior — and Andy at the wet heat swallowing her whole.
She rode her. Hands flat on Andy's chest, hips rolling, finding the depth she needed and taking it. Andy's hands were on her hips, gripping, but her face — Emily looked down and Andy was staring up at her with her mouth open and her eyes dark and wide, pupils blown, her hands moving up Emily's body to her breasts, to her collarbone, to her neck, thumbs pressing into the marks she'd already left, finding them, tracing them, pressing until Emily felt the ache pulse through her.
"Every time you put your face in my neck in front of strangers, you wanted this."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I wanted to fuck you. I've wanted to fuck you since —"
"Since when."
"Runway. Everytime you were mean to me I wanted to bend you over your desk and make you say sorry."
Andy's mouth found her chest — a bite on the curve of her breast, below the nipple, hard enough that Emily gasped and her rhythm stuttered, and then Andy's tongue over the bite, soothing, wet and warm, and then another bite, higher, closer to the nipple, and Emily looked down and saw the marks forming on her skin, red and already darkening, and felt Andy's cock thicken inside her and thought: she's not going to stop until she's covered every inch of me.
"Come inside me again," Emily said. “I want to feel it."
Andy's hands tightened on her hips — bruising, possessive, exactly the kind of grip that would leave ten perfect fingerprints — and she thrust up hard and held, and Emily felt it, the pulse of it, the heat spreading through her, and it pushed her over. She came with her head thrown back and Andy's name in her mouth and Andy's teeth closing on her breast, and the orgasm rolled through her in long slow waves that left her shaking and stupid.
Round three started ten minutes later because Emily's heat was insatiable, and she reached for Andy in the dark and found her hard and ready, because alpha biology was, for once, exactly what it was cracked up to be.
She kept Andy on her back as she straddled her, facing away this time, and sank down. Andy's hands came up and gripped her hips, and Emily rode her and the angle was different — deeper, the head of Andy's cock pressing against the front wall of her body with every stroke, a sharp bright pleasure that made her vision blur. Emily put her hands on Andy's thighs and leaned back and moved, and Andy made a sound behind her — gutted, desperate.
"God, Em, I can see —"
"Don't narrate."
"You're so — I can see you —"
"I said don't.” Emily rolled her hips and Andy's hands twitched on her waist.. "Keep your hands there. Don't move them."
"Em —"
"I said don't move."
Andy's hands stayed, but her mouth couldn't reach anything from this angle, and Emily could feel her frustration in her grip, in the way her hips snapped up seeking depth, and the low continuous sound in her chest that was half growl and half plea. She wanted to mark and she couldn't, and Emily rode her harder because of it, because the alpha beneath her, pinned by nothing but an order, shaking with the effort of holding still — that was power, and Emily was drunk on it.
"Next time," Emily said, "you can have my neck again."
"Em —"
"But right now you're going to lie there and let me use you. Understand?"
Andy's answer was to thrust up so hard Emily's hands slipped off her thighs and she nearly lost her balance.
Emily caught herself, resettled, and kept moving. She set the pace — grinding, deliberate, taking what she needed — and Andy lay beneath her, breathing through her nose like she was doing calming exercises.
Emily looked over her shoulder. Andy's face was tight, jaw clenched, tendons in her neck standing out, her eyes fixed on where their bodies joined. She looked on the edge, like she was holding something back with both both hands and the entirety of her willpower, and Emily felt a pulse of dark satisfaction at that — at the sight of an alpha on her back, pinned not by hands but by an order, obeying.
"You know what's funny," Emily said, still moving, slow rolls that kept Andy deep but denied her the pace she wanted. "Some people are terrified of you. The senior features editor at Runway, Miranda's left hand." She clenched around Andy's cock and watched her flinch. "And look at you now, nothing anyone should ever be scared of."
Andy's fingers dug in. "Emily."
"On your back." Emily shifted her weight, leaned back, took her deeper, and heard the sound Andy made — pained, wanting. "Letting me take what I need. Letting me use you like you're just a toy. Some all-powerful alpha you turned out to be."
Andy's hips jerked up. Emily pressed them back down with one hand flat on Andy's thigh.
"Uh-uh. I said don't move."
"You're playing with fire," Andy said, and her voice had gone somewhere dangerous, somewhere Emily recognized from the hallway when they were shouting at each other, from the first round, from every moment tonight when the alpha had shouldered past the eager to please puppy.
"I'm not playing." Emily rolled her hips again and felt Andy twitch inside her. "I'm taking what I want. That's what I do, Andrea. I take what I want and I manage what I don't need and I —"
"You’re going to keep talking?"
"I will, actually. I'll keep talking while you lie there, and you won’t do anything about it." Andy's breath hitched. "You walked in here with your concern and your puppy eyes, and now you're on your back in my bed letting an omega fuck herself on your cock, and you can't even —"
"Em."
"— mark me from there, can you? Can't reach my neck, can't reach my back, can't do any of the things you've been doing all night, and you're just —"
"Emily." Andy's voice was quiet. Far too quiet.
"— lying there taking it, and I think we both know that's not really what you —"
Andy moved.
One second Emily was upright, in control, setting the pace, and the next the world rotated and her back hit the mattress and Andy was over her and inside her, her wrists were pinned above her head in one of Andy's hands and the alpha's face was very close, the sound coming from her chest going straight to Emily's cunt.
Emily's body responded before her brain caught up — her back arched, her legs wrapped around Andy's waist, her hips tilted up, and she was so wet she could feel it on the sheets. Her heat, which had been simmering, roared back like someone had thrown fuel on it, and every nerve in her body whined for the alpha above her.
"Oh," Andy said, looking down at her. "I see."
Emily swallowed. "Let go of my —"
"You don't want that." Andy's grip tightened on her wrists, not enough to hurt, enough to hold. "You don't want that at all, do you, baby?"
"I said —"
"You've been running your mouth because you wanted this." Andy shifted her hips and drove in deep and Emily's sentence fractured. "Wanted me to flip you over and take over, because you're too proud to ask for what you actually need."
"That's not —"
"It is." Andy pulled back, slow, and pushed in just as slow, and Emily's hips chased her without permission. "See? Your body knows what it wants. It's just your mouth that has a problem. We’ll fix it though, won’t we?"
"Get off me."
"You don't want that either." Andy's free hand came up and touched the mark on Emily's neck — the one she'd left in round one, the one that was purpling nicely — and pressed. Emily's whole body clenched. "Every time I touch one of these you clench around me. You're covered in my marks and every single one is making you tighter. That's not a woman who wants to be in charge, Em. That's a woman who wants her alpha to take care of her."
"I don't need anyone to —"
"Take care of you." Andy thrust deep and held, and Emily's mouth fell open. "Not manage. Not arrange. Not structure. Take care of. There's a difference, and you've never once in your life let someone do it, and right now your body is begging for it even if your mouth won't."
Emily turned her head to the side. Andy's hand left her neck and caught her chin, turned her back.
"Look at me."
"I don't take orders from —"
"Look at me, Emily."
She looked. Andy's face was close, flushed, her eyes dark, her mouth wet. She looked feral. She looked exactly like what she was — an alpha who had spent months with her hand at the small of an omega's back, breathing her in, holding herself back, and was no longer holding back.
"You're so pretty," Andy said, and the words came out rough, stripped of anything soft. "God, Em, you're so — the first time I saw you again I couldn't think. Do you know that? I forgot what I was saying mid-sentence, Nigel laughed at me for a week." She pulled back and thrust in and Emily's breath shook. "And you're so wet right now, you're so open, you've been taking me all night and you're still —" She moved again and Emily's wrists pulled against her grip. "Still so tight. You feel incredible. You feel like you were made for this."
"Faster."
"Made for me." Andy released Emily's chin and her hand slid down, over the mark on Emily's collarbone, over the bite on her breast, down to her hip, where five fingerprints were already darkening. "Every time I look at you I want to put my mouth on you. Every time you walk into a room I can smell you and I want —"
Emily clenched around her, hard, and Andy groaned and her hips stuttered.
"I like everything about you." Andy's rhythm found itself again. "I like that you're mean. I like that you're smarter than everyone in the room. I like that you order expensive wine and won't share it. I like that you cried at Paddington 2 and threatened me about it."
"Don't bring up —"
"I like that you rode a pillow for hours and all it did was get you ready for me." Andy's mouth found her ear. "I like that you're in heat and you still try to argue with me. I like that you're wet on my cock right now and you're still trying to be in charge. You’re failing, by the way; but that’s okay, I’m right here, just leave it to me.”
Emily's wrists twisted in Andy's grip. "Let go."
"No."
"I want to touch you."
"No, you don't. You want to be held down and fucked until you stop thinking." Andy drove in hard enough to shift Emily up the mattress. "Every taunt, every order — you were begging me to take over, and we both know it."
"I was not begging."
"You were begging." Andy's pace turned brutal. "You have your own way of doing it."
Emily closed her eyes. The heat was a living thing inside her, coiling tighter with every thrust, and Andy's weight on her wrists, Andy's mouth on her marks, Andy's voice in her ear — it was too much, all of it, a sensory overload that her body was processing as pure need. She could feel herself getting close again, the pressure building low and deep, and she tried to slow it down, tried to think, and couldn't.
"Stop thinking," Andy said, like she could read it. "I can feel you trying to think. Stop."
"I can't —"
"You can." Andy's hand left her hip and slid between them, found her clit again, and Emily almost screamed. "Let me take care of you. That's all you have to do. C’mon baby, be my good girl."
Emily came. She saw white — her whole body locking, her legs tightening around Andy's waist, her wrists pulling so hard against Andy's grip that the headboard rattled — and the sound she made was not a word, was not a name, was closer to a scream than anything else. Andy fucked her through it, didn't slow, didn't stop, and Emily felt herself clench and release and clench again, making a mess, each wave pulling a sound out of her she couldn't control.
"That's it," Andy said, against her throat. "That's it, you're so good, you feel so —"
"Don't call me —"
"Good. You're good, Em. You're so good for me."
Emily's eyes burned. She turned her face into Andy's shoulder and bit down — hard, instinctive, the way Andy had been biting her all night — and Andy moaned her name and came inside her. Emily felt the heat of it spread through her and her body took everything, clenched around it, drew it in, and the emptiness that had been screaming since 2:15 went quiet for the first time all night.