Office Hours After Dark

The lecture hall drains slowly, folding chairs clicking shut, a hundred therapists and educators shuffling for the exits with their tote bags and lukewarm coffee. You stay seated because you've been staying seated through the whole talk, and because Adrianna noticed. You can tell she noticed. A woman like that — forty-something, dark curls pinned up with one loose strand she kept touching at the podium, a wrap dress the color of red wine — doesn't lose track of who's watching her. Her talk was called *Anticipation as Intimacy: Why Waiting Is the Point.* Forty minutes on desire, on the erotic value of patience, delivered to a spellbound room. You took notes you'll never reread, because the whole time she was describing restraint, you were imagining the opposite. The last attendee leaves. The door clicks. Adrianna sets down her clicker, steps out from behind the podium, and looks directly at you. "You stayed," she says. "Good. I was hoping you would."

She crosses the empty hall the way she owns it — unhurried but certain, heels soft on the carpet, and stops one row below you, close enough that you can smell her perfume. Something warm. Amber, maybe.

"Did you enjoy the talk?" she asks. "Yeah. A lot." You're aware of how lame that sounds. "The part about — anticipation." A slow smile. "That part got the most squirming, yes. I could see it from the stage. Half that room needed a cold drink." She tilts her head. "You didn't squirm. You just watched me. The entire hour. Do you know how rare that is?"

You don't have an answer. She doesn't need one. "I'm staying upstairs," she says. "Room 812. I have a bottle of wine and about two more hours of things I couldn't say into a microphone." She picks up her bag. "Give me ten minutes, then come up."

The elevator takes forever. You count floors. Your reflection in the brushed steel looks like a man pretending to be calm. Room 812. The door opens before you knock. She's changed — or rather, she's un-changed. The wrap dress is looser now, the pin gone from her hair, curls falling to her shoulders. She's holding two glasses of red wine and she doesn't hand you yours.

"You're punctual," she says. "That's one point in your favor. Come in." The room is dim, one lamp, curtains open to the city. She sets both glasses on the desk and turns to face you, arms crossed, entirely comfortable in a way that makes you aware of your own hands.

"So," she says. "Tell me why you came to my talk."

"Because I read your book," you say. "The chapter on desire being a conversation. I kept thinking about it for months." Something in her face shifts — genuine pleasure under the polish. "Months. That's honest. Most men in that hall would've said a colleague recommended it."

"I'm not most men in that hall." "No." She steps closer. "You're the one who watched my mouth instead of my slides." Her finger comes up and touches your chest, light, right over your heartbeat. "It's beating fast."

She finally hands you the wine. You drink. She watches you drink with her arms folded, sipping from her own glass, circling you once, slow, like she's appraising a sculpture.

"Here's what's going to happen," she says, standing behind you now, voice at your ear. "I'm going to teach you what I couldn't say on that stage. But at my pace. You don't touch until I say. You don't rush. If you're good —" a pause you feel in your teeth — "you'll find out how good I can be."

She comes back around to face you. "Do we understand each other?" "Yes." "Yes, what?" "Yes... Professor." Her exhale is almost a laugh. "Oh, you're going to be fun."

She takes your glass away and sets it down. Then she takes your tie — you wore a tie, and suddenly you're grateful — and uses it to pull you three steps toward the bed. She stops you at the edge of it.

"Sit. Hands on your knees." You sit. She stays standing between your legs, looking down at you, and slowly, deliberately, she pulls the tie loose from your collar. She drapes it around her own neck like a trophy.

"First lesson," she says. "The body says yes before the mouth does. Watch mine." She reaches back and eases the zipper of her dress down her side. Not off. Just down. Enough that the fabric loosens, that you can see the edge of her bra, the warm skin of her ribs. Then she stops. "Tell me what you notice."

"Your breathing," you say. "It changed." "Good. What else?" "Your eyes. They haven't left mine once." "Mm. And what are they telling you?" "That you want this. That you're deciding how."

Her hand cups your jaw. "Fifty minutes of lecture," she murmurs, "and you learned nothing. I've been deciding how since I watched you take your seat."

She lets the dress fall. It pools at her feet and she steps out of it, standing in black lace and nothing else but those heels, and your hands twitch on your knees.

"Ah," she says, catching it. "That instinct — to reach. Feel it. Don't do it. That's the whole lesson." She leans down, her breasts a breath from your face. "The wanting is the good part. Stay in it."

She straddles your lap, weight settling over you, the heat of her obvious through the lace. Your cock is hard enough to hurt and she rolls her hips once, slow, letting you feel exactly what you're not getting yet. "Fuck," you breathe. "Language," she says, and rolls again.

She kisses you, finally, and it's not gentle — it's claiming, her hand fisted in your hair, her mouth taking what she decided to take an hour ago on that stage. You keep your hands on your knees through sheer discipline, and when she pulls back, she's breathing harder too.

"There it is," she whispers, forehead against yours. "That's what I wanted. A man who can wait." She takes your wrists and moves your hands to her waist herself. "Now. Touch me like you've been thinking about it for months. Because you have." Your hands slide up her back, warm skin, the clasp of her bra, and she sighs into your mouth.

You get her bra off and her breasts into your hands and she moans — a real one, low and surprised, when your mouth finds her nipple. She holds your head there, fingers in your hair. "Yes — like that. Suck harder. Good boy."

The words go straight through you and she feels it, laughing breathlessly. "Oh, you like that. Noted." She pushes you back on the bed and works your belt with quick, sure hands. "My turn to look." She strips you out of everything, kneeling over you on the mattress, and looks — openly, hungrily, no shyness at all. "Months," she says, wrapping her hand around your cock. "You've waited months. You can wait a few more minutes."

She makes you wait exactly the way her talk promised — her mouth so close to the head of your cock that you feel her breath, her tongue tracing slow, maddening circles, taking you deep only when she decides to. Your hands are in the sheets, your hips fighting not to move.

"Adrianna —" "Say it again." "Adrianna. Please." "Please what? Use your words. You're at a conference on communication." "Please let me come. Or let me fuck you. Either. God." She lifts her head, wipes her mouth, grinning. "That'll do."

She reaches into her bag on the nightstand, rolls the condom on you herself, and then sinks down onto your cock in one long, controlled motion that pulls a sound out of both of you. "There," she breathes, braced on your chest, beginning to move. "This is what patience buys you. Feel how wet waiting made me? You weren't the only one suffering up there." She rides you slow at first, then harder, chasing it, her breasts moving, her voice coming apart into filth — *yes, just like that, don't you hold back on me* — until she shakes through her orgasm with a cry she muffils against your shoulder, and only then, spent and grinning, does she say, "Now yours. Come for me." You do, and it goes on and on, her holding you through it, whispering your name like she's finally letting herself say it.

Afterward: wine, finally, in bed, the city lights on her bare shoulders. She's tracing lazy shapes on your chest like she's grading you and you passed.

"For the record," she says, "I don't do this at conferences. Ever." "What was different?" She props her chin on her hand and looks at you a long moment. "You watched my mouth instead of my slides. And then you waited when I asked you to." A kiss, soft, at the corner of your jaw. "I give my talk in this city twice a year."

You leave her room near midnight with your tie still hanging around her neck, and she kisses you once more at the door like a period at the end of a sentence she intends to continue. Down in the lobby, the conference banners are half-taken-down. Tomorrow there's a panel on attachment theory at nine. You're thinking about skipping it. You're thinking about a woman upstairs who spent an hour lecturing a ballroom on anticipation, then spent the evening proving every word of it on you. Twice a year, she said. You're already counting.