Technically Faking

by Robin Hale

“Yeah, I figured that part out, thanks,” she laughed, nudging my unprotected waist with the stroke of teasing fingers. “I meant what is it for?” She slipped her hand over my skin, slid her arm around me and settled close where there’d always been space waiting for her.

  I shifted my arm, made sure she was comfortable, and tried to keep my voice even while I responded. “Your usage research. You’re doing a lot of the same work by hand over and over each week.” I finished the line I was writing by muscle memory more than conscious thought. Amber was hell on my ability to focus on anything that wasn’t her skin. Her body. Her voice. “No reason you couldn’t run a script, instead.”

  Amber didn’t say anything and the silence stretched on for so long that I couldn’t keep my eyes on my computer. I had to look at her face. She was tucked against my shoulder, fingers white-knuckled where they clutched at the wrecked sheets, eyes glassy and unreadable as she focused on something in the vicinity of my thigh.

  “Amber…?” I murmured, soft as if whatever I’d fucked up would fix itself if I said it gently.

  “So you’re writing it for me?” She asked after an agonizing moment and her throat sounded tight, the words grating over her tongue.

  It looked like a trap, but I couldn’t see the trigger. “Yes.”

  “Put your laptop down.”

  “What?”

  “Put your laptop down,” Amber insisted and began to move the thing herself.

  I took it from her hands and guided it onto its open side on the floor, eyeing the tousled brunette warily as I did. We hadn’t had a fight yet, but needing to get the laptop out of the way didn’t bode well for it. I turned back toward her slowly, shoulders tense as she sat up and shifted between my legs.

  “You,” she said, reaching out with both hands to grab my hips. “Are fucking amazing.” Amber pulled, dragging me down the mattress toward her, and the gust of air forced from my mouth when my back hit the bed had nothing on the surprise that bubbled up in my chest.

  Okay, she wasn’t angry.

  Hands slipped beneath my thighs as she dove into me. Her breath was hot against the cotton of my underwear, fingers pressing into my skin and promising bruises if she kept holding on so tight.

  “This is your chance to save these, if you care about them,” Amber murmured, lips caressing slowly over the taut fabric between my legs. She nipped at the cotton, hinting at the sharp edge of teeth.

  “Fuck,” I hissed.

  A brow arched above Amber’s gorgeous eyes, so dark they were nearly black, and she barely hesitated before deciding that was long enough. If she’d asked, I’d have guessed that the big problem for tearing a pair of panties would be the elastic at the edges. Hard to tear through, reinforced. Amber sidestepped the problem entirely. She didn’t tear them off, she just tore them.

  Right down the middle. Right where she wanted to be.

  The first touch of her tongue was like hot velvet swiping around the edge of my clit. There was no teasing start, no gentle foreplay just a gut-punch of sensation right up my spine. The noise I made in response was not dignified. Not dignified, but it made Amber smile such a wicked grin that I couldn’t make myself regret it.

  She pulled my hips up to meet her mouth and stroked slow, confident touches along my lips. I was used to a simmering build. Like a tea kettle. Going from cold disinterest to bubbling over in a steady application of heat. I’d never had anyone make it their mission to devastate my senses by skipping the first half of the experience.

  Her tongue was rough over my opening, purposeful. She didn’t dip inside, didn’t plunge in, but rubbed around the rim. Every touch ratcheted the tension in my body tighter. It drove my shoulders out of alignment, made my spine into a bow waiting for its string to release.

  “You —” Words failed and it was a damn good thing — I didn’t know what I’d intended to say. She was relentless. Ceaseless. Her tongue worked me over, chasing every whimper, every moan, every gasp I couldn’t keep locked behind my teeth. Soon, my thighs were shaking on her shoulders, trembling with the force of what she’d done to me.

  Hell, had it been more than five minutes since she’d told me to put the computer down? Couldn’t have been. And yet my skin was gleaming with sweat as if she’d kept me on edge for an hour. Her fingers twitched over my hips, stroking in little circles, and I couldn’t think of anything but getting that movement inside me. Immediately.

  “Fuck, I need —” The tip of her tongue flicked against my clit, sending a shockwave of pleasure through me, overloading my brain with more sensation than I could handle.

  And then she fucking stopped.

  My chest heaved as I panted, trying to get the room to stop spinning, trying to reorient myself. I didn’t do this. I didn’t lay back while I was undone. I didn’t take a passive role in bed. And I sure as hell didn’t whimper that I needed to come.

  At least, I hadn’t. Before Amber.

  “Yes?” She asked sweetly, the huskiness in her voice and the slick on her chin the only hints that she wasn’t about to go to fucking Sunday school. “You need…?”

  Oh, that tease.

  I let out a frustrated groan and the wicked smile on her face went molten. “I need to come.” The words ground their way out from behind my clenched teeth. My belly was already trembling, already quivering, so close to the edge that it would take three strokes to tip me over. I was sure of it.

  “I think we can make that happen,” Amber purred and dipped her head between my thighs.

  I was fucking doomed.

  * * *

  MINUTES OR YEARS after Amber had let me up, we settled in amongst the sheets and pillows and turned our attention back to our respective laptops. That was a new one for me. The women I’d dated before Amber — I fought to keep a wince from my face that I’d let myself believe I was dating Amber — had been ambitious in their own ways. They’d had plans and paths, but they never meshed with my own.

  Sandra had never brought a laptop to bed to tinker with her investment portfolio or respond to queries about attending some party or another wearing a particular designer’s newest look. Hell, she’d never stayed in my bed any longer than it took for the pair of us to shake each other apart.

  I shifted where I sat, feeling the delicious ache that remained after Amber was done with me. Sandra had certainly never focused so thoroughly on my pleasure and ignored her own. She hadn’t been a selfish lover, but it had been...transactional. I’d never seen someone watch me come like it mattered as much as their own orgasm.

  “More water?” Amber asked, lifting her water bottle from her bedside table. How quickly it had become her bedside.

  “Yes,” I agreed and handed my own bottle over. That was another thing: Amber included me in everything she did for herself. Seemingly without thinking of it. When she got up, she asked if I needed anything. If she was hungry she brought me a snack. She’d refilled my water bottle so many times I was sure that my physician was experiencing a rush of inexplicable euphoria.

  She’d even cleared our things from the floor, tossed them into the hamper, and asked where the laundry machines were. It was thoughtful and domestic and the strangest non-relationship I’d ever had.

  “There’s a charity ball my club is throwing — they do it every year, always hold it in the Fallon building downtown. I usually skip it,” I said, breaking the comfortable stillness as Amber returned and regarded me with wide, serious eyes. “But you should come with me,” I continued, feigning ease. “It’s meant to bankroll STEM programs in underperforming schools. It’ll be full of Silicon Valley patrons with more money than sense. Dahlia likes to trick them into doing something useful.”

  There. I’d invited her, in a manner of speaking.

  She stayed quiet, chewing on her lower lip. Surely she knew exactly how distracting I found the habit? Eons later, she nodded.

  “Sure,” Amber said thoughtfully.

  My heart lurched, lungs growing tight with a breath I’d evidently been holding.
Stupid.

  “It’s a good plan,” she continued.

  A good…plan?

  “Obviously, if we’re seeing leaked CEO candidates, our existing social media campaign isn’t quite doing it. It makes sense for the next phase to be a…let’s call it a ‘charm offensive’ in a room full of people who make those decisions.” Amber perched on the foot of the bed and reached for her laptop.

  She’d settled into problem-solving mode seamlessly, which was one of Amber’s more attractive qualities. The cold disappointment in my gut was ridiculous. An idiotic, sentimental overreaction to having shared a number of orgasms with the woman at the end of my bed.

  She was there to help me keep hold of my company, and if I’d wanted her to come to the charity ball as my date that was no one’s fault but mine.

  I fixed the expression on my face into one of professional determination and watched Amber bring up screen after screen of photos from the previous year’s event to begin planning the next wave of our campaign.

  I wasn’t disappointed. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it?

  14

  AMBER

  Walking through the front door of my apartment felt strange for the first time since I’d moved in. It was unnerving how quickly I’d come to think of Iris’s place as home. I’d barely needed Carrie to suggest that Iris would like to see me before I was on my way and settling in like I owned the place. I’d spent three nights there. That was all. Three nights and I’d already updated my internal address to read ‘wherever Iris lives’.

  I shook my head to clear the daydream from it and scooped my mail off the kitchen island. A couple of credit card offers I was never going to accept, some announcements for new community theater productions — and the carbon duplicate of a delivery receipt with my name on it, signed by Rain Gutierrez.

  “Rain?” I called as I made my way toward her bedroom door. “Was there a package for me?”

  The door stood partially open, revealing Rain’s bedroom as it always looked: dominated by her super-king mattress piled with fluffy comforters and pillows by the mountain, walls covered in watercolor paintings and mirrors she’d rescued from curbsides all over the city. The glass was cracked in places, patched in others, but the effect was similar to Sarah’s ballroom in Labyrinth, a shared favorite movie. They bounced light around the room until the space was otherworldly.

  Rain sat on her bed with a book open in her lap, reading glasses perched on the end of her upturned nose. “Hi,” she said happily, stretching her arms toward the ceiling. “It was delivered a little while ago.” She pointed a graceful hand toward me. “I hung it over the back of the door.”

  A garment bag, sturdier than anything I owned for transporting suits or dresses, hung from the back of Rain’s bedroom door. It was completely out of place against the chaotic array of diaphanous scarves.

  “Huh.” I frowned as I took it down. “Thanks for signing for it.”

  “Weren’t you expecting it?”

  “No, can’t say that I was.” I pulled at the tag on the outside of the bag, but it only told me which shop the item had come from. With a stomach-turning lurch, I recognized the name of one of the more expensive designer boutiques in the city.

  The zipper rolled smoothly down the bag and I pulled the canvas away to reveal an evening gown I’d never seen before.

  “Oh, Amber,” Rain breathed from much closer than she’d been a minute ago. She reached a hand out and trailed it down the front of the dress.

  I couldn’t disagree. It was gorgeous. It was a muted oil slick, all dark purples and tinges of peacock blue and green shimmering along an a-line skirt and surplice bodice. It must have been silk, but it wasn’t any kind of silk I’d ever seen. It was impossibly lightweight without being sheer, textured only with the occasional thick strand. Just enough that I was stomach-quakingly sure it was the real deal.

  “Put it on right now,” Rain squealed and clamped her hands onto my forearm. “You’re going to look like a goddess.”

  Her fingers plucked at my clothes, tugging until I was laughing and helping her wriggle me out of the layers that wouldn’t work under the dress, stumbling over my shoes as we tried to get my jeans off over them.

  Soon, we slipped the gown over my head and I was surrounded by images of myself: reflections in all the mirrors that Rain had collected, different angles and sizes and impressions of a girl who looked like me but who was definitely not me.

  The girl in those mirrors looked like she belonged in a dress like that.

  “There are earrings!” Rain chirped, retrieving a box from the hanger. “Oh, black pearls. Look at these…” She fitted the hooks through the piercings in my ears and strands of dark pearls — shimmering black tinged with the shades of the gown I wore — tumbled down to brush my shoulders.

  “I have to send a picture to Dave. He is going to die.” The sound of a phone’s camera shutter jerked me from the strange daydream I’d been walking in and I stared, wide-eyed and panicked, back at Rain.

  “I can’t wear this.”

  “Of course you can! It’s your size and everything.” Her thumbs fluttered over her phone and I heard the picture message send.

  “No, I mean — who would…?” I trailed off helplessly under the force of Rain’s surprised look.

  “It had to be Iris, right? Unless you’re dating some other gazillionaire you haven’t told me about.”

  I huffed a laugh. Iris wasn’t a gazillionaire. She was well off, sure, but SparkSignal wasn’t exactly Google. And half the luxuries she had — the assistant, the apartment, the driver — were provided by the company, weren’t they?

  Rain smiled and looked back down at the jewelry box. “Look! There’s a card.”

  The card, a strangely weighty little piece of linen and parchment, was covered in tidy letters. ‘Ms. Spark would like you to wear this at the charity ball. Regards, Carrie Liebe’

  “Who is Carrie?” Rain asked.

  “Iris’s assistant. She must’ve had her arrange for something to wear.” My heart thudded and I looked back at the long mirror on the opposite wall. It was for me. It was actually for me. And Iris had even included a pair of earrings that I knew she would hate on principle. But she’d included them because I’d told her the earrings were part of my brand.

  Something softer than lust flooded through me. She was incredible. When she’d invited me to the charity event, I’d figured that I’d dig through my closet for something halfway presentable and no one would pay much attention. But I should’ve expected that Iris would want to make sure her date didn’t feel out of place.

  She was so…ruthlessly practical. Thoughtful, but she’d be offended if I said so. She was perfect.

  And after the vote on Tuesday, I would never speak to her again.

  The thought hit me like a punch to my unprotected gut and I nearly cried out at the force of it.

  “Hey,” Rain soothed, frowning at me, pulling me around by the shoulders to face her. “What’s wrong?”

  Oh, nothing.

  I fell in love with my boss, that’s all. I let myself develop real feelings for someone who only gave me three weeks to be in their life.

  “I’m just nervous,” I lied. “The charity ball. It’s a lot of Iris’s kind of people, you know? Tech CEOs and investors and big names. I don’t — really know what I’m doing.” There. That last part was true, at least.

  Rain’s eyes went soft and she pulled me into a rose-scented hug. “It’s going to be okay.” The blonde pulled back to meet my eyes. “She wouldn’t have invited you if she didn’t want you there.”

  Debatable.

  “And she’s crazy about you, Amber. You’d have to be dead not to see it.” Rain’s soft hand stroked the back of my neck. “Your girlfriend is a lion. No one at that party would dare say anything to upset you.”

  Oh, God, I hoped Rain was right.

  * * *

  I’D BEEN ready for what felt like hours. Well, as ready as I could be. I’d h
ad a shower, did my hair and makeup as well as I was personally able — borrowing Rain for her gift with winged eyeliner — and had been perched on the arm of the sofa for forty-five minutes while I waited for instructions on the next phase of the plan.

  When my phone chirped, I threw myself on it.

  ‘I have the Tesla waiting downstairs whenever you are ready, Ms. Kowalczyk.’

  The text message was hilariously formal, given that I’d devolved into immature jokes with Mr. Stevens the instant I stepped into his car three weeks ago.

  “I’m headed out,” I called. It was like I was trying to slip out the door to homecoming rather than going to a charity event like a grown woman. I shifted in my comfortable flats. The whole effect would probably be more convincing if I could stop fidgeting.

  * * *

  MR. STEVENS WAITED beside the black Tesla, dressed as usual in his perfectly pressed uniform, and offered me a smile.

  “Ms. Kowalczyk,” he said as he pulled open the door. “You look lovely.”

  “Thank you.” I grinned as I climbed into the electric car’s back seat.

  Its empty back seat.

  “Where is —” I began.

  “Ms. Spark offers her apologies and says she will meet you at the venue. She was unavoidably detained at the office,” the kindly older gentleman explained, engaging the engine.

  I settled back against the seat and tried not to let the disappointment build on my anxiety over going into the wild unknown. It was going to be fine. I did well with new people! I’d made an entire career out of getting along with strangers. There was no reason that event should be different.

  None at all.

  * * *

  WHEN I MOVED to San Francisco, I’d mistakenly believed that it would take about ten minutes to get anywhere. Looking at the map, nothing looked that far from anything else. What glancing at a map hadn’t told me was which streets were set on massive hills, which changed traffic rules at different times of the day, and how many people were trying to drive through the city at any given moment.