You don’t notice the time until your laptop dings with the sent confirmation and the room turns quiet enough to hear your own pulse. The clock in your task bar reads 12:47 a.m. Outside, the city is muted—only the distant shush of tires on wet asphalt and an elevator that hums like a held breath. You rub your eyes, stretch, and tell yourself you’ll shut it down.
Your phone vibrates.
No name on the screen, just a number you’ve learned by heart in the kind of way you shouldn’t. You let it ring once, twice, pretending you have the willpower to ignore it, and then your thumb betrays you.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” her voice purrs—soft, intimate, like she’s already inside your room.
“Lila,” you say, and her name tastes dangerous and sweet. Lila, the client. Lila, the reason your company’s HR has those polite, chilly paragraphs about boundaries. Lila, who looked at you across a boardroom table last week with a smile that said she knew exactly what she was doing.
“You sound tired,” she whispers. “And wired. I like you this way.”
You lean back in your chair and let your eyes close. “You shouldn’t call me this late.”
“That’s what makes it irresistible,” she says. “Tell me you don’t want me to.”
You should. You don’t. “How long do you have?”
“As long as we can keep our voices down,” she replies, and you hear the rustle of sheets, the hush of a lamp clicking off. “I’m at the hotel. The kind with curtains heavy as secrets. I could draw them tighter, if you want.”
You swallow. “Draw them.”
There’s a pause that feels like a fingertip trailing the edge of a glass. Then the faint swish of fabric, the sigh of darkness settling. “Done,” she murmurs. “Now it’s just me, the dark, and your voice.”
You’re not supposed to ask. You ask anyway. “What are you wearing?”
She laughs, a low sparkle in the dark. “A rule. Just one.”
“What rule?”
“No names,” she says, even though you both know each other’s. “No touching in person. And no… explicit descriptions. We keep it at the edge and let the rest happen in our heads. Think you can play with me there?”
Her game. Your undoing. “I can try.”
“Good,” she breathes, and the word slips under your skin like warm light. “Tell me where you are.”
You sketch it for her: the last open document, the coffee cup with a crescent of heat left, the blazer slung over your chair like it got tired of behaving. You describe your desk lamp casting a circle on your notebook, the page covered in notes that look, in this hour, like a strange kind of poetry.
“Take me to the window,” she says. “I want to see what you see.”
You stand, phone cradled between your shoulder and cheek, and cross to the glass. The city is a map of constellations. A man on the sidewalk tucks his chin into a scarf. A taxi pauses, then glides on. The sky is the color of unspoken things.
“I want you to touch the glass,” she says.
You press your palm to the pane. It’s cool, unyielding. “It’s cold.”
“And you’re warm,” she says softly. “I can hear it. Your breath. The way you wait for me to ask the next thing. I like that you wait.”
“You always make me.”
“Only because you want me to,” she counters, and then: “Tell me what you’d do if I stood behind you and put my hands over yours.”
You let the picture bloom: Lila at your back, both of you looking out at a city that knows nothing about this line you’re walking. You keep it simple, the way she wants. “I’d cover your hands with mine. Linger. Make you feel how steady I can be.”
“Steady,” she echoes, and the word lands with a little tremor. “And then?”
“I’d trace along your wrists,” you say, voice lower. “Just enough to raise goosebumps. I’d say what a terrible idea this is in perfect detail, while my mouth forgets everything about good ideas.”
She exhales a laugh that turns into something else halfway out. “You’re going to be trouble for me.”
“You called me,” you remind her.
“Mm. Because I liked the way you looked at me when you wouldn’t look at me,” she says. “I like the way you talk like you’re pulling silk through a ring. Slow. Smooth. Purposeful. Keep going.”
The room feels smaller. The night feels nearer. You let your forehead rest against the cool glass, the phone warm in your hand, her voice a ribbon around your throat.
“I’d turn you,” you say, as carefully as if you were placing wineglasses on a table. “So you’re facing me. I’d stay close enough that we share air, but not enough to touch. I’d tell you what I want to do and let the wanting do the work.”
“And what do you want?” she asks, steady, curious, brave.
You choose your words with care, keeping them suggestive, not explicit, letting the shape of the desire do the heavy lifting. “I want to map you with my voice,” you say. “Every place where a breath would be enough to make you gasp. Every place your body asks for patience and every place it demands you stop being patient at all.”
A quiet sound comes through the line—one you feel more than hear. “Where would you start?”
“At the places that don’t get enough attention,” you say. “The curve of a shoulder. The hollow at your collarbone. Behind your knee, where no one ever thinks to worship. The soft place at your hip where your pulse jumps when you’re trying to stay composed.”
She makes a sound like she’s smiling into the dark. “What about my neck?”
“I’d treat it like it’s holding secrets,” you say, and as you speak you turn from the window, pacing slowly, feeling the floor cool under your feet, the line between caution and hunger growing thin. “I’d let my breath hover until you tilt the way I want you to. I’d murmur what I’m going to do next and then barely do it at all, just to hear you ask.”
“I would ask,” she whispers. “I would ask so nicely.”
Your chair nudges the back of your knees and you sink down, the phone anchored to your ear, the world narrowed to the theater of this conversation. “Tell me where you are now.”
“In bed,” she says. “On my side. One knee a little higher than the other. The duvet is a little too heavy, and I’m a little too warm, and I’m thinking about the meeting where you didn’t touch me and how much better you are at that over the phone.”
“You liked me not touching you?”
“I liked knowing you wanted to,” she says. “I like knowing it now.”
You close your eyes, and in the dark behind your lids there she is: hair spilled like ink on a hotel pillow, smile you can hear. You keep your voice low and careful. “What else do you like?”
“Being told what to do,” she says, candid as a confession. “But I want you to ask first.”
You ask. “Do you want me to tell you what to do?”
“Yes.” It’s almost a sigh. “Please.”
You let the silence fill with permission. “Then listen,” you say softly. “I want you to pay attention to all the places that respond to suggestion. Start with your breathing. Slow it down. In for four. Out for six. I want your body to listen to your voice listening to mine.”
You count with her, and the air changes. The rhythm changes. She hums on the exhale and you feel your own pulse drop into step with hers.
“Now,” you murmur, “I want you to think about your mouth. How it felt when you were laughing at something I said in the elevator, and you stopped too quickly because the doors opened and we had to behave. I want you to imagine me a step closer than I should be. Imagine I say something I shouldn’t say very quietly, and you decide you don’t care about should.”
She inhales like the idea surprised her. “What do you say?”
“That I’m going to make a lot of problems for both of us if you ask me to.”
“I would ask,” she says, voice roughened by the hour. “I’m asking.”
You let your own laugh slip out—quiet, no less dangerous. “Then do as I say,” you murmur. “Move slowly. Pretend I’m guiding you, not with my hands, but with words.”
You keep your sentences like touch: light, precise, suggestive, never crude. You tell her to skim her fingertips over the places that sing when attention finds them; to circle the edges, not the center; to savor the ache of almost. You describe the way patience can turn into heat, how denial can be a gift in the right hands. You instruct her to pause, to listen to the sound she makes when she obeys, to chase that sound.
She obeys. You hear it in the way her breath skips. In the shiver in her laugh when you make her hold still. In the whispered, “You’re cruel,” that doesn’t sound like complaint at all.
“Only until you say otherwise,” you remind her. “You can stop anytime.”
“I don’t want to stop,” she says. “I want you to keep me right here until I’m begging.”
“You don’t have to beg,” you tell her, and then, after a beat that tautens the air, you add, “but I’d like it if you did.”
She says please the way a door opens. The way a tide turns. You let your instructions soften, deepen, lead. You tell her to chase warmth, to let the room disappear, to let the line between thought and sensation blur until your voice is the only thing she trusts.
The city moves somewhere out there. You barely remember it exists. There’s just the bed you aren’t in, the chair you barely feel, the hiss of the lamp, the faint night-sound of two people doing something they promised not to do—and doing it anyway.
“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” she breathes.
“Your face,” you say. “Right before you give in. The way your throat works when you swallow a sound. The way your knuckles pale when you hold on to the sheets like they’re going to save you.”
She makes a sound that might be your name, except names are off-limits, so it becomes a sweet, scraped syllable of want. “Keep going.”
You do. You guide her across a threshold made of breath and suggestion, never naming the thing you both know you’re naming, never describing it explicitly, instead describing the way the world narrows and brightens, how time slides, how the body knows what to do when it’s finally allowed.
“Now,” you say quietly, “don’t hold back.”
The line goes hushed, then electric. You hear the moment—bright, breathless, breaking open like light under a door. You listen, steady and sure, through the crest and the fall, through the tremor in her exhale, through the lengthening quiet that feels like a palm settling, smoothing, reassuring.
When she speaks again, her voice is velvet-soft. “You stayed with me.”
“Always,” you say, and the word surprises you with how true it is in this hour.
“I like your rules,” she murmurs.
“They were your rules.”
“I like how you enforce them,” she says, amused and wrecked. “Say something nice to me.”
You smile into the dark. “You’re luminous,” you say. “Right now. I can hear it.”
There’s the sound of fabric shifting, of her rolling onto her back, of her finding the cool side of the pillow. “You didn’t say what you were doing,” she says.
“I was with you,” you answer, and it’s both evasive and honest. You’re warm, wound tight, and charmed by the ridiculous discipline you’ve managed to keep.
“Will you… later?” she asks, playful as a dare. “If I ask nicely?”
You pretend to scold. “We don’t barter.”
She laughs, drowsy and delighted. “Fine. Then I’ll just imagine you doing exactly what I did, and I’ll pretend you’re better at it.”
“Unfair,” you say.
“Untrue?” she teases.
You don’t answer, which is an answer of its own.
“Are you coming to the office tomorrow?” she asks after a while, like she’s drifted onto a gentler river.
“Early.”
“Me too,” she says. “We’ll behave.”
“We will.”
“For a while,” she amends. “But you know what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“Another call,” she says, fearless now, the request threaded with a promise. “Another night like this. Another set of rules I can break by following.”
You lean back and let your head tip, feeling the smile in your bones. “Then call me,” you murmur. “When the curtains are heavy and the city is quiet and you’re ready to be good so I can make you worse.”
She sighs like that line went straight through her. “You’re going to ruin me.”
“You’ll thank me,” you say, because the bravado is part of the dance and she likes it when you lead.
“It’s late,” she whispers. “We should hang up.”
“We should,” you agree. Neither of you moves.
“Say goodnight,” she prompts.
“Goodnight,” you obey, softer than you expected. “Sleep well.”
“And you,” she replies, and then she’s gone, and the room feels like it’s still holding the outline of her voice.
You sit there a long time, the phone still warm in your hand, the glass still cool where your palm remembers it. The city lifts its head outside your window; somewhere, a neon sign flickers back to life; somewhere else, a cab door closes, a key turns, a couple laughs the laugh of people who didn’t take the kind of risk you just did.
You set your phone down, fold your blazer over the chair, and turn off the lamp, leaving the little circle of light to dissolve into the dark. The bed is a long step away. You make it, and when you lie down, the sheets carry a trace of the day and a promise of the next one.
Your last thought is a picture of heavy curtains, a voice shaped like permission, and a rule you can’t wait to break again by keeping.
