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The call had been running forty minutes. Hana knew because she'd been watching the timer on Soo-Yeon's phone, the little green digits ticking upward with the kind of patience she absolutely did not possess. Forty two minutes now. Forty two minutes of Soo-Yeon sitting in the armchair by the window, one ankle crossed over her knee, still in her work clothes, talking to someone named Gerald about quarterly projections. Gerald, apparently, had a lot of feelings about Q3.
The city spread out behind her through the window glass, sixty stories of Seoul lit up like a circuit board against the dark, the stars out above the smog line, Hana kneeling on the heated marble floor in just her underwear. Hana decided she did not care about any of it. Not the stars, not Gerald, not a single quarterly projection.
She pressed her cheek against the inside of Soo-Yeon's knee and breathed.
"That's a fair concern," Soo-Yeon said into the phone. Her voice was exactly the same as it always was, measured, low, professionally pleasant. The kind of voice that made boardrooms go quiet. The kind of voice that, minutes ago, had said get on the floor with perfect calm, and Hana had gone liquid before her brain had caught up with her knees.
She shifted now, adjusting the angle of her hips. Soo-Yeon's heel, Italian leather, one of the good ones, pressed warm and firm through the thin fabric of Hana's underwear.
She rolled her hips, just barely. Testing. Soo-Yeon's fingers, resting loose on her own thigh, twitched.
"I'd want to look at the numbers again before we commit," Soo-Yeon continued. "Give me twenty-four hours."
Hana rocked forward, then back, finding the angle. The pressure filled up through her and she bit her lip hard, keeping her breath even, face tipped down away from where Soo-Yeon's gaze had dropped to rest on the top of her head. She could feel it. She always could, that particular quality of attention, not distracted, not absent, entirely too present despite everything the rest of Soo-Yeon's body was doing.
"Right," Soo-Yeon said. A pause. "Faster turnaround than I'd like, but we can work with that."
Hana moved faster.
Her hands were flat on the floor, keeping her balanced, keeping her quiet. That was the rule, the one rule, the one she was already not sure she could hold. Quiet. The penthouse was theirs alone but Soo-Yeon had said it so simply. You don't make a sound, or I stop, like it wasn't the most devastating sentence Hana had ever heard in her twenty-seven years of living.
The leather pressed into her through the thin cotton and she breathed out through her nose.
"No, I understand the urgency." Soo-Yeon uncrossed her ankle. Recrossed it, different angle. The pressure shifted and Hana's hips stuttered, chasing it, finding it again. "We'll move harder on this than the last cycle."
Oh, Hana thought, and pressed her lips together. She could feel the flush climbing her throat.
"We need to stop short of over-committing the timeline," Soo-Yeon said. Her free hand settled onto the top of Hana's head. Light. Just resting there. "Hard stop at end of month. Non-negotiable."
Hana stopped, and made a sound. Small. She tried to swallow it back but it had already escaped, just a hitch, barely a breath, but in the quiet apartment it landed like something dropped. She froze.
Soo-Yeon's fingers tightened in her hair. Not pulling. Warning.
"Right. Hold that thought, Gerald."
The phone lowered. Hand pressed over the microphone. Soo-Yeon looked down at her with an expression that was perfectly, terribly calm.
Hana stared up at her. Lips parted. Hair already a disaster. And yet, she had never in her life wanted anything as badly as she wanted Soo-Yeon to keep her foot exactly where it was.
"Can you be quiet," Soo-Yeon said, very soft, "or do I need to help you with that?"
Hana opened her mouth. Closed it. Nodded.
Soo-Yeon looked at her for a moment longer, that same assessing look she gave contracts and disputes, and then her hand came down against Hana's cheek.
Not hard. Just enough. Hana's whole body went still.
"Better," Soo-Yeon said, and brought the phone back up. "Sorry, Gerald. You were saying."
The call kept going.
Hana pressed her face against Soo-Yeon's knee and shook.
She moved slow now, slower than she wanted to, because quiet meant small and small meant controlled. Even when she was unraveling from the inside out with nowhere to put it.
Harder on this. Her hips rolled.
Push through. Her breath caught.
We want to see performance. Now she was close enough to-
"We're going to need to move on this quickly," Soo-Yeon said, and then, just barely lower: "Don't stop."
Hana's head snapped up.
Soo-Yeon was looking even at her, phone at her ear, expression professionally placid, the hand in Hana's hair pushing down until her face was back against the wool of her knee.
"That's what I want to see," Soo-Yeon said.
Hana moved.
She stopped trying to be controlled about it. The pretense of stillness dissolved and she just moved, hips rolling forward in a slow grind that pressed the heel of Soo-Yeon's shoe flush against her. The friction was unbearable and perfect and she chased it with her whole body, graceless and desperate and completely past caring.
Soo-Yeon kept talking.
"We'll need better margins going into the next quarter." A pause. The hand in Hana's hair tightened, not guiding, just holding, fingers curled against her scalp. "…yes, I'd say we're performing well."
Hana whimpered against Soo-Yeon's knee and immediately pressed her mouth harder into the wool to smother it.
The pressure was building in deep, gathering at the base of her spine and outward, her underwear was soaked through now, the fabric doing nothing, every forward roll of her hips dragging it against her in a way that made her vision go soft at the edges. She was so close. She'd been so close for so long, wound tight and kept there, and her thighs were trembling with the effort of keeping her movements small and her sounds smaller.
"Mm." Soo-Yeon's thumb moved in slow circles against her scalp, absent and deliberate at once. Like she was petting her. Like Hana was something she kept. "I'd say we're almost exactly where we want to be."
Hana's breath broke. Just a fractured exhale, hot against Soo-Yeon's knee and then she was there, softly moaning and breaking all at once, she ground down and held herself there and shook through it with her face buried and her hands fisted on the floor and the whole skyline burning silently behind the glass like it had been waiting.
It went on. That was the thing about being kept at the edge this long, when it finally broke it just kept going, rolling through her in ways she couldn't brace against, each shake dissolving into the next, trembling so hard she could hear her own breath hitching in a broken rhythm she had no control over.
Soo-Yeon's hand held her through all of it. Steady. Unhurried.
"Good work," Soo-Yeon said, into the phone, into the quiet, into Hana's hair. "Let's circle back Friday."
The call ended.
The room went quiet.
Then Soo-Yeon's hand slid onto her cheek properly, not resting, holding. Tilting Hana’s head up until she was looking up at her with what she was certain was a completely wrecked expression.
"Hi," Soo-Yeon said.
"Hi," Hana managed.
Soo-Yeon's mouth curved at the corner. "You were loud at the end."
"I know."
“Come here," Soo-Yeon said.
Not a question. Not quite a command either. softer than that, the particular register she only used in private, the one Hana had spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about in contexts where she absolutely should have been thinking about other things.
Soo-Yeon patted her own thigh once, an easy, unhurried invitation, Hana didn't make her ask twice.
She got up on unsteady legs and folded herself sideways into Soo-Yeon's lap, knees hooked over one armrest, shoulder tucked against her chest. Soo-Yeon's arm came around her without ceremony, pulling her in, and Hana pressed her face into the collar of her shirt and breathed.
"Okay?" Soo-Yeon said, into her hair.
"Very," Hana said. "Extremely. Possibly deceased."
"Mm." The arm tightened slightly. "Gerald sends his regards."
Hana laughed before she could stop it, muffled against Soo-Yeon's shoulder, and felt Soo-Yeon's chest shake once in answer. Outside the windows the stars held steady, indifferent and bright, sixty stories below the city continuing on, and Hana stayed exactly where she was.