Chapter 943: Noor & Soraya
That, perhaps, was the strangest part.
They had known the terms going into the room to fuck Phei. Both of them. They had discussed it in the brief stolen minutes before the break, speaking in low, frank voices like two professionals negotiating something they wanted and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
A threesome with Phei who clearly would fulfil the fantasy the two friends always had and they would likely never see him again afterward.
They had looked at that arrangement with clear eyes with no sentiment nor girlish delusion or absurd little fairy tale creeping in through the window with flowers in its mouth. They were grown sensible women who had long ago stopped believing desire came with promises unless someone was foolish enough to write them down.
So they had decided together that there was no reason to hold back.
The logic had been clean.
They were standing in front of the most beautiful man either of them had ever seen, and he very plainly wanted to fuck them as much as they wanted him if an opportunity presented itself. Neither woman belonged to anyone. Neither was looking to belong; no commitments existed in their hearts, classic women who needed no distraction from the most important things; their careers.
So, hearts had been placed on the table, it was so fragile to be offered up for bruising.
So, what, precisely, was there to agonize over?
It would be a fine, harmless thing.
Good.
Bright.
Uncomplicated.
A single afternoon given to two unattached women by a universe that, for once, seemed to have delivered a gift instead of an invoice. He would not want them clinging afterward. They would not want to cling. The day would seal itself neatly, beautiful and self-contained, then slide into memory without demanding anything further.
That had been the plan.
Plans, Noor was beginning to understand, were adorable little lies people told themselves before Phei smiled at them—smiles that unraveled certainties as effortlessly as shadows claiming the light.
What neither of them had planned for was the after.
The first surprise had been the emptiness; a sudden, hollow, entirely uninvited ache at the simple thought of him walking away and never coming back, the instant the day began to end.
They had agreed to this and yet...
Now, Noor was honest enough to account for some of it.
Some of it was him.
There were things in the way Phei touched a person that did not feel entirely ordinary. A pull. A warmth. A strange sense of being held at the very center of someone’s attention, as though the rest of the world had been dismissed and only the person beneath his hands still mattered.
Noor had no proper name for it.
She did not need one.
She had noticed that the strangeness worked through feeling rather than above it. It did not create something from nothing. If she had felt nothing for him, truly nothing, she suspected that pull would have found no soil to root in.
The strangeness was not doing the work but amplifying what had already been there.
The wanting had been hers from the beginning.
And in that amplification lay a quiet terror—for what did it say of her own heart, that it had been so ready to resonate with his unspoken claim?
The second surprise, the one that actually tightened her chest, was the car.
After the sex was over, neither of them had asked him for anything. They had not begged for a second meeting or plead with their eyes, or at least not in any way they could be prosecuted for.
They had held their dignity with both hands precisely so they would not become the sort of women who could not accept a beautiful day for what it was.
Which meant Phei had not arranged the car because they pressured him or response to anything they had said.
He had done it because the feeling had been mutual.
Because somewhere, perhaps from the moment he let their hands settle on him, perhaps long before the locked door, or from some impossible instant neither of them had noticed, Phei had already decided he was not letting them vanish quietly into memory.
That thought did something to Noor’s composure that the entire afternoon had failed to achieve—a subtle fracturing, as if the foundations of her carefully constructed independence had been quietly, irrevocably shifted by a man who moved through the world as though it had already bent to his will.
"You have gone quiet," Soraya said, lowering herself onto the arm of the chair beside her. "That is usually my cue to worry."
"I am thinking."
"I can hear it. It is deafening."
But Soraya’s voice had softened too, losing its edge and becoming a little dreamy. Noor glanced up and found her staring at the door Phei had left through with an expression that had no business on the face of a woman who ended negotiations for a living.
Noor studied her for a moment.
"We are not girls," she said quietly. "We are not teenagers losing our heads over a beautiful boy. I keep telling myself that."
"Is it working?"
"No."
Soraya laughed.
"It is not the beauty," she said. "I want that on record too. I have worked with beautiful men. Beautiful men are exhausting, mostly. Decorative problems with cheekbones."
Noor’s mouth almost curved.
"It is..." Soraya gestured vaguely, trying to catch the shape of it. "Do you understand what I mean? At his age, I expected to be a pleasant afternoon he might have trouble remembering by Friday like any playboy teenager celeb, although different I expected the same detachment after sex given how many women he has; my naivety. I did not expect to be considered or be read that accurately, then quietly accommodated before I had even worked out what I wanted."
She shook her head slowly.
"I have never been handled with that thoughtful quiet gentle much care. By anyone. And he did it like it was nothing. Like of course."
Noor looked toward the door.
"It frightens me a little," she admitted, she was being honest.
"Me too," Soraya said, still staring at the door with that soft, helpless look. "Isn’t that the worst part?"
They sat with it for a moment:
Two grown-up girls in the wreckage of a plan that had been so sensible before reality developed taste and ruined it.
Then Noor exhaled and asked the practical question, because someone had to rescue them from all this feeling before it began demanding furniture and a wedding date.
"How are you going to tell your sister about this?"
Soraya’s face went through three distinct stages.
"Gods." She dragged a hand down her face. "I had not... I genuinely had not gotten that far."
For the first time, she looked almost envious.
"This is the part where I hate that you answer to no one but yourself, my love. You can simply do things. Go home. Make your own choices. No one to report to. I have to walk back into that woman’s orbit and somehow explain that I..." She stopped, then waved helplessly. "That we..."
She gave up on the sentence entirely.
"She is going to know the instant she looks at me. She always does."
"Then do not lie to her," Noor said simply. "You never could anyway."
"I envy you," Soraya said, and meant it. The dreaminess slid into something more wistful. "Independent all the way through. Nobody’s daughter in the business. Nobody’s sister to explain herself. Nobody’s anything. Just yours."
Noor watched her friend soften into sentiment and decided, with the brisk affection of a decade’s partnership, that this had gone far enough for one afternoon.
She stood, caught Soraya’s hand, and pulled her up from the chair arm.
"Come on. Enough of that. Let us go look at this car of his before we talk ourselves into or out of anything."
Soraya let herself be hauled upright, then dug in. "Wait. What about the interview?"
Noor paused.
"I heard it is going out live," Soraya continued, the businesswoman resurfacing through the wreckage. "And there is supposed to be some kind of announcement built into it. A real one." She hesitated. "After everything today, you are telling me you do not want to see what that man does in front of a live camera? We should watch. We would be fools not to."
"We’ll watch," Noor agreed. "Obviously, we watch."
Then she steered them both toward the door.
"But not before you speak to your sister. And not before we both thank the Madam properly. She hired us, Soraya. We do not simply vanish from her set into our strange man’s car like a pair of runaways. There is a right way to leave something."
She allowed herself the smallest dry curl of a smile.
"Even something like today."
Soraya looked at her, composed, careful, immovable Noor, already rebuilding the wall, already guiding them both back toward the shape of their actual lives.
Something in her chest eased.
"There she is," Soraya said fondly. "I was getting worried you had melted."
"I melt on my own schedule," Noor said, and opened the door.
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