SHE STARED.
I stared.
This was bad. Six million bucks kind of bad. So bad it ought to be really fucking good for me to stand there like an idiot and let Jesse rise on her tiptoes, her lashes, thick and long, fanning across her cheeks. I wanted to kiss the curve of her lips and dip my tongue between them and conquer her inch by inch, like a hidden continent. Mine to explore and reign. Mine to rule. Mine to hold. She tipped her chin up, her lips a breath from mine. I liked Jesse a lot, but watching her make the first move was killing my fucking balls, and I wasn’t too keen on kids, but I liked having the option, you know?
Finally—Jesus, fucking finally—her lips locked on mine, and the urge to grab her face and kiss her the way I knew, the way I was used to, the way I wanted to, burned every cell in my body. I itched. I burned. Yet I stood there, still as a brick, giving her the power as her mouth shyly explored mine.
“Is this…am I doing it okay?”
I nodded slowly. Moses on a cracker, yeah. It was more than okay. More than okay for her to fuck up my deal with her stepdaddy. It was more than okay for her to fuck up my plans. And my dreams. And my life. It was more than okay because it was me who’d come to her. Who’d crawled to her, really, sporting zero self-control.
I inched down, closing the space between us. My blood pounded between my ears, and I wanted to punch my own face for feeling the way I’d felt about a closed-mouth kiss. I needed to get laid. Soon. Shit, right now. We kissed like kids. One peck. Two pecks. Three pecks. Again and again and again, the world around us vanishing into a thick cloud of nothing, until the kisses became one long kiss.
And then she opened her mouth. Gently. Timidly. A baby’s first step in the world. Her tongue swept my lips, silently asking for permission, which I granted. She tasted warm and coconut-y, and we stroked for a while, just kissing, just fucking kissing, before I realized I’d wrapped her hair in my fist like the savage that I was and yanked her into me. Her body responded, wrapping around me like ivy. She bobbed her head into our kiss, as if giving me the permission to go ahead, and that’s all I needed to open my mouth all the way and demolish her. I ate her face, and I might be talking literally here. I licked the corners of her lips, biting and tugging at her lips until they became puffy and sensitive. Our foreheads crashed as I sucked her tongue into my mouth, until it stopped being a kiss and ventured deep into tongue-fucking territory. She whimpered into my mouth, and I nearly let go of her, worried that it was too much, but then her little fists balled around my neckline, and I grabbed her by the back of her thigh and curled it against my waist, grinding against her in a mixture of agony and need I’d never felt before.
As I boxed her in with my arms against the wall, I realized that I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself. I’d sprinted past every single red line and broken every rule on my way to so-called healing her, all while creating the biggest junkie to walk on earth.
Yeah, that would be me.
My hard-on was aligned with her pussy, and I bent my knees a little, fucking her through her clothes. She clawed into my shoulders as I ground against her like I was trying to drill her into the wall. Her pussy against my cock felt like dark magic.
I was fucking her through our clothes. Literally fucking her without a condom. My dick was halfway inside her pussy, the only things separating us were her yoga pants and my trunks. I was going to remove my lips from hers for the first time in forty minutes when her little hand slipped into my waistband and grabbed my shaft. My dick jerked in her fist and sprang out of my trunks, and even though this was the definition of stupid—fucking the girl you signed a six-million-dollar contract not to fuck mere feet from the front door of the man who’d made you sign it—Jesse inspired the idiot in me. I was about to protest and mumble something about needing to calm down a little before my dick exploded, when she slipped my cock between her clothed thighs and rubbed them together.
Dumb Bane: fuck our dick. Let’s do it.
It was delicious and dirty and the kind of thing to make the new Jesse heave, which prompted me to believe I was getting the old one. The pre-Emery one.
“Snowflake…” I said. That was it. I didn’t really think beyond that. I wasn’t even sure what I was asking. Maybe for her to take mercy on my balls.
“Let’s come,” she moaned into our kiss. “Finger me.” She moved her hand back to my cock and began to stroke it, thumbing my PA and sending shivers up my spine.
Since I knew Darren’s security cameras didn’t point at the oversized plants decorating his entrance from each side—I’d checked—I knew we were in the clear. I shoved my hand into her yoga pants and found her silky and warm and so fucking tight I wanted to die right then and there, knowing no moment in my life was going to top this one. I slipped two fingers between her thighs and played with her a little. With any other woman, I’d get straight to the punch line, rub her clit and make her come so we could move on to the important part—me. With Jesse, she was the important part, and while a few months ago I’d have found this idea unnerving, I couldn’t give two shits about me when it came to her.
I grazed the walls of her wet pussy, fingering her old-school, thrusting two fingers into her and making sure her clit and pussy were thoroughly wet. My hand teased her with a come-hither motion that slammed into her G-spot again and again and a-fucking-gain, slowly enough to build her orgasm gradually, like never-ending foreplay. Her head rolled from side to side on the wall, and I had to chase her for every kiss and bite.
“Touch my clit,” she begged, hooking her finger in the titanium ring and tugging. I was so close I could feel the cum rushing through my dick. I laughed into our kiss, because it was such a trip, having Jesse talk like that. The old or the new or anything in between.
“Ask nicely.”
“Please touch my clit.”
“Will you go surfing with me tomorrow morning?”
“Maybe.”
I dragged two fingers below her clit and pressed them to her core. She chased my touch with her pussy, but I withdrew quickly. She groaned.
“Will Edie be there?”
“Who the fuck cares about Edie? Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. She’s married. And irrelevant. You’re my girl.”
My girl.
My girl.
My girl.
The sentence echoed in my apparently otherwise empty head. I didn’t know what made me say that. Maybe the crazy need for it to be real. Truth was, it drove me crazy that Hale had even looked at her. I wanted to tear his eyeballs out and make a smoothie with them for even noticing she existed.
She squeezed me harder, and I bit down on her lip out of instinct, reopening a recent small cut that made her bleed. I sucked her pain into my mouth.
“I’m your girl?” she asked. My heart raced like a wild horse, galloping straight into her little fists. Break it and I’ll fuck you up, I wanted to warn. But that was bullshit, and I knew it.
“Not to be messed with, not to be touched. So what’s it going to be?”
Pause. “I’ll surf with you tomorrow.”
“That’s my girl.” I pushed my fingers into her clit and rubbed until she choked on her breath. She pumped me until her hand began to shake and her legs gave out. Her orgasm was like a domino, the fall long and steady and epic.
She dropped to her knees, writhing and panting, just as I said, “I’m coming, too.”
She wrapped her lips around my cock and looked up to me, her blue eyes shining. I fisted her hair, realizing what needed to be done to save both of us.
Giving up my dream.
“I want you to swallow every drop, Snowflake,” I said as I shot my load into her mouth. I made it messy, not going straight for her throat, but pulling out halfway through so she could taste me on her tongue. Marking her in all the ways I could.
She swallowed. I tucked myself back in.
“What did you want to talk to me about in the text message?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looking up at me. I took her hand and helped her get to her feet. What I wanted to tell her was that we needed to stop doing this couple bullshit. But now I had a solution. It was going to make me hate myself forever, but I would also get to keep Jesse.
“I wanted to tell you that you snore.”
She punched my arm.
I smiled.
She bought it.
“Bane?” a soft voice probed, forcing me to open my eyes.
It took me a second to figure out where I was. Flung over my messy bed, catching up on some sleep. I looked up and saw Grier pulling an elastic off of her hair, letting her blonde locks fall down all the way to her ass. She was wearing a summer dress I’d once told her made me want to eat her ass. Yellow with cornflower blue daisies. It did nothing for me now.
“Shit,” I croaked, jerking up to my forearms and rubbing a hand over my face. “What’s the time?”
“Eight o’clock. You didn’t open the door so I let myself in.” Her fingers grazed the strap of her bra. Eight o’clock. I was supposed to be meeting Darren at six at his Newport Beach office. I’d even set my alarm, not wanting to miss the meeting for obvious reasons, but I must’ve crashed. I looked down and saw the nightstand clock broken into pieces on the floor. Shit. Goddamn Beck was going to be the end of me with those long surfing sessions. Asshole better get third place or above, otherwise I was going to kick his ass all the way back to Hermosa Beach.
I jerked upright, tossing a shirt on, when a shriek left Grier’s mouth.
“Oh my God, you shaved! Roman, you are gorgeous!”
I wished people would stop saying that. No real man wanted to be described as gorgeous or beautiful. I wasn’t a fucking cocktail dress. But seeing the look on Jesse’s face last night when I’d climbed through her window was enough to make me stand by my decision. She’d looked at me with soft eyes, and her sudden submission was worth waxing the rest of my body, too.
Without sparing Grier an answer, I flung my sheet back and darted to the kitchenette, where I charged my phone. I had a few text messages, and I dreaded almost all of them.
Darren
Are you here?
Darren
Of course you are not here. You called me asking for an urgent meeting, which you didn’t even show up to. I waited for you. Now I’m going to be stuck in traffic for hours.
Darren
It better not be about Jesse. I know she has a new job with you and that she is making friends with a bald girl who came to pick her up for the mall today. But you still need to get her to meet more people, make more friends. The six months are not up yet.
I hadn’t even known about Gail and Jesse, but I was happy they’d hit it off. Gail was a solid chick. Then there was another message. One I didn’t dread.
Snowflake
At the mall with Gail. I thought I’d treat you to this beauty, because I know you like orange.
She sent me a picture of her with an orange onesie. Not only the color, but the fruit. I snort-laughed, shaking my head. I shot her a quick message before returning my gaze to a confused Grier.
Bane
Delicious to a fault, but we’re gonna do something about this orange onesie. For one thing: take it off of you once I see you. x
Yeah. I ended a message with an x. I really was a special kind of fucked.
Grier tapped her foot nervously, her arms crossed over her chest, glancing at her Cartier. She kept her clothes on, which told me that she already knew what was up. I’d bailed on our hookup last week, and frankly, I was about to ditch this one, too, and would have, if I hadn’t crashed like a goddamn meteor. I plucked two beers from the fridge and handed her one. It was time for an uncomfortable conversation.
She took a sip and looked down at her shoes. “Jesse Carter,” she said.
I walked over to the door leading to the deck, parking my forearms on the rusty railways. She mirrored my movements, doing the same. We both stared at the waves crashing on rocks by the shore.
“Brian said you asked for him to pull out her case file and sniffed around who worked on it.”
I had, a second after I’d cleaned my cum-coated dick the day Jesse and I had fooled around in the storage room. Maybe she didn’t want to retaliate, but I wasn’t going to go on pretending these assholes hadn’t done anything to her. They had. And they were going to pay. The fact that I had to chase two of them away not too long ago meant they did not understand the error of their ways. And nothing, and no one, was going to harm Jesse.
I shrugged. “This whole goddamn town knows what happened, but the little dipshits are still free. How is that okay?”
Grier’s eyes sparkled like the water underneath us. Even in my periphery, I saw that she was emotional, but not about Jesse.
“You know, I never thought you’d fall in love. That’s what made you such a safe bet,” she said, wiping the cold mist of her beer bottle on her dress. “There was something so detached about you when I met you. Like you were here, but not really. It made sleeping with you so easy. So…uncomplicated. And I know a lot of other women share this sentiment. Yes, you were paid. Yes, you were an escort. But you were decent. Discrete and cool and nice to talk to. You didn’t make us feel cheap or tacky, or like freaks. You were always a true gentleman, Bane.”
I didn’t really know how to respond to this. I noticed that she talked about me in past tense, and that was a relief. She knew that we were over. I swiveled my body to face her, resting my hip on the railway.
“You’ll find someone better. Someone who’ll give you more than a quickie once a week.”
“Maybe I can have a full-blown affair this time.” She smiled bitterly. “With feelings and all.”
I made a gagging sound. “Ugh. Feelings.”
“How would you know what they’re like?” she teased.
Because I’ve been ambushed by the fuckers and can’t seem to shake them off.
We shared one of the most awkward hugs in the history of embraces. It was only when she let go of me that I realized I was relieved. I was done with the bullshit, with or without Snowflake. Really, she was the kick in the ass I’d needed all this time. And what a fucking kick that was. My tailbone was still sore.
“I’m a little jealous of Jesse Carter,” she said to me when I walked her to my door. I rubbed the back of my neck.
Don’t worry. I’ll fuck it up at some point, I’m sure.
When Grier left, I walked over to my kitchen nook, took my phone out of my back pocket, and started going over every single client on my contact list. I decided to go for something laconic, firm, and polite. Thing was, I wasn’t much of a diplomat, so after much thinking, I came up with this:
Hi. It’s Bane. I’m writing to let you know that I’m hereby terminating our professional relationship. I’m officially retired and will not be making a comeback anytime soon. If you owe me money, consider it paid. If I owe you dick—I suggest you go look for it somewhere else.
So long and thanks for all the fish.—Bane.
I sent it to all forty-six women I had worked with at once, thinking in retrospect that the fish reference could probably have been omitted. All I knew was that I’d just killed the business that had helped me rise to power in this town, and that I was about to kill my dream next time I spoke to Darren.
Grier described what I felt toward Jesse as love. But I wasn’t so sure what actually existed between us, which made all this rash decision-making even crazier. If Jesse found out about my deal with Darren, she’d kill me. And I wouldn’t blame her. I needed to terminate it immediately and come clean if I wanted half a chance to make it right.
But do you want to make it right?
Along the years, I’d watched as plenty of idiots around me formed long-lasting relationships. Maybe I could, too. All I needed was to remind myself that I was not my father, that I was worthy, and that I deserved her. Even if the mere deal I’d struck to get to her in the first place suggested otherwise.
I texted Snowflake one more time before I dragged my ass back to bed.
Bane
Still can’t unsee that orange onesie. Send a pic w/o it.
She responded back with a faceless selfie of her tits pressed together inside her black My Bloody Valentine tank top, a smutty book open on her bent legs. I bit my fist.
Bane
Is that My Bloody Valentine? I hate them, too. Remove.
Snowflake
Is there something you don’t hate?
Bane
Yes. You.
Snowflake
Interesting. So you don’t hate me?
Bane
Not even close. Not even close to close. What’s the antonym of hate?
Snowflake
No way I’ll be the first one to say the word.
Bane
Sleep tight, Snowflake. Big day tomorrow.
I stared at my peeling ceiling for the remainder of that night, ignoring the chiming cell phone beside me as a stream of messages from clients started pouring in, from irate to panicked to mildly offended.
Maybe love wasn’t about feeling happy and whole.
Maybe love was about breaking so the person you cared for would feel a little more whole.