Anna
He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him, but not just looking. Looking into each other, looking at each other in that way that leads to other things. I’m aware of how my t-shirt barely covers my breasts, drawing attention to them, and yet I do not even think of going into the bedroom and throwing on a hoodie. No, the truth is, I like the way he is looking at me. It’s odd, and it shouldn’t be the case. He’s a hitman. A killer. I should scream, run, fight, cry. Not sit here oddly calm and excited.
After he cleaned up the broken glass and spilled wine, we moved to the living room, sitting on the couch. The man who killed my tormentor is sitting across from me. A fact, but it seems strange. Eric was a hurricane, a nightmare, a husband from the dark burning depths of hell, and this man stopped him from hurting me again. Perhaps that’s why I don’t even try and stamp on my lust. I let it spread through my chest and down into my crotch and down my legs right to the tips of my toes until my entire body is humming with it.
“So?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I didn’t see anybody, Samson,” I say. “I was in the locker room the entire time. I only found out about Eric when I left after the game, and then the parking lot was filled with people. I didn’t see a thing.”
Samson nods shortly. “Ah,” he says.
He sits in a relaxed posture, one hand holding his glass of wine, the other draped over the side of the couch, his legs stretched out under the coffee table. But beneath that relaxation is something. It takes me a second to realize what it is, and then I see. It’s waiting power. He reminds me of an alligator I once saw at the zoo. Amazing creatures, alligators, old as dinosaurs and just as fascinatingly inhuman. Alligators sit there, waiting, waiting, and then, sometimes too quick to watch, those waiting muscles snap into action. It’s the same with Samson, I sense. He’s relaxed now, but at any moment he could rise for a fight. Or for something else, I think, and a tingle moves up my spine.
We’re silent for a time, and then I make to stand up.
“Where are you going?” Samson asks.
“To get another glass,” I tell him. “I can’t believe I dropped mine.”
“You were shocked.”
“I still am—but what’s shock without alcohol?”
Samson smiles. “True,” he says. “But wait here. I’ll get it.”
Time seems to expand in the apartment. I feel as though we’ve covered the space of five dates in half an hour. I feel bonded to this man in an inexorable and yet inexplicable way. Why should I be bonded to this man? What is there to bond me to him? He’s a stranger. Worse than that, he’s a killer. I should run, I think to myself. And yet I find myself watching him as he strolls to the kitchen and takes a glass from the cupboard. “There’s another bottle of wine in the cupboard to your left,” I tell him. He takes it down.
We sit on the couch, two bottles of wine, a glass each, and we drink.
###
I’m not a heavy drinker, but tonight I don’t stop myself. Foolish, perhaps, but I feel safe in Samson’s company. I feel as though I can drink as much as I like, because nothing will happen to me with Samson in the apartment. I have to remind myself, you don’t know this man! And yet he killed Eric. If I can’t trust the man who killed Eric, who can I trust? I try to apply logic to the notion and fail. It’s without logic, I think. Without logic but with more force behind it than anything logic-bound.
“So, you’re sticking around?” I say, taking a long sip of my wine. The first bottle is nearly conquered. My head swims. And soon it will be swimming even more with bottle number two.
Samson inclines his head. “If you don’t mind,” he says. “I don’t think leaving you alone tonight is such a good idea.”
His eyes look my body up and down without shame now; he’s not even trying to hide it. He traces my breasts and my folded legs. I don’t stop him, don’t even try to stop him. Wherever his eyes move, tingles follow. I’m warm and comfortable and flushed and horny and no matter how many times I tell myself I shouldn’t be this way, I can’t stop it. This man killed Eric! This man killed my would-be murderer!
“Tonight?” I say, my voice braver than it normally is with men. “You’re staying the whole night, are you?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Yes?” I laugh. “Maybe I don’t want you to.”
“Maybe, but you do.”
“Well,” I say. “The couch is comfortable enough.”
His forefinger glides across the rim of his glass; a whistle sounds. “I’m sure it is,” he says.
I wonder, idly, if it’s possible for me to stop what is inevitably going to happen between us: whether, if I really tried, it would be possible for me to prevent us from falling on each other like animals. But heat is rising around us and I know that, sooner or later, this strange man and I will collapse into each other. I’ve never understood the sex-with-stranger syndrome that some of my girlfriends are so fond of, mainly in clubs and bars. The wordless, entirely physical attraction that causes strangers to come together in passion that burns volcanic for a night and then sizzles out.
But now I do.
But is this man a stranger? I ask myself. He is, technically, yes. He’s a stranger but he’s more, too. I’m tied to him. He killed Eric. I keep telling myself that because it seems surreal. He killed Eric. Eric is dead and this man killed him.
Yes, I’m justifying. Pre-justifying. Gearing myself up for something I know my body wants to do.
“I’m sure the couch is very comfortable,” Samson says.
“I need to know about you,” I say. Then I drain the last of my wine and hold my glass out. Samson takes the new bottle, uncorks it, and pours me a tall glass of red. I place it on the coffee table and fold my hands in my lap. I need a break from drinking, but I know I’ll drink more tonight, more than I should. It’s been one of those days and it’s shaping up to be one of those nights.
“About me?” he says. “What do you mean?”
“You’re in my apartment. You’ve done something for me. And now we’re . . .” What? But it doesn’t need to be said. We both know what we’re doing, what we’re going to do. “Don’t you think it’s fair I know something about you?”
“What do you mean?” he repeats. He watches me easily, completely at ease with himself. It’s a welcoming change to the men who try too hard, who always seem on edge.
“Is it that complicated?” I say. “I want to know something about you, who you are, what you are.”
“That’s a strange question.”
“Is it?”
We pause, and I get the sense we’re dueling with words.
“Yes,” he says. “It is.”
“Tell me!” I giggle, the wine swilling in my mind.
He lets out a sigh, and then launches into a long speech. But it’s not about himself. He talks for around five minutes about NBA, about his favorite players and how he thinks the season is going to end. He’s a huge NBA fan, I can tell, but he goes into too much detail. He gives me the names of players who won matches before I was born, gives me the dates of interesting games. But I don’t care about that. I dance for the NBA; I don’t watch it. In truth, basketball isn’t so exciting to me. And it doesn’t tell me anything about him.
“You’re skirting my question,” I say, when he’s finished.
I’ve picked up the glass of wine, taken a sip, and I feel shakier than I did an hour ago. But shaky in a good way.
“I am,” he admits. “But I am an NBA fan. Aren’t you?”
I shake my head. “I read and care for animals and sometimes read about caring for animals.” I shrug. “I guess they’re my only hobbies, apart from reading, and sometimes dancing. For fun, not cheering.”
“There are worse hobbies to have.”
“You know a lot about me,” I say. “You know about my past with Eric and I’m assuming you know about the shelters and all that. Maybe you’ve even delved deeper and you know I went through a ‘wild stage’ in my teens: drinking, partying, all of that.”
“I did,” he says, without a hint of shame. “I had to know as much as I could.”
“See! But I know nothing about you.”
“But what do you want to know?” he sighs.
“Anything!” I exclaim, louder than I mean to. “A story from your childhood. Your favorite pastime. Anything.”
“A story from my childhood,” he mutters. “I don’t usually share stories from my childhood.”
“I can imagine it’s not really the sort of thing you talk about with your usual crowd,” I say softly, trying to guide him to me, steer him into the full fray of the conversation.
“You’re right,” he says. “It isn’t.”
I’m hungry to learn about this man. Not just eager, or curious, but hungry. The force of it startles me. I cannot remember a time when knowing about a man seemed so important, when learning about the soul of a person called out to me with such fury. A killer is sitting on my couch drinking wine, watching my legs and my breasts, and I am watching his muscles, his strong-jawed face, and his sky-blue eyes. I want him, but I don’t want him when I know nothing of him. I don’t want us to just be two random people; I can’t be like my girlfriends in clubs and bars. I can’t cross the threshold until I know at least something about what makes him who he is.
“Then tell me,” I prompt. “If you can’t talk to anyone else, you can talk to me.”
“Women don’t usually care,” he mutters. “The women I’m with—”
“I don’t care about them,” I interrupt. “I only care about us, now, here.” That’s true. The circumstances and the wine have combined to enclose this night in something almost magical. A bubble traps us in this apartment, in this moment.
“I guess I could tell you about Black Knight,” he muses.
“Black Knight? Who’s that?”
He lays his glass on the table, leans back. “I came here as a professional,” he says. “I came here as Samson Black, cold-hearted professional, with no intention of talking about anything but the job at hand.”
“That’s changed,” I say. “You must be able to feel it.”
He lets out a throaty groan, wolfish. “Of course I can,” he says. “Fine, let me tell you about Black Knight.”
My belly does a little backflip of excitement. I won, I think. I’ve broken down his wall, at least partially.
“His name was Richard, really, but everyone called him Black Knight. He was a vicious killer, only ever using his fists. Messy and nasty, but he thought there was a kind of honor to it.”
As he speaks, he looks down at his hands, and I sense he doesn’t want to meet my gaze. Out of shame, or fear, or embarrassment, I don’t know.
“Go on,” I urge, when he pauses.
“My father was not a good man,” he says. “He drank too much and he was too free with his fists. When he got into one of his moods, I would go to Uncle Richard and live with him for a few days. This started when I was around seven or eight and had no clue what my dad or my uncle did; they were both in my business. All I knew was that Uncle Richard was a big black-bearded man with kind eyes. He let me watch all the movies I wanted to and never hit me.” He smiles and his eyes look into the middle distance, as though his uncle is standing before him. “I don’t know what you want to know about him.”
“Anything,” I say. “Anything you can tell me.”
“This is stupid,” he grumbles.
“Well, maybe it’s stupid of me to let a killer stay in my apartment,” I say.
He flinches. “That’s true,” he says. “Fine, but I can’t go on much longer. I’m not normally the sharing type.”
I sip my wine and wait.
“One day, when I was around fourteen—and learning the business—I went to Richard with two massive black eyes and a cut along my cheek. It was from my dad. Richard didn’t hug me or console me or anything like that. That wasn’t the man he was, and doing that would’ve seemed very strange to him. But he did invite me into the apartment, sit me down, and run water over the cuts and bruises. Afterward, he asked me what happened. I didn’t want to tell him at first. I was scared he would hurt Dad. And even after everything, he was still . . .”
“He was still your dad,” I finish. Samson nods. “I get that,” I say, thinking of my own father, and all the insults and pain. And yet, it’s true, he’s still my dad. That’s the only thing that allows me to sit in his car without tearing his face off.
“Exactly. But Richard got it out of me in the end. He was like that. Hard to ignore. Hard to push away. I expected him to go to Dad and fight him. They were brothers, Dad the older one, and they fought a lot. But Richard didn’t even stand up. He just knelt in front of me and looked hard into my eyes. ‘You have to fight him,’ he told me. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Your father.’ When he said this, his voice was harder than I’d ever heard it. It was the voice I imagined he used at work. And so I went round to my father’s, just as Richard said, and I . . .”
He cuts himself off, as though just now realizing how much he’s sharing.
“That’s enough for now,” he says, and his tone is unswerving. I know without probing that he means it; he will not share any more with me.
“Okay,” I say.
But that’s enough, isn’t it? Because now this man is not a stranger. He’s not just some random killer sitting on my couch. He’s the man who was once the boy who went black-eyed and cut to a black-bearded man who forced him to face his father. Looking at him now, I can see the boy he once was, the scared boy who became the strong, steady man.
“Tonight is like some kind of fever dream,” I say.
“I know what you mean,” he replies. “I feel closer to you than I should.” When he says this, his head is bowed. He can’t bear to look at me when he says things like that, I think. He just can’t bear it.
My eyes move down to his pants, his crotch, and I see what I always knew was there, ever since he entered my apartment. He is hard, rock-hard. His cock is a thick steel rod pitching up the fabric of his pants.
I drain the last of my wine and drop the glass onto the carpeted floor. “Samson,” I breathe. My heart doesn’t beat; it cascades, a series of quick desperate thumps that ricochet in my chest and dry up my mouth and moisten my palms.
“Anna,” he mutters, finishing his wine and dropping it as I did.
Then he leans across the couch and finds my lips with his own.
###
He kisses me forcefully, hungrily, as though he’s been waiting to kiss me since he first laid eyes on me. I return the kiss with the same force. I’m instantly lost in it. One second we’re talking, we’re people; the next we’re animals breathing in the pleasure of the other. I moan as our mouths open and our tongues meet, buzzing heat moving down my tongue and through my body to my pussy, my clit, my lips—all of it buzzing. I’m kissing the man who killed Eric, I think, and that drives me on. I reach down and grab his cock through his pants.
He growls when I touch it, a low growl, the growl of a caged beast finally set free. I rub his cock up and down, and even through the pants I can feel how huge it is. At least nine and a half inches, and thick. A magnificent cock. An impressive cock. An intimidating cock. I rub it quick, and the quicker I rub it, the louder his moans sound.
He breaks off the kiss, looks down at my breasts, and moans. “Fuck,” he breathes. “You’re too damn sexy, Anna.”
He grabs my t-shirt and pulls it up, over my head, and then throws it into a corner of the room. My large breasts spill free. My nipples are as hard as his cock, as hungry for pleasure. He leans down and grabs one, sucks the other. When he sucks it, heat blooms in my chest. I rub his cock faster and faster and he sucks harder, until the flesh around the nipple is red from the pressure.
“Yes,” I moan, and this in itself is strange. I’m not usually one to moan words; I’m usually quiet. But Samson is bringing it out in me. The pleasure is greater than any I’ve experienced before. “Yes, yes, yes.”
But I can’t be satisfied with this alone. I need more. I grab his arm at the wrist and guide his hand down between my legs. I open them, feeling the wetness of my pussy against my underwear, and place his hand on it. He grips me hard, clamping his hand down on my pussy, and then begins to rub, up and down, as I rub his cock. We rub each other in unison—all the while he sucks my nipples, massages my breasts—as though in some orchestrated dance. But this is new, fresh; we find each other’s rhythms easily, far more easily than I ever have before.
He releases my breasts. “Take your panties off,” he commands.
Commands. That is how he says it. He is telling me, not asking. And I don’t care. I want him to tell me. I want to be commanded by this man. Strange, because I remember men before Samson trying to use the same tone of voice on me, trying to tell what to do in bed. And each time I laughed at them, or told them gently not to talk to me like that. But now, here, with Samson, it seems natural. I want to be his to command.
I quickly take my undies off, revealing my pussy. He looks down at it. His eyes go wide, stay wide, the eyes of a predator finally setting sight upon its prey.
“I need you,” he says. “I fucking need you.”
“Take me, then,” I breathe.
He yanks down his pants, his underwear. His cock springs up. It’s massive, almost frightening, the kind of cock a woman looks at and thinks: Can I take it? That’s what I think, now. Can I? But my pussy doesn’t have the same qualms. My pussy is hungry for it. As soon as I see it, my pussy twinges, gets hotter, wetter. Tingling sensations move around my hole, anticipating what will soon be inside of me.
He grabs me under the armpits and lifts me up, lifts me as though I weigh nothing. He’s still wearing his suit jacket and his shirt but he doesn’t seem to care. Even his pants are only around his ankles, whilst I’m completely naked. But he’s too impatient. He wants me, and he wants me now.
I part my legs, and he lowers me down onto him, slowly. Reaching down, I grab his cock and guide him inside of me.
Oh. My. God.
He is big, far bigger than any man I’ve ever slept with. His cock thrusts into my pussy smoothly, slowly, and I ach as it opens to take him in. His pushes up, up, his cock sparking heat inside of me, until he is buried in me, his balls resting against my ass cheeks, the tip of his head hitting that sweet spot deep inside of me no man has ever hit before. Without realizing it, I’ve leaned down and sunk my head into his neck, biting his flesh.
He grabs me by the waist, lifts me a few inches to make some room, and then begins to thrust. Slow, at first, his cock sliding in and out, in and out, in a steady flow. I feel my pussy get bigger as he slides in and out, stretching around him, my sweet spot calling out to him each time he slides out, and sighing with pleasure when he slides back in again. His hands are firm on my ass cheeks. I lean up, grip his shoulders, and bounce in time with his thrusts. My breasts are in his face. He kisses them, bites them, sucks the nipples.
“You’re the sexiest goddamn woman alive,” he grunts. His voice is strained. He isn’t thinking about what he says anymore. He’s just saying it. “You’re fucking amazing.” A pause, and then, “I have to go fast. I can’t hold it any longer.”
“Go fast,” I moan. “Go fast, Samson.”
He doesn’t need more prompting than that. He slides out—and then in. Like a rocket firing, the speed of it . . . He pounds into me ferociously, red-hot, in-out-in-out-in-out without any pause between thrusts. I can’t bounce with him. It’s too quick. I dig my fingernails into his shoulders, propping myself up, and sit atop the pleasure.
“So tight,” he grunts.
“That’s because . . . because . . .”
But I can’t finish the sentence. My pussy gets tighter and tighter, and I know it’s coming, coming fast, and I know before it happens that it’s going to be more intense than any orgasm I’ve ever had. My head gets hot and fuzzy and my body prickles and then—and then—and then—
Everything stops. Time stops. I hardly know where I am, who I am. All I know is the thick solid pleasure lancing into me, over and over, and the feel of my pussy, burning. It grips his cock like a squeezing hand, stays like that for a few moments, and then releases. Everything releases. Time resumes. My pussy gets impossibly hot, my head clouds, and the prickles on my skin explode in a chorus of pleasure. Twenty seconds of pure bliss grip me. I’m vaguely aware of Samson moaning. I’m more aware of his shoulders, muscular in my hands.
I feel myself squirt on his cock, but I don’t care, I don’t get embarrassed. Both of us are too caught up in the moment for that.
When it’s over, I flop forward for a moment.
“Thank fuck for that,” Samson sighs, and then he thrusts deep into me one last time.
His cock judders, his breath stops, and then his cock begins to wilt inside of me.
I kiss his neck, again and again. “Yes,” I breathe. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Fuck,” he exhales. “Oh my fucking—Fuck!”
He comes, hard, and then I slide away from him onto the couch.
After a few minutes, he turns to me.
“You’re incredible,” he says.