Monday morning was more of the same, in bed and in the shower. It was a long, late, sex-drenched morning that neither Suzanne nor Justin wanted to end. Though neither of them said it, they both wished there were some way for them to freeze this past weekend in time and just stay in it, doing everything that they’d been doing, forever.
Nevertheless, as the eleven o’clock hour of the morning rolled in, they reluctantly and grudgingly pulled themselves out of Justin’s bed and got themselves dressed. Justin put on a suit. Suzanne donned a simple blouse and Capri pants, with the heels that she’d worn Saturday night. In the front hall of the house, Justin could not stop himself taking her in his arms and just holding her. That was all, just holding her. Suzanne did not object. She loved just being in his arms—for want of his bed.
Mack rang the doorbell. Justin answered and Mack told him he would pull the car around to the driveway and wait for Suzanne. This was Mack’s way of being discreet and letting them have their goodbyes in private. Justin led Suzanne to the front landing, and there they stood close, gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, which were so filled with the memory of the days just gone by.
“Do you have any idea how much I’ve enjoyed having you?” Justin asked.
“As much as I’ve enjoyed you having me, I hope,” Suzanne replied. To which she added, “You know, I welcome repeat business. In your case I’m going to be right up front and ask for it. Please call on me again, any time. Your place, my place, wherever you say, any time.” She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Please.”
Her squeeze of his hand made something else get very tight below Justin’s belt. It was all he could do to stop himself canceling all the appointments he had pushed back for today, calling Ginny and ordering this appointment to be held over, and throwing Suzanne over his shoulder and carrying her back to bed.
But no…business awaited him, and the cleaning and housekeeping crew would be along directly to tidy up after his very busy three days with the ravishing blonde in front of him. Sadly, he resisted the impulse.
Justin kissed the hand in which she’d squeezed his and said, “Damn right I’m calling on you again. Soon. I’m getting a lot more of you, Suzanne. Count on it.”
The next impulse was one he did not resist. He pulled her closer for one last heart-stopping, mind-scorching kiss. She kissed him back for dear life. They held the kiss and held each other in defiance of time and his responsibilities. It was only with the greatest exertion of will that they at last parted.
Not wanting to take her eyes from him, let alone her body, Suzanne backed up out of his arms and walked backward at first, away from the front door where he stood watching her with the same gaze he had given her so many times this weekend. She waved goodbye. He waved back and mouthed the word, Soon. And he added the gesture of making a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand and thrusting the index finger of the other through the circle, the sign of how they’d spent so many hours. Suzanne smiled a blinding smile back at him, and finally turned and walked away, surprised that her fancy shoes were actually touching the pavement. By rights she should be walking on air to the driveway where Mack waited to help her back into the passenger’s side of the Lexus.
On the road, she and Mack were halfway back to Suzanne’s apartment when her phone rang and she fished it out of her purse. It was Ginny.
Suzanne’s manager sounded almost as ecstatic as Suzanne had felt all weekend. “Honey,” she gushed, “I’ve just been talking to Justin Gates and he has been absolutely raving about you!”
Her toes curling in her expensive high-heels, Suzanne beamed a smile like the beacon of a lighthouse. “He was? Well, I could do some raving of my own about him! Ginny, that man is…he’s just… Oh my God, he’s out of this world! I told him to ask for me again, any time, whenever he wants.”
“And he says he’s going to, the first time his schedule allows. As a matter of fact, he was so thrilled with you, he didn’t just pay. He added a bonus!”
Suzanne’s eyes almost popped out. “A bonus?”
“Another five thousand dollars on top of your weekend rate!”
And Suzanne let out a scream that actually made Mack flinch at the wheel. Mack looked over at her, startled and a bit incredulous, and the car actually lurched toward the middle of the road. Suzanne was afraid he’d crack them up in a collision, so she immediately reined in her excitement. In a hushed but no less enthused tone, she said, “That much?”
“Worth every penny and more, he said.”
Putting her hand on her heart as if to feel whether it were actually melting at this moment, Suzanne sighed, “Oh my God, he is the best. The best.”
“He thinks the same about you,” said Ginny. “Listen, you’ve earned yourself a rest. I’ll be sending your payment to your account as soon as we’re off the phone. Take some time and treat yourself to something nice.”
Not nearly as nice as what’s been treating himself to me, Suzanne thought. “I will,” she said. “And Ginny…thank you so much for picking me for this one.”
“Tell you the truth, honey, I wouldn’t have sent this one to anyone else. I knew you were the girl for this job. I’ll be in touch. And I’m sure, so will he.”
That concluded one of the happiest phone calls of Ginny’s life. She ended the call, rested the phone in her lap, and stared blissfully out at the road.
After a minute or so, Mack ended the silence. “Sounds like things really went well for you on your date.”
She glanced over at him, trying to read his expression. Did he know what her “date” really was? Did he have any idea who and what she really was. The little smile that Mack wore suggested that he did—but with his accustomed discretion, he was not mentioning it. He was responsible for taking care of both his employer—and his employer’s secrets.
Suzanne simply replied to Mack, “You have the greatest boss ever.”
“I know,” said Mack, and broadened his smile ever so subtly. Oh, he definitely knew what this past weekend had been and with whom his boss had spent it. There was no question that he knew. And he was not judging. If nothing else, the bodyguard and chauffeur looked impressed with his employer’s taste.
With another sigh, Suzanne relaxed in the seat of the Lexus, and Mack drove her the rest of the way home.
_______________
In the days that followed, Suzanne gave much thought to a French expression she’d once heard: le petit mort, meaning “the little death.” It referred to that time when one was just coming down from an orgasm. After having been with Justin, and now not being with him, Suzanne was feeling as though her entire life was now le petit mort. Time and life could now be measured as the time before she went to Justin’s house, the time she spent there, and the time after. In this time after, she felt something missing, something that made her heart ache in a way, even more than her jaw had ached from serving him orally. She would happily go back to the latter ache if it meant losing the former.
As they had mentioned, Ginny did not refer any further business to Suzanne for the rest of that week. That gave Suzanne plenty of time to herself, to enjoy the large payment and the bonus and enjoy knowing how she had gotten them. She thought about going on a shopping spree as Ginny suggested, but somehow there was no thrill in the idea of it. Going out and buying herself expensive things as a reward seemed trivial in light of the reward of just having been to bed—etcetera—with Justin.
No clothing and trinkets that she could buy on Rodeo Drive could compare with the way he’d made her feel. Nothing that came out of a store could ever be as perfect as he was. She saved her money for that day, someday soon perhaps, when she really would move to Santa Monica or Manhattan Beach or Hermosa Beach, possibly with more earnings from more time with her awesome werebear billionaire.
It was perhaps her most ironic thought that Justin had in fact missed his calling. As spectacularly well as he had done for himself as one of the world’s wealthiest global business mogul, there was one profession for which he would be even better suited—or unsuited , as the case may be. Justin would make the perfect male counterpart for Suzanne. He would truly have been the perfect gigolo. The well-to-do and dissatisfied women of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Pacific Palisades would have kept him constantly on the go, from one bed and one hefty payment to the next. He could have struck it very rich just by lying with the privileged females of southern California.
Time and again she returned to his photos on her computer, lingering over his pool and workout photos, ripping the thongs off him with her eyes and imagining the beast between his legs looming out at her. Without question he would have been the most successful of all studs for hire, had life taken him down such a path.
Returning to her yoga routine, she was amused to remember how much she thought she would need it after the pounding she took from Justin. Where it had made her wobbly at first, she was surprised at how quickly she had acclimated herself to the force that his muscles and his basic, lecherous, sublime carnality brought to sex.
Her body remembered being with him in the same way her mind and spirit did. That constant, relentless animal pounding that had in the beginning made her scream not for mercy but for him never to stop was the most exhilarating thing she had ever experienced.
Going through the motions of her yoga positions, Suzanne could not help but think that her favorite position of all was prone, legs in the air, knees bent, under Justin. The more she thought about him, the less she could stop herself thinking about him. And the less she could stop herself craving so much more of him.
The nights were the most difficult part for her. Suzanne would lie alone in bed, actually wishing he were there. That was when she worked the hardest to remind herself that Justin was a client and she was a provider, that there was a specific and defined relationship between them, with understood limits and implicit expectations. She had gone to him, given him what he wanted, performed as he required, and been compensated for it. Very well compensated, and with a performance bonus for a job well done, yet.
When she saw Justin again—as she expected and hoped she soon would—the nature of their relationship would not change. What they were to each other was what they would continue to be. It would be another job for further compensation.
And yet, laying her head on her pillow each night, feeling the emptiness of the bed and the sheets around her, Suzanne could not dismiss the wish that he were there beside her, that she was in his incredible arms and under his godlike body.
Every night Suzanne would send herself to sleep without him, and in her mind would echo the plea of her longing: Call for me soon, Justin. Call for me soon…
_______________
The laboratory was a shambles.
Dr. Owen Coleman stood speechless in the tableau of wreckage and mayhem, moved his glasses from the bridge of his nose back into place, and scratched his thinning, greying blond hair. What a godawful mess she had made. And what a godawful mess she was likely to make until someone found her, which had better be soon or heads would roll and someone might even roll into prison.
This was what the company got for trying to reorganize and repurpose itself after going through the corporate version of a strip-mining operation in which Gates, damn his bearskin hide, gutted it and ripped it apart and sold off the pieces. Now she was loose and set to do God knows what with what the company had given her. They had thought, believed, they could keep this whole thing under control. The nature with which they had tampered had just taught them otherwise.
“It’s like something out of a bloody science fiction story,” he muttered.
The place looked almost as if an indoor tornado had come through. Tables and chairs were overturned and tossed about. Equipment lay strewn and shattered. Fragments of glass vessels lay everywhere. Cabinets were torn from walls and thrown across the space. And here and there on the walls and the broken furniture, the blood of research personnel, technicians, and security people was splotched and spattered. If it was not a tornado that hit this room, it was a strong and powerful wind, nonetheless. And the analogy brought to Dr. Coleman’s mind the words of an old song…
“They call the wind Mariah…”
From over his shoulder came a voice: “Dr. Coleman…?”
With a start, jolted out of his reflections, the scientist turned around and saw Roscoe Saunders approaching. A black man approaching middle age, but at the moment looking old beyond his years, the head of security in his grey uniform and black tie came up to Coleman and said, “There’s no sign of her anywhere on the grounds, Sir.” With grave trepidation, he concluded, “It looks like…she’s gotten away.”
Coleman shook his head. “Even as fast as she is, she can’t have gotten that far in this short a time. If she’s not still on the grounds, she’s not far away. But she will be soon. And no one we have available is going to have any ability to track her. Not with the powers she has.” He looked down, shook his head again, and sighed. “The powers we gave her.”
“Dr. Coleman,” said Saunders, “you’re right. Looking around at this place, seeing what she did to some of my men, she’s more than we can handle. We’re gonna have to call this in to the police, maybe the FBI.”
The scientist turned almost as pale as his white coat. “No!” he snapped. “Absolutely not! This is an internal matter! It will be handled from within the company with resources that we retain for ourselves. We’ll put a specialist on it, someone whose training and expertise can cover…a thing like this. But we are absolutely not going to civil or government authorities with this, is that clear?”
Saunders protested, “But Dr. Coleman, she’s dangerous—incredibly dangerous. And she’s loose out there where she can do God knows what to God knows who. Someone else is gonna get hurt—maybe worse than your staff and my people got hurt today. And it’ll be on our hands, Doctor. Ours.”
Coleman broke out into a sweat. “Don’t you think I know that, Saunders?” Fighting to calm himself, he went on. “Listen to me. I told you the status of this company when we hired you. We were part of a much larger corporation in the beginning. Justin Gates saw that corporation as something to slice up like a roast, and that’s what he did. He took that corporation apart and sold a piece here and a piece there. It’s taken us years to recover from that. Years.
And it was this project that turned it around; this project that won over the stockholders and got us back on our feet. And now you want to take this thing public and put us back in jeopardy again? You do that, and there goes your job and mine and dozens of other people’s—assuming I don’t fire you first. So you will say nothing—nothing!—and let us handle this matter internally. We will contract with the right person we need to contain…the problem. Is that understood?”
The security man slumped his shoulders, seeing that he was going to get exactly nowhere in nothing flat, arguing with the scientist in charge of the project on this issue. But in his mind he could already see the headlines, and deep in his heart and his bones he could already feel the guilt. Weary and worried, he simply answered, “Understood.”
“Very good,” said Coleman. “When maintenance comes through, see to it that they remember the non-disclosure agreements they signed. If one word of this gets out, there will be people fired and lawsuits filed.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Saunders. “I’ll remind ‘em.”
“Thank you. Dismissed,” the scientist said.
Saunders trudged out, still fearing the worst but powerless to address it, leaving Coleman alone in the ruined lab again.
His thoughts turned back to Justin Gates, the werebear billionaire with whom the whole thing had started. Perhaps the company had been too hasty in selecting this particular subject for this particular project, considering her history with the former owner. Perhaps they should have gone with someone else. But the reorganized Board of Directors was anxious, in a hurry to turn the company back around and get back to profits coming in and shareholders’ dividends going out.
It was the corporate way, wanting maximum profit and happy shareholders and wanting them yesterday. It was also the corporate way to want no whiff of impropriety or public scandal to reach the media. As the turnaround had to happen fast, now so did damage control. It had to be fast and it had to be quiet.
If only Justin Gates had just left everything the way he found it when he acquired the company. Ultimately this was his fault. And having broken things up and sold everything off, he had just walked away with his pockets full. He would never feel the pain of any of this.
Perhaps, he thought, he should. Perhaps, somehow, what had gone round between Justin Gates and his former lover should come back round to him again.
But if it did, it would not come by way of Dr. Owen Coleman.