American Queen

Curious, I wrap my fingers around the proffered box and pull it closer. Ash leans back as I examine it, smoothing his tie and looking faintly amused. “There’s nothing dangerous in there,” he tells me.

Still, I take my time opening it, wondering what could be so important that he had it in his bedroom, at the ready. I have no idea what to expect—bullets or military badges or mementos of his dead wife even—but it’s none of those things. I swing the lid all the way open and pull out a stack of papers folded into quarters, papers that are dirty and soft from repeated handling.

I glance at Ash with a confused look, and he inclines his head toward the papers in a silent invitation. He wants me to read them.

With hesitant fingers, I unfold the paper. It’s computer-printer-sized, looks like it had once been bright white with fresh black printer ink. But the black of the words have faded and dulled, and the paper is smudged with what looks like oil and dirt and blood.

Dear Ash,

It’s my seventeenth birthday today. It’s been exactly one year since we met…

My eyes snap to his. “My emails,” I say, a little numbly. “I thought you never got them.”

“I got them,” he replies. “I got them and I read them a thousand times and then I printed them out so I could read them wherever I went.”

“But you never wrote back, never even once. Not even to tell me to stop writing to you.”

“You were seventeen, Greer. Was I supposed to write back and tell you that yes, I did fuck my fist every night thinking of you? That every time I read your emails I had to jack off, that even the mere sight of your name on my computer screen got me hard? I hated myself enough for having those feelings for a girl that age. I couldn’t make it worse by reaching out to you.” He gives me a rueful smile. “But I also couldn’t bring myself to tell you to stop. To block your emails. God, I wanted you so much and it was the only way I could have even this little piece of you. So I kept reading. Kept coming to fantasies of you fingering yourself at your desk as you wrote to me.”

“Ash,” I say, stunned.

“I have them memorized, you know. Word for word. I don’t want boring, common ways of being bad,” he recites, his hands once again warm and rough on my inner thighs. “I want to be the kind of bad that leaves me wrung out with bite marks blooming purple on my body. I want someone to hold me by the neck and make me stare at an entire reckless realm of possibility. I want to crawl to them.”

My cheeks are flushed as he says my own words back to me. I’m so embarrassed and yet…that he memorized my words, touched himself thinking of them, that he carried my words with him wherever he traveled…

“Greer,” Ash says, his hands sliding up to my hips and holding me tight, “I have to know you meant what you said. It’s been ten years since you wrote me that email, and while I’ve spent those ten years wishing to God that you were mine, I know things might have changed for you.”

Everything has changed. So much has changed. And yet nothing at all, because here I am just as breathless and squirmy as I was kissing him when I was sixteen. As infatuated and obsessed as when I wrote those emails.

“I want to know if I can be the man to hold you by the neck,” he says. “I need to know how much you’ll let me do to you, how far you’ll let me go, because you are the only woman who’s ever said those words to me. The only woman who’s wanted that from me.”

His fingers dig into my hips, and I nod, vigorously, desperately. “Yes,” I plead. “Yes, please.”

A certain tension leaves his shoulders, and the smile he gives me is luminous. “I’ve waited so long for this. Wanted this so hard, so painfully, and now…” He takes a breath, moving his hands down so that his palms rest on the top of my legs and his thumbs brush against the crease of my thighs. “Now you are here, and you are actually telling me you want to be mine.”

“I’ve wanted to be yours since I was old enough to want it,” I tell him. I can feel the warmth from his thumbs, the faintest movement of them as they gently rub closer and closer to my cunt, and it makes me ache so fiercely I can’t handle it. I try to subtly move my hips so that I get the touch where I need it, but he merely presses his palms against my thighs to stop me.

“What do you want?” I ask him in a whisper. “Let me give it to you.”

The words are like water to a parched man, and he presses his eyes closed for a moment. Then he opens them. “Don’t move,” he orders, pressing my legs wider apart. I’m so exposed to him, and his thumbs are so very, very close to the place where I throb and need.

“Yes, Sir,” I murmur.

And then the first press of his touch. His thumbs brush against my folds, up and down, up and down, until I’m fighting the urge to squirm, and then he spreads my pussy open. He can see every fold, curve and slick line of me, and the way he’s looking at my cunt, as if it’s something for sale, a thing for his pleasure and his possession, it makes it impossible to stay still now. I wriggle a little on the desk.

Thwack!

A sharp slap on the inside of my thigh.

I’m surprised by the hot flash of pain, and even more surprised at the way my pussy tightens at it, the way goose bumps pepper my flesh and the way my nipples harden. I can’t stop the whimper that leaves my mouth.

“I’m the first man to look at your pussy this way, aren’t I? The first to spread you open and just look.”