There was no nice way to let someone know that they were fired. Nobody liked to lose their job. Audra wouldn’t like losing her position at Strickland’s, but maybe the blow would be softened when I told her the position of head cataloguer was waiting for her at our New York office?

Our forthcoming New York office. We didn’t have one yet. But we were going to, and she was going to be our head cataloguer if she wanted to be.

I would offer her the position myself; how could she say no? She’d be able to move back to New York. She’d be near her mother. She’d be near me. We wouldn’t have to fuck over the phone like I was deployed or something. It would be great. She hated California.

Yeah, she hated California, but she loved me, right? Yeah, she loved me so much she’d have no problem leaving behind the life and career she had been building for the last couple of years to come live with me in Manhattan.

She’d move back to New York and want to live with me at all. She lived across the bridge; who said she’d want to live with me at all? She was so in love with me she’d jump on the idea without so much as a second thought.

It wasn’t like I was going to try to talk her out of a life of destitution and lack. She lived alone and in Noe Valley; it wasn’t like I was trying to pick her up out of Skid Row. She supported herself, and she enjoyed her work. I’d be asking her to give her life up for me. For us… no, for me.

We hadn’t talked about any of this. I didn’t know whether she wanted to move, leave her job, whether she wanted to live with me. It was for me. I hadn’t asked her to find out whether she wanted the same thing.

It was a lot. I guess I’d know how much when I saw her again. It hadn’t been that long, but this long-distance thing sucked. We talked every single day, but that didn’t matter; her voice from thousands of miles away wasn’t a good enough replacement for her hair in my hands and her skin touching mine. Waking up with her, touching her, fucking her. I couldn’t wait to see her.

The one woman I had brought to my home besides my mother, Katherine and Sissy was Debbie, but she didn’t count. I wanted Audra to live here with me. To put her favorite paintings up. Have her hairbrush in the bathroom, even bring her cats so they could rip the leather couches up with their claws.

I guess that meant I loved her. More than love, was there a level up from that? There must be because that was where I was. Ready to move Audra across the country to be with her. Moving back to California to be with her didn’t sound like something that either of us would want to do. The being together part definitely, but not the California part. I hadn’t asked her, but she didn’t want to be there. Or rather there was a place she would rather be, I knew that much, and that was New York.

It was fine. We would talk about it. We would talk about it when she got here. She was coming. She’d gotten out of work Friday, so we were spending the whole weekend together. She’d be at the house when I got home. Lindsay was going to be waiting for her in the building when she got dropped off and let her in. I’d have to give her her own key. It was her house too. Fighting the urge to ditch work completely to go home and ravish her was killing me. It was like its own twisted foreplay. The worst kind of edging, but the payoff would be worth every minute.

I had left all the spare bedrooms locked because there was nowhere she was sleeping but with me. I got to the house and looked for signs of her. I found her in the bedroom. She was asleep. She lay on her side with one of her hands tucked under the pillow. Her hair was tied up in a bun. Her bag wasn’t unpacked, it sat open on the floor by the bed.

Watching people sleep was one of the creepiest things you could do. I didn’t want to wake her, but I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to kiss her, and I wanted to finally, finally fuck her. I walked up to her on the bed and kissed her cheek. There it was. I needed to feel her near me again. Breathing in the smell of her hair, her skin, I felt like a junkie getting my fix.

“Sweetheart, wake up,” I whispered, sitting next to her. She sighed and rolled onto her back. She opened her eyes looking at me.

“Hi,” she said, smiling. She sat up and hugged me. I pulled her into my lap and hugged her back. It could be like this every day, I thought. I loved the way she felt. I loved that she was so happy to see me. I tried to ignore the instant arousal I had felt seeing her on my bed, so my hard dick didn’t ruin the moment.

“How long have you been waiting?”

“Not that long. I was just a little tired,” she said. She had told me she had been sort of drowsy a lot lately. She was always going to bed when we talked, even when it was just around nine o’clock her time. I could see it in her face a little bit, around her eyes; she looked sleepy.

“Are you hungry? Have you eaten?”

“I’m not hungry, not for food, anyway,” she said, kissing me. Her hands pulled my shirt out of my pants, untucking it. They were already at the buckle of my belt, quickly getting past the barrier between her and my cock. She took it out and stroked it slowly as we kissed. It had been two weeks, but my body felt like it had been two years.

She kissed my neck and chest, pushing me towards the bed, so I was on my back. Her lips closed around the head, sucking as she slowly worked her way down my length, running her tongue along the underside. I put my hands in her hair encouraging her to take it deeper. She used her hand, jerking my tip as she sucked my balls into her mouth, one at a time before sucking my cock again, all the way to the back of her throat. I sighed hearing her moan. I could feel the vibration in my cock.

“Slow down,” I told her. I wanted to feel her swallow around my cock, but first I needed to be inside her. “I want you to ride me.” She let my cock pop out of her mouth, sitting up on her knees. She took her t-shirt off and stood, turning her back to me as she shimmied out of her jeans. She bent down, and I could see her glistening pussy lips between her thighs.

Goddamn, she was so sexy. Her ass was round and firm.

She climbed into my lap, straddling me. I unhooked her bra and sucked on one of her nipples as she lowered herself down on my cock. She was so wet she slid right down. I held her waist feeling her tight pussy choke my cock.

She might have been on top, but that didn’t mean she was in control. I held her waist as she began to grind her hips. It hadn’t been that long since we’d fucked, but she felt different in my hands. Her build was petite, but she felt smaller. She made me forget about wanting to ask her by moaning and closing her eyes like my cock was the best thing that had ever been between her legs.

“Hold still,” I instructed, holding her round the waist with one arm. Leaning back on the other I thrust up into her pussy. The angle must have made sure I hit her clit on the way up; it drove her crazy. Her eyes shut as she moaned. She couldn’t stop herself from grinding into me. Her nails left light marks on my arms and back.

I lay on my back, pulling her down with me. I grabbed both her arms behind her back, holding them behind her, so I was holding her up. She didn’t fight it. She let me. I fucked her from below, hard and fast. Her head rested on my chest. She moaned, trying to bite back her cries. It only made me want to fuck her harder.

This was what I liked. Pushing her. Making her come harder than she thought she could. Making her scream. She was making it hard for me to push it any longer. I let go of her arms and grabbed her hips, thrusting as hard as I could as I came inside her. She shuddered and shook on top of me as my body relaxed below.

She raised her hips so I slid out of her, kissing me lazily as she lay on my chest. I let her roll off back onto the bed. I didn’t need to ask her whether it was good. She had a pink, just-fucked glow on her cheeks. Her eyes were half-lidded like she would doze off soon.

“Do you want anything to eat?” I asked her, smoothing some loose hairs off her forehead.

“No, I just want to go to sleep.” She closed her eyes and put her head back on the pillow. I ran a hand over her cheek and forehead. What was wrong with her? I saw it with her eyes closed like that, her cheeks looked a little sunken, like she’d lost weight, I knew I hadn’t been imagining it.

“What’s wrong?”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“I’m fine,” she said. She lied.

“You’ve lost weight,” I said.

“Usually that’s a good thing,” she quipped. What was she? A buck fifteen? Twenty? She didn’t have spare weight on her that she could just drop. No, that was not a good thing.

“You haven’t eaten anything since you got here. Are you sick?”

“No, I’m fine. Really. I’m just tired,” she said. Her hands were on my chest. Tired? Why? She’d flown across the country, forward three hours. It would be midafternoon back in the Bay. Was she sick? Maybe she was just tired. If this went on, I’d have to call a doctor.

“I’m going to order some food. What do you want?”

“Thai, or Chinese?” she suggested.

“Don’t fall asleep before it gets here,” I told her, standing. I left the room to make the order. One of the levels in the building was a restaurant. Pan-Asian, just what she wanted. I had a menu somewhere. She wasn’t in the bedroom when I walked back in, but I heard the bath running in the bathroom. I walked in, and she was sitting on the rim of the tub pinning her hair up before she slid inside. I left the phone near the sink and joined her, climbing into the tub behind her, holding her close between my legs. I felt her relax and lean back into me. She’d just had an orgasm, she was relaxed, and we had food coming. Now was as good a time as any to talk.

“What do you think about moving here?” I asked. Her hand rested on my thigh under the water.

“Here? Back to New York?”

“Here, with me.”

“I thought we were doing long-distance for a while first.”

“What if we didn’t have to?”

“What about my job?” she asked, turning. I wanted to say that she didn’t have to work, but that wasn’t a selling point with her. I knew that. She’d want to.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Strickland’s is opening a New York office.”

“Max is doing this?”

“No, I am. I want to start a Strickland’s real estate subsidiary. I can sell real estate, but what reason is there not to continue fine arts auctions here? I know that you can do that.”

“You want me to leave my job?” she asked she asked after a pause.

“Once the office is established, you could do your job from here. The same job, or you know, something higher up to match your abilities.”

“When were you going to tell me all this? How long have you been planning this?” she asked.

“Now. I wanted to have the conversation in person. I want you close to me, and if the only thing keeping you in San Francisco is Strickland’s, then you don’t have to lose it.”

“Why do you think I want to live with you? Why would you think I would say yes to moving?”

“I can think of a few reasons,” I started. I pinched one of her nipples.

“No, I’m serious,” she snapped, pushing my hand away. “How much of this have you planned without asking me first?”

“We aren’t going to be long-distance forever. Eventually, we would be having this conversation. We don’t have to continue hopping between coasts. This time next year, we’ll have a running Strickland’s auction house in the city.”

“No. It isn’t fair. We are supposed to talk about this stuff. You aren’t supposed to make the decision to move for me.”

“We’re talking now.”

“No, you’re telling me that I need to move and basically making it so I’m the one who has to do it. You aren’t giving me a choice here. You aren’t even willing to talk about it.”

“What’s there to discuss? We want to be together and this way we can be.”

“You’re asking me to make sacrifices for you. I know that both of us have to if we want to be together, but you’ve just made it so I can fit into your life.”

“What do you want? You want to live in San Francisco? You want me to move?”

“I wish it was an option. You aren’t giving me a choice. I just wish you’d ask me before you did some of these things. Don’t make decisions for me.”

She climbed out of the tub wrapping herself up in a towel. Great, now she was upset.

“Audra… I’m sorry. I should have asked you if you were interested before I started planning anything,” I said. She was quiet. I had asked the question to her back because she was facing away from me.

“Can I sleep in a guest bedroom tonight?” she asked, not turning around.

“Don’t run from me, sweetheart,” I said. She turned to look at me, and I saw it. I had fucked up again. She was serious. She didn’t want to be near me.

“I’ll talk to you in the morning.” She turned to leave. I got out of the tub coming up behind her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I spun her around so she’d look at me. “Please, Audra. I don’t want to fight.”

“Then don’t. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

She left the room, closing the door behind her.