Brazen (4 page)

“Why did you
come here?” I ask.

His eyes open
and meet mine. “I wanted to know who you are. What sort of woman demands to
have her selfish fantasies fulfilled so
openly.
By strangers.
I wanted to meet you. And now that I have, I
want you to use me.
Even more than the others.”

I like Sean’s
answer more than I will ever admit to him.

“Let me give
you what they can’t,” he says, gaze dropping back down.

“They’ll give
me whatever I ask for,” I remind him. “You’re the one who can’t follow orders.”

“I won’t take
the money,” he says, and it’s difficult to tell if he’s teasing or apologizing.

“Good,” I
say. “You haven’t earned it.”

“Caroline,”
he says in a low rumble, mouth millimeters from my lips.

“How did you
know that?” It’s not a difficult fact to sleuth out, but I still want answers.

“You’re a
photographer,” he says. “I saw your equipment downstairs. The framed prints on
the walls are signed. Caroline Thom—”

“That’s not
my name anymore.”

After a
pause, Sean asks, “What was he like?” His tongue flicks me lightly, making my
breath hitch.

“He’s old
enough to be your father,” I say, hiding the arousal in my voice. “And he was
exactly
the right age to be my university professor.”

“How did you
find it, being the student?” Sean asks in his lower-class accent, and I realize
now that he is
everything
my ex-husband was not.
Rude
and pushy, sensual and beautiful.
Warm and available.

“Lucrative,”
I finally say.

“Do you wish
he could see you now?” he asks, and the conservative in me feels as though I
should slap him out of protocol.

I don’t
answer because at that moment Sean’s tongue strokes my clit and my legs clamp
around his ears involuntarily. The sensation pulses up my belly like a
current—a violent electrical current, not a gentle, poetical stream. He pushes
my thighs back open and holds them with his strong hands. He licks again,
slower, so exquisite it
hurts,
the pleasure mounting.

I watch his
reflection and I watch my fingers grasping his hair. In the mirror, I wear a
wedding band. It’s not actually a wedding band, just a fancy woven ring I wear
on my right hand, but I pretend it’s a screen, not a mirror, and I pretend that
I’m still married. I pretend I’m my husband, walking in and finding me spread
at the edge of our bed, a raw, tight young man on his knees pleasuring me. The
guilt feels as hot and real as Sean’s mouth.

“You taste
amazing,” he mumbles a short time later.

“And you
never shut up.”

He swirls his
tongue around my clit until I groan against my will. One hand slides up my
thigh.
His left hand with its violinist’s calluses.
He
runs two rough fingertips up and down my swollen lips, bathes my clit in the
wetness. He covers that spot with his mouth, suckling, and his fingers tease my
entrance.

“Say please,”
he whispers. “Say please and I’ll do it.”

“Fuck you,” I
reiterate.

“Five years,
Caroline. Let me be the first.”

“
You
say please, then.”

“Please,” he
murmurs, and laps at me again. “Please.”

I’m dying to
grant him permission. At this moment I can’t imagine my cunt was created for
any other purpose than to take pleasure from this man. Those two threatening
fingertips trace a shallow line up and down, up and down. I want to be his
instrument. I want to be mastered.

“Please…”

“Fuck me,” I
say.

One
finger at first, slow thrusts.
His mouth is still on my clit, tongue flickering. He groans
as though he’s the one being served.

“More,” I
demand.

He makes his
hand into a gun and gives me the barrel, slow and deep. I clench his hair
tighter. In the mirror, his hips thrust at the same tempo as his fingers.

“Touch
yourself
,” I say, and I watch the hand still holding my
thigh slide obediently down between his legs. His groans turn hoarse as he
shares my pleasure, joins the rhythm. I wish I could see his cock, see him
stroking it in a tight fist, milking
himself
until he
glistens. I picture him alone, in his overpriced, shit-hole Allston apartment
or wherever he lives, on his back in his rumpled bed with its mismatched
sheets. That lean, strong, young body, spread naked, the come lashing his
clenched belly as he shoots.
As he thinks of me.

His fingers
make me feel empty as I remember how thick and stiff he was when I spanked him.
If and when he takes me, it will hurt.
At least at first.
I want to know if he’ll ram it in hard, or ease it in gently. If I were on top,
I’d slide him in slow and steady, as if I were sinking into a Jacuzzi, dizzy
from the steam. I watch his pumping hips, needing him so badly it feels like a
mania. How easy it would be for him to stand up, to push his hips between my
legs and make the longing go away.

“Take me,
Sean.”

He doesn’t.
His lips keep sucking
me,
his hands keep fucking both
of us. I rake his scalp, demanding more. I feel his thrusting hand rotate, feel
his fingers curling, his calluses tugging against that sinful spot deep inside
me, beckoning, inviting me to come home. The pleasure is a flint, lighting me
up with a spark each time his touch strikes. Molten heat seeps into my feet
until my toes buzz, hot. My palms are sweaty and his hair is damp and our
voices are one, the moans like a mantra, sanctifying the space we’re sharing.

I jerk
upright as the climax churns through me and my back arches and my eyes are
fixed on Sean’s body in the mirror. The heat rushes up from the flame he’s
ignited, burns through my cunt and my womb and my belly, through my breasts, up
my spine until I feel it licking at each fingertip and pounding in my ears and
tingling in my lips. He knows how to make it last. His fingers and lips and
tongue slow, the touch deliberate and skillful, and he draws my orgasm out. It
doesn’t flash and fade. It builds, lingers, pummels my synapses in fresh waves
until I can feel the bedspread under my bare butt once more, smell us in the
air, hear the rain on the glass. I feel him lapping up the spoils of our
intimate battle. He makes tiny, hungry, whimpering noises. When he finally
looks up from between my legs, he’s smiling like a wicked boy.

I shove his
shoulders back with my knees. “Get out of my house.”

His eyes
widen but he stands.

I grab his
underwear from the bed behind me and toss them unceremoniously at his chest. He
watches me watching him as he pulls them up his thighs and over his raging
hard-on. He runs his tongue over his swollen lower lip, and his expression is
dark. I move away and slip my plain silk robe from the hook by the door and
thread my arms into the sleeves. It feels like a straitjacket, just as his
presence feels like an invitation to madness.

“I don’t want
to see you ever again,” I say evenly, and it’s true. If I have to look at him
for one minute longer I’ll want him in my sheets, his body curled around me.
I’ll want him seated across the table from me in the morning, drinking coffee
and reading the paper, and that’s not acceptable.

His mouth
twitches, but he holds his tongue. His blue, blue eyes stare into mine for a
long moment, and only the desperate motions of his ribs as he struggles for his
breath give him away. He turns and he leaves me, leaves the bedroom door open
behind him.

I sink down
onto the mattress. Out in the hall, I hear the metallic squeak of a hinge. With
a suddenness that makes me gasp, he snaps all the breakers back on, and my room
and the hall glare bright and artificial. I feel naked and blind, and as I hear
his footsteps fade down the steps and the click of the front door closing, I
feel more alone than I have in five years.

The
trouble-man stayed away for an eternity. Well, four days. But trust me when I
say it felt like years. I’d almost begun to believe he decided to respect my
demands. I can’t imagine what made me think he’s the sort of man who would.

Will wanted
an explanation when I announced first thing on Monday that Sean was to be
struck from the roster, even as I could still practically feel his tongue
sliding in and out of my pussy.

“I never want
that man allowed here again,” I said, buttering my toast.
“The
one with the short brown hair and the annoyingly blue eyes.”

“
That
one?”
Will sounded
as if he were taking the news personally. “Are you serious? I was so excited to
get him! He’s perfect! He looks like Paul Newman, circa
Exodus
.” Will
shares
my love of old movies, as well as eager young men.

“I should be
so lucky,” I said flippantly and sipped my coffee. Paul Newman should be so
lucky.

“What did he do? Or not do?”

“He isn’t
housetrained,” I said, and Will dropped the matter with a bitchy shrug and a
sigh.

This evening,
when Sean finally returns, he doesn’t darken my door. He scales my fire escape,
instead, and when he appears in my bedroom window I’m so startled I scream like
a film star confronted by a mummy.

I recover
quickly and glare at my would-be burglar. I stand before the tall window with
my arms crossed sternly over my chest, and I can’t decide right away if I
should let him in. I’m dressed in my robe again, fresh from the shower. The
scheduled boys aren’t due to arrive for another hour.

I’ve come to
equate Sean with the rain. In the past week I haven’t had one without the
other, and now that I think about it, they’re both designed to make things
thoroughly damp. He’s framed in the window, face shining with drizzle, white
dress shirt wet and clinging. It’s dark out but he’s lit by my bedroom lights.
Very, very slowly, he smiles his lopsided smile.

I flip the
latch and push the bottom pane up.

“Don’t you
dare get mud on my carpet,” I say, and I turn my back on him and go to my
vanity to finish brushing my hair out.

I hear the
clang of his shoes as they drop onto the fire escape, and I feel his energy as
he enters and approaches. He snatches the brush from my hand and takes over. I
watch his eyes in the mirror, studying my shoulder-length hair as he runs the
bristles through it, and I wonder if he’s making an inventory of the grays. He
looks melancholy tonight.
Or guilty.
And with good cause.

I push my
stool back roughly and catch him in the knees. He takes it in stride and sets
down the brush.

“I have to
get dressed,” I tell him, and then his arms are holding me. They snake around
my waist from behind, enveloping me, pulling me against his wet shirt, his firm
chest.

“I missed
you,” he says. His hands slide up over my ribs and cup me. I feel his cock
right through his jeans, pressing at the small of my back. He pulls the lapels
of the robe open and palms my bare breasts, the pads of the fingers on the left
scratchy, the right side less so. His hands are big and my breasts are small,
but I feel more full and feminine and worthy of my sex than I have in twenty
years. He pinches my nipples gently between his fingers and broad thumbs,
arousing them with tiny pulls. He teases until I’m aching, until my face and
chest are flushed and my attempts to appear cold are laughable.

“I told you
not to come here again,” I say, and I sound husky.

“You opened
the window,” he parries, and his voice is right at my ear. It’s deep, a
baritone, forever tarnished with that working man’s accent. It’s like a shot of
lousy house whiskey, cheap and strong, and it goes down stinging, upsets my
stomach and swims in my blood.

“The others
will be here soon,” I tell him. I twist my arm around so I can cup the front of
his pants behind me and feel his excitement.

“Good,” he
says. “They can watch.”

I imagine
such a thing for a moment—four or five young men standing in a circle around
us, pleasuring
themselves
as they watch me get fucked
by Sean.
Watching me suck him off, on my knees as he barks
orders, his hand on the back of my head.
Watching what they’re denied.

“No,” I say.
A fine fantasy, but no one can know about this. If Sean gets his way, it’ll be
our secret. And he shouldn’t get his way. He’s brought me nothing but trouble.
I step out of his embrace and rewrap myself.

I turn to
study the length of his torso plastered in translucent white cotton. “You have
a hell of a nerve showing up here.”

“So punish
me.”

I
squint
an eye at him and nod. I grab the brush off the
vanity and motion for him to go to the bed. “All fours,” I say. “Hold the
headboard.”

He kneels and
lowers down to his elbows, grabbing the slats. I settle in behind him and reach
around, unbuckling his belt, tugging open his damp jeans, sliding them and his
briefs down to expose that perfect, firm ass. I hold each cheek for moment, my
fingers curled into claws. He cranes his neck to meet my eyes and anger flashes
in my chest.