Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy) (7 page)

His touch on me wasn’t desperate, like mine, but it was a love letter, a love letter to my mind and to my soul, as he caressed my elbow sensually, feeling how the roughest part of my body was still smooth, how I’d paid attention to such a small detail in my daily routine, and had done so almost religiously. These were things I wouldn’t tell him outright, that he would guess, but as he pressed a hand into the crook of my knee, I let out a small gasp. His hands were firm and skilled, and against the soft, delicate skin of my inner leg, they felt so foreign, like they didn’t belong, even though I wanted them so desperately, not just on me, but in me.

And I did, but only as he pressed a single finger to my lips, and then, pressed on, like an explorer in some exotic land, looking for fruits that had some miraculous ability, the ability to make him happy, so as he did, the anaconda of my tongue came to life and guide him in, further, to the soft caves of my cheeks, to the treasure chests of ivory and marble, from no behemoth and from no quarry, at least known to man, but known to woman. The secrets of my vulnerability were exposed to the man that I wanted exposed in that moment more than I had before. I’d proved to myself that I could trust him with my mouth, and now, I wanted to trust him with my body.

So why did I pull away?

“Why did you pull away?”

“It’s just...I like you a lot, but...” I started, and I couldn’t finish.

“But what?”

“I don’t think you can feel the way I do, about you, ever.”

I expected Lawrence to leave, or sit there in silence. What I didn’t expect was for him to get up, turn to me, and pull me up, only to lift me up, not to kiss me, but to push me down on the middle of the bed, where he got on his knees, one betwixt my legs, one outside my thighs, and his hands firm on my wrists.

“L-Lawrence!” I stammered.

“Shush. You’ve talked enough, for now. It’s time for you to listen, and listen good, alright, Kim?” I nodded my head because apparently, I wasn’t supposed to talk back. “Good. When you say something like that? You don’t just insult yourself, you insult my abilities to discern the good from the mundane, you insult whether or not my eyes and my mind can do their job, and whether or not I’m capable of the most basic of rational thoughts.” He pressed a stray hair back, over my hair, and it bounced back up, into my field of vision. Lawrence smirked and I didn’t know what he was going to do to me. He had me pinned down, alone, and although I wanted him to fuck me, did I want it like this?

“Kim, you are the most distracting woman I’ve ever met, and most of the people here, I wouldn’t describe as women, but as girls. I’d describe the males as boys, not men, because they’re all immature. Maybe I’m from a different time, but I think people should be mature by the time they’re old enough to have the money to flash their credit cards and charge thousand dollar bottles of liquor. Obviously, that doesn’t stop me from exploiting their weakness, the need to impress others and spend as much money as Daddy can afford, but if I didn’t, somebody else would. But you? You’re someone that nobody could really control, Kim,” he said, brushing a loose lock of hair out of my face. I turned away, knowing I was blushing, even through my makeup, but I didn’t care. I knew I couldn’t will away the telltale shading of light red, but he pressed his knuckles underneath my chin and pushed my face forward and up so that I was forced to look into his Siberian blue eyes. He kept my wrists down with one of his hands, and with the other, he traced the lines of my body, from the angular curve of my jaw to my décolletage, as if he was painting a line across my collarbones, using only his fingertips as a brush. The painting continued down, along my dress, but not under it, as he lightly pressed my waist and the small of my back, but didn’t go grabbing for my tits and ass the way that someone else might. He was a man who appreciated details, and while breasts and ass was a dime (or, in Beverly Hills, twenty thousand dollars and the number of a great surgeon) a dozen, he was a connoisseur of not just alcohol and fashion, but of beauty in general. He understood that design was universal, and that a curve that was gorgeous on a bottle of absinthe could be as appreciated as that of a fine woman in a damn fine dress.

I wanted his hands on my body, but really on my body, not just on my clothes, not just gently handling me like I was an expensive glass vase at Sotheby’s. I didn’t want to be held like something that had provenance, like a work by an up-and-coming artist. What I wanted was more basic and primal, the sort of thing that a frat boy can do with ease yet a man with multiple master’s degrees and a Wikipedia page seemed somehow unable to bring himself to do. He was on me, he was beholding me, he was objectifying me, and I loved every moment of it, but I didn’t want to be an object of art, but an object of his affection: something he not only admired, but that he could use. “Kim, you’re not just a woman, you’re a force of nature. You’re able to hold your own in conversation without talking about trite topics. You understand what I try to say better than even I do, and you’re an enigma wrapped in a black bodycon dress, and I wouldn’t change that for the world,” he said, pressing his lips onto my forehead gently, before he pulled up and removed his hands from my wrists.

I could have gotten away without a struggle. I could have just left the room. I didn’t have to put my hand by his cheek, feel the stubble that was dense and rich and soft and sharp at the same time, and press further up, pressing some imaginary lock of hair out of his hair, cut short, and pulling his head to mine, digging my hands into his hair and feeling how his hair felt like a luxurious mink coat. I didn’t need for us to press foreheads, then noses, before we bent into a kiss. I could have just left.

But I didn’t, because I knew that he was the only man that I really wanted. I knew if I walked out the curtains, what we had could be irrevocably lost. I wasn’t stupid: this wasn’t The Great Gatsby, he wasn’t going to wait and watch a green light from across a bay, and I wasn’t going to be oblivious as to his true feelings about me. There was no Tom keeping me from Jay, so this wasn’t some American classic, this was a pulpy romance at best, the likes of which you get at a supermarket as an impulse purchase, the way I was letting myself loose the impulse, and finally, letting myself learn to let someone in.

A
S I REACHED MY HANDS DOWN TO LAWRENCE’S PANTS, he took my wrists again, and held them at my sides. In that moment, it was like the bass dropped and the world paused at the same time. I hadn’t realized how much Lawrence had wanted me before. Inside, I’d still thought there was a possibility that maybe; just maybe, he was playing a game with me, just for the sake of having something to do. I hadn’t understood why a man like him would want a girl like me, but there was no mistaking the look in his eyes as something more than mere lust, but as desire.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Kim?” he whispered into my ear, but with a voice so sexy, how was I supposed to say anything other than...

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,” I whispered back, wriggling my wrists, trying to get loose to get Lawrence out of his pants, but he kept his grip tight. Chuckling, he gave me a kiss on the cheek before pulling himself up again, so he was on his knees, between my legs.

“Kim, if we’re going to have sex, there’s something you have to realize,” he said, pressing my wrists now to my sides. His grip was firm but I trusted him, knowing if I told him to stop, to let me go, I would be released as quickly as possible.

“What is it?” My heart skipped a beat. Did he have a wife I hadn’t found out about? Did he have girls in every city? Did he have an STD, or was he having second thoughts? This was the waking nightmare that had run through my head at the frat house when I couldn’t sleep.

“I’m a control freak, Kim, and that means that I like to have command of a situation...even in the bedroom,” he said, and I laughed. “What’s so funny?” he asked, raising an eyebrow, which just made the situation even funnier as he released my wrists. I could still hear the music playing down by the dance floor, even from up in Lawrence’s box, the music’s rhythm drowning out the beating of my own heart. If I couldn’t have felt the beat straining against my bra’s cup’s crux over and over, I would have sworn I’d flat lined.

I took his tie in my hands, not bothering to turn it over to see the brand, already recognizing the pattern as Burberry due to the placement of the plaid’s stripes, and pulled him close to me, close enough to feel his breath against my skin. “This isn’t the bedroom, is it?” I teased, desperately needing him but not exactly about to get down on my knees and beg for him to give me an old fashioned dicking.

“You tease,” he growled, pulling away, and pressing my shoulders down, but my hands were still free, and I ran them through his hair, unable to resist looking into my eyes and imagining myself jumping into them, loosing myself in the abyss of his pupils as his icy irises closed around me, an icy prison, keeping me inside of him, in a different sort of owner’s box, as black and discreet as the one we were in, but different nonetheless.

“You’re so cute when you don’t get your way, Lawrence. You have no idea how fun it is to know that there’s a billionaire who wants nothing more than to have me, who could have anyone but who has been playing it cool and safe so as to not scare me off, who finally, is so close to having me, but is being kept on edge,” I said coolly, even though I knew my cheeks were bright pink and giving away my true emotions. I wasn’t used to being so open and honest around people, but Lawrence was different, and I wasn’t about to pretend I didn’t want him. I knew he could read me like an open book but that wasn’t about to stop me from denying what I felt for him, at least with my words, if not with my body language, and with the language spoken by my body.

“You have no idea how much I want you, Kim,” he started, and then he changed his tone. “You have no way of knowing, that is. Maybe I don’t want you. Maybe I just like this game.” He was acting, the way that I was, but for what audience? It was just the two of us, in private, and there was no reason to put on airs. Somebody had to stop this charade, had to stop the game we were playing, which was just keeping us apart when all we wanted to be was together, more now than ever before.

I knew that somebody had to be me, after what had happened last night, or rather, what hadn’t happened; given the fact I’d skipped out on our date before it even started. Being a no-show wasn’t exactly the greatest start to whatever it was we had, no matter how scared I’d been about learning the truth about Lawrence, no matter how nervous, no matter how worried. I reached my hand to his pants, but I didn’t slip under them, instead, tracing a trail along the waistband, to the pockets, and then, the stitching that lead to his groin. “I guess your dick just might love Monopoly, then?” I said, running a single finger along the contours of the prominent bulge, and I saw him bite his lower lip and close his eyes for a split second.

“Right now, the only Monopoly I care about is the one you have...on the space between your legs,” he half-said, half-growled. “That is, if you’ll have me.” He raised a single brow and I knew in that moment that yes, I needed him, and it wasn’t just about the sex, about desiring his body, but about requiring his will, about desperately needing him to want me as much as I needed him.

“Are you sure it’s going to be...private in here?” I asked meekly. The last thing I wanted was to see one of the perfect employees enter here in their designer clothes and perfect hair, for them to see me vulnerable, to see me being fucked. I was always the watcher, never the watched, and I didn’t want that to change.

“Yes, my employees know not to bother me unless there is an emergency,” he said with a smile. “Right now, the only thing that’s emerging is this dick, though,” he said, grabbing his crotch and raising a single sexy eyebrow.

“Then, if you’ll have me–,” I said, borrowing his line, but I didn’t have a chance to finish my sentence. Lawrence pressed his lips onto mine and pulled me off the sheets of the soft black bed, pulling over one of the luxurious pillows, black and shiny with black matte stripes running over it top to bottom, and pressed it under the small of my back, as I unbuttoned his pants. Underneath his designer suit was a pair of black boxers, and I resisted the urge to remove them too, instead, helping him unbutton his white shirt. One of the buttons on the shirt popped off.

“Your button –,” I started. I didn’t know where it had rolled off to but I knew that he couldn’t just go to JoAnn’s, pick out another black button, and have it go unnoticed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who wore jeans that read “YKK”.

He kissed me quiet. “I’d rip this shirt off if I had to.” And as quickly as he got it off, he might as well have. There was no tank top or shirt underneath, just his perfectly smooth chest, glistening with a light glaze of moisture, a few beads of sweat on his collar bone, ready to fall like the tears of an innocent down his pectorals like a waterfall in July: the only possible thing that could quench the heat of my body, as I kissed at his saltiness, and was then abruptly pushed down as I moved my hands to his waist.

“Not yet,” he said, pulling my tube dress up above my head. My pin-straight hair was left sprawled on the bed like the tentacles of an octopus, melting into the black silk sheets of the bed, the bed we’d spent so much time on, but never actually used for its traditional purpose. The black sheers around the bed were like another layer of protecting from the outside world.

Finally, there he was: my billionaire, his cool-toned salt and pepper hair lit from behind by the lights of the club, his firm, muscular and tall body like the silhouette of a Greek statue, a statue that reached not to some absent figure or to the heavens, but to me, to the ground of the bed, to something real, to something he could actually hold and hold he did, pulling me into his embrace, before pulling up to look over me again, tracing a line from my bra strap and around the top of the cup to the bow that marked the middle of the black lace and nude satin set that I’d picked out just for tonight.