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Authors: Cleo Peitsche

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BOOK: Trickiest Job
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They’re nothing special, the sheets, but they slide sensually against my skin.

Hawthorne is telling me about a group-building retreat one of the managers proposed. He’s speaking very slowly now, and when he laughs, the rough, deep sound builds heat between my legs.

My hand cups my breast, and I close my eyes. I wish he were here. He’s got calluses on his fingers and palms from lifting weights, and I love how rough his skin feels against my nipples when he pinches them.

And the way his hands feel on my ass… That sparks a visceral memory, too. He loves to spank me, and sometimes he rubs my inflamed, tingling skin afterward.

“What are you doing?” he asks abruptly, interrupting himself mid-sentence.

My fingers, which are caressing my pussy, freeze. “Nothing,” I say. “Listening.”

A long pause.
 

“Are you in bed?” He sounds mildly curious, like he already knows the answer and he’s interested to see if I’ll tell the truth.

“In bed?” I ask with a laugh. “It’s only 6:30.”

“Yes,” he says very solemnly. “And are you in bed?”

“I’m… lying down,” I admit.

“Are you naked?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“If your hand isn’t between your legs, it should be,” he says, and my pussy clenches. I feel it inside, of course, but I also notice the light flutter under my fingertips.

“Are you wet?” he asks.

Drenched.
“How should I know? Are you?”

“No, but I’m hard,” he says in that stern, deep voice of his. “I’m not ashamed of it. The sound of your voice turns me on, Lindsay. It reminds me of your moans, of your wet little mouth desperately sucking my cock after I spank you. Are you wet now?”

“Maybe.”
 

“You are. I often thought we should keep a bottle of water nearby to rehydrate you because you get so wet,” he says. “Goddamn, I miss the scent of your pussy.” It comes out in a growl, like he’s angry, but I don’t know if it’s the lack of me or the fact that he misses fucking me that annoys him. Or something else entirely. Hawthorne is a complicated man when it comes to matters of the ego.

I gather slippery moisture on my index finger and draw it up toward my clit. A shuddering, electrifying thrill almost makes me gasp.

“You know how I knew you were touching yourself?” Hawthorne asks.
 

“No,” I whisper, too horny, in the end, to keep pretending I’m not masturbating.

“The way you breathe,” he says. “It alters how you speak.”

My sigh of exasperation sounds a little unconvincing. “Impossible.”
 

“How many orgasms have you had with the three of us? I know all the markers along the way, no matter how small. You can lie to yourself, hide from yourself, but that doesn’t change reality.”

His claim, that he knows me—or my body, at least—that well, strikes me in my emotional core. The silence from my bosses after I left made me think they didn’t care, that they didn’t see me as anything but a plaything.
 

Why would they?

But now I know that at least one of them was paying attention. Hawthorne was always the coolest of the group, so I wonder if the others miss me as well.

My pussy begins to spasm rhythmically, but I don’t want this to be over, not yet. I stretch out a second finger and slide both over my clit, then down to my channel. Thrusting them inside my silky slit, I arch my back. I can feel the sheets dampening under my calves, under my buttocks, my back.

“Are you touching yourself?” I manage to ask.

“If I weren’t at the office, I would be,” he says. “But I’m hard. If you were here, I’d bend you over my desk and fuck you. You would scream for mercy, but as hard as I am, I don’t think I’d be in the mood to stop.”

“Don’t stop…”

“Come for me,” he says.

And I do. I bite my lip, but it’s not enough to keep my whimpers from filling the room. The phone falls away from my ear as my body shakes and spasms. Under my legs, the damp sheet clings to my skin.

Then it passes.

And the humiliation hits me like a truck. Not because of the phone sex, or the orgasm; I have no regrets about those.

But my choice of partner…

“Lindsay,” Hawthorne says, his voice muffled because the phone slipped between two pillows. “That was lovely. Please pick up the phone.”

Reluctantly, I pick it up, but I don’t say anything.

Really, what can I say? Hawthorne already knows more of my secrets than the others do. He saved me from Kidnapper Joe, and he gave me $300,000.
 

He’s not someone I ever wanted to be beholden to, and the debt I owe him is piling up.

“Thank you,” he says. I think he’s saying it to me until he clarifies, “Say ‘thank you.’”

Yeah. That’s the problem with Hawthorne.
 

“For what?” I ask as I sit up a bit. “Last time I checked, men are the ones who pay for phone sex.”

“But I didn’t get any,” he points out.

“Not my fault if you don’t know how to jerk that thing,” I say, and I suddenly have a very clear image of his large, thick, veiny cock, so swollen it’s almost purple.
 

He’s laughing. “Do you really think a man should orgasm just from hearing you breathe heavily?”

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s just say that you’re right, ok? Whatever you want to charge, add it to my debt.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” His seductive voice has turned harsh.
 

“I have things to do.”

“Well, I don’t want to keep you,” he says formally, frostily. “But why did you really call? Did you change your mind about running away?”

“Running away? I’m an adult.”

There’s an amused exhalation of air that suggests he would disagree with my statement. “Do you want to come back?”

“No,” I snap.

“In that case, don’t call again, Lindsay. You said you wanted a clean break, and I gave you that. You want to do it on your own? Have fun.” He hangs up.

“Fucking bastard,” I say loudly. Hawthorne has taught me that there are so many nuances and different ways to hate another person.

Why couldn’t it have been Slade calling? Slade, with his soft hair, and his large hands that hold me up even when he fucks me roughly. Slade, who makes me laugh.
 

“Slade would have given me a better orgasm,” I say, and I wish to god I’d thought of it earlier. That would have been fun to throw in Hawthorne’s face.

What about phone sex with Romeo?
I wonder. But he’s so serious, so scary, that I can’t imagine letting him talk dirty to me. I’d be too self-conscious.

Well, unless he orders me to play with myself, in which case… Yeah, that would be extremely effective.

Chapter 4

The next morning, nothing goes according to plan.

The dry cleaner tells me his wife already sent out my clothes.
 

“But she was gone ten minutes later,” I argue.
 

“Doesn’t change the fact that they’re gone,” he says.

“When will they be back?”

“Tomorrow at noon. It should be on your claim check along with our hours. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.” He doesn’t sound like he really cares, though. I guess he’s used to desperate people demanding to get their clothes faster.

Then it starts raining, and that turns my hotel room dark and depressing.
 

I play games with Bandit, who doesn’t seem too interested, then I watch television—I’m not in the mood to do the next chapter in my Intro to Philosophy MOOC—and eat too much of my food.
 

My mood is so sour that I don’t even try to make myself contact my sister.

I go down to the hotel restaurant for lunch, and when I come back Bandit doesn’t greet me at the door, which is strange.

When I call him, he does come, but he’s clearly not himself. I try the feather on the string, and he barely looks at it.

Maybe, I think, he’s bored with it already. I offer him one of the kitty treats, and he sniffs it before turning away. He seemed to like them before. When I look at his food bowl, it’s clear something is very wrong.

He barely touched it since I refilled it last night.

Panic tightens around me like a noose. “Bandit,” I whisper.
 

He raises his head upon hearing his name, then his eyes close to half slits.

Already I’ve grabbed my phone and am opening a browser. Hawthorne’s sister is a vet, and she’s the one who nursed Bandit to health when he was just a scrawny kitten with matted fur.
 

But I can’t find any vets with the last name of Tarraget, and I don’t know her first name.
 

So I text Hawthorne—no choice in the matter.
What’s your sister’s name?

I figure I’ll give him five minutes to reply, but after one minute, I text again.
It’s important.

Almost instantly he replies.
Olivia Casagrande.
He includes a phone number, which I dial immediately.
 

“Tri-County Animal Hospital. How can we help you?”

“I need to speak to Dr. Casagrande,” I say. “It’s a friend of her brother’s.” The second the words leave my mouth I realize it sounds like I have bad news to deliver.
 

“One moment,” the receptionist says before I can correct the misunderstanding.
 

I kneel by Bandit and gently stroke the top of his head. Uncharacteristically, he doesn’t seem to enjoy it, so I stop.
 

“Hello?” a woman’s voice says.

“Hi. You don’t know me, but I’m friends with Hawthorne, and I’m Bandit’s owner. You helped—”

“Oh, I know who you are,” she says. There’s a smile in her voice. “It’s not every day that my bratty little brother brings a woman to meet the family.”

“No… I didn’t meet you,” I start to explain.

She laughs. “I realize that. Forgive my strange sense of humor. My social skills are always questionable after I get out of surgery. What I meant is that Hawthorne has never brought a woman to my house, so even though you just sat in the driveway, well, it stuck in my mind. It also helps that he texted me moments before you called. How is our dear Bandit?”

“That’s why I’m calling. He’s… listless.”

Olivia runs through a list of questions, then decides, “You need to bring him in immediately.”

My heart plummets even though I expected this conclusion. I was hoping it wasn’t anything serious. “I’m not in the area anymore,” I say.
 

“Where are you?”

Without questioning the wisdom of giving out that information to someone affiliated with Hawthorne, I tell her. “Milford Crossing. It’s in—”

“One of my partners grew up in that area,” she says. “Give me five minutes and I’ll get you a vet recommendation. And don’t worry, Lindsay. He probably just ate something he shouldn’t have. Cats wouldn’t need nine lives if they weren’t always getting into trouble.”

But there’s nothing in the hotel room for him to get into. When we arrived, I checked carefully for bug and rodent poison.

While I wait, I put together everything I could possibly need. Several thousand dollars in cash. My phone charger and a few snacks, in case the wait at the vet will be long. I brush my hair and gather it into a low ponytail.

After four minutes, I carefully load Bandit into his soft-sided carrier, and I zip it closed. I realize it makes sense for me to wait in my car so that I’m ready to go, and I’m heading down to the parking lot when my phone rings.

I answer without looking, and Hawthorne’s deep voice floats out of the speaker. “You’ve got an appointment in thirty minutes with Dr. Dimka,” he says. “I’ll text you the address.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
 

It turns out that Dr. Dimka is only twenty minutes from the hotel. The rain stops before I’m halfway there. When I arrive, I’m trembling, and just walking through the door almost makes me burst into tears.
 

No one is stationed at the sign-in desk, so I take a seat on a hard wooden bench.
 

Across from me is an English sheepdog with a runny eye. The owner reminds me a bit of Donald Quackk, the head of accounting at Sunrise Imports. This guy has the same glasses, the same scratchy wool clothing, the same bushy eyebrows.
 

I wonder if Quackk is back on the job after his heart trouble or if he decided to take early retirement. Likely I’ll never know.
 

An hour later, I’m back in my car. I make it a few blocks before I pull over and start sobbing with guilt and relief.

Bandit should be fine. It’s something akin to kidney stones in humans. The vet wanted to keep him overnight for observation. He’ll need prescription cat food, but so long as he receives it, he’ll have a long and happy life.
 

The vet assured me I couldn’t have known, that he often sees cats whose illnesses are more advanced, but I feel like it’s my fault, that if I’d been paying better attention, I could have gotten him medical assistance sooner.

And I can’t help but think that Bandit would be better off if he’d never hustled me for lunch at Sunrise Imports. Or if Hawthorne hadn’t given him to me.

I don’t remember anything of the drive back to the hotel. I go into the room, shut the curtains and get into bed.

And I ask myself what the hell is wrong with me. Why did I come back to Milford Crossing? It’s clear to me now that I don’t have the guts to see my sister.

All I did was drag out the time that I’d be on the road. With Bandit.

I sleep a little bit, then wake up and watch some television. Hawthorne calls a few times, and I text to say that Bandit is fine.
 

It doesn’t stop him from calling again, but I don’t feel obligated to respond.

The hotel phone rings, and that I answer.

The lady working at the front desk tells me I have a visitor.

“Who?”
 

She mumbles something about the vet.

And then I know.

Bandit must have taken a turn for the worse, and the vet wants to tell me in person. I gave them the hotel address—they insisted, and now I know why.

BOOK: Trickiest Job
12.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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