Until We Burn
Authors: Courtney Cole
UNTIL
WE BURN
A
Beautifully Broken novella (#2.5)
by
Courtney Cole
Copyright © 2013 Courtney Cole
Names, characters and incidents
depicted in this novel are products of the author’s imagination and are used
fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, organizations or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental and
beyond the intent of author or publisher.
No part of this book may be
reproduced without written permission from the author or publisher. If you are
reading this book and you did not purchase it or it was not given to you
directly by the author/publisher, then this book is pirated. Piracy is a
crime. Please delete it and support the author by purchasing it from an
authorized distributor.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
UNTIL WE BURN is a novella to introduce Dominic
Kinkaide, the main character from BEFORE WE FALL.
This novella is intended to illustrate Dominic’s
lifestyle, his behavior and his mindset which will enhance his character as you
read BEFORE WE FALL. Because his lifestyle is a bit wild, this novella
will contain explicit language and adult content.
If you like a bad boy, you’ll love Dominic.
I’ve always found this to be true: The badder they are, the harder
they fall. Dominic will prove this notion in BEFORE WE FALL. He’ll
fall hard….eventually.
But until then, he’s immersed in his bad boy
ways. I hope you enjoy UNTIL WE BURN.
“Harder,” the girl whispers. Obligingly, I slap
her ass again. Hard.
The stinging sound
echoes through the night, rippling through the silence of Mount Lee. A
hundred feet below, the giant letters of the Hollywood sign gleam ghostly white
in the darkness.
I smile against the
back of the girl’s pale neck and bite it. Hard.
My teeth sink into
her soft flesh, but she likes it. She moans, twisting around so that she
can clutch at my chest, twisting her fingers in my tux jacket.
“Dominic,” she
sighs. “I can’t believe I’m here with you right now. Dominic
Kinkaide is slapping my ass.”
“Dominic Kinkaide is
doing more than that to your ass,” I point out, remembering how I’d just pulled
out of it a minute ago, how I’d rolled off the condom and flicked it
away.
As the coatcheck girl
from the black gala event I’d just vacated, she probably had no idea when her
evening started that it was going to end like this: with quick, hard anal
sex in public….with me.
Even though it’s two
a.m. and it’s unlikely that anyone will be hiking up Hollywood Ridge Trail, the
knowledge that they
could
, the knowledge that strangers might stumble
upon us and find us in this intimate situation, turned me on quicker than anything.
I finished what I set
out to do within a few minutes and now, I pull away and adjust my clothes as
the girl pulls at her own.
I don’t know her
name.
Her name doesn’t
matter.
The girl looks up at
me, batting her eyelashes. “That was nice. If you want to… you
know, um,
actually
sleep with me, call me, okay? I’ll give you my
number.”
I look at her in
amusement. “Actually sleep with you?”
She looks
embarrassed. “I don’t mean like… sleep in my bed overnight. I mean,
real sex. Not just… what we did.”
“Anal?” I raise an
eyebrow. We’re both adults here. We can call a spade a spade.
“Yeah,” she manages
to say, her cheeks flushed. “Anal. That’s the first time I’ve ever
done that, by the way.”
That’s what they all say
and I have a hard time believing it. This is the twenty-first century
after all. I grin at her though, deciding to humor her.
“And? What’d
you think?”
She bats her
eyelashes again, coy now, laying her hand against my chest. “I think that
you can do anything you want with me,” she purrs.
I fight to not roll
my eyes at her sticky-sweet tone now. She’s too compliant, too needy, too
willing to do anything at all that I ask of her. Why the fuck are they
always like this? Are they so desperate to sleep with someone famous,
even one single
time, that
they’ll do anything for it?
Nine times out of
ten, the answer is yes.
And nine times out of
ten, I capitalize on that. I’d be an idiot if I didn’t.
But to be honest, the
whole thing is getting tiresome. I’m weary of it. I’m weary of the
shallow people, I’m weary of people using other people,
I’m
weary of easy women who constantly throw themselves at me.
They only want to say
“I was with Dominic Kinkaide.” They want to claim a tiny piece of me, no matter
how small that piece or moment was.
In this case,
Coatcheck Girl will be able to say that she claimed ten minutes of my
time. But from the look on her face, the wonderstruck expression, that
ten minutes was enough.
“Won’t Amy be mad at
you?” she asks curiously as she runs her fingers through her tangled hair in
the dark. She doesn’t sound concerned as she mentions the woman that most
people assume is my girlfriend.
I shake my head at
thought of Amy Ashby, a woman whose fame is equal to my own, a woman whose
jaded outlook on life surpasses even my own. She’s beautiful, successful
and savvy.
She’s also a
cold-hearted bitch. It’s one of things I like about her.
“For one thing, Amy
and I aren’t exclusive,” I answer, turning to walk back toward my car.
“And for the other, it’s not your business.”
My voice is cool now.
I’m not rude, just matter of fact. It’s just a way of my life. I have to
constantly try to keep people at arm’s length, out of reach and out of my
business. It’s a full-time job. Actually, it’s several people’s full-time
jobs. I employ an entire staff of publicity people for this very reason.
“Shall we?” I ask
politely, holding out my elbow to the girl. I’m a gentleman now, something that
women adore about me.
I’m an actor. I
can be whatever they want me to be, I morph into whatever role I’m playing,
whether I’m on-screen or off. On-screen, I’ve been a serial killer,
rapist, romantic, misunderstood, vampire and poet.
Off-screen, the role
I play the best is that of an asshole.
The girl smiles up at
me now and I can see that this one simple gesture took the sting out of me
telling her to mind her own business.
“Will you call me?”
she asks hesitantly as I help her into my slate gray Porsche.
“Probably not,” I
answer honestly as I close her door, still the gentleman. Gentlemen are
polite. Gentlemen use manners and most importantly, gentlemen are
honest. I’m almost always honest.
“Seriously?” she
stares at me as drop into the driver’s seat.
“Seriously,” I
nod. “Not because I won’t want to, but because this isn’t the kind of
life that would be good for you. If you were linked to me in any way, the
press would hunt you down, stalk you, photograph you, and pretty much drive you
insane. Trust me, it’s for your own good. I won’t call you because
I want to you protect you from that.”
Lie.
Okay, fine. I’m
not always honest.
And I’m not always a
gentleman.
I stare at the road
in front of me as I drive down the winding trail. The engine of my 911
revs around each curve as the tires hug the road.
“OK. That makes
sense,” the girl nods, buying every bit of my line of shit. “Well
then, can I call you?”
“That probably
wouldn’t be a good idea either,” I answer bluntly. “But it was nice being
together tonight, wasn’t it? I had fun.”
From my periphery, I
see her shoulders slump as she realizes what I’m saying. But what the fuck did
she expect? She handed me my coat and offered herself to me on a
platter. Did she expect a long-term relationship?
“Oh well,” she says
with forced brightness. “You’re right. It was fun. Can I at
least have an autograph?”
“Of course,” I tell
her. “It would be my pleasure.”
A few minutes later,
after we glide to a stop outside of the Shangri-La hotel where she works, I
scribble my name on a piece of paper and hand it to her.
“Thanks, Dominic,”
she murmurs, staring me in the eye. “If you change your mind, you know
where to find me.”
I nod and she gets
out. I barely glance in her direction before I drive away, although I
know that she’s standing on the sidewalk watching me disappear into
traffic. They always do.
Deep down, I should
feel guilty. I should feel bad. And once in a while, every once in
a blue moon, I do. But then I stomp the shit out of that emotion and put
it out of my mind.
These girls throw
themselves at
me
, not the other way around.
I’m only giving them
what they want.
It’s a public
service, really.
But none of them, not
one, will ever see the real Dominic Kinkaide. In fact, I’m not even sure
that he exists anymore.
I might’ve been
successful in drowning out his existence in a barrage of women, kink and
whiskey.
As I drive toward my
home overlooking Hollywood Hills, my phone buzzes in my pocket. Pulling
it out, I see Amy Ashby’s name flash on the screen.
I sigh, debating
whether or not to answer it.
Yes, she understands
me… or at least, the part of me that is like her. The part that has to
shield itself from the public. And yes, I like that she’s bitchy and
tough. I admire it because I always know where she stands. But
sometimes, like tonight, I’m just not in the mood for it.
I answer the call
anyway.
“Why did you leave
the gala so fast?” Amy complains into the phone, forgoing a greeting. “I wanted
to ride home with you. My brother was boring me.”
Amy’s older brother
Sam was the host of the event tonight, in an effort to raise money for
autism. He’s as different from Amy as he can be: kind, considerate and
normal. Because of those things, he’s not in show business.
I shake my head,
although she can’t even see me. “Because I was tired of the whole thing,”
I answer, not mentioning the coat check girl. “You could’ve left with
me.”
Lie.
Amy’s a freak in the sack, but she wouldn’t have enjoyed being with a coat-check
girl. She likes to think she has standards.
She sniffs.
“Whatever. Come over. I want to see you.”
I open my garage
door. “Nope. I just got home and I don’t want to go back out. You
can come here, if you’d like.”
There’s a pause while
she considers it. Finally she sighs.
“Can’t. I’ve
got an early call tomorrow. I don’t want to be a bitch on-set.”
“No?” I ask in mock
surprise. “Amy Ashby doesn’t want to be a bitch?” She laughs, a husky
contrived sound.
“You know, I’ve
changed my mind. I’m coming over and I’ll be a bitch tonight for
you. I know how you like it. Which riding crop should I
bring? The leather or the red velvet?”
A thrill goes through
me at the thought… of being tied up and of Amy Ashby whipping the shit out of
me right before she goes down on me.
It’s our favorite
thing to do together.
“The red velvet,” I
answer curtly. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes. Don’t be late.”
“On my way,” she
purrs.
I enter my lavish house
and disarm the alarm, before grabbing a tumbler of whiskey and heading out to
the back veranda.
As I stand looking
down on Hollywood, I ponder my life.
It’s not what it was
supposed to be. In high school, this wasn’t what I had in mind when I pictured
myself as a grown up. But here I am, at the mature age of
twenty-four and I feel like I’ve aged a hundred years. I feel as though
everything that could’ve possibly happened to me in life has happened.
And it’s left its
mark. I’ve got so many marks and scars hidden beneath my surface that I
can’t even name them all.
But that’s all
right. I don’t need to name them all. I need to shove them away and
forget about them, like I always do. I need to mask them in a wild kinky
night of S&M with Hollywood’s favorite starlet.
In the morning, we’ll
go about our lives as normal, both of us pretending to be what we’re not:
normal, well-rounded people.
The pretense is how
we survive.