by Pratt, Lulu
Xavier would like this plenty.
Some half an hour later, there was a knock on my door.
“How’d you get up here without a key?” I called from my spot on the sofa.
“One of your neighbors let me in. Open up.” And then, in a lower voice, “I’m going to devour you. Don’t make me scream it in front of everybody you know.”
That got me up pretty quickly. I ran to the door then slowed just before the entrance, pausing to fix my hair, tug down the corset and prepare myself for the big reveal.
I opened the door just a crack, and sure enough, there was Xavier.
He had circles beneath his eyes that I hadn’t noticed earlier, and his hair was all tussled up. There were shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. In other words, he looked tormented.
“Hey, Chloe.”
I opened the door all the way and stepped into his view.
At once, the desperation in his face seemed to disappear, and was replaced with a profound hunger as his eyes drank in all of my flesh.
“My God,” he murmured. “Do you know how good you look?”
“Yeah. Now come inside, before the neighbors know too.”
He didn’t have to be told twice. Xavier took a step in, then slammed the door behind him before shoving me up against the entry way wall.
I put up no resistance, melting into his arms. I’d assumed we were going to pick up where we left off earlier, but it was even better than that — it was as though the time apart had only intensified our craving for one another, leaving an aftertaste of sexual desire in our mouths. I wanted Xavier to fill me in every way possible.
He kissed me as he ran his hand over my black silk-clad breasts, breathing deeply as he filled his palms with me.
“You are so, so hot,” he murmured, gripping my waist and tugging me even closer. “Turn around and face the wall.”
I obeyed, and his hand give me a light slap on the ass.
“Gorgeous,” he said, as if unable to help himself.
“Spank me harder,” I begged, loving the sensation. Between the tight binding of the corset, and the pain his open palm was causing me, this meeting had turned more than a little sadomasochistic.
Xavier obliged, slapping me once more on the ass, before saying, “Chloe, I’m gonna take off your corset. It’d be a shame to ruin it while fucking you.”
True to his word, I felt the laces in the back begin to slide open in his surprisingly gentle touch. How did he move so quickly between the roughness of a spank to the tenderness of undressing me? Each moment I spent with him, he seemed to grow more and more complex.
After a few moments, the corset tumbled off my chest and onto the floor, and I stepped out, careful not to crack its delicate boning.
Xavier spun me back around to him. “How do you want to be fucked?” he asked, slipping a finger under the edge of my panties and pulling me in.
His lips descended on my neck as I struggled to breathe. “Dealer’s choice.”
His fingers were moving deeper into my underwear as his lips migrated to my left nipple. I wanted anything Xavier wanted.
“Take me from behind.”
“Take me to your bedroom.”
I caught my breath as much as I could, and took his hand in mine, leading him to my room.
“Here we are,” I said as we entered my space.
“It’s lovely,” he observed mildly. “Now, get on your bed.”
I instantly followed his directions, crawling onto the mattress so he could get a good look at my pert ass.
Xavier groaned at the view. “That ass is mine.”
“Yes, it is,” I agreed.
I pushed my head deeper into my comforter and pulled the string of my thong aside so that I could show Xavier everything.
“Jesus, you’re something to look at,” he muttered with appreciation. “Don’t come without me.”
“I would never.”
I craned my neck to peer over my shoulder, and saw that Xavier had taken off his shirt, baring his insanely chiseled chest. He wasn’t buff, like those overstuffed super heroes, but rather lean and tight. He had a taut stomach, lightly muscled arms and a tapered waist. My heart quickened as my panties grew ever more wet. Xavier was going to fuck me, and I couldn’t wait.
My thoughts suddenly snapped to my pregnancy. How had that left my mind, even for a moment? My hand went to my belly. I still hadn’t told Xavier. Oh my God, what was I doing? I was carrying Xavier’s child, and I hadn’t even bothered to tell him. Suddenly, guilt surged through me. How dare I not inform him? What I did with the baby was my choice, of course, but not telling him — and continuing to fuck him without sharing the information — now that was unkind.
But then I felt Xavier climb onto the bed with me, and I looked back once more to see his gigantic cock covered with a condom.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
I nodded, unable to speak. If only he knew.
“Tell me yes,” he said. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes, Xavier, fuck me.”
“Good. I’m gonna start with a finger.”
As he said it, I felt a finger slip into my pussy. Oh shit. It was good. The angle was different with his fingers coming from the back. I relaxed around his hand, letting pleasure rush through me.
“How’s that?”
“It’s amazing,” I managed to say. “Put another finger in me.”
“Dirty girl,” he said, but did so.
I groaned into a pink pillow as he stroked my walls. “Xavier, I want your cock. I want it. Don’t make me beg.”
“If that’s what you want…”
“It is.”
“Very well.” He pushed my knees further apart, until I was spread as wide as possible. “Yummy.”
With that, I felt the tip of his cock at my entrance. I shivered with excitement and anticipation.
And then Xavier began to fill my center with his thick, veiny dick. Every inch felt like a revelation. I arched my back, pushing him further inside me as I groaned.
“Oh my God, oh my God.”
“You like that?” he asked in a ragged voice as his cock slowly moved in deeper.
“Fuck, you know I do.”
Finally, I felt the base of his cock against my body. I’d taken all of him inside me, I realized with a strange sense of pride.
“Shit, you’re tight,” he moaned. “You feel so good.”
“Fuck me.” I didn’t want to beg, but his huge dick was forcing me to. “I want you to come.”
He grabbed my hair, pulling my head back so he could fully mount me.
“As you wish,” he said, and began to plunge in and out of my center.
I’d never felt anything so intensely wonderful in my body. Each ridge and ripple of his cock changed me, each stroke opened my eyes. So this is what heaven feels like, I thought wildly as he rode me like I was a wild animal, grabbing my breast one moment and spanking my ass the next.
“Yes, yes, yes!” I screamed, not caring if the neighbors heard.
My screams egged Xavier on, urging him to thrust harder, faster and deeper, each movement splitting me wide open. Now, I could barely breathe, let alone find words.
All at once, I felt Xavier come inside me. He had come so hard he’d been unable to even announce that it was impending. I shivered as he pulled out of me and collapsed to the side, face bright red with exertion.
He sat up just long enough to wipe the juices that dripped down my leg, then flopped back down on the pillows.
I joined him, throwing myself onto the mattress, my whole body still tingling with pleasure.
Why was it that, no matter how hard I tried, I always ended up freshly fucked next to Xavier?
CHAPTER 26
Xavier
THE SCENT OF Chloe and our lovemaking, filled the room like an exotic perfume. I breathed in the musk, overlaid with sweat. It was delicious and intoxicating.
I watched as Chloe tucked herself under the sheets, n
uzzling into the pillow, her blonde hair splaying out across the clean cream linens.
We were so quiet that I was afraid to speak, thereby breaking the reverie of the moment. Everything was, in that split second, perfect. When was the last time I’d thought as much?
When I was dating her in college, I thought immediately. We’d been young, stupid and without a single care in the world. God, had it been so long since I’d felt whole? What a terrifying, heart-wrenching realization.
Reaching under the covers, I pulled Chloe close to me. She giggled then sighed, curling up under my arm and lying her head on my chest. You feel so right huddled on me, I wanted to tell her. Instead, I said the first innocuous thing that came to my mind.
“Remember when we TP’d that dorm in college?”
“How could I forget?” she laughed. “I thought I was gonna get expelled.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Of course it was. The way that RA stammered—”
“T-t-toilet paper!”
“Yes, exactly,” Chloe said, devolving into fits of chuckles.
I hugged her tighter, loving the feeling of her soft skin against mine. “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything.”
“Me neither.” Her voice had grown softer, sweeter, like a feather sinking down through heavy air.
“Chloe…”
“Yes?”
This time, there was no innocuous thing to say. I needed to tell her what was on my mind before it consumed me.
“Chloe, I’ve made plenty of bad decisions, including TP’ing a dorm. But I’m starting to think the worst mistake I ever made was letting you go.”
CHAPTER 27
Chloe
XAVIER HAD said exactly what I needed to hear.
He wants me, I thought with unremitting glee. He wants me back.
That stirring in my womb kicked up a notch. Maybe this was the perfect moment to tell him about our baby. We were holding one another close, having just made love and Xavier was admitting that he regretted our breakup. What better time could there be?
I swallowed against the silence that permeated the room, formulating the words to tell him that he was going to be a father.
Just as I pulled together a semblance of a sentence, Xavier continued, “Hey, I thought of a new proposal plan. What if I ride in on an elephant, like in Aladdin?”
My heart sank. So we were back to making jokes, huh? I smiled feebly. It was obvious that Xavier was kidding, but even the fleeting reminder of his impending engagement to Rebecca was enough to bring me down to earth. It’d been foolish to think that we could be anything besides a fling. And, sure, the baby was his, but that didn’t mean he had to be a part of its life. To thrust fatherhood on a man who had no interest in the business… well, talk about wasting time. And I didn’t need his alimony or whatever. I’d be fine on my own.
The world resolved into a new image once more, this time transitioning from a specter of Xavier and I parading down to the streets of Rome, pushing a baby bassinet, to one of me holding my child, alone in Central Park, eating ice cream and splashing in the fountain. There was joy in both images.
All I need is you, I thought to the baby, as if it could hear me.
This was okay. I could live without Xavier. Or, rather, we didn’t have to be serious. Maybe all we were destined to be was a fun, easy fling. Forcing it into more wasn’t good for either of us. Sure, we had a fiery connection that lit me up every time I saw him, or even heard his name, but that was just lust. Love takes planning and convenience, and we had neither luxury.
“Chloe?” Xavier pressed. “Where’d you go?”
I quickly brought myself back to the present. “Oh, I was just thinking about you on an elephant. I think you’d look better on a white horse.”
“Yeah?”
“Definitely,” I said, forcing myself to tack a laugh onto the end of the sentence. “White horse all the way.”
“Well, you are my style consultant, so I guess I’ll have to arrange the menagerie.”
I rolled onto my side then swung my feet in front of me, stepping out of bed and grabbing a nearby silk robe.
“You have somewhere to be?” Xavier asked. His tone strove for lightness, but I could hear an edge of disappointment.
“Some of us have work in the morning.”
“So?”
I knotted the robe and turned back to him. “So I can’t sleep well with other people in my bed. You know that.”
He rolled his brown eyes, framed in thick lashes. “Guess you were always a lone wolf.”
“Ew, don’t say lone wolf,” I replied. “Nowadays that means crazy white boys.”
Xavier laughed, a noise which transitioned into a groan as he willed himself out of bed. Standing in the dim light of my room, he was silhouetted in shadows. His back muscles were ropey and trim, ending in a perfectly rounded ass. Maybe I should let him get back in bed just so I could run my hands over his thighs once more…
No, Chloe, I told myself. Have some self-control.
Anyways, Xavier was already pulling on his pants. Clearly he wanted to leave, so why should I stop him? He’d probably just been reluctant to put on clothes, not to actually part ways with me. It was laziness, not love.
His head tilted down as he did up the buttons of his shirt with a methodical precision, his fingers flying in and out. The way his arms burst against the confines of the fabric was enough to send another rush of sensation to my private parts.
But I resisted the siren call just long enough for Xavier to say, “I’ll see myself out.”
“Oh — okay.”
“It’s just easier that way,” he replied, and I wondered what he was referring to. “Get back under the covers, it’s cold in here.”
I slid back into bed, because he was right — without the warmth of his body, it was cold in here.
He was halfway to the door when he asked, “Does your building have heat?”
“Not good heat.”
“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that.”
“Xavier—”
“Good night.” He blew me a kiss and exited.
I stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, wondering if I could read them like tea leaves and force their mysterious shapes into a grander meaning.
What did Xavier want? What did I want? And what the hell were we gonna do about it?
The next morning, I woke up in a daze.
Had last night really happened? I couldn’t believe I’d welcomed Xavier into my bed once more, letting him fill me — especially when his former seed was already growing in my womb. I’d had so many opportunities to tell him about the pregnancy, and I’d taken none of them. We were stuck in this uncomfortable liminal space that I could neither decipher nor resolve.
Looking at the clock, I realized I didn’t have time for guilt this morning. I’d overslept my alarm clock, and needed to get a damn move on.
I flung on the first thing I could find, wrapping a scarf around my hair and slipping into my usual comfy clogs before grabbing my work bag and racing out of the house. Today just wasn’t going to be a glamorous day.
Through divine providence, I arrived at work exactly on time. Most art institutions are fairly lax about actual work hours, under the assumption that non-security-related staff are also “creatives,” but Mx. Tok ran a tight ship, and too many late sign-ins would surely be noticed.
“Good morning,” she said as I strode into the office.
Of course she’s here early, I thought with frustration as I plopped my bag down on my desk. She was always the first in and the last out. Say what you want about her, but the lady worked hard.
She was sitting in another employee’s chair, apparently reading some Joseph Conrad, which she immediately snapped shut.
“Glad you’re here on time,” she sniffed, standing up to reveal the full black and white, Yayoi Kusama-esque polka-dot slip she wore. “You know how I feel about punctuality.”
“Yes, Mx. Tok,” I repl
ied with a weirdly formal nod of my head.
She moved to my desk so that she could stand just a few feet in front of me. Her matte gray fingernails tapped against the wall, sending a loud rat-a-tat-tat through the office. No one else was in, I noticed.
“Chloe, I’d like to talk to you.”
“Of course, what can I do for you?” I asked, my adrenaline suddenly kicking in at those words. Did I do something wrong? In my experience, ‘I’d like to talk to you’ was a phrase always followed by a stern recrimination.
But Mx. Tok replied, “I’m extremely pleased with your work on the paintings. We trusted Alexandra to find a satisfactory replacement, of course, but you’ve risen above what I even expected.”
My mounting fear retreated, but my adrenaline was still in high gear.
“Wow, um, thank you, Mx. Tok.”
“I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Several people are commenting on the high quality of your work.”
“That’s incredible, I’m so glad to hear it.”
“Hard work begets hard work,” she intoned. “We have a special visitor. I’d like you to help me show him the restoration progress. He’s already waiting in the gallery.”
“Of course, I’d be more than happy to oblige.”
Without another word — Mx. Tok never spoke more than was absolutely necessary — she turned on a red heel, expecting me to fall in step. Almost needless to say, I did.
She guided me through the galleries to the Renaissance wing, where an old man with fine gold glasses and a hunched back sat on a bench. The gallery wasn’t yet open to patrons, so I knew that he must be the guest in question.
“Pierre,” Mx. Tok called with a warmth I rarely saw from her. “I have our restoration expert, Chloe, with me.”
He rose shakily to standing, and I quickly moved in his direction to greet him so that he wouldn’t have to take too many steps.
“Pleasure to meet you, Chloe,” he said in a thick French accent, clasping my hand. “I hear good things.”
I blushed. “I hope that you think as much after viewing the work.”
