Chase (Chase #1)

by M. L. Young

  CHASE

  The Series

  Volume One

  M.L. Young

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances of characters to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. The author, M.L. Young, holds exclusive rights to this work.

  Copyright © 2014 by M.L. Young

  All rights reserved

  NOTE: This is a serial, and unfolds over three volumes. This series also has alternating points of view. Each volume is 20,000 words, and each volume will be $0.99, but free to read with your Kindle Unlimited membership. Please join my mailing list (link at the end) for release dates, as well as to know when things launch as they happen. I will also update this on my Facebook, with the link below at the end of the volume.

  Also by M.L. Young

  The Stipulation Serials (first volume free)

  Broken

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Subscribe to M.L.’s mailing list

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chase

  My name is Matthew Chase, but you can call me Chase.

  I’ve never been one for the type of romantic exploits that most of society seems to thrive on. I’ve been burned one too many times to even care about tending to your fragile heart any longer. The thing I’m interested in is purely carnal. I want to feel your touch, your body, your skin, but never get close to the point where I see your heart or what you normal people would call feelings.

  There once was a time when I used to be a relationship man, one who tended to the hearts of women, doing everything and anything I could to make sure they were safe, satisfied, and most of all, loved. A few choice women ruined that for all of you, though. Now I’m off the market…at least in every way besides the bedroom.

  I’ve been fortuitous enough to have luck in my life, the kind of luck that only presents itself once. It’s the kind of luck you have to hold onto if you’re to get anywhere in life, and trust me, I plan to go very far.

  I pulled into the parking garage of my office in downtown Los Angeles, the smell and sight of aspiring starlets almost too much for my overloaded nose to handle as they gathered outside my building, hoping to get a glimpse of someone, anyone, they could give their demo tapes to.

  I should start by saying that I’m a record executive, and a damn good one at that. You know Nigella Riseman, the multi-platinum star who’s now made millions? I signed her when she was Nicole Herman, the shy, introverted nursing student who had wiry hair and thick, black eyebrows. I transformed her, like I have others, into mega superstars who tour the world and make millions, and in turn, make me millions.

  I parked my metallic red sports car near the front of the garage, always making sure I click twice on my key fob, just so I can hear the chirping sound of my alarm activating. Three hundred thousand dollars of Italian engineering never sounded so damn good.

  I flashed a smile as I walked to the elevators, the girls outside the cement walls in their bohemian clothes waving crazily at me, not knowing who I am, but obviously seeing I’m important…and let me tell you, I’m damn important. The security guards and gates kept them back, their little hands dangling CDs and letters my way, like fishermen with a lure, but I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, be caught. I knew I had the power to single-handedly turn them into superstars, on their way to headline huge stadiums domestic and international, but for now, I needed some coffee.

  I got into the elevator and felt my phone buzz inside my pocket, like it did most of the day. They, and I mean my colleagues, never have the courtesy to leave me alone. Business was always on, with no days off. With nobody around, I took it out, seeing on the lock screen that I had a notification from RandomMeetX, a truly remarkable hookup and relationship app that I’ve been using for months with very, very great results. Women see me, they message me, I flirt a little, and I get them in bed. It’s that simple. There are no second dates, no second meetings, no second moments together in bed…nothing. I meet them, I seduce them, I fuck them, and I move on to the next.

  I know some people must think I’m horrible for doing this, not telling these fine women that my needs are only for pleasure and not romantic, but it’s exactly what their species has done to me multiple times throughout the years. Isn’t this just me getting even? I’d like to think so, even if some others might not. Besides, not every person you meet on every dating site or app can be the right person to spend the rest of your life with in a little cottage with a white picket fence and a loving dog and children. Sometimes you need something that satisfies that human urge to be close to someone, skin-to-skin, as they run their hands down your hard, masculine body before you flick your tongue up and down their pulsing clit.

  With my phone out, I opened the dating app, seeing my new match show up.

  “Eh,” I mumbled aloud as I clicked on her pictures.

  She wasn’t that amazing, more homely than anything, but for some reason she had some kind of spell that made me want to learn and see more about her. She wasn’t like the other girls I had talked to on this app. She wasn’t sporting DD fake tits and dousing on so much bright pink lip-gloss that you thought the valley was missing another bimbo. She was something else entirely. I could tell her body was nice, even if her clothes weren’t that revealing, and her skin was soft, her hair a little flowy, not weighed down by clouds of hairspray and product. I liked it.

  Her nametag said Alexis, a name I rather liked. She was ten miles away, a Libra, and her biggest adventure to date was going snorkeling in San Diego. Definitely not a wild girl by any means, but sometimes the wildest of personalities hide under a soft exterior that just needs to be cracked open.

  As my floor was approaching, I decided to make her number eighty-two, also my birth year, and send her a wink. I hit send, locked my phone, and slid it back into my pocket just as the elevator doors opened and the sight of frantic interns running around plagued my vision for yet another day.

  “Mr. Chase!”

  I looked to my right, seeing my assistant, Brian, running towards me with papers falling out of his grip. He was five-foot-six, one hundred forty pounds soaking wet, and one of the smallest men I had ever known. He was, however, a great assistant, and he always got things done, which was why I kept him on instead of a sexy twenty-two-year-old who couldn’t get a coffee order right. I’d had a few of them.

  “What is it, Brian?” I asked.

  “Ms. Riseman is here, and she isn’t happy one bit! She says she’s going to quit!” he said frantically.

  “Relax, Brian, she isn’t going to do anything. She’s a diva. She does this every few months, calls me up, trying to demand more money or resources from us. It’s fine. Where is she?” I asked.

  “In your office,” Brian replied.

  I walked casually to my office, making Nigella, or Nicole as she was really known, wait as long as possible, like I always did. I didn’t let her, or any other woman, for that matter, boss me around and turn me into someone like Brian. Matthew Chase wasn’t whipped, and he wasn’t controlled by any woman.

  After a few minutes, with a warm coffee in my hand, I walked into my office, the floor to ceiling glass that looked out over the city showcasing Nigella with her back to me, her hands on her hips.

  “Hello, darling,” I said, setting down my bag and coffee.

  “Where the fuck have you been, Chase? I’ve been waiting for your ass to get here and work out these goddamn problems,” she said, turning around with a scowl.

  “Always nice to see you too, Nicole,” I said, before taking a sip of my coffee.


  “I’m not kidding with you this time. I want my shit, all of the shit on my list, and I want it now,” she said.

  I walked up to her, getting close, looking into her eyes, as she pursed her lips and tried to give me the death stare that only she could give. I gazed at her, sizing her up, seeing the little kitty cat hidden deep within the lioness persona she tried to give off.

  I leaned in, my lips to her ear, my hand making its way onto her hip. “We can’t all have what we want,” I said, feeling her body quiver and her stance change. I pulled slowly away and sat down in my chair, once again taking the full weight of my attention off of her.

  “Why do you do this to me?” she asked.

  “Because I can,” I replied, smiling.

  “I’m going to come back another day when I have some more time and you’re on fucking time. You wasted all of mine by not being here when you’re supposed to be. You better look over my demands. I mean it,” she said, wagging her red-tipped finger at me.

  “And you don’t come back here unless you’re bent over my desk, with me telling you my demands,” I quickly snarked back.

  “God, you’re such a misogynist,” she said, turning around to walk out the door.

  “Don’t act like you don’t like it,” I retorted.

  She looked back at me, rolled her eyes, and walked out of the room. I turned around in my chair and sipped my coffee as I looked out my office windows to the scene of Los Angeles down below, the ordered chaos of the busy streets winking back.

  My phone buzzed, catching my undivided attention as I pulled it out. The chirping sound I’d set this app to play when I got a new match or message made me light up like a five-year-old kid during Christmas. What new fish did I reel in this time?

  I unlocked my phone, seeing that the girl from earlier had winked me back. Her full profile showed up, her name in bright lights. I’d forgotten her name after I locked my phone before, but there it was, demanding I learn it, even if I would forget it the next morning.

  “Alexis,” I said out loud as I stroked my stubbly chin.

  The little cursor on the chat box blinked incessantly, waiting for me to say something, anything. Usually I tried to take something from their profiles, a little tidbit of information, crafting the kind of message other guys aptly missed but shouldn’t, and used it to twist these girls around my fingers, showing them that I’m different and not like every other guy. She had none of that, though. Her profile was bare, blank, devoid of information, and quite honestly, rather boring.

  Like a basketball player on the court when the timer’s about to buzz and the championship game’s about to end, I quickly typed something, not knowing if I’d sink the shot, but throwing the ball anyway, hoping for the best.

  “You have the most exquisite eyes. The depths of blue from which they stem make even the most tropical of waters look dull and bleak in comparison.”

  I hit send, smirked, and went back to her profile, looking at the few pictures and studying her from head to toe. While she wasn’t a glamorous girl with everything hanging out, she was strikingly sexy. I didn’t know if it was her eyes, her soft complexion, or her tight curves that beckoned from under her plain-Jane clothes, but I knew I wanted to taste them. Like a caged lion cut off from the wild for years, I was hungry, and I knew what was going to satiate my hunger and desire.

  One night. One time. One chance.

  Chapter Two

  Alexis

  There are two broken strips of plastic on my blinds that are in the exact right place to let the sun shine brightly through, right into my eyes, every single morning. They were like that when I moved in, and with an unapologetic Bosnian landlord who told me to suck it up and get over it, I now have a little reminder every morning that I need to pack up and get the hell out of this place.

  Things always seem to be so hard for me in ways they aren’t for other people, or at least anyone I know. Between going to school part-time, working part-time, and getting set up with West Hollywood guys who turned out not to be playing for team vagina, I didn’t think things could get much worse.

  I had classes today, like I do a few other days a week, much to my dismay. My psychology book has a ripped cover, pages 190 to 245 are missing, and a few questionable stains on the first few pages made the pages stick together when I first got it. I bought it used from a kid online for ten bucks, much less than the two hundred it cost brand new with everything intact and no weird stains, which I was pretty sure the last guy left as a present for me, if you catch my drift.

  I got up and out of bed, finding a pink t-shirt on my floor that looked clean, but wasn’t necessarily. I picked it up, sniffed it like some bachelor with old pizza boxes lying around, and decided it was clean enough, and if it wasn’t, nobody else would ever even know. If I couldn’t tell, they definitely couldn’t.

  I still had two hours until my class, a deathly amount of time when you don’t have cable, let alone a television, and you have to leech a weak, tired wifi signal from your neighbors. I was pretty sure they were starting to catch on and were about to password-protect their router and shut me out completely. All I generally had to rely on was my phone, as my computer had a power charger that worked a third of the time and crapped out the rest of the time.

  I checked my phone, seeing a message from a guy I met on RandomMeetX, some app I downloaded for free that lets you meet other people in the area who might actually find you interesting or attractive. It was one of those things my grandmother would scoff at and say was destroying the world with the whole “no real interaction” thing, which seemed to be purely generational.

  “I just wanted to say I had a great time with you the other night. It’s really cool that you’re so cool.”

  I clicked the little trashcan icon and deleted his message, the content of which was severely disappointing, even for someone like him. I had gone on four dates with guys I met on the app, and each was just a little more disastrous than the last. One man was in his mid-twenties and still lived at home, while another must’ve taken his pictures when he was sixty pounds lighter, and another left me at the table so he could go pay the bill, before running out the front door, never to be heard from again.

  I wouldn’t say that I was bad with guys, more like they were bad with me, and I wasn’t sure anything, or anyone, was going to change that. I’d pretty much given up any and all hope that a decent guy would come my way. He wouldn’t need to be amazing, just normal, a little sexy, and somewhat caring. I guess that was asking a lot in Los Angeles. Every guy here was either a wannabe actor, a wannabe model, or a wannabe wannabe. I moved here from Iowa for school two years ago, and now, I almost wished I had a Midwestern guy instead of the prissy ones out here. I wasn’t sure there was a dating end in sight.

  With a lot of disdain and angst, my mind telling me to give up and toss my phone aside, it buzzed, piquing my attention. I picked it back up, looked at the lock screen, and saw I had a notification from RandomMeetX. Great, another dipshit loser here to try to “save” me from the sorrows of being single.

  After a drawn out sigh and the sound of my tongue clicking against the roof of my mouth as I waited for the app to load, the guy who had sent me the notification appeared.

  “Damn,” I mumbled, seeing him on my screen.

  “My name is Chase. That’s all you need to know,” his profile said.

  It was short and sweet, giving me just enough information to want to know more. He had sent me a wink, something I didn’t get all too often. Most of the guys I talked to just messaged me outright, telling me how hot I was or how they wanted to make me into a woman, as if they even could.

  I went back to his profile, studying it, looking at the one picture he had of himself on there. He was tan, though not orange or Jersey-trophy-wife tan, a little stubble from five o’clock shadow peppered along his cheeks and chin, and piercing green eyes that made you want to know more. He looked like he was in good shape, his suit fitted, telling me he cared about his
looks and that he had some kind of money. That wasn’t your everyday baggy bargain bin suit your weird cousin buys for your grandma’s funeral.

  He didn’t look like the type of guy I’d normally date, or the type of guy who would even be interested in me, for that matter. He was the type of guy, at least from his looks, who could and should have a sexy blonde bombshell of a model on his arm…and I wasn’t blonde or a bombshell.

  As I looked him over, I began to wonder if maybe he hit my wink button by mistake, thinking he was leaving my page or talking to someone else. Even though he was very attractive, and had just enough of everything that made me want to learn more, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I shouldn’t try to find out.

  I locked my phone and put it down, continuing to get ready, as I tried to think of what to do about the random wink. It wasn’t even a big deal, really. It wasn’t like I was asking him to marry me or have kids with me. It was just a reply, a wink, on a crappy dating app. Hell, he probably wasn’t even real. It was probably just some stock photo that anyone could get for free, with some perv of a guy behind the screen waiting for innocent women like me to click on them and agree to meet up, only to be chopped into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase. The short “about me” section, the one picture, the model looks. Yeah, that had to be it.

  •••

  Half an hour passed and I got to school, sitting there, waiting for my class to start, stuffing two day-old doughnuts into my mouth because my university was giving them away for free so they didn’t have to throw them away. I didn’t have much in terms of disposable money, only enough to get by, so breakfast was more of a delight for me, not an everyday thing. Three meals a deal in this city could get expensive.

  I watched the couples go by, their happiness deafening and soul-crushing as they held hands and kissed like they were alone in their rooms, about to rip each other’s clothes off and have an orgy. They didn’t care who was around or what could happen, so long as their tongues got to slither down the other’s throat. I wasn’t like that, at least not in public. Well, I guess I wasn’t like that too much in private, either. My last boyfriend called me vanilla, a term he said described someone who was plain, with nothing exciting going for them. It was a real mystery why we weren’t together anymore.