by Ami Snow
If I was being entirely truthful, I didn’t want to give up either one.
Catherine had beaten me to the house, and she was already digging through my closet by the time I got there. She tossed a pair of dark skinny jeans on the bed, and rifled through one of my drawers. “You want to look nice, but not like you care too much. That’s the vibe these sorts of places have. Here we go!” she crowed triumphantly as she pulled a forest green cashmere sweater out that my mother had given me for Christmas one year. “This, the jeans, and oh! Here. This jacket.” She tossed my leather, shearling-lined bomber on the bed next to it. “Start getting dressed!” she urged as she turned back to the closet. “Shoes…”
I tugged on the jeans, pulled the—admittedly cozy—sweater over my head, and left the jacket, not wanting to overheat and melt before I even made it to the date. Catherine had found a pair of black leather booties, and she brought those out as well. “Here we go. Now what about your hair?”
I shrugged. “This is why I brought in the reinforcements.”
She tugged me by the hand into the bathroom, where she sat me down on a stool and promptly plugged in a curling iron. Meanwhile, she started applying my makeup.
I had to admit, it was nice to be fussed over. I breathed in and out, trying to relax as she blended and shaded and powdered, doing my face first and then applying eyeshadow. I balked at first when I saw the black and grey “smoky” palette she pulled out, but she reassured me that it would be fine, and when she was done, I was surprised at how subtle it looked. She’d done a really fantastic job. She handed me a mascara tube and some lipstick, and let me apply those myself while she checked on the curling iron.
She did quick work on my hair, and when she was done it fell softly around my face in small waves, nothing too dramatic. I felt very pretty, and I gave her a hug when I stood up. “Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem! You know I love this stuff.” Catherine put away the tools we’d used, and I went to find some jewelry, settling on a pair of onyx studs and a couple of silver bracelets. I put on the booties and shrugged into the jacket, and not a moment too soon. I heard a knock on the door, and hurried to open it. Brian was standing there in his own leather jacket, with a flannel underneath, dark jeans and boots. I was glad I hadn’t overdressed.
“I got a cab waiting for us. Ready to go?”
I nodded. Catherine gave me a thumbs up as I headed outside with Brian to the waiting cab. It was a short ride downtown, and he reached for my hand as the cab wove through traffic. I let him, enjoying the simple pleasure of feeling his rougher palm and wide fingers lace through mine. His skin was warm, pleasant against my cold hand. I liked the feeling of comfort that I had with him. There was no anxiety, no building tension, no question of where the night might go—all of the things that attracted me to Ethan. There was only an easy sense that the night would go wherever it might, and we would go along with it.
We got to the restaurant, a small building wedged between two bars, and Brian paid the cab driver. I didn’t know why it didn’t bother me so much when Brian paid for things. Maybe it was that he wasn’t as extravagantly rich as Ethan, or that he didn’t flaunt it as a way to show his power. He did it because it was a nice thing to do, and that was fine with me.
I followed him into the restaurant, which was as cozy on the inside as it looked on the outside, with wooden farm-style tables, and a large brick fireplace in one wall, roaring with a fire. The result was a warm space that smelled of wood and delicious food, and I immediately liked it.
“Care if I order a drink for you?” Brian asked.
Purely because he’d bothered to ask, I nodded in agreement.
The waitress sat me at our table, and Brian returned shortly with a beer for himself and a glass of wine for me. “This is a local red. I think you’ll really like it.”
I took a sip. It was fantastic. It was earthier than the refined wine I’d had with Ethan at the Italian restaurant, and I thought with not a little amusement that the comparison was much like the men themselves. One was refined and expensive, the other, down-to-earth and attainable. Just within reach, while the other remained distant and mysterious. I took another sip. “I love it.”
Brian grinned, and opened the menu, beginning to detail to me the best items. It occurred to me to wonder if he’d brought other dates here, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to care. He’d brought me here, and chosen a great wine, and we were having fun. That was all that mattered.
We ordered a fried corn cake with a green tomato relish, goat cheese and honey drizzle for the appetizer, and when it came and I took a bite, I nearly died. It was amazing. I looked at Brian. “I could live here. Seriously. I’ll sleep next to the fireplace.”
He laughed. “It’s pretty great, yeah? A friend of mine owns it, he sends clients my way to the brewery, and I recommend him to my customers. It’s not hard to, when the food’s this good. And he makes a point of doing everything organic and local, which really goes over well with the clientele.”
“Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it right. This is amazing.”
We ordered two dishes to share for dinner, since neither of us could decide. One was a venison steak with mushrooms, onions and a red wine glaze, served with garlic mashed potatoes, and the other was a spice-rubbed fish filet in a cream and tomato broth, with zucchini and squash on the side. We had the waitress sit the plates down side by side when she came, and we both dug in, on our second drinks by now. The food was incredible, and we hardly talked through the meal, too intent on eating.
I laughed by the time we reached the end of the plates. “I’m so full I can hardly stand it! Maybe we shouldn’t come to a place so good, we’ve hardly talked at all.”
“We can go back to my place and talk, if you want,” Brian said. I raised an eyebrow and he hurriedly continued: “Just talk, I mean, really…if that’s what you want.”
I smiled. “Your place sounds great.”
The waitress showed us a dessert menu, which sounded amazing, but I couldn’t eat another bite. Brian ordered a bottle of the wine he’d chosen to take with us, over my protests that we could get something less expensive. I finally shut up, figuring that his friend probably was giving him a discount anyway.
Brian paid the check and called the cab back, and we climbed in, laughing and warm from the alcohol and good food.
He wasted no time reaching for my hand, holding it throughout the entire drive. The cab bounced over a few holes and I slid closer to him, and I made a point of not going back. He slid his arm around my shoulders, and I rested my head on his for a moment, before turning my head to look up at him.
He bent his head then and kissed me, his lips as soft and unassuming as I remembered them being the last time. I returned the kiss, pressing my mouth against his, my tongue flicking out to taste him. He was spicy and sweet all at once, and I could taste the remnants of the hops of the beer on his breath, not unpleasant at all. His fingers tightened on my shoulder, and he leaned towards me, his lips parting and deepening the kiss. I breathed in, my hand clutching his arm, and he groaned softly, one hand going to my waist as if to pull me onto his lap.
He pulled away, though, a little breathless. “I did promise we would go to my house to talk,” he said, laughing slightly. I nodded, laughing along with him, although truthfully I felt a little disappointed. He didn’t make me tremble and ache the way Ethan did, but my blood was hot from his kisses, my body eager for more.
The cab pulled up along the sidewalk, and I insisted Brian let me pay this time. He deferred gracefully when he saw that I was serious, which I appreciated.
His rowhome, which he said he shared with two friends, looked very much like a bachelor pad. There was a sofa and a couple of armchairs, a giant television with multiple game consoles, and a kitchen that looked as if it wasn’t used all that often. “We can stay downstairs if you want, but my buddies will probably be home soon. Or we can go up to my room…no ulterior motives, I promise.” He ra
ised his hand like a good Boy Scout, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Your room is fine,” I said, and I followed him up the stairs.
It was sparsely furnished, too, with a few posters on the walls, a made bed, dresser and nightstand, and one exposed brick wall across from the bed. He settled onto the mattress, piling up pillows for us to lean against, and I settled into the crook of his arm.
“So how much longer do you have here? I remember you saying that first night that you were here for an internship.”
“About five weeks,” I said.
“Are you ready to go home? Or do you like it here?”
“I like it here. This is where I thought I’d wind up after college. I like some of the people I’ve met here, too,” I said, giving him a cheeky grin.
He laughed. “So do you think you won’t wind up here now?”
I could sense that he was trying to suss out my intentions without coming right out and saying he might want to date me. It was a nice thing for him to do, I thought, to not put pressure on me to make a choice by insinuating that I would have someone here. But, I thought, if I said I was certainly coming back, I thought that he would probably make a move.
I didn’t know what I would say if he did. I liked him…I liked him a great deal. But there was Ethan, always hovering in the back of my mind. The knowledge that if I chose Brian, I would have to give up Ethan. The rush of excitement when I saw him, the way my heart started to pound when he was close to me. The furious fucking on my floor, in my shower, on his desk. What else does he give you? I thought to myself, but it wasn’t enough to make me settle on one side or the other. Not yet.
“I might come back here,” I said cautiously. “A lot depends on whether or not I have a job. If no one here offers me anything…I’ll probably go to New York or Chicago. Maybe Boston.”
“I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t get job offers,” Brian said, and I felt warm all over at his certainty. Of course, I thought, with a sudden rush of guilt—he also didn’t know that I was sleeping with my boss. And that if I angered said boss, I could wind up blacklisted from every marketing firm in Washington D.C. Maybe further.
These were things I didn’t need to say right now, though. Right now, I knew that the promise of maybe coming back was enough. That while Brian might not wait for me, if he was still single when I…if I…came back, he’d want to pick up where we left off. Later, if I did come back, that was when I knew I would need to make a choice.
We kept talking, talked for what felt like hours. And although I didn’t mean to, although I’d had every intention of following through on what we’d started in the cab, eventually I found myself lying next to him on the bed, my head on his shoulder, and I fell asleep.
Chapter 4
Ethan
I was watching the calendar days tick by. I couldn’t help it. Day after day, she spent her time in my office and at the desk outside of it, making calls, filing papers, listening to me as I instructed her on how to handle clients. Every moment, I wanted to drag her onto my desk, slide her skirt up again and fuck her until she screamed my name. But I refrained. I wasn’t sure why I refrained…but I did.
The tension was nearly unbearable. I called Anne more often, taking pleasure in denying her hers until the absolute final moment, enjoying lashing her to the bed, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her front, and pounding her until we both lost ourselves to complete oblivion. I enjoyed the sensation of my hand on her flesh, feeling it warm and redden under my palm. I knew that it was really Elizabeth I wanted there, Elizabeth that I wanted to punish for the way she pretended that nothing had happened between us.
I thought I saw, sometimes, the flashes of lust in her eyes. When she leaned over my arm to look at a report, or stood next to me in an elevator, I could see the desire there. It would be so easy, I thought in those times, to turn and bend her over the desk, or push her up against the elevator wall, kissing her until she begged for me to take her back to the privacy of my office.
But I wanted, more and more, more than just sex. I wanted to possess her. On the nights that Anne was busy, I took care of it myself, gripping my cock and stroking it as I imagined tying Elizabeth’s hands over her head and spanking her until she begged for release, or bending her over the bed and spanking her small, pert ass with a cane. I pictured the lines on her wrists from the ropes and the way she would beg for my cock before I finished, the way I would punish her by not letting her come until I felt she’d had enough. I pictured these things, over and over, until I would come violently, my body jerking and spasming, and leaving me unfulfilled in the end. Because just like my nights with Anne, I would lay awake afterwards, my body still throbbing, wondering what she was doing. Wondering if she were in bed with another man, letting him plunge into her until she cried out from the pleasure of it, or if she were alone, touching herself while she thought of me fucking her on my desk in front of windows that overlooked the whole city.
Or maybe, I thought sometimes, glumly…maybe she was just sleeping, in those wee hours when I lay alone in bed. Maybe she wasn’t fucking anyone or dreaming of fucking me. Maybe she was just sleeping. That thought depressed me more than anything else. I would rather her be longing for me or fucking someone just to get rid of the tension, the way I was. Anything but apathy.
Although, I longed for apathy. Never had a woman gotten under my skin like this. I wondered if it was just the chase, the fact that she hadn’t given in to me completely, hadn’t begged for me to fuck her of her own accord. She’d only begged once, when I’d already had her pinned to my desk, my fingers inside of her. Then, she’d begged. But she’d never come seducing me.
So I watched the days tick away on the calendar, and I wondered when something would give. Either she would give in, or she would leave. I wondered what I would do if she simply left, and nothing happened. It would be so anti-climactic, after everything that had passed between us.
But on her last day, it looked as if that was what was happening. I’d gotten to work early, unable to sleep again, despite having fucked Anne a record three times the night before, to the point where she’d very nearly looked as if she might ask to stay, simply so as not to have to make the effort to get home.
Elizabeth came in an hour after I did, a coffee in each hand, one for her and one for me. She set mine down without a word, and went to her desk to start working through her list of calls for the morning. She’d brought a box with her, I saw, for her things, and at lunch she was starting to pack them as she ate the sandwich she’d brought from home. I’d ordered in from the deli, and I thought of asking her if she wanted anything, but I didn’t. We’d barely spoken to one another all morning, only brief work-related questions or statements, and the tension between us was tinged with awkwardness. After all the heat and struggle and denial, neither of us seemed to know what to say at the end. All I could think of was that I wanted to tell her not to go, but I knew she had to, at least for now. She had to go back to school.
By four-forty-five in the afternoon, her desk was packed, her call list was checked off, and she walked into my office with a stack of files. “Here’s the finished ones, Ethan.” I’d nearly expected her to call me Mr. Sharpe, her demeanor was so stiff, and I was strangely grateful when she didn’t.
I stood up, and walked around the desk. She stuck her hand out. “It was nice working with you,” she said.
I took her palm, felt the heat of it, the softness. I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed her upper arms, bent my head, and kissed her. There was no gentleness, no caution. I plunged my tongue into her mouth, parting her lips, my grasp hard on her arms. I’d expected fight, expected her to push me away, but her mouth simply opened under mine, her tongue brushing up against mine, and I groaned, my cock hard in an instant. She pulled away, starting to say something, and before a word could come out of her mouth, I spun her to face away from me and pushed her up against the wall. I reached around her for the closure of her pants, my mouth on her neck.
“I
f you don’t want this, Elizabeth, tell me. You can go, of course. But goddamn it, I want you, and I don’t want to let you leave without fucking you one last time,” I growled in her ear, getting her pants loose. They dropped to the floor, and I tugged her panties down, plunging my fingers between her legs. She was wet, dripping for me, and her legs parted without a thought. She moaned as I flicked a finger over her clit, pulling her hips back and nudging her legs apart. “Do you want me?” I asked again.
“Yes,” she moaned. I could feel the tension in her body, knew that she was telling herself that she shouldn’t. I didn’t care. She’d said yes, and that was all that mattered to me. She wanted me.
I pulled my cock out faster than I could ever remember, and in a matter of seconds I was inside of her, to the hilt, my cock surrounded by her wet heat, throbbing around me, and I thought I might come on the spot.
She was pushing back against me, her hips grinding into my groin, and I reached for her clit, rubbing it with my fingers as I began to fuck her. It would be fast and hard, I couldn’t hold out for long. I knew she wouldn’t, either.
Somewhere in my thoughts was still the desire to hear her beg for it, to have her lashed and tied and spanked, her pleasure dragged out in degrees while I took mine as I willed. But for now, all I wanted was to feel her come on my cock, to feel her body shake while I fucked her and poured into her.
It didn’t take long. She was moaning, her fingers curled against the wall as she thrust back against me, amazingly balanced in her heels, and then I heard her murmur: “Oh, fuck!” and I knew that she was about to orgasm. I felt it, the fluttering followed by the grip of her muscles, and she was pushing back against me, her back arched and her legs trembling, and I grabbed her hips, fucking her harder than I ever had before, my cock all the way inside of her, and I felt it swell and throb, and then I was coming too, my hips jerking as all of the tension and frustration of the weeks prior poured out of me.
