Big Bad Twins
Page 110
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Audrey
I’d had no idea what I’d been missing.
Okay, that was not entirely true.
I did have an idea.
I had just never imagined how utterly AMAZING having a man’s cock inside me would feel.
As Chase pummeled in and out of me, it was as if every nerve ending in my body rose and fell with each stroke. I tingled all over, even in places I didn’t know would tingle.
When I felt myself coming for the third time, I felt the muscles in Chase’s arms tighten and I opened my eyes to watch him orgasm. This was my first time making a man come. This was a moment to remember. There was no way I was going to keep my eyes closed for this.
Every muscle in Chase’s body tensed, from his arms to his shoulders and down his back. Even his ass turned rock hard beneath my heels.
He clenched his eyes together and opened his mouth as if he were going to roar. As I bucked my pussy to come against him, he drove his cock as far into me as it would go and released a flood of hot creamy cum that I could feel warming me from head to toe, inside out.
One more good thrust and he was done.
Thank god, because this former virgin needed a break.
Chase collapsed beside me on the bed and we turned our heads to look into each other’s eyes.
With a goofy smile on his face, Chase said, “A plus, Miss Ross. Fucking A plus…”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Chase
Audrey sat naked at the little table in my little kitchen in my little house.
Jesus, I sounded like freakin’ Dr. Seuss.
Was this what having sex with a virgin did to a man of my age?
Made me think silly little thoughts about my silly little life?
We were both famished after our initial bout of…what was it? Love making? Hot sex? A fuck fest? A virgin sacrifice? All the above?
The only thing I had to eat in the entire house (that wasn’t spoiled or out of date) was a small container of Egg Beaters and an onion bagel that was as hard as a rock.
Audrey was a trouper. While I scrambled the eggs, she dampened the bagel with water and tried to get it back to an edible stage in the toaster oven.
She also found two Keurig cups in a junk drawer and made us each a cup of coffee we had to drink black because I had no cream or sugar.
I set the plate of faux eggs between us and handed her a fork. I had to scrub the crap off a plate and two forks and two cups. I typically used a shot glass for all my meals.
As I watched her eat the eggs (are they eggs, really?), which she doused with salt and pepper in a vain attempt to make them taste better, I realized that I was in a fantastic fucking mood for the first time in I didn’t know when. And it was all her fault.
I wouldn’t venture so far as to say that I was happy with my life now, but at that moment, staring into those eyes, I was as happy as someone like me could get.
“Your eggs okay?” I asked as I took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter as hell and thick as ink, probably because the Keurig cups were left over from Emily’s time, but it would do in a pinch.
“The eggs are…interesting,” she said with a smile. She propped her chin on the hand holding her fork as she chewed and let her eyes go around the kitchen.
It was a tiny space, made even smaller by the stacks of dirty dishes and empty beer and whiskey bottles on the counters. There was an overflowing ashtray on the table she’d moved with a look of disgust on her face.
Audrey didn’t know me well enough to understand that the kitchen was a fair representation of my life over the last two years: a small, dark, dirty space that smelled like cigarettes and booze that nobody ever visited. And if they did, they rarely came back a second time.
“So, Professor Hollander,” she said, giving me a mock frown. “Why did you give me an F on the midterm?”
“I gave everyone an F,” I said with a sigh. “If it’s any consolation, I at least felt a little bad when I gave you an F. Fuck the rest of them, but I know how hard you work, how serious you take your grades. I’m really sorry.”
I tried to smile, but the adrenaline from our fuck fest (I’m calling it a fuck fest for now; that may change later) was wearing off.
My body was starting to crave nicotine and alcohol. I took another sip of the rank coffee, hoping the caffeine might quell the wolves at my door. It didn’t.
My eyes scanned the table for cigarettes.
I looked toward the fridge and licked my lips. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost noon on a Saturday. I should be on my way to get shit-faced drunk by now.
“You seem tense,” Audrey said, narrowing her eyes at me. “I didn’t mean to upset you talking about the grades.”
I shook it off. “I’m good. Really. I just wanted a cigarette.”
“You know those things will kill you,” she said, shoving the last bite of egg into her mouth and wagging the fork at me. “You really need to quit. And you need to clean your house. It smells like an ashtray.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked without smiling. “We have sex one time and now you’re going to tell me my house stinks?”
She smiled at me. “How many times do we have to have sex before I can complain about the smell?”
A smile crossed my lips as my defenses settled down. “You want to have more sex with me?”
“That is a definite possibility,” she said, licking her lips. “But before we do, I think we should get to know each other a little better.”
Shit. There it was. The nail in the coffin of our brief affair. Once she got to know me better, she wouldn’t want anything to do with me. Emily hadn’t, but I couldn’t blame her. Hell, I could barely stand my own company.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Audrey
“I can’t have a serious conversation with you sitting there naked,” Chase said. He was looking at my tits and smiling, but I could tell the smile was forced by the look in his eyes.
It was as if the prospect of getting to know me better was scaring the hell out of him.
Or was it the prospect of me getting to know him that frightened him so?
“Fine. Hang on,” I said, pushing up from the table. I trotted into the bedroom to get my T-shirt and his sweat pants. I pulled the T-shirt over my head and tossed the sweats at him.
“Put those on,” I said, giving him a seductive look. “If I can’t sit here naked, then neither can you.”
Chase continued to smile as he tugged the sweats up his legs and over his cock. The smile seemed to be stuck to his face like a mask. He picked up the breakfast dishes and set them atop the heap of dirty dishes already in the sink.
He leaned back against the sink and crossed his arms over his hairy chest. “So, how does this work?” he asked. “This whole getting to know each other better thing.”
I wasn’t sure myself. This was new ground for me to plow as well. So, I went back to the topic that brought us together in the first place.
I said, “Tell me why you gave everyone in the class an F.”
He wrinkled his nose at me. “Haven’t we been through that already?”
“You said you were drunk, but that doesn’t explain why you’d do such a thing.” I studied his face as he stared at the dirty kitchen floor, as if the dust bunnies dancing over the linoleum held the answers. His eyes filled with tears and he tried to wipe them away without me noticing.
“Chase, what is it?” My heart suddenly ached for him. I got up from the table and put my arms around his neck. I pulled him close and rested my cheek on his chest. I knew he had a heart. I could hear it beating inside his chest.
“Tell me why you’re so sad,” I said. “You helped me. Now let me help you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Chase
Floodgates.
I didn’t know why, but having Audrey’s arms around me and her head resting on my chest opened the floodgates, releasing the emotions and rage I had been harboring for so long.
We went to sit on the couch and I told her all about my patheti
c, miserable life. I knew that it would drive her away, but that was okay. She’d given me the greatest gift a woman could offer a man. I was her first, but she was under no obligation to stick around to deal with an asshole like me.
“Emily and I were married right out of college,” I said, exhaling the words. I spied the pack of cigarettes on the coffee table but tried to ignore them. I had to do this sober or I wouldn’t do it at all. “We had Kiley, our little girl, a few years later.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” Audrey asked, looking around the living room, which was cluttered with clothes, trash, cigarette butts, and empty beer bottles.
“I put all of her pictures away,” I said quietly. “I don’t want her to see me like this.”
It was a silly notion, that my dead daughter couldn’t see me if I stored her photos away. My head seemed to be full of silly notions these days. Silly or not, god forbid she see the pitiful asshole her daddy had become.
I felt Audrey’s fingers gently stroking the back of my neck. Her fingers felt cool and comforting on my skin. She said, “Tell me about Kiley.”
I took a deep breath, and for the next hour I told her everything there was to tell about Kiley.
What a hard labor Emily had.
What a pretty baby she was.
What a happy toddler she became.
How wonderful and infectious her laugh was.
How she loved to hold my hands and stand on my toes and dance with me.
How I read her Winnie the Pooh each night at bedtime.
How we had to watch hours of Barney & Friends.
How I called her “My Angel” and bought her little angel figurines to set around her room.
How my heart grew ten sizes each time she smiled at me.
And how she died one afternoon as we drove home from school.
I never saw the other driver coming.
I saw lights.
I heard brakes.
I smelled smoke and felt the heat of a fire.
I heard my angel scream for her daddy.
Then darkness.
I woke up in the hospital eight days later with a broken body and a dead daughter.
“My life ended that day,” I said quietly, wiping the tears from my eyes. “I stopped caring about everyone and everything. Emily tried to be patient, but I started drinking and eventually drove her away, too.” I glanced into Audrey’s eyes. She was crying. She rested her head on my shoulder and put a hand over my heart.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered. “Kiley would not want you to punish yourself like this.”
I snorted at her. “How would you know what Kiley would want?” I asked, pulling away from her. “How could you possibly know what my little girl would want?”
Rather than run away, Audrey took a deep breath and looked me square in the eyes. “Because my dad died three years ago of liver disease,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He drank himself to death, just like you’re trying to do. And I can tell you with all my heart, the only thing I ever wanted was for him to be happy. Because when he was happy, he didn’t drink.”
Audrey got off the couch and knelt in front of me. She held out her hands. I rested my hands in hers and gazed into her eyes.
“Kiley wants you to be happy, Chase,” she said. “She wouldn’t want you to live like this. I think that’s why you and I have been brought together. Kiley told you to give me an F because she knew that I could help you get your life back. I couldn’t do it for my own father, but maybe I can do it for hers.”
I smiled at her. “Kiley told me to give you an F?”
“You never know,” she said, climbing onto my lap and wrapping her arms around my neck. “Angels work in mysterious ways.”
CHAPTER TWENTY: Chase
Nancy Dorfmann glanced at me from across her immaculate desk with a look of disgust on her face. She had a pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of her pudgy nose and was scanning a printout of the posts from FaceSpace, which the dean had ordered taken down, but not before Nancy could print them out.
“This is disgusting,” Nancy said, alternately reading a comment and then looking at me as if I had written it. “I can’t believe our students would post such filth.”
“I agree,” I said, frowning along with her and giving her a nod. “Most of these kids are shitheads, Nancy. But I’m not sure what that has to do with me. I didn’t post a comment to the thread.”
“Your actions prompted these shitheads to do this,” Nancy said, setting the pages aside and glaring at me over the top of the glasses. “You are becoming an embarrassment to this institution, Professor Hollander.”
“I know.”
“Neglecting to follow procedures, showing up to class inebriated, failing to administer the required tests, failing to submit status reports. And god only knows what other rules you’ve broken that we don’t know about.”
“I think you covered most of them,” I said.
She took off her glasses and shook them at me. “Do you find this funny?”
“Probably no funnier than you do,” I said with a shrug.
“I don’t find it funny at all.”
“Then neither do I.”
She glared at me for a moment. “I don’t understand you,” she said in her most disappointed tone. “You had such a bright career. For years you were the star of this department. Your students loved you. Your work was published in the top academic journals. The administrators and your peers respected you. And most importantly, you respected yourself. And now…”
“And now I don’t,” I said with a shrug.
The high I’d been on when I walked into Nancy’s office was gone. Now all I could think about was getting the fuck out of there and getting home so I could get shit-faced drunk.
Funny, the difference a few minutes can make. I’d spent the entire weekend with Audrey, and while my life outside of this office seemed to be looking up, I had pretty much fucked my career and left it to die on the side of the highway where I’d lost Kiley.
“The dean has asked for my recommendation regarding your future here at Trent State,” she said. “As you know, we can terminate your tenure with just cause.”
“I understand.”
“I think we have just cause.”
“I think you do,” I said, shrugging with my eyebrows.
I was a disappointing fuckup, tried and true, but I wasn’t going to give Nancy Dorfmann the pleasure of firing me.
Before she could say another word, I got out of the chair and left her office.
There was a fifth of whiskey in the glove box of my car that was calling my name.
It would be gone by the time I got home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Audrey
Rachel’s eyes were as big as saucers as she stared across the table at me. The Starbucks on campus was packed, so we were grabbing a cup of coffee at a little off-campus shop called Brewster’s. It was much quieter than Starbucks and the coffee didn’t taste like burnt shoe leather. Or Chase’s prehistoric K-cups.
“You and Professor Hollander spent the weekend together?” Rachel said, her mouth hanging open. “No fucking way.”
“Yes, fucking way,” I said, proudly flexing my eyebrows. “And yes, we fucked in every way you can imagine. We might have even done a few things that you’ve never done.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she said with a grin. She threw her hands in the air and looked at the ceiling. “Thank the lord this all worked out okay. I just knew you were never going to speak to me again after Duke posted that shit on FaceSpace.”
“Duke’s an asshole,” I said.
“I know,” Rachel said. “But he’s hung like a horse.”
“I know. That’s the important thing.”
“Speaking of hung, how was Professor Hollander in bed? Were you adequately satisfied?”
I grinned at her. “Yes, adequately satisfied in every way,” I said with a sigh.
“So, what now?” Rachel as
ked. “You want me to fix you up with one of Duke’s pals so you can work on perfecting your technique?”
I shook my head. “No, actually. Chase and I…”
“Oh shit,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth.
I blinked at her. “What is it?”
“You’re gonna see him again, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes. I was thinking…”
“Audrey, you can’t do that,” she said.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because the man is old enough to be your father for one,” she said, scolding me with her eyes.
“Seriously? You’re going to play the age card? You, the girl who fucked a sixty-year-old man just to see what it would be like?”
“I was doing Viagra research,” Rachel said with a smirk. “And that old man was not a professor.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Audrey, Chase Hollander is a professor. There are rules. He can’t get involved with you. They’ll fire his ass.”
I blinked at her. “They will?”
“Of course they will. There are strict rules about professors and students getting involved. Why do you think I haven’t fucked more professors?”
“I just assumed you preferred dumb jocks with big cocks,” I said, trying to laugh when I really wanted to cry. I hadn’t thought about what our relationship might do to Chase’s career. If we were discovered, he could be fired on the spot, tenured or not. And his career was really all he had left.
“Shit, Rach, what am I going to do?” I asked with tears welling in my eyes. “I mean, I think I really like him. I mean I really, really like him.”
“Well, if you like him you’ll leave him alone,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “You need to just thank him for popping your cherry and move along. You don’t want to be responsible for that man losing his job, especially is he’s as fucked up as you say he is.”
“I didn’t say he was fucked up,” I said defensively.
“He’s a forty-three-year-old man with a drinking problem and a death wish,” she said. “That’s fucked up. You do not need that shit in your life. The grades were fixed this morning. You got your B. Now let it go. Leave Chase Hollander alone and get on with your life.”