by Loki Renard
“Are we going to do it now?” Her question was a gasp of anticipation. Sucking him to climax had only served to arouse her all the more. She could barely stand the heat in her pussy, the wetness that was making her thighs slick as she gyrated beneath him.
“Not tonight, sweetheart,” Miles said. “I want…”
“…it to be special, I know,” Cash rolled her eyes, earning herself a tap of censure that came not across her bottom, but between her legs. It caught her low across her panty-clad pussy, a strong, firm touch that was not entirely unpleasant.
He saw her reaction and smiled, trailing his hands down the sides of her body as he captured the waistband of her panties and drew them down, leaving her almost entirely naked before him. The golden down of her pussy was slick with arousal, and when he moved his talented fingers back to tease across her lips she moaned with desire and frustration.
“Please,” she gasped, working her hips back against him. “Just fuck me.”
“Uh uh, little Goldilocks,” he said, shaking his head down at her. He was so calm, so masterful, even when she was literally writhing with need beneath him. His self-control made her feel all the more vulnerable, as if he could do anything at all to her and she would let him, just for the pleasure of his touch.
He spread her thighs and began to slap the lower part of her pussy with light, stinging taps. There was no pain, but there was plenty of sensation where her already swollen flesh received correction from his hand.
“You’re impatient,” he chastised her. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she moaned, arching her hips up as he spanked her wetness.
“Impatient young ladies have their pussies spanked,” he informed her, leaning down to capture her mouth in another deep, passionate kiss.
She was helpless against him as he alternately spanked and caressed her pussy, his fingers mastering the engorged folds of her sex even as his tongue lashed hers into submission. Her arousal reached new peaks; peaks she hadn’t even known were a possibility until she gave herself over to him. Somehow he knew precisely how to touch her in a way that made the sensation soar, and yet did not let her climax. She was writhing, panting, moaning in a pool of her own desire and he was holding her at a point so close to orgasm that she could almost taste it. But he would not let her cross that threshold; he would not let her hit that peak, not until she submitted to him entirely.
He said none of it, but she felt it in his touch, and she saw it in his eyes. He wanted her to give herself entirely, and she did. She gave up all pretense of control and allowed him to steer her onwards and upwards into even higher realms of pleasure where her clitoris seemed to sing.
“Cum for me, Cash,” he murmured against her ear, finally giving her permission to release all the tension pent up in her frame. He triggered her orgasm with a sharp slap over her clit, a blow that avoided the bud directly but sent the area around it into overdrive. Then, just as she cried out with pleasure pain, he sank three thick fingers inside her pussy, filling her quickly and roughly.
She came stretched around him, her cries completely uninhibited as she reached out and clung to him, her hips and belly trembling as her orgasm lashed through her, taking every little bit of energy she had. All thought ceased and she could no longer tell where she was or who she was or if she existed at all. Her entire being was consumed by his love, she had dissolved into it, been absorbed by it. She could have floated forever in that space outside of existence, but as the pleasure faded she began to feel her body again. Then there was his body and she was pressed against it, tears of release streaming down her face. He hadn’t just given her an orgasm, he had given her absolution.
Chapter Thirteen
Mattie was coughing. And hoarse. And croaky. And grumpy. It was all down to the fact that she’d recently been carted off to a doctor who diagnosed her with damage to her vocal cords. He said it was from too much smoking and too much screaming. As a result she’d been quickly shifted onto nicotine patches by Kevin, who was taking no half-measures when it came to her health.
She stalked up and down the tour bus as they drove through Belgium toward Antwerp, a stick of hard candy clenched between her teeth.
“This is fucking bullshit,” she swore. “What about an e-cigarette?”
“That’s just another way to ingest poison,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “You’re quitting smoking, Mattie. Get used to the idea.”
Unlike his client, Kevin was quite relaxed. He was sitting on one of the very comfortable armchairs, his long designer jean clad legs stretched out in front of him as he worked on his laptop. He’d gone into what Miles was calling ‘hippy mode’, growing out his beard into a sleek dark pelt that shaped his face into masculine perfection. His hair was also longer, so much so that Cash had on occasion offered to lend him some of her accessories to keep it out of his face.
“You can’t make someone quit smoking,” Mattie snapped, gnashing at the sugary stick. “Change has to come from within, haven’t you ever heard that?”
“And when it doesn’t sometimes you need external liberators,” Kevin replied, still looking at his laptop. “Like my hand across your ass if I find you smoking again.”
“Then I’ll make sure you don’t find me,” Mattie smirked.
Kevin lifted his head, shook the long hair out of his eyes and shot her a dark look. “I suggest you run along, little Longstockings,” he said grimly. “Before I remind you why mouthing off to me isn’t a good idea.”
Flipping him off, Mattie stomped back towards the back of the bus, where Cash was catching up on some much needed sleep.
A thick brow creased with annoyance as Mattie’s heavy boots made more noise than a herd of elephants. Miles waved at her to keep it down. He was trying to take a call with fairly terrible reception, owing to the fact that it was originating back in Los Angeles.
“We have the guy,” a LAPD detective was saying. “He posted pictures of Cash’s suite online after the attack. He’s a fringe animal rights activist, too hardcore even for PETA.”
“That explains the animal blood,” Miles mused. “Thank you, detective. We appreciate the information.”
The detective finished giving Miles the suspected intruder’s court dates, wished him a good day and rang off, leaving Miles in a good, but quizzical mood.
“That’s strange,” he said, sitting next to Kevin.
“Tell me about it,” Kevin agreed, distracted by his email. “I have a message here from the London police. Seems like whoever clocked me in the hotel wasn’t after me at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“There have been several break ins at high end hotels in London. Looks like a ring of jewel thieves. They take jobs at hotels as porters or room service or whatever, then break into the empty rooms and steal. One of them was caught tying up a duke. Confessed the whole thing.”
“Really.” Miles frowned. “If the person who broke into Cash’s suite and the person who attacked you aren’t related, then that means…”
“That there’s no stalker.” Kevin shrugged. “We’re just paranoid.”
“But Mattie… she was attacked too.”
“There’s never actually been any evidence linking all these things,” Kevin said reasonably. “We just assumed there was.”
“No stalker. No traitor. Just a series of unfortunate events,” Miles mused. “Is that really possible?”
“Is it possible things could be going sort of right for us for once? Maybe,” Kevin suggested. “I mean, this is what normal life is like, isn’t it? No traitors, no stalkers, just the same random chance of misfortune as everybody else.”
Miles and Kevin looked at one another. They should have been leaping for joy, but neither one of them was much comforted by the news.
“It’s easier when you have a specific enemy,” Miles mused.
“I know, right?” Kevin was quick to agree.
They sat and stared at the passing scenery, both feeling slightly bereft at the loss
of the shadowy villain.
“Are we broken?” Kevin asked the question.
“Maybe a little,” Miles replied. “But I think everybody is. It’s pretty hard to get through life without a few scars.”
“It’s hard to get through life without a fucking cigarette,” Mattie snarled, stomping back up the bus.
“Mattie!” Kevin snapped. “Cut it out. Now. There’s no need to take your frustration out on everyone else.”
Narrowing her pretty dark-lashed eyes, Mattie plucked the candy from her lips and threw it at Kevin. It was a good shot that would have caught him dead on the nose had his reflexes not been so sharp. He snatched the candy out of the air and placed it down on the side table, his expression becoming hard as he glowered at the young woman.
“I guess you’re going to get that spanking after all,” he said, beckoning to her. “Come over here and take your punishment.”
“You come over here and take yours,” Mattie snapped. Her words were full of rebellion, but the expression in her eyes had become uncertain. She’d gone too far and she knew it.
Kevin did not reply, he simply crooked his finger. Although reluctant, Mattie’s feet began to move. When she was close enough, he reached out, wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in. He was sitting and she was standing, so she had a little bit of a height advantage. It didn’t matter one whit when Kevin began to lecture her.
“Now you know this is for your own good, don’t you? For the good of your health and your career, might I add.”
“It’s hard,” Mattie whined. “I want a cigarette more than I want anything else in the world. If you told me I could have one if I jumped out of this moving bus, I’d do it.”
“Well that’s silly, isn’t it?” Kevin said. “Don’t get me wrong, Mattie, I know what it’s like to quit, but you have to stay strong. Now come here.”
The ‘come here’ part was entirely redundant, for she was already there and in fact was already being pulled forward over his lap. By the time he finished asking her to ‘come here’ her bottom was the most visible part of her body, her head being somewhere near the floor.
Kevin gave her a lazy swat against the most padded part of her anatomy and looked down at her. “You do understand, don’t you, Mattie? I’m not going to let you get away with temper tantrums or smoking.”
“This was not in the management contract,” Mattie argued.
She was rewarded with another slap, this one a very firm one to the seat of her pants. “I am altering the contract,” Kevin drawled in his best Darth Vader impression. “Pray I do not alter it any further.”
Mattie snorted. “You’re such a geek.. OW!”
His hand landed again, this time square across her sit spot. “There’s no way this hurts, Mattie,” Kevin said. “Settle down, unless you want it to.”
“That’s mean,” Mattie protested.
“Hardly.” Kevin slapped her backside again. “This is a distraction. Are you thinking about smoking now?”
“I guess not.”
“Good.” Kevin slapped her bottom, catching the curve of her cheeks with a swift upstroke.
“Then every time you feel that craving coming on, and you think you can’t control it, you know where you’ll end up – don’t you?”
Mattie wriggled as he peppered her behind with more swats, the kind that were easily absorbed by her jeans. The point of the spanking clearly wasn’t to punish, but to remind Mattie of the fact that there were limits and there was someone to enforce them. When Kevin let her up, she was quite flustered and pink cheeked. He pulled her onto his lap, kissed her forehead and held her loosely.
“Do we have an understanding?”
Mattie was blushing quite profusely, glancing over at Miles who seemed indifferent to the entire affair. “I guess,” she muttered under her breath. “I don’t like it.”
“Well its better than the alternative, isn’t it?” Kevin eased her back onto her feet. “You should go get some rest with Cash. I hope you didn’t wake her.”
“Nothing would wake her,” Mattie said. “She’s dead to the world. It’s like something or someone has been keeping her up all night.” She glanced over at Miles with a little smirk.
“You worry about yourself, tattle-tail,” Kevin said, waving her off. “Go get some rest. It’s a big concert tonight.”
“The last concert,” Mattie crowed. “I can’t believe we made it through all of them in one piece.”
“Quit stalling and go to bed, Mattie, or I’ll tan your hide properly.”
“Okay, okay, keep your hair on!”
Mattie retreated, satisfied at having dumped Miles in it. When she was gone, Kevin turned to Miles.
“So you and Cash have been canoodling.”
“There has been no canoodling, as it happens,” Miles replied. “You know Cash, she works herself to the point of exhaustion.”
“I do know,” Kevin said. “I’ll be glad when this concert is over, she needs a good long rest. She’s starting to look a little frayed around the edges.”
At that moment, Cash appeared, proving Kevin’s point. Her usual charismatic presence had faded. She looked pale and wan. The only color on her face was the dark circles under her eyes. Mattie followed quickly after her.
“I promise I didn’t wake her up,” Mattie said, covering her ass both literally and metaphorically.
“I’m tired,” Cash said, scuffing to the nearest seat. She looked godawful, so much so that Miles immediately went to sit next to her and took her pulse. After a minute he laid her wrist down, frowning.
“I don’t think you should go on tonight, Cash,” he said. “You’re on the verge of a total breakdown. You’re still not eating properly and you’re still not sleeping properly. You’ve made yourself sick.”
“It’s just one night,” Kevin argued immediately. “The last night. Power on through it.”
“I will,” Cash said, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“We have some good news for you both,” Kevin said, changing the subject quickly. “The security issues have been resolved. There’s been an arrest for the incident in Los Angeles and there’s an investigation pending on the one in London. Neither one of them are related to you, Cash.”
“Oh,” Cash said, hardly able to muster the energy to be happy. “That’s good news.”
“What about the guy who jumped me,” Mattie broken in.
“That I haven’t heard anything about,” Kevin said. “Sorry, Mattie.”
“Oh well, just as long as you and Cash are sorted,” Mattie replied. “Who gives a fuck about me, right?”
“It’s not like that,” Kevin explained patiently. “It’s that we were concerned that all those incidents could be related. It turns out that they aren’t, which means we’re safe. As safe as anyone ever is anyway.”
“Which in my case, is not at all,” Mattie pointed out.
“Don’t you worry, my girl,” Kevin said. “It will be easy to keep you safe enough with a curfew.”
There was a short period of silence in which Mattie bit her lip. “This tour is over in, like, a day,” she pointed out. “And then what? Then I just go back to getting beat up by random people on the street?”
“I’ll still be your manager when this tour is over,” Kevin reminded her.
“But we won’t be living all together like this,” Mattie pointed out. “We’ll all go back to our lives, all separate. We probably won’t see each other at all except for business meetings. And it won’t be the same, so let’s not pretend it will be.”
She spoke to a shared concern. Each of them had come to the tour in some state of solitude. Cash had been locked away in her little world of celebrity where nobody got close enough to really know her, Kevin had privately struggled with his demons, Mattie had been a dark waif frequenting even darker spots and even Miles, who always seemed to be in control, had been adrift in the aftermath of an illustrious career. They were all
very different people but they shared a knowledge of what it was to be alone in the world. The tour had brought struggles, but it had also bonded them like family. Now they were on the verge of breaking those bonds. Each of them was concerned about it, no one more so than Cash.
Cash was tired. She was homesick for a home she didn’t have. Although she and Miles were growing steadily closer, she was afraid that after the tour was over he might just fade back into being someone she had once known. They hadn’t even slept together yet and a little part of her was afraid that they were just being sucked into a road-mance, a fling that would last no longer than the time it took them to disembark on US soil.
As they drew into Antwerp, Cash became even more pensive. She should have been thoroughly excited, but she just wasn’t. She felt flat, and slightly ill. She kept those feelings to herself though and was soon swept up in the familiar routine of make up and wardrobe. She sat through it all, feeling oddly disconnected from the process. The feeling of tiredness had yet to dissipate, though she had done her best to chase it away with a half dozen cans of high caffeine beverages.
When she was declared ready to go on, she went automatically, moving like a woman in a daze.
Miles must have sensed there was something wrong. Just before she went on stage, he pulled her aside. “You don’t have to do this, Cash. We can call it. Even now.”
The fans were screaming. She could hear them, their voices lifted in a cacophony of anticipation. She couldn’t disappoint them. Mustering a smile, she squeezed his hand.
“I am okay,” she lied.
She was not okay. Her head was ringing and her throat felt dry and she wasn’t sure how she was going to make it through one song, let alone an entire lineup. But she had to. This was her calling and there were people already shrieking their lungs out for her, people who had paid money and waited in line and willingly packed into a stadium just to see her. She couldn’t disappoint them. She wouldn’t.
When the bass line for Rodeo Stick came thundering through the speakers she shut her eyes tightly and tried to force herself into the present moment as she took her place and waited for the show to begin.
