After Hours: (InterMix)

by Cara McKenna

  I shot him a glare, not so easily tricked.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’m not tossing out any balls for you to chase, Kelly. Suppress your inner pit bull.”

  “Tell me who he is, and I promise he won’t be bothering your sister anytime soon.”

  I sighed. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It is simple.”

  “This is my nephew’s dad. He’s probably going to stay in my sister’s life, whether I like it or not. And I don’t need him taking out his bruised ego on her, after your threats or beatings or whatever wear off.”

  “Toddlers’ll keep throwing tantrums until somebody shows them they don’t always get their way.”

  I stared out over the lawn, not really feeling like talking about Amber and Marco anymore. “That’s funny.” I shot Kelly a little smile, ready for the flirtation to begin, and for him to do what he promised—take me out of my head for a couple days. “I thought you were all in favor of a guy getting his way.”

  “I’m in favor of me getting my way. There’s a major difference.”

  I shifted my chair to face Kelly more directly, pushing off my shoes so I could rest my bare feet on his knee. He set down his beer and fiddled with my toes with his damp, cold fingers. Better those than the dog-spitty ones. We stared at each other for a long moment, the exchange as loaded as it was companionable and easy.

  “Am I making you dinner?” I asked, curious about exactly how all-encompassing my role as his servant might be.

  He shook his head. “I’ll grill. You can make the salad, if you want. But what I’ve got in mind for you . . . Don’t picture dusting or dishes.”

  “No scrubbing your floors wearing a kerchief, then?”

  “Nah. Though you’ll probably spend some time on your knees.” He smirked and took a deep pull of his beer.

  “Charming.”

  He set the bottle down and handed me the mangy ball that Sadie had deposited at his feet. I accepted it with a grossed-out face, but chucked it all the same. She shot across the grass, and brought it back to me. I tossed it again, thinking that despite my being the obedient one for the next couple days, Kelly was my pit bull, poised to protect and attack, at my command. One word from me, and Marco might wake up in the hospital with far worse than a bitten tongue.

  One word from me, and Kelly would be officially in charge.

  Was the promise of wild, animalistic mating keeping him docile, or riling him up? I guessed I’d find out, whenever I found the sac to cut his tether and sic him snarling on my body. Then those few minutes in my bed flashed across my mind, and I could just about hear his panting in my ear, hot and hungry. Not snarling. Moaning. And not attacking—consuming.

  “You eat lunch?” he asked, cold eyes on the sky.

  “Yup.”

  He met my gaze. “Let’s go inside, then. See if I can’t meet some of your other basic human needs.”

  I mustered a skeptical expression to cover up my real reaction—a rush of excitement and nerves like you feel with each ratcheting ka-chunk, ka-chunk up the roller coaster’s highest ramp. I drained my bottle.

  “Whatever you say.”

  Chapter Eight

  Kelly deposited Sadie back on his neighbor’s side of the fence, and tossed our empties in a recycling bin next to the house. “So. How you feeling?”

  I turned the question over in my head, waiting until we were inside to reply. “Pretty relaxed.”

  “Good.” He slid the door closed. “I got you something.”

  I watched him stroll to the fridge then set a bottle of champagne on the breakfast bar.

  “Oh, fancy.”

  “Seemed like an auspicious occasion.”

  “What? My finally giving in?”

  He answered with an affirmative smirk, then ripped away the foil and twisted the wire guard loose. From a cupboard he procured a pair of wine glasses, and eased the cork free with a pop. Bubbles surged and dissolved as he poured, and we clinked glasses.

  “To what?” I asked.

  “To us, fucking all weekend.”

  “Okay.”

  We sipped, and since I knew nothing about champagne, I was free to tell myself that this was good stuff. Kelly put the bottle in a big mixing bowl and cracked two ice trays’ contents around it. He held out his hand to usher me toward the lounging area.

  “Feel like a movie?” he asked.

  “Like a porn movie?”

  A fresh smirk. “Like a movie. Whatever kind you want. Just something to watch while we mess around.”

  “How very high school,” I teased, but in truth the idea excited me. I’d come here expecting some crazy role-playing weekend, and I’d been horny enough to be down for that. But I liked this more. It’d make the transition to the harsher stuff easier, surely.

  “What are my choices?” While I still get any.

  A nice TV was mounted above the fireplace, across from the couch, and Kelly pointed to the DVDs that lined the mantel.

  I set my glass on the coffee table and went to inspect the spines. He must have bought most of them in a video store closeout, judging from the rental stickers and price tags slapped all over their scraped-up cases.

  “You don’t want to choose?” I asked him, still perusing. “Thought it was all about your way, this visit.”

  “It will be. When you give me the word you’re ready.”

  “Fine, then.” For no reason whatsoever aside from wanting to be decisive, I picked The Rock, featuring Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage running around Alcatraz; an action flick I could vaguely remember seeing in the dollar theater, ages ago. I handed it to Kelly and he cued it up while I made a pit stop.

  By the time I got back, he’d shut the front door and the blinds, and drawn a curtain across the patio doors, closing us in a facsimile of a Saturday night, despite it being three thirty on a Thursday afternoon.

  We sat close on the couch, Kelly lounging at an angle at one end, half facing me with his arm draped along the back. I was suddenly sixteen, in the den with my first boyfriend, scared and hopeful that second base might be reached before the credits rolled.

  This was Kelly Robak, though. A mere look from him felt more obscene than second. What exactly does sixth base involve? I wondered. How sore would I be after all the extra innings he surely had planned?

  I felt high, just sitting near him. I scooted a little closer so our thighs touched, his huge and warm and hard against my slender one. He adjusted, too, edging nearer so his arm was resting just behind my shoulders, my body pleasantly cocooned against his side. He’d intimidated me so much that first week. The memory had become theoretical, he felt so reassuring now. I’d found his body ridiculous before, but goddamn, it was wonderful when it was on your side. Thick arm, broad chest, strong thigh, all mine until Saturday dawned.

  The champagne was making me eager. I finished my glass long before Kelly did his, and he poured me a second. I set it on the table after a sip, and as I settled back against his side, my hands got ideas. Gaze on the screen—where I had absolutely no clue what was going on in the movie—I turned and rubbed Kelly’s chest. Just to feel how hard it was. He kneaded my shoulder in reply, shifted his legs.

  After a minute’s idle caressing, I looked up at him, fingers dawdling along his tee shirt collar. For a long moment he just stared back, then very slowly, he leaned in and kissed me.

  He kept his mouth closed, and we didn’t dissolve into a melee of groping as I’d expected. Not for a lack of chemistry, either. His advances were measured. A gentle tangling of his fingers in my hair, a steady deepening of the kiss. His tongue brushed mine, drawing blood to heat my cheeks and tingle between my thighs, and I heard something explode on-screen.

  I felt delicate far too often lately, and the way Kelly treated me
, all gruff and pushy, made me feel like he thought I could take it. Like I was unbreakable, even if I didn’t feel that way all the time.

  This man on the couch, kissing me, was warm and sensual, and nearly tender.

  But he wasn’t the man I’d come here to fuck.

  I broke our mouths apart. “I think I’m ready. For you to take over, I mean.”

  “Gimme a safe word, just in case.”

  I stared blankly in the direction of the kitchen. “Spatula?”

  “That’ll work. And if for some reason you can’t talk—”

  I imagined my mouth too stuffed full of Kelly’s cock to articulate my needs.

  “—just do something three times. Poke me or snap your fingers, or knock on something, or use your teeth, whatever. Three times. Real clear.”

  “Sure.”

  “You got any triggers I should know about? Any fears?” he asked.

  “Centipedes.”

  “I don’t think that’ll come up.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Finish your champagne.”

  Just the way he said it, I knew it was game on.

  Behind narrowed lids his eyes were ice, and they followed my every motion as I leaned forward for my glass, and emptied it in two swallows. He took it from my hand and set it roughly on the table. When his fingers returned to my hair, they clutched tighter, and his lips didn’t kiss—they claimed. He angled his face and consumed me, my pleasure spiking alongside a taste of fear.

  This was the man who’d half forced his way into my bed, who’d half dictated and half intuited my boundaries, and half ignored them once they were established. As we kissed his hands cradled my jaw, stroked my neck and shoulder. I could feel him examining me, like some new purchase he was admiring, some shiny new toy. We pulled away after a few minutes, my lips already tender.

  “C’mere,” Kelly muttered, and leaned back into the cushions, patting his thighs to say I should sit on his lap.

  I felt heavy and clumsy as I took the order, worried my hair was in his face, that he wasn’t comfortable. Then he jerked my legs wider so my calves dangled beside his, tugged me closer by the waist until I felt his belt buckle, a hard bite against my spine. Cool air kissed my inner thighs, my skirt creeping up toward my hips. I swallowed, woozy, self-consciousness lost in a cloud of lust.

  Beneath me he shifted, erection insistent at my butt. “Feel that?”

  I managed to murmur a shallow, “Yeah.”

  His palms slid to my breasts, cupping gruffly. My civilized host was gone, the change so stark I imagined a bunch of sheep’s clothing must be lying in a heap beside the couch. Every iteration of Kelly was gone, save for the one who’d forced my orgasms that night in my bed. The scary one. The one whose crass promises had kept me up nights and lured me here.

  Low, dark words warmed my cheek. “You been making me suffer for a while now.”

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  His mouth went to my ear, so close I felt his lips move as he whispered, “Hush. You only speak when I ask you a question.”

  The statement dunked me in ice water then encased me in steam—sensory whiplash. I couldn’t draw a real breath, couldn’t clear my head. His thumbs brushed the sides of my breasts, palms cupping more roughly. I felt spread open and helpless, pressed to his strong, ready body but unable to see him.

  “Watch the movie,” Kelly ordered.

  Yes. Right. The movie.

  I stared at the screen, taking nothing in aside from the abstract strobing of colors, the sounds of words I couldn’t make sense of. A few layers of fabric and a belt separated me from Kelly’s cock. My sex contracted at the thought, a greedy fist begging to clasp him. I’d never wanted a man this way before. So explicitly. So viscerally. If my usual fantasies were fully scripted romantic dramas, what I wanted from Kelly was base and pornographic, the clapping of flesh against flesh; ugly, thrilling moans and grunts; cuss words. Spit and sweat and scraping nails. I wanted his hands on my hips, fingers digging too hard into my skin.

  Kelly’s attention left my breasts, wandering down my belly, palms gliding up my arms and leaving my skin tight with goose bumps.

  “Gimme my glass.”

  I leaned forward to grab it from the coffee table and he took it, handing it back after a pause, a bit emptier. I replaced it and Kelly settled me against him, his touch feeling lazier than before. He rested his cheek against mine, as though we really were still watching the movie. As if this were some typical date, except he just happened to be molesting me and I wasn’t allowed to speak.

  He slid his hands down my thighs, chest flexing against my back, and when he drew them up, my skirt rose, dragged to my hips. The pads of his fingers were dry and warm, hard with calluses but not rough. They traced the lightest circles over the softest skin I possessed, faint lines blazing with sensation up and down my innermost thighs.

  Do this forever, I wanted to beg.

  I shut my eyes, hypnotized by his fascinating caresses between my legs, the hardness of his cock and buckle at my lower back. Hypnotized by the way he threatened to use me, even as he spoiled me. Ugly scars, pretty eyes; the calm breakwater forcing order on the ward’s chaos. The contradiction that was Kelly.

  “Eyes open.”

  Obediently, I pretended to watch the movie, focused on nothing but the tingling touch of his fingers; the heat of his deep, rhythmic breaths; the rise and fall of his chest against my back. He drew his lips along my jugular, moaned just below my ear. I held my breath. I felt the scrape of his teeth, the slick, firm drag of his tongue along my throat, just as the teasing of his fingers turned gruff, a whisper deepening to a growl.

  “I’m gonna make you so wet.”

  The words alone were realizing his promise.

  He fanned his fingers, thumbs tracing the uppermost creases of my thighs and the hems of my panties.

  “I’m gonna make you want me so bad it’ll hurt,” Kelly whispered. “Make you want me so much, you’ll come the second my cock sinks inside you.”

  I gulped a breath, head hazy, body tight and aching. He hadn’t even glanced my clit yet and I was closing in. A hot and restless desire, an angry, neglected presence that demanded attention. I needed to fidget, but surely he’d only tell me to be still. Touch me, I wanted to say. But it’d only earn me another shushing and a longer wait.

  “You want me already. Don’t you?” His thumbs stroked the outer edges of my lips through my underwear, lighting up nerves I hadn’t known I had, striking me mute.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, the sound a thick, physical thing, lodged in my throat.

  “I know you do. But you have to be patient.”

  One hand snaked up my body to cup my breast, and the other spread across my mound, warming my skin and taunting my clit with its proximity. But no contact.

  “You’ll get my cock when I’m good and ready. And I can wait all afternoon.” Kelly half chuckled, half sighed, a distinctly sinister noise, then amended, “I can wait all weekend. And so can you, since you don’t get a say.”

  With that, he took his hand from my mons and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his cheek against mine. If not for the palm cupping my breast and the hard cock at my back, it would have been quite the sweet little scene.

  I stared at the TV, trying to make sense of the movie, of eerie green spheres and Sean Connery’s eyebrows. What weird fetishes was I burning onto the sex processor of my brain? Would I be haunted by the sensation of a phantom hard-on pressed along my tailbone every time I caught a glimpse of Nicholas Cage from now on?

  His palm moved across my breast, a slow caress that parted my lips and shut my eyes. The touch was echoed on the other side, back and forth until my nipples
were stiff and aching. He teased them with both hands, plucking, then gentle pinching between his thumbs and forefingers. With a heavy breath he lowered his mouth to my ear, not speaking, not kissing, just letting his lower lip draw a faint line from my lobe and up along the curve then back again.

  Bite me, I thought. Say something filthy. Threaten me. Touch my fucking clit, for the love of God. But he just kept taunting, speaking in nothing more than warm, steady exhalations.

  I never would have expected him to be this way. So soft, and subtle. Sensual. Words that didn’t describe any of his earlier advances.

  Who are you?

  Why lead me here, with gruff Kelly’s crass invitations? Why not let gentle Kelly seduce me first, follow the usual order of things?

  So I’d know what I was signing up for, perhaps, when rough Kelly returned. Or maybe this was how a mouse felt—brought down by force, then toyed with until the time came for feasting.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

  I swallowed. “About what’ll happen. How it’ll be.”

  “How do you think it’ll be?”

  “Rough.”

  A smug sound hummed in my ear, not quite a laugh. “You wet for me yet?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me.”

  “Yes. I am.” I sounded terrified, my breathing shallow.

  “You don’t sound too sure. Maybe I better find out for myself.”

  His hands slipped down my belly and over my hips, kneading my thighs. It made his chest clench—hard muscles pushing into my back every time his palms stroked my knees. Oh, the fucking rhythm of it. The harsh sound of his breath punctuated each motion and all I could think about was sex. About watching Kelly’s body above mine. Flexing chest and arms and hips, the flash of his driving cock, and those cruel, unreadable eyes.

  My hands twitched, dying for something to do. Some part of Kelly to touch. Knowing I might get corrected, I angled my arm to cup the back of his head. That soft hair brushed my palm, not matching any other hard part of him.

  “I know what you want,” he said.

  The next time his hands stroked up my thighs, they stayed there. His thumbs traced the inside borders of my panties, sparking bright and hot as matches. He took my ear lobe between his lips, the gesture so unexpectedly erotic, I gasped. No time to recover, he slid one big, intrusive hand down the front of my underwear.