I wanted her. Badly. Like I'd never wanted a woman before in my life.
I groaned and started slamming my hand against my body, pumping my shaft again at double the rate of before, jerking my fist along all those solid tumescent inches of mine.
I pictured my tongue in her throat. My hands on her perfectly portioned breasts, squeezing them, pinching those dark, luscious nipples. I pictured her thighs, just the right amount of wide, and her tight, juicy ass, and imagined how wonderful it would feel, kneading those buttocks between my greedy fingertips.
I savored the imagined touch of her rich, ebony skin, and the contrasting cool and heat of her body, and how hot and how tight she would feel around me if only I could be inside her.
Finally, I pictured her down on her knees, and my cock in her throat and her tongue twisting around me, sucking me off with a kind of urgent desperation like I just couldn't cum for her soon enough.
I started roaring and pounding myself, and I felt the pressure building, at last, building toward its sweet, inevitable, perfect crescendo.
Then I let out a yell at the top of my lungs. Every muscle in my body seemed to spasm. Every part of me was seized by orgasm, gripped from head to toe, the bathroom seemed to spin around me, the steam making me lightheaded, and my heart thundering to escape from my chest.
My cock spilled over, pulsing, leaping, pumping its hot cum everywhere. It plunged across my shifting hand, and hit the wall of the shower, and poured along down the drain. And all the while, as I just kept cumming and cumming, the whole of my being on fire with pleasure, was how fucking amazing my cum would look all over Keisha's skin, and dripping from her mouth, and spilling down so slowly between her perfect breasts.
At long last, I felt the thrill of climax dissipating. I gasped, and shivered, and felt a devastating emptiness wash over me. All of the sudden, I was reminded of just how far I was from the girl I'd fantasized about. How ridiculous it was for me to imagine that kind of thing in the first place, knowing that a man like me could never settle down. Never have anything even remotely resembling what I craved to have with her.
Best just to put her out of my head, and be grateful for what she'd done to me.
Getting the toxins of murder out of my system, and allowing my heart to finally settle down to something even remotely resembling a normal rate of beating.
I gave my shaft a last few deep, slow pumps, then practically slid along the tiles of the shower to the floor, exhausted, in so many more ways than I could count.
“Fuck,” I gasped, tilting my head back, closing my eyes, and letting the steam from the water sweep me away.
I tried my best to ward off my looming depression. To tell myself that I was all okay. So, I couldn't have what I really wanted. I could never have it. But I was out of this life now. I'd made enough on that hit to be finished with it. Gone for good.
No looking back.
That, as far as I was concerned, should have been enough.
Jay
“Okay. It's over. Ray Philips is dead, along with his bodyguard. The job is finished, completed to your specifications. I am done. Completely. This is the end of the line for me, Marlon. I'm out.”
I stood in Marlon Hillary's office, tendering my resignation.
I knew he probably wouldn't be too thrilled about it. I was his best man in this department. I'd done things for him, taken out hits, that no other hitman would have even dared consider. High profile targets. Risky figures, from whom lesser men than myself might well have shied away. Not that I thought you could have too much of a lesser than myself these days, after everything I'd done, but that was another story.
Marlon leaned back in his chair, studying me. He'd aged so much in the past decade but believed himself invincible. With as much money as he had, perhaps he was.
He pressed the tips of his fingers together, tapping them gently like he was considering the matter intently. He gave a deep sigh, like he really had far more to consider in all of this than he actually did.
I waited patiently for whatever it was he thought he had he to say to me. As I stood there waiting, my eyes happened to rove across his desk to a photograph, featuring himself, and his wife, and Keisha.
I shifted uncomfortably on my feet, grateful that he couldn't see into my mind, and know what I'd been doing while thinking about her the previous night.
“I suppose I always knew this day would come,” he said, at last, leaning forward again toward his desk, crossing his arms over his surface.
I was starting to get more nervous than I cared to admit. I couldn't quite say why- it was just something about his body language.
“Yeah, well... Bird's got to leave the nest and all that. And my time has come. I've got places to go, and people to see, and it's time for me to leave this life behind me. So. If I could just have what you owe me for this last job, I'll be on my way. And the two of us can go on with our lives, and never see each other again.”
He was silent for a moment, and finally, let out another sigh. Then he shook his head.
“No, actually. No, I don't think that works for me.”
I stared at my employer, wide-eyed, not sure that I'd heard him correctly.
I blinked.
“Um... Excuse me?”
“I don't think I'm done with you yet,” said Marlon. “And if I'm not done with you, that means you aren't done with me. So no. You aren't going anywhere.”
What the fuck?
I tried to wrap my head around this.
“Look, Hillary. We've had a great run together. And you've been great to work for, as far as that goes. But I just can't take this anymore. This line of work. It isn't for me. And so I'm asking you. Give me the money you owe me. Let me be on my way. And you and I won't have any problems with each other.”
I'd meant for this to be brief. I didn't have time for Marlon's games...
“And I'm telling you,” said Marlon, as calm and as cool as a cucumber as he spoke, “No.”
“What the hell?” I demanded of him, my blood starting to boil.
“Do you know how many times I've put my ass on the line for you? How much I've risked just to get the job done, each and every time you've asked? I got shot, Marlon! Look!”
I pointed at my face, leaning into him, pointing to the wound across my cheek, where the bodyguard's bullet had grazed me.
“I got shot, and I killed two men, all so that you could add another zero behind a decimal point in your bank account! I've earned that money, fair and square!”
Marlon remained neutral, collected, almost indifferent.
“Your skills, your loyalty, and your ability to complete the job have never been in question,” he said, fixing me with his dark eyes. “That, in point of fact, is your problem. You have become, what you might call, a victim of your own success. You have performed valiantly for me, time and time again. You've done exactly what I asked you to do, exactly when I asked you to do it. And now that I've become accustomed to your services, I'm not sure that I can part with them quite so easily. To be quite frank with you, Sampson, your leaving simply doesn't work for me at this time.”
I gaped at him. Scarcely able to believe the words coming from his mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Marlon!” I spat, my brow furrowing, the nice guy act I'd been putting on for him quickly diminishing. “You have got to be shitting me right now!”
“I'm afraid not,” he said, with a shake of his head. “I still have a lot of work for you to do. Many targets that still need to be taken care of. And I'm depending on you to be the one who takes care of them for me. You've proven yourself with your winning record. You've earned my trust, far more effectively than most ever do. I am a very rich man, Sampson, but trust does not come cheap. And you and I stand to make an awful lot more money together.”
“So what? I'm supposed to keep killing people for you so you can just not pay me once the job is done?”
“You will receive payment, in time. But only after my list of targe
ts is completed. Only, Sampson, after I am properly finished with you, and no longer in need of your services...”
“Oh, come on! Fuck that, Marlon! I want out! Now! Not six months from now! Or a year! Or the day after tomorrow! Now!”
“And I told you,” said Marlon. “I'm not letting you out...” For the first time over the course of the conversation, his tone became genuinely menacing. My blood went colder than I wanted to admit, and in a state of panic, I reached for my gun.
I jerked the barrel up and pointed it at his forehead, narrowing my eyes to look as serious as possible.
“Give me my fucking money, Hillary!”
He glared at me, his eyes so cold that it turned the blood in my veins to ice. He wasn't afraid of me. He didn't even flinch. How could a man like that have a daughter as sweet as...
“Go ahead. Try it. You and I both know what will happen if you do. My men will be swarming this room like flies on a corpse. Your corpse, to be specific. I suggest that you strongly rethink your options at this moment, and try to decide on a wiser course of action.”
I clenched my teeth and started to shake. No target I'd ever had to do away with made me anywhere as nervous as Marlon was doing.
Frustrated, I finally jerked my gun away, and pressed a hand to my forehead, trying to wrap my head around all of this.
“Go home, Jay. Get some rest. Wait for my call. And if you ever point a fucking gun in my face like that again, I can assure you that it will be the very last thing that you ever do.”
As if to emphasize his point, the doors to Marlon's office swung open at that moment. Two bodyguards stepped into the room, his very own Tweedle-dee, and Tweedle-dum, and I knew that this conversation was over, regardless of whether or not I wanted it to be.
I tried to think. To conjure up something, anything I might say to come away from this conversation with the upper hand. Finally, though, I had no choice but to succumb to my defeat. I turned on my feet, and I trudged toward the door, my hands curled into fists.
“I want my fucking money, Marlon!” I reiterated as I made my way to the door, never having felt more powerless in all my life.
As I made my way to the elevator, I was already scheming.
Trying to figure out some way I could possibly get out of this. Some way I could get this son of a bitch off my back, and call it quits once and for all, the way I'd been planning to in the first place.
The doors to the elevator slid shut in front of me, and I was afforded a last, extended glance into Hillary's office as they closed. And all of the sudden, I thought I could glimpse a seedling of an idea for how I might get my money from Hillary after all. And it might just have been the dumbest idea I'd ever had before in my life...
Keisha
I sighed with hopelessness.
I looked at my watch for what seemed the hundredth time that evening. Then I looked at my phone.
It was official. He wasn't coming. I'd been stood up.
I think I knew this all the way back when it had only been five minutes past eight. Then ten minutes. Then fifteen.
I'd experienced this enough by now to know when there was no point in hoping. It didn't really stop me from getting all starry-eyed and optimistic, and inevitably being disappointed, but if I was really honest with myself, I could always, always recognize the signs.
I waited for another five minutes, sipping on my glass of wine. Then another ten minutes. And then, finally, I threw in the towel. Or the cloth napkin, to be more specific.
I stepped from the dim light of Dimitri's and into the brighter neon of the city, illuminated pink and blue and green against the hazy black-yellow of the night sky. It was unseasonably cool tonight on top of everything else, and my breath clouded out in front of me as I stood outside the entryway to the restaurant, trying to decide what I wanted to do.
I really didn't want to be done with this evening just yet. But as far as I could tell, this evening seemed to be done with me.
And so I just started walking. Walking, in the hope that my feet might prove to show better judgment than I did, and take me to somewhere I actually wanted to be.
I was feeling depressed. My life felt empty. Pointless. That was the fourth date I'd tried and failed to go on in the past two weeks. I mean, sure, I'd at least managed to get clear through the other ones. But by the time the night was over, the guys always had their hands all over me, trying to take things a hell of a lot faster than I wanted them to go.
It felt like every man I met was like that. Hasty. Immature.
Shallow, and even emptier than I felt.
Not just every man. Everybody. Period.
Maybe I just had a bad case of affluenza, I don't know. But I'd gotten so bored with life. So over the world, I saw around me. People seemed so unhappy all the time, and they seemed to look for the cure to their unhappiness in all the wrong places.
Hurting people seemed to be foremost among them, whether it was emotionally, or physically.
Honestly, I was afraid to date nowadays, because men always ended up breaking up with me in the end. Some other, prettier girl would turn their heads and they would end up cheating on me.
Or I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do, or else they would just get tired of me. And that would be the end of things.
It was like the same old story, over and over and over again.
But it was like I never got tired of reading it.
For the longest time, I fell into the trap of believing that there was something wrong with me. That there was a reason for this pattern, and it wasn't all just some coincidence.
But then I started rethinking things a little bit. It made me feel a hell of a lot better to think that it was the other way around. That the world was the one that had all of the problems, and not me.
And to be totally fair, the world was a pretty screwed up place. I could hardly be faulted for using its problems as a justification for my own failures in relationships, or my general aimlessness in life.
Seeing my reflection in the mirror across from my table frightened me. What would my college friends think of me if they'd ever known who I actually was?
Candice helped bring clean water to cities with lead pipes. Henrietta ran for mayor in that small Southern town where she lived. Even Bella was doing something meaningful with her life.
What the hell had I done lately to help make the world a better place?
At best, I was a neutral party to it. At worst, I was an accomplice to all of its evils- and this I suspected more and more, with each and every new passing day.
I mean, I was the daughter of Marlon Hillary, who just so happened to be about the most transparently evil corporate bigwig this side of the Prime Meridian. And sure, you can't choose who your parents are, or what your lot is in life. But I'd spent my whole childhood and adolescence turning a blind eye to my father's corruption, his evil deeds.
And now I was an adult, and I should have known better.
I really, really should have known better.
The older I got, the more and more I saw of what I'd tried so hard, for so long, not to see.
Growing up, I'd always thought Daddy was just a run of the mill businessman. Like the kind you see on TV, wearing a suit and tie, smiling, shaking hands with other well-pressed, nice, clean businessman. I was proud of him. He'd made it big and he'd won every award you could imagine, not just as a businessman but an African American businessman.
Mr. Too Big: BWWM Hitman Romance Novella Page 3
