by Bec Linder
But she had asked, albeit not in so many words, and I wouldn’t deny her what she wanted. I moved one of my hands from her hips and slid it between our bodies, between her thighs, down to where we were joined together.
She let out a long, contented groan and leaned backward slightly to give me better access, bracing herself with her palms on my legs, just above my knees. I took full advantage of the new position, moving my thumb in slow circles against her clit, and then faster, as she pressed her hips into my touch, hungry for it.
“You’re ready to come for me now,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
She shook her head, but her body told me the truth. Her hips moved in a frantic rhythm, and she was squeezing around me so hard that I knew she was close. I ground my thumb against her, giving her plenty of friction and pressure, stroking her as quickly as I could. Her thighs quivered. She bit her lower lip, her eyebrows drawing down into a look of intense concentration. Almost—
And then she was there, shaking on top of me, frozen in place as she came. The tremors running through her body fluttered almost painfully around my cock, ecstatic torture, and I fought to hold back my own orgasm.
I slid my hands up her back, soothing her, easing her back to earth.
She opened her eyes again, after a few moments, and gave me a wicked smile.
Then she started moving again.
This time I had no reason to hold off, and couldn’t have even if I tried. My fingers dug into her hips as I slammed against her with every thrust. She was soft, wet, and melting around me, and even with the condom it was the best sex of my life.
Each time I was with her was better than the last. Eventually it would probably kill me.
With a groan, I let go.
Afterward, when we had both cleaned up and climbed back into bed, with her head pillowed on my chest and my arm around her shoulders, she said, “That was really nice.”
“Oh?” I asked, feeling pleased with myself. Nice was good. Mind-blowing would be have been better, and holy shit I thought I saw God would have been the best of all, but I would settle for what I could get.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I like the kinky stuff, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes it’s nice to just, you know. Have sex.”
“Sweetheart, billionaires don’t have sex,” I said. “We make love.”
She laughed and slapped me lightly on the stomach, and then walked her fingers down to toy with the thatch of hair below my navel. “You’re funny,” she said. “And you’re a lot nicer than I thought you were.”
“I’m not nice,” I said. “Where did you get that idea?”
“Yeah, I know. You’re really tough. You’re all man. You make your underlings cry.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, gazing down at me. “I liked the roses.” She bent to kiss me. “And the peonies.” Another kiss. “And the tulips.”
“I’ll buy you all the flowers you want,” I said, feeling drunk on her presence. “Gladioli. Lilacs. Poppies.”
“How about you just take me to a movie?” she asked.
I raised my eyebrows. “You want to go to the movies.”
She nodded.
“Right now?”
She nodded again.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure. Why the hell not?”
* * *
In the sober light of Monday morning, I started having second thoughts.
I went to work as usual, and even got a decent start on reviewing the latest quarterly earnings projections, but by mid-morning I found myself searching online for the perfect flowers to send to Sasha: elegant yet understated, unusual without being ostentatious. I finally settled on hydrangeas, and arranged to have them delivered to her apartment that afternoon.
I got off the phone with the florist, feeling pleased with myself, and it struck me, then, like a bolt from the blue. I had known this girl for all of two weeks—two weeks and a few days—and there I was, mooning over her like a lovesick adolescent, sending her flowers from work, and thinking about when I would get to see her next.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I didn’t moon. I didn’t waste time trying to get women to like me. They liked me or they didn’t, and most of them were savvy enough to like me; but either way, I never devoted any attention to it.
Something about Sasha had made me lose my goddamn mind.
I thought about calling the florist to cancel my order, but that would have been truly pathetic. Better to just let this be the last delivery. I had apologized. I had groveled enough. I shouldn’t have cared if she forgave me. If she thought I was an asshole—well, so fucking what? I didn’t need to impress her. I didn’t owe her anything. I hadn’t made her any promises.
I was thick in the midst of those dark thoughts when my phone buzzed with a text message from one of my business school “buddies,” Trevor. He was a world-class cretin: a womanizer, probably racist, and not particularly bright—but he certainly knew how to party. I still saw him and the rest of the Columbia crew every few weeks, and it was always a good time, although I could have done without the resultant hangovers.
Trevor wanted to go out that night: drinks at some new hotspot downtown. Sure. Why the hell not. I replied, What time?
In the end, I got caught up at work and arrived half an hour late. By that time, Trevor and the rest of them were three drinks in, already a little rowdy. “Alexander!” one of them bellowed as I walked toward their table in the back of the bar. In the dim lighting, I wasn’t entirely sure who it was, but it didn’t entirely matter. Men drinking, I had found, usually became an indistinguishable mass, full of lust and stupidity. I was proud to count myself among them.
I took a seat in the one empty chair at the table. “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Work.”
Trevor, beside me, slapped my back. “Work blows!” he said. “Have a drink!”
“Trevor, my friend,” I said, “that is a truly excellent idea.”
I downed three shots in quick succession, enough to establish the beginnings of a healthy buzz. Around me, conversation veered from the offensive to the absurd. Trevor claimed he had fucked a midget; one of the other guys pointed out that midget was considered offensive; Trevor told him to quit being a politically correct pussy. I rolled my eyes and signaled the waitress for another drink. Ten minutes around Trevor never failed to remind me why ten minutes was more than enough.
The waitress brought me my drink, a middling whiskey, and I sipped at it and looked around the table. Colin, sitting across from me, was staring down at his beer, a look on his face like someone had just run over his dog. I leaned toward him and said, half-shouting to hear myself over the sound system, “Rough day?”
He glanced up at me, realized who had spoken to him, and forced a smile. “Sorry. Girl problems. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket.”
I liked Colin. He was by far my favorite of the Columbia morons, and the only one I thought I might have been actual friends with had we met in a different context. And so, even though I didn’t particularly care about his girl problems, I got up and went around to the other side of the table, told Jim to switch with me, sat down beside Colin and said, “I intend to get quite drunk tonight, so if you’d like to talk about your feelings, there’s a fairly good chance I won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”
He smiled again, and this time it was closer to being an actual smile instead of a pitiful grimace. “The state of American masculinity: emotions are only acceptable under the pretense of alcoholism.”
“You’ve got it, buddy,” I said. “Spill. You can buy me a beer to make up for it.”
He shook his head, his hands curled around his pint glass. “You know how it is. Everything’s great until it isn’t. Elizabeth, you know—you’ve met her.” I nodded. “Well, it’s not great. It’s over.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and I genuinely was. Colin had been dating Elizabeth for several years, and the last I had heard, he was thinking about proposing to her. They had seemed well-matched.
Happy.
“Yeah, well, you know,” he said. “Now it’s back on the dating carousel. Meet someone, fuck her, forget to call her. Rinse, repeat. It blows. You think you’ve met the right one, and it’s good and it’s the real thing, and then it turns out you were wrong.” He shook his head. “It fucking blows. I should have—I don’t know what I should have done differently. Appreciated her more. Realized what an incredible fucking thing I had going and held onto her with all my might.”
I groaned and rubbed my face with both hands. The universe, at times, lacked subtlety.
Okay, I said silently, to whatever higher power was listening. I get it. You win.
“What you need, my friend, is a wild night,” I told Colin, setting one hand on his shoulder. “Drink your troubles away. And lucky you, you’re here with Trevor, who—”
“Whose mission in life is to make sure everyone is as drunk as possible at all times,” Colin said. “You’re right.”
“And the women aren’t bad, either,” I said, gazing around the bar. “Our waitress is quite stunning, actually.” Watching her walk toward us, I realized that she was stunning: tall, slender, with wavy red hair spilling down her back. And somehow, despite the fact that she had brought me four drinks and smiled at me winningly each time, I hadn’t really seen her until that moment.
Sasha had ruined me for other women.
I didn’t stay out late that night. I didn’t drink to the point of insensibility, as I had originally planned. I chatted up a willowy blond sitting at the bar until she agreed to keep Colin company, and I left him leaning into her with a dazed look on his face, like he couldn’t believe his good luck.
And then I went home, alone and far too sober.
There was no helping it: I would have to accept my fate.
Sasha had me hooked. There was no helping it. Whatever weird chemistry there was between us, whatever magnetic draw, I would be a coward if I didn’t see it through to its natural conclusion. Maybe that conclusion would be misery, like Colin had found.
Maybe it would be joy.
15
Having decided there was no point in resisting, I succumbed completely. Over the next week, I spent the vast majority of my free time with Sasha. When I wasn’t at work, I was with her. We went out for ice cream, watched movies at my apartment, and even had dinner once with Yolanda and Will at a hole-in-the-wall burrito place near NYU. And the rest of the time we spent in bed. After sex, when we were relaxed and sweaty and full of endorphins, we talked for hours, sharing secrets, laughing about nothing in particular.
On Friday evening, when I asked her what she wanted to do that weekend, my blissful interlude came to an abrupt end.
“I’m working tomorrow night,” she said, rolling over in bed to face me. “I talked to Germaine. I can’t just keep pretending that I’m on permanent vacation.”
I still hated the thought of her going back to work at the club, but I swallowed my objections. She already knew that I disapproved, and scolding her about it wouldn’t make her change her mind. If I tried to control her, she would tell me to fuck off. Probably in exactly so many words.
So I said, “Let’s do something tomorrow morning, then. Something noteworthy. Soon you’ll be a nocturnal creature again, and I’ll have to settle for seeing you on your days off.” I slid one hand down her side, trying to show her that I wasn’t upset.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, her expression slightly guilty despite my best efforts to mask my displeasure. “I told Germaine I’m not going to be working seven days a week anymore. Probably five. I’m going to try to stick to five.”
“I’m fairly certain that’s a sign of workaholism,” I said.
She covered her face with both hands. “I know! Okay. I know. I can’t help it. We never had any money when I was growing up, and now I have enough money to help my mom and send my sister to college, and it’s hard to know when to stop. I think about all the things I could do for my family if I just had a little bit more money, and it’s like. Where do I draw the line?”
I drew her hands away from her face and kissed each of her palms, one and then the other. “Stop worrying about money. I told you I’d give you whatever you need.” I set my fingers against her lips, staving off whatever protest she was about to make. “I know you won’t take me up on it. But you don’t have to worry anymore. If something happens, if—who knows, if one of your brothers is paralyzed in a terrible accident and needs cutting-edge robotic technology in order to walk again, you’ve got a backup plan. You don’t have to do it alone anymore. You can lean on me if you need to.”
She pushed my hand away from her mouth and said, “You’re sweet.”
Her tone didn’t indicate sarcasm, but I was suspicious anyway. “Are you mocking me?”
“Of course not!” she said, frowning. “I mean it. You are sweet. But I’m never going to take your money, so you might as well give up on the idea.”
She had been perfectly willing to take my money when it was a business transaction, but I knew better than to bring that up. Business was business, and what we were doing had long since ceased to be business. If I was being honest with myself, it had stopped being business the very first time she spent the night in my bed, the day she signed the contract.
“We’ll revisit this topic at a later time,” I said. “Now, what would you like to do tomorrow? We could have lunch at some breathtakingly trendy restaurant, or—I don’t know, rent out the Empire State Building for a few hours and have sex on the observation deck—”
“I want to go to the Statue of Liberty,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows and ran one hand down the curve of her back, settling on her sweet ass. “Really? You know it’s full of tourists and teenagers from New Jersey.”
“I’ve never been,” she said. “Isn’t that sad? I’ve lived in New York for three years and I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty.”
“That is sad,” I said. “And a known side effect of workaholism. Of course we’ll go, if that’s what you’d like to do.”
She smiled at me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’d better be careful. If you keep indulging me like this, I’m going to get spoiled.”
“And what a terrible state of affairs that would be,” I said. I rolled onto my back and pulled her on top of me, and those were the last words we exchanged for quite a while.
She spent the night at my apartment, and in the morning we got out of bed at an unreasonably early hour for Saturday and walked to the subway station in Union Square. We stopped for bagels on the way, and I was treated to the surprisingly delightful sight of Sasha eagerly stuffing her face with a dab of cream cheese on her nose.
“I’m hungry,” she said, when I smiled at her vigor.
“A healthy appetite in a woman is a sign of gluttony,” I said. “Surely you know that. Also, you have cream cheese on your nose.”
She shrugged. “I’ll lick it off later.”
“You’re disgusting,” I said in admiration.
We took the train to Bowling Green, and walked from there to the ferry terminal in Battery Park. We had timed it so that we were in line for the first ferry of the day: less crowded, and fewer tourists. I knew that, as a lifelong New Yorker, I was supposed to be tolerant of and helpful to the tourists, who were, after all, the lifeblood of the city; but I mainly found them irritating, with their sparkling white athletic shoes and propensity to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and unfold their maps, oblivious to everyone around them. The thought of sharing Liberty Island with dozens of squawking teenagers and red-faced men in “I Heart NY” t-shirts was more than I could handle.
It was a hot morning, and even with the sun still rising over Brooklyn, the humidity had me sweating through my t-shirt as we waited in line for the ferry. A breeze blew off the water to the south. Sasha turned her face into it, her hair blowing, and said, “Thanks for indulging me.”
“I don’t indulge,” I said.
“Yeah, you say that, but
you do,” she said. “I bet you’ve been to the Statue of Liberty so many times you’re sick of it.”
That was true, but I wouldn’t admit it to her. “I haven’t been here in years,” I said. “Not since middle school, I think. They tried to make us go in high school, but my father sent a note to school that I was sick, and we spent the day at the Central Park Zoo instead.”
She smiled up at me. “You’re close with your dad, huh?”
I shrugged. “He raised me. My mother was always at work, always busy. I love her, of course, but my father’s the one who changed the sheets in the middle of the night when I wet the bed.”
“I can’t imagine little Alex ever peeing the bed,” she said. “I bet you were a really serious little kid. Like, reading boring Russian novels by the time you were eight. I bet you didn’t even go outside to play.”
“You have very strange ideas about me,” I said. “Do I seem serious now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes. But sometimes you’re really playful. I can’t figure you out.”
“Good,” I said. “When the mystery’s gone, the relationship’s over.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” she asked. “Are we in a relationship?”
Her tone was light, teasing, but I looked at her very seriously—as serious as she accused me of being—and said, “I wouldn’t hesitate to give it that label.”
“Well,” she said. She glanced away, and slipped her hand into mine, small and warm. “I guess that’s okay.”
We crossed the water at the front of the ferry, standing at the railing while seagulls swooped overhead. The ferry was almost empty at that time of day, and our only company at the bow was a man and his son, probably about eight years old, tossing bits of bread at the birds and shrieking with laughter as they stooped to catch the pieces midair.
Sasha smiled at the man and said, “He looks like he’s having fun.”
The man chuckled. “We do this every weekend, and he never gets tired of it. Kids, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said, and looked away.
