by Alex Lucian
It was so easy, so simple, to slip my arms around her back and pull her into my chest. She came without resistance, angling her legs so that she could press herself into my embrace, tuck her forehead against my neck. After I let out a huge breath, I kissed the top of her head, drinking in the feel of her cool, silky hair against my lips. Even now, Ruby smelled dark and sinful, like I could douse myself in her and feel the indulgence of her down to my bones.
“I’m sorry about your parents, baby.” The endearment slipped out and I stilled, wondering if she’d correct me. But she merely tightened her arms around my waist.
“Thank you.”
We rode the rest of the train ride like that, her wrapped tight around me with my chin resting on her head. I took her hand when we stepped out of the train station onto the brick paved roads of Gouda. She marveled at the tiny row houses and curving roads, the entire village looking like it was propped up out of a fairy tale. She laughed when I made her try to pick up a massive round of cheese in the middle of the town square in the cheese market, and I snapped her picture when she only managed to lift it up a couple inches. In the dark, quiet sanctuary of Saint Janskerk, Ruby took my hand and threaded our fingers together while we looked at the stained glass windows.
Somehow, I managed to keep myself at a low simmer all day while we wandered the streets together, never touching on any subjects besides the things we could smell and taste, see and feel. I made it until after we ate a late lunch in a quiet café that we only shared with a few other people. The yellow tables and white chairs, the kind smiles on the faces of the waitress felt light and airy, but inside of me, there was a violent storm brewing.
Ruby took a delicate bite of a stroopwaffle and laughed when a string of syrup stayed connected to the cookie. When she swiped her tongue against the side of her mouth, I snapped. I pushed my chair back from the table and leaned over behind her.
“Meet me in the bathroom in one minute or I will come back here and drag you behind me.”
She didn’t make me wait. I’d only been in the men’s restroom for about thirty seconds when she walked in behind me.
“Lock the door.”
With movements so slow, they could only be purposeful, she did, holding my gaze the entire time.
“Do the Dutch generally approve of sex in a public place?” she asked, staring at the obvious bulge of my erection.
“I guess we’ll find out.” I walked up to her and pressed her back against the door, leaning down to suck on the side of her neck. “You’ve been driving me crazy all day. Little touches and little smiles. Did you think I’d let you get away with that?”
She gasped when I bit down. “I hoped you wouldn’t.”
“Pull my dick out, Ruby.” I lifted my head up and locked eyes with her. “Now.”
With nimble fingers, she unhooked my belt and pulled my zipper down. When she wrapped her cool fingers around my hot flesh, I fucking attacked her mouth. I sucked her lower lip into my mouth and palmed one of her tits through her cotton shirt. Our tongues tangled, harder and wetter until we were writhing against each other.
I ripped her leggings down her legs and when she was free of them, shoved aside her underwear and used the tips of my fingers to smear her wetness around her clit.
“Fuck, baby, you’re ready for me.”
“I’m always like this around you,” she breathed, rolling her palm over the head of my cock and pulling a hiss through my clenched teeth. “Condom?”
“Back pocket. Hurry. Fuck. I need in you.” I groaned, thrusting my cock against her stomach to seek some relief while she fished for protection. “I need to feel that wet pussy all over me, baby.”
She rolled the condom down and hiked her legs up around my waist when I braced my hands under her ass. “Hurry, Elias, hurry.”
Holding her with one arm, I used my free hand to line my dick up, the tip easily getting sucked into her heat. Then I made one, long, hard thrust, and we both groaned.
“Yes, oh yes.”
I took her mouth in another kiss, a sloppy, wet kiss that matched my short, hard thrusts. Her back hit against the door and my balls slapped against her ass. I could feel my orgasm looming, circling like a fucking atom bomb. We breathed into each other’s mouths, her sighs getting higher and shorter with each vicious pump.
“Get there, baby. Get there.” I boosted her up another inch, and it changed the angle of where my pelvis rubbed against her and she dropped her head back on a moan.
When I didn’t think I could hold out any longer, she clamped around me, her hands digging into the back of my neck so fucking hard that I’d probably be counting nail marks for a week. I let go after her, chasing the white-hot ball of pleasure with a few lazy thrusts.
I sagged against her when I carefully let her legs down to the ground and she laughed huskily into my ear.
“This just became my favorite bathroom in the entire world,” she said, kissing my cheek and hugging my neck.
“Me too, baby. Me too.”
We cleaned up, smirking at each other in the mirror, and walked out of the bathroom hand in hand, receiving two winks, one embarrassed cough, and a whistle from the old lady sitting in the back by herself.
While we walked back to the train, knowing that we only had two days left, I wondered how I’d ever be able to let her go.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The festival was slammed—bodies gyrating and bumping, bass loud enough to send a beat into the very ground we walked on. Before leaving the hotel, Elias had encouraged me to dress casual, since it was an outside event. The way he’d said casual, with a skeptical look, had told me he didn’t think I could dress casual. But as I waited for him, I thought I looked like I fit right in with the mid-twenties crowd the festival attracted. My shorts were shorter than I typically wore, with visible wear and a few rips in the front, and the flowy white tank had beading along the spaghetti straps holding it up. I had chucks on my feet and my hair was contained in two braids, one over each shoulder, secured by beaded elastic bands. I wore large hoops and a braided yellow bandana over my hair.
Elias had called it “hippie chic” when he’d given me a once-over before we’d left the hotel. But he’d tugged on my braids, the ones I’d done just for him.
Once we’d arrived at the festival, he’d told me he had to meet with an organizer to go over the different musical acts that would be coming up but then he’d meet me at the beer tent I was currently standing in front of.
I lifted my wrist to check the time, feeling bereft without my phone. But then I remembered that I’d removed my watch, in favor of a half-dozen beaded bracelets. As I looked over the intricately carved beads, I thought of what Elias had told me, back when we’d looked at his photographs.
I’d purchased the bracelets over a year earlier, when one of my classmates had gone on a service trip to East Africa. She’d helped a small village, where women made money by braiding and beading bracelets. Their supplies were donated to them by a non-profit organization, so all the proceeds from sales of the bracelets went right into the women’s pockets. I’d never had an opportunity to wear them, mostly because I didn’t like wearing bracelets when I was doing school work and I didn’t wear such casual jewelry when I was meeting with clients.
I could almost trick myself into believing that that wasn’t what I was doing, because spending time with Elias certainly felt different. I no longer assumed he seemed interested in the things I had to say, because he just was that interested. He didn’t ask me questions to pass the time, he asked because he genuinely wanted to know more about me.
It was easy to shrug off the pretense that we wore in New York when we were together—here, in a country another continent away, everything felt, somehow, more real.
I never had to remind myself to keep his attention, or to make him happy, as I often did with other clients. With Elias, I was just Ruby. Not the escort, paid to spread her legs.
When I spied him making his way through the cro
wd, his head bent as he looked at the viewfinder on the back of his massive camera, it was easy to smile. He wasn’t looking at me, so the smile was honest, a reflection of my happiness to see him. But I knew if I focused on that thought for too long, I’d start pulling back. Pulling back would’ve been safer, but in that moment I was having too much fun to put distance between us.
“Hey,” he said with a quick grin when he lifted his head and saw me.
“Hey yourself,” I said and handed him the beer I’d purchased while he’d been away. “Can you drink on the job?”
Laughing, he took the cup and wrapped his other arm around my shoulders as he led me away. “I’m going to say yes. Though I normally wouldn’t.”
It felt right, walking with his arm over my shoulder, around the many people gathered, speaking excitedly about things I couldn’t translate. I didn’t feel like I was pretending with Elias, which was not just a breath of fresh air but also incredibly enlivening for my soul. “Are you a good boy?” I asked, giving him a wink and curling my arm around his waist. He wore a fitted black tee, with black cargo shorts. He wore what looked like a heavy pack on his back and his camera hung from his neck. Despite the fact that his clothing was severe in its hue, he seemed completely relaxed.
We stopped near a picnic area and he let go of me to cradle his camera in his hands, staying completely still as he captured three quick snaps. It was my first chance to really see him work, and I found it immensely interesting.
“Sorry,” he said, looking at his camera. “I’ll have to do that a lot.”
“No, I understand. This is your work, after all.” Which was the reason I’d tagged along. “It’s easy to forget you’re a photojournalist, since I haven’t seen you actually at work until now.”
He propped his arm back around my shoulders and ran his fingers over the curve of my neck. It always amazed me how he could do that, touch me so gently, but in a way that made me want to curl even closer to him.
“I know. I hope you won’t be too bored.”
“Bored?” I said with a laugh and gestured around. “This is … exhilarating. Being around so many people, seeing how they interact with one another—how energized they become just by watching a performance. It’s, well, arousing. Not sexually,” I said when Elias raised an eyebrow. “But, intellectually? It’s very stimulating.”
One corner of his mouth lifted up as he took in what I was seeing. “Thousands of people would be very stimulating,” he joked.
I gently jabbed my elbow into his side. “You know what I mean. It’s just energizing. The music, the laughter, the heat.” I sipped my beer and watched as he lifted the camera again, curving his hand around the lens as he rotated it just slightly. “How’d you get into photojournalism, by the way?” I asked when he broke his attention from the shot.
“After high school, I decided to stop being a total fuck up and enlisted in the Army.”
The idea of Elias, all burly and muscular, wrapped in fatigues, was like a punch to my pleasure center. “Ooh,” I said, turning to face him as my hand wrapped around his bicep. “Okay, that visual is pretty hot.” I closed my eyes and hummed. “Yep. Hot.” When I opened my eyes, Elias was laughing.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to my hair. “I was just a kid when I joined. No beard.”
I reached up and ran my nails through his trimmed beard. “What a shame.”
“Half the reason I even have a beard is because of the Army.”
“How so?”
“Well,” he said, leading me further into the crowd toward a stage where a band was playing, “I nicked myself so many times shaving over the twelve years I was in that when I was discharged, I threw my razors away.” He rubbed at his beard and then over his hair. “I also had a buzzed head. It wasn’t a great look.”
The beard was so Elias, I couldn’t imagine him without it and without a full head of hair. “What about these?” I asked, running my hands over the bulge of his biceps and over his forearms.
“Nope. I was a scrawny little shit. Which was probably why they threw a camera in my hands. Maybe they thought I’d do better with it than the gun.”
“And were you better?”
“I still carried a rifle, all three times I was deployed. But the majority of my shots were taken with one of these,” he held up his camera, “than an actual firearm.” But when he said it like that, he lost a little bit of his smile.
“Was that your job in the Army? Photojournalism?”
He shook his head and tipped his beer back. “No,” he said after swallowing. “I didn’t do much of the journalism side. My job mostly consisted of filming combat and noncombat operations.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like to film combat, in action. In comparison, I’d lived a very sheltered life, buried in between the pages of textbooks.
He offered me a smile. “But I learned a lot doing it. A photo, or a video, should tell a story. And that’s what I’ve always believed. My photograph should tell the viewer everything. The things I write are only secondary.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I admitted softly. Elias paused the conversation to lift the camera and took a few more snaps. “You’ve made me want to look at photographs in a different way. I can’t help but feel a little ashamed that I always took them at face value, not really looking too deeply at them.”
“Don’t be ashamed, Ruby. Think of it like this—I work in a creative field. You’ve studied religion and sociology extensively. You utilize the hell out of the left side of your brain, the analytical side, and I favor the right side, the creative side.” He tugged on one of my braids. “I think that’s sexy.” He tugged a little harder, and I stepped right up against him. He lowered his voice when he said, “It’s not just that ass that I like, you know.” His fingers lightly traced over my hairline. “It’s what’s in here, what powers your thoughts, that poked at me, telling me to get in touch with you again.”
The way his eyes searched my face made me suddenly feel vulnerable. Very rarely did I feel at a loss for words, but when Elias looked at me like that, like I was something else to him, I couldn’t find the words to pretend anymore.
Gently, very gently, he pressed his lips to mine, almost like if he kissed me too hard, I’d shatter into a hundred pieces in his hands. The funny thing was, that’s exactly how I felt in that moment, in that brief bit of tenderness between us.
The scent of pot wafted around me as we kissed and I pulled back, trying to compartmentalize all my emotions in that same second.
“Hey, remember that pot we bought?”
Elias nodded, but kept looking at me like he was waiting for me to say something about what he’d said to me.
“When you’re done, do you want to get high?”
His mouth tipped up in a smile, washing away his seriousness for a moment. “I’m just about done.” He looked around for a second and then leaned in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Let’s do it.”
“Is that against the rules? Am I being a bad influence?”
He laughed and capped the front of his lens. “It might be, but I’m not too worried about it. And you’re the best kind of bad influence.” His eyes were heated, and the tension between us dissipated. “I’m guessing you brought them?”
I nodded eagerly as I pulled the joints out of my purse. “Elias the bad boy.” I narrowed my eyes as I looked him up and down. “I like it.”
“You don’t even know how bad I can be,” he said, plucking the joints from me.
“Is that a promise for later?” I asked, trying not to sound too desperate. But I was. Having this conversation with him was like a different kind of foreplay, only satisfying my touch and sight senses. I wanted all of my senses to be obliterated by Elias.
“It can be, depending.” He pulled out a lighter and placed one joint in his mouth. I waited for him to bring the lighter to it, but he brought it to the one he held in his hand instead. I watched, fascinated, as he spun the
joint in his hands, applying the flame to just the tip. As the tip smoldered, he pulled it from the flame and brought the other end to his lips, swapping it out with the joint in his mouth. I watched as he inhaled and then pulled out, applying the flame again. He did this a couple times until he said, “Ahh,” in a satisfied-sounding tone. He held it up for inspection before handing it to me and then repeated the process with the unlit one in his hand.
“You don’t light it while it’s in your mouth?”
He shook his head, and inhaled deeply. Opening his lips, he closed his eyes as the smoke flowed out from between his lips. The visual was incredibly erotic, and I found myself forgetting about my own joint as I watched him smoke his.
“You have to create a cherry at the tip,” he said when he’d exhaled. He held the joint between his first and middle finger, turning his hand so I could see what he was talking about. “You want it to burn evenly, and if you inhale while you light it, you’ll get an uneven cherry.”
I brought mine to my lips and sucked on it softly, not wanting to go hard right away. The taste was different, but not entirely unpleasant. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, to see if I could get a better grasp on how it tasted. “Cherry, huh?” I asked as I exhaled.
Elias’ eyes glittered in the sun and his smile looked wider as he took the next inhale.
As I watched him exhale again, I felt even more desperate to get the hell out of this festival, so I could get high with Elias alone, with preferably fewer articles of clothing.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Down the hallway of the hotel, Ruby kept the same beat that she’d maintained through the end of the festival and through the streets of Amsterdam. Her hips swayed with each step, a potent indication of what she was capable of doing with them in bed.
