by Jordan Burke
I brought her hands to my sides, pinning them down to the counter on either side of me.
“I like it when you just use your mouth,” I said.
She tried to murmur something, but I couldn’t tell what it was, nor did I care. I could tell it was something positive, maybe just a sound affirming what I told her.
Catherine was moving a little faster now, her plump lips sliding up and down my shaft. My cock glistened from the mixture of her spit and my pre-come.
Watching her move like that…Jesus, I could have stayed there all day.
I was intently focused on watching her lips slide slowly toward the tip, and she sucked hard, pulling back, freeing my cock with a wet pop sound.
Her long blonde hair fell in her face just then. I reached out with one hand, gathering as much of it as I could in my fist, then held it together.
“I need to see your gorgeous face as you do this,” I said.
“My damn hair’s so long. Sorry.”
“Not at all. It makes a good handle.”
She smiled that perfect smile of hers as she looked at my erection, and I couldn’t have handled one more second of not being in her mouth. I moved her head back to my cock, sliding between her lips once more. Holding onto her hair, I didn’t have to direct her movement. She swirled her tongue around the head, then took me back in with one swift motion.
Moving faster than before, her head bobbing up and down. The friction of her lips sliding along my skin combined with her sucking…it was getting too intense to think. Though I did feel her teeth lightly graze across the swollen tip of my cock, which I didn’t mind and even encouraged on occasion.
Moments later, the visual got me. “I’m going to come,” I said.
I held off on telling her that I wanted to come in her mouth. I wanted to see what she would do on her own—pull away and use her hand or stay where she was and take my come in her mouth?
I let go of her hair. Luckily, it stayed out of her face, giving me a perfect view as she locked her lips around my cock as I came.
“Ah, Catherine, fuck…” I said as my stomach muscles clenched along with my thighs, as if being wound up for a big release.
Her eyes got big and she blinked rapidly a few times, closing them as I came more.
When it was clear that I had finished, she tucked me back into my pants, zipped me up, and said, “I know you don’t want to kiss me right—”
I reached for the back of her head, pulling her close to me, kissing her deeply.
. . . . .
“I can’t believe you went six months without telling me you owned a bookstore.”
She was standing beside me on the sidewalk as I locked the door. I shrugged. “Putting aside what just happened in there, I have a lot of self-control.”
She laughed and grabbed my arm as we walked to the car.
We had spent another fifteen or so minutes inside. Most of it was spent with me urging Catherine to take more books, but she declined. I didn’t force the issue. I knew she’d be back here.
“How far do you live from here?” she asked, buckling her seatbelt.
Goddamn. She was about to start with the one line of questioning I had hoped wouldn’t come up today. Wishful thinking. She was making me sloppy in my judgment lately.
“About ten minutes.” I started the car and looked out the driver’s side window to see the oncoming traffic but also to keep from having to let her see my face.
“Is that where we’re going next? I’d love to see where you live.”
“Not today,” I said, my face close to the window. “Sorry. It’s just a mess and my cleaners don’t come until Monday.”
She didn’t say anything in response as I pulled the car away from the curb.
I put my hand on her knee. “Soon. I promise.” I glanced over to see her nodding, but looking disappointed.
I never let anyone into my house. Had I planned this day better, I would have done a sweep through the place, making sure I didn’t have anything lying around that would look suspicious. A file, a stack of photos, an unopened disposable phone I hadn’t used yet…it could have been any one or more of those things that forced me to tell her the truth about my life.
I wasn’t ready for that.
She couldn’t have been, either.
Chapter Three – Catherine
I didn’t want to push him and risk a repeat of him shutting down like he’d done in the hotel room that night. Yes, I was eager to know more about him. To know everything about him, in fact, and seeing where he lived would have been great.
But I knew all too well about the desire to keep parts of your life secret. I wanted so badly to know what it was about Watts’s life that necessitated his cloak of privacy. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, mostly out of respect for his space, but also out of fear of pushing him away again.
He drove us back to Washington, where we stopped at a deli, got some sandwiches, fruit, and drinks.
“Show me your bench,” he said, sliding his sunglasses on.
“My bench…”
“Where you have lunch everyday and read my emails. I’d like to see it.”
We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the deli, a block or so from the National Mall. Watts held our lunch in a cardboard box.
“I know what you meant,” I said. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”
I showed him the way to the bench, and I was surprised to find it unoccupied. Groups of people used the vast expanse of grass to play touch football, sometimes Frisbee, and the sidewalks were jammed with joggers and groups of tourists.
Watts looked around as I unpacked the box. “Nice views,” he said. “All around. I can see why you picked this spot.”
I handed him a sandwich. “Actually, it was just random.”
“Right. Because you’re always looking down at a screen.”
I shrugged, opening a cold bottle of tea. “It’s 2014. We’re all looking at screens. That’s our brave new world, three-hundred-and-however-many pixels per inch at a time.”
Watts let out a little chuckle. “Cynical.”
“It’s true,” I said. “But, in my defense, I spend a good amount of time looking at pages, too. Real ones, not ebook pages, thank you very much.”
“Don’t get me started,” he said. But it seems that I already had, as Watts launched into an impassioned defense of physical books. His thoughts on the issue matched mine exactly.
“You’re just worried about going out of business,” I teased.
He shook his head as he popped a grape into his mouth.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “I agree with everything you said. I think we’re in the minority for people our age, though.”
“Resistance is not futile.” He sipped his drink. “It’s nice to finally be able to visualize you sitting here reading my emails.”
We ate and people-watched for several minutes.
Watts balled up the wax paper that his sandwich had been wrapped in, and put it in the box, then moved closer to me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “All these people walking around with their families, others rushing off to a meeting, seeing what looks like an innocent lunch taking place here, a seemingly innocent girl looking at her phone. All the while, nothing innocent about it.”
I let out a little laugh. “That about sums it up. But they weren’t all dirty.”
“I’ve never written anything dirty,” he said, the sarcasm heavy in his tone.
I looked at him. “Uh, right. Lots of them were filthy as hell and you know it. I loved all of them, by the way.”
“I liked the way yours were all about you by yourself.”
“Why’s that?”
“It told me you hadn’t been with a man in a long time, so I had a challenge before me. You were a mystery,” he said. “I like a little mystery. It made the chase more exciting.”
“Is the chase over?”
“Not even close,” he said.
I wanted to ask him something,
but gave it a little extra thought, then just let it fly. “All the stories about other women. You said most of them weren’t true. So…why’d you do that?”
Watts took a deep breath and sighed it out. “What can I say? I have an active imagination.”
I nudged him with my elbow. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“It turned me on,” he said, “knowing it was turning you on as well. And now I no longer have to imagine what your face looks like when I’m blunt with you. I can see it for myself.”
I recalled the previous night and this morning in the bookstore, thinking about the things he’d said to me.
“Tell me your favorite,” he said.
“Favorite email?”
“Yes.”
I pretended to think about it for a moment, even murmuring sounds and words like I was giving it some thought. But I knew which one it was. An email he had sent about three months ago, one that I must have read at least a hundred times, sometimes just to read it, other times when I was touching myself.
“She sits on the edge of the bed, naked, wearing only heels. Her clothes are in a pile, pantyhose ripped from my tearing them off of her legs. I kneel in front of her, telling her to drape a leg over my shoulder. I want her to feel like she’s somewhat in control, but she’s just following what I tell her to do. I instruct her to hook her leg tighter over my shoulder, the heel of her shoe pressing into the middle of my back. I tell her to pull me closer when she wants, as hard and fast as she wants…”
It went on like that, in increasingly graphic detail, but as I sat there on the bench with him I had to stop thinking about it. “The one with the ripped pantyhose,” I said. “And she’s wearing heels…”
Watts nodded. “That was a good one.”
I looked at his face, wishing he didn’t have those sunglasses on. I even thought about reaching up and removing them before I asked him what I wanted to know, but thought better of it. I wanted to trust him to tell me the truth. “Was that a real one, or made up?”
“Made up,” he said without hesitation.
“So that’s never happ—”
“No, not like that. But I sometimes think about what it would be like. Obviously you do, too. We’ll find out soon,” Watts said, touching my cheek with the back of his hand. He picked up the box, stood, and walked to a trashcan nearby.
As he walked, I thought about how long we had talked by email, how slow the process had been—getting comfortable enough to actually meet. And now, in such a short time, we were moving fast. Not just physically, either. I was feeling myself becoming more emotionally involved with him. I kept warning myself that it could be a huge mistake, that I could very well be setting myself up for misery. But something about this man made me want to go a little further, have a little courage, a little faith.
And damn, did he look absolutely gorgeous walking back to me. There was a swagger to his walk. Nothing overdone. Certainly not forced. It was just something about the way he moved confidently, his tall, fit body striding as if he owned the ground before him.
Doomed. I was doomed. No matter how much I tried to protect myself from getting hurt, I was going to make myself vulnerable no matter how much I knew I probably shouldn’t.
I realized then what I was dealing with—a proverbial high-wire act. Watts was drawing me closer to him, whether he meant to or not, and the closer I got the more I wanted to know, but I was well aware of his insistence on privacy and the consequences of breaching those lines.
Maybe if I shared more of myself, he would lower his defenses as well. I was ready. It was worth a try.
. . . . .
When Watts suggested we walk before going back to his car, I thought it was the perfect opportunity.
“Now that I know where you work,” I said, “I’ll show you where I work.”
We walked up 9th Street, past The Smithsonian, crossed Constitution Avenue, then took a left on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking me to The White House,” Watts said, an easy smile on his face, but still a lingering curiosity, as if I just might be leading us that way.
By then, we were in front of the building where I worked. I stopped. “Here’s where I am Monday through Friday.”
Watts looked up at the building, then down to the drab brown sign with plain white lettering: J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.
“I can’t show you exactly where I work in there, but…this is it.” I turned to him.
He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were darting back and forth and up and down the building. “Really.”
“Yup.” I held onto his arm and whispered, “I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I work in the basement. It’s the last stop for all incoming packages. They’re checked off-site, but they go through one more scan here.”
“Interesting.”
“Not really,” I said, looking at the building, and then back at Watts. I noticed his facial expression had changed. The muscles in his jaw clenched, making that little knot I’d noticed when he walked into the hotel lounge the first time we met. “But, hey, it’s a paycheck.”
The place never closed, of course. The FBI is a 24/7/365 operation. So as we stood there, men and women in suits came and went, in and out of the front door. I always wondered what each of them did when I saw them. And it looked to me like Watts was wondering something similar.
“How long have you worked here?” he asked.
“Going on four years.”
“Have you ever used a work computer to email me?”
I shook my head, looking up at him. “No. No way, why?”
He casually dismissed it by saying, “It’s just that we’ve been—I’ve been—pretty graphic in some of my emails. I just wouldn’t want you to get caught reading personal emails on a work computer. But,” he said, catching himself quickly, “I know you wouldn’t. I didn’t mean to imply that you were careless.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
“All right, then. Ready to go back to your place?”
He seemed suddenly unimpressed. Maybe it was the way I told him the job wasn’t interesting and I only had it for the paycheck. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. The thought of having him in my apartment again, alone, wiped out any possibility of worrying or thinking about anything.
There was nothing in the world I wanted more.
I’d had a bit of a revelation as we were sitting on the bench. It wasn’t a huge epiphany. It was just a thought I couldn’t deny: I had fallen in love with Watts. Irrevocably, undeniably in love for the first time in my life.
There was one bit of doubt, though, and it was enough to keep me from telling him how I felt.
Chapter Four – Watts
Christ. The fucking FBI. Nice going, Watts.
The situation was risky enough, and now I was dealing with the fact that she worked for what many people consider the world’s premier law enforcement agency. At least she didn’t work for the CIA or the NSA. And at least she worked in the mail-sorting and security department. It could have been much worse. And maybe it was. Maybe she didn’t tell me everything. That wouldn’t have been so implausible, considering the way things had gone for us from the start.
I decided I needed to check her out. So as I left early Sunday morning, with Catherine still asleep in her bed, I found her purse where it always was—on the kitchen counter. I quickly rifled through her stuff, found her wallet and got her name off of her driver’s license.
Catherine Marie Kolb.
I committed it to memory, along with her birthdate.
I found a pen and a piece of paper so I could leave her a note: You looked so gorgeous sleeping, I didn’t want to wake you. I have some business to take care of before tomorrow morning. You will see me soon, maybe when you least expect it. – Watts
I wrote my cell number under my name and left.
On the drive home, I made a phone call to a guy who occasionally did a little work for me.
/> He answered, “At your beck and call, sir.”
“Fuck you, Justin.”
He laughed. “What do you need, Mr. Murphy?” he asked, using the fake name I’d given him.
I gave him Catherine’s name and birthdate, telling him all I needed was any information regarding her connections to the FBI or any other law enforcement or intelligence agencies. I asked him to keep it quiet.
“Don’t I always?” he asked. “You don’t need to tell me that, dude.”
“This is different. It’s personal.”
“Not for me,” he said. “My lips are sealed. Usual hundred bucks, dude.”
“You got it.” Dude.
I had been introduced to Justin by one of my associates. He was a grad student at Boston University, and apparently some kind of computer whiz who had turned down job offers from Microsoft, Apple, and various smaller tech firms right out of high school, opting instead to go to college. Smart kid. Damn brilliant, actually, and very eager to help out. For a small fee, of course.
Justin could get in and out of any computer in the world without leaving a trace. That’s what he claimed, at least. I wasn’t sure how true that was, but whenever I needed something that turned out to be deep within a highly secured computer network, Justin had been able to get it.
He knew me only as Mr. Murphy. Not Watts, no first name, no age, nothing about my employment. I suppose he could have dug around and found out more about me, but I was assured he was safe to deal with.
He had no idea what I was doing. For all he knew, I was a stalker of some kind. Or a serial killer. Either way, he didn’t seem to care.
And, oddly enough, even though he’d seen some names of people who ended up dying mysterious deaths, he never once pressed me for more information. Perhaps he had indeed looked deeper into what I was doing and approved.
As I drove home, I mentally kicked my own ass for not having done due diligence before spending this much time with Catherine. She had given me no reason to suspect that she worked for a law enforcement agency. She’d given me no reason to believe she did anything other than some boring clerical job.
