by Hazel Hughes
Brandon obeyed, lowering himself onto his knees, sliding Elizabeth’s panties down. He looked up at Sebastian before slipping his tongue into her slit. She gasped, closing her eyes.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Sebastian scolded. “Look at me, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth did as she was told. Sebastian was sitting on the end of the bed watching them, his eyes hot with lust, a knowing smirk on his lips. The bulge in his jeans was enormous. Elizabeth’s eyes closed again involuntarily as Brandon’s butterfly-gentle licks brought her close to orgasm.
“Stop,” Sebastian said, “Don’t let her come. Not yet.”
Brandon released her hips and sat back on his heels, looking up at her, then over at Sebastian, waiting.
“Come here,” Sebastian beckoned, crooking a finger at Brandon. Elizabeth collapsed onto a chair, watching as Sebastian pulled the boy down beside him, kissing him hungrily. “Mm,” he said, his tongue flickering over Brandon’s open lips. “You taste like Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth’s entire nervous system was buzzing, her whole body crying out for release. Her clit was throbbing like the bass in a club anthem as she watched the two men on the bed, Sebastian dark and muscled like a prize stud and Brandon a creamy young stallion. Sebastian unzipped Brandon’s jeans, releasing his penis. He pushed him back on the bed and ringed his thumb and fingers around the rod of the younger man’s erection, sliding his hand up and down. Brandon arched his back, pushing his pelvis higher.
“That is a sweet cock,” Sebastian said, looking at Elizabeth through lust stained eyes. “I want to watch you suck it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Brandon moaned.
Elizabeth walked toward them on unsteady legs. Sebastian’s eyes followed her. He let go of Brandon’s cock and pulled Elizabeth onto the bed with them.
“Do it. Nice and slow,” he nodded toward Brandon, who was leaning back on his elbows, his jeans down around his knees.
She bent over Brandon and licked the head of his penis in widening circles. Brandon moaned, lifting his pelvis as she teased him, her gaze locked on Sebastian’s. He was watching her through half-lidded eyes, the corner of his mouth raised in a sexy smirk.
“That’s right,” he said, crawling closer. “Now slide your tongue down his shaft and lick his balls. Close your eyes.” Passing a warm hand over her eyes, he moved behind her. “Imagine it’s me. Suck on his balls like you suck on mine.” She did. Brandon writhed under her. Sebastian ran his hand over her up-turned ass, sliding his fingers into her. She moaned.
“Mm,” he said, pulling them out. “You’re so wet, so ready. But I’m not anywhere near done with you yet.” He rubbed his bristly cheek against her ass as he slid off the bed. She heard the sound of his zipper and the rustle of his jeans falling to the floor. She closed her eyes and plunged Brandon’s penis into her mouth.
“Oh,” he groaned, grabbing her hair.
“Keep your eyes closed,” Sebastian said, standing with his pelvis against her thighs, hands on her hips. She could feel the length of his shaft upright between her parted cheeks. “Imagine that’s my cock in your mouth.” He teased open her labia with the head of his penis. He gripped her hips, easing himself into her with torturous slowness. She tried to push herself back onto him, but he held her still.
“Ah-ah,” Sebastian scolded, slowly pulling out. “I’m in control. Just do what I say.” He pushed into her again, faster this time. Her muscles tightened around him. “Suck harder, Elizabeth. Faster. Take me in deeper,” he said, his movements echoing his commands. He was panting now, plunging in and out of her as her orgasm started, spiraling out from her core to consume her whole body.
Brandon moaned, his cock full to bursting in her mouth. Sebastian’s fingers dug into her hips, as he slammed into her. “Oh, God, Elizabeth,” he cried, “make me come.”
She did.
*
Brandon left early the next morning, a shy smile on his face and a fat wad of bills in his hand.
“For the cab,” Sebastian said, sipping the room service coffee from his white china cup. She and Sebastian wore their white terrycloth robes over their freshly showered skin, sitting up in bed, drinking their coffee and looking idly through the New York Times, like any happy couple. So civilized, Elizabeth thought, as if last night’s bacchanalia hadn’t taken place.
She was leaving for the airport in an hour.
Elizabeth put down her section of the newspaper and picked at the remains of a fruit salad on the tray between them. Whether it was her tumultuous emotions, the effects of sleep deprivation, or a combination of both, her eyes kept sliding off the words.
She couldn’t believe that in just a few short hours she would be back in Fairfield, back to school runs and bake sales and soccer matches and Steve. She fingered her wedding ring, a white gold band with a circle of the tiniest of diamonds embedded in it. It was plain and honest and solid, with a touch of sparkle, just like Steve. Though, it had to be said, she hadn’t seen much of that sparkle since he’d taken the promotion
Elizabeth glanced over at Sebastian. He, on the other hand, was all sparkle and surprise and uncertainty.
Sebastian looked up from the newspaper, catching her eyes on him. A slow smile split his face. He reached over and touched her hair, still damp from the shower.
“What are you thinking,” he asked.
Elizabeth stared into his eyes for a minute, wishing she could just download all that she was feeling through a look. She didn’t know how to put it into words.
“Just that this has been an incredible week.” That was definitely the word for it. Incredible. Unbelievable. How had any of this happened to her?
“Are you going to add Brandon to this?” she asked, sliding her hand under his robe to touch his tattoo.
He looked at her like she was crazy. “No.”
“I mean,” she continued, curious, “Are there any guy’s initial’s in here? Have you ever had a relationship with a man?”
“No! I’m not gay,” he said, his voice filled with scorn.
Elizabeth lowered her eyes and bit her lip, remembering Sebastian kissing Brandon, his hand sliding up and down the boy’s shaft.
“I mean, yeah, I fuck guys sometimes, but it’s like when I fucked Naomi. It’s scratching an itch. It doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes, you just want to, I don’t know…” he mused, his eyes on the ceiling as if he would find the perfect word there. “Physically dominate someone who could do the same to you. It’s hard to explain. But I could never love a man like I love a woman.”
Sebastian dropped the newspaper onto the breakfast tray and shifted it to his bedside table.
“Like I love you,” he said moving closer to her, sliding a hand up her neck to cup her jaw. He kissed her softly on the lips. Elizabeth pulled away from him. Every orifice on her body was swollen and raw from the night before.
“Sebastian,” she pleaded. The last thing she wanted now was more sex.
“Okay,” he said, reading the look in her eye. He put an affectionate arm around her and pulled her head down to his chest. “I get it. You want to talk.”
She didn’t actually, but they had to. “I’m just sad,” she said. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Me too,” Sebastian said, nuzzling her, burrowing into her hair. “But it will make it all the sweeter when we’re together again. Delayed gratification, right.”
Elizabeth felt a chill run through her. She lifted her head to look at Sebastian.
“Sebastian,” she said slowly. “We talked about this, remember? Logistics?’
“Sh,” Sebastian said, kissing her forehead. “What we have, Elizabeth, it can’t just end. We’ll be together again. Soon.”
Elizabeth didn’t speak. She just wrapped her arms around him, breathing in his scent, feeling the firmness of his chest, the fuzzy softness of the hair on the nape of his neck. She nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak.
*
Sebastian put her in a yellow cab less than an hour later. She stared at him through the
rear window as he stood on the curb, watching the car disappear down Prince Street, neither of them waving. They hadn’t gone more than a block when Elizabeth, thinking she’d give Abbie a call before she left to apologize, grovel, whatever was necessary, realized that she had left her cell phone in her room at the Mercer.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as politely as her panic allowed, “I left my phone at the hotel. We have to go back?”
“Heh?” the cab driver said. His ID said Imran Khan.
“Please go back.”
“Goback?”
“To the Mercer Hotel. Please go back to the hotel.”
“Mercer Hotel?” Imran asked, driving through another intersection. “No airport?”
“No airport!” Elizabeth was almost yelling now. “Hotel!” she gestured in the direction they’d come from.
Imran got the idea, making a wild and probably illegal U-turn at the next signal. Within ten minutes they were back at the hotel. Elizabeth threw some money at the driver and ran back into the building, waiting impatiently behind a vaguely familiar red-headed woman who was leaning on the reception desk talking to the staff.
“There must be some way you can hold any calls coming to my room. The Penthouse Suite?”
Elizabeth recognized that voice. A cold snake of nervousness slithered through her. Susan. The woman made her so uncomfortable, she almost decided to forget about her cell phone. But Susan finished her conversation and sailed toward the elevators without glancing behind her.
Elizabeth watched her go, starting in surprise when the desk clerk asked, “Can I help you ma’am?”
“Um, yes,” Elizabeth said. “I just checked out a few minutes ago. I was in room ...”
The smooth faced young man finished her sentence for her. “You forgot your cell.”
“That’s right,” Elizabeth answered, a smile of relief lighting up her face.
“Housekeeping found it.” The clerk reached under the desk and pulled up her small black Nokia. “Your life’s on here, right?” he asked, rhetorically. He put a dramatic hand to his chest. “I’d die if I lost mine.”
Elizabeth thanked him and was about to go catch another cab when a strange impulse struck her. Heart beating in her throat, Elizabeth walked toward the elevators, pressing 6 when she got in, alone.
When the elevator reached the top floor, she almost chickened out. The way Susan had spoken to her had made her feel like a middle-school class reject. Whether it was her affair with Sebastian that had emboldened her or just the New York City vibe permeating her spirit, Elizabeth didn’t know, but she was going to confront Susan, Academy Award-winning actress or not.
Elizabeth took a deep breath and knocked on the door of the suite, staring boldly at the spyhole. She wasn’t some meek small-town housewife. She was a woman of the world, one whose name would soon be in the credits for a film, right along with Susan’s.
“Well, well, well,” Susan said, opening the door wide. She was wearing a black silk kimono and, it was clear from the way her enormous breasts hung, nothing else. “Elizabeth Holmes, I presume?” She laughed at her own joke. “Are you lost?” She smiled, looking at Elizabeth as if she were a cockroach that she wanted to grind under her heel.
Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, the cool rebuke she had rehearsed in the elevator on the tip of her tongue, when she was distracted by the sound of a door opening within the suite. Behind Susan she caught a glimpse of a young man, with just a towel wrapped around his waist.
Elizabeth inhaled sharply, her hand coming to her throat in shock. She closed her eyes and shook her head to dispel the image she thought she’d seen. It couldn’t be, she thought.
Susan watched her, a malevolent smile spreading across her face. She called back over her shoulder. “Oh Sebastian, I think there’s someone here to see you.”
Chapter 10
By the time United Air flight 681 landed in Cedar Rapids, Elizabeth’s face looked almost normal again.
She hadn’t waited for Sebastian to walk to the door of Susan’s suite to, what? Apologize? Justify himself? Invite her in for a quick three-way with the aging actress before she caught her plane? No, she’d turned on the heel of her boot and run down the eight flights of stairs to the lobby. She hadn’t let herself cry until she was sitting in her window seat on the runway at JFK. She felt bad for the passenger beside her, a grandfatherly man who kept silently handing her tissues, his shaggy eyebrows inviting her to tell him about it. She didn’t. She couldn’t. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying.
Fortunately, the flight from Chicago to Cedar Rapids was better. She had managed to stave of the ugly trickle of tears that had turned her face into a swollen, pink wodge between JFK and O’Hare by keeping a continual stream of salty, deep-fried snacks going into it while she watched Some Like It Hot on her laptop, silently thanking Steve for downloading it for her.
Steve, she thought, heading reluctantly toward the arrivals lounge, which, in the tiny Cedar Rapids Airport, was the same as the baggage claim. Maybe he would notice her puffy, blood-shot eyes and rosy nostrils. Maybe he would see the almost faded pink bracelets of tender skin at her wrists. She stretched the sleeves of her cotton turtleneck. It was time to put on her happy face.
“Mommy!” A shrill squeal of delight filled the nondescript gray space of the lounge as Gwen hurtled toward her.
“Oh, honey,” Elizabeth said, feeling the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, squatting down to wrap the tiny ball of energy in a fierce hug.
“Ow, Mommy!” Gwen wriggled in her arms. “Too tight.”
“Sorry, sweetie.” Elizabeth loosened her embrace. She looked at Gwen and brushed a stray white-blond hair from her face. Elizabeth had only been gone a week, but she’d swear Gwen had grown. The sleeves of her Hello Kitty hoodie didn’t quite meet her wrists. “I just missed you so much.”
Gwen took this as her due, frowning and touching her mother’s face, her little sticky paw cool and soft. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
Elizabeth’s eyes roved over her daughter, drinking her in. Gwen was one of those kids who managed to look like she’d been through a natural disaster minutes after getting dressed in the morning. Her hair, cut to her chin, stood out in wild spikes like Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince and there were multicolored smears decorating her Hello Kitty’s formerly white face. “Oh, Gwen. I’m crying because I’m so happy to see you.”
Gwen’s frown deepened and her hands balled into tiny fists on her non-existent hips. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, sternly.
“Most things that adults do don’t make a lot of sense,” Elizabeth’s mother said, appearing behind Gwen. “Steve’s business trip has been extended,” she said to Elizabeth in a way that told her that she either didn’t believe or didn’t approve of the extension. “And the kids wanted to surprise you, so I didn’t call.”
Elizabeth stood up, inhaling in secret relief. “And hi to you too, Ma.” She smiled, bending a little to give her mother a one-armed hug. “This is the best surprise. Where’s Keenan?”
Connie McCannna nodded in the direction of a row of chairs. Keenan’s sandy blond head was bent down, looking at the screen of his PSP, his thumbs working furiously. His right arm was supported by a charcoal triangle of nylon. Elizabeth’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. The sling. She had forgotten. God, I am a terrible mother, she thought, rushing to her son’s side.
“Oh, Keen,” she said, wrapping her arm around his shoulder and kissing his chubby cheek, the only part of him that still reminded her that she had once rocked him in her arms.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, glancing up briefly. “Just let me kill this guy.”
She watched his intense concentration, the speed at which his thumbs tapped, and felt a wave of love fill her chest. Then her eyes fell on the sling again. God, she thought, wincing. I should have come home sooner. Remembering Susan’s smirk as she called back to the half-naked Sebastian, she thought, a hell of a lot sooner.
&nbs
p; A smile of satisfaction spread over Keenan’s face as the little screen of his gaming device filled with flames. He turned it off and held it in his sling hand, hugging Elizabeth tight with the other.
“Oh, my big, brave boy,” Elizabeth said, the tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks. And she thought she’d depleted that reservoir. Apparently not.
Keenan released her and slipped out of her grasp, standing up. “Come on, Mom. Granny said we could eat at Chuck E. Cheese’s.” He gave her a confused look. “Why are you crying?”
Gwen skipped around her brother. “Because she’s happy to see us, silly,” she giggled.
Gwen and Keenan rolled their eyes at each other and shrugged.
“Adults are weird,” Keenan said, walking toward the exit.
Gwen skipped after him. “Totally.”
Elizabeth stood up and put her arm around her mother’s shoulder, sighing. She picked up her suitcase and the two women followed the children out into the golden light of late afternoon.
“Magic hour,” Elizabeth said, breathing in the fresh Iowa air, eyes naturally rising to the sky. There was just so much of it in the Midwest. Elizabeth felt at once exposed and freed by the wide expanse of blue, littered with white streaky vapor trails. In a city, man can feel that he is the creator of his own destiny, but not in the rural Midwest, she reflected. It put you in your place.
“God puts on a better show than anything man can do,” her mother agreed, almost reading her thoughts.
“Mm.” Elizabeth gave her mother a quick squeeze before yelling out to the kids, “Don’t cross the road without us!”
Back to reality with a thud, she thought, a small smile of chagrin twisting her mouth. There was no grace period when you were a mother, which was probably for the best, she concluded. The less time she had to think, the better.
She looked down at her mother. “Chuck E.Cheese’s, eh?” she said. When she and her brother had been growing up, fast food was restricted to the occasional necessary diner pit stop and the county fair. Franchise fast food was pretty much on par with Satan.
