My arms closed around her waist, bringing her body between my legs and guiding her to sit on one side. She let out a yawn and took a long drink of the cold water, then laid her head on my shoulder heavily. I stroked the smooth skin of her thigh, feeling her body begin to relax against me. As her weight shifted, melting into me, I set the water aside and gently pulled the blankets back to tuck her into my bed.
And then I watched her fade off to sleep, her pale skin in stark contrast against the dark blue flannel sheets and pillows. Her lashes settled dark and thick against her cheeks. She snuggled into the pillows, sighing softly with the gentle touch of my hand in her hair.
At last, my own eyelids began to grow heavy, drifting closed. Her soft, warm body called to me, so I lay down beside her and held her as all else faded away.
I woke to the sound of a miserable groan beside me. Sophie lay with her hand over her eyes in sheer anguish, barely moving but for the slight twitch of her fingers pressed against her temples.
I shifted a little, and she lowered her hand to look over at me. Rumpled and obviously not feeling anywhere near her best, she was still fucking gorgeous. Her hair poofed out in thick waves that tumbled around her shoulders. There was still a faint darkness of makeup around her eyes that she hadn’t totally removed the night before, and it made the crystalline bluish-green stand out against her pale skin.
I wasn’t sure if there would ever be a time that I didn’t want her. I could have taken her right then if she’d been up to it.
That said, she clearly wasn’t. She dropped her eyes and crept closer to me, resting her head against my chest.
“I feel awful,” she whispered.
“I’m not surprised,” I quietly replied. “I think you threw up the whole bar on the side of the road last night.”
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid I was going to puke in your car.”
“It wouldn’t have been the first time someone puked in my car. Hell, I’ve puked in my car.”
I felt her smile grimly and began to smooth the tangles in her hair with my fingers. She lay quietly for a long time, so long I almost thought she maybe had gone back to sleep. But then she spoke again, timid and wary.
“Why did you want me?” she asked.
My hand inadvertently tensed and pulled a little harder at the knot in her hair, but she didn’t move or cry out. She was so focused on what I was going to say that I’m not sure she even noticed the tug. I could feel this was dangerous ground. I remembered the conversation last night, probably better than she did. I thought for a moment, tasting my words before allowing them to fill the darkness.
“I wanted to see what you were like inside,” I finally began. She said nothing, but I felt the movement of her lashes against my chest as I spoke. “I'm not blind. I could see how perfectly beautiful you were, but it just seemed like there was more to you. Your eyes looked so… somber. Wistful. Lonely.”
“That wedding,” Sophie began, “I suppose that’s where I got engaged. Not that I was asked then, but my mother just started talking about how much better my wedding with Richard would be. Grander. More expensive. My father and Richard joined right in, like they'd all discussed it before.” With a sad sigh, she continued. “It wasn’t official for about a year, though. We had to go through the search for the perfect diamond, then for the best jeweler to set the stone. But I eventually had a huge rock on my hand. It felt like a shackle.”
“You could have said no when he finally asked.”
She shook her head. “And do what? My parents brought me up to be a society wife. To be seen and to smile pretty while my husband gives someone a big check.” She shrugged, a rueful gesture that conveyed her helplessness. “Besides, he asked in the middle of my parents’ lavish anniversary party in front of three-hundred of their closest friends. My mom coached me how to respond. It was quite a performance, really. You should have seen it.”
“Yeah, not so sorry I missed it,” I muttered with a grim twist to my lips. I shifted a little to look down at her, but she kept her focus on my chest, not letting me in. Not letting me see where her head was at. “I saw you again a few weeks later. You were in a restaurant, sitting with your parents, another older couple, and that dickhead.”
She still didn’t look at me, but she smiled a little at that. The top few buttons of the oversized flannel shirt she wore were undone, so I ran my fingertip along the shell of her ear, down her neck, and along her collarbone to the bare skin of her shoulder that peeked out from the soft plaid.
“That other couple was probably the dickhead’s parents,” she offered. “It seems like they’re always around.”
“You didn’t seem like you were having a very good time.”
“I probably wasn’t. I was always under a microscope. Always told how important it was to be perfect so Richard and his parents would think I was worthy.” She finally looked up at me. “It was so important to my father, and therefore my mother, that the two of us would end up together. Merging Buchanan Investments with Banner Enterprises. A way to create one big company without all the complications of purchasing and paying fees and messing with stockholders and all that stuff.” She looked off to the side. “After all, I was my father’s sole heir. Richard was the same for his father.”
“Your dad could have just tailored your education to run the business,” I said, confused by the whole scenario. “Why didn’t he just plan on leaving it to you?”
“Because I’m a pretty girl. I’ve heard it all my life. My father is all about picking someone’s best attribute and expanding it. Being pretty was mine.” She frowned. “And pretty society girls don’t have a head for business. It isn’t fashionable.”
“Yet he sent you to school in Paris.”
“Yeah,” she shrugged. “I studied art. Wine. Fashion. European culture. All the things that a good little rich wife should know about. But nothing really useful.”
“That’s… archaically chauvinistic.” I muttered, and she turned her gaze back to meet mine.
“That’s my father. I was a commodity. I still am, I guess.”
“You don’t have to be,” I said hesitantly after a moment. “You don’t have to do what they expect you to do.”
“I don’t know what else I’m good for,” she replied with a rueful frown. “I’m actually terrified of working for Lily.”
“Why?”
“What if I can’t do it?” Her eyebrows lowered in consternation. “What if I suck at making appointments and mess up her checkbook? I’ve never even kept my own checkbook. I never had to. I just spent, and the money was always there.”
“Sophie,” I said, tipping her face up to look at me, “you are so much more than a pretty face.”
With that, her eyes filled with unshed tears and her lip trembled. “I don’t know that I am,” she whispered sadly. “That’s all I’ve ever been.”
“That’s all anyone maybe expected from you, but that’s not all you are.”
“How do you know?” she asked with a heart-wrenching skepticism. “You don’t know me all that well.”
“I know because I’ve seen the light in your eyes when you let yourself go. I’ve seen you reaching for something, for a full life that isn’t just passing you by. I’ve seen your kindness and your wit and your spunky sense of humor.” I kissed her lightly, barely touching my lips to hers. As I brought my head up just a touch, I caught her gaze and held it, serious and steady. “I get the feeling that you’ve been more real with me than you’ve ever been with anyone. Am I wrong?”
Her eyes showed a little fear, a faint shimmer of self-preservation. But, in the end, she shook her head slowly. “No, you’re not wrong.” She looked like she was going to continue, but instead closed her mouth and looked down for a moment, then back up at me. Her voice was the barest of whispers. “You make me feel… free.”
“You are. Sophie. You can do anything. You just need to figure out what you want.”
“My father has othe
r ideas, and he’s all or nothing. If I went against him, what he wants… I don’t know how to do that.”
In the end, even though she didn’t say it point blank, she didn’t know how to live without the money. Her whole life was luxury. Her apartment and everything in it was top dollar, paid for by her dad. Her car. Her clothes and her entire being.
And, as much as I wished I could tell her it would all be okay, I had never had that and I sure as fuck didn’t understand that feeling. I’d had times where it was questionable if I could make the rent. My mom had scrimped and saved, but had always worried about how to feed us kids. About how to make the ends meet when there was too much month at the end of the money. We only had each other. And my grampa. And we were blue collar all the way.
We did have each other, though. There was a security in that, a mental safety net. But that type of security was a totally foreign concept to Sophie. The complete opposite of everything she knew.
And I couldn’t really offer her anything like her life, even if she did trust me to help her, and chances were pretty slim that she would. I was a two-bit man-ho. My track record with women was deplorable. I'd never had, or even wanted, more than a cheap thrill.
Not until her.
Not until Sophie.
“So, what’s up?” my sister asked over the phone. “We're having spaghetti for dinner tonight.”
“Can’t, Mira. It’s Friday. I've got plans.”
With Sophie. I was supposed to be picking her up to head to the Copperline in about an hour. But I wasn’t about to tell my sister that. She'd think it was all meaningful and shit, that I was taking a chick out. She'd blow it all out of proportion and would likely want to meet her. So what if this was a bit out of character for me? It was something about Sophie. I was still the same fucked up relationship-phobe I'd always been. Telling Mira about Sophie now would just mean explaining it later when I went back to my old ways.
“How about tomorrow?” she asked.
“Um, it’s Saturday. Busy.” I actually hoped to be balls deep in Sophie’s tight little body for most of the day tomorrow. I just couldn’t get enough of her.
“I know it’s Saturday. But you could still come for dinner,” she grumbled. “Besides, you haven’t been over in forever. Your nephews miss you.”
“I’ll never understand why you want me to spend time with them. I’m not exactly the best role model.” I spoke the truth. I’d have thought she'd want to keep them as far away as possible from a dick like me.
“Oh, whatever,” she scoffed. “You’re not as much of a badass as you think.”
“Well, I’m certainly no angel.”
“Like you have to tell me, that. You’re the little brat who used to throw my make-up in the toilet when we were kids. You’re far from an angel.” She sighed heavily. “Maybe you could come over some time during the week, then,” she suggested.
“We’ll see, Mira, okay?”
“Brannon…”
“Gotta get moving, Mira,” I said, ignoring the frustration in her voice. “I'll give you a call.”
“Brannon, is something going on?”
“Fine, Mira. Really. I've gotta go.”
I ended the call before she could start up again. We weren’t super close these days, not like right after our mom died. She had her family to look after, soccer and playdates and the fucking PTA, and I was, well… a bit more free and easy. There just wasn’t much commonality. All the same, though, few people could make me spill my guts like my sister.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her about Sophie.
More accurately, I didn’t want to look too closely at the situation I was finding myself in. If I didn’t think about it, I didn’t get nervous over the amount of time I was spending with Sophie, or even just thinking about her. I was able to gloss over the fact that I maybe sorta kinda missed her when she wasn’t in my bed at night. It was so much easier to just think of the awesomely hot sex and pretend that she wasn’t getting to me.
As I made my way across the Copperline back to Sophie, a beer in each hand, I was stopped by Vivienne. Vivienne was a couple years older than me, likely nearing thirty. She’d moved to Ophir a few years ago, looking like your typical dark-haired busty porn star. Rumor had it she’d been a well-renowned stripper in Vegas or some shit before she married some old rich guy who died and left her a shitload of money. Thus, she was pretty well-known, very well-built, and, while I had kissed her a couple times, I’d surprisingly never fucked her. She seemed to be wanting to change that, though, as she ran her fingernail down my chest towards my fly in a painfully obvious gesture.
“Hey, Brannon,” she cooed.
“Viv,” I murmured, trying to cut around her, but she grabbed onto one of my arms and pouted prettily.
“Not even a little kiss? Nothing at all?” She pressed her full breasts against me.
Fuck, me. Viv had some really nice tits. Definitely fake, but I'd have been dead not to respond a little. I was a dude, after all.
I wasn’t a complete fucker, though. I did have some morals, and it would have been pretty fucked up, even for me, to be sticking my tongue down Viv’s throat with Sophie standing just a few feet away.
“Not tonight,” I said, trying again to step away. Right then Sophie glanced up from her discussion with Lily and saw me with Viv pressed up against my arm. Her eyes traveled over Viv for a second with a perplexed frown, yet… I suddenly had a thought.
“So, Viv, not a kiss for me, but what about the girl I’m with?”
Vivienne flashed her dark eyes at me, amused, but also intrigued.
“You’re here with a girl? You’re never here with a girl. You leave with a lot of girls, but you’re never here with a girl.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” I rolled my eyes. “Special occasion. She’s kinda going through a dirty bucket list, and one of the things she wants to do is to kiss another chick. I can say from experience, that you’re pretty good at it. I think you’d be a good choice for a girl-on-girl virgin. What do you say?”
Vivienne laughed, but then her laughter faded. “Wait, you’re serious.” She looked completely stunned.
“Yeah,” I looked back at Sophie, and shot her a super naughty grin. Her face showed some confusion, a little wariness, but as she saw me smiling at her, the way I was smiling at her, she flushed a little and gave me a nervous smile back.
Vivienne had about as many scruples as I did, so she shrugged and cocked her head up at me.
“That her?” she asked, nodding towards Sophie who stood out like a beacon of stunning perfection in the sea of common girls. “Why not? Sounds interesting and she’s a very pretty little thing.”
I pushed my way through the crowd back to Sophie, followed by Vivienne, and set the bottles on the high-top table beside Lily.
“Here you go,” I said, pushing them towards Lily and Pauline, “have a drink on me.”
Pauline wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like beer, Brannon,” she whined. “You know that.” I had a feeling the emphasis on the word ‘know’ was a bit for Sophie’s sake, and I wondered for a second just what kind of bullshit Pauline had been spouting. Again. I was pretty sure she was at least one of the bitches that had Sophie so riled up at me the night she had gotten hammered at Teasers. But, I had other things on my mind.
“Well, then give them to whoever might want them. I need to borrow Sophie for a minute.” I turned Sophie around by the shoulders and guided her down the hallway towards the back entrance of the bar. A quick glance showed me that Vivienne was following along behind.
Once we got outside, I turned Sophie around to face me and nodded to Viv. “So, Vivienne here sorta swings both ways,” I began.
Sophie’s confused look only grew more perplexed. “What does that mean?”
“I like boys and girls, honey,” Vivienne murmured, stepping a little closer to Sophie and I. “And Brannon here says you’re a bit… bicurious.”
“Bicurious?” Sophie breathed.
&
nbsp; “Like maybe you want to taste test a little pussy,” Viv murmured, studying Sophie closely.
“Just a kiss, Viv,” I reminded her.
“Brannon,” Viv said with a wicked eyebrow raised, “kissing a girl isn’t at all the same without a little caress.” She took another step towards Sophie, stalking her. “Without feeling the softness of a woman’s breasts. The hot, silky folds between her legs. That’s what makes it fun.”
Sophie’s confused look had given way to something more. I felt a tremble course through her as she stared at Viv, a little bit awed by the lusciousness of the older woman’s curves that were proudly displayed in her tight, slutty dress. As she looked back up at me, I could see the trepidation. But I could also see the allure. The desire to try it. To live with everything, holding nothing back.
“Do or die?” she whispered.
“Exactly,” I replied.
“Don’t be scared, honey,” Vivienne cooed, stepping a little closer and running her fingers along Sophie’s cheek.
I stepped around Sophie to stand behind her and wrapped my arm around her waist, pulling her tightly up against me in a sheltering hold.
“You still want to?” I whispered against her ear. “You don’t have to do any more than you want. You don’t even have to kiss her. We could find someone else.” Her whole body was shaking now, and I pulled her hair aside to press a kiss against her neck. “You could pick.”
“I don’t want it to be someone you know well,” Sophie whispered, then frowned and nodded towards Viv. “Do you know her well? Have you…?” Her voice trailed off in a nervous breath.
“I’ve never fucked Vivienne, baby,” I said.
“Not for lack of my trying,” Viv murmured, and Sophie shot a look over at her. “It seemed like the stars just never aligned for us, did they, honey.” Vivienne gave me a smile that left the invitation wide open, but then turned back to look at Sophie. “But you’re such a pretty little thing. I can see why Brannon likes you.” She trailed a long, dark fingernail down from Sophie’s cheek, across her collarbone, and down to the soft swell of Sophie’s breast that rose above the low neckline of her shirt. Sophie’s breathing picked up.
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