Crosstown Crush

by Cara McKenna

  “This what you need?” he asked, and began to thrust.

  She shut her eyes and dunked herself in the sensations for a long moment. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I need.”

  His pace was quick, but not rushed. “You miss this when we’re apart?”

  “Every minute.”

  “Me, too. I love it inside you, this way,” he whispered, slowing, making her feel how right – how wrong – this was. Just their skin and nothing more, just her excitement and his.

  In the back of her mind, she knew he shouldn’t be whispering, but she loved his voice this way, so soft and personal. Hers. She loved these words that made a sacred place of her body, and not for the sake of defiling it.

  “You feel so fucking good.” Again, so quiet. Spoken louder, brasher, those words could have fulfilled Mike’s script for the two of them, but whispered this way, they hummed like a secret. His voice grew quieter still when he pressed his mouth to her throat, exhaling in a hot rush. “Soft, and warm —”

  “Don’t whisper. He should be able to hear.”

  But for once, Bern didn’t do as instructed. There was no way the recording caught it when he told her, “There’s things I want just between you and me.”

  “It can’t work that way.”

  “Only words, Sam. What he wants brought me here,” he murmured, and nipped at her neck. “I say the sorts of things he wants to hear, fuck you how he wants to see us. I’m his porn star, taking his requests, but I’m a man, too. I don’t ask for much. Just a few harmless words.”

  Were they harmless, though? If the things he was saying weren’t hurtful to Mike…

  It’s not letting him hear that’s hurtful.

  Or would not allowing Bern to voice them be just as hurtful? He wasn’t their whore, after all. He was their lover, and his needs mattered.

  She whispered back, “What else?”

  Bern moaned, and loud enough to be heard. He took her hard and quick with long, deep thrusts, before settling back into the steadier motions.

  “I think about you,” he breathed. “About what we’ve done. And about you watching us doing those things. Watching the movies.”

  She clawed his back, making him buck.

  “Tell me you’ve watched.”

  “I have.”

  “Tell me…” He panted, sounding all at once overcome, his powerful body growing graceless and heavy. “Tell me it was real, the times I’ve made you come.”

  All but one. All but that first night, when he’d been too new, too novel to truly let go with. “It’s real.”

  “Oh…” His heavy breathing left her skin slick where his lips teased her jaw. “This is his fantasy you’re realizing. Him watching us, and you taping me – that’s mine. What’s yours, Sam?”

  “I… I get to sleep with you.”

  “That’s still his. What’s yours?”

  Her fantasies… They were so simple, so blah compared to Mike’s and Bern’s. Sometimes when she made love to Mike, she imagined he was someone else: a celebrity, or a character from a movie or TV show or book. Someone not unlike Bern – an exemplification of exquisite maleness. Like any woman, she fantasized about the lovers she had assumed she’d passed up forever in exchange for the security of monogamy. She’d explored that variety from the safety of her imagination. And now, in reality. On her couch.

  “This is his and mine,” she told Bern, fingers tangling in his hair.

  He held her stare, and something in that look said he didn’t believe her. But all he said was, “Then I better give it to you good.”

  And he did. The sex grew rougher, quicker, needier. Lit by the glow of the computer, Bern’s face was set in stark concentration, his teeth nearly clenched and his breaths coming in low grunts to punctuate each thrust. Sam felt every ounce of that aggression. It echoed through her, but she felt her own ferocity mirroring his. She wanted him. She loved the way he wanted her.

  She wrapped her arms tight around him, hugging his strong, long body close, urging his hips with the greedy motions of her own. Messy sex, with the most obvious views blocked from the camera’s watching eye. Not porno-hot or choreographed to incite. Just two people who wanted each other in the homeliest and most urgent ways, two bodies giving and taking and sweating and aching together.

  “What do you need, Sam?” He practically breathed the question, surely just a groan to the microphone.

  “This.”

  “What else? Tell me how to get you there. Because I can’t last forever.”

  “Make your angle sharper, so – yeah. Just like that.” He’d raised his hips a little higher, so the base of his cock brushed her clit with every stroke. “God yeah. Exactly like that.” She threaded her fingers through his hair and held on tight, eyes shutting. She let the room become a concept, a dark, warm space populated by their mingled breath and heat and noises. She felt release inching closer with every push of his body, like he was forcing her to the edge, stroke by stroke by stroke.

  “Make me come,” she whispered.

  He gave it to her faster, strokes shorter and rougher.

  “Yeah. Like that.”

  “Come for me, honey.”

  “I will. Don’t stop.”

  All it took was a half dozen more pushes, and she was there. And so was Bern. He didn’t slow when her moan announced her orgasm – he raced home beside her, his own groan turned staccato by the frantic hammering of his hips. And with no chance to come down, Sam felt an aftershock rising up.

  “Don’t stop,” she begged when his release had his hips locking. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

  With a pained gasp he obeyed, thrusts hard and uneven. Sam held his neck and arm, nails digging, and rode a second shorter, sharper orgasm. As it crested she released her grip, and Bern stilled. He was softening inside her, and his body loosened to match.

  “Holy shit.”

  Sam nodded, lost for words. She stroked his damp back and he caught his breath, racing exhalations steadily deepening against her throat. But as the fog of the orgasms lifted, so did the relief they’d offered.

  Sam felt sober instantly – backhanded by reality.

  She glanced to the side, to the digital green light that said her computer was recording.

  Mike can’t watch this.

  Good God, what had she been thinking? She hadn’t been thinking. She’d let her attraction mute her good sense and set Mike’s rights and feelings aside to meet her own momentary, impulsive needs.

  If he watched, he’d see that the sex had been different. No doubt of it.

  He’d notice how Bern hadn’t once looked at the camera. He’d notice there was no dirty talk… not the cocky kind, meant for his ears. He’d notice that Sam hadn’t even bothered to take her shirt and bra off – that the show hadn’t been on her mind, but the sex certainly had. He’d notice that Bern the exhibitionist had been almost completely absent, and that Sam had just slept with someone entirely new.

  “Fuck.”

  Bern raised himself up on straight arms, expression darkening from bliss to worry. “You okay?”

  She sat up, forcing him to his knees. There was a naked man on her and Mike’s couch. She stood and clamped a hand between her legs, fingers met by the spoils of everything they’d just done. “No, I’m not sure I am.”

  “You thinking about your cousin?”

  “No. I’m thinking about Mike.” She hurried to hit STOP on the computer, feeling ridiculous – shirt, no pants, hand making a dam between her thighs. “I can’t let him watch this. That was way too…” She turned, finding Bern holding out the toilet paper roll. Dignity abandoned, she dabbed between her legs, then pulled on her underwear and pants.

  Bern stood, and she hated the hungry way her gaze sought his chest and belly as he hiked up his shorts and jeans.

  He tugged on his tee, and as the collar fell into place to reveal his face, Sam found his brow gathered in worry. “That was… It was intense, yeah. And probably not what he’s expecting to see.�
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  She shook her head, panic rising.

  “Sit,” he said gently.

  She did, feeling that wetness along her sex and a pang of shame.

  Bern crouched before her. “It’ll be okay.”

  “Will it?”

  “I know, that wasn’t… that wasn’t right, was it?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “We’ve been making porn for him before,” Bern said, attention on Sam’s fidgeting hands. He took them, but she slithered her fingers free.

  “Don’t.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That was… like lovemaking, wasn’t it?” she asked, body flashing hot, then ice-cold.

  He nodded.

  “I mean, not that we’re in love,” she added, unwilling to even entertain that idea. “But you know what I mean. That was intense, and emotional, and just way too different. That…” She met his eyes, fear tightening her chest. “That was just for us, wasn’t it? There was no room in that for Mike at all.”

  Bern wore an expression she’d never seen on that handsome face, and it dunked her in ice water. He agreed. And she had to wonder, had he known as she had in the back of her mind, that what they’d done was wrong? Had he suppressed that glaring fact for the sake of lust? Or had he known all along that he’d let things get as intimate and private as he had, and chosen to go there regardless? She wasn’t sure she could handle knowing which was the truth, and focused instead on the crisis at hand, the unerasable mistake they’d just made.

  “I can’t show Mike that.”

  “Will you tell him it happened?”

  “I have no idea. I feel like… I feel like I just cheated on him. For real.”

  Bern’s gaze retreated, moving around the room. “I don’t really know what to say. I’m sorry, I guess —”

  “Don’t. Don’t be sorry. Neither of us meant for that to happen the way it did. Right?”

  “No, not like that.”

  She chose to believe him. “We got carried away. We were doing exactly what we had his permission to, just sort of…”

  “Doing it all wrong,” Bern offered, with a hint of a sheepish smile.

  “Pretty much.” She wished she could mirror even a sliver of his levity, but she didn’t feel it. Who had he just betrayed, after all? A man he’d known for a couple of months, while the solidity of Sam’s entire marriage felt damaged.

  Bern touched Sam’s feet, and she let him. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. Honestly. This isn’t what I stayed for tonight. I only wanted to be what you needed.”

  “And you were. I just feel really guilty about what my body decided I needed. Jesus, in all our planning, I never saw this coming.” Did I? Fuck if it hadn’t felt natural. Maybe even inevitable. Fuck, fuck, fuck…

  “It’s an emotional kind of night,” he said, squeezing her feet. “Nobody could expect you to just slip into the role or whatever, given everything that’s on your mind.”

  But they wouldn’t expect her to fucking make love to her supposed sleazy piece on the side, either.

  “I’m sorry, Sam. Maybe I should go. Let you get to bed, and maybe you’ll feel a little less freaked out in the morning?”

  Say yes. Tell him to go. That was her brain’s contribution. Something softer and more dangerous whispered, Ask him to stay. The last thing you want to be right now is alone. Frozen by the choice, she said nothing.

  On the counter, her phone buzzed and chimed. Then again – a call, not a text.

  “Fuck. That’s him.” She let it ring, rubbing her face.

  “I don’t know how your marriage works,” Bern said slowly, “but I don’t know that you need to tell him, necessarily. Not if the truth would hurt him.”

  “I’ve never had a decent reason to lie to him before… and I don’t know that I could if I wanted to.” Or if she even wanted to. Truth only. Always. Her body chilled to imagine it. Please, God, don’t let her have ruined Mike’s kink for him – or, far worse, his trust in her. “He’ll believe me, that it was just impulsive. Just my emotions getting the better of me.”

  Bern nodded.

  But yes, you’d really better go. Because how could Mike believe that him staying, after, could be blamed on impulse? Bern, sleeping in their bed? No, that couldn’t happen. By some twisted magic, Bern could fuck Sam, but sleeping beside her? Way out of bounds. There was no ambiguity on that count.

  She stood. “You need to go. I’m sorry. You’ve been so lovely, but we have to call it a night.”

  “Sure.” He carried their glasses to the breakfast bar. “I’ll show myself out. Just… just be kind to yourself, okay, Sam? We didn’t plan this, and you’ve had a fuck of a shock today.”

  She nodded, then turned away, busying herself tidying the coffee table. She slapped the laptop closed.

  His quiet good night was the last thing she heard before the door clicked shut down the hall. She eyed the clock, feeling alone and cold, worse than before he’d arrived. So many different kinds of hurting.

  It was eight thirty, and Mike had probably just seen her text when he’d called. Before then, he’d surely been hoping for an e-mail by ten – not only hoping, he’d have been hungry for it. And she had none fit to show him. Instead she’d have to call and disappoint him, tell him, I’m sorry, but something terrible’s happened.

  And when he asked her what she meant, God only knew if she’d tell him the whole truth behind why she was crying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  M

  ike hit the road at four the next morning, with the sun not even a promise yet in his rearview mirror. He’d slept only a couple of hours, waking around two and never really falling back to sleep. He couldn’t sleep, not knowing Sam was back home, alone and grieving.

  He’d seen her through only one other loss like this one – her grandfather. The man had been eighty-five, though, and ailing. This was her cousin, a woman she’d grown up with, a woman even younger than her – how did you even process that? Mike’s job may have left him cynical about violence and death, but he could still hurt for his wife. He ought to be with her now, drawing her a bath, cooking their meals, walking with her, patiently sitting through movies he’d normally veto.

  I should have been there last night. He should have been there when she got that phone call, ready to close her in his arms the second she hung up. Instead she’d spent that horrible evening all on her own. And after all that, she’d thought she’d owed him an apology – like he even cared about the video and their games, once he’d heard the news. Like his sexual desires held any sort of candle to the loss of a loved one.

  The five-hour drive from Philadelphia seemed to go on forever, though in actuality he made excellent time, stopping only for coffee and gas. He was pulling up along the curb just shy of nine, the summer sunshine misleadingly cheerful, and his heart feeling leaden as he mounted the front steps.

  He pushed the door in. “Sam?”

  Nothing. She might be sleeping in, exhausted from a long night of crying. “Samira?” He jogged up the stairs, but found their bed empty. She couldn’t have driven to Newark to see her parents – she’d have told him. Her pajamas were folded sloppily atop the dresser, and Mike found the bathtub bone-dry, which was odd. Sam almost always showered first thing —

  “Oh, duh.” He went back downstairs and found her running shoes missing from the bin by the door. “Nice detective work there, Heyer.”

  She felt up to a run – that was a good sign. His heart lightened by a few degrees and he headed to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. A big one. Could be a long Sunday. While he was at it he turned on the TV and Sam’s Pandora account, and cued up her Roberta Flack station. It was the one she always defaulted to when she was blue, and he wanted everything about this day to be easy on her.

  A rattle drew his attention as he dropped two slices of bread in the toaster. Sam had left her phone on the counter, and a text alert lit up her screen. Mike glanced at it, curious.

  Bern. He frowned,
not sure why the man would need to contact her at nine a.m. on a Sunday.

  Maybe he doesn’t know why she canceled on him. He ought to cut the guy a little slack. But he still roused Sam’s phone and read the message.