OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  But that’s so rare it’s almost unmentionable. Crash. Nail. Bolt. Kirill. All my guys have had girls get out of the scene soon as they smelt the powder.

  Which is why, long story short, this whole situation is so fucking bizarre and amazing and unsettling. It’s like one of those modern art things Maya pointed out to me when we were back in the gallery. She’d read the plaque sure enough. Some guy had gone through Brazil or Peru or somewhere or another where there’s a bunch of this garbage and collected every foil wrapper he could find. Candy wrapper or sandwich wrapper or just leftover bits of junk. The guy spent three years hiking the country looking for his bits and pieces of junk. He finds a couple million and takes them back to his studio and spends another three years going through each and every one with a bunch of photo processing chemicals until they’re all nice and shiny and good enough you could straight eat off of them. He sinks another year into it gluing these wrappers up on a giant wooden block and carves it into this incredible portrait twenty feet by thirty. It’s of the president of Brazil or Peru picking his giant, shiny nose with a giant, shiny finger, which is supposed to be sort of funny but unsettling at the same time.

  “You’re comparing us to that giant sculpture of the guy picking his nose?” Maya says when I tell her what I’ve been thinking. “That’s the best you can do?”

  “I’m just trying to explain what it’s like. I don’t know if it’s accurate. It’s just a shot in the dark.”

  “You honestly think the incredibly good-looking, incredibly loving girl you’re being paid to watch over, who’s sucked you off in the shower and told you how much she worships you, really wants to hear herself compared to a bunch of trash some guy spent six years turning into even bigger trash?”

  “You’re making me sound like an idiot.”

  “After a whole morning spent thinking about other possible comparisons you might have made, the way you choose to flatter me—your incredibly adorable, incredibly sensitive princess—is to compare me to some guy worming around in his nose-hole looking for gold?”

  Maya puts an arm around my shoulder and starts to rub my back. “The master flatterer,” she coos. “The bard with the long dong. The wooer with the long hooter. The cunning—”

  “At least give me a chance,” I say, “to shut my mouth and never say anything again.”

  “Oh, no, sweetheart. I couldn’t let you do that. How would you lick me off, then?”

  Her hand curls around me, and she’s got me suddenly tangled up in one of those long kisses again. It’s all tongue and lip and impossible to escape from because her mouth is keeping you interested at every point. And even if you could find a way to get yourself out, everything else in you is telling you not to.

  “Sweetheart,” Maya breaks off, breathless. “Can I give you a blowjob?”

  “Right here?” I look around, a little started with her. It’s not even eleven in the morning, and we’re sitting in the Mercedes in the somewhat crowded parking lot of Ricky’s Diner. “There are people coming out.”

  “Let them come out. They’re not going to see anything.”

  “You want to do this right here?”

  “I’d do it anywhere. This is just where we happen to be now.”

  Her hand is already unzipping my jeans. I lean the seat back and keep the engine running. Maya’s hands trail my shirt, back and forth like a cat massaging a lap, and then dive under to ride up past my abs.

  “I can’t believe your body,” she says. “I just don’t. No one’s that stupid-jacked.”

  She crawls over onto my seat and straddles my chest, kicking off her heels. She tosses her head to the side and throws her blonde hair over one shoulder, then eases up with her thighs and gives herself some room to wiggle my jeans down. My cock pops out, straight and rigid.

  I swear I see her lick her lips. She dips in and kisses me fully on the mouth and then makes a path with her kisses downwards until her chin is touching my cock. She touches it playfully with the fingers of one hand. They’re cool. They’re always cool. I flinch and tighten my core. Maya’s sitting up straight again, and she fits her fingers in her mouth one by one to moisten them.

  She starts by kissing the tip, lightly and gently, before she moves her hand over my thicker shaft. Her hand clasps over my root, and she starts to move back and forth, rocking horse gently, while the little pecks she’s giving deepen into real kisses.

  “I give good blow jobs, don’t I?”

  “The best.”

  I lean my head back on the seat and give myself up to her hands, her lips, her tongue, and her mouth. She fits three inches in, four inches. Comes out and scrubs her bottom lip with her teeth and smiles at me, and goes right back down.

  The convulsion starts in my core. Like a bunch of butterflies suddenly taking off. Each new time she comes down and goes in further she raises my chest off the seat. Soon I’m gone. Transported. I feel myself working up, enough to go off.

  “Kirill’t—don’t…”

  “Kirill’t stop, sweetheart?”

  “Kirill’t stop. Christ almighty. Kirill’t… stop.”

  All the pressure makes words difficult, but I don’t care. I don’t need words. Just Maya’s lips, her full, wet lips sucking me off.

  “Are you about to cum, sweetheart? Do you want to cum in my mouth?”

  “Yeah,” I can’t get it out in anything more than a whisper.

  She wraps my dick in one of those deep kisses, and I’m holding back with all I’ve got and not giving a damn who’s walking by or if anyone’s even seen us or any of that crap. Then all of a sudden all I’ve got holding me back isn’t enough as Maya brings me to a pitch and I cum. Maya takes it like a champ. She doesn’t miss a drop. She even licks the tip, like she’s cleaning the end of a popsicle.

  “You’ve got a beautiful cock.” She rests her chin on my chest; her new favorite position. “Has anyone ever told you that before?”

  “Nope. Never.”

  We sit like that a little while longer. It starts to rain, and I’m not really worried about any happy families wandering around the parking lot looking for their car and finding a half-naked bodyguard straddled by a little blond-headed pixie. It’s even nice. I haven’t done anything in a car since I was in middle school. Even Maya telling me I had a beautiful cock is sort of nice, though I’m still not at all sure how to take it. Probably the same way I took the giant wrapper sculpture.

  The forecast for the whole week shows rain. Nothing but cold rain. A possible mix of ice and sleet. It’s only early November, but northern New Hampshire is already having some scattered ice storms and there’s more on the way from what we see on the forecast.

  No way in hell I wanna take Theo’s Mercedes to New York with weather like that. Maya doesn’t have a problem with it. “Not much of a musical girl, anyway,” is how she puts it to me, though I’ve got a feeling that isn’t quite true.

  “We’ll drink up more of the local culture,” she pronounces. Her chin is still on my abs. She likes keeping it there while I take deep breaths, her head rising and falling.

  “You wanna go back to the modern art museum? Or try the exhibit of indigenous photography?”

  “Where did you learn about the exhibit of indigenous photography?”

  “When I was with you.”

  “Oh.” The rain beats down harder. It beats down like a bunch of kids throwing pebbles at our car. “You’re serious about those museums?”

  “If you’re serious, then yes. I’m still watching over you.”

  “I guess. But there hasn’t really been all that much watching recently.”

  “You want me to do something else?”

  Maya takes the tip of my penis and bends it back so that it snaps back up and hits me like a catapult. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I think I do.”

  I peel out of the parking lot just as the freezing shower breaks over us. There’s an unholy roar from the sky. Lightning crackles in the direction of the bay. Maya grabs my arm, and I th
ink she’s just trying to be cute. When I hit a light, I see her face. She looks as frightened as a little girl.

  “I don’t like thunderstorms,” she says. Another big crack of thunder bursts above us. Her fingers dig into my shoulder like claws. “I absolutely do not like thunderstorms.”

  I put my hand over her freezing fingers and stroke them back and forth.

  “You’re safe. Nothing can get you here. We’ll be back at the hotel in a few minutes, and everything will be okay.”

  The light goes green, and I put my hand back on the wheel.

  “No,” Maya says it as an order. “Put it back. Please, Quinn. Put it back.”

  I know better than to argue with the boss’s daughter and do what she says. We drive back like this: I don’t let her hand go once.

  The storm turns out to be nothing more than a leftover piece of another thunderstorm further south, according to the radio station weatherman. A few more minutes and all the rains disappear like nothing ever happened. The sun even shines, a little feebly like a new bruise.

  “Is that everything?” Maya looks around like she’s never seen the sun before.

  “Yeah. That’s everything.”

  “No more thunder right?”

  “Were you listening to the guy?”

  “No,” she says quickly. Then looks at me. I’ve only seen it twice, but I already recognize it. She wants me to roll over onto my tummy so that she can scratch my belly and make me moan.

  “Pull up out back, near the restaurant.” Her hand gravitates towards my thigh.

  “Why?”

  “You damn well know why.”

  “Again?”

  “No. Not the same thing. This time I want you inside me. I want you to spread your arms so that it’s like a cage and I want you to fuck me against the door in the backseat so hard the whole car will move.”

  “Wait five minutes, and we’ll go inside the hotel.”

  “No, Quinn. Out back. Right now.” Her grip on my thigh tightens. By the time we even get to the parking lot I’m sure she’ll have left permanent indentions. “And don’t you ever try to talk me out of it again. I know what I want, and I know when I want it, and it’s your job to get me what I want.”

  There’s part of me who wants to do exactly what she says, who would spend the rest of my life making love to this beautiful girl wherever and whenever she says it. Part of me who lives for taking her up against the backseat in the car or in the shower or against the wall. Who lives for her moans and her whispers and her hands moving over my body like she’s trying to find her way through a cave.

  And there’s the other part which comes when I’ve got her in the crook of my arm or when I’m lying staring up at the hotel ceiling, reminding me of how crazy-stupid all this is. It comes not just because if Theo heard one word about this he’d send in big guys with guns and I’d be made into a splatter on the wall. Or because I’m worried about being found out or discovered with Maya while we’re shaking the car. This part comes because it worries for her - that she’s going too fast and too hard for both of us. That it’s not me who’s dominating her, but her who’s trying to dominate both of us. It worries that she has got enough fuel to both get a rocket airborne and then crash when all the fuel runs out. And crash hard.

  Chapter 13

  Flash forward to Thursday. The sky is churning with some poisonous gray mass that looks like radioactive sludge from another planet. We’ve been getting rain pretty constantly over the past few days, but it hasn’t stopped us from running around Westtown, ducking into bars, restaurants, and cafes, and then doing it right there in the parking lot. Sometimes twice if Maya’s in the mood for it. She’s getting more and more aggressive. I’ve got the bite marks on my shoulder to show for it.

  But something’s off about the whole thing. It’s not paranoia. Not fear. Or any kind of thoughts I’ve been running through recently. Like wondering what’s going to happen once I’ve dropped her back off at her dad’s place, and we’ve just got to go on pretending I’m doing a job making sure the slimeballs in the clubs or the hits on the street do anything to harm her. I don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. What gets me is how desperate she seems. Like something in her thinks she can save herself by making love.

  I run my hand over the windshield and try and see through the fogged-up glass, into the store where Maya’s been gone for at least thirty minutes. It’s a nondescript place near the edge of town that looks like a bomb shelter. Minus a beat-up yellow Pontiac and a BMW, I’m the only one in the lot.

  It’s the kind of place where you imagine a bunch of bookies with their cheap cigars and sweat-stained wife-beaters playing poker inside, which is why I’m asking myself over and over again why in the hell did I let Maya go in by herself? She said she’s been in there dozens of times and that it’s a surprise and if she found that I’d taken one step out of the car she’d get my ass fired so fast I’d be doing spins.

  Another minute. Another two minutes. I reach into my pocket for my case of Tic Tacs and realize I’ve left it in the pocket of the second pair of jeans Maya helped me pick out yesterday. The windows fog up again, and I wipe them again. Then I see Maya. She’s just come out of the store with a big black bag she’s swinging from side to side. At least, I think it’s Maya. Everything matches exactly, except for her long, brown hair. She taps on the side door for me to unlock it.

  “You bought a wig?”

  “Well done, Sherlock.”

  She fiddles inside the bag, snapping it over her arm so I can’t see what is inside.

  “Bought you a present, too.”

  She hands me something small, furry, and bowtie shaped. A fake mustache.

  “There’s no way you can be serious.”

  “Serious as a heart attack. That thing isn’t going to leave your face until we’re through security.”

  I rev the engine. The rain, predictable gray November rain, starts to fall. “What security are you talking about?’

  “At the hotel,” she says. “We’ve got a room reserved.”

  “We already have a room reserved.”

  “That’s Maya Butler’s room, dear. But Stella and Arnie Smith are only now about to check in.”

  “Wait.” I maneuver onto the service road and try sticking the mustache on. The glue has a harsh and bitter smell like latex. “If we’re really doing this, shouldn’t I get to decide my fake name?”

  “Of course not. Why should you decide your fake name when you never even decided your real name? The reservation is in your name anyway, so it’s too late to change anything. Better start getting into character.”

  “What kind of character is Arnie Smith, anyway?”

  “That’s a surprise. Wait ten minutes, if you can.”

  In ten minutes we’re walking through the Four Seasons entrance hall, and I’m trying to keep my mustache on straight while Maya pops her bubblegum and adjusts her sunglasses and slings her black bag of whatever it is she’s bought over on one shoulder like she was Paris Hilton. The receptionist is the same one as on Monday—Sara—and she’s got a look of recognition in her eyes and a smile which fades a little once Maya starts talking. She’s putting on this overblown British accent for no reason whatsoever, stretching her ‘a’ sounds like they were ‘aws,’ and all that time smacking away at her gum.

  We’re on floor two, room sixteen. The lift operator smiles at us as we strut our way down the hallway.

  “See? That was kind of fun, wasn’t it?” Maya says once we’re inside. The suite is identical to the other down to the color of the furniture. The only difference is that everything’s mirrored over. “The mustache doesn’t look half bad on you, either.”

  “I look like an idiot.”

  I tear the thing off and throw it onto the ground, next to Maya’s brown wig.

  “Mustaches are dignifying. And Stella Smith happens to think they’re sexy as hell.” She throws off her coat and grabs the black bag. “Now get undressed. And turn off the lights w
hile you’re at it. I’ll be a second.”

  She disappears into the bathroom.

  I yank off my pants and shirt and shut off the lights, including the lamps. Then I close the drapes and begin to wonder just what kind of kinky sex game this is. I take a look at the bag but don’t go through it. I don’t know if this is because I know she doesn’t want me to, or if part of me doesn’t want to spoil the surprise.