They shut the doors.
We were alone.
And I wasn’t wearing panties.
“What did you say to her?” I asked, pretending to be more interested in reaching for the miso.
“I told her to shut the shoji on the way out. And not to return until I’d opened it myself.”
“Who knew that dining was such a private event for you.” I picked up the bowl and blew across the top.
“It’s not the dining that I was concerned about keeping private.”
My stomach did a flip-flop. Thank goodness I hadn’t actually sipped the soup yet because I might have swallowed wrong.
Donovan chuckled, as if he could interpret my every thought when I couldn’t understand them myself. I drank from the miso and put the bowl down, and after I did, he was waiting with a piece of sushi that he’d dipped in soy sauce and was now holding out to me between chopsticks.
“Am I supposed to appreciate what you’ve done for me too?” I took a bite of the sushi. “Oh, man, I do appreciate what you’ve done for me.” Like, really really. “Donovan, this is amazing.”
I finished the piece then took the tempura he offered.
As he so often did, he watched me attentively. The amusement in his eyes was gone, and now they were dark and intense, not just with desire but with something else. Something heavier. Like the weight I’d felt when he’d washed my hands.
Whatever it was I saw—whether it was there or I just wanted it to be there, it made me shiver. Made me not want to look away.
“Come here,” he growled, abruptly wrapping his arm around my waist and pulling me into his lap. He picked up another piece of sushi, dipped it and fed it to me. “This is better.”
Better for feeding purposes or because now my bare pussy was just inches from the outline of his stiffening cock, I didn’t know. But yes, I agreed it was definitely better.
It was also easier for me to feed him. Since Donovan wouldn’t relinquish the chopsticks and I couldn’t find mine, I used my fingers, which he sucked thoroughly. He let me feed him one more piece like this. The next time he fed me, he reached down under my skirt and drew slow circles on my clit with his thumb at the same time.
“Mmm,” I moaned.
“You like the sashimi?” His eyes taunted as his fingers teased me.
“Yeah, that’s what I liked,” I said sarcastically.
“In that case…” He drew his hand away from where I so badly wanted it.
“No!” I rubbed up against him, begging for his attention to return. “Please.”
His eyes flashed with an idea. He reached behind me and grabbed the Sharpie that he’d tossed on the table after drawing on my arm earlier. Again, he removed the lid with his teeth—unf, super sexy. With my skirt gathered up around my waist, he bent low so he could write something on the skin at the top of my folds, just above my clit. Then he capped the lid and put the marker back in his jacket pocket.
“What did you wri—?”
But my question was cut off by the return of his thumb on my clit, and seriously, I didn’t care much after that. I didn’t care much about anything except the whirlwind building inside of me and trying to maintain enough composure to eat what he gave me when he offered it.
I managed for a while. I even managed to feed him most of the teriyaki salmon at the same time. But then Donovan abandoned the chopsticks, feeding me with his fingers instead, and with the thumb of his other hand still on my clit, he slid two fingers inside my very slick hole.
After that, I was a goner.
“Fuck, you’re so wet.” He pulled his fingers out and the next time he drove them in, he added a third. “You’re so wet, you could take my cock right now. Couldn’t you?”
I’d eaten the entire piece of sushi, but I clutched onto his hand, sucking on his thumb and forefinger as if they were his cock. “Uh-huh,” I moaned, my mouth full.
“Take it out,” he ordered. “Take out my cock.”
I was dazed but I was still aware. Aware of where we were. Aware that we were in public, that the walls were thin, that I could hear the clatter of dishes and the buzz of conversation on either side of us. I could see the shadowed movement of other guests through the shoji. Could they see us? Could they hear us? Did they know what we were doing?
Probably not. But it was possible.
And that possible was all it took to be one of the hottest things I’d ever done.
Without further hesitation, I scrambled with Donovan’s belt and pants. I pulled his underwear down far enough to release his erection. It sprung out, tall and thick and alert. By this time, he was ready with a condom he’d retrieved from his jacket pocket. While he continued to finger me, I unwrapped the latex over his cock.
As soon as I’d gotten him fully covered, he moved his hands to dig into my hips underneath my skirt. He hoisted me up a couple of inches, and even though he was working quickly, all I could think was that he wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. I needed him inside me. I needed him now. Now. Now.
And then there he was at my entrance.
He was right—I was so wet, I could easily have slid down over him. But, like every time he’d been inside me before, he didn’t hesitate or let me take the lead—as soon as he’d notched his head at my hole, he drove up into me without mercy.
“Ah, fuck,” I whimpered, feeling like I was in the first car at the top of the big loop on a rollercoaster. Adrenaline and excitement surged through my veins, my body ready for the ride.
With incredible stamina, he hammered into me, pounding my pussy with such vigor and force that he was soon sweating. Even through his clothes, I could see the strain of his muscles as he struggled to hold me up. He bucked into me so hard I knocked repeatedly against the table behind me—not too loud that we caused a disturbance, but loud enough that people might have noticed. My breasts jiggled despite the fact I was wearing a bra. Something clattered to the floor. Sake spilled and dripped at my side.
I clung onto him desperately, wrapping an arm around his neck to steady myself. With my other hand, I reached down to massage my clit, which started me again toward the orgasm that had already been building.
I was close. He was too. I was tight in this position already, but I closed my knees in tighter against him and tensed my pussy, both to reward and to torture him.
He had his own version of reward and torture—it came in the form of kissing. When his rhythm was established, and our positions were perfected, he leaned forward and claimed my mouth with his. His lips were frantic and frenzied against mine, as though no matter how much I gave him—and I gave him everything—it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. His tongue plunged deeper. His pressure grew stronger. Still, it wasn’t enough.
But it was enough to send me soaring. Higher, higher, higher.
When I came, he came with me, brutally, like two savage animals fucking in the wild. I practically screamed, and he had to push my face into his jacket to muffle the sound. He wasn’t quiet himself, grunting his release into my hair. My legs trembled and my muscles stretched with the fierceness of my climax. Instead of rolling over my body in waves, it hit me like a truck, smacking out of me in one terrible, amazing rip of ecstasy. It hurt how it crashed through me, as though it was too much pleasure to be experienced at one time. As though my orgasm didn’t know about Donovan’s rule to fuck and run, and it had built up expecting that it would be dispensed in bits and pieces and not all in one dose.
I fell on his shoulder and closed my eyes to let myself catch my breath. When it didn’t feel like the world was spinning anymore, I sat up. He was waiting to kiss me once more, slowly this time, with his hand holding my cheek. It was a sweet kiss, even as he controlled it. It was soft. It was something much lighter than the heaviness that every other intimacy with him carried.
Too soon, he was finished. He lifted me off of him and stood me on the floor beside him.
He tied off the condom, wrapped a napkin around it and stuck it in his pocket.
After he’d put himself away, he got into the platter with the hot towels and grabbed one to clean me up.
“Turns out the hot towels are just as useful after the meal,” I joked when he lifted my skirt and swiped the wet rag over my pussy. “More like warm towel now, but perhaps that’s for the best.”
He didn’t say anything, and I realized he was already pulling away, as he always did afterward. I wondered how difficult it was for him to extend this courtesy, to help me clean up. Did this bother him because he’d made rules about his life? Or did the rules about his life come because things like this bothered him?
Whichever it was, I sensed it anguished him to have to deal with me now. We were done, and I should be gone. I already knew that about him, but after today’s message I understood even better how, for him, sex was not a way to connect with others. Sex was something separate. Connecting was something he didn’t do at all.
So I practiced disconnecting too.
I didn’t watch him while he cleaned me up, didn’t think too hard about its intimacy or its eroticism. I let it just be an act. Like sex was just an act. Without meaning, without attachment. Without emotional interpretation.
When he’d finished, we silently wiped up the spilled sake and picked up the platter of tempura that had clattered to the floor. In a few minutes, the room looked fairly decent, considering.
Donovan nodded for me to kneel in my spot, and once I had, he opened the shoji. “I’ll be right back,” he said, turning in the direction of the restrooms, presumably to dispose of the condom.
While he was gone, the waitress came to leave the bill, which Donovan took care of right away on his return.
“When the meal is over, you say gochiso sama deshita,” he said when she returned with his receipt. He said it slowly, and I listened carefully the first time, ensuring that my other arm wouldn’t soon be marked up.
I turned to the waitress and put on a grin. “Gochiso sama deshita.” I brutalized the pronunciation. She nodded politely all the same.
“Perfect,” Donovan said. He stood then gave me his hand to help me up.
“What’s it mean, anyway?” I asked.
“‘It was quite a feast.’”
The waitress bowed to both of us as we stepped past her out into the hallway. Donovan led the way out, which was fine with me. Then I wouldn’t have to feel his distant stare at my back.
But before we’d gotten too far, he stopped and peered over his shoulder. “Sabrina?” His small smile nearly reached his eyes. “Gochiso sama deshita.”
Yes, it definitely had been quite a feast.
As usual, Donovan didn’t ride home with me. He had his driver take me, and he took the car he’d driven himself. Never mind that he could have given his employee the night off and taken me instead. I understood. It didn’t mean anything. I’d given him what he’d come for. Just sex. Good sex, but just sex.
I’d almost forgotten entirely about the marks he’d made on me until later in the shower. I spent most of the time trying to scrub at the ink on my arm, when suddenly I remembered to look at what he’d written lower. I hadn’t thought much about it, assuming he’d written something else that had to do with Japanese culture. Now when I examined the marks, I saw they were actually English and they formed two letters—D K.
Donovan had written his initials on my flesh.
He’d said, in every way possible, that I meant nothing to him beyond sex, and then he’d written his initials on the most private part of my body.
It was another way to mess with me. It had to be. Like how he’d signed off on my grade back in college, the grade I shouldn’t have needed to “make up”. This time he’d signed off on my skin.
It was infuriating and shitty and a turn-on and also…
Also, it hurt.
The problem was, for the first time since I’d known Donovan, his fucked-up games and how much I loved them weren’t the most dangerous parts of our association. The most dangerous part was how much I wished that his brand on my skin meant something different than what it surely did.
The most dangerous part was how much I wished it meant he thought of me as his.
Chapter 25
“But Thanksgiving is almost a month away,” my sister grumbled the next morning over the phone. “You’ve been on the East Coast six weeks, and we still haven’t seen each other.”
I resisted the urge to apologize. To be fair, it wasn’t just my job that had been keeping us apart, but also her class load. Actually, if I spent the rest of the day knocking out some tasks, I could probably take the train up to see her later and come back the next day.
“I wish I could,” she said when I offered. “But I have a group project that’s due Monday, and we’re working on it all day tomorrow.”
“Oh. It was just a thought.” I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to see her until right then.
Audrey seemed to pick up on my melancholy. “Are you okay? Is there something you need to talk about? Guy stuff?”
Guy stuff. Yes, actually that’s exactly what it was.
I was both confused and hungover from sex with Donovan the night before, and while I hadn’t particularly been looking to talk about it before, now that she was on the line, I yearned to have someone to sort through the strange non-relationship.
But also I wasn’t ready to put my feelings about it into words.
I shouldn’t even be having feelings about it in the first place. I was sure that was against the rules of his Just Sex policy.
“Nope. I just miss you.” It was true too. I tried to think of an alternate way to get more sister time. “When you come for Thanksgiving, can you come earlier than Wednesday? I’ll have to work some of the time, but we could make up for lost time that way.”
“I have the whole week off,” she said, sounding instantly on board. “I could come up Friday after class. And maybe we could see some shows! Will there be ice-skating at Rockefeller Center by then?”
“Probably.” I didn’t honestly know, never mind that Audrey couldn’t ice-skate to save her life.
“We definitely have to go ice-skating, Bri! And we can do the MOMA. And One World Trade Center…”
She spent the next twenty minutes giving me a list of all the things we should do on her vacation to Manhattan, about a month’s worth of activities. There wasn’t any way we’d get through even a quarter of them, but it was good to talk to her.
It was especially nice to have a few minutes when I wasn’t thinking about Donovan. Not that I spent all of my free time with him on my mind.
When we hung up, he was there in my mind though, immediately. I pulled down my yoga pants and panties and stood in front of my bathroom mirror. His initials were faded with the scrubbing I’d given them the night before, but they were still clearly visible.
Why did I like the look of them on my skin so much? It was erotic and it turned me on, yes. But there was more to it than that. It felt like he’d given me his letterman’s jacket. Or like he’d asked me to wear his class ring. It felt like he’d claimed me, and if that was his intention, then I really didn’t understand the terms of Just Sex.
There were other terms I didn’t understand. What were the rules of this arrangement? Was there even an arrangement? Could I call him up for booty calls if I wanted to or was he the only one allowed to do that? Was there a length of time I was supposed to wait in between dates?
Was he sleeping with other women right now too?
My stomach suddenly dropped like a ball of lead at the thought of him in the arms of another woman.
Because it was tacky and it made me feel slutty, of course. Because it created health risks. Not because I had an emotional attachment to him. Not because I was jealous.
Point was, this no strings, private affair of ours needed to be further discussed.
Taking my phone, I snapped a picture of his artwork on my pussy. Then I typed out a text message to him—Can we talk?
Pretty sure that he wouldn’t respond
unless I spoke his language, I attached the photo and pushed send.
Donovan still hadn’t responded by Monday.
I’d come to the conclusion that either I was not allowed to reach out to him, our arrangement was over, or he wanted to make me squirm—something I knew he enjoyed doing.
Well, if that was the goal, it was working. Not only was I antsy waiting for his reply, but I was also missing him physically. I was desperate for the taste of his lips. I longed for the roughness of his grip. I yearned for the overwhelming way he rode my cunt.
It made me desperate and distracted all through my day. A few times I even tried walking by his office, but he was always in a meeting, and he was gone by the time I got done with my work.
Lying in bed that night, I tried texting him. I’m thinking dirty thoughts of you.
I attached a picture of the bottle he’d told me to use as a dildo sometime when he’d fucked me in my apartment.
I brought myself to orgasm three times before I was finished.
Donovan never replied.
“Tom,” I said, stopping my employee from leaving the conference room after our Thursday morning team leader meeting. “I’m really impressed with the way you’ve handled all the details for SummiTech’s presentation at the Think Expo tomorrow night. It was thrown at you without much notice, and your team has taken it on without missing anything.”
I hadn’t spoken to Tom Burns one-on-one since he’d walked in on Donovan almost kissing me weeks ago in the strategy room. Even after he’d spoken kindly about me to Weston, I hadn’t wanted things to be awkward. But he’d shown consistently good work on his team, and when SummiTech had asked Reach to put together an ad and materials to unveil their latest products, I knew Tom was the guy to head up the marketing side.
“Thanks,” he said, seemingly surprised about the acknowledgement. “I appreciate the compliment.”
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 22
