by JD Nixon
“Hello, beautiful,” I said, craning my head to check out his dinner. I snatched a grilled prawn from his plate and popped it in my mouth. “Yum. Perfection.”
“Sorry, Tilly, but you’re usually home much later these days,” he said with a sad face. “We didn’t save any dinner for you.”
“Sure you did,” I grinned. I grabbed a plate for myself and walked around the table, raiding everyone’s dinner. I pilfered a prawn and some potato salad and green salad from every plate. The others let me good-naturedly, but when I came to Clive, he held his hand over his place, refusing me access. Hurriedly darting away from him, I sat next to Niq, who slipped me some more food. I kissed his forehead while Daniel went to the fridge and poured me a crisp, cold glass of wine.
“Perfection,” I repeated with contentment, and I didn’t know if I was referring to the prawns, the wine or Heller, who’d just appeared through the doorway.
Daniel sighed with exasperation. “If I’d known everyone would be home for once, I would have cooked more.”
“No matter, I will eat later,” said Heller, his eyes resting on me. I wondered if he planned on having me for dinner.
He stripped off his polo shirt and his cargo pants, proceeding to also strip off his boxers. Since we’d started sleeping together, he’d reverted to his previous practice of going nude in the hot tub. I suppose it was a bit hypocritical of me to protest about him flashing his delectable man parts on the rooftop, considering all the things I’d done with them in the bedroom . . . and the bathroom and the lounge room and the kitchen . . . oh yeah, and on the rooftop too. Not to mention I was the only one of us who even seemed to notice or care when he nuded up.
“Join me when you are finished, Matilda,” he instructed, stepping into the bubbling hot water, sinking down to his chin with his eyes closed.
“Is that an order?” I asked, miffed at being bossed around in such a preemptive manner.
He cracked open one eye. “If you prefer.” He closed his eye again and smiled lazily. “Or you could consider it a suggestion.”
“A suggestion you’d highly recommend?” And yes, my voice was a little tart.
His smile became only smugger. “Highly.”
As a small and ineffectual protest, I took my time eating my dinner and helping Daniel to wash up. Then I dawdled downstairs to change into a bikini. By the time I came back up again, the others had joined Heller in the hot tub. I tried to slip into the water between Daniel and Niq, but Heller grabbed my hand and yanked me over to his side to sit next to him, draping his arm over my shoulder. I was very conscious of the press of his bare thigh against mine.
While we chatted inconsequentially, he ran his hand up and down my arm and played with my hair, twirling it around his fingers. I tried to ignore him nuzzling my neck with his lips, attempting to carry on telling the twins about Seductively Sextravagant as they were quite interested. But that became increasingly difficult when he began kissing my neck upwards to nibble on my earlobe.
“Heller,” I warned, a bit embarrassed. Nobody ever felt comfortable witnessing public displays of affection. Not even me, and I was the object of the affection.
“Yes, my sweet?” he murmured, trailing his lips over to my mouth and kissing me.
“Yuck!” declared Niq, his face scrunched in disgust. “If you’re going to get all mushy, I’m out of here. I’d rather be gaming any day. It’s more fun to be chopping off heads than watching you two kiss.” All delivered with a full tanker load of adolescent scorn.
He stood, water cascading from him. And in that careless way teenagers have, he tore off downstairs, leaving huge puddles of water and a discarded soaked towel on the floor behind him.
We talked for a while longer, Heller continuing to be overly attentive. He tugged at the bow on my bikini top. I slapped his hand away.
“Stop it.”
“You should go topless up here, Matilda. You have beautiful breasts. None of us would mind.”
“I would!” I said hotly.
He chuckled softly. “You should at least try it.”
“That is so not going to happen.”
“Good!” said Daniel. “I sure don’t want to see your boobs. It’s bad enough seeing your butt on TV all the time.”
I splashed water in his direction and he splashed some back at me. We kept at it, giggling, until Heller stepped in, “Enough.”
I splashed one more time before Heller grabbed my wrists, stopping me. He took advantage of my immobilisation by leaning down and kissing me, a long, sensual embrace involving a lot of tongue.
“Gross,” judged Daniel, looking away. “Get a room, you two.”
Heller lifted his head and considered him. “That is a very good idea, Daniel. Let’s go to my bedroom, Matilda.”
“Heller,” I protested weakly, embarrassed again.
He sighed. “What is the matter now?”
“You shouldn’t be so obvious. Nobody wants to know . . . you know.”
He laughed. “What, Matilda? That we are going to my bedroom to have sex? I’m sure they can deduce that without any clues from me.”
“Heller!”
“Is it so wrong for others to know I desire you and want to have sex with you?”
“No! . . . Yes! . . . There’s no need to be so . . .” I spluttered to a stop, never finishing the sentence or the thought, because at that moment he arose from the water, nearly taking Daniel’s eye out with his huge hard-on.
“Heller!” I screeched in shock, and if I’d thought my embarrassment level was already high, it suddenly won an Olympic record for pole-vaulting. Heller probably could have won some record vaulting with his ‘pole’ too.
He swung around until it pointed at me.
“Geez! Be careful with that thing, Heller,” laughed Sid, dodging. “It’s dangerous.”
“Come, Matilda. As you can see, I’m ready for you.”
I could not believe that someone could be as mortified as I was at that moment and still breathe. It just didn’t seem scientifically or medically possible.
Heller stepped out of the hot tub.
“Put a towel around yourself, at least,” I squeaked.
He looked down at his hard-on and smiled. “I don’t think that will be of much use in this situation.”
“Please!”
He shrugged and wrapped a clean towel around his waist, but he was right – his hard-on just poked itself through the edges of the towel, as if it was looking for me.
“Oh God,” I groaned to myself faintly, dazedly stepping out of the hot tub, avoiding everyone’s eye.
He took a towel from the stack and began to dry me down, his boner prodding my stomach each time he stepped closer. Not sparing us a second glance, the others began to chat again, as if nothing had happened. Heller tossed my towel over the back of a chair and took my hand, leading me through the door.
“Have fun!” Daniel called out casually as we left and the three men continued their conversation.
“It’s not right to have a hard-on in public, especially when you’re nude,” I complained as we walked down the stairs to his flat.
“I wasn’t in public. I was in my own house,” he pointed out with infuriating logic.
“But the guys could see it!”
“I wasn’t as though it was on purpose. It just happened. These things do on occasion, my sweet. Daniel and the twins understand. After all, they have personal knowledge of the male body. They know an erection is an entirely natural reaction of a man to a very attractive, skimpily-dressed young lady. Especially a young lady the man knows will have sex with him later in the evening.”
“You’re making a big assumption,” I huffed. “Who said I’m going to have sex with you tonight?”
We reached the door to his flat, his hard-on not having diminished in eagerness in the slightest. He pushed me against the hall wall, his towel parting further and his boner slipping between my thighs. He kissed me long and hard, languidly rocking his hips to move
his hardness in and out against me.
“I say you will.”
“What makes you so sure?” I breathed against his mouth, my chest rapidly rising and falling. He was rubbing me up in the most exquisite way.
He cupped my breast with his hand, running his thumb across my bikini-clad nipple, his voice as husky as mine. “Because I want you to sleep with me, my sweet. I need you to. The world doesn’t feel right when I can’t have sex with you.”
“That’s not very romantic,” I said, unimpressed.
He searched his brains trying to find those magic words that men have hunted for thousands of years – the words that make a woman say “yes”.
He tried again. “The world doesn’t feel right when I can’t spend time with you.” He paused a beat. “Time having sex with you, an activity I enjoy quite a lot.”
I laughed at his clumsy attempt at ‘romance’. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“No,” he agreed. “But I want it.” And with a deft couple of flicks of his hand, he untied all the bows in my bikini set, leaving me helpless, hastily clamping the loose scraps of material to myself for decency’s sake, and only too aware of the security camera in his hallway. I really had to stop wearing that bikini around him.
“Heller!” I squealed. It sometimes felt as though I spent my whole life saying that one word.
“Better hide in here, Matilda. Looks as though you’re having problems with your bikini,” he grinned evilly, pushing me through the doorway to his flat, me shuffling, jammed up against the wall, to keep my bikini on.
But once inside he pulled my hands away and my bikini fell to the floor leaving me totally naked. He yanked off his towel and threw it over his shoulder, leaving him naked again as well. And . . . well . . . neither of us left his flat for the rest of the night.
The next morning, I staggered down to the security section to meet up with Bick again. And even though it was a Sunday, there were still quite a few men standing around, trading crude jokes and insults while preparing to go out on jobs. Security work never took a break, definitely not a career for those who enjoyed the structure of regular Monday to Friday, nine to five employment.
The atmosphere changed the second I stepped inside the room. All the men stopped talking to look over at me, speculative gleams in their eyes and grins on their faces. I scanned them, noticing that Farrell wasn’t there. Heller’s insistence we have nothing to do with each other made me hyper-conscious of his presence in any environment.
“What?” I collectively demanded from the room, immediately suspicious. “What’s going on?”
“Enjoy yourself last night, Tilly?” asked one in an innocent voice.
“I might have,” I said with a hint of attitude. “Most people do on a Saturday night. Did you?”
“Not as much as some,” he smirked, and the room erupted into a burst of snickering.
What the hell? I appealed to Bick, “What’s going on here?”
He almost looked abashed as he gently took my arm and led me to a quieter corner, leaning down to speak to me discreetly. “Um, maybe a couple of the guys in the surveillance section shared with the rest of us some very interesting security camera footage taken in the hallway to Heller’s flat last night.”
“No,” I denied, dismayed, not wanting to believe that could possibly happen. Surely Heller wouldn’t tolerate his men distributing footage of his private life. Definitely not, I assured myself. But that could only mean . . .
I violently pushed past some of the men in my way and stormed out of the security section, up the stairs again. I burst into Heller’s main office, startling Daniel who was at his desk, industriously punching numbers into a spreadsheet. I ignored him and his greeting and headed straight for Heller’s enclosed corner office, not even bothering to knock, slamming the door shut behind me.
He looked up from some paperwork, his beautiful, expensive pen poised in his scarred hand. He raised a cool eyebrow. “Matilda?”
“Tell me you didn’t know about this!” I almost shouted. Almost. Well, maybe I didn’t quite hit the ‘almost’ mark. Oh, all right, I’ll be honest – I shouted.
He flinched as if hit by a sonic boom and yeah, maybe I shouted rather loudly. “What are you talking about? Or rather, yelling about?”
“The men. They’re laughing at me because of what happened between us last night in your hallway, which, in case you’re having trouble remembering, is fitted with your security cameras.”
“Why would they laugh?”
I sighed and it was a big enough, melodramatic enough, sigh to encompass the frustration of every woman so far born on Earth who’d had to deal with a wilfully ignorant man. “Gee, I don’t know why they’d laugh, Heller. Maybe it was because they saw your hard-on and saw you dry-humping me and saw you completing untying my bikini, leaving me virtually naked, before pushing me inside your flat.” I stopped for a second to glare at him some more. “Maybe, just maybe, they deduced that you were going to give me a good, hard fucking! And maybe, just maybe, that gave them all a great big old smutty laugh.” And my sarcasm level was so high at that point, it could only have been charted by the most distant of the planet-roving droids.
He frowned his disapproval at my blunt language, leaned back in his chair and contemplated me. At the same time, Bick nervously knocked on the door, opening it cautiously.
“We have to go, Tilly. Barb and Roger will be late otherwise.”
“Go downstairs, Barnes,” Heller ordered. “Matilda will be there in a few minutes.” Bick scooted away gratefully.
“I heard about it. Are you not pleased?” he asked.
I wanted to punch something, preferably him. “Pleased? Are you fucking kidding me? No, I’m not pleased. Tell me whether you allowed or encouraged the distribution of that footage.”
He stared at me silently, which was answer enough for me.
“Why are you doing this, Heller?” I spat out. “Sending out a message to the troops that I’m your woman? That they need to keep their hands off me or else?”
“Or else,” he said simply, confirming to me everything I’d said.
I didn’t know if was more upset or angry. “You’re unbelievable. How could you?”
“Go to Barnes, Matilda. He has a job to do and I won’t let you hold him up.”
If I’d had something in my hand I would have thrown it straight at his head. Instead, I flounced out, slamming his door so hard the window next to it shook. I kicked over a couple of chairs on my way to the door and left without saying goodbye to Daniel. I stomped down every step to the basement, where Bick waited patiently in a 4WD for me.
Noticing the thunderous expression on my face, he wisely remained silent as he reversed and drove up the ramp out of the garage. We travelled without saying a word for a couple of kilometres.
“I saw the footage,” he ventured, casting me a hesitant glance. “Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was pretty hot. You can tell that Heller’s really into you.” I scorched him with my eyes and he flushed. “Aw man, I didn’t mean that he was into you in a physical sense, although obviously he likes to get into you as often as possible, not that I would put it like that, of course. Um, er, I meant it more in a sense that . . .” And clocking my grim unrelenting features, he petered out.
“Shut up, Bick.”
“I think I’ll just shut up now.” We drove in silence for the rest of the way.
At the hotel, I ran up to bring Roger and Barb to the car, while Bick idled the 4WD out the front. They’d dressed as befitting their status as major stars again. Barb had squeezed into a snugly cut, red leather ensemble, her taut tanned midriff on display, her enormous boobs barely contained in the cow hide, the top being zipped down to its last few centimetres, her copious bounty spilling out the front. The tight mini-shorts she wore highlighted her perky buttocks and toned thighs. She’d left her hair long and loose and it curled coquettishly around her shoulders. She looked gorgeous and stunning and I felt like a
frump in a potato sack standing next to her. I really had to get to the gym more often, I thought morosely, sucking in my stomach.
Roger was dressed immaculately too, but really, who cared what he wore? Nobody paid him any attention. All eyes were on Ms Busty, not him.
I bundled them into the 4WD and we sped off, parking in the priority bay at the conference centre again. Once more, Garrett hurried forward to greet them, enveloping them in his devoted attention. We whisked them to the HUMP Productions booth without further delay, where the morning panned out much the same as yesterday’s had.
“Everything okay, Tilly?” asked Barb in a kind, confidential voice as we escorted them from their booth to the auditorium.
“No, not really,” I admitted, rather subdued.
“I thought you seemed a bit down today. Man problems?”
“How did you guess?”
She laughed. “They’re usually the cause of all of a woman’s problems. Was your guy being a jerk?”
“Yep. That’s a good word for him. Though I would probably add arrogant in front of it.”
We didn’t have a chance to say any more, Roger and her having to ascend the stage to the enthusiastic welcome of the cheering crowd.
I barely even watched what was going on up on the big screen. One of their ‘favourite’ scenes was showing, another one where Roger pumped Barb and another two women endlessly and mechanically, all of them looking quite bored. Instead, dark thoughts filled my head about Heller and the precise scathing words I was going to blast him with when I saw him again tonight. Or maybe I’d just lock my flat door and refuse to speak to him all together. I couldn’t make up my mind which action would give me greater satisfaction and a greater salve to my hurt feelings.
Fully occupied with those doleful considerations, the time slipped by quickly and it seemed like only a blink later that Barb and Roger’s presentation was over for another day. On our return to the HUMP Productions booth, we could hardly fail to notice a new entertainer present in the arcade near the booth. I actually cracked a smile for the first time that day as we watched a guy dressed in a giant penis costume – a startlingly realistic and rather terrifying representation of one – wiggling and dancing passionately to the thumping music that played all day throughout the centre. Realising he had an audience, a small group of other patrons now also milling around him, the entertainer performed for us with gutso. His unbridled enthusiasm for putting on a show and cheeky features left none of us unsmiling. It was such a ridiculous sight that it was impossible, even for someone currently as grumpy as me, to not be amused.
