by Emily Bishop
I didn’t want to sneak around. Like fuck was I afraid of that puffed-up mayor prick, but making things difficult for Max or Olivia wasn’t an option.
“Let’s grab a hotel room. Just in the next town,” I said, my voice low. “Pretend we’re on vacation.” I spun toward Max, watching as his face broke out in laughter. Rain continued to drip from his nose. “What do you say, Max? You like going on vacation?”
“Uh, I guess. The other ones we took were always with Grandpa.”
“It’ll be different than the other ones,” I told him, overstepping slightly. “I promise.”
In a flurry of the chaos, I sped us from the barn house and away from Randall toward Raleigh. It was the capital of North Carolina, a place Olivia and I had only gone to for the occasional school field trip. I could remember slinking into a gas station in the middle of Raleigh, while the rest of the kids had loitered outside of a museum, to grab a pack of cigarettes and puff, angrily, waiting for the school bus to arrive. Something about being in the city had fed those dark demons in my heart, assuring me that my style, my energy, was more suited for something of that size. For those kinds of people.
The smaller, gleaming skyscrapers of Raleigh peeked up from behind the hills as we sped toward it, the radio flickering in and out as the storm messed with the frequencies. Between us, Olivia and I held hands, listening as Max told me more about his school life. He was fascinated with animals and wanted to “learn more” about what it took to be a veterinarian. “I want a dog, but Grandpa said not under his roof.”
My gaze moved toward Olivia, watching her face clench. “We’ll get a dog,” she said. “We will.”
A million questions raced behind my tongue. Questions about how much her father had belittled her, and whether he truly had the power to control them.
Dammit. Fuck, it was all my fault. If I hadn’t lost my fucking mind. If I had actually stuck around, after the fire… But it wasn’t like I had a choice, after that. The world had shifted around me, pinning me as the enemy number one of Randall.
But I wouldn’t hurt her again. I wasn’t capable of it.
When I caught sight of Max in the rearview, my heart bumped up, telling me that this kid? He was unequivocally mine. He spoke like me. His arms and legs whirled like spaghetti when he ran, just as mine had, before the muscles. He spoke only after thinking long and hard about it, his tongue articulating each emotion with more precision than most eleven-year-olds. That part—that part wasn’t me, and I fucking knew it. I had been whip-fast with an insult, immediate in lashing out. Perhaps this was Olivia’s patience, through and through. The patience that had left her latched to her small town.
I parked the car at a hotel on the outskirts of Raleigh. In the back, Max was already assisting Maggie with her seatbelt, helping her into the air. It was still foggy with humidity, the pavement slick with rain. I guided my family in, shepherding them toward the front desk, where I ordered a two-bedroom suite on the top floor.
“The kids will love to see over the city,” the clerk told me, eyeing Maggie and Max. “So different in ages! You must be a good older brother.”
Max nodded his head, his face growing solemn.
“You have no idea,” I told the clerk. “Really, just more than we could have ever asked for.”
I slipped my hand through Olivia’s and placed my other on Maggie’s back. I guided them toward the elevator, where we stood in silence as it took us toward the top. The mirror in front of us brought Olivia’s gaze to mine. Heat. Sensuous fucking heat. Christ almighty.
The first room of the hotel suite held a large sofa and two kid-sized beds, with a television stretched out on the wall. As Maggie’s mouth lurched open with a yawn, Olivia and Max set to work, deciding on what to do for dinner. They pored over the room-service menu, Olivia scrunching at her hair with her fingers, drying it out. Her movements were short, feminine bursts, and her breasts, round and firm, pulled her wet dress taut across her chest. I imagined undoing her bra in the next room, seeing those breasts again.
Fuck, I had to keep myself under control here until it was time.
Since when are you okay with this? Too complicated, right? Maybe. Maybe I couldn’t open up again, but damn I wanted to. Wanted to take her right now. Fuck her, claim her, again and again.
We ate dinner together, the four of us, and then watched as Maggie and Max collapsed, slowly, into the cushions of the couch. Maggie slipped beneath the covers of her bed just after seven-thirty, and Max finally retreated at eight-thirty.
Olivia tipped her head toward the next room, giving me a half smile. After sipping two whiskey and cokes throughout the movie Max had picked, my joints were loose, my cock straining, thick, filled up. Needing her. Needing to feel that wet soft pussy pulling around it, pulling me into another world.
We clicked the door closed behind us, staring into one another’s eyes. Olivia’s lips parted, wet and soft, hunting for words.
“What a strange day,” she said finally, shrugging. “What a weird and beautiful day.”
“Should we talk about it?” I asked her, taking a small step toward her. I lifted my hands on either side of her waist. My thumbs traced the softness of her skin. “About what it all means?”
She shook her head, almost imperceptibly. “I want to pretend that it was all just the same as it always was. That we’ve been allowed this for our entire lives.”
“Me, too,” I murmured.
I couldn’t resist her a second longer.
I placed my arms around her, lifted her up, the inner beast just fucking roaring for this woman. My woman. Her legs found my waist, tracing around me, clinging to me. Her palms flattened at the muscles of my chest, her thumb whirling around my nipple. Still, our eyes burned with hunger for one another.
“Kiss me,” she demanded. And I did, parting her lips with my tongue so that mine could fall against hers. She tasted of peppermint, of wine, of memories.
A moan escaped from her lips and echoed through my mouth, filling me. I pushed against the edge of the door, tipping my head into it as she kissed me with constant fire.
My cock strained harder, outside my boxers, the droplets of cum becoming more insistent and dotting my leg. Unable to resist, I brought my fingers under her blue dress, finding her little G-string beneath.
It perfectly framed her ass, her supple, perfect ass, and I lashed it off in a moment, ripping it. Her moan grew when I ripped it, echoing against the mirror, the window that reflected all of Raleigh. The big city that we’d only ever dreamed about.
I thrust her onto the bed, and her legs parted for me. Between, her pussy was soft, the red nub of her clit waiting. Olivia brought her finger to the center of herself, her perfect, gleaming nail hunting for the clit and then finding it. She rubbed at herself, her movements making her hips undulate. My hands found my belt and ripped it from my pants, tossing it to the ground.
“You’re a bad girl, baby,” I told her. “Touching yourself like that.”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m gonna teach you a lesson. Gonna show you that you can’t touch yourself like that without me. You have to do exactly what I say. From here on out. Do you hear me?” I asked her.
In response, her eyes widened, showing the whites. “Tell me what to do,” she said to me.
I tossed my pants and then my boxers to the ground. My cock hung in the air between us, hard and red and nearly bursting with cum. I gripped it, hard, and drummed my hand up and down it, feeling at the cum that dribbled from the tip.
“Put a finger in your cunt,” I told her. “Open yourself up.”
Olivia reached deeper between her legs, finding the sweet wetness that pooled there, for her. For me. She placed a single finger at the base, easing it inside, eyes closing. Her lips parted, glinting with the light of the hotel lamp.
“Another one,” I insisted, loving the way her fingers disappeared in the darkness between her legs. “Deeper. Feel at
the G-spot. Feel what I feel, baby, when I fuck you.”
She nodded slowly, allowing a second finger into her pussy. I could smell her, even from feet away. Reaching forward, watching her grow lost in herself, I pressed both her knees toward the mattress. Her legs were so wide, stretching out for me, and my cock was poised to thrust into her. A bit of cum dribbled onto the little soft bit of skin between her belly button and her cunt, forming a line. Her eyes parted, gazing at it.
And then, she lost her mind. She sat up from the comforter, her mouth opening wide. Her lips closed around the base of my cock, and her tongue swirled. One of her hands reached up and cupped my balls, toying with them as she shoved as much of me as she could deep into her throat.
Fuck me.
She took hold of me, as she became this little minx—so eager to spread herself out for me, to press my cock against the back of her throat. My fingers found her strands of hair and rolled her head back and forth as she gave me the best blowjob of my life. It had nothing in common with a blowjob she’d given me in the backseat of that car, back at the carnival. And it held no comparison to any other woman I’d met. Every flick of her tongue drew me deeper into her. Every moan that escaped her lips traveled through my cock, across my balls, and deep into my belly—where I felt a stirring for her I couldn’t deny.
Jesus. What the hell were we going to do?
I’d come in seconds if I didn’t do something here. Jesus, it was too good. Too connected.
I pressed against her shoulder, shoving her onto the bed. Her tits bounced, and her belly stretched out flat. Still, her legs were wide for me, her fingers tracing the wetness between her legs.
“Fuck me, baby,” she said, in a voice that was both hers and the old Olivia’s, the Olivia I’d pined for. “Fuck me until I can’t feel myself anymore.”
Chapter 14
Olivia
Eric did just that.
He rushed into me, shoving his cock up to the hilt, so that the lips of my pussy stretched along his girth. My fingers traced across his abs as he rammed himself into me, my head falling back against my pillow.
He folded over me so that his chest pressed against my tits. His nose tilted against mine, and his eyes held onto me—so inviting, so urgent.
I fell into an orgasm, on a tilt-a-whirl of passion. My lips parted, and my legs clung to him tighter.
“Baby, I think I’m going to come,” he sighed into my ear, cupping my head. “I’m going to fucking come inside you.”
He pumped once, twice, three times, growling, tugging on my hair, biting my neck. Our bodies were alert and our minds melding. I cried out against him. Jesus Christ. This. This was all I’d wanted.
Eric collapsed against me, then. He pulled out and shot some cum across my stomach, leaving me strung out, my heart bursting, each beat filled with something a lot like love. Beside me, he sighed heavily, bringing his arm around my slim frame and holding onto me like I might run away.
What the hell were we going to do?
The entire day had been a daydream, bursting with laughter, with Maggie’s little silly dances, Max finally putting his energy to good use. I’d fallen in love with Max and Eric together, with the way Eric ruffled his hair. How natural they were together. How alive. But each good moment soured when I remembered those lost, first days of my pregnancy: a baby brewing inside me as my scar closed up on my face.
My father telling me, over and over again, that he’d been right about Eric. That I couldn’t trust him. That if he ever lurked back into my life, I had to turn him away at the door. “This baby doesn’t belong to him,” my father had burned into my brain. “This baby will only become good if we train him. If I fight. If I become his father figure. And if you buckle down and become the best mother you can be. Not like this bimbo you’ve become. Jesus. Didn’t we take you to church? Didn’t we try to instill any fucking values in you?”
I shifted and forced the thoughts away. My father was a manipulative asshole, and he’d taken advantage of me at my weakest moment. That was all there was to it. None of what he’d said was true.
“I’ve been trying to go through his things, Olivia. Trying to figure out how to clean it out. To undo all the fucking mess he created. Not just in my life, but in my mother’s. In mine,” Eric sighed, his voice soft. “But Jesus, it’s hard. It’s like. Can I possibly fight all this pain he caused? Can I really enter the kitchen and not remember the time he had my mother pressed up against the refrigerator with a knife drawn?”
I curled into him. “You know you’re not like him, right?” I whispered. “I know you fear that. I know you handled Maggie with the thought that you could become him, any day. But you’ve pushed it away, masterfully. And the way you’re handling Max? It’s brilliant. He’s never looked more awake.”
Eric’s eyes darkened. His lips parted, then closed, as if he waited for the right answer to flicker in from the heavens. “I want to take care of you. All of you,” he said. “I worry that Randall puts a poison in me. I’ve been feeling it since I arrived. I can see him—Isaac—everywhere. And I’ve been remembering…my past self. Like that time I almost attacked the cop, Olivia? I was uncontrollable. And then the carnival…”
He’d dropped the word.
The carnival. The fucking carnival. My nostrils flared, and I shook my head, my hair burrowing against the pillow. “Don’t,” I whispered. “We’re in Raleigh. We’re thirty-one years old. We’re a million mindsets away from that reality.”
He listened. He leaned toward me, cupping my bottom lip with his two terribly tender ones. Soon, we dove into one another again, our ears still rushing with the weight of what we’d said, and what we hadn’t. Our bodies responded. But all the other questions remained.
Could we move away?
Could we pick up and leave?
Did either of us have the means to support a full-on family?
Chapter 15
Eric
I needed to tell her she didn’t have to come to the funeral. That if it was too much for her, too much to demand of an already complicated, sticky situation, I would nod at the sparse crowd, shake their hands—and I would do it alone, without a partner.
Certainly without the mayor’s daughter. And then? Then what? See if Olivia wanted to come with me, to build something? I imagined her strutting down the New Orleans sidewalk, her hair whirling behind her as trumpets and trombones blared from above. Imagined her slipping a paper bag of groceries atop the counter at my place, sticking a fist against her tight waist and saying, her eyes no-nonsense, “Listen, baby, we need a bigger place.”
How could I get us there? How could I drive out the panic of the next twenty-four hours and lift us onto the other side?
But we dressed in silence, watching each other in the haze of the morning—both knowing we had to return to our own lives, to our own beds.
In the next room, Maggie leapt up and down on Max’s bed, awaking him. “Max! you have to get up, now!” she cried. “It’s time to go!”
“Do you think they always thought they were doing the right thing?” Olivia asked me. Her blue dress curled around her knees. Unbuttoned at the top, I could still see a bit of her breast, poking through. I wanted to race forward, to bring my lips around it and dart my tongue over and over—feeling at the perkiness, make her moan.
“Who?”
“Our parents,” Olivia sighed, buttoning up the last of it. Closing herself off. “Do you think, even in his evilness, your dad was thinking he was doing the right thing, in raising you? Do you think my dad still thinks every decision he makes is right? I mean, everything I do, I do for Max. I do it so he can go to the best school. So he can have the best music lessons. So he can—fuck, I don’t know. Get somewhere in the world. I can’t imagine being a parent any other way. Can you?”
My arms grew heavy with the memory of the first time I’d held Maggie. Her little eyes, peeking up beneath the white of the swaddling sheet, had demanded so much in their innocence. How could any dec
ision I made in the wake of that not be impacted in some capacity? It had baffled me when her mother, Candace, had left.
“My dad, running a fist into me every other day?” I asked. “You think that was somehow him thinking it was the right way to raise a kid?”
Olivia’s eyes drew toward the floor. She looked vaguely like Maggie in this moment, stuck in a second in time—unable to see herself out of it.
“I should have done something. I should have helped you,” Olivia said, her voice rising. “Jesus, all those years you were racing into my bed, hiding from him. And my dad was right there, knowing what Isaac was doing to you and your mother. It was fucking wrong, Eric…”
“It was wrong, but it’s over,” I told her, slipping my belt through its notches and locking it tight. “It’s over.”
Olivia swallowed. In the next room, Max kicked on his favorite cartoons, speaking over the top to Maggie. “This is a good one. In this one, he turns his dog into a unicorn, and they fly to this other land where everyone is a garden gnome.” Maggie giggled at these nonsensical words.
“I should go with you today,” Olivia said. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone. Say goodbye to him. Stand up there like you—like you represent him, or something. You’re nothing like him.”
“Tell that to the rest of the town,” I tossed to her, turning toward the door. “Tell them I’m not just the monster who lit the carnival on fire. Tell them I’m not the one who gave their precious Olivia that scar.”
“You know they can’t see outside of themselves,” Olivia replied.
“Max is a fucking good kid,” I whispered, my voice low. “Are you going to raise him in this place where no one can see beyond what I did to you? Where all anyone sees is the grandson of the mayor? One he hates.”
