Hate to Lose You

by Penny Wylder

  I slide my hands into her hair, hold on tight as she places those perfect, pouty lips around the head of my cock, and slowly pushes forward, drawing me into her mouth. I gaze down at her, savoring the view of those big, innocent-looking blue eyes fixed on mine even as she takes my thick cock into her mouth.

  “That’s right, dirty girl. Suck my cock.”

  Her lips touch her fist where it’s wrapped around my cock, and she starts to pull back, but I reach down with one hand and pull her hand off the base of my shaft.

  “Ah, ah. Not yet. I want to feel my cock all the way in that pretty little mouth of yours. I know you can get me into your throat.” With my other hand, I pull her head forward, farther onto my cock.

  She takes in a deep breath, and grips my ass with her hands at the same time, before she pushes forward, taking me all the way into her mouth now. The spongy tip of my cock touches the back of her throat, and I groan, my eyes still fixed on her as her eyelids flutter with concentration.

  “Fuck yes, Daisy, just like that.”

  I pull her back a little, and she breathes in again, her tongue still swirling around the underside of my cock. I rock back on my heels, giving her time to catch her breath before I thrust forward again. “God, your mouth is fucking magic,” I murmur.

  Before long we find a rhythm, and I’m moving fast enough to make her breathe hard, her mascara smudging a little at the corners as tears form, which only makes her look hotter. She seems to agree, tightening her lips around me and gripping my ass so hard it hurts, but it’s the perfect pain to go with the pleasure of that fucking mouth of hers.

  “You are so goddamn dirty, I love it,” I hiss, fucking her face faster, faster…

  But right at the edge, I step away, and she stumbles forward with a cry of protest. “What the hell, Bronson?” She grabs the sink to push to her feet. “I was almost finished.”

  “I know,” I tell her. I step closer and grip her waist again. Lift her onto the sink, this time pushing her skirt up and out of our way. I position myself at the entrance of her pussy, and when I reach between us to check, I find her soaking wet all over again, even more so than before. “But I want to make you come first,” I say.

  I hold her in place as I reach for a condom, but she beats me to it, plucking one from my shirt pocket where she’s learned I keep them by now. With deft motions, she unrolls it along my length, and I’m barely able to restrain myself until she’s tossed the foil aside before I plunge into her, my cock positively throbbing with the need for release now.

  Fucking hell.

  “God, yes,” she cries out, her head falling back, her hair a perfect blonde cascade all the way down to the edge of the sink as my cock fills her tight pussy. Her legs clamp around me, ankles hooked behind my ass, and her hands grab my shoulders tight.

  I fuck her against the sink’s edge, hard and fast until she’s screaming, and we’ve both long since forgotten we’re in a public place. Neither of us cares. I savor the sensation as she comes hard with my dick inside her, her pussy convulsing around my cock like a fist.

  When I finish, shortly after her, we come back to reality to hear someone pounding on the door.

  “Hey! This is a public restroom, do you hear me? I’m calling security.”

  She catches my eye, and bursts into laughter.

  “This isn’t funny!” the woman outside the door shouts back.

  By now, I’m laughing too, as I reach down to yank my pants back into place. One glance over my shoulder at Daisy, though, tells me she needs a moment to put herself back together. Her mascara has streaked down her cheeks, and her hair is a wild mess. Not to mention I think I might have torn the edge of her dress. “I’ll go distract her,” I promise.

  “Thanks,” she mouths to me, not that it makes a difference now.

  I step close to her, pull her in for one last searing kiss. “You are fucking amazing, you know that?” I whisper.

  She laughs and shoves my chest with both hands. “Go. Distract that lady before we both get thrown out.”

  “Meet you by wherever they’re keeping the Scandinavian-inspired modern log cabin furniture?” I wink. She laughs and nods, and I duck out of the bathroom to head this woman off at the pass.

  It takes me a few minutes to ditch the angry woman outside the handicap stall—mostly by offering to walk her to security myself, and explaining along the way that I was taking the mother of all dumps in that bathroom, so if she wants to report me for being overly loud while using the bathroom, or for using the handicap stall when I should have gone in the men’s room with its single actual bathroom stall, that was just fine by me.

  Halfway to the security desk, she seems to give up on the whole mission, though not without yelling a few choice words over her shoulder at me about how I should respect other people’s spaces and not be such a filthy creep.

  She might have a few points. Not that I care to admit it.

  I leave her muttering to herself in an aisle near the warehouse, and I’m about to turn around and delve back into the main part of the store in search of the only other person in here who’s dirty-minded enough to tolerate me, when a fist clamps around my upper arm.

  I yank my arm free and turn to find two familiar-looking faces behind me.

  The bruisers from the day I met Daisy. The ones at the gas station with the scorpion tattoos. I ball my fists and plant my feet on instinct.

  That’s when I hear a single, ominous click from one of their pockets. I glance down to find the bruiser on the left holding a long, barrel-shaped object underneath the fabric of his baggy hoodie. “Outside, wise guy,” he says, in a thick accent I can’t place. Eastern Europe, maybe?

  “I don’t want trouble,” I say.

  The guy without the gun grabs my shoulder and spins me around, then shoves me toward the nearest brightly-lit Exit sign. “Neither do we,” he says. “And shooting you in the middle of this fine establishment would constitute trouble in our book. So let’s take this somewhere less public.”

  The old lady’s scolding about the bathroom echoes in my ears as I grit my teeth and stumble into motion. At the same time, I scan the shelves and aisles around me, terrified with each one we pass that I’ll see Daisy coming toward me, all bright smiles and no idea what the hell is going on.

  Luckily, I don’t see her. At least, I tell myself it’s lucky. But a sick, twisted part of my brain wishes I could glimpse her one last time. See that smile once more before these fuckers put me out of my misery.

  Thing One shoves open the exterior door and Thing Two shoves me out of it, the barrel of his gun digging into the small of my back as we walk, nestled right up against my spine. Outside, it’s broad daylight. I squint against the sun’s glare. It feels weird. Like this is the sort of thing that ought to happen at night in a lonely alleyway, not in the middle of a crowded store at noon on a Saturday.

  But maybe that’s why they chose now. Most nights I’ve avoided lonely alleyways, been careful. Today, though? Today I got sloppy. Went out to this big box store in public, right in the middle of town where I knew these guys saw me a month ago.

  I thought I’d seen them watching me since. I’d caught glimpses of cars parked on my street at odd hours, spotted people whipping around to walk the other way, tailing me home late in the evenings after I come home from “work.”

  But I convinced myself it was nothing. I tricked myself into believing I was safe here. I wanted to believe it, because if I could hide in plain sight here, then there was a chance I could stay. I could spend more time with her.

  “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” the bruiser to my right growls, as he shoves me up against the windowless back door of an unmarked white van. My shoulder collides with the metal in way that makes my bones shriek, and I grit my teeth to keep from shouting in pain.

  His buddy wrenches open the door. “We’re going for a ride.”

  “Anywhere nice?” I ask, which earns me an elbow to the gut. I double over in pain.r />
  That’s when I see her. Through the stocky legs of the big bruiser, back at the main entrance, just fifty, one hundred yards away. Daisy pops out of the store, skirts flying around her, looking as perfect as ever. Perfect, and perfectly confused, as she squints against the bright sun. Peering around the lot. She holds up a hand to shade her eyes, and I turn my head away so she won’t see me.

  I shut my eyes, trying to imprint that image of her on the backs of my eyelids. Trying to hold onto her like she looks now. Because I know deep down it’s the last time I’ll ever see her.

  “Into the van,” the guy on my right growls. “Or we hunt down your little girlfriend next.”

  “Leave her out of this,” I say, and I climb into the vehicle without another protest. I turn to face them. One bruiser climbs in after me. The other slams the door and circles around front to the driver’s seat. “Please,” I say to the guy who’s back here with me. “She had nothing to do with any of this. She doesn’t know a thing.”

  “Good.” He grins, his teeth crooked and yellowed in his wide smile. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Then, without warning, his fist connects with the side of my skull, and I lose track of anything else he says, because all I can hear is the ringing in my ears, and all I can see is the flash of bright colors that pop across my vision.

  3

  Bronson

  I lose track of time. I lose track of how many bruises and breaks I’ve acquired. I lose track of everything, anything, except the sound of footsteps on the steps of the cellar where they’re holding me. That, and the sound of flesh slapping against flesh whenever they beat me—which is pretty much every time they come down here, as far as I’ve been able to determine.

  “Give. Us. The. Money.”

  It’s become a chant. A rhythm, over the hours. With every word comes another punch to another soft spot on my body. I’m a ball of cuts and bruises, broken ribs and black eyes. And all I can ever do in response is spit blood and the truth—“I don’t have it.”

  Eventually, the punches stop coming. Then the footsteps stop too. Panic settles in, instead. All I can see, every time I close my eyes, is that one last glimpse I caught of her. The confused furrow of her brow, the way she shaded her eyes to gaze across the parking lot.

  And his voice, a growl in my ear. We’ll hunt down your little girlfriend next.

  I am such a fucking moron. I should never have gotten involved with her. Never have let my guard down, never have let her in. Now I’ve put her in danger too, and for what? For my pride? For some fucking money?

  Money that I don’t have, not personally.

  But money you know how to get, says that little voice in the back of my head. The fucker that’s been dead silent all this time. Until now. Until I’ve finally hit rock bottom, gotten desperate enough to reach at straws.

  He’ll never speak to me anyway, I tell myself. He won’t accept the call.

  But that’s not true, and I know it. It’s been five years. He’ll answer the phone for me. More than that, he’ll pay for me. I know he will.

  The truth sits like a weight in my gut. It reminds me all over again of the chains I escaped, the pressure I ran from. Only to run straight into this fucking mess.

  I deserve this, part of me believes, as I reposition my body on the hard concrete floor. Bruises throb on every inch of my skin. My ribcage stabs my side like a goddamn knife—there’s definitely something broken in there, probably more than one rib. My collarbone feels funny too, jutted at the wrong angle, probably fractured. I can barely feel my hands, they’ve got them cuffed so tight. Who knew handcuffs left ligature marks? Every time I shift so much as a centimeter, I feel the metal edges cutting my skin.

  One eye has swollen shut, but with my other, blearily, I peer around the basement where they’re keeping me. There’s a window in the distance. It’s dark now, which means it’s been at least seven or eight hours since they grabbed me from the parking lot. Daisy will be freaking out by now. She’ll have gone to my apartment, searched for me. Maybe she’d have started off angry but by now she’ll just be terrified.

  The knowledge of that, too, weighs heavy on my shoulders. I might deserve this, but she doesn’t. Not any of it.

  It’s the thought of her that makes up my mind. That makes me decide to finally do what I swore all along I’d never stoop to, no matter how bad things got.

  The next time I hear footsteps on the stairs, an hour after I make the decision, I raise my voice as loud as I can—which isn’t loud, since one of these fuckers throat-punched me. My breath wheezes in my throat as I say it, as reluctant as I am.

  “I can get your money,” I say.

  The footsteps pause. Then continue down, until feet appear at the edge of my vision. Thing One walks over and grabs a fistful of my hair, yanks my head upright. He sneers down at me, lips curled like a supervillain in a movie. “I thought you said you don’t have it.”

  “I don’t,” I reply, teeth gritted. “But let me call my father, and he’ll pay you.”

  Rewind six years, and my life would look unrecognizable. Nobody in their right mind would connect the beaten, bruised man in that basement to the boy I was in high school. The wealthy, popular kid with a full ride scholarship to Harvard, where his old man went, legacy, just like five generations of his grandfathers before him. The clean-cut, all-American smiling kid, heir apparent to the Burke fortune, who does everything right, toes the line every step of the way.

  The kid who had never made a single goddamn decision for himself in his life. The kid who had every second of every day planned, scheduled, calculated.

  Don’t take guitar lessons, it’s too low-brow; but don’t take piano either because there are seven other kids from your class who will be going for Ivy League legacy status who already take piano. Join the school orchestra playing cello, so you stand out, but only just far enough.

  Soccer lessons are too cliché; take lacrosse for your sport, so you’re well-rounded but you don’t actually have to excel too much.

  Captain of the debate team is a requirement, obviously. Work on yearbook, not the school newspaper, because nobody’s hiring journalists these days but you need to seem literary.

  Hell, even my goddamn name was carefully calculated from day one. My parents went back and forth between a family name—Henry, like my father? But Henry was already Henry Burke III, and they felt a IV tacked onto the end of my name would be just one step too far toward pompous.

  Yeah. Because that would be the thing that pushed us over the edge into ridiculous caricatures of rich people.

  They settled on Bronson because Stacey (that’s what she prefers to be called, never Mom or Mother) did an extensive survey of dozens of her “nearest and dearest” female friends—only the wealthy ones, obviously—and that’s the name they settled on as “unique yet inoffensive.”

  She was the kind of parent who wore headphones strapped to her pregnant belly, with a constant cycle of classical music playing—mostly Beethoven and Mozart because she didn’t approve of Wagner’s “proclivities.” She and my father never agreed on much, but controlling me was the one place where they both presented a united front.

  After all, I was the heir apparent. The modern-day prince. One day, I would step into my father’s shoes, take the reins of the company and lead us all to future prosperity.

  My friends were chosen, groomed for me. Anyone I associated with outside of my parents’ carefully approved list of choices suddenly met with untimely transfers to other schools, or mysteriously stopped speaking to me right before they started strutting through the halls with brand new designer kicks. My parents weren’t above paying off the people they considered unsuitable for my friendship.

  As a result, I had nobody in my life I trusted. Nobody I connected with, not really. Nobody I could turn to for advice or help or hell, even just to blow off some goddamn steam for once.

  At my eighteenth birthday party, surrounded by a bunch of rich blowhards I’d hated fo
r years, half of whom were also headed to Harvard or Princeton or Yale in the fall, I silently retreated up to my bedroom. Nobody else at the party even noticed. I spent the rest of the night, while chatter and the distant strains of classical music floated through the palatial goddamn mansion we lived in, packing up a single suitcase, the least obviously rich-looking one I could find. I dug it out of my father’s closet, brown leather and stenciled with my grandfather’s initials, cracking at the corners.

  How could I have known it was vintage Gucci?

  I stuffed a few jeans, a couple shirts, and a wad of bills I’d been squirreling away at every opportunity into the case. The bills were hundreds, ones my parents would toss at me whenever I mentioned I needed lunch money or a bit of cash to shop for a new tux for prom (to which I took the daughter of my father’s best friend, per his request. She ditched me for the girl she really wanted to be there with five minutes into the first dance).

  Any excuse I could come up with over the year before that birthday, I took. It all paid off now—I surveyed my bag, counted the stack, and realized I had well over $500,000 saved.

  I left that very night, with the party still in full swing behind me. It was the perfect time to slip out. The one time I could move around unnoticed, because my parents were too busy fawning over their wealthy friends, trying to decide which one’s daughter I should date at Harvard, probably.

  I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I’ve never regretted it, not for a second.

  Not until now. And even now, I feel the years between have been worth it. Five years of freedom for a few hours of pain?

  My only regret is dragging Daisy into my mess.

  I squint through my lone functioning eye at my captor. Watch as he dials the number I can still rattle off from memory. A number I haven’t used in five years. Father’s private line, one reserved for family and immediate friends.

  It only rings twice. Halfway through the second ring, the phone connects, and through the tinny whine of this blundering oaf’s speaker, I hear my father’s voice for the first time in half a decade.