by Carly Fall
After dinner, Abby and Noah cleaned up in the kitchen, and there was talk of a
movie. The debate broke out between an action flick or a chick flick.
“We always have to watch movies where stuff blows up, Noah,” Abby said. “For
once, let’s just watch something nice. About people in love or something.”
Noah rolled his eyes.
“Vin Diesel is in love in The Fast and the Furious,” Talin chimed in.
The argument continued for a few more minutes and finally it was decided they
would watch the latest James Bond flick.
“Perfect,” Talin said. “Fast cars, beautiful women, sex, explosions, and cool
gadgets. And more sex. And gadgets.”
“Do you feel like watching, Bev?” Hudson said into her ear as he came up behind
her. She hadn’t heard him, and now that he was so close, she felt a chill go down her spine, and her face flushed at the thoughts that went through her mind.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe for a bit.” She turned around and looked up
at him, concerned at what she saw. “You look exhausted,” she said.
He nodded. Just inches separated them, and she fought the desire to take that one small step and wrap her arms around his waist.
“I am. I’m thinking I’ll turn in, if it’s okay with you.”
She hoped the disappointment didn’t show in her face. “Of course. You need your
rest. Have a good sleep, Hudson.”
His eyes met hers for a moment, and the world disappeared just as it had before
when he looked at her like this.
He brought his hand up and gently touched her cheek. “Goodnight, Bev.”
She watched as he slowly made his way to the elevator.
Chapter 25
Hudson wasn’t all that tired. Well, he was in a way. The pain searing him from
within was just about unmanageable, and his demon was at full force. That was tiring.
He just needed some space to try to deal.
I like you, but I’ll never love you.
When he got to his quarters, his breath was shallow, his mind fuzzy, a complete
disconnect from reality, almost a disassociation. He didn’t have the energy to take out the contacts that dulled the glow of his eyes, so he left them in, stripped, and lay down on the bed. Jesus, he was wrecked. His demon had control, raking and clawing him from within.
He knew Cohen would be home in a few hours, and then he would hit the gym for as long as it took to make the pain manageable. Until then, he wasn’t sure how he was going to deal.
Chapter 26
By the end of the movie, Beverly and Abby had finished another bottle of wine,
and Beverly was happily drunk. They giggled like schoolgirls as they admired James Bond and ignored the eye rolls of everyone else in the room. Beverly actually thought she heard Noah growl a time or two while they discussed James Bond and his sexiness, but maybe she had been mistaken.
After the movie, Beverly said goodnight to everyone, went down to her floor, and
then realized she still hadn’t moved everything out of Hudson’s room. She thought she should probably just fall into her own bed, but going to get her stuff gave her a reason to see Hudson. She rationalized with herself that not only did she need her bag, but she needed to check on her patient.
When the elevator doors opened, she stepped out and pushed open the door to the
room. Hudson was lying on his back, and from the light shining in from the bathroom she could also see that he was gloriously naked. Inhaling sharply, she hoped that he wouldn’t hear her, but at the same time praying that he would.
And he did.
He turned to her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a husky, far away voice, as if he wasn’t
fully present. Against her better judgment, she went to the bed.
“I…I came to check on you,” she said quietly. “Are you okay, Hudson?”
“I’m fine,” he said and looked away.
Trying to get her “doctor face” on, she assessed his body. She let her eyes travel from his face, then down his battered and beaten torso. Her eyes stopped at his sex.
“You like what you see, Beverly?”
She snapped her gaze back to his face and said nothing.
“See, I think you do,” he said in the same husky tone, as if he needed a glass of water. “I think you like it a lot.”
She imagined this situation would be awkward at best. Perhaps it was the wine,
but it didn’t feel that way to her. The sexual tension in the room was so thick, she could feel it practically clogging her throat when she breathed. “I…I do,” she whispered.
And good God, did she.
Hudson stared at her. “Just like you liked it that night when you watched me with that other woman, right? You want me to do that to you?”
Beverly shut her eyes. How many times had she fantasized about that since that
night? Dozens? More?
“If you want me to do that to your body, Beverly, if you want my hands all over
your skin gently caressing you, if you want my mouth between your legs suckling and licking you, if you want my cock inside you, slowly pumping you to orgasm, all you have to do is say yes. And I’ll do it. Just tell me what to do, what you want, and I’ll make it happen for you. Just say yes.”
Beverly’s mouth went dry and she shut her eyes.
Oh. My. God.
He was offering to fulfill every sexual fantasy she had conjured up since she had first seen him. Her stomach did a flip-flop, and she wasn’t sure what emotion the butterflies fluttering in her belly represented.
***
Somewhere beneath the fog of the agony inside him, Hudson knew what he was
doing was wrong on a lot of levels. The last thing Beverly needed was for him to use her to relieve this mind-fuck he had going on.
At that point, none of it mattered. Due to his injuries, he couldn’t workout, and he couldn’t fight. He had done a shitload of cooking, and that helped very little. The last thing on his list had just walked through the door.
A woman.
But not any woman, he reminded himself. Beverly. The one who was supposed to
be worshipped, not used like all the other women since Iris.
A knife in his heart.
More pain.
Fucking agony.
Desperation for relief.
He didn’t really track what he said next. At some level he realized he was looking for one word.
He studied her face, barely seeing her.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes, relief flooding through him to that place that wasn’t quite
reality.
Chapter 27
Hudson had Beverly stretched out on the bed, just as he had the woman at the
hotel. Her dainty hands were handcuffed to the metal cylinders attached to the headboard, her breathing coming in short spurts. As her piercing eyes stared up at him, he knew he didn’t want to see them. He needed her to be anonymous; he couldn’t allow himself to know it was Beverly.
He got off the bed and went to the dresser, stumbling, as if he was stark raving
drunk, and pulled out a silk blindfold from the top drawer, something he had used many times on other women in his outside-the-silo conquests. The softness of the black fabric slithered through his fingers as he went back to the bed.
“This will make it better,” he mumbled to himself as he gently tied it around her eyes. As he looked her over, her marveled at her beauty.
Her breast were small, but full, her stomach flat, the small flair of her hips
inviting. Her legs were long and toned, and her sex was bare.
He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply, the slightly flowery scent channeling itself into his brain.
She was beauty beyond anything he had ever seen.
He opened his eyes again to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.
Shit. He wasn’t.
Her lily-white skin glowed in the light from the bathroom against the black silk
sheets of the bed. And it looked as soft as the sheets as well.
It’s just a body. A vessel to relieve the demon.
He looked down his own body at the angry stitches and his sex jutting out from
his hips ready to be used.
Glancing back at Beverly, a fissure in his delirious fog opened, and he questioned what he was doing. Almost immediately, it closed again, and he was back in the same place of just needing to soothe his pain.
He ran a thumb over her nipple and heard her gasp. He gently traced his
forefinger down between her breasts, lightly over her ribcage, and down her stomach, stopping at the apex of her sex.
Her hips arched and her legs spread a bit, an invitation for him to keep going.
Instead, he lowered his head and gently suckled her nipple, careful of the cut on his lip. With his hand, he massaged her other breast.
He watched her begin to thrash on the bed, her head turning side to side, her
hands pulling at the fur-lined cuffs. Her soft moans let him know that she was enjoying herself.
His tongue traveled, peppering her neck with light kisses and exploring her torso.
She was delicious. The only thing that would make her taste better would be just a light layer of whipped cream.
Sweet Jesus.
He groaned just thinking about it.
Sliding his hand down between her legs, he felt the softness of her inner thighs.
His fingers traveled up slowly to her secret flesh, and he probed the folds, finding them slick and hot.
He let his finger slide into her core and was rewarded with her hips undulating off the bed, a groan escaping from her throat.
Gently removing his finger, he licked it clean and he poised himself above her,
ready to take her. She spread her legs, ready to receive him. As he looked her over, the fog in his brain cleared again, and he realized that the blindfold wasn’t helping at all.
Everything about her registered in his brain as Beverly: her soft skin, her sweet scent, her perfect lips, her blonde hair splayed out on the black pillowcase.
He sat back on his knees and looked at her again.
She deserved more than he could give her. He had too much respect for her.
He couldn’t do this.
***
Beverly had never had such an erotic experience as what she was having now.
Everything about it was new to her: the cuffs, the blindfold, the complete unknowing of what was going to come next.
Her body hummed with excitement and throbbed with desire.
She thought she knew what was coming next, but then his weight disappeared
from her. Using her senses, she tried to figure out what was going on. All she heard was his heavy breathing. She felt nothing.
Swallowing hard, she waited, figuring it was part of the seduction. God, she was
loving this. Seeing Hudson with that woman had awakened things in her that she never knew existed.
He moved on the bed, and her bones vibrated with anticipation.
She heard a click, and then her hands came loose.
Next, she felt a sheet being pulled over her body, and then finally the blindfold was removed.
Squinting in the glow of the bathroom light, she found his face.
“I can’t do this, Beverly,” he said quietly as he sat on the edge of the bed and
looked at the floor.
He what?
“You need to go.”
She sat up, bringing the sheet over her chest, confused.
“I’m sorry?”
“You need to go,” he repeated. “I can’t do this.”
She let her eyes drop to his hips. He certainly looked more than ready to do
exactly “this.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You don’t need to.”
She let that sink in.
On the contrary, yes, she did need to understand.
The sting of this rejection hurt.
“Oh, I think you’re wrong,” she said in a low tone. “I think I do need to
understand, Hudson.”
He exhaled loudly and looked at her. She noticed he was shaking, almost as if he
was sick again. “I can’t use you like this.”
Beverly stared at him. “Use me?” What was he talking about?
“Yes. You’re too…you’re too kind, too good of a person. Too beautiful. Just too…
everything for me. You deserve so much better.”
She sat in stunned silence. She was too good for him? She was a rehabbed junkie,
for God sakes. “That’s ridiculous, Hudson,” she said. She held up her hand to stop him from talking as he began to argue. “And you aren’t using someone if it’s consensual. We both know there aren’t any strings attached. We both know that I’ll be leaving soon.”
She wouldn’t let her confidence that had taken root after the talk with Hudson be ripped away. Her uncertainty in herself and who she was had began to be restored.
“And you let me decide what’s too good for me and what isn’t,” she said softly,
yet firmly.
She watched his face for a glimmer of what he was thinking. He didn’t say
anything, just continued to shake.
Moving forward on the bed, she got up on her knees, letting the sheet fall to her waist, and she grabbed the sides of his battered face.
“Hudson,” she whispered.
“Bev, I—”
She cut him off with a delicate kiss.
***
As her lips gently moved over his, Hudson’s senses went into overdrive. Her soft
touch soothed him, and her lovely smell wrapped itself around him.
He became utterly lost in everything that was Beverly.
Wrapping his arm around her waist, he pulled her to him so they were chest to
chest. The pain of the cuts on his torso faded and was replaced with the sweet fire of Beverly’s skin.
She gently guided him down to the bed so that he hovered above her. A raw heat
coursed through him, a feeling he had never had. Not to this extent anyway. He was close to the point where he wouldn’t be able to turn back. So close. He had to make her see that she deserved better than him.
“Bev—”
Her lips stopped him again. As her tongue snaked out to find his, her hands
roamed up his back, her scent engulfed him, and he finally gave in to his desire.
Chapter 28
The road to happiness is peace in your soul.
Holy shit, he had more of that in the past eight hours than he had in years.
He sat up in bed, certain that he was dead. He had to be, because the pain was
almost gone. If he searched for it, he could find a slight hint of it, but nothing like last night, where his body had literally rattled. Had he finally offed himself? Looking around, he realized he was in his quarters. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t dead, but what the fuck was going on?
It came rushing back to him, and he crashed back onto the pillow as if he had just been run over by a locomotive.
Beverly.
Ah, sweet Jesus.
Last night had been…incredible. Absolutely incredible. Beyond incredible.
Fucking fantastic. He thought about it, a full-blown color movie playing itself through his mind.
They had sex six times throughout the night. Six glorious times, each a new
adventure, each time felt better than the time before. He couldn’t get enough of her, and based on the fact that she had woken him three of the six times, he guessed she felt the same.
Of course, there were obstacles that needed to be dealt with because of his
injuries, but he and Beverly had found their way to absolute bliss over and over again throughout the night. Their bodies moved in harmony together, a perfectly orchestrated, erotically beautiful dance.
While they recouped, they talked about everything from working out, to favorite
foods, to difficult pasts. He had told her about Iris, leaving out the details of how the carnage of his heart had taken place twenty-seven years ago, because hey, he looked thirty at the oldest, not fifty.
No use screwing with her head or letting on to what he was.
And he also left out the part about how he was barely getting along in life because of that carnage, but she pretty much put that one together.
“And just to clarify, Iris was the reason you were going to commit suicide?”
He had thought about lying, but as he stared into those green eyes, he couldn’t do it. Besides, she had read his letter to Noah. “Yes.”
Beverly had nodded. “I can’t imagine loving someone that much that you would
feel the need to end your life. Obviously she was everything to you.”
Everything, and then some.
And then some more.
He looked over at the empty pillow next to him and wondered where Beverly had
gone.
He stretched and couldn’t believe how good he felt, and noted there was still a
slight glimmer of his SR44 form still on his skin. He certainly wasn’t in love, so he didn’t have to worry about losing his SR44 form, but damn, Beverly had sure rattled his bones enough to make the damn thing do the shimmy on his skin. He checked his clock, and saw it was seven. Beverly was an early riser.
He liked her scent on him, so he would forego the shower. After splashing water
on his face, he looked over his torso in the mirror and decided that his stitches looked okay. The shimmer from his SR44 form was now completely gone, so he slipped on a
pair of sweats, took out his contacts, and decided to go wake Cohen.
He rode the elevator up to floor three, then knocked on the door.
“Go away,” Cohen grumbled.
“Can’t do that, man. Open up.”
He heard some cursing, and then Cohen opened the door. He rubbed his eyes and
