by Kellie Hart
“Atty?” I ask as I fall to his side.
“I’m so sorry, Carolina,” he whispers between his fingers.
“Tell me why,” I plead. “I’m so fucking confused right now.”
“When I saw Mike’s hands on your body,” Atticus manages, his voice raw at the edges, “I instantly knew he was hurting you. My conscience cried for me to do something, anything, to help you, but I couldn’t. I was too paralyzed with fear, and I hesitated, Carolina! I fucking hesitated, and the goddamn bastard kept his hands on you. I’m so bloody sorry that I am—that I did not—”
Atticus stops to drag in a wet breath, and his battered blue eyes meet mine.
What the fuck he is talking about?
“Fuck it all,” he mumbles under his breath before he tears his gaze away.
“Your reaction to what you saw is entirely expected, Atty.” I cup his cheek, turning his face back to mine. “I can only begin to imagine what must have run through your mind when you found Mike kissing me, but you are not giving yourself enough credit. You pulled him off of me for fuck’s sake! You got to me before it was too late.”
Atticus leans in and kisses the palm of my hand, but the laugh he adds to the sweet gesture is dark and laced with regret. “You are too kind, Carey, but it is my place to defend you. To save you. Tonight, I couldn’t pass the simplest test of that responsibility.”
He doesn't think he can save me? How fucking wrong could he be?
Desperate to have him closer, to convince Atticus he is entirely incorrect about everything, I throw him into the pillows and straddle his waist. Though his face bears his shame, his body remembers me, and his cock rises in greeting. Now is neither the time nor place for such thoughts, so I shove them away to concentrate on resurrecting the sorrowful ghost beneath me into the man I know and love.
“I told you once before that I have come to consider you my personal Superman, but I think that was unfair of me,” I explain, my eyes trained on his so I know he hears my every word. “To act as Superman implies you must live up to some inhuman standard, and you can’t, Atticus. You are you, you are human, and that is more than enough.”
“What is the true purpose of your oration, love?” Atticus asks and pokes my side. “I am supposed to be begging your forgiveness for my shortcomings, remember?”
“I’m getting there,” I laugh and tweak his nipple. He grabs my hand, and the grin on his face tells me to keep going, that I am on the right path to bringing him back to me. “Atty, I want us to save each other, time and again, every fucking day, because we are in this together. Love is not one-sided, so if we fall, we fall together. If we soar, I will be by your side as the earth disappears beneath us because I love you, Atticus Angustrot Sherwood, and you love me.”
When Atticus groans playfully, I know he is back with me.
“You had to bring my atrocious middle name into this, didn’t you?” he teases. “By the way, you forgot to mention how stunningly handsome I am while you were professing your undying love for me.”
“Oh my goodness, I am so sorry,” I mock and toss my hair over my shoulder. “The fine package in which you present yourself is a nice bonus, of course, but I meant every word I said. I love you, Atty.”
“And I love you, Carolina Rose Grant.”
At his declaration, the air between us suddenly shifts to something full of palpable need. It is the perfect stage for requirement number nine.
“Make love to me, Atty.”
With a gentle nod, Atticus raises his hands to untie the halter of my dress. I have no reason to stop him as he guides the fabric over my shoulders to expose my breasts and my tummy. His fingers skim my waist then clench tight around me as I rise up to work the dress and my panties over my legs. I toss them to the floor and move to help Atticus out of his shirt. It is a painstaking process, unfastening each pearl button at a time, but soon, Atticus’s chest is bare to me. My eager hands caress colorful skin while he flicks open his pants. I lean back just enough to help him slide them down his legs, and they join our other clothes on the floor. Following suit are his socks and boxer-briefs. Entirely naked, we take in the other; entirely speechless, our ragged breath is the single sound in the room.
Atticus leans into the pillows and extends a hand. I take it up and he guides me to straddle his waist once more. Laying our entwined fingers on his chest, Atticus’s eyes trail over me again, and mine do the same to his gorgeous form. Long, lean, yet laced with muscle in the best places, he is truly something to behold.
Atticus frees his fingers to run them through my hair before bringing a curl to his lips. He twirls it around his finger, drawing my face down to his own. When our mouths come together, I pour all my love into the kiss. Atticus groans, slips his tongue into my mouth, and tugs at my hair, drawing me closer still. I scrape my nails down his chest, over his abs, to his cock. My hungry hands take him up, and Atticus lies full and hard and glorious between my fingers. Our lips never break as I stroke him feverishly, my hand translating into action the cries of my heart.
Why Atticus pulls my hands away, I cannot explain, but I truly have no reason to protest because he lifts and settles me atop his length. I slide down his cock until every last inch of him fills me up. I pant at the fullness and clutch at his chest, but Atticus steadies me with fingers bitten into my hips. I draw in a ragged breath and rise up to crash down again around him, and there Atticus is, all of him, joining me so that nothing separates our bodies, nothing separates our love.
Atticus groans beneath me, and his grip on my waist tightens. Hungry hips bump my ass, so I move for him. My God, do I fucking move, but a desperate Atticus takes control, his hands guiding me, up and down, left and right, hitting me exactly where I need him. He grunts louder with each thrust, and the sound is fucking beautiful to my ears. I moan along with him, and my eyes drift closed. My head falls back, and I hold on, taking everything he has to offer, but it is not nearly enough to sate the beast within.
I need to see him. I need to fucking see us.
I gather strength enough to glance down to where our bodies meet. Atticus’s eyes drift to the same place, and together, we witness the majesty of our union—his cock, passing in and out of me, coated in everything that makes us us.
“Fuck yes.”
Dying to have Atticus’s skin on mine, my rabid fingers claw at his shoulders. Obliging, he sits up, never pulling out, and shifts me atop his lap. Skin to skin, chest to chest, and fucking nose to nose, I have never been closer to another human than I am to Atticus at this moment. The sheer bliss in his eyes echoes my heart, and I wiggle my hips, urging him to move again. I wrap my arms around his neck and plant kisses on every inch of his flesh that is within my reach. With each brush of my lips against his skin, Atticus drives deeper and harder than before, and when I sink my teeth into his neck, his nails break the skin of my ass.
I have no idea how long Atticus gives to me, but soon, a new sensation deep within me grows. At first, it is like the sun rising behind the Cathedral—warm, promising, wild. Then, it blossoms into bourbon on my skin—hard, alluring, and hot. Finally, it explodes and obliterates everything I thought I knew about loving another.
“Atticus!” I scream as I come around him.
Atticus’s hands rise to cup my cheeks, and he kisses me into silence. His quaking body stills for a gentle moment before he groans against my mouth. His dick quivers and jumps, and my oversensitive flesh amplifies each and every detail of his release. Our eyes meet, and our gazes remain locked as his warmth spreads throughout me, marking me definitively, and everlastingly, as loved.
***
Click.
“Put down the damn camera, Atty, and come back to bed!”
Click. Click.
“I miss yoouuuuuuuuu!”
With a sad, little pout, he drops his camera onto the sheets and crawls onto the bed next to me. I know he’s only slightly disappointed, but he has taken my picture for hours since our last fuck. He’s only stopped snapp
ing twice—to turn on Hallmark’s 5:00 AM block of The Golden Girls and to get a snack from the fucking kitchen.
“Would you care for some chips, Carey?” Atticus asks, proffering his fridge-find like it’s some sacred treasure.
I throw a skeptical glance at the suspicious foodstuffs in his hands. “Do you mean fresh American chips in all their deep fried crispiness or the British version? That’s just another one of our words you keep messing up, by the way, so here’s another language lesson for you. American chips come from a bag, and they are never served cold.”
Atticus hugs his precious to his chest and pets it gingerly. “Don’t listen to her, Chippies. She knows not what she says. I’ll eat you. Why? Because I love you.”
I take the bowl away and put it on the bedside table. I also spread my legs wide for his viewing pleasure. A dip of a finger between my legs lets me dampen his bottom lip in invitation.
“I know something else you can eat because you love it.”
Atticus growls as he obediently crawls down my body. “Is that so? I’m not sure how I feel about being ordered around by a tiny woman.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining during round two.”
“There is something to be said, I suppose, for how sexy you are when you sass me about. It makes me eager to please.”
“Then, get to the fucking pleasing, Atty. Billy Broadraft knows the drill. Enter the ginger beshrubbed field of combat post haste, and ATTACK. DAT. PUSSY.”
Atticus sucks my sacred fruit into his mouth then lets it go. He pauses, sniggering against the Lady Berry Farm.
“Goddamn tease,” I laugh. I kick him in the back with my foot. “Plow the fucking farm, will you?”
Atticus flicks his tongue out, taunting me again. “Will you ever grow tired of this, of me, Carolina?”
“Fuck no,” I moan. “I need you like I need goddamn cheese.”
“Cheese you say?” Atticus mumbles as he reaches for something.
I blink and a can of Cheez Whiz appears miraculously before me. “You didn’t, Atty.”
“Oh, but I did,” Atticus smirks. “Shall we see what shenanigans we can get ourselves into with this fine container of aerated cheese product?”
“Is a frog’s ass water-tight?”
And, that is how I have learned love truly works. Love legitimizes the desires of one with the efforts of the other, and it burns its brightest when two opposing elements—the paper and the match, the rising sun and dewy dawn, or the broken heart and the healing balm of trust—come together as one. The process is slow, complicated, and easily ruined, but with time and patience, love can draw a spirit from the darkness to once again dance in the light.
Maybe it’s a little cheesy, but it always is when your dreams come true.
- ATTICUS -
TWO WEEKS LATER
***
I LOOK DOWN AT MY tattooed body, set to be on public display at Hot Rod in mere moments, and I realize my knickers hardly cover all of me. As such, I wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.
“You love Carolina,” I repeat for the approximate hundredth time since I clad my dick in this…spandex. “You’ll do anything to make her happy. You will do, quite literally, anything to make her happy.”
“Including stripping for charity?” Chad says to my right. He laughs and runs a hand through his hair. “Man, it is a good cause, raising money for the literacy program Fox has founded, but couldn’t they have killed the AC a bit back here? I am shrinking as we speak, and the ladies didn’t pay to see a worm. They’re coming for the Loch Pe-ness Monster.”
“You just compared your dick to a mythological creature, Chad,” Fox offers as he approaches, wearing an identically horrendous pink costume. “Are you drunk or has Char rubbed off on you a bit too much?”
Chad tips a bottle of a local beer at Fox. “Both, I think. When you live with Char, you can’t help but pick up her euphemisms. They are contagious like that, like a fucking fungus.” He cringes; then, he looks to me. “How about you, Atticus? How are things in paradise with Miss Carey?”
An involuntary smile makes my face hurt. It seems as if I am smiling much more these days. Perhaps, the nonstop sex has helped, but to be fair, I’ve never been happier. I’ve never felt more myself.
God, I do love that darling girl.
“Things are fucking brilliant.”
Fox punches my arm. “You’ve got it bad, Atticus. I’ve never seen you this way.”
“And I’ve never felt this way,” I admit. “It’s difficult to describe, but it’s as if I rise in the morning to simply bask in her warmth again. She is the sun by which I measure the moments of my life. I swear to you, gentlemen, I will marry her one day.”
Chad pauses, throwing an incredulous glance at me over the neck of his bottle, and Fox’s jaw has dropped to his chin.
“I’m waxing poetic, aren’t I?”
The guys nod slowly in unison, but they smile as if they understand. They pull me in for a hug, slapping their congratulations against my back. Chuckling to myself, I shove them away and straighten my show knickers. Don’t want the great general marching onto the field prematurely.
Some techno piece for which I don’t know the name begins to stream into the backstage area through the speakers overhead. It’s pulsating and strong, and the floor beneath my bare feet echoes its rhythm. I could fuck Carey to this, using the driving beat as the cue for each of my thrusts into her tight, little body. I put a pin in that for later—fuck Carey to something other than The Golden Girls theme song.
A familiar form jogs up as stagehands position us behind the black curtain. He’s a little worse for wear, his hair entirely askew, but I’d know him anywhere. The chap is my personal bread pudding supplier.
I stick a hand out, and Montague Cotton grips it. “Evening, mate. Ready for the show?”
Monty spits on his hand and tries in vain to tame his bedhead. “Yeah, I didn’t think I was going to make it though.” He throws in the grin of a man satisfied by an excellent fuck. “I had a wild fucking afternoon.”
Chad leans forward so he can see us around Fox. “Same raven beauty as last time, Mont?”
“You know it,” Monty says. “She’s a lion in the sack, and that accent. It’s so fucking rich. Goddamn, I should change my name for her from Honeydew to Crumpet.”
“Crumpet?” I push my glasses up and raise an eyebrow at him. “That’s quite regionally specific.”
Monty smacks my chest. “Fuck! Why didn’t I think of it before! Atticus, she sounds exactly like you! She’s a fucking Brit!”
“My accent is easily identifiable,” I offer. “Why did it take you so long to piece the mystery together?”
Fox turns our way. “Atticus, Monty is a bit slow on the uptake. Too much bourbon in the old bread pudding glaze, I suspect.”
“No, no,” Monty argues quickly because the curtain is rising. “She’s meeting us here later tonight. and frankly, I don’t care if I know what the fuck she’s called or where the fuck she’s from because she sucks cock like it’s going out of style. Names don’t matter when you’r—.”
Monty is shushed by another stagehand as the music grows to a deafening volume and the curtain moves above the level of our knees. I look to the left and right, finding that each member of the stripping party has assumed his assigned pose. I follow suit and turn my bare back to the curtain. I raise my left arm into the air, flex a bicep, and touch my lips to it. My other arm is crooked at the elbow, my right hand gone south to cup my ass.
I feel ridiculous as fuck. But, when the curtain fully ascends into the rafters, and we go on full display before the patrons who have paid hundreds of dollars to be here today, and I spin around to shake what my mum gave me, I don’t feel any less bloody ridiculous.
Like a well oiled machine, my fellow men and I gyrate our pelvises to the beat. In beautiful synchronicity, we parade across the stage, pumping invisible iron for the audience’s viewing pleasure. When we pull out scarves tha
t have been stowed away with our cocks, we think nothing of it, but the ladies of Hot Rod beg for more.
Each of us is granted a moment to shine, and when my moment arrives, I saunter to the foot of the stage, kneel before the gathered spectators, and find Carolina. She’s tucked away in the second row, screaming like a banshee among her best friends.
“That’s my Atty!” she shrieks and slaps a woman next to her. “That’s right! I suck that man’s log!”
Jacque, who I suppose has been looking only to the floor to avoid witnessing her brother’s anatomy, somehow still restrains my girl as I take the scarf, place it between my legs, and rub it against my cock. Carey sucks on her bottom lip in anticipation, and when I toss the scarf to her, she barrels forward, ripping herself from Jacque’s grip, to knock down three or four innocents in pursuit of that scrap of fabric. When she raises up, spoil in hand, she waves it over her head triumphantly.
