Once Upon a Time

by Luna Doerr

“God, I need to taste you,” Alaric moans between my legs, pushing my thighs as far open as they’ll go.

  When he drags his tongue through my folds, I scream.

  This was madness, the way his mouth felt on her down there. She plunged her fingers into his hair and held him there. He licked her and stroked her with his tongue, carefully avoiding that one spot she so desperately wanted him to touch. She tried to tug his head higher but his hands held her hips still. Over and over she approached the brink of her desire only to have him draw her back. Every time, her need roared back with renewed intensity.

  “Alaric!” I scream again.

  Oh god, I’m screaming. I’ve never screamed during sex before. Erica wouldn’t scream, would she? She is too genteel, too … I’m not genteel. I’m clutching Alaric’s head, about to cravenly beg in three, two, one …

  “Let me come, Alaric. Please.”

  His tongue dances over my clit—at last—and I explode into a climax that’s both painful and a sweet, sweet release. The energy rocks my body off the bed as Alaric relentlessly licks my clit. I have to beg him to stop.

  Charles reared back and tore at his shirt, the buttons of his trousers. His cock sprung out, thick and long. She’d never seen it this clearly before. It was magnificent. His eyes darkened at the sight of her naked admiration. She feared he was going to begin apologizing for the rest of his body, his scars and injuries, and she wanted to hear none of that. He had no need to apologize to anyone, much less her. He was her husband and she loved him. Desired him. Desired him with a wantonness so untamed that it frightened even her.

  “Come here, love,” she said, reaching for him, spreading her legs for him, guiding his tip into her wet channel.

  Channel? I’m momentarily distracted even as Alaric is pushing himself deep inside me. But we’re working, I remind myself, and I need to get this right.

  “What would Erica have called her … you know?” I ask.

  Alaric draws his cock slowly back out, wet and glistening with my juices. “Her pussy?” He plunges back in and buries his face in the curve of my neck. “Ah fuck, sweet, I don’t know. I can’t think right now.”

  “I just want to get the details right.”

  “Fuck the details, Cat.” He begins thrusting into me with a hard, steady rhythm. But it’s not fast. It’s not like Sim pounding away at me, or even like my college hookups, all concentrated effort chasing some mechanical conclusion.

  “I want you to feel every inch of me.” He slid deep into her, her breath catching in her throat at the sheer pleasure of it, at the wonder of being filled so completely by another person, by their love. Charles took her slow and deep and sweetly, his body brushing her most sensitive spot each time he pushed back in. Erica gave herself over to the sensations coursing through her, the pleasure building between her legs, the emotions on the verge of being unleashed from her heart.

  She loved this man. She had loved him every minute of the years when he was gone and she would love him every minute for the rest of her life.

  Alaric strokes my cheeks with his thumbs as he rocks in and out of me.

  “You are so fucking beautiful, Caterine.”

  A girl could get used to hearing sweet nothings like that. His eyes are a little wild with lust, but there’s a softness to his gaze as well. My heart twinges.

  Don’t go thinking you’re going to get used to this. Because it’s not going to happen often enough for that.

  “Cat.” He kisses her. “Come back to me.” He nips at my bottom lip. “What’s Erica thinking right now?”

  I force myself back into the moment. “She’s wondering why Charles doesn’t want to do this. She imagines it feels so good.”

  “He’s wondering that too.”

  I let loose a tiny whine when he pulls out of me.

  “Just for a moment, my sweet.” He pulled her body to the edge of the mattress. “I want to watch.” He pushed her knees toward her shoulders, laying her open completely to his gaze. He ran the tip of his cock through her soft folds, then entered her again. She gasped at how deep he went this time.

  “I’ve never felt anything so good as this,” he moaned, thumbing her sensitive bud as he thrust, working her back to the edge of delirium.

  “Please Alaric.” I’m back to begging, a result of his thumb circling my clit over and over as he pushes deep inside me

  “Come with me,” he commands as he flicks my clit once, twice more, and then I crash over the edge. He shouts his own ecstasy as he pulses inside me, then stills.

  Erica cradled her spent husband in her arms, listening to his ragged breathing gradually calm into its regular rhythm again. At long last, Charles looked up from her breast and breathed, “I love you. Forgive me for the things I’ve done.”

  In that moment, she would have forgiven him anything.

  39

  Caterine

  “I’ll come with you,” I offer as Alaric tosses a weekend bag into the back of his car.

  “No. Stay here with Sim.”

  “I thought you didn’t want—“

  “Caterine!” He runs his hand through his already mussed hair. “I don’t have time to argue this. I have to go. Just don’t …” He grabs my cheeks and kisses me hard. “Just don’t fuck him.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. Why can’t I—“

  “Trust me, you don’t want to be around my family. They’re toxic. I’ll call you, okay?”

  I watch as the BMW backs out of the driveway and disappears into the evening fog. Alaric’s sister had called. His father is near death. He has to go to Pennsylvania tonight.

  I trudge back into the house and retrieve a beer from the kitchen. I’ve never been much of a drinker but my nerves need some soothing. Going from our intense lovemaking that morning—and the equally intense collaborative writing session we had that afternoon—to his coldness and rejection tonight … it’s emotional whiplash and I don’t know how to deal with it.

  Because it’ a fantasy, right? We acted out Erica’s wishes, her desire for Charles to make love to her. But it didn’t really happen. Charles is still going to the brothels.

  And Alaric is still just my employer. No matter how much I’m falling for him. That’s the problem, I think as I pry the cap off the beer bottle and head back outside, this time to the back lawn. I’m attracted to Alaric White and not just in a physical way.

  I take my beer and walk down the back lawn to the waterfront. In the distance, I can hear the sound of boats motoring in for the day. I walk to the dock and sit down. I kick off my sandals and drop my feet into the water. I take a long drink of beer and remind myself why I took this job in the first place.

  The money and a little sexual experience.

  At the end of all this, I can go back to looking for a library job with a healthy nest egg in the bank. And certainly I now have a little more experience in bed. Maybe it won’t be useful experience for dating normal men, but it’s more than I had before.

  I cannot let myself fall for Alaric White, who is so far out of my league he’s practically in another solar system.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Speaking of alien life forms, I think. Sim sits his heavy body down next to me, a beer in his hand. I shrug, not sure how I’m supposed to act around Sim. I haven’t seen much of him since I got him fired from the job. I suppose I should apologize.

  “I’m sorry for what happened.” I glance over at him but his gaze is trained on the watery horizon. “I told Alaric he didn’t have to do that.”

  “No problem, babe. There’s always the next book.”

  My heart seizes at that thought. But it’s true, isn’t it? For Sim—and Alaric—there will always be another book. And I will be yet another set of anecdotes about a past assistant.

  “What’s the story with his father?”

  “Besides the fact that he’s a world class, grade A asshole? Who cheated on Alaric’s mother for decades and drove her to drink herself into an early grave?”
<
br />   “Wow.”

  “Wow is right.”

  We sit in silence and drink our beers for awhile, watching the last of the day’s light fade away.

  “He’s being blackmailed by his father,” Sim says a few minutes later. “That’s why he’s been so cranky lately. Well, one of the reasons anyway.”

  “Blackmailed over what?”

  “You.”

  I whip my head around to look at him. Sim’s face is serious, impassive. “How can that be? I don’t even know his father.”

  “He knows you, though.” Sim drains the rest of his beer and stands up. He holds out his hand. I let myself be pulled up. “Come.” He starts back towards the house. “You need to make some decisions for Alaric. And you need to make them soon.”

  “No.”

  That’s all I can get out as I stare at the newspaper clippings Sim is showing me. Alaric’s father tried to drown my mother? My mother and I had been close, as much like sisters as mother and daughter. She would have told me about something like this.

  Yet there it is in black and white. No mention of his father but that’s indisputably my mother, photograph and all. It’s a little eerie, actually, how much my mother had looked just like me at that age.

  “So he knew this when?” I look up at Sim. His expression reflects his uncertainty over what he’s just done.

  “Shortly after he met you. He drove to Pennsylvania to see his father in the hospital.”

  I nod. Right. He had told me that and then afterward, he drove back down to Greencastle to pick me up. But who the hell does that? Try to drown a stranger in a public swimming pond? When you’re a teenager? Evil, there is no other explanation for a person like that.

  A shiver runs through me. And I had spent the night sleeping next to that person’s son? Had let him see me naked, touch me, be inside me? My skin crawls at the memories.

  “Why didn’t he just tell me? Why drag me into this?”

  “He was afraid you wouldn’t take the job, and he had spent so much time looking for Erica. He thought maybe he could get the book finished before his father died, and then his sister could still get her inheritance.”

  “And then he was going to tell me? That was the plan?”

  Anger burns in my chest. He brought me up here, ate with me, worked with me, slept with me, acted like nothing was going on—and all the while he knew he was going to drop this bomb on me at the end.

  Like father, like son.

  40

  Alaric

  I’m fucked. Totally and irrevocably fucked. I sit in the cold, airless waiting room at the hospital. I’m out of time. That’s all there is to it. I don’t have the book finished. I haven’t apologized to Cat for my father’s misdeeds. And my father is about to die.

  I really am like my father. Gadding about in Maine, my biggest worries about my best friend screwing the woman I’m falling for. A woman I can never have, anyway, so what’s the point of worrying? Even if there weren’t this whole situation with my father and Caterine’s mother, she is too good for me. Too innocent.

  Too light to my too dark.

  And as a result, my sister will lose her inheritance and lose control of White Chocolate and everything she has spent years working like a dog for. My sister deserves some happiness. Far more than I do.

  I open my laptop and turn it on. My father has been in and out of consciousness all night. Kristin and I are taking turns at the hospital. Needless to say, Kristin isn’t speaking to me at the moment. We passed each other on the way in and out, barely a glance of acknowledgement exchanged.

  I imagine my relationship with my sister is at an end. And why not? I had put my own priorities, my desire to have a particular woman work for me, ahead of Kristin’s needs. I deserve her wrath, her silence, whatever she wants to give me—I deserve it.

  I click open the manuscript and stare blindly at the first page for a good five minutes. God, I don’t even want to finish the damn thing anymore. Sim is right. I’m just indulging myself with this book. No one wants it. Not my readers. Not my publisher even, though they are humoring me. I’ve blown up my family over it.

  Not to mention, dragged an innocent woman into the mess.

  On top of that, I don’t even really like Charles anymore. Probably not a good sign when you can’t stand your own character. Charles is such an idiot. He has a good and beautiful woman at home and he can’t get over himself long enough to see it. Maybe I should have Erica leave him. That might get his attention.

  I rake my hand through my hair, then scroll to the end of the file. Charles is still going to the brothel, still denying what’s right before his eyes. I’m sick of the guy. If I had that kind of woman at home—sweet, sexy, patient—I sure as hell wouldn’t be hiring whores.

  You do have that kind of woman at home.

  Charles turned the knob and pushed open the door. Inside, the room was dimly lit and for an instant he forgot where he was. He has been going to his wife’s bedroom every night, every night making love to her from behind so she wouldn’t have to see his face. She says she loves him. Every single night she tells him so. And he loves her. Damnation, he loves her more and more all the time.

  But even if she could stand the sight of his face—or was willing to keep her eyes closed when they were together—he could never do with her the things he likes to do with the whores. He has ruined himself that way. He liked those things too much, even if there is not affection in them, no love involved. It was just pure pleasure that he could take and take, and he was addicted to it. He was powerless to resist the lure of the madam’s home. He was a weak man. That alone made him unworthy of his wife.

  His eyes adjusted to the low light and he saw the girl sitting on the bed, her legs spread wide the way she knows he likes it. There was no pretense here, no judgment. Or if there was judgment, the girls kept it to themselves. They were paid to. If ever he were to see a look of disgust or pity or disappointment on his wife’s face, he would never be able to go to her again.

  He was not the man she married, but there was nothing to be done for that.

  He began to unbutton his shirt, then stopped. He looked over the whore. He has been with her before. Her cunt was darker and less fleshy than Erica’s. Her breasts were overlarge and pendulous. How did he ever find them enticing? He had no desire to touch them, nor to be between the whore’s legs tonight. The only breasts he wanted to touch were Erica’s, hers the only womanly folds he wanted to part.

  “Come here,” he barked to the whore. He would only do with her the things he could not do with his wife. “Lie down.” He motioned toward the edge of the mattress. “Your head there.”

  The whore knew what he wanted. Charles knew that his tastes, while not appropriate for the marriage bed, were fairly tame compared to some of the other men who came to the madam’s. The whore let her head drop back over the edge of the mattress, her mouth open and waiting. He unbuttoned his trousers and took out his limp cock. He pushed it into her mouth, then placed his hands on the bed, leaning his weight into them. She caressed his balls until he was hard, and he began thrusting deep into her throat. He fucked her mouth and tried not to think of Erica’s soft pink lips as he did so. Lips he would kill for—or die for—if only he could have them around his cock, just once. But that would never be. This was not about Erica. This was about his own ruined desires. If only he could go back in time, he would decline the other soldiers’ invitation to come with them to the whore’s house. He would not have become addicted in the first place, not gotten used to indulging in these base acts. He would have come home pure and prepared to be satisfied by his beautiful wife.

  Instead he was in this shadowy netherworld. Pretending to love his wife at home—no, not pretending. He did love her. Yet he was unable to stop himself from coming here. He knew he had to give up one or the other. Either stop with Erica or stop with the whores.

  He felt the release building in his spine and he was eager for it to come, for it to be over with. He
thrust harder into the woman’s mouth, and then she was gagging on the great burst of his seed. It overflowed her mouth and leaked from her stretched and cracked lips. He recoiled at the grotesqueness of it. He wiped himself off, cleaned off his seed and her saliva. Even then, he did not feel clean. He buttoned up his pants in a hurry and tossed his money onto the dresser without another word, without even a glance back at the whore.

  He clattered down the stairs, untroubled over the noise he made. He needed to get outside immediately. On the street, Henry stood waiting with the carriage but Charles rushed around the corner of the house, into the stinking alley. He barely made it before vomiting onto the ground, his hands braced on his knees against each new surge of bile.

  I wake when the waiting room door slams open. My sister is nearly in tears—albeit angry tears, that much is clear—followed by our father’s attorney, who looks neither angry nor happy. Of course not. He has no stake in the outcome of the White family drama. He gets paid either way.

  Kristin grabs a sheet of paper from the man’s hand and waves it in my face. “The press release!” The paper slaps my cheek. “It’s that close, Alaric! Make up your fucking mind!”

  I tug the paper from her shaking hand and read it. It’s our father’s deathbed confession to the attempted murder of eight-year-old Deborah Schwartz thirty-nine years ago.

  “It goes out over the wires upon your father’s death,” the attorney adds, not helpfully. “If you don’t apologize to that woman.”

  That woman. Caterine is not just “that woman.”

  “Do you have any idea what this will do to the company, Alaric?” My sister grabs the press release back. “There are hundreds of people who rely on White Chocolate for their livelihoods. To pay their mortgage, feed their kids.”

  She sinks onto the scuffed linoleum floor of the waiting room. “Against your one employee. And she’s only a temporary employee, like all of the women you hire. Why can’t you just fucking do this?”