The Wild Side

by Lilley, R. K.

  I ran my hands along her outer thighs. It was more than a little impressive how she kept the pose, spread that wide on top of me.

  I grabbed her hips again and pumped into her hard, once, twice, absorbing her cries of ecstasy with profound satisfaction.

  I rubbed at her ass, sliding my hands over her legs until I could massage her inner thighs. “Am I stretching you too much like this? You’re damn near doing splits.”

  Her only response was to moan and shift on top of me, gyrating her hips, making my entire body clench in pleasure as her tight sheath worked me. I’d have sworn I was deep enough I must be touching her cervix. I jammed up hard, and hit a wall so solid that she convulsed on top of me. Yeah, that was it. I did it again, and again, but stopped when her cries began to sound alarmed.

  “Am I hurting you?” I asked, my hands shaking. I wouldn’t be able to hold myself off for much longer.

  “It’s too much,” she sobbed, but she was shifting against me. “I feel too full.”

  I started thrusting again, fucking her in absolute desperate earnest, but not going so deep, not grinding against that delicious part of her until the very end, when she fell apart again, and I let myself finally, mercifully come, jarring as deep as I could with a rough groan.

  CHAPTER TEN

  We turned off the cursed TV that was still blasting music videos and went to clean ourselves up. In new sweats and wet hair, she tugged me silently to my library, where she grabbed one of my books, which she’d dog-eared about a fourth of the way in. She curled up on my worn-in brown leather sofa and started reading.

  It was the first novel I’d ever written, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her to read it, but she seemed to have already started in on it, so it was a bit late to stop her.

  She glanced up, saw my face, and smiled. “It’s really good. I was drawn in right away. I’m a hundred pages in and I already feel like I’m submerged in this world you’ve created.”

  I started wringing my hands, a nervous habit of mine that usually only presented itself before TV interviews. “Thanks. That world has been a part of my life for many years now. Though I wrote that one so long ago, I’m not really sure I can recommend it as my best work.”

  “This was one of your first, right?”

  “The very first.”

  She looked impressed, her pretty mouth moving into a little O. “That’s amazing. What a talent you have. I love the tone of the book, too. It’s so gritty and dark. Twisted, really. Just perfect.”

  I smiled wryly. “That’s sort of the genre. To be honest, I’d like to try something completely different, branch out a bit.”

  She sat up, looking genuinely interested in what I was saying, which was not a reaction I was accustomed to from someone outside of the business. “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “I’d love to do a character piece. Something emotional and raw, and that never mentions a word about forensics or blood spatter.”

  “You should do it.”

  “I could. I’m only contracted for one book a year with my publisher, at the moment, but I’d hate to sign on for more, and be stuck in deadline mode even more frequently.”

  “Fuck ‘em. Just write what you want and go indie.”

  I’d heard about this, was fascinated by it actually. “What have you heard about publishing independently?”

  “It’s a thing. It’s catching on, and I think you should try it. Quit signing your life away to those blood-sucking publishers.”

  That was sort of my take on it, too. “And what about you? Do you have anything you’d like to be doing different, career wise, or maybe educationally speaking?”

  She grinned like I’d just said something very funny, and I realized I’d been wearing my pseudo-dad lecturing tone. It was ghastly, and I instantly apologized.

  She brushed it off, not offended in the least.

  “I could never figure out just what I wanted to do. I still can’t. I wish I could be like you, with something I was so good at that I couldn’t stop doing it.”

  “So you dropped out of school because you weren’t sure which career path to follow?”

  She smiled and tilted her head to the side. “What are you fishing for here?”

  “You’re a very smart girl. I’m just trying to figure out why you didn’t take the college route.”

  She shrugged. “That’s really the least interesting thing about me. I’m just done with school. Couldn’t pay me to go back. At the moment I want to learn from living.”

  I found myself absently picking out a book, sitting next to her, sprawling out with my arm thrown over the back of the couch, behind her shoulders.

  We both held books, but we didn’t read.

  The rest of the day disappeared in a little puff of smoke, without a regret, as we started talking, about the little things, and the big, about the personal, and the political. She had a mind and a motor, this one, and I found that it was just as attractive as the rest of her.

  Talking to her had the most bizarre, familiar feel to it, as though we’d done it a thousand times. It was all new, every second with her, but it felt so right that it instantly found a place in my life, as though it was not something new at all, but rather a lost thing I’d found, like rereading an old book that I’d completely forgotten was my absolute favorite.

  Her eyes would widen and light up engagingly when she told a story. I found myself utterly charmed by them. By her. My fond gaze would dart from her eyes to her mouth and to her cute little nose when it scrunched up with her expressions.

  Her mouth may have drawn my eyes the most. Her lips were generous and lush, but as she spoke, they moved around her words, flexible, thinning and thickening, ebbing and flowing. It was fascinating how it shaped around the things she said, adding as much expression to her words as her gesturing hands.

  Her stubborn chin and jaw were another fascination, firming and flexing to illustrate a point.

  She’d do well on screen, I found myself thinking. As a newscaster or even an actress. It was just so enjoyable to watch her. I didn’t think I’d be the only one to think so.

  And it didn’t escape my notice that even when she spoke in detail about herself, about who she was, she gave me absolutely no details as to her actual life, past or present. She’d speak of her nature, of her likes, dislikes, preferences, and weaknesses, but nothing about where she was from, nothing about her parents, her family, her schooling, her occupation. I tried to fish for more information about what she did for a living, but she only fed me that glib cigarette girl line.

  She didn’t strike me as someone from her generation. She was mature, to say the least, and well spoken, even well read. She used words like nonsensical and dichotomy, as she told a simple anecdote. That struck me as odd. To my mind, she seemed to know too much to be so young.

  More amazing than her ability to draw me in and engage me with her own talk was her ability to make me spill my guts to her.

  I found myself telling her every awful thing that had ever happened to me. Just the worst stuff that I hadn’t shared in years, because I normally hated to talk about it. Drudging it up never made me feel better, and I didn’t figure anyone wanted to hear about it, anyway.

  I told her about the guy that had bullied me to the point of terrorizing in high school. I’d been years younger than everyone else in my class, and it had made me the easiest mark.

  “He was on a scholarship. He’d never have been in a school like that otherwise. It was a very expensive private school back east, and I found out later that his home life was pretty terrible,” I told her. Part of me would always feel guilty for being born too smart and too privileged, and so I had to make excuses for my tormenter before I even began.

  “An academic scholarship?” she asked, the hand that wasn’t holding my book in her lap tracing soft patterns on my forearm.

  I loved her relentless affectionate gestures, but I sat stone still, not touching her back. I wanted to, but it felt too forced, so I just sat and t
alked.

  “Yes. He was very smart. Smart, devious, and violent are a bad combination.”

  She bit her lip, her affectionate hand moving to clasp my cold one. “What did he do to you?”

  “Just little things, at first. He called it hazing, because I was the youngest in the school, by a lot. He’d pull down my pants in front of the class or dunk my head in the toilet. Things like that. I didn’t say anything. I guess because I thought it was like a normal initiation, and I already felt like I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to be a baby about it. In fact, that was the absolute last thing I wanted to do, so I put up with it all without a word for quite some time.”

  “How long?” she asked, looking completely absorbed in the story, her eyes eating up every part of my face, much like mine must have done to hers when she was speaking.

  “My full first year. Like I said, it was mostly harmless, at first. He kneed me in the balls a few times, which was awful, but that was the worst of it, that year.”

  She left my book resting between her legs and moved her other hand, rubbing mine with both of hers.

  My gaze was glued to that book as I continued. “When we came back from summer break for the fall semester the next year, I could tell right away that things were going to be much worse. I found out later that his mother had died, and his dad had been using him as a punching bag pretty regularly. I guess you could say that I became the target for his externalized pain.”

  She grimaced, shifting closer. My eyes were still glued to my book between her legs, shifting against her boxer-covered crotch. I was familiar enough with what those boxers covered that I could picture how every part of her was making contact with that lucky paperback. She didn’t even seem to notice it was there, still wholly focused on my face.

  “The pranks became outright beatings. I started wearing a cup to school regularly, because that was the worst of it, when he’d knee or punch me in the groin. I was tall for my age, and though I was slender, I wasn’t scrawny, but like I said, I was years behind. It was just impossible for me to defend myself, but no one else was going to do it.”

  I took a deep breath, shocked that the story still troubled me, even after all these years. “My parents noticed a few odd bruises, the occasional shiner, but I played it off, saying I’d gotten them playing tennis or in gym class. I never once ratted him out, no matter what he did. I asked him once why he hated me. His response baffled me, but it didn’t tell me anything.”

  “What was his response?” she asked, voice quiet, eyes soft on my face.

  “He just came back with, ‘Does it matter?’ That was it. That’s all he’d say, but if I had to guess, I’d say he hated me because he hated himself. He saw what life had handed him, and what it had handed me, where I was going, and I became the literal punching bag for his rage at the unfairness of life.

  “His hostility bothered me, it messed with my self-esteem for sure, but it’s always been easy to bury myself in my studies, and so I did. I avoided conflict as much as I could, and looked forward to the end of the year, because he was graduating. It was an awful year. To this day, it was the worst time of my life, and that’s including my divorce last year, which was hellish.

  “He’d been laying off me during the last month of school, and so I figured he’d gotten bored tormenting me, or hell, was too excited about getting out of high school to care anymore. It was all unfortunate, because I let my guard down. I just wasn’t expecting him to come at me the way he did. I’d have been more careful, I guess. See, that’s my low self-esteem talking. Even after all the things he did to me, I feel guilty about what happened.”

  Her eyes were wide, as though she could read me well enough to know the worst part was coming.

  “Well, to get to the point, he cornered me alone after gym one day, beat me nearly unconscious, and then used my T-shirt to try to hang me by my neck from a locker door. No one else was around, and he left me like that. I had to stand on my tiptoes to keep from blacking out, but even then I couldn’t get much air in my lungs. To this day I don’t know if it was an accident to rig me up that good, if he was trying to kill me, or if it was some miscalculation on his part, but the only thing that saved me was the basketball coach just happening by.”

  “That’s awful,” Iris said, still rubbing my hand, sympathy in her eyes. I’d always assumed I was the type to hate pity, but coming from her it felt somehow gratifying. Soothing, even.

  I found that odd, to say the least.

  “Yes. Everyone thought so, especially the coach and the school’s principal. And my parents. And the judge. He was a few weeks shy of eighteen and was charged as an adult for attempted murder. Ten years, no parole. If he thought his life was bad before, well, I suspect life showed him much worse after that. I hated him, but to this day, I still feel sorry for him. What did I do to drive him to that?”

  She made a tutting noise, but that was all.

  “I felt very helpless back then, and it was about that time I started working out a lot, like I do now.” I couldn’t think of one time, in my entire adulthood that I’d ever admitted aloud the true reason I felt the need to workout the way I did. Until Iris. “I just wanted to be strong enough to defend myself.”

  “Well, you’re certainly that. I’ve said it before, but you don’t do anything half-assed, do you?”

  That brought out a smile and lightened the mood.

  Working me, affecting me, soothing me, managing me, whatever you wanted to call it, she seemed to have a natural talent for it.

  As we talked, she openly admitted to being pragmatic about nearly everything. I should have been more troubled by this, because she presented herself as a wild thing, and chaos and pragmatism weren’t an easy alliance.

  Not without motive.

  I knew I should have been more worried about her motives.

  No, I wasn’t an idiot, and the logical answer to Iris wanting me was pretty obvious.

  The thing was, I just didn’t care. That, and I had the most naive, optimistic, completely ludicrous hope that she would come to feel something for me, even if she had only approached me because she’d been able to spot me as some kind of a loaded mark.

  And frankly, bringing some joy into my life seemed worth a little money on my part. Because, hell, I had money, and I could use some joy. It would sure as hell beat trading half my life’s earnings for twenty years of misery, and the past year of humiliation I’d already experienced.

  That night, as we got ready for bed, she called out to me from the master bathroom. The door was slightly ajar, but I’d been giving her privacy.

  “Alasdair,” she called again.

  I shuddered and felt myself getting hard. I loved it when she said my name.

  I’d just been standing there, staring at the door, but that got me moving.

  She was sitting at the vanity, watching me in the mirror, still in her thin white tank top with no bra, and as I moved closer I couldn’t fail to notice that she’d stripped down to just panties. Tiny, transparent panties.

  I was just about to grab her, for obvious reasons, when a few soft words out of her mouth stopped me.

  “Will you brush my hair?” she asked.

  It caught me off guard, but I agreed readily enough, taking the brush off the counter and setting to work, very tentative at first.

  I watched her face, hating the thought of drawing so much as a wince from her, but her expression was peaceful. Her eyes closed and her head fell back as I became more confident, raking the bristles firmly against her scalp, my other hand rubbing at her neck.

  It was nice. It felt more than a little unnatural, but nice.

  None of this was natural for me. Simple physical affection was a new development for me. And the fact that I enjoyed it was a revelation.

  It made me feel good. It made me feel contented, happy even. These were new things for me.

  Feeling good had never been a high priority for me, screwed up as that was.

  Perhaps I needed to
change some of my priorities. Perhaps it was time to start enjoying my life, instead of just working through it.

  And slowly, sweetly, Iris was teaching me something about that.

  I decided then and there that I wanted to let her.

  Her eyes opened, and she looked at me. My mood changed between one blink and the next.

  I wanted her again. Needed her. It was madness.

  It felt as though my body had been switched into some kind of perverted survival mode, where it wanted to fuck itself unconscious.

  It was a bit like blacking out, when I got like this, as though something else took overtook me.

  Her gaze stayed glued to mine as I slid the straps of her threadbare tank off her shoulders.

  Her clear as water eyes were changeable in the most fascinating way. They were like the sea, parts green and blue, shifting darker and lighter with the changing hours of the sun. Now, with the sun gone and the bright bathroom light flooding them, they were at their most mysterious, as though the day showed her truer than the night.

  I slipped the thin white material down to her nipples, rubbing it back and forth over each hard peak, teasing her into a gasp. She bit her lip, and I moved closer, pushing my erection into her shoulder as I fondled her roughly.

  Her hands covered mine as she squirmed in the chair.

  She was just so gloriously responsive to my touch. A few touches and she was ready, trembling for me. I couldn’t seem to get over just how much I craved that addictive response.

  I moved around her, straddling her in the chair. I jerked my cock out, gripping her hair as I pushed the tip against her lips. They opened for me, her tongue sliding along my length as I worked my way to the back of her throat. I wanted her pussy, not her mouth, when I came, but I never got over the sight of her deep throating me.

  Years without receiving oral would give anyone some sort of fixation, I thought.

  I dragged myself out of her mouth just shy of coming, pulling her up and moving behind her, facing the mirror. It took her like that, watching my hands fondling her as I took her slowly, standing up and braced against the bathroom sink.