by Alyse Zaftig
Emilio was in charge of the sheet. I realized that he was somehow the leader of the group. He was dressed just like everyone else — polo shirt and slacks — but there was something about his attitude that made it seem like he should be in charge. He wore competence and cool intelligence like a shield.
He knew a lot of the answers, and when he didn’t, he asked the group. We all played a fun game of Telephone.
Nearly everyone in our crew was American or Canadian, but nobody felt uncomfortable whispering in anybody else’s ear. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the late hour. But all of us were feeling pleasantly relaxed.
My burger came at some point during the competition. I pulled it as far away from the trivia answer sheet as I could.
Fortunately, they brought a set of silverware with it. I cut the burger into bite-size pieces and ate it carefully. I couldn’t think of anything worse than spattering grease over our trivia answer sheet, the culmination of the whole group’s work. If I messed it up, I would make a horrible first impression.
The waiter took it away pretty much the instant that I was done. Maybe the staff paid a lot more attention than I thought.
When the contest was done, Emilio brought the sheet up to be counted by the organizer.
Within 10 minutes, all the scores had been tallied.
The whole team held hands as they announced the winners.
“Third place is the Exploradoras. Second place is Wicked Wombats.”
Emilio gripped my hand tightly as we waited for the announcement of the winner.
“And with a perfect score, the winners tonight are the Fruitbats.”
My whole team erupted in cheers, meanwhile I was afraid that they were going to overturn the table.
“Campeones,” they chanted over and over again, sounding like a tune that I didn’t know.
Everyone’s hands were on each other’s shoulders. The camaraderie was so sudden and utterly charming. These people had only met me tonight, yet I fit into their group instantly, as if I had known them for years.
Alley Mugging
Naelle
Two jirafas later, I was weaving a little bit when I went to the bathroom. I was grateful for the long line, since there was only one toilet for every woman in the bar. Needed its support, I leaned against the wall, not caring if it was clean or filthy.
When I was done, I made my way back to the table. I felt a little nauseous. There were still two mostly full jirafas on the table, but I couldn’t take anymore.
“I’m gonna go,” I slurred softly. “Nice to meet you all.”
They all waved to me while carrying on their conversations.
I walked outside. It was cold at night. I wrapped my jacket a little more closely around me.
I was barely down the block when I felt a hand grab my upper arm and haul me into an alley.
There were two of them. Both of them were armed.
“La plata!” he shouted at me. The second guy just cocked his gun. The safety was off.
Plata? Wasn’t that silver? I didn’t have any.
“I don’t have any,” I told him in Spanish.
They snorted and pointed the business ends of their guns at me.
“La plata,” they insisted.
I was going to die just because I didn’t carry silver.
I heard the crack of two gunshots and closed my eyes in the split second.
When I opened my eyes, I looked down at my chest, expecting to see two bullet holes.
But there wasn’t anything there.
I looked at my attackers who were now flat on the ground. One of them was wearing a white shirt that had a growing bloodstain on it. It looked like a blossoming red flower that grew exponentially.
I looked behind me.
Emilio was there, kneeling next to me.
He reached for me.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Cut? Bruised?”
“Just a bump on the head.”
“Let me see.”
He touched my head gently.
“Shouldn’t we turn those guys into the police? I mean they tried to mug me.”
“They won’t try to mug anybody else, so, no, I won’t involve the police.”
I looked back at the two of them. Neither of them were moving.
“Are they dead?”
Instead of answering my question, he pulled out his phone.
“Hold still.” He put his hand on my chin.
All of a sudden, a bright light was shining right in my eyes.
I tried to flinch away, but his hand held me in place.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking to see if you have a concussion. Your pupils aren’t dilating properly. One of them is bigger than the other.”
“It’s not a big deal.” I shook my head. “I’ve gotten minor concussions before. I’m fine. I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
“You don’t need to go to the hospital, but you do need to stay with someone who will wake you up every two hours.”
“Why do you know so much about concussions?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me.
“Come home with me.”
It wasn’t a question.
I tried to joke, “I wasn’t expecting to go home with anybody tonight.”
I earned a small smile from him. “Is there anybody else who can take care of you?”
I thought about it. I didn’t even know if the hostel owners had a first-aid kit. I doubted that they would be willing to wake me up every two hours to make sure that I was still breathing. It might be bad business if I died in their hostel.
“No.”
“Then it’s settled. You’re coming home with me.”
He pulled me into his arms.
“I can walk,” I protested, even though it was really fun to be carried as if I didn’t weigh anything. It was a new experience. I hadn’t been carried since I was 4.
“I can carry you.”
And that was the end of it. I wrapped my arms around his neck and leaned my head against his hard shoulder as he walked further down the block.
“I’m going to let you down now.”
I slid to my feet.
He took out a key fob, and then the car next to us beeped.
“Get in. Watch your head.”
I opened the door and thought about getting into a car with a stranger. My mother had not raised a naive fool.
“Wait. Maybe I should just go to a hospital.”
“Naelle, please. If I wanted to hurt you, I’ve had enough opportunities already. You could be dead in that alley.”
He was right. I knew he had a gun, but I wasn’t afraid of him. He’d saved from those two thugs.
I got into his car.
First Aid
Emilio
I looked at Naelle in the backseat of my car. She didn’t look like she had a concussion.
I could easily have my driver take us to a clinic. With a phone call, I could wake up a doctor and have her properly checked out.
If I really thought that she was hurt, I would do that immediately. I had a doctor on speed dial, but it wasn’t necessary.
I meant what I’d said about checking on her to make sure that she didn’t have a severe concussion. I could keep her up all night.
I was willing to take her home, of course, but I’d check her out first. I’d done my time in the military after going to military boarding school. I was trained as a medic, so I knew the basics, although I was a little better at tying a tourniquet than I was at caring for a concussion.
And then we were finally at my house.
“Is that your house? It’s huge.”
I looked at my home, trying to see it through the eyes of a stranger. I had lived here since I was a tiny child.
“It’s okay, I guess.”
She curled in on herself a little bit, and I frowned. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
I gave a nod to my
driver, who took the car around the back. The garage was next to the servant’s quarters.
“Come on in,” I said. “I can check you out properly.”
The two of us went inside of the house. I went to the medicine cabinet of the downstairs bathroom.
She sat on the toilet seat cover and waited.
“Did he touch you? Are you bruised? Any lacerations?”
“No, I don’t think so. He grabbed me by my upper arms.”
“Show me your arms.”
She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and she tried to roll the sleeves up, but she couldn’t roll them high enough.
“I think that I’d have to take off my shirt if you needed to see that area.”
I looked at her. “I promise that I’ll never touch you in a way that you don’t like.” I couldn’t promise that I would view her as dispassionately as a health professional. My mother had pressured me towards becoming a doctor, given my rudimentary medical training, but my father had expected me to go into business, which I did.
She took off her shirt.
I stared at the angry marks on her upper arms.
“I’m going to kill them.”
“No…they’re long gone.”
I didn’t want to touch her bruises. I knew that it would hurt her, so I knelt beside her and got a very close look at them.
They were clearly hand-shaped, and it made me insanely angry to see the marks.
“Anywhere else?” I forced my voice to be normal.
But it must’ve been on my face, because she backed up half an inch.
“I’m not angry at you,” I said in the gentlest voice I could manage. “I want to go out there and find them.”
“They just wanted silver,” she said softly. “I grew up in DC. I can take care of myself.”
“They wanted your wallet, and they wouldn’t have hesitated to hurt you. You’re not used to the rules here. It’s not safe for a young woman to be alone at night.”
Her back straightened a little.
“I’m capable of taking care of myself.”
“Hm.” I didn’t say anything else.
She didn’t seem to be badly hurt.
“Let me get you one of my shirts, something sleeveless so that nothing brushes your bruises.”
“Okay.”
I quickly left the bathroom and ran up the stairs to grab a shirt. I took one of my softest undershirts out of its package. I should’ve had my housekeeper unpack it when I ordered it, but I’d been too lazy.
I brought down the undershirt to her and she put it on. What fit my torso was very long on her. She was much smaller than I was. She looked very good in my clothing.
“Do you feel okay?”
She nodded.
“Just tired.”
“You can come upstairs and stay in my guest bedroom. I can check on you every hour.”
“Sounds good.”
She yawned.
We walked up the stairs, and I couldn’t stop myself from checking out the slow sway of her hips as she went up them.
I mentally kicked myself for checking her out. She was hurt. I should be focusing on making sure that she didn’t have a real concussion.
I opened the door to the guest room that was closest to mine.
“I’ll come by and check on you, okay? I’ll set a timer to wake me up every few hours.”
She yawned and leaned against the wall.
“Sure.”
She walked slowly into her room and closed the door.
I went to my own bedroom and changed into more comfortable clothing. I set an alarm on my phone to wake me up in two hours.
First Morning
Naelle
I rolled over, my mouth dry and my head pounding. A combination of being woken up frequently during the night and a small hangover made for a pretty bad morning.
I sniffed. Was that bacon?
Before I could even get out of bed, I heard the clatter of a plate on a tray.
There was a knock on my door.
“Are you up?
I looked at myself in the mirror and almost screamed at how awful my hair looked. I was still wearing his sleeveless shirt.
“No!” I yelped. I needed to fix my hair.
“I have bacon.”
“Come in.”
It was okay if he had bacon. A good amount of bacon grease could go a long way the morning after.
I smelled the fresh coffee.
“You are a god.”
He grinned at me, and my heart skipped a beat when he did. He was extremely gorgeous when he smiled, and I just couldn’t resist smiling back at him.
I looked down at the tray and said, “There’s no way that I can eat all of this.”
“Of course not. Half is for me.”
Half of the mountain of food on the plate was much larger than what I could manage to eat. He had an enormous fluffy omelette for each of us, and there were two bananas on the tray alongside the coffee.
I snagged a piece of bacon and took a bite.
The bacon was perfectly cooked. It was crisp with that slight hint of chewiness which was hard to achieve.
“This is perfect.”
He sat on my bed and unrolled the napkins to get out silverware.
Then we ate there, as if it weren’t the first morning that I’d ever eaten breakfast with him and it were completely natural for him to sit on my bed.
I’d stayed in his home despite not knowing him at all.
And he’d been a gentleman about it. I caught his eyes resting on me once in a while, but he hadn’t made any moves. He’d woken me up a lot during the night, but it had been professional, almost dispassionate. I grew to hate the flashlight that he kept with him, but we knew now that I didn’t have a bad concussion.
I must’ve been hungrier than I thought, because the omelette and bacon disappeared in record time. I felt a little guilty, because I was sure that I’d stolen his portion of it.
He didn’t seem to mind. Before I finished, he ate all of the bananas.
I sat back when I was done and touched my stomach. He put the tray on the nightstand.
“If I ate like that every meal, I’d be the size of a whale.”
He shook his head.
“You are the perfect size. You have the curvy shape that I love.”
There was a beat of silence between us. He was sitting right there, looking right at me.
I didn’t have any experience with men. I’d dated Brayden only for our senior year of college. We knew what was expected from the both of us. His proposal at the end of the year wasn’t a surprise; it had been planned for our whole lives.
He’d had plenty of fun in college, but I was more of a bookworm. I didn’t party very much, instead I was too busy with my part-time job and a course load that was just a little bit more than what a normal person would sign up for. Jenny was my polar opposite. She had dated so many boys in college that I’d lost count. I’d driven to the doctor’s clinic with her every time that she had a pregnancy scare. I knew how all of this worked in theory, but not in practice.
I was very curious, but I hadn’t gotten very many chances to try anything.
Before I could freak myself out and talk myself out of it, I leaned forward and planted my lips on his for a firm, brief kiss.
After a half second of shock, his hands were in my hair and his mouth was kissing me back. He traveled a little lower.
I tilted my head back as I felt the roughness of his beard on the bare skin of my neck.
He bit me hard. I gasped as the little burst of pain coursed through my body.
He soothed the bite with his warm tongue, then traveled down to my shoulder and bit me even harder there.
I could smell the clean scent of his hair from here.
I don’t know how he got my clothing off, but I was naked, and he was, too.
His head traveled downwards, and he bit the inner curve of my right breast before moving to my left one.
He kep
t moving downwards, kissing his way down my stomach.
I was normally very self-conscious about the softness of my stomach, but he didn’t seem to even care, which made me relax.
And then his head was making its way between my thighs. He parted them gently but with inexorable force.
Then his mouth was kissing me down there. My hips bucked of their own accord as my hands went to grip the back of his head as he licked me gently at first and then with a lot more force.
I didn’t know if I was screaming, because I was past the point of being able to hear, but my mouth was all the way open and my back was arched like a bow.
And still he kept going.
Every muscle in my body clenched as I experienced the most intense orgasm I’d ever had in my entire life. It was as if he’d taken part of my soul.
And he hadn’t even taken me yet.
As I panted, trying to catch my breath, he rolled us so that I was on top of him. One hand was on the back of my neck, pushing me down onto his cock, which he must’ve guided into me with his other hand.
It felt incredibly hard inside of me as I slid down on it and took even more of him. I felt like I was too tight to take it. I felt something give inside of me.
And then finally I was all the way down, my head on his chest.
His hands went down to grab my butt.
Even though he was on the bottom, he controlled the rhythm, which was fast and hard. Every time that he stretched me, I felt like I was being taken to my limits and a little beyond.
Soon he was breathing hard under me. His eyes were shut. When he groaned, I felt him release inside of my body, which triggered another orgasm for me. I fluttered around him as my eyes rolled back in my head from the feeling of his warmth inside of me.
I wasn’t a tiny little thing. I didn’t want to crush him, so I tried to roll to the side. His hands tightened on my butt.
“Stay right there. I might want to go again.”
I was shocked to feel the butterfly sensations as he hardened again, as if he hadn’t just filled me up.
“How can you be ready so fast?”
