by Lexy Timms
Mel slowly opened the door.
She stood there, not quite the fantasy girl she’d imagined herself to be. It was with a certain amount of shyness, a certain amount of boldness, that she presented herself, one of Brant’s dress shirts on her back, unbuttoned, askew, and clearly the only article of clothing she wore.
His mouth fell open as his eyes traveled up and down her form.
Mel stared up at the towering man and tried to look innocent, but the persistent smile that wouldn’t go away spoiled the effect. “I’m so sorry.” Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite contrite. Oh, that damn smile wouldn’t go away. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too badly…” She lowered herself to one knee, putting her eyes on level with his belt. “If only there were some way to make it up to you…”
Brant stood still.
For a minute, she wasn’t even sure he was breathing. Did he approve? They’d never actually had the time for roleplay or games. Their lovemaking had always been…hurried. Passionate. In the middle of too many other things going on.
The whole night still lay before them.
She looked up, realizing that he was breathing all right. Stronger. Heavier. She’d never seen his eyes so dark. He bent, tangling one hand in her hair. He was shocked she suspected, but judging from the look of utter awe and delight on his face he didn’t seem too upset.
This was love. Kneeling here for him. Not for herself, though her own pleasure was part of this act. But for him. To give him something that only she could give. Something that he wanted desperately.
She quickly stripped him out of his clothes. This could easily become a ritual. The unbuckling of the belt. The button underneath. Her own breathing came a little faster. Who knew that each act could be so erotic? This slow revealing of him…this savoring of each step. She smelled his arousal. Felt the hair on his legs beneath her hands as his trousers dropped to the floor. Her senses were alive. All that remained was to taste…
A single kiss though the soft fabric of his boxer-briefs. The taste of cotton and pre-cum.
Already he was ready for her.
Brant grasped the doorjamb with one hand. The other tugged at her hair. He stroked her head, long delicate touches as she stripped him of this last barrier, leaving him naked but for the shirt he wore.
Free to the air, under the caress of her fingers and tongue, he swelled to meet her lips. She kissed him there, almost chastely, and looked up at him—smiling.
“Nothing to say?” she teased him.
“Afraid to break the break the spell,” Brant admitted. “I might wake up.”
Mel laughed and took him. The way they’d made love earlier, it was a passionate thing, a hurried combination of need and longing. They’d been apart too long. Even with the shrinking of the world through technology, they had never had enough. Sure, they were always in communication, but being far away after intimacy, after being apart for months on end…what had they really expected? And when they had met again, it was like lightning had struck between them. They had needed desperately to reconnect.
But this…this was time and time enough. Mel was exhausted. Brant probably was, too. They’d been through stress and work issues and travel, but this night was theirs. They agreed without words, without discussion, to pretend they were well-rested, that sleep was a long way off. This was a night that was reserved for them and only for them.
So, Mel took her time, lovingly touching him with fingers and lips and tongue and teeth. The hardness, the wonderful flesh that hung under it, the tight, muscular thighs that trembled and threatened to give way. Every inch of him was a delicacy, a form of worship, a chance to connect with someone perfect. Perfect for her. She wanted to be perfect for him.
Her hand wrapped around the tight muscles of his butt cheeks, squeezing, pulling as she worked everything she’d ever read about or heard about; wishing she’d been more experienced, wishing to give him the best of herself.
Until he took her unexpectedly. He made her stand and then lay her on the bed, the shirt she wore falling around her, her hair fanning out around her face. She was open to him, spread before him, and the scars that she bore didn’t even register. It never even occurred to her to be ashamed.
He was in her and on her and around her, with kisses, thrusts, hands feeling what his lips could not reach.
It blurred the lines between their bodies, lost in the sensations. One cried out, the other answered, or perhaps it was the same cry in two throats, or in one. It didn’t matter. She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him close. He slid along her, drawing her in.
In her orgasm, in the cry of release, in the whimper of all freely given, if she used the word “love”—it felt good. It was the truth, clear and simple.
They slept after pulling off shirts, leaving them skin to skin. The blankets were tangled around them, or maybe it was they who tangled together, a mass of arms and legs and sleepy kisses that spent the last of the energies on a pure and noble cause.
It was the best Mel had slept in a very, very, long time.
* * *
Mel stretched. It was the stretch of a cat, waking up in a soft bed after a dinner of cream. She forgot where she was, nothing looked familiar, but then it all came back in a rush. Brant, Maria, last night.
She was delightfully sore in all the right places, still felt his skilled hands on her skin. She smiled and rolled over to see how he was doing.
And found a note instead.
My dearest Melissa:
I’m sorry I had to leave before you woke up. I hope you don’t mind too much, but I saw you sleeping there and watched you for a while. You looked so peaceful, so beautiful stretched out on the sheets.
I need to go into the office. There’s something that I have to do, something I should have done yesterday. There’s someone I need to talk to, and something I need to fix.
Maria has a room, # 546. It’s a private room, spacious, and I’ve alerted the staff to keep a lid on things. They’ve handled celebrities before, the rich and famous who don’t want to be identified. They should have no problem keeping Kenneth away.
I’m taking Maria down to check her in. You need the sleep after the trip you had. Take any car you like, they all have GPS; you can meet me at my office and we can go together from there. Call me if you need directions or help.
Last night was…I don’t know how to describe it.
I can still feel your lips on mine.
Brant.
She fought a feeling of peevishness. She’d wanted to be there when Maria got settled but, truthfully, she’d been exhausted. Now she felt better than she had in days, and found it hard to hold a resentment against two people so dear to her that were only thinking of her well-being.
She took a quick shower, washing some areas with special care. There were one or two marks on her skin, mementos of the night’s activities. She stared at them, feeling way too old for hickeys yet pleased nonetheless.
With fresh clothing, she felt like a new person. She paused in front of the mirror after getting dressed: flowing blouse, jeans, a pretty pair of shoes that were destined to become torture later. She looked…good.
Vanity was a new experience for her. After so many years in the jungle, so many years in medical school, so many years where looks were nothing and no one cared. Here she was in a mansion, fresh, clean—loved. She didn’t recognize the person that smiled back at her, but whoever it was…she wanted to meet her. She looked like a good friend to have.
That thought echoed in her mind as she set off in exploration of the mythical…garage.
As with finding anything else locating the garage was a challenge, but only the idea that Brant and Maria waited at the end of the quest gave her feet the power to continue. But while she’d expected maybe a car or two in a typical suburban space of concrete and lawn mowers, here there was an echoing warehouse of a structure dedicated solely to an automobile collection that would have put Jay Leno to shame. Okay, maybe not Leno. But there were a dozen cars in t
he place. Who needs a dozen cars? Some of them looked like savage hunters, frozen in attack. Some looked ancient, gentrified, as though slightly offended at all the noise and ruinous living of young ones around them.
At the end, a small, unpretentious little car sat in innocent resignation. This was the car overlooked, forgotten, a little reliable—Mel hoped—that no one remembered was there. It was a Jeep, so similar to the one that the clinic had, but with all the bells and whistles and super fluff.
It took her a long time to discover the key was in the ignition. Who does that here in L.A.? It fired right up and, after a little experimenting, she found that the button on the box under the armrest opened the garage door.
The small Jeep jumped out of the garage as though pleased with itself that it had been chosen, and gamely flowed through the front gate which opened in front of her and then closed behind her. Mel shook her head at the surreal-ness the rich considered to be passé, and turned on the GPS.
The voice told her to go left for a couple of miles, right for three more, and then enter the freeway.
“Wait. What? Freeway?” Apparently, the GPS was unaffected by her hesitation; the screen clearly showed the little red arrow boldly climbing onto a pile of spaghetti. “Hold on a sec?” Mel tried to see the picture better, but a blaring horn took her attention back to the road. A large SUV cut in front of her and immediately slammed on the brakes. Mel just about did a faceplant into the steering wheel she hit her own brakes, and then sat back in absolute disbelief when the SUV turned in at a parking lot. “You had to do that in front of me?” Mel swallowed and continued, only to tap the brake again as the car attempting to leave the parking lot chose the opportunity to block Mel completely as the nose now jutted out into her lane.
The cars behind him took up the slack, abandoning him to his fate, and the cars behind her flowed around her Jeep like a stream of metal around a sudden rock in its path. The driver who was now blocking half of her lane flipped her off and screamed at her, and though she couldn’t hear him the intent was clear.
He bullied his way into the center lane, effectively blocking the entire road before pulling out and caroming down the street to shove his way into the far-left lane. Mel jumped and got past the parking lot opening, but her breaths were coming fast and shallow now.
I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.
She turned right at the indicated light, only knowing that it was the correct light because of the calm, ethereal voice coming from a plastic box mounted on the dash. The voice had said nothing about the pedestrian who was walking with the occasional pause to pull on his testicles, and once to turn completely around and flip off someone Mel couldn’t see. She hoped the honking was for him and not for her.
Once the crosswalk was clear, the traffic that turned behind her shot out like a shaken bottle of soda.
I can do this!
Looming ahead was a bridge with traffic so backed up it looked more like an elevated parking lot. Right was south. She needed to go south. The office was south, the plastic box said south, everything was south. Except the entrance ramp. That was on the north side of the road. On the far left.
Mel tried to get over and became the road block. She found a hole to get into the middle lane, but the traffic from there just went to the left and blocked her out. If one person had let her over, the entire street would have been able to go, but no one would.
She was flipped off, cursed, honked, yelled at. She missed the turn.
The people that had been cursing her all wanted to go south, too. There were so many of them that the turn lane filled up and overflowed, blocking the left lane, giving Mel the time to get over well after she needed to.
I can do this…
She looked for a place to get turned around, a small side street up ahead. It took five minutes just to turn left into the street, the GPS was “re-routing,” and the traffic was so backed up that the cars were at a stand-still all the way down the ramp, across the intersection, and into the turn lane.
“You are still on the quickest route,” the GPS assured her.
I can’t do this! I can’t do this!
There was a mattress store in front of her with a generous parking lot. The Jeep nestled into a corner of the lot, and Mel waited while the friendly person with the strange accent assured her that her Uber would be there soon.
It was not, she was glad to see, the kid from the day before.
“You people are all crazy,” she said by way of greeting, and climbed into the stranger’s car.
* * *
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Mel asked the female Uber driver. It hadn’t been as much of a nightmare as the last time she’d been the victim of a ride in L.A., but it still bad. The woman had been a careful and flawless driver, but that only meant that the wildness of the traffic was more pronounced.
“This is the address you gave me.” The woman half-turned in the seat to look at her, a look made somewhat disconcerting given the number of facial piercings she’d indulged in. “What’re you looking for?”
“A cosmetic surgeon’s office?” Mel heard herself say it like a question.
“There’s a sign there,” the woman said doubtfully, pointing a black-painted fingernail complete with skull motif. “Reconstructive Surgery?”
“I guess so…” Mel looked around. There were multiple water fountains all the way up the median of the driveway, great pillars that rose from the asphalt and jutted into the air, standing free on either side of the walkway. Every fifteen or twenty feet another set of ornate columns lined the walkway, but not one of them held up anything that she could see.
Neatly trimmed heads on every orange and lemon tree held a specific amount of fruit, all in aesthetically pleasing places. Yet no fruit dared litter the paths or the greens so tightly trimmed it could have been a putting green.
“I could’ve sworn I read something about drought in California. People spray-painting their front yards to make it look like they had grass.” Mel wasn’t sure she’d said even said the words out loud till the driver responded.
“Not in this neighborhood.” To be fair, even the driver looked slightly awed as she snapped her gum and waited for Mel to figure out if she was getting out or not.
The doors to the main building were large enough to admit a parade of giraffes. Even from here she could see soaring archways and vaulted ceilings. She assumed there were flying buttresses, too, though for the life of her she didn’t know what that would look like. It sounded overblown, though, but if there was a place for overblown this was it.
Ironically, the smallest and least pretentious part of the architecture was the sign on the side of the door that read “Hastings, Mangal, Williams, Layton, Millen. Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery.”
“I guess this is the place,” Mel mumbled, reaching for her purse, and feeling less sure of herself by the minute. “I’ve seen five-star resorts that don’t look so elegant.”
The driver glanced from the building, back to Mel, frowning slightly, causing her gelled hair spikes to wilt somewhat. “Listen, Miss…it’s none of my business, but you really don’t need to go in there.”
“Pardon me?” Was the driver telling her to stay away? Like some omen of what was to come?
“You’re beautiful as is; too pretty to go through all that.”
Mel caught herself in a short laugh and covered it. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled out $20 and handed it to the driver, knowing she was over-tipping drastically. But, hey, how often did a girl get that kind of compliment? “I don’t mean to laugh, I appreciate it, I really do. That’s very kind of you to say so.”
“I mean it,” the woman insisted, and thanked her for the tip.
“Well, as it happens,” Mel said, opening the door to the warm winds that twined through the pillars and rustled the trees, “I’m just meeting someone here. I’m not a patient.”
The air was scented with something sweet. Exotic. Flowers bloomed everywhe
re. Mel paused on the sidewalk, and took a deep breath. Fortifying herself for the next step forward.
“Hey.”
Mel turned. The car hadn’t left yet. The driver had rolled down her window and was leaning out. “Listen, if you get bored or anything, there’s a concert tonight at a coffee shop near here. Give me a call.” She winked and waved a piece of paper that Mel automatically stepped forward to grab.
Did she just…?
She watched the Kia Soul disappear down the driveway. A hand appeared at the window, with a cheerful wave. She could just picture the little skulls dancing cheerfully on the driver’s fingertips.
The paper held a single word, “Jessica,” a phone number, and what looked like the outline of a pair of lips. In black lipstick.
“What the hell is it with Uber drivers?!” she demanded of the universe. The universe declined to answer.
It was time to focus back on the task at hand. She turned to study the building again. As it turned out, the entire building wasn’t given over to one practice, no matter how lucrative; there were lawyers and tax people and investment firms. It was the ultra-rich one-stop shopping, like a boutique mall for the upper 1%.
Still, Brant’s office was large and well-appointed. The ubiquitous waterfall with its constant resultant reminder of needing the bathroom was here, too; an entire wall was awash in falling water that split and re-formed and eternally washed a glass WELCOME sign before falling to a rock-strewn plate in the floor.
The reception area itself was packed. Mel felt a dozen pairs of eyes on her as she opened the door. Uneasily she fixated on the reception desk and stepped forward, sinking into carpet so plush that she half expected to leave a trail of footprints behind her. At least she’d have a trail to follow if she needed to exit in a hurry.
Behind the reception desk was either a plastic surgeon’s masterpiece or the result of finding a Miss Universe who could answer phones and type. Either way she was the living, breathing example of the sort of beauty a place like this could offer.
