by Fiona Zedde
She smiled again at the old nickname. “There’s absolutely nothing on my mind, May. I’m blank right now.”
“And why is that? Usually there’s too much going on up there.” A warm finger tapped gently at the middle of Renee’s forehead.
Despite her best intentions, a sigh huffed past Renee’s lips. “I—you were right, Mayson. I had no business meeting up with these men. It was stupid.”
Mayson’s body stiffened against hers.
“Did something bad happen?”
“Not bad, just…” She thought about the girl who had pretended to be a man for her. She thought about the scratches in her car’s paint that needed to be repaired. “Something annoying happened,” she finally said.
“Well, are you going to tell me or just leave me wondering?”
“There’s nothing—”
Quiet footsteps sounded just outside the doors. A woman walked in.
“Oh, there you are.” Linette, the studio’s manager, looked relieved to see Mayson. “Tara said you must have left for the night, but I saw your office door was still open.”
“I’m leaving soon,” Mayson said. “Do you need me for anything?”
“Nope. We locked up the rest of the studio for the night and everyone except me and Tara is gone.”
“Go on home then. I’ll finish locking up.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if I changed my mind and asked you to stay.” Mayson’s mouth twitched.
Linette backed out of the room, laughing. “Say no more, boss. See you in the morning.”
Still smiling, Mayson turned back to Renee. “You were saying?”
She shook her head. “I’ll help you lock up the building. We can talk and work.”
It didn’t take long to close up for the night—shut all the windows, set the a/c for the early morning classes, turn off everything that wasn’t being used—even though Mayson had to deal with some minor paperwork in her office. As they worked, Renee told her everything, every sad and boring annoyance of the past few days.
“So you’re telling me that you fucked a girl this week?” The file drawer hung open, ready for the papers in Mayson’s hand. But she wasn’t paying any attention to it. She was completely focused on Renee.
“Of all the things I told you, why are you concentrating on that?” She squirmed under her friend’s scrutiny.
“Because it’s weird. Don’t you think it’s weird?” A frown and something else lingered on Mayson’s face.
Renee shook her head. At the time, it had been a fly in her ointment. The thing that she wanted, the thing she’d arranged her entire evening around—a hard and heavy session with a man—had been denied to her. She felt sad for the girl but there was nothing “weird” about their encounter.
“No. She was just a kid who needed to find other gay kids to play with.”
Mayson looked at her again for a long moment. Then her shoulder hitched in a shrug before she turned away to tuck the papers into the file cabinet and slide the heavy wooden drawer shut. “I think it’s a little weird but if you don’t, then…”
She plucked her keys from a hook on the wall and picked up her messenger bag. Her hand lifted to the light switch.
“Ready?”
Renee nodded and moved toward the door.
Outside, they walked toward Renee’s car. “We can take yours,” Mayson said. “I’ll hop on the trolley to get back here tomorrow.”
Instead of getting into the passenger seat when Renee opened the car with the remote, Mayson followed her to the driver’s side. She traced the scratches on the door with a long finger, her face thoughtful.
“If it’s that little girl who tried to have you for dessert, I don’t think you have anything else to worry about from her. She’s long gone.” Mayson traced the interrupted W again. “But it wouldn’t hurt for you to be more careful next time.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time.” Renee opened the door and got into the car, forcing her friend to step out of the way.
When she moved to close the door, Mayson grabbed it. Light from the parking lot haloed her tall body as she stood there looking down at Renee. “Why?”
“Was I just talking to myself in there?”
Mayson snorted. “Some girl was playing games, so what? The first time was…” She paused. “It was everything you thought it would be. This last time shouldn’t be the last time if being with these men gives you something you need.”
“But …” Renee’s legs spilled out of the car, shoes lightly slapping the concrete. She didn’t know what the “but” was. There was frustration in her. There was yearning. All mixed up into something unnamed that had been lying in her for a long time. The situation that she’d set up with these strangers quieted all that. Her eyes met Mayson’s. In that moment, she felt as if her best friend knew everything.
She sighed. “Oh, Mayson.”
Mayson crouched to look in her face. She took Renee’s hand.
“I know you’re afraid but I also know that you want this.” Mayson’s voice was low and soft, the same silken tones she used in class. “Take it. It’s sex. It doesn’t hurt anybody. Maybe having this simple thing will help you realize that it’s possible to have more.”
Heat flared under Renee’s skin. Why was Mayson reading her mind? “Life is just one big smorgasbord, huh?” She tried to make her tone light but failed.
“Exactly. If something doesn’t taste good, put it aside and pick up something else.” Mayson’s eyes glimmered with the beginnings of a smile. “You get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” she said slowly, an answering smile on her lips. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“Good. Now let’s get out of here. All this talk about food is making me hungry.” Mayson stood up and closed the door. When she came around to the other side and sank into the passenger seat, she flashed Renee a satisfied grin. “So, is it your turn to cook or mine?”
Chapter 16
Mayson rolled over in the bed that was as familiar as her own. The windows were open, the ceiling fan whirled above her head, and the room was absolutely dark, just the way she liked it. But she couldn’t sleep. In the room across the hall, she knew that Renee was knocked out, lulled into oblivion by her half of the bottle of pinot noir they’d shared after dinner.
Although she’d taken care to reassure Renee about her choice to sleep with strangers, the potential danger of it still bothered Mayson. Well, that and other things, but it seemed safer to dwell on the physically dangerous aspects of this adventure than anything else stirring up in her subconscious.
The sheets rustled again as she moved restlessly in the bed. She plumped the pillow under her head. There had to be something—Mayson sat up. There was something she could do. Or at least she could try. With the beginnings of an idea forming in her head, Mayson reached for her cell phone.
Chapter 17
Renee laced up her corset and turned to look at herself in the mirror. Her newly long hair lay in shimmering waves around her shoulders and down to her breasts. A tiny voice lingered at the corner of her mind. Are you sure you want to do this? But she ignored the voice. Pushed out her breasts, sighed at the press of the thong against her freshly shaved and oiled skin, against her clit. The laces of the corset brushed against the rounded globes of her bottom. She was absolutely sure.
After her talk with Mayson, she felt renewed.
“There’s nothing wrong with pleasure,” Mayson told her last night while she hand-grated a nutmeg for the Argentinean baked fish Renee was making. And Renee held on to those words, needing to believe there was nothing wrong with wanting passion from a man without the prison of a relationship with one. Needing to believe there was nothing wrong with her.
So she moved eagerly forward. At the beauty salon, she replaced her normal short, sleek haircut with a luxurious head-ful of long, silky black hair. A fresh manicure and pedicure left her nails gleaming a Hellbent Red. As she was on the wa
y to the car with her feet slipped into high-heeled sandals and the new hair bouncing around her shoulders, a corseted mannequin in a window caught her eye. It only made sense to buy the simple and simply sexy black corset with the matching thong and stockings.
The purchase had been a good one. In the mirror, she looked very much the determined seductress. Renee stared at the picture she made—her breasts overflowing the tightly laced corset, the bare vulnerability of her throat, the hyper-feminine fall of hair—until she felt like how she looked. Alluring. Confident. She grabbed the black wrap dress from the back of the chair and slipped it on.
Tremors of nervousness gripped her fingers but she clasped them tightly together, breathing deeply. Everything will go great tonight. It has to. Although he had not included a picture in his profile, tonight’s man was exactly what she wanted. The description said he was big, over six feet tall and muscular. In his e-mail, he had been very specific about what he wanted from her. His words had drawn her in effortlessly, quickly.
It was a different hotel from the last one. She’d never been there before but it was close to the restaurant where she and Mayson had brunch. Like before, she booked the room over the phone and checked it out by doing a quick drive-by after work. It was acceptable, a nondescript bleached brick building in the middle of Old Town. Pretty and intimate. She hoped her lover of the night would appreciate that.
He wanted to arrive after she did. He wanted to come into the hotel room and know that she was there waiting for him.
“I want to smell you when I walk in,” he’d written.
Renee was wet at the thought of those words. She made it clear in her response that she could do that, only for him, but he couldn’t talk. They couldn’t talk.
She slipped into the anonymous hotel room, pulled the shades, trailed her hand over the bedspread as she walked past. A delicate shudder moved over her skin at the thought of what would happen in that bed when he arrived. He would erase her doubts, make her feel pleasure, take her beyond herself.
In the bathroom, she turned on the light, then closed the door to let out just the tiniest sliver of illumination. Nothing more. As she made her way around the room, the dress whispered against her almost bare skin, her stockinged legs, her nipples shielded in velvet.
6:17. The digital clock flashed the time. Thirteen more minutes. Her swollen nether lips rubbed wetly together with each step.
6:19.
The bed sighed and took her weight at its very edge. She imagined this new one. Strong, according to his self-supplied description. And used to command by the way he had asked her to make herself and the room ready for him. Well, she was ready for him now. Renee’s thighs fell open. Her fingers climbed under the dress, slithering over her stockings, the voluptuously stretched garter. She sighed as finger met wet flesh. The muscles in her neck stretched, relaxed. Renee fell back into the sheets.
She stroked herself with the lightest of touches, the outer lips. Wet. The moisture up to her clit. A low gasp from her own throat like the touch had been unexpected. Her fingers dipped inside, teased the parted flesh, sending delicate shockwaves of sensation tripping through her body.
The door clicked open. Her body clutched around her fingers. The dark figure in the doorway drew in a lungful of air. A rumble of appreciation from a masculine throat. Renee’s head fell back against the sheets. She could smell him, a mixture of mint and soap.
Light from the door only flooded across her lap, across the edge of the bed where she held herself open, widened her thighs for him to see more of her. His big body filled the doorway for a moment longer before he stepped into the room and closed the door.
His eyes on her were hungry, intent. Her skin tingled as he stood there, tasting her with his eyes, his back pressed against the door, all of him clothed in darkness.
Thick waves of lust moved over her skin as he stood taking in the smell of her femaleness in the closed-in room. Her fingers moved deeper inside her the longer he stayed still and unmoving, his silence preserving the sanctity of the moment.
She knew he could see her face in that moment, stretched across the bed, her mouth open to release the moans she couldn’t keep to herself. Renee felt his arousal. Felt it in the way he crept closer, as if he couldn’t help himself. Big hands gripped her knees. Denim-clad hips moved between her thighs.
He shoved her hands away, quickly, violently. And fell to his knees, groaning, to bury his face in her heat. Renee’s breath caught. It had been so long since someone had done that to her. So long. She shuddered as his mouth covered her weeping flesh. When he licked her from the puckered rosebud of her bottom to her clit, slid his tongue deeply inside her, she bucked against the sheets, gasping.
It only got better when he gripped her, pulling her to the edge of the bed, spreading her wider to the seduction of his tongue. He grunted, loving her slowly with his tongue, filling her, before withdrawing, pulling back to lavish her clit with hot, sucking kisses. Renee couldn’t have kept quiet if she wanted to. Panting gasps left her throat as her fingers twisted in the sheets, twisted in his hair.
He knew exactly what he was doing, what would drive her out of her mind. Sliding his tongue in and out, playing at her entrance before diving back into her like his life depended on pleasing her. His greedy noises spurred her on. She could feel him pumping against the bed, provoking tiny squeaks from the springs. The hot spot in her belly tightened even more. Her body flushed blood red.
Gasping, she grabbed at his shirt, urging him to come up, to bury himself inside her. He shoved her hands away again. Deepened his sensual assault on her dripping womanhood. His groans made the flesh under his mouth vibrate, pushing her arousal even higher. Deeper.
“God!”
He seemed intent on making her come. Caressing, licking her until the fireball inside her burst wide open.
Renee called out again. The rising flash dropped her, panting, gasping, exploding again and again, backward into the bed. Still, he continued, lavishing her with gentle kisses and licks, pulling her down for her orgasm while simultaneously pushing her toward another.
Gasping, Renee turned over onto her belly, twisting away from him and the too-intense stimulation. Her dress fell back around her thighs to shield her sex. Behind her, he groaned. Hands slid under the dress, squeezing her thighs. He pulled her up to her knees. Her face pressed into the sheets. Then his fingers were at her entrance again, playing in her wetness, sliding over lips and over her clit. Renee groaned. The drum deep inside her began to beat again. Oh, he’s good.
She turned over to look at him. Or at least she tried. But a firm hand settled into the small of her back. Holding her still. She heard the faint crinkle of a condom wrapper, then felt movement behind her.
“This isn’t exactly how I wanted it,” he rasped from behind her, his voice deep and guttural, “but it’ll do for now.”
Then he filled her, his mint-infused scent overwhelming.
Hands gripping her hips, thickness buried inside her. Renee sighed. This was what she knew. Until her lover gave her what she had expected, Renee didn’t fully realize how uneasy she had been. Lost in her pleasure but not lost enough to wonder why he gave her his mouth, her pleasure first.
He began to move. And she opened up. Thrusting back. Sighing. Then breath shivered in her throat when his fingers found her clit again, making lazy circles in time with his thrusts, pouring molten delight into her with each languid movement of his shaft. She raised herself up on her hands, getting enough leverage to push back harder into him, letting him know that this was nice, but she wanted more. He grunted a laugh.
“All night, remember?” He pushed more firmly into her clit to send the point home.
Renee shuddered. In his e-mail, he’d said he wanted to take his time with her and she should come only if she was ready to devote the night to pleasure. But at the time she’d taken him just for another man boastful about his staying power. She figured as long as she got one orgasm out of the deal she was h
appy and he would be too.
But this lover was as good as his word. He was large and strong inside her, slamming into her with sure strokes that angled perfectly each and every time. She moaned. His fingers stroked her clit and squeezed nipples through the lace corset. She arched her neck, threw her head back. Strands of hair caught in her mouth, clung to her damp neck and shoulders. Her body tingled and ran with sweat that caught in the lace of her corset.
His deep grunts punctuated the lustful quiet. The slap of his thighs against her thighs. In the storm of his attentions, she became sharply aware of everything. The pinch of her thong into her hips from where he’d pulled the panties aside to take her past the thin silk. Traffic’s whispering hush beyond the open window. The dark smell of her lover behind her, a combination of their sex and crushed mint.
Renee reached back, touching him where they were joined, reaching back until his heavy seed swung into her palm with each thrust. He made an urgent sound. Gripped her hips tighter, and began moving more deeply, more purposely inside her. She gritted her teeth against the needful sounds that rose in her throat, digging her fingers into the bed as he pushed into her and she shoved back into him. Renee rolled her hips, squeezed herself tightly around him. The explosive give and take of his body slamming against hers and his grunts rising harder and faster in the air. Sweet heat twisted through her body, rising and falling, waxing and waning. Orgasm teased her, tugging at her with golden fingers.
“Fuck,” he gasped, bending hard over her.
Fire burst inside Renee when his teeth sank into her shoulder. He groaned something loudly, something muffled into the flesh of her shoulder. Grabbing her hips, he thrust deeply, once, twice, three times, and shuddered against her, explosively emptying himself. He gasped. Her body still tingled, tiny points of sensation, electric shocks tripping over her skin. Waiting to be brought over to the other side of her desire. She writhed between him and the sheets.
Almost. Almost. Renee touched herself, squeezed her clit between trembling fingers.
