Anarchy

by Carmel Rhodes

  I stuck two fingers in her cunt, pumping in and out roughly. “Three,” she reminded me, and who was I to deny her? She needed me. She needed to be filled by me. I spread her cheeks apart and let spit drip from my lips onto her asshole. My thumb, stained pink from her lipstick, teased the puckered opening. Around and around it went, applying pressure then releasing, then pushing in further. “Three. Three. Three,” she chanted, raking her nails down the headboard. She begged for it, craved it, so I sodomized her with my thumb. “Yesssss,” she hissed, pushing against my hand. She used me, stealing pleasure that wasn’t hers to take. Her pleasure belonged to me. It was mine to dole out as I saw fit.

  “You don’t get to come until you’re drowning, remember?” I withdrew my hand and pushed her face first into the pillow.

  “Then stop being a pussy and drown me.” Her frustration was adorable. Reaching behind me, I grabbed her ankles and tugged. Arms splayed, her body collapsed on the bed with a soft thud. I pinned her down by the ankles and squeezed until she whimpered. “Dr. Cooper,” she chastised. My angry little slut, wanted to be fucked. Desperately. Urgently. Mercilessly.

  The tip of my dick probed her entrance. The damp lace covering her felt rough against my cock. Teasing her was almost as fun as fucking her. Her body responded to every touch, every kiss, every lick, every bite—especially the bites. “You’ve ruined these panties,” I admonished.

  “You’ve ruined me.”

  Her words were like Adderall. You’ve ruined me. Didn’t she know that was the plan? Ruined. You’ve ruined me. If I could love, I would have fallen right then—right there. You’ve ruined me.

  “I own this cunt,” I roared, dipping my fingers into the lace, tearing a hole big enough for my dick to fit.

  “It’s yours. It will always be yours.”

  “You’re damn right it will,” I grit, driving into her. Wet wasn’t the appropriate word. It was as if she hid an ocean in her pussy. Warm, wasn’t the appropriate word. My dick cocooned inside of her as if she were home.

  I rammed in and out, hard and fast, yanking her hips back to meet mine thrust for thrust. Her body shook uncontrollably—violently. I felt the orgasm blooming in her core like roses in May. A strange thing happened then. I didn’t pull out. I didn’t tease or torture. I didn’t deny her. I couldn’t. I kept pounding, kept fucking, kept pushing her higher and higher. Sweat dripped from my brow, down her back. My heart pounded in my chest, and suddenly, I wanted nothing more than for her to cum. Simone was my equal, my match in every way.

  You’ve ruined me. I thought. Only it wasn’t her words echoing in my brain. They were mine.

  * * *

  The sun rose, and with the morning came reality. We’d locked ourselves away from the real world to indulge in a seventy-two-hour cocaine and sex fueled bender. I wasn’t a man of faith, but those three days at The Standard with Simone were as close to heaven as someone like me would ever come.

  “Where’s home for you?” Simone asked, her voice deep and scratchy from the coke and the hour she’d spent choking on my cock. Her flight was leaving in an hour, yet she laid across the bed, wrapped in a sheet.

  “New York,” I answered, sucking on my teeth. Fucking coke.

  “I’m headed west, but I’ll be in New York this summer.”

  “Interesting.” I yawned, pulling a navy-blue sweater over my head, as I shoved my feet in my loafers. I’d stayed in Aspen three days too long and I needed to get back to my life.

  “Maybe we could meet up while I’m in town,” she suggested, rolling onto her side. Angry red and purple bruises covered her neck and chest. Her brown hair was scattered this way and that. Truthfully, Simone was a great piece of ass. Aspen would always be a fond memory, but now that the cocaine fog had waned, I could see the situation for what it really was: a toxic mess.

  “Maybe,” I shrugged, knowing full well Damien and Simone could never be—would never be. We were a disaster waiting to happen. We brought out the worst in each other. I couldn’t have Simone in my real life any more than I could have the dragon. We existed in the shadows of The Standard Hotel. In the rafters and the crown molding and in the old bar with Ricky.

  That was where our story began.

  That was where it was supposed to end.

  —3—

  Chaos

  My body buzzed on the drive home from Meadowbrook. After catching-up, Simone and I got down to business. We talked about how she previously coped with her disorder and set goals for her time at Meadowbrook and beyond. She answered every question perfectly, too perfectly, like she’d read every book on bipolar disorder and its treatment and memorized the right things to say. I didn’t bother calling her out. She was keeping my secret, so I’d keep hers.

  It was a standard visit and Simone was a smart woman, mentally unstable as fuck, but smart nonetheless. A New York Times bestselling author who wrote self-help books for women about accepting their sexuality and embracing their inner slut. Ironically, the queen slut was seeking help for being the thing that made her millions.

  Still, I’d forgotten what it was like to step into the ring with Simone. She verbally sparred with the best of us. It was a welcome challenge after three years of polite conversation with Natasha.

  Shit.

  Natasha.

  She hadn’t responded to any of my text messages or phone calls which was unusual. Normally, I was the one with slow replies, but that day she had maintained radio silence. Hopefully, she’d had enough time to stew in her emotions and had taken the stick out of her ass. I had other plans for her asshole.

  I parked my Tahoe in the empty garage and killed the engine. Our five-bedroom home sat on nearly four acres of land. Natasha found it online and fell in love with it the moment we saw it in person.

  “There’s so much space. We could fit our entire penthouse inside of here.”

  “Our penthouse cost three times as much,” I replied dryly. She ignored my wisecrack and wandered deeper into the suburban hell that was to be our new home.

  “Great school district too,” the realtor added. “Do you have children?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Yet.

  It was the first time she had brought up having kids. Before then, I’d assumed we were on the same page about procreation. Moving was one thing, but babies and shitty diapers was a hard-fucking limit.

  The inside of the house was quiet. I walked through each room, flipping on lamps, checking for clues to my wife’s whereabouts. The living room remained untouched. Odd, I thought. Natasha always, ALWAYS left the TV on. It was a fight we had at least once a month. Staring up at that black screen mounted on the wall was like staring into the future. Dark. Vast. Lifeless.

  The kitchen was clean, no leftovers waited by the stove, no Tupperware in the fridge. Curious indeed. Even when Natasha stayed late visiting her grandmother, she always left food. I tried her cell again as I made my way upstairs. It went straight to voicemail.

  Soft, yellow light stretched out from under our bedroom door. The ominous glow mesmerized me. I followed it, shouldering through the door and stomping my way across the room to the lamp on the bedside table. A note written on soft cream cardstock sat in the center of the nightstand. Water droplets smeared the black ink etched onto the page. Tears.

  Damien,

  I’m done. Finally. Forever.

  Have a nice life.

  —Natasha.

  Huh.

  Not what I expected. I scanned the note again, then once more. Finally. Forever. Finally. Forever. Those words should have stung. My heart should have been racing. Tears should have leaked from my eyes like water bursting from a levee. I should have drowned in my sorrow, or been blinded by my rage. I should have felt something. Anything. Finally. Forever. Nothing. Crumpling the note, I let it slip from my hands.

  Her side of the closet was empty. The shit that cluttered the bathroom sink, gone. The scent of cherry blossoms used to linger in the air as if the trees were indigenous to Colorado
. It, too, had disappeared—as if she never was, as if we never were.

  In school, we learned about the five stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. My wife was gone, but I wasn’t in denial, or angry or depressed, though I hadn’t accepted it either. I didn’t grieve. I didn’t cry. I didn’t throw a tantrum or beg. I simply loosened my tie, toed off my shoes, and undressed.

  The shower spray burned my skin. Wrapping my palm around my cock, I tugged, hard and fast to a memory. To a ghost. To the one person who made me feel alive. To a scent I’d never forget. Despite its physical absence, the smell of vanilla surrounded me, engraved in my memory. I masturbated in the shower I once shared with my wife to the memory of Simone.

  I was so fucked.

  * * *

  “Are you upset your wife left?” Reed, my therapist, asked.

  I had started seeing him shortly after we moved to Colorado at Natasha’s insistence. She thought talking about my reluctance to procreate might trigger something inside me, as if realizing some repressed childhood trauma would suddenly make me want to become a father. The truth was, I had a great childhood. My parents gave me everything, including love and a substantial inheritance. I agreed to counseling to keep her from nagging, plus Reed and I had gone to med school together and he was the closest thing I had to a friend.

  “I was more annoyed than anything,” I said, draping my arms across the back of his couch. His office wasn’t Sears catalog chic. Simone would probably like it. A Starry Night print hung on the wall next to his Bachelor’s degree from Colorado State and photos littered his desk, photos I’d never noticed before. Photos I never cared about before Simone.

  “And why was that?”

  And why was that? I hated answering that question, and yet I’d asked it a million times myself. It was effective. It got patients talking. It got them thinking. Even if they couldn’t articulate the words, they thought them. Thinking a thing, allowing yourself to dwell in its possibility, was the first step to understanding, and with understanding came acceptance.

  “Why was I annoyed or why wasn’t I upset?”

  “Start with annoyed,” Reed suggested.

  He was a small man, five-six or five-seven. He had a ridiculous handlebar mustache, and crossed his legs like a bitch, but I liked him. I could be myself around him. He saw the monster, we didn’t speak of it openly, but he’d known me long enough to know the real me.

  “I wanted my dick sucked, and without Natasha there, I had to settle for jerking off in the shower. I didn’t buy her a three-carat ring to jerk off in the fucking shower.”

  Reed bristled at my honesty, then quickly schooled his features. “But she doesn’t want the ring,” he reminded me.

  Correction, I used to like him.

  “She wants the ring. Natasha loves with her entire heart. When she said I do, she meant forever. It’s why she stayed as long as she did. It’s why she hasn’t filed for divorce.”

  “Her actions would suggest otherwise.” He uncrossed his legs and crossed them again. Something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he seemed more antsy than usual.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, not because I cared, but because I wasn’t paying him $150 to half-ass my session. I deserved his full ass.

  “I’m fine. Stop avoiding.”

  Avoiding, me? I didn’t avoid. I lied, sure, but I was a direct liar. “Her actions were a power play,” I said. “She wants me to change and she thinks leaving will force my hand.”

  “Will it?”

  “I will never want children. I will never go and visit her grandmother without her prompting. I will never be that man, and I’ve never led her to believe I would be. I love Natasha as much as a man like me could love anyone, but I am who I am, and I’ve never pretended to be anyone else.”

  “Never?” he raised a brow.

  I looked to Starry Night, as if it held the answer. Black, navy and yellow swirled on cheap card stock. Van Gogh was probably rolling in his grave. Did I mislead her? “Maybe a little when we met,” I conceded.

  “And how was that, again?”

  “Four years ago, in the city. Summers in New York are brutal. Hot. Humid. Crowded. God, I miss it. I miss the energy of the city. Everyone’s an asshole. Everyone’s a narcissist.” My pulse strummed just talking about the city. Talking about home. “I had lunch with a colleague in Chelsea and was heading back to my office in the Upper East Side. I was scrolling through some emails on my phone, not paying attention, and ran right into a jogger. Spoiler alert, the jogger was Natasha. She was heading to the park. We collided. She fell and hurt her ankle. I insisted on taking her to the hospital to get it looked at.”

  “That was very nice of you.”

  “Have you ever seen my wife in spandex? I wasn’t being nice.”

  “But you pretended to be?”

  “Because I wanted to put my dick in her ass.”

  Reed sighed. The sound was tired and full of frustration, but he covered it up with a, “So, then what happened?”

  “Her ankle was fine. A few days later, she called to thank me and I asked her to dinner. We never made it—”

  “I get it,” he said, putting his hand up to stop me.

  “I put my dick in her ass, Reed.” I smirked, wiggling my brows. Reed was weird when I talked about fucking my wife so naturally, I never missed the chance to make him uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, I got it,” he sighed. “So, when did you go from dinner and anal sex, to three carat rings and exchanging vows?”

  “We’d been fucking exclusively for a year. I was thirty-five and the playboy bachelor thing was a little cliché, even for me. Natasha made life easier. She took care of things I’d rather not. She cooked, she RSVP’d for events, she remembered my dry cleaning—”

  “Sounds more like an assistant than a life partner.”

  “Ah, but you forget, she also let me fuck her in the ass. You can’t exactly go around sodomizing your assistant.”

  “Touché.”

  “Anyway, I proposed in front of her family in Central Park.”

  “Where the two of you met.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. “Nice touch.”

  “It was, wasn’t it? Anyway, we had the fairytale wedding and life was good. The sex was great.”

  “What changed?”

  “Our zip code. As soon as we landed in Colorado, Natasha started to care more about school districts and ovulation than about traveling and sucking cock, like the altitude affected her personality.”

  “Did you ever stop to consider if she’d always been that person? That you were just too wrapped up in getting your cock sucked—to use your words—then getting to know the woman you married?”

  “I’ve considered it.”

  “And?”

  “And it doesn’t matter now, we’re already married.”

  “But not for much longer.”

  I blew out a breath. Divorce. What a stupid fucking word. Divorce. Was that where we were headed? Dr. Cooper’s wife loved him. She worshipped him, and the fucking dragon turned her into a pile of ash. Did I feel bad? I thought about it for a full minute before I spoke. “I’m annoyed again.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because now I’m going to have to find someone else to suck my cock.”

  Reed snorted, “Don’t forget about picking up the dry cleaning.”

  “And pick up the fucking dry cleaning.”

  * * *

  After my lunch time session with Reed I drove back up the mountain to Meadowbrook, deciding it was exponentially more gratifying to deal with other people’s problems than my own.

  “Any messages?” I asked Harper as I strolled by her desk.

  “No, but Dr. Stanley is waiting for you,” she said, shooting me a sympathetic glance. Even my assistant could see Morgan for the vulture she was.

  “If she’s not gone in five, buzz me with an urgent message from my wife,” I instructed.

  She narrowed he
r eyes at me. Whatever sympathy she had regarding Morgan’s presence vanished at the mention of my wife. Harper and Natasha were close, friends even. It started out as jealousy on Natasha’s end. Not only did Harper have the pleasure of spending sixty hours a week at my beck and call, she was also gorgeous. Milk chocolate skin, curves to die for, plus, she was as sharp as a tack. Any woman would be intimidated by Harper, even one as beautiful as my wife. As it turned out, Natasha had nothing to worry about. Harper liked pussy as much as I did.

  “Sure thing, boss.” I ignored the edge to her tone and went to deal with my uninvited guest.

  Morgan sat on my desk, her legs crossed, arms extended behind her. “Dr. Cooper,” she mewled as I approached. I had two options, let Dr. Cooper be professional and courteous, or let the dragon toss the bitch out the window.

  I went with professional.

  “Dr. Stanley, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I missed you at lunch.”

  “I had a last-minute appointment,” I shrugged, walking around my desk, reaching for the water bottle of gin. Two swallows later, my ass hit the chair and Morgan’s swiveled to face me. The motion shifted the neat pile of papers arranged and alphabetized on my desk. I took another drink, so as not to take her life.

  “Everything okay?” Her voice was syrupy sweet. It made my teeth hurt, and not the coke bender kind of hurt, which sucked, but was worth it. More like the punched in the mouth by an angry husband who caught me fucking his wife kind of hurt. That was Morgan’s voice.

  “Yes.” My jaw ticked. My life ticked. I eyed the phone and took another swallow. “Was that all?”

  “For now,” she said, hopping off the desk. I followed her to the door and ushered her out. Simone waited in a chair in front of Harper’s desk. She glared at Morgan’s back as she sashayed her way down the hall.

  “I was just about to call. You’re two o’clock is here.” Harper pointed to the angry looking nympho pouting in front of us.