by Stasia Black
I thrust down on him especially hard, grinding my ass to his pelvis back and forth. I writhe back and forth before lifting off and slamming back down again.
“God. Fuck. That. Yes. Right there.” Yeaaaaaaaah. Fuck, this is nothing like when I use toys at home. Those just can’t do it for me anymore.
I look down at the man below me. Even with the little bit of light from the hallway, I can see the awed expression on his face. How I am blowing his mind. I’m just some stranger who came up to him and now I’m dominating the fuck out of his dick, his pleasure, his fucking world.
I lift my hand to my mouth and bite down on the side of my palm to muffle the high-pitched whine of pleasure that I can’t hold in. Damn, this is what I’ve needed. Not wanted. Needed. The knot has been winding tighter and tighter inside me, fear and panic threatening to choke me every time I leave my house. I need control.
So I take him faster, land harder, but it’s not enough. I need more. I need fucking more.
“You fucking bastard.” I slap him hard across the face but never for a moment stop riding him. I tighten my inner walls and feel him swelling inside me.
His hand clamps down on my breast, so hard I bet it will bruise. I slap him again and I’m closer than ever to the edge. Oh Christ oh Christ, almost there. The noises coming from my throat are uncontrollable and I lift my hand to stifle myself again. I can’t be too loud in spite of the cacophony of the club. A scream of pleasure will pierce through even that noise.
But oh God, I’m on the edge. Riding that fucking edge.
He starts thrusting harder into me from below.
What. The. Fuck??? Red rage flashes through my pleasure. Hasn’t he learned his goddamned lesson by now? I say how. I say when.
Why do guys always fucking assume they can just take over? What the hell is wrong with them? Even Mr. Supposed Nice Guy? Fucking piece of shit.
I drop even further away from the edge, and when he grabs my hip like he’s going to flip me over—like he thinks he’s going to be the one thrusting into me, I just fucking lose it.
I use one of the tricks I learned in self-defense to heft all my weight up into my chest and shoulders to keep him pinned in place. He lands back where he was with an oof that I can feel more than hear.
He got dislodged during this process, so I grab his dick, shove him back inside me and pump up and down even more furiously.
I glare at him and don’t bother hiding my wrath. This is rage-fucking now.
Bastard must have a death wish. He obviously has no idea where my head’s at, because he grabs my thighs again. His fingers knead my flesh. I don’t knock his hands away this time. His eyes are closed, his head back thrust against the cold concrete.
He doesn’t notice me slip the knife from the garter belt tied at the very top of my thigh.
But his eyes sure as hell pop open when I lean over and hold it against his throat.
I keep pumping on him just as furiously, but my face inches toward his. “I’m on top, got it motherfucker?” I say loud enough so he’ll hear it.
He nods but just the barest bit so he doesn’t come in contact with the knife. His eyes are wide with sudden terror. What a little bitch. I don’t even have the knife right up against his throat. There’s a good half-inch of clearance. Still, it’s close enough. As long as he’s a good boy, we can both get what we want out of this exchange.
He still an iron rod inside me but he’s learned his lesson. His hands drop flat to the floor like he’s afraid to move.
A momentary pang of regret hits.
I didn’t mean to scare him. I just needed. I needed—
I move the knife a little further back from his neck, but still close enough so that if I need to, I could strike.
Then I look down at him and take in the whole tableau—him prone and at my complete mercy. A shudder goes through my body and my back arches in pleasure.
Oh God, yes, yes, right there. I grind down on him deep and rub my breasts against his chest. I lick up his neck and suck on his bottom lip, relishing in his filthy, cigarette taste. I hear his pained groan and feel the tension in his body as he struggles not to move.
Oh very, very good boy.
I have fucking mastered him. This realization plus all the stimulation finally sets me off like a rocket. I come quick and sharp and hard.
It’s gone far, far too soon for all the work I’ve done to catch it.
Mr. Nice Guy’s face scrunches in concentration and anticipation. If I was a super bitch, I’d just leave now, maybe even wave my knife at him and forbid him to get off. But in the end, even if he had a few unruly moments, he pleased me. So I continue grinding on him, clutching my walls tight around his dick.
I lean over and speak loud enough so he hears. “You’ve been such a good boy for me. You may come now.”
Almost immediately his whole body stiffens and his pelvis pushes up into me once and then twice more. His eyes open in fear right after, like I’m going to punish him for it. The rush of power the very thought shoots through my veins surprises me. I climb off him, leaving him to deal with the condom situation.
I feel shaky all over now that the adrenaline high is wearing off. The knife is still in my hand and all the sudden it’s like, what the fuck did I just do?
Did I just really think it was okay to hold a weapon against a guy’s throat? He could fucking call the cops on me. I would call the cops on me. What if anybody had stumbled on us back there and seen me? Oh my God. Holy shit.
I hold a hand to my forehead, then realize it’s the hand holding the knife and drop it back to my side.
I lift my skirt and shove the knife back into the mini-sheath in my garter. It was only supposed to be for extreme situations. If I was in danger.
I back away from the guy who is struggling to get to a sitting position and pull up his pants. He looks like he’s trying to say something, but I turn on my stiletto heel and high tail it out of there.
Two
CALLIE
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
God. What the fuck? No.
I sleepily lunge for my alarm clock and slam the snooze alarm. I’m about to let my heavy eyelids drop closed again when I glimpse the red numbers of the clock.
7:39.
SHIT. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit! I almost fall off the bed, I sit up so fast. How many times did I hit the snooze button this morning. Damn it!
I scramble off the bed and trip on my dress from the night before that’s on the floor, barely catching myself on the wall. “Fuck!” I yell as I kick the stupid dress out of the way and haul ass to the bathroom.
What greets me in the mirror isn’t as disastrous as I feared it would be. Only a mini-nightmare as opposed to full on Walking Dead extra.
I tried just falling into bed when I got home last night, but within ten minutes, I was crawling out of my skin with the need to get clean. A thirty-minute shower later and I finally felt like the club was scrubbed off me. Or at least I was too exhausted to care anymore. I fell into bed without even brushing my hair.
Yeah. It shows. I’ve got a serious case of bed head going on. Even without the oh-so-sexy mattress/pillow styling I’m rocking, the image looking back at me is strange. I went in for a makeover midsummer. Gone are the long natural blonde locks I’ve sported my whole life. For the first time, I started coloring my hair—a nice but unspectacular auburn shade. I also cut it to just below shoulder-length. My natural wave gives it some body, but I don’t do anything else to it except let it air dry most of the time.
Since it’s flat on one side and poofy on the other today, I brush the front and pin it back with some bobby pins. A quick glance with a side mirror shows my solution fixed the poof situation. I brush my teeth quickly, one eye on the clock the whole time. Shit, shit, shit.
I’m going to be late.
I’m never late. My boss, Marcy, gets pissed whenever anyone on her team comes in even a couple minutes after eight. The thought has me jogging
back to my room and grabbing the first outfit I see in my closet, some pants and a simple blouse. I don’t have time for anything complicated today. Like something with buttons. I don’t have time for fucking buttons today. I barely give myself time to pee.
Marcy gives people who are late the glare. The I’m-dissappointed-in-you-and-don’t-think-I’ll-forget-this-when-quarterly-review-time-comes-around glare. Plus all week that team member gets assigned the shitty tasks like debugging everyone else’s code.
I slip on my fancy ballet flats and then I race to the kitchen to grab a breakfast bar. I snag one and also a banana. I swing around to scurry from the kitchen and—
“Fuck!” I look down to see what my hip banged into—and then my throat closes up.
Charlie’s highchair.
All the air is knocked out of my lungs. Everything else disappears. Needing to rush to get to work. Marcy being pissed if I’m late. Everything that went down last night.
Charlie.
Charlie.
Charlie.
My head drops backward so that I’m looking up at the ceiling. I give myself a moment, just this one single solitary moment to feel it. The absolute gaping hole in my heart. Where is he this morning? Is that woman who is pretending to be his mother treating him right? I don’t even let myself count to ten. Ten is too much. I’ll be paralyzed if I let myself get all the way to ten.
I bring my head back down and start moving again. I realize belatedly that I’ve been squeezing the banana so hard it’s gone squishy in the middle. I’ll have to eat it fast or it’ll bruise. Guess it’ll be breakfast instead of part of lunch. I grab my purse that’s by the door and then I’m out.
I hurry to the light rail station, checking my phone for the time as I go. Seven fifty-one. I should be freaking out about how late I’m going to be. No way morning transit is going to get me there in nine minutes, in addition to walking the three blocks to the CubeThink building.
Fuck it.
Stressing about it won’t change anything. I keep my steps hurried, but I don’t jog. No point in showing up with sweat stains only to save a minute or two. The shit will hit the fan with Marcy either way. Besides, my head is too full of Charlie.
My baby boy. While I don’t let myself linger on the feelings of self-pity that could overwhelm me and keep me in bed for weeks on end, thinking about Charlie himself is what keeps me going.
And I get to see him today. Every Friday, I get supervised visitation. That thought brings a smile to my face even as I weave in and out of several homeless men yelling at morning commuters for change. I slip onto the light rail just before the doors close and breathe out, heart racing from my frantic race here.
I lean against one of the poles to steady myself as the train rattles forward. The car is packed just like it is every weekday morning.
The visits with Charlie might be in the most unnatural setting possible—a fancy child psychologist’s office with someone watching my every move and noting every word that comes out of my mouth—but I still get to see my baby. Even if it’s only for two hours. Once a week.
My hands go white-knuckled around the pole.
Oh hell, calm down. This is more than I got in the beginning. I just have to remember that. Right after they took him away, I didn’t see him at all for six weeks.
Even then, the only reason I got supervised visits was because I went along with the bullshit court order to get outpatient substance abuse treatment, along with taking parenting classes. Fucking parenting classes. I think that one pissed me off even more than having to be in outpatient rehab for the drug problem that I didn’t have.
My new lawyer was busy sending off the paperwork to get the initial sample retested and asking for a new drug test that was far more reliable, a follicle hair test proving not only had I not been on drugs the day of the hearing, but I hadn’t even been in the vicinity of people doing drugs for the last six months. Still, I’d see my son a lot faster if I did all the other bullshit in the meantime.
So I did. And yeah, occasionally I had violent feelings toward some of my fellow peers in the parenting class. There were some in the class who seemed like they genuinely wanted to reform and were desperate to do anything it took to be better people in order to get their kids back.
But some of the others, God, they didn’t deserve kids. At all. In fact, I thought the class should be pass or fail. If you failed, then you not only didn’t get your kids back, but you also got neutered at the end. Not PC to say, but fuck that. Case in point: there was one guy who was a disgusting lowlife, watching porn on his phone instead of paying attention to a lesson on current behavioral theory and effective ways to discipline one’s children that weren’t verbally or physically abusive. We’d all gone around and told why we were there at the start of class. Lowlife had lost custody of his kids for abusing them and his wife. Or as he put it, “ya know, I’d kinda get pissed sometimes. I’d come home after a long day of work and my wife was being a bitch and my kids wouldn’t stop whinin’ and it would all just get out of control, ya know?”
Yeah. I wanted to take his phone, break the screen, and stab him in the eyeball with it. Toward the end of class, he came in grinning and told us that his wife had taken him back. He was moving in with her and the kids again. He never came back after that and I still feel sick thinking about those kids.
The fact that I was lumped in with the same category of parent as him in the court’s eyes… I can’t even.
The double beeps of the train announcing the arrival at a station break me out of my thoughts. I look up and see that it’s my stop. Shit. Today’s not the kind of day to space out and miss my stop by accident. Thankfully, I’m close to the doors.
When they open, I move with the crowd and am expelled out onto the platform with all the other commuters, half of whom are staring at their phones. I don’t even bother to check the time. I’m sure it’s already past eight o’clock. I jog off the platform, only now remembering my breakfast bar. I unwrap it and shove half of it in my mouth, chewing as I go.
It’s at least another ten minutes before I hurry into the building that houses the CubeThink offices. I swallow down the last bit of the bar and now my mouth feels like the Mohave Desert. Must. Drink. Water.
No time though. I make a beeline for the elevator once I’m inside. My heart rate speeds up as I cross the threshold into the small boxed-in space and I look around. It’s fairly packed and I quickly scan each face. It’s only as the doors close and I’ve finished looking everyone over that I let out a breath.
No Jackson.
Then I shut my eyes, kicking myself for even letting his name cross through my head. I’m usually so good about it. I don’t let myself think about him. His face. His touch. What might have been…
God, here I am doing it again.
I force my eyes back open. There’s a reason I take the stairs every day. I don’t need to fight through these mental acrobatics each morning, worrying about running into him in the one space we might accidently encounter each other.
That day I told him I’d accept a job with his company and his lawyer’s help with Charlie’s custody hearing but not a relationship with him was the last that I saw him. I started working here at CubeThink the following Monday, but it’s been the unspoken agreement between us that he stays on his executive floor and I never leave my workspace three floors below.
My foot taps impatiently as the elevator rises. I want to scream each time the elevator stops to let people out at what feels like every floor on the way to the CubeThink offices. Which naturally take up the top five stories of the high-rise. I check my phone when the elevator finally slides the last bit up to my floor.
8:14. Fuck. My whole body winces right as the doors open and I step out.
“Glad someone felt like showing up today.” Marcy’s sharp voice is the first thing that greets me. She’s walking by the lobby, her assistant at her heels holding a tablet and a folder stuffed with printouts.
“I apo
logize for being late,” I say, my voice coming out slightly croaky through my dry-as-fuck throat. I try to compensate by standing up as straight as I can.
“What? No excuses about traffic? Or let me guess, your cat chewed through the cord of your alarm clock?”
“No ma’am. I do apologize, though.” I feel my cheeks redden. Marcy might be a hard-ass, but she’s a woman I respect the hell out of. I hate being in this position. “It won’t happen again.” I’ll set three alarm clocks if I have to from now on.
She snorts, turns away, and continues walking. “It better not,” she says. Then when she’s almost to the door, she looks over her shoulder, irritation on her face. “Well what are you doing now?” She seems absolutely exasperated by me. “Follow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I scurry and hurry after her. I only glance longingly to the water cooler in the corner before following her through the door.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I whisper under my breath as I race into the psychologist’s office. It was 5:01 when I last checked my phone in the Uber as we fought traffic to get from San Jose, across town, then to the office in Menlo Park. Fucking Menlo Park. Only David’s stick-up-her-ass wife would be able to afford actually living in this area and demand the custodian for the supervised visits be at a place like this. Yeah, I got to put forth some names as options too, but David and the Shrew were always going to fight anyone I recommended. In the end my lawyer independently checked out this psychologist and agreed she’s one of the best, unlikely to be biased one way or the other. I just have to eat the outrageous costs, which I can halfway manage because of my new job.
Not that a fifty-dollar Uber ride to get here on time is helping my finances. Usually I take public transit, but there was a team meeting at the end of the day today. After being late to the office, there was no way I was asking to be excused early. But every minute that ticked by after four o’clock, I felt like my guts were being twisted.
