by Nella Tyler
He replaced the dress with his hands in no time. He pulled me onto the bed, placing a hand on my stomach so that I wouldn’t bounce up and hit him. I struggled to catch a breath and gasped at how suddenly his hands came against my chest, working around.
“Clasp in the front,” I told him. I’d chosen one specifically for this occasion.
He grinned for a second, and we nearly bumped teeth. He undid the clasp and his hands, soft and warm but so strong, assured, carefully kneaded my chest and pulled at the most sensitive skin until I was a sighing mess against his mouth.
One of his hands had found my underwear, and as I’d done before, I pulled my hips up to force friction. He withdrew his hand instantly, as though I’d done something wrong, and he began to kiss my neck.
He said something to me, the words lost in the reverberation between my neck and his mouth, hand still hovering where I wanted him to touch me most. Further, teeth against my collarbone, marks on my chest. He caught my nipples in his teeth and grinned when I yelped and dug my fingers into his hair.
I expected him to return to kissing me, but he didn’t. He continued to descend, leaving a trail of fire down my stomach. He pressed a kiss beneath my navel.
His eyes flicked up to mine. I stared, entirely speechless, as he hooked his thumb in my underwear and pulled them away. His hands came up to my knees, and he pulled me towards the edge of the bed and got on his knees.
A searing kiss in my inner thigh told me what was to come. He carefully, almost politely, pulled my knees further apart and then continued to press those burning kisses so close to where I wanted them. My fingers found their way back into his hair, and he pressed a kiss, a chaste, kind kiss, to my sex. I became intensely worried that he was going to stop, or that he thought that that was it.
Then he settled in.
“Oh my God.” I struggled not to pull my hips up against his face. His forearm came down across my hip bones as a sort of way to keep me still.
I was nearly incoherent. He knew exactly where to apply pressure, when to back off, and when he could tell that I was reaching a point of no return, he slid his fingers inside me, pumping at a slow, luxurious pace. I pulled my hips up against them, effectively fucking myself on his hand, babbling through an orgasm that I couldn’t stop.
When I’d finally come down from it, I nearly worried that I’d yanked out his hair. When I took away my hands, though, they were free of the dark hair that Dexter had. I sat up, a bit shakily, and couldn’t help but smile at the sheer mess I’d made of that hair.
I noticed something else, too, when he stood up. My heart still pounded in my chest, and I didn’t know if I could make out any words. Standing there at the foot of the bed, his erection caught in his underwear, 6-foot-3 of muscle, I noticed that he also had several tattoos. I reached forward to touch one, a sort of rose.
“You hadn’t seen them before?” he asked.
“There was never time,” I replied. “Now, we have all of it in the world.” I paraphrased what he’d told me earlier and squinted to look better at it. I came to kneel at the edge of the bed and pulled the heel of my hand against his dick, earning a groan. He started to crawl back onto the bed, but a hand on his stomach refused him; I wanted to look at him like this for a moment longer.
He had another tattoo, too, nearer his abdomen. This one looked like a bird of some sort. I kissed it, and then his hipbone, pulling the skin with my teeth.
“Briella,” he whispered.
I kissed the tent that only seemed to grow in his boxers. “Mmmm?” I pulled his underwear away, revealing my prize.
I decided to be every bit as tantalizing with him as he had been with me. I kissed carefully against his lower abdomen and left unsatisfying kisses around his dick. I wrapped my hand around him and pumped so that he wouldn’t lose his arousal; honestly, I wasn’t sure he could lose it at this point.
He repeated my name, and wove a hand into my hair. I finally enveloped him in my mouth, working slowly, and a thrill went down my spine when he pulled my hair, leaving a tingling in my scalp. I moaned around him, worked every trick I knew, until I could feel his hips starting to thrust a bit too much towards me. I pulled away and reached into the bedside drawer where I knew he kept his condoms.
By the time I’d turned back around, he’d come down on me, pulling me towards him. I could feel every place that our mouths and bodies connected, and it seemed that even when we stayed still, we moved. I nearly dropped the condom, but he took it from my fingers and opened it, rolled it on himself.
He opened his mouth to say something, and I shook my head, pulling my hips up against him to grind, and the sensation made me smile. He smiled back, understanding; we didn’t need to say anything right then. We could go without the meaningless words and phrases; right now, we could prove anything we needed to prove without saying a word.
He slid into me more easily than he had the first two times because of his mouth’s handiwork. He retracted and thrust slowly at first, and our gaze unfocused at the pleasure. I clenched around him, and he closed his eyes, burying his head in my neck and shoulder.
I didn’t want this to be over. He picked up his pace, driving deeper and deeper into me, and when he pulled my hips up and drove still deeper, I felt a part of me burst in pleasure. I shouted in surprise, and he backed away like he was afraid he hurt me.
“There,” I managed.
He pulled my hips up further, and I marveled at his strength. He drove into me again, again, each time hitting that spot that drove me mad. I could feel another orgasm coming, and based on his pace, he could feel one too.
“I can’t last much longer—”
“Come for me,” I told him. “Please. Please. Please, God, yes…” I couldn’t keep it together much longer.
He detonated. He pulsed inside me, and the force of his final drive sent me over the brink; he held me up with one hand and worked the other between us to prolong my orgasm as long as it could last. I felt tears pricking my eyes as my hips bucked of their own accord, unable to control my own movements, lost to the throes of what he’d done to me.
It might have taken entire years to come down from that moment. Before, we had gone our separate ways to clean up and make ourselves decent; now, there was no intention of moving. He pulled away from me to throw away his condom, and then he returned to my side.
We were gross, we needed a shower, and we didn’t care. He kissed my shoulder, my neck, my cheek, and my mouth. I had never felt more spent, more loved.
For a long time, we lay like that, catching our breath. Eventually, our heart rates evened out, and he played with the ends of my hair in a sweet move that I couldn’t help but find adorable. I lay against him, nearly wanting to sleep when I made up my mind about something.
“I want to meet your father,” I said.
Dexter’s face contorted into surprise. “Oh. Now?”
“No!” I rolled my eyes. It seemed men turned into idiots after sex. “No, just, before I go back. I decided I want to after all.”
He still looked surprised, but honestly, he looked more tired than anything. “All right. I’m a little surprised to hear you say that.”
“It’s just prolonging the inevitable if I don’t,” I pointed out. “If you’re okay with it, anyway.”
“No, I’m more than okay with it. It was my stupid idea in the first place,” he reminded me, smiling all the while. “I thought you’d use the opt-out.”
“I was going to,” I admitted. “But I think I’d like to meet him.”
He wrapped his arms around me and held me close to him. I’d never felt safer. “I can arrange that,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dexter
When I woke up the next morning, I still had Briella tight in my arms. I let her go gently, so as not to wake her up, and pulled myself away a bit. We smelled like sex, and I could tell that I was in need of a shower. The sheets needed to be cleaned, too.
I couldn’t get the gr
in off my face.
“Morning,” Briella offered. Her face was still very much planted in the pillow.
“Good morning,” I said. I smiled at how sweet it was to see her turn her head in the pillow like she could keep the day from progressing. “Do you want breakfast? I’ll make it.”
“We need a shower first,” Briella pointed out. “And then, yeah. Breakfast sounds awesome.”
I kissed her head and took off to the bathroom to get through the shower quickly. I scrubbed up and threw on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs to get started on breakfast. I heard her turn the shower on, and by the time it was off, I had breakfast mostly finished.
She came downstairs in one of my shirts and a clean pair of my boxers. It was a flagrant display of what we’d been up to the night before, and I felt affection rising in my throat at the way my underwear hugged her hips. She brushed past me to grab a mug; I’d gotten the hot water ready for her.
Before I could say anything to her, the front door came open; I knew I’d forgotten to lock it the night before.
“Dexter, my man!”
Briella rolled her eyes and looked up at me. “You know, you really ought to establish better boundaries with that guy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not mad. Quite the opposite. I think you might have actually fucked my brains out,” she said, very matter-of-factly. She smiled at me and offered a wink so that I’d know she meant it, and I held on to that little gesture.
Tyler came barging into the kitchen. “Oh, shit, you have company.”
“If you cared, you’d have called beforehand. Or knocked,” I said.
“I did call.”
“Or knocked,” Briella chimed.
Tyler raised his hands. “Sorry. I ran out of toilet paper. Are you making breakfast?”
Without meaning to be, Tyler was the greatest wingman in the world. Next to him, anyone could look adult and put-together. I nodded and thought to send him on his way. As if she could sense that I was about to tell him to do so, Briella said, “You can stay for breakfast if you want.”
I frowned at the abrupt betrayal, but I couldn’t argue with her smile. I wanted to have every morning with her. I wanted this to be my life.
At the breakfast table, the conversation didn’t take long to turn to important subjects.
“I’m gonna meet your dad later,” Briella told Tyler.
Tyler cringed. “Why? You looking to set up an investment?”
“Nope, just trying to date his son,” she replied, spearing a piece of sausage with a fork.
Tyler shook his head. “I would advise against that. The man is pure evil.”
“Come on,” I tried. I didn’t like to think of him that way. Even though evidence overwhelmingly suggested that my dad was an asshole, I still remembered when times had been different.
“I’ll go ahead and apologize on his behalf. I’m very sorry,” Tyler continued.
Briella furrowed her eyebrows. “Is he really that bad?”
“No,” I cut in. The worst he could do was say something slightly off-color, and I’d be right there ready to correct him if he tried to be rude to Briella. I wouldn’t stand for her coming all the way to Florida just for him to be a dick. “He isn’t that bad.”
Tyler muttered something unintelligible into his cup of coffee.
“I’m going to go get dressed,” Briella said. She kissed my cheek, and Tyler’s eyes widened in a way that told me he was never going to let me live it down.
When she was up the stairs, Tyler leaned forward, suddenly alert and energetic.
“Dude. You absolutely cannot let her meet Dad.”
“I absolutely cannot believe you’re being so weird about this,” I returned. “Dad’s a little off, sure, but he’s not unreasonable. It’ll be fine.”
“It will most certainly not be fine. He’s going to get pissed that you’re not dating someone in the circle.”
“In the circle? What is this, the Illuminati?”
“You know what I mean. It’s going to go badly, Dexter, if not for you, then for her. Think about her feelings.”
“She wanted to meet him!” I countered. “She asked me to.”
“Was it her idea?” Tyler returned.
I quieted. “I have to introduce them, Tyler.”
“Why? What could be so important?”
“I’m in love with her.”
Silence. For a second, the loudest thing in the room was the coffee machine slowly pouring more coffee on the other side of the kitchen.
“I’m in love with her,” I repeated. “And that’s… that’s not going to change. If I don’t introduce her to Dad, then I’ll… I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t try.”
Tyler shook his head at me. “Jesus Christ. If you’re really in that deep, maybe the only thing that will change your mind is a no from him.”
“Harsh.”
He shrugged.
I spent the rest of the day with Briella. She found the piano downstairs, and although both of us had received lessons in our childhood, neither of us could recall them very well now. We played some terrible piano, made lunch, and looked at some of her clients’ wedding plans. I had little to actually help her with, but I liked to think that I was being supportive in the small way that I could.
Finally, we got ready for dinner. We decided to have dinner at my house so that we would be in a neutral area. She could go up to her room if she needed to get away, or leave the house altogether. I could kick my father out of my house, but not a restaurant.
She got dressed and we met downstairs. We decided to have dinner in the austere, uppity dining room; it was more suited to my father’s tastes: foreboding and elegant. I made sure the good silverware was out and gave the wine glasses a final polish.
I thought about what I’d told my father. That I’d met a woman that I wanted him to meet. I’d been incredibly vague over the phone, mostly because I didn’t want him to opt out, and now I wondered if being vague might backfire. If he might be horrible in person because he hadn’t been given time to prepare himself.
But, prepare himself for what? A beautiful, intelligent woman whom his son was quite in love with? That was hardly something that he should be concerned about.
“You’re nervous,” Briella said. She set a hand on mine so that I would stop fidgeting with the table settings. “Do you think this will go poorly?”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t know how things are going to go, but I can promise that I’ll do everything in my power to make my father understand. I remember when he used to be understanding. He can…he can still be there for me.” It was a futile, futile hope, but I believed it, or at least some small part of me did.
I heard a knock at the door. My stomach knotted up, and I walked towards it, robotically, feeling oddly like I was in trouble. I should have explained the situation in greater detail.
I opened the door. My father stood in the doorway, holding a bottle of wine.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Briella
In middle school, I’d done a little bit of theater, and then a little more in high school for the fine arts credits. I was allegedly not very bad at it, and knew a thing or two about pretending that everything was all right on the surface. Those skills had done me well in my relationship with Jason, and had kept me calm in my relationship with Dexter.
Nothing could have prepared me for the bone-chilling glare that I received the first time I saw Leonard Mason. He stared straight into my brain, and I got the feeling he might read every one of my thoughts forwards and backwards. I couldn’t keep a secret from this man. Where my father was warm, appreciative, and kind, this man was cold.
He even looked like a skeleton. Horrifyingly, he looked like Dexter, if Dexter aged 50 years and grew a permanent scowl. The table remained quiet as I pulled my knife across the piece of chicken on my place.
“Dexter tells me you own an investment company, th
e one he works for. Did you start it yourself, or is it a family business?” I asked.
Leonard said nothing to me. Dexter finished pouring the bottle of wine into three separate glasses and cleared his throat, casting a look that I couldn’t help but notice read sheer irritation.
I began to think of what my father told me when I got on the plane. These people weren’t like me. I could never fit in with them.
“Dad, Briella’s a wedding planner. She’s done 50, 55 weddings?” Dexter spoke up on my behalf, and I thought that I might die.
“It’s 56,” I corrected weakly.
He said nothing. Absolutely nothing. Leonard didn’t even acknowledge that I had said anything at all, but rather took a sip of wine as though he were waiting for someone to say something. He set the wine glass down, and I noticed the tightness in his knuckles. Fear rose in my gut; I couldn’t help the fear I associated with angry men.
And Dexter didn’t even know that much. I couldn’t explain it to him now. “Dexter told me about the deal in Houston, or at least a little of it. I’m sure there’s some information he can’t disclose. He seems to be a really important asset to the business.”
Leonard looked up at Dexter, turning that steely glare on his son. I wondered how Dexter had ever grown up with a smidge of compassion with a father like that.
“Is that why you went to Houston? For her?” Leonard jabbed his thumb at me like I wasn’t even there.
“I went to Houston to fix the account Tyler messed up,” Dexter said.
Tyler had tried to warn me. Why hadn’t I listened? It was like Jason all over again, when my father and Nina and everyone I knew told me that he was bad news. And instead of listening to them, I insisted that I knew better. Here I was, trapped in another cycle that I couldn’t get out of. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for whatever Leonard could say next.
