by Finn, Emilia
“Look at me, Priss.”
She shakes her head with violent little jerks.
I grin. “Fine. Hold on.”
Her eyes shoot open with surprise, but slam shut again when I take her mouth with mine and kiss her in a way I’m not sure she’s ever been kissed before. I nibble on her bottom lip, and when she opens her mouth, I slide my tongue in at the very same moment I breach her opening with my finger.
One finger. One single finger, and she’s still tight enough to slow me down.
Abigail cries out and breaks our kiss. Her body tenses and tightens, the hands she was using to push me away now clutch to me as though afraid to let go.
“Relax, Priss.” I lean forward and take her mouth. “Relax and let me in.”
“I don’t…” She scrunches her eyes closed and squeezes a tear through her lashes. “I don’t know h–”
“Just hold onto me.” I drop the single flower to our feet to free up my hand, then I probe my tongue past her lips and share the taste of wine. “Hold on tight, babe. Open your legs a little more.”
I struggle with the angle, though her heels help a little. I struggle with her panties, because I can hardly move my hand unless I tear the flimsy cotton away completely. I struggle with how fucking tight she is, and my mind wages war with itself between tearing her clothes away and claiming her for myself, versus running the fuck away because innocent chicks get attached, and I don’t do attachments.
“Open up, Priss. Close your eyes, and concentrate on breathing. I’ll do the rest.”
“This is wrong. This is so, so, so, so wrong.” And yet, her legs open, and a new wash of pleasure slicks her from the inside and makes my trek a little easier. “This is so, so, so, so wrong.”
“I’ve made a lot of wrong choices in my life.”
I push a little higher, and squeeze her a little tighter when she squirms. Not from pleasure, but from pain. I inch my finger inside and grin when I find my truth.
“You’re a fuckin’ virgin, Priss. Are you kidding me right now?”
“How do you– How…”
She throws her head back and slams it against the stall door when I push further inside. She cries out from the pain, but it mingles with pleasure, and when I use my thumb to play with her clit, her panting from fear turns into the kind of panting that leads to her filling my hand.
“That feels so–”
“Naughty?” I offer. “Do you feel like a naughty girl?”
I crush her against the door, push my leg between hers, and force her to open wider. When her mouth moves into an O that I know means her brain is about to explode, I take her mouth with mine, and swallow her cries.
“Come on my hand, Priss. Let it go.”
“I don’t…”
Her nails dig into my shoulders and send me wild with need. My cock strains against the fly of my pants.
Normally, I’d already be fucking. It’s not like I didn’t come here tonight with a strip of condoms in my pocket. But if my finger hurts her, then we have a fuckload of conditioning to do before she can take all of me.
I like hurting women in bed. I fucking crave hurting women in bed. But it has to be done right, it has to be mutually mind-blowing. And tearing someone like Abigail apart just to get my own isn’t my idea of a good time.
“Spencer, I can’t–”
“It’s gonna feel like peeing, Priss. But don’t be afraid. Don’t stop it.”
“I can’t… no, I can’t… I don’t w–”
I press my thumb over her clit, and revel in her cries.
She steps over the ledge with sharp spasms, fills my hand with her pleasure, and my lungs with her screams. Her legs crumble beneath her, so she stands only because my chest is pressed to hers, pinning her up.
I smile, tapping her clit each time she comes down, only for her to shoot into the air again and pulse into my hand.
“For the rest of your life, you’ll always know me as the one who did that to you in a public bathroom.”
I bask in the way she dazedly looks around the room. Her pupils are dilated, her cheeks flushed.
“I will always be who you think about when you let your mind wander. When you’re married to a banker, and he can’t get it up because he’s a pussy, you’ll remember the time Spencer finger-fucked you at a Bishop wedding.”
“Oh my gosh.” Her eyes clear, and as they do, her body turns from gooey limbs to tense muscles. “Oh my gosh! Get off me!”
I pull my hand from her panties and step back.
She’s every man’s hot dream as she stands against the stall with flushed cheeks and open legs. Her skirt is still high, and her chest rapidly lifts and falls.
We stare into each other’s eyes for a full minute, and when she thinks shit can’t get any worse for her, I bring my slicked hand up and slide my finger into my mouth.
I’m not sure she’s ever been so scandalized in her life.
Her mouth drops into a shocked O, her hand to her stomach as though she’s tempted to be sick.
But all I do is suck her flavor off my finger, then follow the trail of moisture over my palm and down to my wrist.
“You taste as good as you smell, Priss. And now you know what it feels like to relax for two seconds.”
“I want to vomit.” She genuinely turns a shade of green that hints at truth, but instead of dashing into the stall, she shoves her skirt down with jerking movements and fixes her top. “Oh my gosh, what did I just do?”
“You gave in to the very thing your body has been begging you for. You let nature and instinct take over for a minute, rather than your wildly spinning brain with all the overthinking and ‘what would my momma think?’”
“Oh my gosh. Shut up. Shut up!” She dashes across the bathroom and clutches the sides of the porcelain sink. Her back lifts and falls with sharp intakes of air. Her hair is a little messy, despite the fact I barely touched it. Her skin is flushed a dark red and matches her locks. “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe you just… Oh my gosh! I have to leave.”
I reach out and snag her wrist as she dashes toward the door, but she’s agile, and slips out of my hold with barely a stumble.
She swings the heavy door open so it bounces off the wall, and races past a watchful Laine, who waits against the opposite wall with her hands clasped behind her back.
The door swings closed again, and I’m all alone in the ladies bathroom with a dozen mirrors reflecting back at me.
“Fuck.”
Her horrified face plays in my mind. Her shame. Her embarrassment.
“Fuck!”
I move across the room and swing the door open to find Laine hasn’t moved. She watches me with lifted brows.
“What did you do to her, Spencer?”
“I wasn’t very nice. Fuck.”
I cast a glance along the wide hall, but I don’t see her. She’s run back to the safety of the reception, where she thinks hundreds of people will keep me away and ensure I’m on my best behavior.
“I took something from her, and when I was done, I was kind of crass about it.”
I stop beside Laine and lean against the wall so we stand shoulder to shoulder. Abigail’s sad eyes continue to play through my brain like a bad movie on repeat, but I have just enough brain power set aside to notice that Laine doesn’t shoot away just because our arms touch.
She’s grown so much since Angelo took over and helped her heal, that not only does she not cry and shy away, but she purses her lips and shakes her head.
“You’re a dumb shit, Spence. Seriously, so damn stupid. How can you not see she’s vulnerable? She needs gentleness, not to feel the shame I saw in her eyes when she ran outta there.”
“Why didn’t you follow her?” I turn and look down into blue eyes that remind me of the Caribbean ocean.
“Because she told me not to, and since I already knew you took something from her, I didn’t want to disrespect her wishes.”
“I’ll fix it.” I push away
from the wall with a sigh, and head back toward the reception.
Laine hurries to catch up to my long strides. She’s in heels, and has a hell of a lot less leg than I do.
“You don’t have to supervise, Twink. I said I’ll fix it.”
“I’ve heard that before. Ya know, the last time she ran away.”
“Shut up.” I push the reception doors open and let my eyes readjust to the dimmed lighting.
Spotlights move around the dance floor while Jess and Kane continue to sway, but now other couples have joined them. Eric leads Katrina around the floor, and Soph does naughty things for Jay when she thinks no one can see her hand between their bodies. The chief leads his wife around, finally smiling for once in his life, while his deputy – who always smiles – palms his wife’s ass and eats her neck like it doesn’t matter that they’re practically indecent.
When Angelo catches sight of me and Laine at the door, he walks our way and extends a hand for her. He doesn’t snatch her up, but waits for her to accept and come to him. He leads her away from me, so I head toward table one and sit. Alone.
I pick up my unfinished beer, and look around the room in search of red hair and bicolored eyes. Ten minutes pass, and she doesn’t show. Then twenty.
I sit alone at the table for a full hour before the guys lead their girls back and the meals are served. Abigail’s plate arrives when mine does, but it remains conspicuously uneaten as her chair goes unoccupied.
One hour. Then two.
Her untouched plate is taken away while Laine watches me from across the table with a disapproving glare. When Abigail’s cake is served, then later taken away, I sit back and press the heels of my palms into my eyes.
She left. She got to enjoy the reception for no more than twenty minutes before I swaggered in and sent her running.
I fucked up bad.
8
Abigail
I stand in front of my bathroom mirror with puffy, red eyes, wearing nothing but my underwear. I study my splotchy skin with a pathetic sigh. It’s splotchy because I cried after running away from Spencer.
It’s so dumb. I shouldn’t cry. But I’m an emotional idiot, and something as big as… what he did, is surely reason enough to let a few tears fall.
I’m so humiliated, so horrified. Why did I run? Why couldn’t I stand up to him?
Why am I mad?
I’m not even sure.
With shaking hands, I unsnap my bra and let the plain black material fall to the tile floor, only to look back in the mirror and sigh again. I’m too skinny, too shapeless, too scarred, too…
“Gah!” I turn away, because I don’t want to look anymore.
Instead, I step toward my freshly run bath, and shimmy out of my wet panties. I toss them into the hamper across the room and clamp my lips shut, because I quiver with emotion as I remember why they’re wet.
I hate feeling like this.
There, I said hate again.
But it’s true. I hate feeling so weak. I hate feeling like anybody can walk over me and there’s not a dang thing I’ll do about it.
But if I’m being completely honest, weak is the one word most would use to describe my life.
Not my brothers. They would claim strength, resilience, wit, and compassion, but then they’d turn around and baby me. Their words say one thing, but their actions say something else entirely, and that something else undermines my confidence when I want to shake that scared girl off and be stronger.
Is it truly living if I’m always afraid?
My bath smells of frangipanis and lavender, and the steam rising toward the ceiling fills my lungs, and helps distract me from the fool I made of myself tonight.
So what if I let him do that to me?
It felt good. It felt forbidden and so unbelievably naughty, but while he was doing it, while his chest was pressed to mine and his lips covered me, I wasn’t afraid. If anything, I felt empowered.
I was a single woman, a grown woman, enjoying something than many others have.
If I didn’t want him to do that, I could have said no. I could have pushed him away, and he would have gone. But I didn’t, because while I stand all alone in a steam-filled bathroom, when he’s no longer standing right in front of me, looking at me with those eyes, I can admit that I liked it. I liked it so much that I’m humiliated.
“Son of a frick!”
I step up to my bath and hold my arm over my stomach as though to hide, despite the fact no one else is here. Dipping my toes in, I groan at the sting of the heat, but then I step all the way in and bring my second foot over. Holding on to the sides of the tub, I lower myself below the bubbles, and hiss when the warmth hits my most sensitive places.
My vagina hurts from the way he stretched me, which is so dumb, because we didn’t even have sex. It was just a finger. One single finger! And that’s kind of terrifying, since that means the real thing will hurt so much more.
I roll my eyes, because this is just another reminder that I’m fragile and demand special snowflake status.
“It was just a finger. It was just one single finger.”
“Abigail?”
My front door closes with a snick as my eyes shoot wide.
It’s not– It can’t be– No way!
“Abigail?”
I shoot back in my bath so water spills over the sides. I frantically scrape bubbles up over my chest, and the noise I make only telegraphs my location.
The bathroom door opens without being knocked on first, and still in his suit pants and white shirt with a couple buttons undone and his sleeves rolled up, Spencer-Freakin-Serrano steps into my bathroom and smiles.
“Well shit, babe.”
“What the heck are you doing here?” My heart races. My hands shake. And all I can do is cower into the end of my tub and pray for the bubbles to last. “What the hell, Spencer?”
This man, this massive mountain of a man whose legs are like tree trunks and his arms like logs, watches me and lets his lips quirk up into a cute smile. The side of his face is scarred, and the steam of the bathroom seems to turn the pink scar tissue a darker shade as he lifts a brow and hungrily studies my legs, since I’ve pulled my feet up close to my butt in a poor attempt to hide.
“You said hell.” He closes the bathroom door, and when I think it can’t get any worse, he flips the lock and turns back to me. “I think ‘hell’ might be the naughtiest thing you’ve ever said in your life, huh?”
“How did you get in here?” I swear my heart will bust out of my chest any second, it beats that hard. “How did you get into my apartment?”
“Through the door?” He stops by the side of the tub so I have to look straight up.
His powerful body stands over mine, his wide hands sit on his hips, and something behind the fly of his pants stands forward and nearly sends me into a tailspin.
It’s his penis, Abigail. Just say it. You’re not a child anymore, and Spencer Serrano refuses to indulge your need for innocence.
When my eyes linger on his pants a moment too long, he gives a throaty chuckle that draws my eyes up, and when our gazes meet, he lowers into a squat and rests his elbows on the side of my tub.
“My work includes a certain skillset. I feel like you know that about me already. I know how to open doors that are otherwise… well, locked.”
“You broke into my home. I can’t believe you broke into my home.” I hurriedly swipe more bubbles to cover myself, and almost burst into crazy tears when his eyes follow my movements. “Get me a towel. Please get me a towel.”
“You don’t have to cover up in front of me, babe.” He reaches a hand forward to dip his fingertips in the hot water. “You don’t have to pretend you don’t–”
“Just get me a towel!” His eyes widen as my voice cracks. “Get me a towel, get me a towel. Get me an effing towel!”
Lifting his hands in surrender, he reaches to the vanity and tugs down my charcoal gray towel. He extends it toward me, and lifts that stubborn bro
w again when I snatch it with shaking hands.
Tears flow over my cheek, making me feel like a loser as I snap the towel open and bring it down to cover my chest and torso. Water is sucked into the fabric immediately, but I don’t care. The bubbles won’t last forever, and there’s no way I’m going to let him see me this way.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Abigail.” He rests on his elbows and studies my eyes. “I promise I’ll never hurt you.”
“Why are you here? You weren’t invited into my home!”
“I wanted to see you.”
His dark eyes flicker between mine, and in my heart, I feel like his admission was almost painful for him. But worse yet, he reaches out and slides his thumb beneath my eye to collect my stupid tears.
They’re tears of humiliation, because right in this moment, I feel like the worst thing that could happen to me is that the handsome man I let touch me might look down at my body.
“I’m sorry for making you cry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry for making you run away from the wedding.” He nibbles on his lower lip and watches me. Strangely, I find it kind of endearing that he watches my eyes and doesn’t let his gaze stray along my body. “You worked for that wedding, you did those amazing centerpieces and vases and stuff. You worked hard, and you didn’t get to enjoy any of it.”
My bottom lip quivers. “I’m just the help.”
“No.” He shakes his head and slides his thumb over my jaw. “I’m sorry for saying that. You’ll learn soon enough that when I’m feeling threatened, and can’t take care of my problem physically, I’ll use my words. I’ll lash out with immaturity, because I don’t like being vulnerable. You constantly make me feel vulnerable. Fucked if I understand why, but there it is. You scare me, and since I can’t fuck you or fight you, I say mean things.”
“Why– umm, why can’t…” I clamp my lips shut for a moment and pray I don’t say anything that’ll be the cause of my tears later on. “So you’re saying you use your words to hurt me?”
He nods.
