by James, Ella
“My nose?” I’m surprised to find myself smiling again. I press my lips together, because my cheeks are aching.
“The job, silly.”
I arch my brows. “Does this mean we’re... associates?”
I’m actually thinking of making her my partner, but it’s too soon to tell her.
I fold my arms over my chest and watch her leggings stretch over her nice, round ass as she stashes the brick under her bed. She ignores my ‘associates’ comment as she turns and sifts through the basket. “Snuggly blankets.” She presses her face into one of them. “They smell like fresh detergent.”
“They are freshly detergenterized.”
“By you?”
“Who else?” I ask. For some reason, I want her to think I laundered them myself. “I’m courting you, Cleo. You said you like fleece.”
“When did I say that?” she asks, almost accusingly.
“Last night.” I run my eyes over her bed, and Cleo’s cheeks stain red.
“I don’t like to be embarrassed,” she says. She leans her butt against the mattress and her green eyes peer into mine.
“So don’t be.”
“I was going to do that anyway,” she says softly.
By “that” I assume she means “masturbate,” not “have phone sex.” I can tell she’s trying to be casual and failing. Even her neck is red now. I’m surprised I’m having this effect on her.
She recently got out of a relationship with Brennan. That guy is boring, and a douche. Maybe he just never really did it for her.
I assume she was referencing him; the guy who bound her wrists with his tie. I wonder if it was on this very bed... I grit my teeth. I can’t stand to imagine her body stretched out under his.
Instead I ask, “What else don’t you like? Teach me your mysterious ways.”
Her green eyes blink, wide and more solemn than this moment calls for. “I don’t like surprises.”
The intensity of her expression makes me smile a little, teasingly. Cleo seems, to me, like exactly the sort of girl who would enjoy a nice surprise. “So I need to promise never to surprise you?”
She nods, chewing her lip. “Unless it’s good. Like that.” She nods to where she tucked the brick under the bed.
I’ve got nothing good at all, so I promise, “No more surprises.”
She seems appeased by that, as if she’s moved past whatever serious moment had its claws in her.
“Sixty-five percent,” she says lightly, grabbing a leather book bag from one of the bed’s posts. “Because that deal of yours is so not happening. I can barely add two plus two. You’ll see.”
I reach down to work the bag’s strap from her fingers.
“Don’t think that wins you any points,” she warns. She grabs a water bottle off the dresser, stuffs the letter she had earlier into her bag, and sprays the room with linen-scented air freshener, while I check out her art again. I like the bold brush strokes and the way that she blends color. The texture of the paper adds a 3D effect.
The one I’m looking at now is Sylvia Plath. The colors are a translucent sort of jade, pale gold, and, in a few places, milky white. Running jagged and clear, horizontally, through the middle of the canvas, is a line I recognize immediately and, after a long second, place as a line from the poem, “Daddy.”
“So I never could tell where you put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you...”
Where in the Wordsworth-inspired painting, the colors are a blunt amalgam, making any intention beyond the feeling of discord difficult to discern, the colors here are elegant; almost ghostly. They fade in and out of each other, like billowing clouds backlight by glowing light.
The pale spots—clouds—are beautiful. Blooming. Swelling into whatever they will be. The painting stirs a feeling of inevitability, and catches something at the bottom of my throat, so it’s hard to draw my next breath.
I look up and find her staring at me with a poker face. “Criticism?” she snips.
I shake my head. “It’s lovely.” I want to say more, to rave about the particular feeling she just thrust into my chest, but I can’t find the words. I’m only good with words on paper, so I just stand there, hoping that I look sincere.
“Thank you,” she says eventually. She sniffs, standing a little straighter. “I don’t like fake compliments, you know.”
“Then you’ll be glad to learn, I don’t like blowing smoke up asses.” I hold her gaze for a moment, just to show her I mean it. Then I hold out my arm, and she slides her tiny hand between the crease of my forearm and my bicep.
I walk her down the creaking stairs and out onto the porch, down the stairs into the lawn, then through the lamp-lit, car-filled parking lot. A balmy, grass-scented breeze tosses her dark hair, filling my nose with her light, sweet scent.
“That’s your car, right?” she asks, as we approach the Escalade. A street lamp shines off the hood, making the black paint look like wet ink.
I nod. It belonged to my father first, but that’s just another thing not to mention. He’s not someone I care to talk about.
“You know it’s called the Sexcalade,” she says as I steer her around the hood and toward the passenger’s door.
“What?” I stop with my hand stretched toward the handle.
Cleo gives me a smirk that has a distinctly chastising tilt to it. “People call this thing the Sexcalade. Because the last four months.”
“The last four months.” I repeat the words once more in my head, trying to make sense of them. The last four months are significant to me personally, but I don’t associate them with sex. In fact, I’ve never had so little. I pull her door open, and in her soft, prim, Southern drawl she says, “Before that, you didn’t ever seem to go out hooking up with people.”
She hoists her small self neatly into my passenger’s seat, and I press my lips together. So that’s what people think. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I got noticed.
After I dismissed Gina, my last submissive, I thought I could terminate all sex. I made it all of thirty-seven hours before I admitted that would never work. So I started bar-hopping.
I always took the women I picked up to hotels. I couldn’t fuck them how I like, because word would get around—as evidenced by Cleo, looking smugly down her nose at me right now. I fucked them hard and fast and sent them on their way. They may have told their friends I like it rough, but they couldn’t say they didn’t enjoy it.
All those liquored, perfumed, ropeless fucks weren’t satisfying. By coincidence, about the time I started to feel restless, I was sniffing out my “rival.” She’s been my distraction ever since. Everything about her, from her slow, casual gait to the way she throws her head back when she laughs—like a bad actress on a sitcom—strums some cord inside me.
I think I knew earlier than I’ve been willing to admit that I need Cleo in my windowed room.
I walk around the car without corroborating her story about the “Sexcalade” and slide behind the wheel. I can feel her watching me. I ignore the urge to meet her eyes as I back out of the spot.
It doesn’t matter why I was never seen out socially with women, then suddenly was. She doesn’t need to know. Keeping Cleo in the dark about me is the only way I can know her.
I pull out of the parking lot onto a crosswalk-striped campus street. She crosses her legs and props her hands on her knee. She looks at me, and I can feel her expectation hanging in the shadows.
“So that’s kind of weird, right?” she asks me, in a chipper, prodding tone. “Aren’t you going to tell me why you didn’t you date before four months ago?”
My throat stings with the question. Four months. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. I wish I had met Cleo before. I want to have her thoroughly, and now I’m worried that there won’t be time.
I keep my feelings off my face, because, again—she doesn’t need to know this shit. I twist my lips into a smug smile and try to project the Kellan Walsh she thinks she knows. “Maybe I
was in a committed relationship.”
Her pretty face twists skeptically. “Were you?”
I laugh. “That’s Kellan business, don’t you think?”
I turn into the narrow drive that leads around the side of the huge, brick library building.
“I thought we’re doing business together,” Cleo replies.
“Are you committing to that?”
She hmphs.
“That’s what I thought.”
I find a spot on the second level of the parking deck and notice the thought of Cleo doing business with me has taken some of the tension out of my shoulders. More and more, I think she’s exactly right for what I have in mind. It gives me peace.
I walk around the front of the car and open her door. She sashays out, her black shawl fluttering behind her as her boots click against the cement. Like every time I’m near her, it’s a struggle not to touch her in some way.
She turns around to face me as I shut the passenger’s side door. “Were you?” she asks, hand on her hip. She looks like a superhero with that ridiculous long shawl and those boots. “Were you with someone before? Honesty, Kellan. If you want to work with me...” She licks her soft, pink lips. My cock twitches.
I trail my hand down her lower arm, catching her by the wrist and tugging her lightly toward a covered breezeway that adjoins the parking deck to the side of the library.
“I was,” I say as I slide my fingers through hers. It’s not a lie—exactly. “I was always with someone else before.”
Sometimes several someones. The relationships were always regular; mutually beneficial and bordering on official at times. So much neater and tidier than what I’m doing now with Cleo. So much more... sound—in every way.
She frowns at my answer, as if she’s turning it over in her head and isn’t sure what to make of it. Then she looks down at our joined hands. “For a domineering prick, you’re pretty big into hand-holding, aren’t you?”
I grin, and quickly roll my lips together. “You’re mine for now,” I murmur to the top of her dark head. She tries to pull ahead of me, but I ignore that fact and focus on the warmth of her hand in mine, on her small-but-curvy body. I tighten my grip and force her to break her fast stride. She looks back at me, and I bring her hand to my lips. “I want to keep you close.”
She snorts and increases her pace until she’s dragging me behind her. I’m surprised to find I’m feeling...lighter. The weight that seemed ever-present on my shoulders seems to have drifted off—at least until I see the mail bin at the top of the library’s brick steps.
Emptiness yawns inside me: a crushing need for what I can’t have.
As Cleo flounces to the glass doors, I drop another half-step behind. I slide the post card out of my back pocket and reach around behind her to toss it inside.
She spins, a blur of black fabric to match her raven hair. “Did you just mail a letter?” she demands. It’s the same tone she uses for everything: some funky blend of incredulity and amusement—as if she’s ready and waiting to comment on any toe I put out of place.
I murmur, “Kellan business.”
Pain cries through me, and I tell myself to try to forget about the postcard. After all, there is no address on it: no mailing, no return. It, like the few others I’ve written since May, will be discarded.
And still, the words echo in my mind.
I’m sorry, Sloth.
I’m so sorry.
NINE
Cleo
“Holy shit, I think I get it!”
I give Kellan my surprised bug eyes, which probably scare the crap out of him, because we’re sitting thigh-to-thigh on a narrow, padded bench in one of those little closet-rooms-for-rent inside the library.
He’s got his right ankle resting atop his left knee, and my calculus textbook spread over his muscular calf and thigh. He’s only been at it for about thirty minutes, and most of the time I’ve been distracted by his huge shoulders edging into my space as he gestures to the pages. But just now, something clicked inside my head.
“So...to find an antiderivatives for a function f, just reverse the process for differentiation?”
The corners of his mouth twitch. He nods slowly as his eyes twinkle.
“So you can usually find an antiderivatives by reversing the power rule. And the indefinite integral is like...a reference to all the different antiderivatives of a single continuous function. Because there isn’t just one. There’s a bunch of different ones. Even an infinite number?”
His grins smugly. “I told you.”
“I can’t believe it. I mean... Cannot. Believe. It.” I bump his shoulder with mine. “Kellan, you should be a math teacher. A professor!”
He snorts.
“Seriously! How did you know how to explain it to me? I’m an idiot with this stuff. I wasn’t even good at algebra.”
He looks down at me through his long lashes, and I feel my body temperature spike. With his deep blue eyes, his high cheekbones, and those sculpted lips, he’s just so... striking. His skin is smooth and tanned, with just a little stubble on his jaw and cheeks—more than most college guys have, I can’t help noting. His hair is short and soft-looking, and just a little wavy: the just-rolled-out-of-bed look, which contrasts nicely with his dressy clothes.
He lifts a shoulder, and I swear that simple motion makes sweat pop out on my forehead. “You caught on fast,” he says.
“Yeah, cause you have serious skills.”
He shakes his head.
“Too cool for school?” I tease. I’m getting better at hiding my awkwardness from him, I think.
And immediately I think maybe not, because he’s just... staring at me. My cheeks and neck are red now. I can feel them burning.
“I won,” he says softly. His eyes are steady on my face.
A shiver runs across my shoulders, the kind of chill I felt once when someone was looking at me through my bedroom window back at home. I feel breathless. Helpless. Like a rabbit in the eyes of a coyote, I can only pant here, frozen.
I lick my lips, trying to think of what to say. When nothing comes to mind—because I can’t decide what I want and my heart is beating too loud for me to think anyway—I shrug and, in a strange, high voice, say, “I don’t understand it all...”
“I won, Cleo.”
I watch his jaw tighten as he casts his eyes away from my face and down to the space between us. I study his hair as he reaches out and grabs a strand of fringe hanging from my shawl. He rubs it gently in his fingertips. When he looks back into my eyes, his luscious mouth is frowning.
“I really make you nervous.”
“You really do.”
I can’t help noticing he briefly looks away. His eyes are on the brown carpet below our feet as his fingers travel smoothly up my forearm, caressing the inside of my elbow before running up my shoulder. His thumb strokes the hot skin of my neck, and then his gaze is back on mine.
“Don’t be nervous,” he says, rough but soft. My heart pounds as he finds my throat with his mouth. “I’ll be careful with you.”
This is a bad idea. It’s all I can think, but the words stick in my throat as his mouth moves softly, gently, warmly over my jaw.
“Give me a few weeks.” Hot breath tingles over my throat. “Three.”
I’m panting now. I feel his thumb over my nipple, making it harden through my bra.
“Why?” I rasp.
“Because I need you.” His tongue traces my ear. “I’ve got you in me, Cleo. Now I need to get you out.”
He squeezes my breast, and I feel a burst of warmth between my legs. “That’s what I’m scared of.”
“What?” He nibbles my earlobe.
“Being subject to your...whims, or whatever.” The word fades into a gasp as he kisses my throat, hard then tickling.
“This is a business plan, Cleo.” He kisses my chin and finds my lips, his low words blowing warm into my mouth. “I won’t be living here in Chattahoochee for much longer,” he breathe
s. “I want to get you settled before I leave.”
He drags his lips over my cheeks, my nose, my brow, until my stomach is somewhere below my knees.
“How do you know... I plan to stay?” I ask him as he strokes the skin above my shirt collar. My voice quakes so much, it sounds almost like a sob.
“Do you?” While his eyes burn into mine, his hands smooth my hair back firmly off my forehead, a soothing motion one might use to calm a child.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Would you deal long-term, Cleo? Would you run dealers? Or do you just want something temporary? Something easy?”
The word ‘easy’ makes my neck flush. He snakes an arm around me, pulling me against his warm, hard chest as his hand delves between my legs. He flattens his palm against the inside of my thigh and presses, light but firm, until my legs swing open.
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
“The pay is good,” he murmurs to my hair. “The three weeks you’re at my place, I’ll make it twelve K.” His mouth covers mine, and he kisses me so hard and well, it makes me dizzy.
“What?” I break away. My heart is racing. “Why?”
His hands frame my face. “That’s thirty-six thousand dollars, Cleo. Deal to your regulars, and sleep in my windowed room.”
One hand slides down to stroke my neck, his fingers dragging lightly over flaming skin. I can feel his forehead brush my cheek as he runs his lips along my jaw.
He breathes, “You are beautiful. You make me want...”
His lips trail down my throat, tickling. When he nears the indention of my collar bone, I feel the soft heat of his tongue and mouth. He moves slowly... softly... taking great care as he sucks my throat—increasing the force until my skin feels like it’s bruising and my body like a rope about to snap.
His arm snakes underneath my shawl, and I feel the weight of his wide palm spread over my thigh. His fingers burn through the cotton of my leggings, then drift to the crease between my legs.
I grip his shoulder. “Kellan...”
I clench my teeth as he settles his fingertips on me, tracing my most tender place as if he’s learning braille.
