RECLUSE

by Andrew, Nikolai

  “I love the classics.” I step across to the nearest shelf and run my finger along the spines, then pull out a battered copy of Wuthering Heights and hand it to her. “One of my favorites as well.” As she takes it from me, the expression of wonder makes her look even more childlike.

  “This is a first edition.” She runs her finger over the first page.

  “Yeah, I used to collect first editions.” She starts to hand it back to me and I shake my head. “You can have it.”

  She returns my head shake with her own. “No, Mr. Weber, I can’t take gifts from clients. Especially gifts this expensive. It would jeopardize our professional relationship. And my job.”

  Professional relationship.

  What the fuck.

  The words burn me like bee stings, but I see the honesty in her eyes, she’s worried about her job and I don’t want to cause her any anxiety.

  Besides, everything here will soon be hers, so giving it to her just to have to bring it back when I move her in seems redundant.

  I point around at the doors that lead off the room. “Kitchen. Bathroom. Dining room.” I meet her eyes, taking back the book and putting it on the coffee table as I point upstairs. “Bedrooms. Down the long halls are work rooms, empty rooms, rooms I don’t know how to fill.”

  That’s a lie. I know how to fill them now. With children. Our children. Rooms filled with toys and games, rooms filled with laughter and love.

  She draws a deep breath, averting her eyes, scratching the side of her head. “Can—can I ask… I mean, I thought your brother maybe was overreacting. We have to follow up on every report, but still. Was he? Overreacting?”

  “Yes.” I step closer to her, so close I can almost feel the warmth of her body. Smell the sugary, floral scent that surrounds her. “But I’m glad he did.”

  “Really? Most people are angry when someone calls in a report on them.”

  I nod and lean in, taking a deep breath of her, the sweetness now spun with the scent of her arousal. “Sweet as flowers ready for picking,” I murmur, thinking of wildflowers in bloom, like the ones I’ve been leaving outside her house.

  “I’m sorry?” She clears her throat and steps back. “I h—have a form to complete.” I watch the pulse just below her jawbone move as she catches her breath, fumbling with her satchel, reaching inside, pulling out a few papers on a clipboard. “Can you confirm your name please?”

  “You don’t know my name?”

  “I—I do, I just…need you to confirm it. Please.”

  “I like when you say please.”

  She holds my gaze, but I can see she stops breathing for a moment. I glance down at the thin t-shirt struggling to cover the swell of her tits. I want to suck on them, to make her moan as I bite at her nipples.

  I draw a quick breath, not bothering to hide my interest. “Vincent Richard Weber,” I mutter and watch her scramble to fill in the form.

  “Th—thank you. And do you feel you are in any immediate danger, Mr. Weber?”

  “Of what?” I lumber forward and she retreats, her eyes wide.

  “Of… Of… Not being able to look after yourself. Any trips or falls? Any thoughts of self-harm? Delusions? Thoughts that people are following you? Anything like that?”

  “Well, I have fallen. Hard.”

  “R—really? You don’t look injured.”

  “Some injuries you can’t see, little girl.”

  “I’m not a litt—” She takes another step back, stumbling on the wood pile by the fireplace and tottering, but in an instant I’m there.

  I catch her in my arms, lifting her clean off her feet and pressing her against the stone mantel. She’s wearing a simple white cotton t-shirt and khaki pants, but she may as well be gracing the inside of a Victoria’s Secret catalog because I’ve never been more turned on.

  She yips, but to my ears it sounds more like a shriek of excitement than panic. For a second, I think she might throw caution to the wind and give herself to me, but instead she just grips my arms and shakes her head, the clipboard and pen clattering to the floor.

  “I’m not a little girl.”

  “Yes, you are. Look at you. You need a man to look after you,” I grunt out, caveman style.

  “No I don’t.” She shakes her head and pushes at my arms, and I snort at the idea that she would ever be able to escape me if I actually decided to keep her here. “Put me down!”

  For a moment I don’t move.

  I stay perfectly still, feeling her pressed against me. Her soft against my hard. Drinking her in. Memorizing her.

  Her eyes are wide. Disapproving. I try to remember how I would have responded once upon a time, if she’d come into my life when I was the man I used to be. That man knew how to act around normal people, or at least he pretended he did. Learned to fit in, to act appropriately. He would have let her go. He probably would have lost her.

  With a grunt of effort, I step back and lower her to the floor, our bodies still close enough to touch, then she retreats, struggling to catch her breath while she gathers the items from the floor.

  “W—well, I can see that you’re not in any danger. The house looks more than in order.” Her fingers tremble as she ticks off boxes on her form.

  “Don’t you need to see the rooms?” I ask. “My bedroom is up the stairs.”

  “No.” She shakes her head, pressing two fingers of one hand into her eye socket. “Thank you, but no, that’s fine. I can see that this was a waste… But I had to check, you understand. I—I’ll see myself out. Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Weber. I don’t think I’ll need to come back tomorrow.”

  She stumbles away, as she takes a wide route to the door. Before she races through it, she opens her mouth as if to say something else, and the thought flashes into my mind of how she would look on her knees, opening her lips as I guide my cock inside, feeling her tongue rough against my shaft, burying myself up to the hilt in her warm, tight throat.

  Do you feel in immediate danger my little Goldilocks?

  The sticky spill of my release seeping from the corners of her stretched, swollen lips, tears in her hazy eyes, drunk on my cum.

  Beautiful.

  Then, she’s gone, and a moment later I move to the window, watching her from behind as she makes her way down the path, fighting the flaming urge to drag her back.

  “You’ll be back,” I murmur as she disappears over the rise, the muscles in my back twisting as it feels like there’s gravel in my throat when I swallow. Then I’m out on the porch, shoving my feet into my boots as I punch my way out the front door. “Bear, heel.”

  3

  Melanie

  Lori was ringing my phone at seven AM, making sure I was okay. When I answered, she could tell something was up, so we decided to meet up for a quick lunch after my morning calls.

  “Come on, I want details.” Lori points her fork at me and squints one eye. “So, he’s a bit rough around the edges? I kind of like that in a man. But what was he like? Is he weird? Creepy? Did he smell?”

  I roll my eyes as I push scrambled eggs with onions and peppers around on my plate. One of my favorite meals but these are too cold. Because all I’ve done is stare at them.

  Usually, I have a very healthy appetite, but today not so much. Every time I think about him my stomach does somersaults.

  “No, he didn’t smell but rough around the edges?” I shake my head. “Yeah, times a thousand.”

  “Melanie, come on. I’m living my life through you right now, do you know how long it’s been for me? There’s like eighteen eligible men in this godforsaken small town and I’ve considered…or…” She gives me a wry smile. “Let’s just say, in one way or another, I’ve considered them all. So, I need fresh meat. Or, at least the fantasy.”

  “Nothing happened,” I tell her. And that’s the truth, right? Nothing actually did happen.

  And, I’m certainly not going to go into detail about how last night I spent a couple hours riding my pillow, pressing my hands down o
n the bed thinking it was Vincent’s chest, his cock buried inside me. Spinning from one orgasm into another until I fell, exhausted, into a fitful sleep.

  “And he has this monstrous dog.”

  “What did you do?” She knows my dog phobia. I practically peed my pants the day I went into the shelter where we met and inside in the lobby stood a chihuahua named Hades, who I swear was trying to kill me.

  “I thought I was going to die. Of course.”

  “But look at you. You made it out alive.” She shrugs, bobbing her dark eyebrows.

  “Barely,” I say with a shake of my head. When he pinned me up against the fireplace, I remember thinking of wanting him to hold me there, to tie me up, to force me to stay. “And now Raymond insists I go back for the rest of the paperwork. I tried to tell him it’s totally unnecessary. Vincent Weber can handle himself…”

  And he can certainly handle me.

  “So that’s why you’re all dressed up? Because you’re going to see him again?”

  “I am not dressed up…”

  I glance down at the sundress and think about the lacy black lingerie I dug out of the bottom of my drawer this morning. It still had the tags on. Something I bought a few months before I turned eighteen and thought it was sort of a right of passage to lose your virginity on or before your eighteenth birthday.

  I’m glad I never followed through.

  “I’m not dressed up for him anyway. I just felt like a change. It’s a nice day.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you wearing a dress, Mel. Ever.”

  “I’m not dressed up for him. Anyway, you’re supposed to be on my side.”

  “I am on your side. You look gorgeous, but then you already know that.” She smiles sweetly, and while I’d usually be defensive about any compliment regarding my looks, coming from her I’m willing to accept it. Lori has no shortage of male attention, but she has no ego about it. “And he sounds like exactly what you need in your life.” She raises her eyebrows and lowers her voice as she leans in conspiratorially. “I bet he has a ginormous—”

  “Lorraine!”

  “Pair of hands?” We both laugh as the low thrum between my legs has me thinking in excruciating detail about just what his ginormous…hands might look like, because what I saw straining under his jeans had Guinness Book of World Records written all over it.

  I roll my eyes again. This time so hard I make myself dizzy.

  “He’s at least genetically half caveman, Lori, Cro-Magnon. I don’t need a man in my life and I certainly don’t need a Neolithic creature like Vincent Weber. Besides, he’s much older and I’m sure I’m just a child to him.”

  His words come back to me and my face heats.

  Little girl. You need a man in your life.

  What a dick thing to say, right? He’s about a century behind the times.

  “What I need is money,” I say, feeling the blossomed heat on my cheeks and neck burn hotter as Vincent Weber’s primal face swims in my head. His black eyes, so dark NASA could study them as black holes because the gravitational pull I felt when I looked at them was not of this earth. “I need a way to pay my rent before I get a final notice. That and Peaches…a cool ten grand should do.” I hesitate. “Sorry, you’ve been invited to my pity party. Here’s your hat and noisemaker.”

  Lori shakes her head, smiling as she reaches over and pulls my plate closer to her, starting to scoop up my leftover eggs. “Things aren’t any better then?”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. I feel helpless.”

  “Peaches survived a lot before she came to the shelter. She can survive this.”

  I nod. “I hope so, because I’m out of ideas. I had a second late rent notice this morning taped to my door, along with another bunch of wildflowers.”

  “More wildflowers? You still think it’s Raymond leaving them?”

  “Who else would it be? God,” I shiver, “he makes me gag. If he thinks that’s going to get him inside my pants… Anyway, that’s the least of my worries. It’s at the point where I’m seriously considering telling my mom. She won’t give me the money, but she’ll insist that I come back home. At least I’d have a roof over my head. And an allowance, as much as I hate to be back in my parents’ pockets.”

  “And Peaches?”

  I shake my head as Jacqueline, the waitress here at the Silver Spoon, spots our empty plates and heads our way. “Mom hates cats. All pets for that matter. But she isn’t heartless. She’d find someone who’d take her, probably someone who could afford to pay for the treatment. And what good am I to Peaches if we’re both homeless?”

  “Hey Mel, Lori, is everything okay over here?” Jacqueline smiles as she collects our plates. “More coffee?”

  I shake my head and meet Lori’s eyes. “I’m going to have to get going. I’ve got to go up to the cabin and I still have paperwork to finish off when I get back.”

  “Just the check,” Lori says, smiling at Jacqueline. She waits until the waitress moves off before adding: “Things will get better.”

  “Will they? How? Unless I sleep with him, Raymond is going to find a reason to fire me sooner or later. Then I’ll have no chance. My first job out of college and I get fired? I guess my idea of what being a social worker meant was more fantasy than reality.”

  “Well, maybe if you confronted him over the wildflowers, he’d back off? Maybe set up a trap to catch him?”

  “I doubt it. I think it’s him that’s been following me too. I felt like there was someone watching me last night from outside, but when I pulled back my curtain there was no one.”

  “What if it’s not him? What if you have a secret admirer leaving flowers and watching you get home safely?”

  “Yeah, well I wish he’d leave a stack of cash instead.”

  * * *

  Mom would bring me back home. She’d find someone to take Peaches.

  The thought rolls in my head as the unkept road up to the Weber property winds away beneath my car. I could admit to Mom that she was right, that I can’t handle life on my own.

  She’d love that. She’d feel vindicated. And she’d be magnanimous in victory, never gloating, never bringing it up again.

  Unless I got the stupid idea in my head that I wanted to try things my way again. Then I’d be reminded of how it turned out last time.

  I’d have a roof over my head though. The comfort of our mansion. There are far worse things.

  So why does my heart feel like it’s tearing apart?

  Because of him.

  No. Not because of him.

  He’s just some guy I met yesterday.

  And he’s infuriating. Calling me little girl.

  I’d be much better off with one of the many millionaires or billionaires my mom would set me up with.

  Probably one of my father’s friends or their sons, men who ogled me before I was even legal.

  I may not be the pageant princess I once was. Without my mother controlling my every calorie, I’ve put on some womanly curves, but Mom would have me quaffed and buffed up in no time in order to find me an acceptable and appropriate husband. I’d be engaged within six months.

  I can see it now. My husband would be an upstanding citizen. Rich, of course, someone who could improve our family position another notch. An industry leader with a yacht, no doubt, a summer place on the coast, membership at the golf club. I’d have a couple of kids within a few years, never gaining a pound, always having a little secret vacation when the errant wrinkle in my forehead would appear or sag in my mid-section or boobs became noticeable.

  We’d pretend to be happy. I’d obsess over wallpaper and how hard it is to find good help these days. I’d do everything I could to be sure our children went to the best private schools. We’d be everyone’s relationship goals while behind closed doors, there would be long nights when my husband ‘worked late’. Then he would need to travel more and more. We’d pass each other in the halls of our mansion not saying a word on our way to separate
suites.

  I’d surely grow to love drinking wine too early in the day, and maybe my doctor would prescribe me something for my ‘anxiety’. I’d go to a lot of martini lunches with the ladies, talking about which charity events we were attending that weekend. The kids would get into ivy league schools, and we’d have a family portrait commissioned and hung over the fireplace for all to see how perfect and happy life at the top of the food chain can be.

  Would it really be so bad?

  Yes, it would, but Peaches would be taken care of. And I’d never see Vincent Weber again.

  I’d never see Vincent Weber again.

  That thought causes a knotted ball of panic to clutch tight in my gut.

  So what? I’d never see him again; I should be celebrating.

  He’s big and hot, I can admit that. Powerful.

  Dominant.

  And, attractive? In his own way, yes. So much yes.

  But this weird obsession I seem to have with him isn’t just unprofessional, it’s confusing. Something primal, something that exploded inside me when he saved me from his massive dog. Or picked me up, pressed his hard-on into me. His neanderthal attitude awakened some submissive reaction, and now I see him as a protector.

  I feel grateful for him stepping in. That’s all it is. It makes perfect sense.

  I’m a psychology grad. I know these things.

  I slow as I take the next bend, knowing that just around the corner is the Keep Out gate at the edge of his property. I’ll go to his house, complete the paperwork, and then give some serious thought to going back to my childhood home—

  There’s a loud crunch and bang and the car lurches, making a loud grinding sound.

  “Oh, God, what now?” I grip the steering wheel as it vibrates so hard my fillings feel like they will come loose and there’s a weird screeching sound as the tires crunch on the road.

  Easing to a stop just before the padlocked gate, I climb out and walk around to the front of the car, hands pressing into my forehead as I stare at the flattened rubber on both sides.