Beyond Wilder

by Leigh Tudor

  Losing her virginity was the goal, and she was going to rip off that Band-Aid by jumping in headfirst and paddling like crazy.

  She came to an abrupt stop, making it inside the room. Trevor had removed his shirt, folded it and placed it across the back of a chair. He stood to his full height, with his hands in his pants pockets, pure heat emanating from his dark chocolate eyes.

  His skin glowed in the late afternoon sun that floated lazily through the windowpane. She swallowed, wondering if it would be weird if she walked up to him and licked his nipple.

  Yep, that could be weird.

  Try to be normal for once.

  Let him take the lead, and for once just follow. No smart remarks or nervous quips. For once in your life, shut-the-frick-up.

  “Come here, Buttercup.” He instructed, with an uplift to one side of his mouth.

  Argh, her new nickname was fast becoming her kryptonite! Not to mention that half-smile on those full lips.

  Another place, she discovered, she’d like to lick.

  She tucked a rogue strand of hair behind one ear feeling both anxious and unsure as to how to navigate this particular . . . transaction?

  If only she’d read more books. Maybe the Kama Sutra would’ve prepared her for this . . .what was the word?

  Coupling?

  Sexual encounter?

  Deflowering?

  Would he be able to tell she was a virgin?

  Would he care?

  She then noticed his bare feet, and somehow the whole thing seemed suddenly far more intimate. His naked chest, as well defined as it was, with rivulets of muscles cascading down the sides, weren’t nearly as captivating as the bare feet peeking from beneath his trouser legs, saying, “This is what people do who care about each other.” Whereas his bare chest screamed, “This is what women fantasize about. Come lick my nipple you saucy wench.”

  Chewing her lip, she reminded herself to follow his lead and stepped out of one shoe and then the other, before walking a couple of steps closer. Until they were about a foot apart and she had to lean her head back to meet eyes that were storm clouds of hunger.

  He reached out one hand to latch onto the bottom of her sweater and then the other side, as he languidly pulled it up and over her head.

  After folding it and laying it next to his shirt, ever the neat freak, he turned toward her and took the final step that brought them together as he wrapped one arm down her side, his hand engulfing her ass and pulling her to him.

  His bare skin was touching her in all the places her bra and panties didn’t cover, and the feeling made her eyes practically roll back in her head.

  But that look wasn’t sexy.

  She needed to look sexy. No eye rolling. Keep those retinas focusing straight ahead.

  And then there was his smell. Why had no one warned her of the smell of a shirtless aroused male? The scent landed somewhere between fine leather, cedar, and chemically enhanced pheromones.

  No, that wasn’t quite right, either.

  A musky cologne scent mixed with sweat.

  But she could no longer ponder the aphrodisiac qualities of his skin as his hand was now sliding down the inside of her pants. The other hand found the clasp of her bra and was pulling one strap down.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said, kissing her shoulder as he managed to remove her bra and set it down with the rest of their clothing without interrupting the marauding of her collarbone. “How do you like it?”

  Suuuch a good question.

  Telling him to just rip the Band-Aid off and throw her in the shark-infested waters felt a bit too allegorical. But then again, she was supposed to be letting him lead.

  “Just do what you like to do, and I’ll let you know if any red flags start flapping.” She gasped as he once again took to taking hot little nips of her neck and then licking them.

  Her directions didn’t appear to hit the mark he was looking for as he asked, “Do you like it soft or rough?”

  Good Lord, why didn’t she just fill out a survey? “Like roll around the floor rough, using headlocks and . . . inserting objects into orifices?”

  He hesitated, “Are you saying you . . . you want to me to insert things inside you?”

  “No,” she said, with a frenetic shake of her head. “Of course not.”

  “Did you… want to do that to me?”

  His eyes were wide, his eyebrows almost reaching his hairline. She wanted to crawl in a hole, failing miserably at sexy talk.

  “No, no . . . just asking for clarification. You know, rough can mean different things to different people.” And literally nothing to her. “I mean, there’s Christian Grey rough where he has a variety of riding crops, and then there’s Hallmark rough where the guy raises his voice to stern levels.” And then she remembered something Becky Waterman told her just the other day. “Oh, and some people are into asphyxiation. . .”

  He was now stock-still and then pulling away. And she could’ve died from embarrassment.

  “You want me to choke you? Be-cause . . . that’s a hard stop for me.”

  “No,” she said, covering her eyes with her fingers at his expression, which looked shocked, dazed, and confused. “I was only using that as an example of the lack of specificity in your question.”

  Her chest caved in as he took another step back.

  She thrust her hands down and stared at his chest because looking directly at him only made her realize how badly this was going.

  “Can’t we just do it, you know, normal-like? Without all of the complexities and accoutrements?”

  “What’s an accoutrement? Is that a new sex toy?”

  Dang her one percentile verbal skills.

  That was it. She was done.

  Once again, she managed to muck this whole thing up with her big mouth.

  She reached around and grabbed her sweater, pulling it on. “You know, I just remembered I have something I’m supposed to do tonight.” She ran her fingers through her hair, slipping into her shoes behind her.

  “You’re leaving?”

  She made her way toward the door, staring at the frame instead of him. “Yes, I’ll stop by tomorrow to check on the kids. Maybe Sunday I could take them to church?”

  “Mercy, maybe we just talk about . . . things. You share what you like, even if it’s a little . . . out there, and then I share what I like, and we find the middle ground.”

  Omigod, he thought she was some sexual deviant, and he was trying to find a way to accommodate her proclivities. Was this what Loren went through with Alec?

  The blood drained from her face. How could she even look at him again? How could she be around him and the kids when he pictured her as some crotchless-underwear-donning dominatrix, snapping a silk tie in her hands with a riding crop between her teeth?

  “No, that’s okay. I think we just need to go back to being fake fiancés and pretending we do stuff instead of actually doing it. See you.”

  She tore through the hallway, stopping only to grab the open bottle of champagne, and ran out the front door to her car.

  A call from Madame G a few minutes after Mercy ran out of his house like a bat out of hell informed Trevor that the kids had wanted to spend the night with them so they were going directly to Levi’s house.

  He then realized the cunning matriarch had been matchmaking between he and Mercy the entire evening.

  Well, that play didn’t work out for her.

  He meandered through the house looking for things to do, throwing a load of laundry from the basket into the washing machine and placing the new champagne flutes inside the dishwasher.

  But that was the extent of household tasks as Mercy had washed, folded, cleaned, and picked up anything and everything that needed to be taken care of prior to Mrs. Standish’s arrival.

  Mercy must have absconded with the bottle of champagne as it was nowhere in sight.

  He leaned on the counter, reliving their earlier discussion and trying to make sense of it.

/>   So she liked some kink? Who was he to judge? Should it really have come as such a surprise? She was outspoken, flirty, and brash. But it all came alongside what he misperceived as a coping mechanism.

  Then again, she wanted it to be “sex only,” refusing to discuss exploring their relationship as they were clearly attracted to one another.

  To each his own, Trevor thought. He wasn’t one to judge other people’s lifestyle choices, but he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that it stung a little. That his feelings for her were evolving, and hers were one-dimensional.

  He sat on the sofa and began scrolling through channels that were something other than Disney+ or Pixar. He settled for ESPN and cursed himself for feeling bored and somewhat empty without Mercy bringing home pets or spouting off with some of her witty repartee that ironically came off as more of a deterrent than a sexual invitation.

  His phone began to buzz, and he picked it up, not recognizing the number other than it being local. Maybe it had something to do with the kids?

  “Trevor,” he answered.

  “Hey, Trevor, this is Gus over at Lucky’s.”

  The guy who owned the local bar and nearly threatened him with his life if he treated Mercy poorly. Well, the joke was on this dude.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Mercy Ingalls is here, and her sister Loren told me to call her if she ever needed a ride, but she’s still out of town. I don’t know what or who would drive Mercy to drink so much, but she has no business driving herself home. Hope I’m not making a mistake by calling you to come get her.”

  Well hell. In other words, you’d better not be the reason she was trashed at the local watering hole.

  “On my way.”

  “Okay, and one more thing. Don’t tell her I called you.” He hesitated. “She’s sweet and all, but she’s got a mean left hook. Nearly took out a city boy who stopped by and made the mistake of touching her and suggesting they leave together.”

  Trevor saw red at the thought of someone hitting on an inebriated and overly sexed Mercy. But a little relieved that she clocked him instead of having “just sex.”

  “Understood,” he replied, wondering how their failed attempt at fucking caused her to drown her sorrows.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Drink to me.”

  — Pablo Picasso

  Turned out, Mercy was a happy drunk.

  When in a fistfight.

  Trevor walked into Lucky’s, witnessing all of the tables pulled to the side of the bar while Mercy had a hulk of a man playing what appeared to be a version of air-guitar but fighting as opposed to jamming on virtual guitar strings.

  Mercy was bouncing back and forth on her toes with her fists hovering at her face. “You never allow the roundhouse kick to make contact. Otherwise, you’re going headfirst into the mat. You have to block it with your forearm.”

  She came at him with a kick that would’ve made Van Damme flinch. She managed to kick her right leg to an almost ninety-degree horizontal level, only to switch it out and kick at his head with her other leg, missing by inches.

  She made a cartoonish sound that sounded like, “Bam,” and, “Kaboom,” as the man’s head jerked back and then fake crumpled to the ground as others stood around yelling at him to get up as if he were in the middle of a boxing ring.

  She continued bouncing and swaying a bit.

  With hands on his hips, Trevor shook his head.

  Damned if she wasn’t an adorable drunk.

  Her opponent shook his head as if nearly knocked out and got back up, swerving and weaving theatrically while Mercy was listing a bit too far to the right. Not from play-fighting but from being shit-faced.

  Trevor watched Gus approach him. He flipped the bar towel over one shoulder. “Woman has amazing motor skills despite drinking her weight in alcohol.”

  Trevor nodded as her unworthy opponent attempted a right hook to her jaw which she blocked and returned with a swift undercut that didn’t make contact.

  “She came in here finishing off a bottle of champagne and then started drinking shots. If you did anything to cause her to over-imbibe, tell me now, and I’ll call Levi Simmons. And then I’ll kick your ass.”

  “No, no,” Trevor insisted. “Don’t call Levi. We aren’t . . . arguing or anything.”

  Admittedly, he wasn’t sure what they were doing. She had become a daily part of his life, yet at the same time, she kept him at a distance. At first, he was on board with that, and then the distance bothered him, and he found himself trying to get closer to her at every turn.

  She’d make brash flirty comments, not as much as a come-on, but almost to prove that what they were doing was nothing more than a joke. A joke that didn’t seem funny anymore.

  At least to Trevor.

  “I would have called Loren, but she’s still out of town,” Gus said. Before walking back to the bar, he added, “Don’t make me regret calling you.”

  A sing-songy voice from the middle of the air-fighting spree reached Trevor, “He-ey, Sugarplum!”

  She was waving and stumbling to the left with a wide grin.

  “Wanna fight?” she asked, jabbing her fists toward him like a prizefighter with vertigo. “I’ll tie one hand behind my back. Give you a handicap.”

  “Come on, slugger,” he said, grabbing her hot pink leather wallet from a nearby table. “Time to get you home.”

  She stuck out her bottom lip, and then grabbed her wallet, turning to her fanbase.

  “Bye, everybody!” she said, waving enthusiastically and almost overturning a chair. “My super-handsome fiancé is taking me home now. Have a nice day tomorrow. I hear the weather is going to be sixty-five degrees and partly sunny.”

  They all waved back, continuing the fight scene she must have started after clipping the handsy dude from earlier but actually making contact.

  Trevor turned to Gus behind the bar, giving him a single head nod of a thank-you as he opened the doors for Mercy.

  “Ooh, it’s so nice outside,” she said, arms splayed out to the side as if taking in rays of sunshine rather than the cold prairie winds, and then, just as quickly, crossed her arms over her chest with a shiver. “No wait, it’s a little cold.”

  “Do you have a coat?” Trevor asked as she started dancing back and forth on her toes, similar to the air-fighting in the bar except shivering with her arms crossed in front of her.

  “Nope,” she said, suddenly plastering herself against his body and wrapping her arms around him as if to soak up his warmth. “You’re so toasty. Like one of those super-soft onesies for adults.”

  He pushed her back an inch, giving himself enough room to remove his hoodie, yank it over her head and pull it down.

  She swayed, and he held her by the forearms to help her catch her balance.

  Hooded amber eyes gazed up at him. “You’re such a gentleman.”

  He raised his eyes to the sky at the irony of the comment. For a gentleman, his dick was rock-hard and ready to rumble.

  “And so handsome.”

  “Thank you,” he said dryly, avoiding her gaze. Looking at her only made him harder.

  “You look like a really tall Jake Gyllenhaal. With all that thick dark hair,” she grabbed a handful attempting to run her fingers through it, drunkenly snagging chunks on each side with the various rings on her fingers. “And those broody eyes.” She poked at his retina.

  “Okay, Buttercup,” he said, trapping her small fingers into his before she could do irreparable damage. “Where’re the keys?”

  She patted herself down but couldn’t seem to get past the hoodie to the pockets in her capri pants. Trevor rolled his eyes, lifted the hem of the hoodie and plucked the keys from her pocket.

  “You found them!” she said, as if on a treasure hunt. “It must be a part of your super-sleuth skills.” She slurred, sounding more like ‘thuper-thuth skillths.’

  He opened the passenger door and before pulling her feet inside, she looked up at him. “You kn
ow, I’m not some perverted sexual predator. I’m, like, the opposite of one.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “But I do. I don’t want you to think I’m weird, or anything. I’m really super normal. And I like normal sex.”

  He lifted her legs, moving them to face forward and shut the door to shut her up. He straightened, relieved he was able to bend over without cutting off the blood flow to his throbbing dick. Rounding the front of the car, he slid into the driver seat.

  The engine started and he gave her the side-eye as her head fell back on the seat. He couldn’t hold back. “I hear some asshole . . . touched you.”

  She snorted, “He tried.” She pulled her fists to her face. “The perfect punch,” she said with a deep creepy foreign accent, creepy because of the slurring, “. . . is a complete transfer of energy from the ground, through your legs and hips, along your core and shoulder, through your arm, and into the first two knuckles of your hand as it makes impact.”

  Despite her level of inebriation she demonstrated the punch as if rote knowledge.

  She smiled up at him and then she turned sad. “He cornered me as I came out of the bathroom and I wasn’t even aware that I’d hit him until he fell to the floor. Asshole. I hope he’s okay.”

  She grew pensive, and he almost wished he hadn’t asked as this was a look on Mercy that made him uncomfortable and wildly protective. Looking at her furrowed brows, all he wanted to do was to hold her and protect her from all of her demons.

  And barfly asshats.

  She continued, “You know, I had never wanted to fight. Didn’t have a choice. Our trainers were these ex-Israeli soldiers who were experts in Krav Maga. They didn’t have names. I mean they did, but we weren’t ever told them. So we called them No-Name-Number-One and No-Name-Number-Two, which we shortened to Number One and Number Two. If I didn’t do something right, or acted half-hearted executing a particular move, they’d demonstrate on Loren to punish me.

  “It was hard to watch grown men purposely hurt someone you love because you’re so weak.” Out of nowhere, a half grin returned to her beautiful face. “But Loren showed them. She would train after training. She never stopped. And then, she’d make me train with her and it didn’t take long before we were so much faster than Number One and Number Two. We were slippery little devils. It’s hard to punch someone you can’t catch.”