“So here I am,” she says, coming to a stop in front of my wheelchair. Her face remains calm, but her bosom rises and falls rapidly, giving away her too fast breaths.
I stare at her. Stunned…and afraid…and wanting her more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.
“If this is a trick…” I start to say.
But she cuts me off, jumping into my lap, and knocking the rest of that threat out my head. With a kiss.
MIKA
The thing is, it was supposed to be a trick. Just a trick. I’d had a whole speech planned about respect, and how I wasn’t an object he could replace with another object for whatever price.
I’d imagined throwing the condom the half-black, half-Filipina escort had given me at him. Then leaving him there, shamed and humiliated, to think about what he’d done.
I wanted him to feel like I felt when I opened the door to that woman. Save for the dimples, she could have easily played the role of me if they decided to feature the nanny in the biopic of Holt Calson’s life.
But the way he’d looked up at me when I told him I’d volunteered to take her place. Hope and anguish shining in his eyes…while the outline of his long hard length strained against his grey sweatpants.
One moment I was standing above him, filled with righteous fury. And the next thing I knew I was in his lap, attacking his lips as I ground my pussy over his cock. My righteous anger morphing into one raging and desperate kiss.
After a moment of shock on his part, one hand fists in my hair and the other finds my breast. He doesn’t just kiss me back, he mauls my lips, his beard scraping across my skin, his teeth biting me at my lips whenever my tongue dares to retreat. His kiss burns…it hurts. It doesn’t feel like a kiss. I’m not the enemy, and neither is he. But it feels like we’re still fighting for domination, this time with our bodies and tongues.
I need to stop this madness. Climb off this crazy ride. But I can’t. I can’t stop. Or get enough. My grinding gives way to frustrated whimpers, as I try to get to more.
His hand falls out of my hair, and the tearing of fabric suddenly rents the air. It’s my romper, now ripped down the middle. He yanks at my bikini top, spilling my breasts into his hands.
Oh God, his hands…my pussy pulses when he pinches the nubs, then full-on throbs when he takes one globe into his mouth, his beard scraping the underside.
“Take me out and put the condom on,” he says after attending to both breasts.
The condom…for once, I don’t argue. I tear the package open, and pull him out. Oh God, his cock is so big in my hand. And it’s heavily veined. Like the dildo I’ve been dependent on here in Hawaii because I thought a vibrator would be too loud with Faizan next door. But unlike that big dick, this one is alive and throbbing.
And I guess Rashid’s not the only one who’s inappropriately desperate for sex. My hands are trembling so much I can’t get it on.
He only lets me fumble for a little bit, before snatching the condom from me and putting it on himself. Then his hand comes back to my hair, fisting around my locks and pulling as he says, “You will fuck me. Right here. In this chair.”
It’s like I’ve been hypnotized. There’s no hesitation, no arguing. I just lift my hips, pull the crotch of my bikini bottoms aside, and sit. He’s so large, my pussy lips strain wide as I push down on his dick. But he fits. We fit. And we both groan when I hit home.
My hips don’t have to be told what comes next. They start moving up and down with a mind of their own.
I try to kiss Rashid again, once I find a natural rhythm, but he doesn’t let me.
“Keep fucking me, Mika. Look at me and keep fucking. Don’t stop.”
He pulls back on my fisted hair at the same time curling his other hand around my neck, holding the top of me in place. So that I have no choice but to look down at him as I fuck him, faster and faster until I begin to moan.
The climax, when it comes, burns through me like acid, corroding everything it touches, including my dignity. Tears spring to my eyes and my moans devolve into frenzied keens.
Strangely, when I lose it, he does, too. He finally breaks eye contact and his grip loosens on my hair. I feel him swell inside of me, right before he releases into the condom with a loud grunt.
For some reason, my hips continue to fuck, dumbly seeking more pleasure, even though we’ve both come.
“Stop. It’s done.” Rashid brings his hands up and stops my hips from rocking. “I came. We both did.”
I don’t know whether Rashid is speaking to me or my hips when he says that. But either way, his wish is my command. I don’t just stop, I collapse into him, flopping my arms around his neck, and lolling my head listless on top of his shoulder. For moments we stay like that. Him releasing air in panting grunts, me so spent and exhausted I can only manage the occasional breath.
I feel…I don’t quite know how to describe this. It’s like back in school, when I used to skip cafeteria lunch at high school because I thought I wasn’t hungry, only to lunge at the food when my mom set something good in front of me.
I hadn’t just been hungry after so many years without sex. I had been ravenous.
This sex with Rashid feels like the best meal ever…until suddenly it doesn’t.
One moment I’m floating on a cloud, and the next I’m free-falling into an icy lake of cold reality. My eyes pop open as I realize that I just climbed on top of my wheelchair bound boss and fucked him like…well, the sex worker I sent away after pretending I needed her advice. You know, the sex worker who’d only been contracted for a blow job and nothing else?
“Oh my God, what did I just do?” Shame curdling my insides, I scramble off of him and clutch at my torn romper.
Rashid just looks up at me, his expression cold and unreadable.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I took it too far…I didn’t mean to…I…”
I don’t know what else to say. How to explain myself or what I did, especially with him looking up at me so coldly.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
Then I run.
16
RASHID
“Oh my God, what just happened. What did I do?”
A miracle. That was what had just happened. At least it had been a miracle for me. The feel of her in my lap…the way she’d made me fight her for domination as we kissed…how she’d responded to my commands and rough touch…it had been beauty on top of perfection. The best thing I’d ever experienced, broken or whole.
“I’m sorry.” She stands before me in the romper I destroyed, sputtering. “I took it too far…I didn’t mean to…I…”
That sex had been a fantasy come true for me. But for Mika, it had been a trick. One she took, according to her own words, too far.
“I’m sorry.”
I keep my expression neutral as she apologizes to me for the best sex of my life, and then I watch her run away without a single ounce of surprise.
I knew from the start it was one of her mischievous games. That she didn’t really want this. Especially with me. She’d meant to humiliate me for my obsessive desire when she came in here, to punish me for asking for a hooker who looked like her. I knew that. And couldn’t bring myself to care.
Not when she was in my lap. Soft and real. Even better than I’d imagined.
But now she’s running away. From me. From the explosion she obviously hadn’t been anticipating.
And no, I’m not surprised when she runs. But I also can’t stop myself from rolling after her.
“Mika…” I call in her wake, although I have no idea what to say, how to make her see that I didn’t care about her motives. I just wanted her. Again and already. I now realize the biggest lie I told myself when I told Faizan to hire the escort was that one servicing would cure me of my obsession.
“Mika…” I call again.
She either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t want to respond.
She cuts left, and when I emerge from the end of the hallway into the open
common area, it’s just in time to see her bare feet pounding up the stairs.
Running where I can’t follow.
Let her go, I tell myself as I watch her dash across the second floor landing.
“Your Excellency, is there anything I can get you?”
I wheel my chair around to see Faizan in the kitchen. And I know then, that despite his new surfer status, Hawaii hasn’t changed him quite as much as it appeared. If he’s at all non-plussed after seeing my temporary housekeeper run up the stairs with me yelling after her, like any good Jahwar servant, he doesn’t show it. He simply waits for my answer, calmly putting together what looks like the machine he used to make my meal replacement drinks before Mika stole it.
“Where did that come from?” I ask.
“Jasmine Hayes thought it best that we take it back since Mika will be leaving in a couple of days,” Faizan answers. His expression softens at the mention of Mika’s younger sister. “She is very unusual. Also very honorable.”
And here comes that burning envy again. That he can pursue what he wants while I cannot even chase Mika up the stairs.
“No, nothing else tonight,” I say, turning back to my room. “I’m going to bed.”
“Very well, Your Excellency,” Faizan calls after me. “Would you like for me, to…”
I slam the door behind me before I can hear the rest to that question.
In the end I don’t have to convince myself to let Mika go. She’s gone by the time I wake the next morning.
Faizan enters with a breakfast smoothie and an apologetic expression. “Mika asked me late last night to drive her to her parent’s house. Apparently, she decided to return early to her job in Connecticut. She offered no further explanation but she did give me back the window walls’ remote. And she told me to have her last days’ wages taken out of her check. Would you like me to call Sheikh Zahir to arrange that?”
I think about it, and then answer, “No.”
I want to rail against Faizan for agreeing to her plan, and then for helping her run away in the middle of the night.
“I hope you can forgive me, Your Excellency. It was unwise of me to agree to let Mika replace the escort you asked me to hire,” Faizan says as if reading my thoughts.
“It was only that you’ve made such progress since her arrival. At the time, Mika, not the escort you requested, seemed to be exactly what you needed, which is the only reason I agreed to leave her alone with you. But I can see that I woefully miscalculated how that would turn out. And now her leaving has upset you. For this, I apologize, and I hope you won’t let this affect the progress you’ve made over the last three months.
I note his careful tone and say, “So you agree with Zahir.”
“Excuse me, Your Excellency?”
“You’re apologizing to me now because you think I’m weak...half a man. A child who needs to be monitored and handled. Someone who shouldn’t be left alone, because I can’t handle one little maid without killing myself.”
Faizan reacts, his expression becoming startled. “I did not…I certainly would never.”
I leave him there with the smoothie and roll into my office. Back to The Big Idea.
For once, I don’t try to resist the work or deny that I need it. I furiously finish the rest of the design drafts for the rest of the pneumatic actuators and solve the last of the torque bandwidth issues. I work and work until suddenly, there’s no more work to be done.
I sit back in my chair, realizing that I’m finished.
A full schematic for The Big Idea sits on the screen in front of me.
And I feel like I want to die.
My brain is officially dumped. The summer is over. And Mika…she’s gone.
Images of Mika flash through my brain. Her heavy breasts spilling out of the romper I destroyed…the way she arched into my fist when I refused to let her kiss me….
I’m done, but my mind’s engine continues to rev. With memories. With next steps. Wanting something else to do.
No—cross out want. I needed something. Something else to fixate on.
I look at the final schematic, desperately searching it for answers.
I know it’s hard to stay here after losing that sweet little girl, but that’s what you have to do for her. Keep on living. Learn how to walk again. Dance now that she can’t. That’s the only way to make her life worth it. To make your life worth it.
And that’s when it hits me. I realize what the schematic really is. Not just a concept, but an opportunity. And opportunity, that if properly executed could make me…if not whole…worthy.
Worthy of this life I was given when my daughter was not.
“Faizan!” I yell out.
He’s at the door by the time I open up a new Evernote file and begin furiously typing up everything I’ll need to make The Big Idea a reality. “Yes, Your Excellency?”
“Order me something real for lunch, and bring me my phone.”
No more smoothies. I’d need calories and all the help I could get to pull this off. The Big Idea had just morphed into The Big Plan.
17
MIKA
Have you ever experienced something miraculous? Then run away in the middle of the night from that miracle? Then thought about that miracle every single day for the next month?
No?
Well, I guess you’re not crazy like me then. Good for you.
I know, I know, there’s no such thing as crazy. I should know better after a whole year of Psychology grad school. Blah, blah, blah…
I get it. And I agree. But sometimes crazy isn’t just a bad label for mental illness.
Sometimes crazy is missing something that never should have popped off in the first place.
It’s wishing you had gotten a certain manservant’s number, so you could text and see how the man you ran away from is doing.
It’s sending everything you made last summer to your sister, save for two days wages you really don’t feel you deserve—those go back to Zahir with a short apology in the PayPal box.
It’s sitting down to write a letter—yes, an actual letter in the 21st century. Then balling it up when you can’t think of anything to say after “Dear Rashid.” Yes, you still have no idea what to say to him, not one clue after nearly a month back in Connecticut. But you want to say something. You want to reach out.
Because you’re that kind of crazy.
“You okay?” Sylvie asks, like, every time I walk into her office for our weekly coordination meeting these days.
No, Sylvie, I’m not okay.
“I’m great. So great,” I answer, pasting on a smile. Trying to do my best impression of a responsible nanny who definitely didn’t jump her summer boss’ bones a couple of days before she was scheduled to leave.
Sylvie squints at me the fourth week in a row I insist I’m totally great. I don’t think she believes me.
Luckily Sylvie has her last year of graduate school to juggle and a little girl who’s still too young to potty train but has somehow figured out how to take off her diaper.
“Poo-poo no like! Di-di bye-bye,” little Lydia calls out to us, interrupting her mother’s possible interrogation.
We both look up to see her toddling across the kitchen, dragging her dirty nappy behind her.
“Oh Lydia, why? What am I going to do with you, little girl?” Sylvie asks, her Jamaican accent becoming much more pronounced as we both rush over to her daughter.
“Why does she always do this on Lucynka’s day off?” I wonder aloud as Sylvie picks up her cute but gross daughter from underneath her armpits, and I wrest the diaper from her triumphant little fist.
Sylvie opens her mouth to answer, only to be interrupted by a tinkling sound.
Apparently, Lydia wasn’t done. The toddler flashes us a proud smile as a stream of her pee hits the kitchen floor.
“This is why I refuse to allow the boys to get a dog,” Sylvie informs me while carrying her daughter up the backstairs to the changing table. “It
is already too hard with all the human animals in this place.”
I just laugh and clean up the mess Lydia left behind. It’s always an adventure with a baby in the house.
I try to be grateful as I fall back into a happy routine of taking care of the baby and afterschool pickups. I have a good job for a family I really love. And now there’s a little girl in the mix, just like I always wanted.
It’s fine that she’s not mine. And that the closest I ever come to a date night is waving goodbye with Lydia on my hip as Holt and Sylvie walk out the door, holding hands. Like they still can’t believe their luck at having reunited, even after having another baby and over a year of wedded bliss.
That’s totally, totally fine.
I’m back where I belong. In the background of Holt’s and Sylvie’s story. Not tangling it up with The Broken Billionaire, as Jazz called him.
Speaking of Jazz, with the rush to get out of Hawaii, we never got a chance to talk about the personal loan she had to pay back or her mysterious “client.”
But, as it turns out, I didn’t have to worry. She texted me later in the month to tell me the VA finally approved the clinical trial drug for Dad. No reimbursement for what we’d already paid, but also no more worries about that loan. “Totally got it covered, sis,” she’d texted back when I asked.
So, save for the Bible Verse phone calls, life is great. And even those messages creep me out less than they used to now that I’m back in Connecticut. So I guess I should be grateful for that, too.
Though, I have a hard time finding my new sense of resolute gratitude, when my phone wakes me from a dead sleep in the middle of the night with a phone call from an 808 number.
For once I answer, I’m so fed up with Alberto’s brothers. “Okay, I get that you’re angry, but you really can’t be calling me this late.”
RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii Page 12