by Sadie Black
I somehow managed to peel my body from the cool metal counter. “That was amazing.”
“I aim to please.”
I looked around at where we were. My slight inebriation combined with the after effects of my orgasm made the kitchen swim in my vision. “We are going to have to sterilize this place tomorrow.”
Cole made a show of considering my statement. “Yes. Yes and the bar too.”
“The bar?”
He pulled me up by one arm and used the other to lift me like a bride on her wedding night. “You didn’t think I was finished did you?”
With a flourish he carried me out of the kitchen and behind the bar. After laying me down on the floor, he removed the remains of his clothing and arched over top of me like a cave.
The space behind the bar felt like a secret clubhouse. No windows looked in on us. No one could see us except the myriad of bottles and empty glasses. I worried briefly that we would jiggle them off the shelves, but my longing for Cole trumped all logic at this point.
He was a perfect specimen. His tanned, muscular figure hovered over me. I could see the strength in his arms and torso. I’m not a woman who is easily subdued, but he could subdue me with those arms any day.
“Ready for round two?” He asked as he sunk lower and started working on my neck.
I was. I had never been so ready for anything in my entire life. I felt like us having sex was the most natural thing in the world and things were only now starting to make sense. I supposed that’s what desire feels like though. If you knew you were going to hate yourself later, you wouldn’t have sex in the first place. I’d do well to remember that rule about desire. As it stood, I would probably have married him on the spot if it meant one more ride.
Even after we’d both finished again and he was lying on his back, me curled around him, blankets improvised from scattered clothes and towels, I thought it was perfect. I would never forget this and I would never regret it. That was an incontrovertible truth. Funny thing about truth? It looks very different in the morning.
6
COLE
When I woke up the next morning, it took me more than a moment to remember where I was. My first thought was that I must have slept on my pillow funny because my neck was killing me. My next thought was that I must have slept through my alarm because I had not been this well rested in a long time. As the world started making sense around me, the pieces of last night started taking shape. One particular image, that of me bending Moneka Hart over a counter in the kitchen, stirred some familiar low-down feelings. Yet here we were, behind the bar. How many times had we had sex last night? How drunk had I really been?
Something shifted to my left and I glanced down at Moneka. What a sight. She looked like a Greek statue, her nutmeg skin was glowing under the morning sun, like a goddess. Her body curved in all the right ways. I caught a tendril of hair that was tangled in my fingers and rubbed it with my thumb. Moneka’s hair. I started filling up with so much longing that I was shocked I had room for it all. It felt a bit like I was made to be an empty vessel, and I was meant to be filled with longing for her.
“Hmmmm?” Her eyes began to flutter.
“Hey sleeping beauty.” I shaped my voice to be both nonchalant and kind. Sexy Moneka might have been out last night, but who knew if she’d still be around. I caught myself hoping she was, fantasizing about a little morning treat before we both had to face reality and get this place cleaned up.
“Hmmmm?” She seemed to ask as her lids finally rose to a resting position.
“I said hey good lookin’, watcha got cookin’?”
“What? Wait…”
I watched as Moneka’s brain did the same mental math that mine had done not five minutes ago.
“No…” She continued, clearly not finding the results as appealing as I had.
“Funny. Last night it sounded a lot more like ‘yes’.”
Moneka turned her face away in embarrassment and I laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” She asked in an accusatory tone.
“I’m laughing because the Moneka I met last night was not shy, not like this version of you this morning. What’s the matter? You regret our little adventure?”
Moneka paused. Things were certainly more complicated in the morning. She seemed to be contending with her embarrassment, her hatred of me, and another emotion that I thought I recognized from last night when she was on her knees with my dick in her mouth.
“I don’t regret it.” She sounded almost defeated.
“Good,” I said “because neither do I.”
She gave me a sharp look. “That doesn’t mean I want anyone else to know about this.”
“No?”
“This is strictly between us.”
“Strictly.” I crossed my heart in the most dramatic way possible, putting on an appropriately serious face for the occasion.
“I’m serious.” Moneka looked almost alarmed at how lightly I seemed to be taking this.
“Relax. So am I. You want to keep it on the low? That’s where it’ll be.”
“Right. Thank you.” Moneka laid her head back and groaned.
It was at that moment that she suddenly seemed to realize that she was naked. She grabbed a towel from the floor and tried to cover the important parts. The parts that I was most enjoying being uncovered.
“It’s 7am on a Saturday, I checked. No one will be here for another hour, at least. Also, the blinds are drawn. No one can see you.”
“You can see me.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen already.” I grinned at her. Wrong move.
Moneka huffed like the Big Bad Wolf and tried to rise from the floor. I was going to lose her if I didn’t arrest her progress.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting dressed.”
“So soon? Like I said, we have another hour. We could…do something with that time.”
Moneka rolled her eyes. I wasn’t going to let her leave that easily though. If she left annoyed, my chances of sleeping with her again would be less than nothing. I reached over and placed a hand on the other side of her, trying to give her the most smoldering look I could manage.
“What are you doing?”
“Seducing you.”
“Please.”
“It worked last night.”
“Well, a lot of things happened last night that aren’t…”
“Aren’t what...going to happen again? Why? You had fun. You don’t regret it. Let’s not regret it again.”
I bent low over her and planted a kiss on her cheek. By letting my face hover there, over her face, I could bring the tension to the surface. I want to make her squirm the way I made her squirm last night. She didn’t respond though; she just started at me, mired in some inner conflict. I kissed her again, this time on the lips. She responded. It was small, but I could feel her lips conforming to mine. They puckered up, silently begging me to kiss them again.
The second kiss was hers. She nibbled at my lip and smiled. The Moneka from last night seemed to be rising to the surface. I took the hint and ran my hand up her thigh, as I started kissing down her soft neck. She continued to respond, wrapping her arms around me and pushing her hips up to meet mine. There was no mistaking where she wanted this to go. I had no problem with it. I could fuck her all day if she wanted me to.
But I wouldn’t fuck her all day. I wouldn’t even fuck her right then. A phone was buzzing from somewhere behind the bar. Moneka reached back and snatched her purse from its hiding place. From inside, I could hear her ring tone jealously demanding her attention.
My cock was slowly hardening against her thigh even as she answered.
“Hello?” She said, not bothering to see who was calling.
I decided to have a little fun with her and moved my hand down between her legs.
“Hi mom. You know I’m actually kind of busy today.”
Yeah you are, I thought as I caressed the inside on her left thigh with my fin
gers.
“Yeah. You know the restaurant is opening soon and there’s just a lot to get done here.”
She gave me a scolding look, but didn’t stop me. Instead she moved her hips a little with pleasure.
“I know I know, I am too focused on work…well, I am trying to have a little fun.”
As if on cue I moved my body down between her legs and planted my mouth on her pussy. Her nectar was sweet as morning dew on my tongue as I slowly teased her. All I wanted to do was plunge my dick into her and fuck her like there was no tomorrow. I was trying to show restraint though; I wanted this one to be for her.
“Uh huh?...Yeah?...Ok.”
I couldn’t tell if her caller was chatty or if those utterances were all she could manage with my tongue flicking vigorously across her clit.
“Right. Ok. I...have to go. No, we'll talk later... Ummm…is everything ok?”
Moneka covered the receiver for a quick gasp. I grinned and started to work harder.
“Mom I’m really. Now? This can’t wait?” There was a long pause. “Fine,” Moneka said tersely.
She shook me off, despite how avidly she seemed to be enjoying it a moment ago. Moneka started pulling on her clothes in earnest.
“Wait,” I stammered, “What’s going on? You don’t want to finish?”
“My mom wants to see me for brunch.”
“So, tell her you’ll be late.”
“She says it’s urgent and I barely have time to go home and shower.”
“Awwww, but you were so close.” I tickled her ankle, trying to inspire a little playfulness.
Undeterred, Moneka walked away in search of her shoes. “I’m sure you’ll find a way to finish without me.” She sounded almost cold.
I wasn’t at all sure I liked morning Moneka. It seemed like we were having a good time, but her sudden transition from flirty morning goddess to stone cold bitch was more than a bit jarring.
Whatever. I wasn’t going to lie here and just rub one out like a pervert in somebody else’s restaurant. I got up and started putting my clothes back on as well, helping Moneka clean up the towels and wipe down the kitchen. Moneka was trying to be thorough, but I wasn’t worried. A cleaning crew would be through here and they would handle every surface before customers stepped a foot inside. That gave us another week to find some new surfaces to soil, provided Moneka had any interest in that. Right now, I couldn’t be sure.
As we exited Crave, we both turned to go our separate ways. I turned back though, briefly, to watch Moneka swaying her hips down the boulevard. Those hips. After last night, all I could think of was bending those hips over cars and front step railings. Or grabbing those hips and pulling them down on me. When I looked at Moneka now, whether it was morning goddess Moneka, bossy restaurant Moneka, or nighttime animal Moneka, all I could think of was fucking her in every way imaginable. This isn’t over I thought to those hips as they swayed out of sight.
As I made my way to my bus stop, my own phone started going off. Queen’s We Will Rock You blared from my jacket pocket. When I heard it, I thought about how much it annoyed Moneka and smiled. When I answered, I caught my Dad on the other line, sounding out of breath and frantic. I stopped in my tracks.
“Dad, are you ok?”
“Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah everything’s fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. Is it your heart? You know what Dr. Leister said about your blood pressure.”
“It’s not my heart son. Well, I suppose it is actually.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” he brushed me off.
“No…no, no never mind Dad. You tell me what’s up.”
“Look. Take some advice from your old man and relax. It’s not good for your blood pressure.”
I could hear him chuckling at his own joke through the phone and I wanted to reach through the receiver and throttle him. I could even picture myself doing it, like Donald Duck or some other bizarre cartoon.
“You working today?”
“Well, no.”
I looked around me. I guessed it was my day off. Moneka probably didn’t want to see me at all after this morning. Clearing out and taking it easy seemed like the best option. Of course, there had been one brilliant moment when I thought my day might be filled with sex. Can’t win them all I guess.
“Good. I want you to come to the country club out toward Amherst.”
“Dad, that’s over an hour away.”
“You’ll come because I have some big news for you.”
“Too big for the phone?”
“Way too big. It’ll make your phone explode,” he teased me and I had to smile. Whatever it was had him in a good mood, that much was clear.
“Sounds dangerous.”
“You betcha.”
There was a long pause in which my Dad was clearly listening for confirmation of my compliance.
“Fine, I’m there. Just let me get ready first. I’ll see you by noon.”
“I’ll wait for you in the club house. Don’t forget the clubs I gave you last Christmas. Brenner won’t let you borrow his since you dented his nine iron on that big oak out by hole fourteen.”
Right. I’d forgotten that he’d given me those clubs. I wasn’t much of a golfer, but my Dad seemed to have made it his life’s mission to make me into one. There was no doubt that he saw perfectly manicured greens and a dry gin or three in my future.
I gazed down the boulevard at the morning drunks mixed with Saturday executives and young mothers. They all peeled out of the woodwork as the city woke up, each with a separate story from the night before, separate plans for the weekend, separate dreams for the future. I can’t gaze at the country club that way. When I try, all I see is the same old man repeated about twelve times, talking about his money and criticizing whoever happens to have more than him or less than apropos.
Nah. I preferred to gaze at street lamps and broken windows, laundromats filled with people and restaurants like Crave. I preferred to live a life apart from my father’s money and find a way to be my own kind of man. I guess I’m just not a country club kind of guy.
7
MONEKA
That fact that my mother was treating me to brunch at the The Honey Dew did little to assuage my frustration. My morning with Cole stuck like a burr in my brain. It wasn’t all bad though. He definitely knew how to make me feel good. But last night couldn’t happen again. It was unprofessional and not the kind of foot I wanted to start on with my new restaurant. Honestly, who would take me seriously as a businesswoman if word got out that I slept with my contractor? Especially since said “sleeping” happened before the work was finished. I took solace in the fact that there was only one week left and then I would never have to see him again. Affair over. Problem solved.
I was so distracted by my own tumultuous choices, that I barely had time to wonder why my mother was treating me to brunch at The Honey Dew. Sure, it was a terrific restaurant. The décor gave me the warm-fuzzies, which is to say that every time I walked inside, I wanted to curl up on one of their couches and fall asleep. It was the kind of homespun coziness that you might expect on a winter night by a fire, hot cocoa in one hand and a cheesy book in the other. Of course I never got that kind of coziness at home. My apartment didn’t even have its own washer and dryer let alone a fireplace. That’s why I came here.
All of the seating took the form of couches or easy chairs. There were even some dining and rocking chairs for those who preferred a firmer back. Each “table” was simply a collection of these furniture pieces around a low coffee table. This might make eating difficult if the cuisine were your typical brunch fare. However, The Honey Dew served brunch and lunch tapas. Little bacon wrapped deviled eggs and miniature crepe pockets stuffed with ricotta and ham were among the “finger brunch” selections served in the classic Spanish style. What’s more, they had a bloody Mary menu that went on for three pages. I had no idea there were so many different ways to have a bloody Mary! As I eased into one corner o
f a love seat, the first to arrive as per usual, I made a mental note to discuss drink inventions with Sonia. Maybe we could work something out on the bloody Mary front for our own bar.
My Mom hated this place. Ever the purist, she preferred old-fashioned diners. If it couldn’t easily be confused for something in a movie about the 60s and if there wasn’t at least an inch of grease on every observable surface, then it wasn’t good enough for Mom. Whenever we planned to have brunch and I suggested The Honey Dew, she would turn her nose up at it, complaining that the people there weren’t nearly as friendly as the ones at her diner. She’d make the claim that all the hoity-toity restaurants, gifted to the city through the wonders of gentrification, lacked the openness of their predecessors. Louise Hart was always lamenting the loss of a Boston that “knew how to be your friend”. When I told her about my plans to open a restaurant, I’d promised her that I would make mine the friendliest joint in the neighborhood. She liked that; she even promised to swing by every once in a while.
So it’s no surprise that I was not on my A-game this morning. My mother invited me to The Honey Dew? She’s going to open her wallet for a restaurant whose only courtesies are to ask her how her day is and take her order? Not to mention her insistence that this happen now, not tomorrow, not this evening, not even an hour from now. If I hadn’t been wrapped up thinking about how much I never wanted to see Cole’s gorgeous ass ever again, I might have been worried that she was preparing to tell me some very bad news.
Kaila was the next to arrive. When she saw me curled up at one of the “tables” she smirked.
“Mom’s the last to arrive as per fucking usual,” She sighed as she nestled into a cushy armchair.
“Yep.” I was still browsing the bloody Mary catalogue, trying to decide what drink most complimented my shame.