Spy Games

by Jillian Boyd

  “You don’t look like one of my normal girls,” Roman announced sarcastically but calmly. “Who sent you?” he continued.

  I wonder now what my voice sounded like to him the first time he heard me speak. Was it instantly intoxicating, as his was for me? “I don’t actually know,” I responded, honestly but quietly. “It’s not the way that I operate.” I spared him the explanation that I always opted out of knowing who wanted it done or why. I found that such information hindered my efficiency.

  He slowly sat up, the red sheets falling into his lap. He drew his hands to his chest in submission as his carved, naked muscles flexed. “How long have you been with me?”

  I sighed as I stared longingly between the lines of his muscles, “Six months.” His face had reddened then, thinking perhaps about whom he would personally execute for the oversight of my presence. I let him slide his feet to the floor in the same way I had seen him do so many times before. Perhaps because I am so small, he thought he could out manoeuvre me. He thrust forward like a beast released from a cage, groping towards the spot where I knew he kept a 9mm Glock.

  I dropped to my knees, thinking to swipe his ankles. With my legs spread, and my shins pressed to the ground, I looked up into his clear blue eyes. My mouth hung open in awe. I had never seen his eyes this close and they mesmerized me. My sex began to throb and my breasts swelled with heaviness. A dull ache stirred in my clitoris. I was overcome with sensation I thought I could suppress. He hovered over me, looking down at me between his legs. I must have seemed so inane, so slight, perhaps even so lovely straddled there beneath him, looking up at him like a confused but lovesick dog. All I would have had to do was rise onto my knees and I could take him into my empty mouth as I kept staring into those calm eyes.

  I will never know why he stopped going for the gun, why he looked down at me with a new expectation, or why he pulled on the black silk tie of his sleeping pants to give me a chance. They drifted with the speed of a feather to the ground at my knees and all of the fantasies I could not suppress over the past few months filled me like a dam had broken. I saw us walking through the park with the lost, white dog prancing along beside us. I saw us sparring, and then falling to make love on the mat. I saw myself as his warrior, his personal assassin for any man he needed taken down.

  After months watching him, he had made me doubt my solitude and even my consuming profession, and I was deeply grateful to be beneath him watching his cock elegantly harden. I suddenly wanted to express my respect and longing for him. I wanted to show him how he had changed me, though I was still unsure in what ways I was different. When he ever so slightly nodded his head to me, my mouth watered, saliva jumping from the buds in my mouth.

  I arched my back and leaned my small breasts in to rub at his knees. For a second only I worried for his hands having access to my neck, where we both know places for that smooth snap. But the skin of his cock had turned dark and burgundy against the white of his muscular thighs and I was magnetised. I placed my hand at the base of his shaft, opened my mouth and flattened my tongue over his balls. I dragged my tongue up him, each taste bud softly abrading and then absorbing him as I moved up to the head of his cock. I ascended so slowly, as if every cell of his skin needed to be tasted. I licked it ravenously, the way Eve had when she first beheld and then tasted her own apple.

  I hovered there, at the bright head of his dick, and dug my nails into his inner thighs as I tried to hold myself back from swallowing him too deeply. When I finally let myself take him slowly into the back of my throat, he had begun to softly groan “yes” with each exhale. He pulled at my bundled brown hair so it fell down my arched, begging back. When he dug a powerful hand into the roots and shoved my head farther onto his dick, I moaned loudly and my nipples tightened, fiercely longing to be thumbed.

  He lifted me without effort just before he could no longer keep himself from erupting hotly onto my face. That would have been enough for me, to swallow him reverently. He sat me on the heavy wooden bed in front of him and peeled off my black pants. He set his teeth against the inside of my ripped thigh and squeezed his teeth on my muscle. I thought briefly of the major arteries available to his mouth, if he was considering using it for a different kind of destruction. As he bit, he pulled back the skin of my hood and rubbed the head of my clit, already engorged and slick just from sucking him. I drew my knees toward me as I balanced back onto my arms and spread with trust for him.

  When I lifted my eyes from his dirty blond head, I discovered a mirror behind us and watched his gluteal muscles ripple and twitch as he thrust his tongue into me. Misty grey tattoos covered his back and I could see a scar where one had been dug from his body by the blade of another man’s knife. If I were his, he would be perfectly protected for life. A white, shiny scar had healed there but threads of leftover ink still peppered the new skin. I first came quietly and deeply with his face between my legs, lapping my clitoris while his two fingers calmly caressed me. I stared into the white dwarf star of that scar that swallowed me whole.

  As he stood, I returned my hands to his cock and stroked him as he discarded my tight black top and I stared up into his blue eyes, biting my lip and wishing for this moment to continue on and on. He spat on my breasts and then sat his dick between them and slid himself up and down. He stroked my hard, dark nipples, exactly as I’d dreamed before. I grew wetter and wetter, the energy in my pelvis growing as I began to moan softly for him. Just then, he could have done anything to end me. He could have slit my throat or choked my breath from me. I submerged myself in the moments with him, avoiding myself and the decisions I would need to make, lost from my consciousness as he rubbed me and showed me his beautiful cock and let me pet his tattooed chest and abdomen. My cheeks and neck flushed red like they did when I sprinted after him in the park below, like they did when we pounded ourselves into switch kicks and hooks.

  I let him turn me and set me on my knees in front of him on the bed. He could have made a horror movie of me, dark and sadistic with my blood smeared on the walls and my insides brutalized entirely differently. I didn’t worry about his hands groping for a gun as he kept on massaging both my nipples while he pumped himself deeply into me from behind. Eventually, he grabbed my ass and split my cheeks as he slowly pulled his length from me, floated at my entrance, and then painfully slowly slid back into me. I dripped sweat when he sped up, fucking me deep, hard, and rhythmically. I was too weak with desire to fear him when he set his hands on top of his head, continuing to bang into me. “Harder,” I begged as I stroked myself and pressed my face into the red sheets.

  He could have shot me, stabbed me, broken my neck. Instead, he fucked me until I came twice more. The last time, I was on my back and he had smiled deep into my eyes. This was the smile I had seen when he was deeply happy, deeply at peace. This was his smile for lost dogs in the park, for toasting frozen vodka at midnight, for singing off key in the gym late at night. He withdrew from me as I stared hazily at him and the world exploded around me. He erupted searing cum onto my belly and chest. Then he massaged it into my breasts and nipples as he softly made love to my lips and tongue with his mouth.

  After, Roman lay behind me - he spooned me tenderly and I allowed it - as we spoke softly for some time. He asked me what I had seen over the past months, and I told him, which was everything. He sighed deeply as if it mattered what one murderer saw another do, as if he still planned on us both making it out of there. Telling Roman the complexity of his life, I finally admitted to myself how I had come to fall in love with him. And I failed to recognize that the story could have a different ending.

  It happened around dawn, when the light of the sun was just spilling into the edge of the dark and I began to see red sky in the distance. Soft flakes of snow fell like down feathers in front of the window. Warm air had buzzed gently from the ceiling vents. He stepped into the hot water that rained from the ceiling of his shower and I followed him lik
e a fawn. He pushed me up against the wall of the shower, my hard spine pressing into the marble as I thought of the choke he might put me into. He gently laid his mouth against mine as he sweetly split my lips with his tongue. He reached down to pick up my lithe leg, giving him access to my bare, warm cunt. My arms were wrapped around his neck, holding him tightly as we kissed.

  As he bent his knees to pick me up so I could wrap myself around his waist, he was lower than me for just a moment. I looked into his jewel eyes, the shower raining down on us and the steam collecting in fat drops on the glass door. I set my hands on either side of his handsome face. My lip, I remember, had trembled. It was only slight and it could have been mistaken for passion, but it was hesitation. I felt my hands moving forward of their own accord, my muscle memory activating as it had so many times in the past when the job was at its end. My mind and my fresh heart were incapable of stopping the trajectory of my hands.

  This small hesitancy hung in the air as he slid to the ground, his eyes open still and his breath coming in gurgling gasps. He lay on the floor of the shower, twitching and writhing like a wounded deer in the long hour before it finally passes. But there was no way to take it back. I croaked a moan as my hair flattened over my eyes. I immediately felt shame and remorse. I stayed there on the ground with him, stroking his chest as he lay paralyzed until I gathered the resilience to finish it. He did not take his last breath until I finally snapped to the other direction. As I shifted his bones like a demented chiropractor, it felt like an apple lodged and exploded in my throat and all I could smell as he lay dead in my hands was rotting cider. I do not recall how long I stayed there, but the water pouring over me eventually went cold and my skin bloated with wrinkles. I do not recall how I left, if I did it carelessly as if begging for punishment.

  A few months after the fiasco, I still had not left New York. The icicles on the trees had melted and shattered at my feet. The snow had gone, and small white and green buds were beginning on the black trees. Yellow taxis still shuttled past. I had sent back the money on the hit, and then discontinued all requests on my services. It was suddenly time for a career change. I kept running through the park every day, following Roman’s paths, and wondering at the desolation of my life, wondering what I was to do next. I was considering going home to my father and brothers, whom I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. A jewel thief. I remember snickering at that idea, proffered by my father much earlier in life.

  One morning while running, I stopped at the statue of Alice in Wonderland. While pondering her ease at forging relationships, I heard the most pitiful whine of an unfortunate soul. Out from between the stalks of the bronze mushroom slinked that ornamental poodle. It was like she knew I would be here, as if she was spying on me. Sticks and mud degraded her white mounds of coiffed hair and she was overgrown in the clipped parts. I stood like a statue, unsure what to do. Then she dropped her naked haunches onto my running shoes. I bent to where the collar was last time, when I observed Roman doing just this. But there was nothing. She was a free soul. Unaccounted for. An independent contractor. I didn’t have to tell her to come. We finished our jog side by side, then went to a boutique to have her hair redone. It was not long after this that we finally left New York for my father’s estate.

  ***

  The sapphire cools my sweating palm. My perfectionist father will remind me to polish the jewel later, before the hand-off. My breath slows and my body calms. I return back the way I came, which will take me just under three minutes, where I will rendezvous with my brothers. The poodle, I am sure, is still sleeping peacefully, her muscles twitching as she dreams of Central Park. As I wiggle through the maze of tight ventilation tunnels, I imagine Roman standing there with her, next to the lake. A pair of swans paddle past. He sinks his teeth into a sparkling apple. When he throws it like a tennis ball for the dog to fetch, the taste of cider and cinnamon brightens my throat.

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