She whispered the word again and he tasted her wetness with his fingers, stroking the firm pearl of her pleasure. Her thighs fell open even more, gifting him with more of her rich and salty scent. A hitching and moaning breath. Her fingernails sank like delicate little teeth into the back of his neck. Then he put his mouth at the source of her pleasure, and he received the gift of one of the sweetest sounds in the world, the low moan of his name on her lips.
So sweet…
He hummed in pleasure, flattening his tongue to lick and taste her, drinking up the salt-laced wine of her sex and the aural ambrosia of her soft moans. Elle circled her hips, grinding her center against his mouth, seeking even more pleasure. He gripped her thighs, held them open and dived in for more. He loved it all. The way she moved against him, moaned his name, arched into him, and begged for more. He ached with his desire for her. Just from this alone, she could make him explode. At that thought, the pleasure rushed dangerously close, and he had to reach down and grab himself to hold it at bay.
He didn’t want to finish. Not yet. He pulled back, kissing the soft insides of her thighs, pulling down her skirt.
“Come to bed with me.”
“Yes, please.”
He swept her up into his arms and, dimly aware of the crush of tulips under his feet, took her through the house and up the stairs to his bedroom. Behind its closed and locked door, he dropped her on the bed and pulled back to get undressed, but she dragged him back over her, spread her legs and pulled him flush against her.
“I want you now,” she groaned into his mouth, and Ahmed was lost.
Panting and desperate, he quickly unzipped and dragged off her dress, tossing it aside to tumble somewhere in the room. Elle moved with him, her body sensual and graceful, bare limbs settling around him, eager and soft. Then her mouth was hot under his, panting, while she fumbled to undo his belt and zipper, drag his pants and boxer briefs just low enough to bare him to her gaze.
“You are so gorgeous,” she breathed, and reached for him.
Her hands scorched desire through him, palms hot on the globes hanging heavily beneath the thickness of his sex. Then on the weeping head of his shaft. So good… The breath hitched in his throat, and his hips bucked, thrusting his arousal into her loose grip. Sweat prickled all over his skin.
Trembling in his eagerness, Ahmed crab-walked his hand into his bedside drawer to get a condom. He grabbed one with relief, ripped open the packet and rolled on the rubber with shaking hands, too far gone to bother with taking off his pants or underwear. Lapping at her had brought his need rising to a fever pitch. The lust writhed in him like a living and ravenous thing. He needed to be inside her. He needed for her to come around him, to shower him with her pleasure.
Despite his desperation to sheathe himself inside her, he wanted to make it good for her, too, to pull out her pleasure, taffy slow, and make her want to do this with him again and again. He took a nipple into his mouth, sucked and licked while caressing her other breast, rolling its firm bud between his fingers. She gasped and surged up, her bare flesh searing him through his clothes, the contrast between her nakedness and his covered body achingly arousing. Her thighs flared wider to receive him.
“Elle.” He gasped her name and slowly guided himself into her tightness.
They groaned together.
Hot. Wet. Miraculous.
God, he never wanted her to leave.
With a low groan, he pressed his open mouth into the dampness of her throat, delicious with the taste of sweat and the faintly bitter scent of her perfume. He began to move. An aching slowness that built, growing with the pleasure and the kittenish whimpers she made under him, delicate noises in contrast to the fierce clasp of her thighs around him, the ravenous motion of her hips.
“You’re perfect,” he gasped as they raced toward the end together.
A drop of sweat fell from his forehead, splashed down her heaving chest. Elle moaned his name again, her sex tight and wet around him, the pleasure tearing through him like flash after flash of lightning. The bed rocked with their movements. The room rang with her delirious cries. Closer. The heat climbed fast in Ahmed, rippling through his body and pushing him closer to the edge. Elle cried out, still moving frantically beneath him, reaching for what she needed. But she wasn’t there yet. Ahmed reached down between them to touch her with firm strokes of his thumb. Elle moved faster beneath him and cried out his name.
His control was slipping, the heat gathering low and tight. Pleasure rushed over him in a tsunami, threatening to overcome him. But he didn’t want to leave her behind. Ahmed gripped her hips, adjusted the angle of his thrusts inside her.
Elle tore her lips from his and screamed.
Oh, yes…
He let go. And allowed himself to fly with her. His body releasing in pulse after pulse of completion.
Minutes or hours or years later, Ahmed dropped on his back into the sheets, fighting for every breath. Elle draped herself over him, the weight of her body heavy and sweet. The pins had fallen from her hair, and the dark strands fell around her face and down to her shoulders. Some stuck to her cheeks. Panting, she licked her lips and blinked down at him. Sweat matted her eyelashes, and her throat was a glimmering line of damp in the soft bedroom light.
“Tired?” she asked breathlessly.
He was exhausted. Like he’d run two or ten marathons in a row. His back muscles trembled and twitched, and sweat ran down his skin in waves. He wanted nothing more than to sleep. “No.” He panted the denial, cupping the curve of her behind, loving the feel of her bottom and how it fit perfectly in hands. “I’m not tired at all.”
“Good.” She crawled up his body, bringing the hot scent of her female center close to his mouth. She was pink and dripping and beautiful. “Now you can finish what you started downstairs.”
She was insatiable. And he loved it.
Despite the faint pulses of sensation from his orgasm still pulsing through him, Ahmed wanted her again. Wanted to please her. His taste buds perked up, already anticipating her taste. Ahmed gripped her parted thighs and kissed her sex, sighing when she gasped and slid closer, the muscles of her thighs twitching against his cheeks. Elle looked down at him. Her face was a study in arousal, lips parted and wet, eyes low and slumberous, the curves of her body bathed in the soft overhead light. She took his damn breath away.
“Closer,” he breathed into her dampness. The desperation to have her under his tongue wiped away any lingering exhaustion.
Her soft laugh tapered off in a groan as he licked her in one long motion. Ahmed nuzzled deeper into her sex to get more of her on his tongue. Her pleasure smeared his chin. She moved against his mouth, writhing as he loved her with his tongue, squeezed her beautifully perfect butt, gripped her and pulled her harder against his ravenous mouth.
“Oh, my…” she moaned. “You’re so good at this.” Her voice fell away in another deep moan, one that vibrated her body on top of him. “So good…”
He licked her harder, sucked the salted-candy lusciousness over and over again until her moans were constant and she was riding his mouth hard, scraping his lips with the fur of her sex, bathing him in her scent, in her pleasure. He blindly reached up, realizing he’d closed his eyes to savor the taste of her, grasped her breasts, squeezed and stroked her nipples, pinched them.
She cried out his name as she came, her silken sex rippling against his mouth, pulsing and pouring sweet nectar into his mouth. Sympathetic pleasure rushed through him. Even with her shout of orgasm, he squeezed and tugged her nipples still, licked her while she shook and gasped on top of him, quivering like a leaf caught in a storm. He only stopped when she arched away from him and pushed his face away, her cries of pleasure transformed into something like pain.
Elle gasped again and slid away from him, falling limply into the rumpled sheets beside him. “I think you might already know this but just in case you don’t, you’re the MVP.”
“It’s nice to have my own opinio
ns confirmed,” he said, just because she expected him to. He wasn’t disappointed when she laughed again, although softer this time.
They sank into silence together, the only sounds the gradual calming of their breaths. Soon enough, Elle gave a sleepy moan and rolled back into Ahmed. She smelled of sex and satisfaction. He deliberately slid against her, savoring the feel of her skin against his, the languorous movements of her body, the way she smiled up at him with the barest motion of her full lips.
Contentment fell over him like an unfamiliar but welcome blanket.
“Spend the night,” he murmured.
The words came out of nowhere and surprised him, but he didn’t want to take them back.
A heartbeat passed. “I’d love to, but I can’t,” Elle said, looking truly regretful. She lightly raked her fingers through the hairs on his chest, and he wondered if she could feel how fast his heart was beating. “I have a meeting in the morning before I go to the radio station.”
Damn. He must be really gone to have forgotten he had to be at the radio station for his regular Wednesday-morning time slot.
“Okay. Meet me before then.” He wasn’t sure why he needed to see her, he just did. Maybe it was to see for himself that what he’d found with her was more than just sex, more than him wanting to feel her gasping and coming apart under him. “For coffee at the Starbucks near the station,” he heard himself say from far away, already beginning that quick slide into sleep, but it was suddenly important for him to see her outside of the farce that had brought them together in the first place. “Promise me.”
A warm breath brushed against his throat, and he felt her hand float down his chest and settle low on his belly. Although there shouldn’t have been anything left of him to respond and although he was tired, his sex twitched. God, if only he were twenty again…
“Okay,” Elle softly. “The Starbucks. Nine fifteen.”
“Nine fifteen.” Ahmed sighed. Then he was gone.
The next time he opened his eyes, the bed beside him was cold, but a note lay on the pillow. The sound that had woken him chimed again. His phone.
After a glance at the screen and a groan at the early hour, he answered the call. “What’s up, Sam?” Ahmed dropped back to the pillow with the phone pressed to his ear. He scratched idly at his belly.
“Come to my place.” His cousin sounded serious.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
Ahmed debated pressing the issue, after all, it was well past 2:00 a.m. and he had to be at the studio in the morning after meeting up with Elle. But he sat up and pushed the covers off his overheated skin. “Gimme twenty minutes.” The room smelled like sex, and so did he. That wasn’t something he wanted to share with his cousin.
He rushed through a shower to meet Sam in the small pool house where he lived.
“What’s up?” he asked, walking in wearing hastily pulled on gray sweatpants and a matching hoodie with his hands jammed in the pockets. Since he was going to climb immediately back into bed, he hadn’t bothered with underwear.
His cousin sat on the couch of his spartan living room with a laptop open in front of him on the coffee table. “I did that check on Elle Marshall.”
Ahmed found himself bristling but held his irritation in check as he sank into the couch next to Sam. “That I never agreed to.”
“Then it’s a good thing I checked,” his cousin said.
“What do you mean?” Ahmed asked with a trickle of alarm. He couldn’t be wrong about Elle. “I doubt there’s anything out there for you to find out about her. Nothing at the Christine level of messedup anyway.”
“Come take a look.” Sam turned the computer screen so he could see.
“She said she didn’t know that much about you, but look at his.” He clicked and Elle’s Facebook page came up on a new tab. Her profile picture was one of her grinning fiercely at the camera, a thorny rose clenched between her teeth.
“You’re stalking her Facebook?” Sam was usually more thorough than this or at least used more credible sources of proof of whatever he wanted Ahmed to see. “You of all people know that most stuff on social media is fake.”
“To a certain extent, but there are certain things you just can’t fake. Look.” Sam scrolled down the page and clicked on a post someone else had put on her page. “She said she had no idea who you were before the radio spot.”
“That’s not exactly what she said,” Ahmed protested, because her saying that would have been an outright lie. Someone would have to be living under a rock to not know who he was, before or after his retirement. His career had been meteoric in its blaze, the trajectory of his fame compared to Steph Curry or even Michael Jordan. His looks, active social life, the fact that he’d played for Team USA in the Olympics and had a few guest-starring roles in multiple TV shows and movies had essentially seared him into the current common consciousness. His activism earned him another kind of attention, this time one that exposed him to people through their after-dinner news shows and Twitter trending topics.
Elle had known who he was and said as much. She just didn’t know the particulars of his life and didn’t care to. At least not back when they first met.
Sam impatiently jiggled the mouse, pulling Ahmed’s attention back to the open Facebook post. “Here.”
On her wall, someone named Paula had posted a recent photo of Ahmed from Sports Illustrated. It was one of those artsy black-and-white shots of him in midair about to dunk the ball. His bare chest and stomach were damp with the appearance of sweat and damn near every muscle in his neck, arms and calves was on display in the sideways shot. The midthigh basketball shorts draped over his butt in a way he doubted they ever had in real life. Another miracle of Photoshop.
This one is rich enough to make all your worries disappear, the Paula person had typed above the photo along with about a dozen eggplant emoji. Plus, you two would make some hella cute babies.
The post was dated a week before he and Elle met. It had nearly fifty likes and just about as many comments. But Ahmed couldn’t see where Elle had responded to the post.
“That doesn’t mean a damn thing,” he said.
Sam shook his head like Ahmed was just being thick. “Maybe this will change your mind.”
“What am I supposed to be looking at now, comments from her high-school yearbook?”
But his cousin opened a folder on his laptop and pulled up a set of spreadsheets he shouldn’t have had access to.
“Are these the earnings and loss statements from her business?”
“Stop being such an easy mark and take a look. Didn’t she tell her business was doing well?” He didn’t wait for Ahmed to confirm because he’d been there, and they both remembered her passionate defense of Romance Perfected, its potential for making money and how well it had done before. “Her business is hemorrhaging money. She even filed bankruptcy a couple of years ago. How is it a coincidence that she linked up with you just now? Don’t you think she’s playing the innocent a little too well?”
“Come on, Sam. This doesn’t mean anything,” Ahmed said, but the doubts were already crowding in on him. Then he remembered an image that had disturbed him at the party, Christine in her red dress standing behind Elle. In a trick of light and perspective, she had looked like a devil on Elle’s shoulder. Or at least a warning sign of what could come.
“She hasn’t asked me for anything.”
“Other than to create this publicity stunt with you, which, according to traffic on her website, has been sending lots of new business her way. Just in the last few weeks since this whole thing started with you.” Sam closed the laptop with a snap. “Think with your big head, cousin. We don’t want this to be another Christine situation.”
Ahmed winced.
“Damn. Sorry, man.” Sam really did look regretful.
But it was too late. Memories of the woman who tried to ruin him financially rushed over Ahmed, drowning out his common sen
se. Christine had come into his life near the beginning of his career. A sexy, passionate woman who seemed to have the stereotypical “heart of gold.” She never saw an animal she didn’t care about, a charity she didn’t want to donate someone’s money to, an orphan she didn’t want to see in a real home. Through months of incredible sex and chess-master level mind games, she’d wormed her way into Ahmed’s life, gotten his credit card and financial account information then proceeded to wipe him out.
Luckily, his accountant had caught on before she could do any serious financial damage. The other damage was already done, though. Ahmed’s trust in women had been completely destroyed. Any women he allowed in his life after that had been there for a specific purpose and only got just so close to him before he firmly but gently moved them on from his life.
Elle is nothing like Christine, Ahmed thought but could not say out loud. He didn’t like how desperate and gullible those words seemed.
*
Later that morning, he still hadn’t managed to say them out loud. Instead, he was caught in a cycle of memories. Christine’s smile. The things she’d said that made him trust her. He had been young, only twenty-four years old. But he hadn’t been a child.
Awake from his second round of sleep since six o’clock, he called Elle to cancel their Starbucks date but got her voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.
Ahmed sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the news on his iPad, aware of time passing, watching the time for the coffee date get closer, then pass. His stomach wrenched with anxiety and regret. On the kitchen counter his phone chimed, but he ignored the sound. He only lifted his head from the iPad when Sam, already dressed to go to the radio station, came into the kitchen to check on him.
“You ready?” Sam asked, looking fit and well rested in one of his favorite black suits, all signs of strain from his struggle with the migraines now gone.
At nine thirty, Ahmed and Sam left the house for the station.
They arrived with just enough time for Ahmed to greet Clive and, ignoring his questions about how the arranged date with Elle went, slip on the mic during the commercial break between the earlier morning show and his.
On-Air Passion Page 13