by Nigel May
Kassidy could feel her knees beginning to ache, kneeling on the ledge of the hot tub as Sheridan pumped her harder. His cock was big and, thanks to the odd blue pill, remarkably regular for a man of his age. It straddled the line between being an orgasm-inviting perfect fit and straying into the realms of discomfort. Kassidy’s position, bent over the edge of the hot tub, took it into the latter. His strokes were deep and more brutal than the tender flesh between her legs craved. His hands gripped her sides, a little harder and more forceful than normal to steady himself against the steaming water of the hot tub. Kassidy pictured herself reaching for the arnica gel in the morning to try and soothe the blotch of fingerprint-sized bruises that would doubtless appear. That was something her mother back in Ireland had taught her never to be without. What was it she always told her? ‘With Jesus in your heart and a good lot of remedies in your medicine cabinet, you can deal with anything or anyone that comes your way.’ And didn’t Kassidy’s mother know it. A God-fearing Catholic woman married to a drunken bum of a husband with a nasty habit of being a little too fist-friendly after one too many pints of Guinness, while telling her what a lowlife wife she was. How many years had she put up with that? Too many, in Kassidy’s opinion. But somehow Kassidy’s mother thought that her marriage was worth fighting for, even if it was her husband who seemed to be the one far too fond of a hands-on fight. Hence her necessity to carry painkillers, arnica and the most robust of cover-up powders in her bag pretty much wherever she went.
‘And we’re there…’ shouted Sheridan, slamming his cock as deeply into Kassidy as he could and emptying his balls into her. He was both smug and uncaring as he did so. He didn’t kiss her or say anything else before pulling his wilting cock from her and slapping her ass with his hand. Maybe it was a little harder than he’d planned, Kassidy didn’t know, but the sensation smarted a tad more than she would have liked. It was only then that he spoke.
‘Enjoy that, eh? And by the way, can you organise a one-on-one for me with that new girl on reception? I think I need to show her the ropes.’
It should have been rich, swirling images of desire, ambition and lust marbling through her mind as one of the richest tycoons on earth climaxed into her, but strangely it wasn’t. Kassidy Orpin was thinking about her mother. She may have been seemingly happy to put up with the mental scars and the physical bruises of being beholden to a man, but Kassidy was certain that she wasn’t going to let that happen to her. No, it was as brutally clear as Sheridan’s carnal intentions for the girl on reception that her boss no longer considered Kassidy as he once had. His interest appearing to be wilting as fast as his post-ejaculation cock, and Kassidy needed to make sure that she didn’t end up the victim.
‘It was beautiful,’ said Kassidy on autopilot again, her own orgasm nowhere to be found.
10
When you’re married to the owner it’s simply a matter of clicking your fingers to bag yourself the best table, with the most awe-inspiring view across London, at the Velvet hotel’s top-floor Michelin-starred restaurant. Even if it was at the last minute and even if the table was already reserved by some Neanderthal rugby player and his latest simpering reality-show girlfriend who were flavour of the month after ‘accidentally’ posting photos of their sex play on Instagram. Sutton Rivers had no qualms in bumping them to another table, no matter how it looked for business. She needed that table, she wanted that table, and nothing or no one was going to make it otherwise. Sutton had bigger and tastier fish to fry than worrying about some rugby star with a tiny cock, judging from the photo she’d googled after finding out whose table she was hijacking. What was that sport anyway? As a New Yorker, Sutton could not see the point. And what was it with people posting pictures of their genitalia on the Net for all and sundry to see? You couldn’t pick up the papers these days or log on to Twitter without seeing some pop pipsqueak’s ballbag or a socialite’s snatch. She prayed no compromising photos of her own family ever hit the Web. Nikki and Heather were too sensible for that surely? And thankfully when Sutton was younger, the whole idea of courtship was wining and dining, not sending somebody a photo of your privates on an app or filming a sex session with the intention of broadcasting it in full graphic glory like an episode of Game of Thrones. So much in life had changed. By the age of forty-seven it was bound to have done so.
Sutton drummed her nails on the soft pink cloth draped across the table. As yet she was alone. She glanced at her gold Cartier watch and saw that she had arrived early. Eager? Her dinner companion wasn’t due for another ten minutes. Sitting alone did not become her, especially without a drink. She raised her hand to a nearby waiter, one of many whose eyes were upon her, keen to please the boss’s wife, and mouthed the word ‘champagne’. A bottle of the finest Velvet had to offer arrived in under a minute.
‘Would you like to taste...’ began the waiter, a blond, floppy-fringed, baby face with the most delicious blue eyes.
‘Just pour.’
The waiter was just about to do so when Sutton barked again. ‘My glass is dirty,’ she said, picking up the champagne flute in front of her. A tiny smudge of a stain, barely a pinprick, was visible on the glass as she held it to the light. ‘My husband and I do not pay you to serve the finest alcohol in the murkiest of glasses, do we? Now change it.’
The waiter, obviously crestfallen at failing to please the boss’s wife, scuttled away to fetch another glass, hurriedly offering his apologies as he did so. Was that the trace of a tear in his baby blues? Sutton thought it might be. God, she really shouldn’t be such a bitch. The glass was hardly filthy and to be honest, she only highlighted it as she was feeling a little on edge. She fully knew why.
‘There, but for the grace of God, go I,’ said Sutton softly to herself as the waiter disappeared from view. ‘The poor boy was just doing his job. It could be you still mopping up glasses and flipping burgers, honey. Just remember where you came from…’
It was a place that still gave her chills when she thought about it.
Three decades earlier…
Sutton Nash could smell the fusion of alcohol and cigarettes on her boss’s breath. She could see the piece of burger still stuck in one of the gaps between his discoloured teeth. It was hard not to when he was standing six inches in front of her face, leering into her eyes as he rubbed his calloused hands across the pert seventeen-year-old breasts underneath her work apron.
She was used to it by now. It was just another evening shift at Dirty Dick’s Diner, the place she had been flipping burgers for the last six months. And pretty much every evening shift for those six months, Dirty Dick himself had decided to try and cop a feel of what she had underneath her work clothes. He did it to nearly all of the girls who worked there. Except those too old or too fat. Dirty Dick had his own set of double standards when it came to which of his staff he tried to touch up with promises of pay rises, seeing as he himself was knocking fifty and the size of Bluto from Popeye, but without the muscles.
Sutton let him do it, as she always did, watching the spittle form in small droplets at the side of his mouth as he cooed and oohed at her breasts. There was no point complaining. She needed the job and she’d already seen two of her co-workers dismissed for no reason other than the fact they wouldn’t let Dick touch them up. It never went further than her boobs and if his nicotine-stained fingertips did try and stray below where her diner apron was tied at the waist then a gentle slap and a ‘Now, now, Dick!’ from Sutton would stop his wandering mind and migrating digits.
Why any seventeen-year-old should have to put up with such behaviour was beyond comprehension, but then Sutton was no ordinary teenager. At an early age she’d learnt the art of survival. She’d had no choice. When your dad is labelled ‘person unknown’ on your birth certificate and your mother is killed by a hit-and-run driver while trying to turn tricks as a prostitute in one of New York’s roughest districts then you learn to adapt quickly.
Sutton had never known her dad. She wasn’t sure her mother
had been able to pinpoint the man who sired Sutton either. There had been a few suspects and the conception had been a mistake. Her mother, Tilisha, had worked the streets for many years before Sutton came along. She was a working girl and proud of it. It kept a roof over her head and put food on the table for her and her own mother, Pasinetta. The two of them lived together. Pasinetta also doing what she could, working as a mobile hairstylist, to bring money into the home.
Pasinetta was proud of her daughter and never questioned her choice of employment. If selling sex was what she wanted to do, then so be it. As long as she was sensible and didn’t get into trouble then Pasinetta would support her only daughter. And Tilisha did manage to stay out of trouble – until one month she skipped her period and it was clear that one of her tricks had not been as safe as Tilisha had thought. A trip to the doctors confirmed that she was pregnant. Nine months later Sutton was born.
Thirteen years later, Tilisha was still working the streets, her life a very different one now that AIDS had reared its ugly head. It had turned Tilisha and the other girls who worked her patch into nervous bags of neuroses about their sexual lifestyle. It had been a day like any other, searching for the next injection of cash to keep the wolf from the door, but it was a day that ripped Sutton and Pasinetta’s world apart.
Tilisha was working her corner, the same seedy, graffiti-covered patch she had pounded for years, when a car approached, as cars had done a thousand times before. She knew the routine like she knew the nail art on each and every one of her manicured fingernails. But there was something odd about the young guy behind the steering wheel, something she didn’t like. Something told her to be aware. Maybe the nervous prickle of sweat on his top lip, perhaps the brusqueness of his demands. Whatever it was, something told her she could do without his dollars. Call it a hooker’s intuition, but she declined.
But the man didn’t want to take no for an answer and began to shout, demanding Tilisha climb into the car and that they find themselves a room nearby. Again Tilisha declined, this time shouting back with the same force that she was being given. The young man attempted to grab her, Tilisha backing out of his way before he could take hold. It was then that the other prostitutes working the same patch, and Pasinetta, who’d been delivering food to the girls on the street, came to her rescue. Pulling an angry Tilisha as far away from the car as possible, they told the young man to sling his hook before they called the police. He had sped away before they’d finished the sentence.
It was the same group of prostitutes who were later to inform Pasinetta and a teenage Sutton, who had never been shielded from the truth of her mother’s work, of the events leading up to Tilisha’s death. Of how she had been working the same corner later that day when a car had sped out of nowhere and ploughed into her as she went to cross the road to work a trick. She hadn’t stood a chance as the vehicle smashed into her, sending her into the air, over the roof and crashing to the tarmac in a crumpled, broken heap. The car didn’t stop, but her fellow workers recognised it as the one driven by the young man who had given her attitude earlier. It was found burnt out on Harlem scrubland even before Pasinetta had been called upon to identify her daughter’s body. There was no sign of the driver and he was never found.
Sutton’s heart broke that day, a rift of despair forming that would never heal, but with her immense heartache came a reserve of strength that she hadn’t known she possessed. Overnight she was forced to grow up. She left school, which was no hardship given both she and her family before her had always been of the opinion that the best education was learnt on the streets.
With Tilisha gone it was now up to Sutton to bring money into the home to keep a roof above her and her grandmother’s head. It may have been a leaky one when the rain fell and a draughty one in the icy blasts of winter but it was their roof, their sanctuary, their home and a place that they would always fight to keep.
Sutton started work with her grandma, who now had her own tiny hairdressing salon two streets away from the squalor in which they lived. It was no bigger than most hotel elevators, fitting just one chair, a sink and a mirror, but Pasinetta worked it. The number of clientele, including the hookers who chose to go there for their weaves and braids, keen to make sure Tilisha’s family never went short, increased month after month. Sutton helped out as much as she could, sweeping up hair, shampooing, painting nail designs and booking people in. For a while the tips were good but not enough to always pay the rent on time. When an eviction notice was served on them, Sutton knew it was time to try and find work elsewhere as well. At the age of fifteen she had started another daytime job at another salon not far from her home. She scraped together enough cash to pay their rent arrears and when the eviction notice was removed she swore that she and Pasinetta would never be in that position again: it was a promise she had always kept.
The money she earned at the salon, as well as that from Pasinetta’s, was sufficient for a while, but when the rent went up they needed more, which is when Sutton started doing evening shifts at Dirty Dick’s too. Dick may have been Mr Sleaze but the money was good and once or twice a week there was free food and drink to take home too. A few chicken wings, some burger buns, corn on the cob and fizzy sodas. They would never live like queens, but she and Pasinetta never went without and it was the thought of her grandma lacking what she deserved that always ran through her mind when Dirty Dick was getting touchy-feely with her teenage boobs.
‘I think that’s enough, don’t you, Dick?’ said Sutton, slapping his hands away from her breasts. ‘We’ve got customers lining around the block out there and they need seating and serving. And burgers don’t get flipped of their own doing, you know.’
‘Well, fucking get out there and sort it out!’ growled Dick.
Sutton was used to Dick speaking to her like this. But his bark was much worse than his bite and to be honest his nature was typical of any man who lived around that area of New York. Anyway, she knew how to handle him and when all was said and done he was harmless. Persistent and predatory, but harmless – and no more likely to get an erection than she was.
Not that Sutton was that experienced with men as yet. She had lost her virginity to a guy who had accompanied his mother to have her hair extensions threaded at the other salon where Sutton worked during the day. He was cute, randy and obviously saw an opportunity in Sutton. Her curiosity piqued, she had let him fuck her in the alleyway at the back of the salon. She had been sixteen and it wasn’t particularly pleasant and she wasn’t overly sure of what she was doing but the rubbing and the kissing and the eventual penetration had satisfied a need for them both.
Sutton walked out to the front of house at Dirty Dick’s from the dingy kitchen where Dick always cornered his ladies. It was a hive of activity with a line of people stretching from the ‘please wait to be seated’ sign all the way out of the door and down the street. Despite being in a far from salubrious district of New York, the food at Dirty Dick’s had become almost legendary and even those who would never normally drift into such a downmarket zip code found themselves booking lunch and dinner meetings at the diner to see if the reality of the food lived up to the hype. Media men, hip photographers and model agents all used Dirty Dick’s as a reason for a rendezvous.
Sutton could see that the line was not becoming any smaller and wandered outside to see just how far it stretched. As she stared down the street, searching for the back of the line, a man approached her. She smelt him before she saw him, a cloud of heavenly aftershave, deep and manly, reaching her nostrils. His appearance lived up to his intoxicating scent. He was no more than a few years older than her but he carried an air of gravitas that immediately made her catch her breath: he was suited, booted and had to be looted. Sutton had seen enough fashion magazines to know that the clothes he was wearing were top drawer and top dollar.
He spoke.
‘Excuse me, miss. Me and my party have a reservation for eight thirty. Table for four. We’re a bit late.’ His accent was not
American and to Sutton it sounded either Australian or British. His skin was as fair as the white serviettes Dirty Dick’s placed underneath their burgers and his hair the colour of cola. ‘Do we need to join the queue… Sorry, you call it the line, don’t you?’
‘With a voice and face like that you can call it whatever you like, mister.’ The words had fallen from Sutton’s lips before she even had a chance to think about reining them back in. She could feel her ebony skin burning with embarrassment as she realised what she had just said. How come words managed to spew out of your mouth when in your brain you had every intention of saying them internally?
She had obviously pleased him though as he let a broad smile sweep across his face. ‘I think I should use the American vernacular – when in Rome, so to speak – don’t you? Not that this is Little Italy, of course. Isn’t that over in Manhattan?’
Sutton didn’t have a clue what he was speaking about. And as she gazed into his eyes, nor did she care.
‘Sorry, I’ll shut my stupid Brit mouth,’ he added. ‘The table is under the name of Rivers… Sheridan Rivers. As I said, we’re a bit late. Blame the driver.’
Sutton should have sent the party to the back of the line. Late arrivals lost their reservation and had to join the procession of those non-bookers waiting in the street. But for once, she felt like flouting that rule. They were only ten minutes late and a table of four was still reserved, she’d seen it on her way out. What harm could it do? Something told her that Sheridan Rivers would be a good person to break the rules for. He seemed kind of important – as well as drop-dead gorgeous. As she ushered the party inside, Sutton had no idea just how important Sheridan Rivers would be to her.