Anything You Say: An Enemies to Lovers Standalone Romance

by Chloe Finch

  She let out a little yelp.

  “Answer the question, Gracie.” He was smiling, but his voice was taunting.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, concentrating. There was a lot in that particular fantasy, but she was definitely not saying most of it aloud. “It was…well…”

  He slapped her ass again when she didn’t answer fast enough.

  “I told you I was thinking about having sex with you. And the dirtiest part was when, well…”

  Slap.

  “You came on my face.” She said it so quickly it was almost one word.

  He raised his eyebrows. “And in your fantasy, did you like it?”

  She was humiliated, but it was too late to turn back now. She scrunched her eyes shut.

  “Yes.”

  He dropped her feet.

  “You’re going to be the death of me, baby.” Before she could ask what he meant, he buried his head between her legs again and the world melted away.

  * * *

  Zach

  Grace wanted him to come on her face. The thought made his rock-hard cock ache with longing. There was nothing he’d love more than to make that particular fantasy come true. He’d thought of it before in his own fantasies, Grace with a face full of his cum. But the idea that she wanted him to do it? He couldn’t believe his luck.

  He put a finger inside her, and she gasped. He was honored to be able to make her feel this way. There was so much he wanted to show her. He wanted to get nasty with her, starting now.

  He moved the focus of his mouth down to her asshole. He began lapping his tongue all around it, lavishing it with attention.

  She let out a squeal and clenched her legs around his head.

  “What are you doing?” She said, slightly panicked.

  “Just relax,” he murmured. “You’ll like it, trust me.”

  She didn’t respond, still squeezing his head with her legs.

  “Relax,” he said, more forcefully this time. He put his thumb inside her pussy and massaged her clit with his index finger. There was a sharp intake of breath, and then her legs relaxed a fraction.

  “That’s it,” he said, soothingly. He moved more quickly now, his hand in sync with his tongue, and she trembled under his touch. He loved having this power over her. It was incredible that she gave herself over to him so willingly. That she would put herself in his hands like this. She was getting close to coming again, and he wanted to reward her with a mind-blowing orgasm.

  He kept it up, only faster now. Licking. Stroking. Caressing. Everything was soaking wet because of his mouth and her sweet pussy. She cried out and stiffened, her pussy throbbing on his hand. He didn’t stop until she was gasping for breath and batting at the top of his head.

  He stood and wiped his mouth. She had practically melted into the picnic table. He would have paused to admire the view for longer, except his cock was aching with need and he was going to pop the button on his pants if he didn’t get off soon.

  “Take your shirt off,” he said. She pushed herself up on her elbows and unbuttoned her shirt as she did before.

  “All the way off,” he said. “Bra too.”

  She looked suddenly shy but did as he said, shrugging off the blouse and then putting a hand behind her back to unlatch the bra. Her breasts popped out, and like everything else about her, they were perfect.

  “Push your boobs together.”

  She gave him a confused look. “Like this?” She lied down on her back and pushed her tits together.

  “That’s perfect, baby.” He took his pants all the way off and got up on the picnic table to straddle her. Her arms were caged in by his legs, and she could hardly move if she wanted to. It was insanely hot to have her so helpless, almost entirely naked, outdoors. She was staring at his cock, and he smiled, wondering just how inexperienced she was.

  He positioned it between her breasts, and she finally understood what was going on. He started rocking his hips back and forth slowly, enjoying the ecstasy of her warm breasts, the sweet friction on his cock. She watched with wonder as he fucked her breasts, and once again he was grateful to be getting dirty with her.

  After everything else, it didn’t take long to get close to orgasm.

  Inspired by their dirty talk, just before he was about to come, he pulled back and sat on his knees, over her, and began to jerk himself off. Grace sat up on her elbows, watching, enthralled.

  And then he was coming all over her. The way she was positioned was perfect to absolutely shower her in it. Cum sprayed all over her face and chest. Intense pleasure rolled through him like a live wire, made even better by the sight of Grace’s shocked expression, here eyes squeezed shut, cum all over her face. Her mouth fell open and she shrieked in surprise, which immediately gave way to laughter.

  He started laughing too. After the tension and the release, there was just something so absurdly silly about it. He leapt off the picnic table and looked for something to wipe her face with. She fell to her back, laughing so hard she was almost crying, holding her hands up like she didn’t even know where to begin cleaning up. His handkerchief was already dirty from earlier, and he didn’t have a tissue or anything. He had to improvise. He grabbed his pants off the ground and began to wipe her face with the soft linen as they both caught their breath.

  “Was that okay?” He asked.

  She opened her eyes and burst out in fresh round of laughter. “Are those your pants?”

  He broke down laughing again too. “There isn’t anything else. And I didn’t think you’d want cum all over your face the rest of the day.”

  “You better tip your dry cleaner,” she said. And then, wiping tears from her eyes with the pantleg, she added, “You’re sweet.” The words had the unexpected effect of cracking his heart wide open. He couldn’t recall anyone saying that to him in a long time, or maybe ever.

  * * *

  Zach

  One year, Zach and Derek had gone to summer camp. The kind where they took disadvantaged youths out to the country to teach them about nature. At the time—he must have been eleven or twelve—he had never been outside the city before. He knew real nature existed in the same abstract way he knew space existed, but he had never fully grasped it until that summer.

  The vast empty space felt apocalyptic. From the city, the ocean seemed like an afterthought. But on a lonesome beach, the scale switched. Against the vastness of the ocean, one puny human was nothing. Totally insignificant without eight million others backing you up. Disappear and no one would even notice.

  The ocean still gave him the creeps in a way that drew him closer to it. He couldn’t shake the fear of being swept away. Would anyone notice if he were to disappear? Derek might not unless he needed money. Probably a client would be the first to notice when he didn’t return a phone call. What an utterly depressing thought.

  There was no need to dwell on that now though. Not with Grace sitting on his suit jacket on the picnic table, her perfect ass grazing the silk lining. He pulled her onto his lap and put the suit jacket around her shoulders. She looked good in it. He absently traced a circle on her forearm with his finger.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. He hadn’t taken his shirt off, and suddenly wished he had, so they could sit like this skin-to-skin.

  “Can I ask you something?” She said.

  “Ask away.”

  “Are you and June…?” She left the unspoken question hanging in the air.

  She was jealous. He almost laughed out loud. Poor Grace thought they were fucking. Of course she would, that was literally the reason he and June started hanging all over each other in the first place. He wasn’t about to out June without her permission, and there was literally no way to explain their strange friendship if Grace thought she was straight. Besides, with Grace here on his lap, he couldn’t even remember what was so appealing about screwing around with June in the first place.

  “You don’t have to worry about June,” he said.

  She nodded but still
looked concerned.

  “I don’t want to pry,” she said. She looked down and rubbed her finger over the buttons on the cuff of the jacket. “I just need to know. You’re not, uh—”

  “I’m not fucking her if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay, good.” She looked slightly more relaxed.

  “I’ve never fucked her.”

  “Oh.” She looked surprised, and left it at that, thankfully. He wasn’t sure how he could explain further if she asked why. She kept rubbing at the buttons, apparently lost in thought. He didn’t say anything, enjoying the warm spring air and the salty breeze and the sound of the waves.

  She broke the silence. “Was Derek always like this?”

  He was reminded how much he had to be pissed at her for, but the feeling no longer had teeth. He sighed. “No, obviously not.”

  She cringed at his tone. Quietly, she said, “What was he like before?”

  “Better-looking. More like me.” He cracked a grin.

  She relaxed at the joke and rolled her eyes. “I meant his personality.”

  Normally he would have shut it down. As a general rule, he avoided any talk of his brother. But for some reason, he wanted to tell her. “Derek was always the loud, funny one. The attention seeker. I was the serious one.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “That’s because you don’t know the real Derek. He was the kind of guy who could make anyone like him. Once, when we were in college, living in this shitty apartment in Long Island City, we had this huge house party and the cops came. They kicked everyone out, and they were going to ticket us. The cops said only one of us had to get ticketed, and they were going to let us choose which one got it.

  “So Derek says, ‘Officers, I think we should handle this the way the court would.’ And he turns to me and says, ‘Rock, paper, scissors?’ And we do best two out of three. Derek lost. Then he tells them, ‘Looks like I’m your guy.’ The cops started cracking up and said, ‘You guys are cool, we’re not going to ticket you.’”

  Grace laughed. “No they didn’t!”

  “Swear to god, they turned around and left, no questions asked.”

  “That’s hilarious.”

  Out at sea, there was a big, industrial boat slowly making its way from New York towards the open ocean. The sun glinted off a reflective part of the boat like a lighthouse.

  “That’s Derek. He loved to make people laugh. Got our mom to start taking us out with her. When she didn’t bring us, people would ask, ‘Where are the twins?’”

  “Out, like at bars you mean?”

  “Yeah, and clubs mostly. Debbie loved to party. More than she wanted to be a mother at least. She was seventeen when she had us, so by the time we started going out with her, she and her friends were barely thirty.” His age. It seemed impossible he was almost as old as his mother had been when she died.

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It didn’t even occur to Derek and me. Her friends fawned over us like we were fun toys she brought. They all thought Derek was hilarious”

  “What did they think of you?”

  “Oh, just that I was the more charming, intellectual, better-looking one.”

  She laughed.

  “Do you miss him?”

  The boat was almost over the curve of the earth now. Just a shrinking speck on the horizon.

  “Of course. It feels like half my brain is missing. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s not a twin. Do you have any siblings?”

  “No, it’s just me.”

  He felt sad for her then. Even with Derek being a royal fuckup, he couldn’t imagine not having him at all. How lonely life must be.

  “Then it’s especially hard to explain. Derek and I are like two halves of the same whole. When he’s not around, I don’t feel like the complete version of me. And with him acting all crazy like this…I feel like I’m half-crazy sometimes too. Sometimes I wish he had just died. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this psychotic shell of him.” He had never told anyone this stuff. Derek was the only one he confided in. Used to, at least.

  “He could still get better,” she said. Her eyes were so big and innocent. Dark, inky blue, same as the ocean. “If he was dead, he’d be gone forever.”

  He wished she was right, but he knew better. “That’s not how it works,” he scoffed. “I used to think the same thing about Debbie. All she had to do was get clean and then she’d be a good mom. Instead, when she tried to get sober it only meant that when she relapsed, she overdosed and died.”

  “Oh god, I’m so sorry.” Grace said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “You have no idea, Gracie,” he said darkly.

  It was the worst night of his life. Every detail seared like a brand into his memory. He and Derek were sixteen and skipping school a lot to party with Debbie. It was the only time she seemed happy with them. When she was the girl with the twins. Otherwise, she was only ever screaming at them or ignoring them.

  They were at an after-party from the club at someone’s shitty apartment. Zach was in the living room, chain smoking cigarettes with his mom’s friend Sheena. She had white-blonde hair and big boobs and was nice to him. He never saw her eat anything. Debbie liked to say Sheena was on an amphetamines-only diet. That night she was wearing a silver tube top and these gold hoop earrings so big he could have fit his whole fist through them. He’d had a crush on her since he was six.

  The Real World was on TV with the sound off, and there was a 50 Cent song blasting on the radio. They were having a friendly argument about East Coast versus West Coast hip-hop.

  “You live in New York, Zach. You have to be East Coast. It’s not right,” Sheena said. She was gesturing wildly with both hands and pink liquid splashed from her cup onto the couch.

  “You can’t tell me I can’t like Tupac just because I’m from New York,” Zach said. He was sitting on his knees and felt like he might spring off the couch at any moment, he was so revved up from the conversation. Well, from that and the rail of coke he and Sheena had just snorted. “Biggie was a good musician, but Tupac was a poet.”

  Sheena was the type of friend who showed up at their door unannounced and helped herself to whatever half-drunk container of cranberry juice was languishing away in their fridge. She stayed over sometimes after they went out, sleeping in Debbie’s bed with her, then lounging on the couch the next day, sweating out a hangover not wearing a bra.

  There was a commotion down the hall and someone yelled Debbie. Zach immediately knew something was wrong, like an icicle to the chest. He was stone-cold sober in an instant. He ran to the source of the commotion and it was like a scene from a horror movie. A handful of people were standing around yelling at each other and his mom was lying, barely moving, on the dirty blue carpet, making these horrible choking sounds. No one was doing anything useful. They were just standing there blaming each other. “Do something,” he shouted. They needed to call an ambulance or something. Why did no one ever act like an adult?

  He ran around the apartment to find a phone—no one had cellphones yet, not anyone he knew at least— but all the cordless phones were missing, left off the hooks like something from a nightmare. He finally found a corded phone in the kitchen. It was disconnected. By the time he got back to the bedroom, she was dead. It was a heroin overdose.

  She had been clean for two months.

  He had played the scene over and over in his head so many times. Lying in bed at night, it would start up on its own like his own private horror movie. He examined it from every angle, trying to find what he could have done differently. What would have saved her. All the twisted little details he could never shake off, like how her hair was fanned out around her head like a halo in a religious painting. In the end, it didn’t matter. She was dead the moment she decided to shoot up. Nothing he did could have stopped her.

  As bad as his memories were from that night, at least he didn’t have to l
ive with Derek’s memories of that night. When everything was happening, he had been hooking up with a random woman twice their age on the fire escape. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have known. But he was right there. Right outside the bedroom window where she was lying there dying, getting his dick sucked by someone their mother’s age.

  Zach and Derek used to talk about everything. There were no secrets between them, they knew each other too well to keep them. But this? This they never talked about. Not even once.

  Chapter Seven

  Grace

  When Zach dropped her off at the train station after the beach, they had agreed to meet again in exactly one week. It seemed like a good idea at the time, keeping work totally separate from hooking up, but now all Grace could think about was next Saturday and what was to come. Would they have sex this time? She hoped so. She felt ready. She didn’t care about virginity as a rite of passage, but she did want the first time she had sex to be good. Now she knew Zach pushed all her buttons in exactly the right way, and she wanted him to be her first.

  Despite that, she was trying to be cautious. There was still a chance Zach could be using her. Being too trusting was what screwed her over with GiveAnalytics.

  Her CFO was her parents’ friend Paul. He came on early as a favor to the Lockwoods and when GiveAnalytics was beginning to have financial difficulties Paul pulled some strings to convince the board not to fire Grace. She had trusted him implicitly. Then one day at a meeting about finances, she noticed something off about his projections. When she questioned him, he brushed her off, but she didn’t let it go. Late one night she went through all their financials line by line. She found more oddities, enough to make it clear Paul was funneling money away from the company and into his own pocket.

  It was completely devastating. The company was struggling, and he only accelerated their downfall. The next morning, she fired Paul and took over as CFO herself. It didn’t matter, the company was already too far gone. It was the last time she trusted someone so blindly. If one of her family’s closest friends could screw her over like that, why should she trust someone she hardly knew?