Holiday Loves
Page 16
I wanted to mark all that fine, classy skin with my workingman’s hands, debase those delicate ears with foreign-accented filth as I described to her all the ways I was going to make her come for me.
She was beautiful, but she looked like a woman who hadn’t had a good orgasm in a long time. Of course, there were some women that showed the promise of beauty, finely shaped and beautiful like an ornate vase but filled, alas, with nothing.
I didn’t believe this beauty was that.
No.
Not when her wide pale eyes, fixed on a mark outside the moving vehicle, slid just a hair toward me whenever she thought I was preoccupied with the road. When her breath puffed softly from her moistened, parted lips and her small hands––hands I wanted to fill up–– curled and uncurled restlessly in her lap.
And that was only the first time I drove her.
The second was midday two days later, and the light was bright but grey under London’s habitual low ceiling of clouds. My palms sweat inside the supple leather driving gloves the luxury car service provide all their drivers with, but I affected a casual pose, legs braced, arms crossed loosely, as I waited for her outside Harrods.
She was wearing white again, this time a neat little suit that would have been demure to the point of dowdiness but for the fact that she paired the low-cut blazer with a sheer white camisole as thin and clingy as condensation against the slight swell of her breasts.
My mouth went dry, but I managed to take the heavy shopping bags from her and open the door to the Rolls Royce smoothly.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Meyers,” I’d said, because it was policy at Luxury Regent Car Service to do so.
I had a dossier provided by the company with all of her details.
Savannah Meyers. Wife of Adam Meyers, the very famous British actor/producer. Preference for classical music, heated interiors even on warm days, bottled Evian and unsalted Marcona almonds.
So, she was married.
It didn’t matter. She was so out of my league it felt blasphemous just standing too close to her. Even then, I wasn’t the sort of man who thought marriage was sacrosanct, at least not to most.
My father had cheated on my mother every day of my life. If not with other women, certainly with booze, cards and shady backroom deals with made men.
But she was married to Adam Meyers, a man I’d admired from afar since I was fourteen and fluent enough in English to watch every movie I could get my hands on. He was my idol and his wife, his gorgeous wife, was in a car with me. There was something disturbingly sexy about that, about knowing his hands had been on her. I imagined I could see the marks they’d made on her skin like a highlighter pen, emphasizing all her feminine curves to lewd heights.
I got a whiff of her scent when I opened the door for her. Lilac or something sweetly floral, something clean and classy that probably cost hundreds of bucks because it came in an upmarket bottle.
My dick hardened.
I watched her as I pulled out into the street and began the journey to her townhouse in Chelsea. Her eyes were once again fixed out the window but her lips, painted a deep raspberry that I wanted to trace with my tongue, were tipped up at the corners in an enigmatic smile. One hand played at the low edge of her flimsy tee, thumbing the lace border between her fingers.
A growl worked low in my throat as I thought about taking that lace in my teeth and tearing it in two. My animal brain wondered kind of sound she would make as I exposed her and it settled on a soft gasp, the noise of a damsel in distress.
Only I wouldn’t save her.
I’d ruin her.
Right there in the back of the Rolls, her berry lipstick smeared across the window as I held her face against the glass and worked myself into her tight pussy, her cum dripping onto the smooth leather seats as she convulsed around my driving cock.
The low edge of my growl worked its way up my throat before I could contain it. I flashed my gaze up to the rearview mirror and caught her wide, almost child-like blue eyes. I felt that gasp like a hot grip around my cock.
She tore her eyes away as a flush the same color as her lipstick warmed her pale skin.
I’d never been so turned on in my life yet I’d seen next to nothing of her sweet body and knew even less about her life.
Che cavolo! She didn’t even know my name.
Someone honked at me when I waited too long at a green light and I cursed under my breath.
If I wasn’t careful, I’d run us off the road and I needed this shitty job like Catholics needed the Pope. It was my lifeline. If I lost it, I couldn’t afford the rent in the one-bedroom apartment I rented with four other flatmates in Shoreditch. I wouldn’t be able to pursue the acting gig that had brought me to London in the first place, a part in a low-budget theatre company on the outskirts of the city.
If I lost it, I’d have to slink back to Naples, back to my mother and sisters without the money to support them or the out to take them away from our stinking homeland. I knew exactly what would happen if I went back. I’d be railroaded into joining Tossi and his crew in our local Camorra affiliate.
I’d spent my entire nineteen years of life working to stay away from the mafia and there was no way in hell, even for a woman as beautiful as Savannah Meyers, that I was going there now.
Despite my conviction, when she spoke, ten minutes into what would be a thirty-minute drive thanks to the late Monday afternoon traffic clogging London proper, I almost crashed the car.
“I’d prefer classical, Chopin or Bach if you have it.”
I didn’t hear a word.
My mind locked on the crystalline lilt of her words, the way they softly clicked together like chimes in a breeze.
“Excuse me?” she asked again when I just stared at her like a stronzo.
“Sorry,” I said, flashing her a wide grin because even though I was probably younger than her and definitely not good enough for her, I couldn’t help but flirt. It was instinctual. “Your speaking voice is dolcissimo.”
A frown folded the skin between her eyebrows. It made her look both haughty and adorable. I bit back my grin.
“You’re Italian,” she guessed.
“Parlo italiano?”
There was humor in her voice but not in her carefully schooled face as she said, “No, not at all. I’m afraid English is it for me.”
I shrugged. “Lucky you. It’s a difficult one to learn.”
She shifted just slightly forward, but it thrilled me like it had when I was a boy and I’d caught a fish on the line, reeling it in, playing it slow but steady toward me.
“You seem to speak it very well,” she said and I realized belatedly that she was American.
I grinned at her in the rearview as I flipped on the indicator and turned left into Chelsea. “My father was Irish.”
She raised her eyebrows, her mouth a perfect deep pink circle of shock. “Interesting combination. Volatile, no doubt.”
I winked at her. “Passionate is my definition of choice.”
She smiled slightly. “I’m sure. And what brings a passionate Irish-Italian to dreary, proper London?”
“The women,” I said with a smirk. “I didn’t have enough money to make it to America, so I figured England was the next best thing.”
Her laugh was delighted. “My accent betrays me.”
I shrugged. “It’s charming.”
“Not more so than you,” she returned, those big blue eyes sparkling with humor.
“Ah, such a compliment from la duchessa, I will treasure it,” I teased her.
“Oh please, do stop speaking in Italian before I disgrace myself by going from ‘duchess’ to ‘pile of mush on the floor.’”
“I can’t say I haven’t turned a woman into a ‘pile of mush on the floor’ before but usually it involved more than just my voice,” I teased.
We smiled at each other in the rear view mirror for a moment before I returned my eyes to the road and she seemed to remember herself. I could feel the air
shift as she closed herself off again, tugging the mantle of class and poise around her shoulders like a mink coat.
“Classical,” Mrs. Meyers reminded me softly, primly. “Bach, if you have it.”
She didn’t speak or look at me for the rest of the trip.
But it didn’t matter, the damage was done. I was hooked on her brand of class, on the idea of stealing that wealth for myself and dirtying it up.
I went home that night and fisted my cock to an intense orgasm picturing all the ways I’d do just that.
* * *
“I can manage it,” my sister repeated, a steel edge of determination in her tone. “You focus on what you need to do.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I sat outside The Ivy Restaurant waiting to pick up Mrs. Savannah Meyers the following Friday afternoon. I’d driven her six times in the last week, but the rapport we’d established hadn’t been revisited. If anything, she was even more careful around me, a portrait drawn against the backseat in oils and old-school ideals.
“You don’t have to manage it, Cosi,” I said between my clenched teeth. “You think we move to England, we completely abandoned our values? I’m the man of this family. It kills me that you’re the one supporting mia famiglia, but I understand that for our mother and sisters, you need to do it. That doesn’t mean I’m not pitching in with what I can to lessen your responsibility, capisco?”
“Sebastian, money is not an issue. Please, save what you make to get an apartment without five other males sharing the one bedroom,” Cosima insisted.
I didn’t want to dwell too long on how it was exactly that my twin sister was making enough money to support a family of five, including tuition at one of the top art schools in the world for our younger sister, Giselle. I didn’t want to think about it because those dark, troubling thoughts that carved me up like a butcher with a cleaver were reserved for the dark hours I lay sleepless in bed when the good little Catholic boy in me reared its naïve head to worry about our eternal souls.
It disgusted my pride, as both a man and an Italian, two separate, but I knew, entirely too prideful sides of me, to rely on my sister to support my family but I was also disgustingly grateful because I had a plan. I just needed time.
I was a good actor. It could be argued that there were innumerable good actors out there.
I was also, it had been said by many, many women, unaccountably attractive. Of course, it was easy to see that there were many, many attractive people in this world and it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that many of them wanted to be actors.
So, what set me aside from the rest?
Well, I doubted very few people had grown up using their acting skills to survive as I had. When lying became a matter of violence or absolution, food or starvation, their safety or ruination. Everything in my life thus far had boiled down to being a good actor. If the Mafia came calling for my father, I had to be prepared to spin a good tale, convince them that he was coming back from wherever he’d disappeared to and that of course, he would have their money for them on his return.
The safety of my mother and three sisters depended on me acting the man of the house from the time I was eight years old. Now, eleven years later, I was still honing my craft, but even though the life or death circumstances had passed, I practiced with the same intensity. My tool of survival had become my passion.
I’d also been writing stories since I was a boy, stealing papers and articles from my father’s desk so I could pen my own words on the back using one of Giselle’s pencil crayons. They weren’t grand tales of dragons and princess because I was a poor boy in the Italian countryside, we didn’t have the scope or sensibilities to waste time on other worlds. No, my stories were about desolation and small joys, the intricacies of life made so real on the page that I imagined I could feel the grit between my fingers when I held them. I reached out to the stack of papers that comprised the screenplay I had been working on for the last year and fingered a page just to feel the texture of it.
Cosima knew these stories, these talents, and she called them ‘my gifts.’ She spoke about them with the same reverence as a disciple her religion and I knew in a way that twisted my insides, that she would do anything to ensure my gifts were brought into the light.
“I’ll send Mama and Elena what I can,” I finally responded. “I don’t care if you have it covered, Cosi, at least they’ll know I’m thinking of them and working for them too. They can use the pitiful cash to buy better groceries or save it toward Elena’s computer fund.”
There was a silence and then softly, “Va bene, mio fratello.”
I closed my eyes and pounded my head back against the seat rest as pain radiated around my sensitive heart. “One day soon, mia bella Cosima, we will be together again.”
“One day sooner, not later,” she stated authoritatively, and I again wondered what she was doing in order to secure that promise. “Insieme.”
“Together,” I repeated in English, feeling the ache where my twin sister, my best friend, should be in my life like the loss of a limb.
The sound of the back door opening jarred me out of my thoughts and I raised shocked eyes to the rearview to see Savannah Meyers sliding inside.
“Cazzo,” I cursed, knocking my script off the console between the front and back seats in my haste to disconnect my call with Cosima and apologize to Savannah for my lack of professionalism.
“Sebastian?” Cosima called before I could cut the call.
“What a lovely name,” Savannah said, her eyes creased at the corners with suppressed mirth even as the rest of her face lay perfectly still.
“You’ll be hard pressed to find an Italian name that isn’t,” I told her with a wry grin as I quickly picked up the papers that had spilled into the back. I tried to distract her with my charm so she wouldn’t look at them too closely and wonder. “You’ll also be hard pressed to find an Italian who wouldn’t curse like a sailor after being startled the way you did me just now.”
Her lips pressed but there was amusement there too. “Is that your way of apologizing for cursing in front of a lady?”
My grin turned wicked. “I believe actions speak louder than words… if we weren’t the definition of lady and the tramp, I would apologize in my usual way.”
Her pressed lips curled. “Let me guess, with a kiss?”
I winked at her. “Exactly, though not on the mouth. Surest way to get any woman outside of the family to forgive you. Trust me, nothing says ‘I’m sorry,’ like an orgasm.”
This time, she let herself laugh and the windchime sound peeled beautifully between us.
“You are outrageous,” she said with a shake of her head.
The movement dislodged a curl, tumbling it across the smooth peaches and cream of her cheek. My fingers twitched to tuck it behind her diamond studded ear and the papers I had successfully collected, tumbled back to the ground.
I quickly ducked back over the console, twisting awkwardly to pick them up but Savannah was already there, a sheaf of paper in her hand. I watched her eyes snap to the words like the collision of two magnets.
“You write,” she whispered, holding the discarded papers in her hand reverently.
“Ugh,” I swallowed harshly. “Yes.”
“Screenplays?”
“Mostly.”
“Hmm,” she hummed lightly then shifted the papers she held into her lap and held out her manicured hand to me. “Give me the rest.”
I barked out a surprised laugh. “Scusi?”
“Pardon,” she corrected me primly. “Now, Sebastian, hand me the rest.”
“It’s private,” I tried even though I recognized the determination in her eyes because I’d grown up with women and I learned their capacity for stubbornness from an early age.
Her response was a sharply arched brow.
I sighed, feeling all few of my nineteen years as I petulantly passed her the screenplay I’d been working on for the last twelve months.
; “Eyes on the road,” she reminded me as she settled back against the creamy upholstery with her eyes already trained on my words.
It was a seventeen-minute drive to Savannah’s beige brick and white paneled townhome on Halsey, but it felt infinitely longer with my story in her small hands, her big eyes eating up every word with an avidness that disturbed me.
I tried at one point to intervene after she little out a small gasp, but she merely held up a hand when I spoke her name, silencing me immediately.
My gloved fingers thrummed mutely against the wheel as I speculated what classy wife-of-the-amazing-Adam-Meyers Savannah might think of my story. It was about a poor immigrant boy in 1920s New York who ends up selling his soul to a variety of shady characters in order to pay for their safe arrival and set up of his big Italian family.
It was allegorical, obviously, but set in a period of time I’d always found awesomely mysterious, shadowed by backroom deals, mafia corruption, and scandals that never saw the light of day thanks to a few well-greased palms.
Corruption, greed, and a ruthless need to survive.
These were the things I knew.
These were things I had been taught growing up poor in Napoli, desperate to free my family from the shackles we’d been born into.
So, I knew somewhere deep in the marrow of my bones that my story was good because it was true. It was so gritty I imagined I could feel the sand between my fingers as I touched the pages, smell the acrid scent of urine in the dank, muddy alleys of New York City before asphalt was poured. I loved it. It was good. In fact, I was banking my future and my family’s on it being fucking brilliant.
Yet, my heart was barely beating in the tight grip of fear that had hold of it at the thought that this woman––my sort of boss and total stranger––might not like it.
When I pulled up to the tall, iron, gold-tipped gates of her townhome, I had to clear my throat twice before I could say, “Mrs. Meyers, we’re here.”
She ignored me.