by April Fire
Wrapping her fingers around his cock once again, she helps him open his shirt and begins to kiss down his chest, running her fingers through the light brown hairs. He pants underneath her, unsure of what to do with his hands until he seems to get it and place one on her hips, the other creeping between her thighs to massage her clit.
She sighs into his skin at the sensation, letting herself go limp and simply feeling the growing pleasure across her hips. She very nearly stays there, happy with getting each other off slowly, until she remembers that this is Richard’s last day here, and they can’t waste any time. Kissing him once again, she pushes herself up on her knees and fumbles for Richard’s cock. Right on cue, he rolls the condom over it, then helps her line it up before she sinks down, the head pushing inside of her to the tune of Richard’s groans.
Savoring every inch of him, she takes her time, lifting herself off later and later until she’s sitting in his lap, rolling her hips slowly. He feels so good, especially when he starts to rub her clit in time with her hips.
“God, that feels – that’s just –” he babbles, his brows furrowed with concentration but his mouth open with pleasure. “I wish I didn’t have to leave.”
“Don’t say shit like that,” she breathes, then starts to bounce herself in his lap a little faster, the obscene sound of slapping skin filling the room. “You – fuck – you’re not leaving for good.”
“No, but – but I won’t be – ah – be here for a while, I’ve got – uh, meetings, to go to,” he says, but it’s drowned out by Lauren’s moans as he starts to pick up his pace on her clit.
“Fuck the fucking meetings,” she tells him, coherent sentences becoming more and more difficult each time he hits that spot, just right, “tell them you’re – too busy fucking your amazing and beautiful girlfriend.”
“I have another girlfriend?” he asks, breathing a smile at her.
“Fuck you!” she laughs, shoving at his chest, then almost doubling over as her orgasm boils, the white-hot heat building inside her and bursting out in the form of shudders and moans. As she clenches around him, he starts to come, too, their ragged breaths twisting together like thread. She falls forward, riding out her high, pressed close to his chest and panting into his neck.
“Shit,” he breathes, his dick still nestled inside her and his hand still caught between her legs. “We’ve gotta do that again tonight.”
“I need to get back to work,” she says as she realizes that the world doesn’t stop to let them have sex, “God, they’ll be wondering what happened.”
“It’s past five,” he tells her after a glance at the clock on the wall, “there’s really no point. You wouldn’t get any work done.”
“I’ve gotta get my stuff, though –” She begins to climb off him, but he hugs her close.
“No, you don’t. Everything important is in your handbag, everything else will still be there in the morning.”
As much as it pains her to admit it, he has a point. “I mean – I guess I could stay for a little while longer.”
“Stay the whole night?” he offers, eyes wide. “Please? We’ll set an alarm this time so you won’t be late for work.”
She knows she should say no. Does she want him this much? As she looks at him, a disheveled mess in an armchair, she decides that the answer is yes, yes, she does want him this much. “Okay,” she says eventually. “I guess we better make tonight count.”
A flash of sadness crosses his face as he looks at her. “I really wish I could stay,” he says, stroking a hand down her hip gently.
“I wish you could, too,” she replies, burying her face in his neck. He smells of sweat and faint cologne and something that’s just inherently Richard. She wants to be able to smell it every day; she wants to bottle it up and store it away for times when he’s not with her. It looks like there might be quite a lot of those times.
They make the most of the night. They fuck until they can hardly move, their limbs aching and their bodies coated in sweat, ordering room service at some point in the evening when their energy needs replenishing. Lauren sits in a loose sweater of Richard’s as they eat, wishing every night could be like this, wishing they could be talking about future dates and tomorrow’s plans rather than avoiding thinking about what’s yet to come at all. Instead, they try to laugh as much as possible, leaving the sadness for the morning.
Lauren grumpily informs Richard that he’s forgiven for the four days of hell he put her through, and Richard replies that he’s forgiven her for stalking him for said four days. As they reminisce, though, it feels like a goodbye, like they’re striving for some kind of closure, and Lauren hates it. When it looks like Richard has tears in his eyes, Lauren pushes him down on the bed and restarts the sex marathon; they’ve got no time for tears, not yet, anyway.
They spend the night alternating between fucking and talking, and eventually sleeping. Lauren savors the way Richard’s arms feel when they’re wrapped around her, how his dick feels inside of her, how his lips feel when they’re tracing across her skin. Over the weeks they’d spent together, she’d become so used to falling asleep with someone else’s breaths in her ear, someone else’s warmth around her, that it’s strange to know that she’s got months of sleeping alone ahead of her.
Once the sex is over and they lie together, slowly drifting off in each other’s arms, it becomes harder to ignore the future, the reality that in the morning, she’ll have to leave him for who knows how long. As much as she’s said that she’ll try to keep the relationship alive, she’s not sure whether she’ll be able to survive off nothing but video calls and text messages.
Her only other long-distance relationship crashed and burned, and she’d hate to see this one go the same way. She’s beginning to understand why Richard wanted to break things off before they got too painful – before they got like this.
She lies awake for far too long, trying to calculate exactly how many days it’ll be before she can see him again and weighing the number up against the number of days she thinks she can get through before she bursts. It’s going to be difficult, she decides, it’s going to be something they both have to work for, and God knows they’re already working enough anyway. She reckons she could do it, though. Just about.
***
Richard feels his heart sink through the mattress and right down to the ground floor when Lauren’s alarm goes off the next morning. He groans out loud, feeling her shift and tightening his grip on her. He won’t let her leave that easy.
He lets her reach out and shut off the alarm before he pulls her against him, pressing his lips to her neck and whispering, “Just five more minutes.”
“I can’t,” she replies, shifting to face him. “You know I would if I could, but I really, really can’t.” She kisses him then, slow and sleepy, letting him dip his tongue inside her mouth briefly before she pulls away.
“We could just quit work altogether,” he says, grazing his knuckles over her cheek. “We could just run away and live in a cave.”
“There’d be no Wi-Fi, though,” she reasons, “how would you order takeout?”
“Good point,” he sighs, “we could always just forage for berries.”
She laughs, pecking him on the nose. “You’d be dead within a week, babe.”
“Rude,” he says indignantly, poking her in the stomach. “I could farm mushrooms, or something.”
“Okay, well you keep working on that plan,” she says, pushing herself up onto her elbows, “in the meantime, I need to go to work.”
He shuffles closer to her each time she moves away, hearing her giggles ring out like wind chimes as he starts to tickle her, digging his fingers into her sides and feeling her squirm. “If I tickle you to insanity, you’ll have to stay,” he reasons as she shrieks with laughter and bats at his hands.
“Stop!” she squeaks, pushing his hands back towards him and giggling into the pillow. “I really do need to go, now.”
With a whine of disappointment, he l
ets her climb out of bed and towards her pile of clothes. He savors this last look at her body, the sweep of her hips and the bounce of her ass as she walks. He’d quite like to wake up to this every morning.
He’d protest more if he thinks it would change anything, but Lauren’s always been the same; once she’s decided she’s going to do something, she’ll do it, no question about it. She’s going to leave Richard alone whether he likes it or not. So, he just watches her from the bed, drinking in his last look, smiling when she wiggles her ass at him as she pulls her skirt back on.
“Just one more kiss?” he asks, reaching out to her. She sighs at him, buttoning her blouse quickly, but wanders back over to the bed and sits down beside him, running her fingers through his hair. “Please?” He gives her his best puppy dog eyes.
“You’re adorable,” she tells him, leaning down to peck him on the lips. As she does so, he sits up, pushing his lips into hers and draping his body over her.
“Now you can’t leave,” he says as he cuddles her tight, her back to his chest and his nose in her neck. “I’ve got you forever.”
She turns her head to meet his lips, kissing him hard, and he can tell that this is the last one. He decides to make the most of it, turning her towards him and cupping her face, dreading the moment when she starts to pull away.
It has to arrive, though. He mourns the loss of her lips when she finally pushes him back, tries to chase her with his mouth. “I’ll see you – soon,” she says with a nod, like she’s damn well gonna see him soon or there’ll be consequences.
“As soon as I’m done in LA – and then Dubai – I’ll come back, I swear.” As he says it, it becomes more difficult to bear. She throws him a pained look, wrestling with her heels.
“You better,” she says, but then she’s heading for the door, and he feels the reality of all this hit him.
“God, I’m gonna miss you,” he calls, a tightness in his throat that wasn’t there before. He told himself he wouldn’t cry if she didn’t cry, but that promise turns out to be quite difficult to keep.
“I’ll miss you too,” she says, looking back at him with a sadness creeping into her usually stormy expression. She opens the door and steps out of it, throwing him a last smile before she disappears. Richard watches the door close, then collapses back down on the bed again, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
His flight is late afternoon; he has nowhere to be before then. He won’t need long to pack – he barely unpacked in the first place – so he just rolls over and tries to go back to sleep. It’s much more difficult, now that she’s not there.
Chapter Ten
Lauren’s never cried in front of James before, and she doesn’t want things to change at this point, so she marches into the office with her head held high. She remains steadfast, carrying out all her daily tasks as if nothing at all has happened, as if she hasn’t just left the man she possibly loves alone in a hotel room with nothing but a phone number.
She sits down in her office and thinks about anything but him, immersing herself in spreadsheets and timetables rather than compulsively checking her phone, wondering if she’s got a text from him. It becomes one of her most productive days yet, her mind fixed solely on her work, her concentration never wavering from the numbers on the screen for fear of straying towards the events of the past few days. She should get her heart broken more often; it’s great for business.
She’s in the middle of plowing through the month’s expenditure when there’s a knock at the door. She knows it’s James, he’s been hovering around her, asking what’s up with her all day. She’s managed to hold him off for most of the afternoon, but she knows he won’t stop lurking until she tells him what’s going on. Beckoning him in, she leans back in her chair with a sigh. Maybe talking about it will help.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong,” James says rather patronizingly as he sits down.
She opens her mouth. “Well, it’s – ”
“It’s Richard, isn’t it. These rich guys are all the same, they’ll just fuck you and dump you and you mean nothing to them, they’re all pains in the ass,” James gushes, and Lauren suspects there might be some residual bitterness there, but she’ll bring that up with him later on.
“Whoa, okay, slow down. He didn’t dump me, we just – well, we’re still technically together, but with his work I’ll only see him, like, once in a blue moon and today was the last time I’ll see him in ages and I just –” she lets out a huff of air, crossing her arms, “I don’t want to wait that long.”
“Oh, man, that sucks,” he says, “long distance relationships are difficult.”
“I know!” she almost shrieks at him. She’s been told that so many times, and she’s sick of hearing it. “I know. But we’ll just have to make it work, won’t we.”
“Lauren –”
“Look, I’m fine,” she snaps, suddenly unreasonably angry. “Just – leave me alone, okay? I’ll be fine on Monday.”
“But –”
“No, James. Just go. It must be nearly time to go, anyway –”
“Well, that’s what I came in here for, really, it’s six-thirty, Lauren. I wanted to check if you were okay,” he says gently, and she glances at the clock on her computer.
“Six thirty?” She’s been here for far longer that she realized. The day hasn’t quite felt real – everything after she left Richard’s hotel room has been a blur. She doesn’t want to go home, though. That would leave her time to think. “I’ll just stay here for a –”
“No, Lauren, go the fuck home, for God’s sake, it’s Friday night,” James tells her, and he looks more serious than ever.
“I’ve got work to do, I might as well stay and do it –”
“No,” he says firmly, pointing a finger at her. “Save it for Monday, you work far too hard anyway. I know you don’t wanna be alone, so what we’re gonna do is get up, turn everything off, and go back to my place to watch eighties movies, okay?”
She looks up, and he seems so hopeful that she can’t help but nod. James is good company when he’s not whining about work, and he always seems to have an endless supply of popcorn in his cupboards. “Alright. Okay, that sounds good.”
He makes a celebratory noise and jumps up from his chair, chivying her along as she starts to shut down her computer and clear all the rubbish from her desk. She begins to regret her decision when he babbles about God knows what for the whole journey to his apartment, but in the end, she’s glad of the distraction.
They spend the evening watching cheesy movies and insulting all of the characters, and Lauren ends up almost passed out on James’ couch. Still, it could have been a worse evening – it could have been her, by herself, crying into a bottle of wine, but instead she’s with someone who catches her tears before they fall and lets her put her feet up on his legs.
She gets a text from Richard at around nine o’clock telling her that his flight has landed, safe and sound. It makes her relax a little to know that he’s still thinking about her, that he hasn’t forgotten about her even though he’s halfway across the country.
James’ couch isn’t the most comfortable place in the world to sleep, but he drapes a blanket over her and fetches her a glass of water and it’s almost like being at her mom’s house again. James is nothing if not a mother figure to her and he even puts on Alien for her, despite his absolute hatred of blood and gore. She dozes in and out of consciousness, occasionally telling James to shut his eyes or leave the room if she knows it’s about to get bloody. She appreciates his kindness, even if he can’t fix anything.
She decides not to call Richard. She’ll do it in the morning, she doesn’t want to reopen the wound right before she tries to sleep. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t stop thinking about him, though.
***
Caviar is still disgusting, Richard thinks as he stares at the canapés he’s just been presented with by a suited waiter in one of LA’s finest restaurants. He doesn’t take one, just star
es at the plate as it’s passed around the table and his colleagues gobble them down. He feels sick just looking at them.
He’s not sure who they all are – which is awful because they’re not prospective partners anymore, they’re supposed to be his employees – but he pretends to know them, smiling and nodding when they talk and hoping they don’t ask him too many questions.
They do ask questions, though, mostly about the merger and the meetings that took place in Chicago, and they expect him to have actually listened. Richard struggles through conversations he couldn’t care less about and laughs at jokes he didn’t hear the punchline of. He’s been in this situation so many times – too many times – and he’s so tired of it. He’s not sure how much more he can take.
As he looks around, he knows he doesn’t belong. He hates being complimented on his watch rather than his smile, his business acumen rather than his sense of humor, the contents of his wallet rather than the contents of his mind. He wants to know the people beneath the suits, he wants to know their passions and their fears rather than which fucking car they’re buying next week. He realizes he doesn’t care about profits, about growth, about investments, he doesn’t care about stock markets and shareholders. He doesn’t care.
He sits at the immaculate glass table in complete silence, rubbing the back of his neck and staring into the water jug in the middle of the table, hoping it might have a better idea of what to do than he does.
He looks at his mother, sitting next to him, chatting bullshit to a man wearing an obnoxious hat. She built this company from nothing. As a little boy, he would sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night to watch her pouring over stacks of paperwork. He didn’t realize then that she was building a future for them, something that she would pass on to him - and he didn’t want any of it.