Dr. Fellatio

by Author Stella

  15

  Lexi

  I wasn’t expecting anyone to knock on my door in the middle of the workday. After I’d resigned from Seneca, I’d gone straight to the AT&T store to buy a new cell phone. I’d learned five years ago to have a paper backup for all my contacts, so I hadn’t worried when Martin asked for my devices and swipe card for the building. However, I hadn’t had time to get home, charge the phone, and get anyone’s number out to let them know what I’d done.

  “Coming.” I hopped up from the couch, setting my phone and address book aside to answer the door.

  The moment I came face to face with Chris, he didn’t say hello, he didn’t ask what I was doing, nor did he explain his presence during the middle of the day at my apartment. His left hand caught the back of my neck when he stepped inside, and his lips crashed to mine as he kicked the door closed behind him. I welcomed his embrace and affection as though it were the only thing to keep me alive. His tongue parted my lips and danced a seductive tango with mine, heating my core. I was done playing games and pretending I could keep him at arm’s length. And with the current state of affairs, it appeared he was through waiting for me to come to him.

  Not wanting to have sex for the first time in five years up against the door of the apartment I shared with my best friend, I grabbed Chris’s free hand to pull him to my bedroom. But his lips broke free, and even though he tried to mask the groan, he winced in pain.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, winded from the stolen kiss. And then I glanced down to his hand in mine. “What did you do?” The knuckles were swollen and angry red with speckles of purple and blue bruises already forming. “Chris!”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled me back to press a firm kiss on my lips and then his forehead to mine. “I might have beaten the shit out of Brad.”

  “At work?” My mouth gaped in shock and dismay. “Why?”

  “Because he kept you from getting the job on the ad team that you worked so hard for.”

  “He didn’t keep me from a spot.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “With Brad?” I wasn’t sure if he even knew at this point that I’d quit.

  “Sure, we can start there.” Apparently, he knew more than I thought he did.

  “Let’s just say he’s difficult to work with.”

  He raised his brows, indicating that wasn’t going to cut it. So I gave him the rundown of encounters starting with the first meeting he’d ever made an inappropriate comment and ending with Brad touching me in the conference room on Monday after the meeting. I tried to lessen the severity to keep Chris from going even more barbaric than he already had on the guy.

  Chris’s chest heaved in anger and frustration, and I worried about how he would go back to work with a man he wanted to kill. Assuming, of course, Chris had a job to go back to. “Why did you hit him?”

  “Kyle said he was the reason you didn’t get the job on the ad team.”

  “So you beat him up?”

  “I saw the way you reacted to him in my office, Lexi. There was more to what Kyle believed, even if he didn’t have any proof. I didn’t have to have the details to know I needed to deal with him when I had the chance. Turns out, I was more right in my assumption than I thought.”

  “Chris, you’re going to get fired!” I pulled him into the kitchen to put ice on his hand while waiting to hear how he thought he’d work his way out of this one. “You’re an executive manager who just took a shot at an AR.”

  “Was.”

  I scooped ice into a dishtowel and wrapped it around his hand. “Was what?” I hopped up on the counter and held the ice in place while staring him in the eyes, completely confused.

  He captured my wrist and held it up. The copper bracelet he’d given me slid down my arm a couple inches, and he raised his brow in question.

  “One thing at a time. Was what?” I asked, again.

  “An executive manager.”

  I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. One of the two of us wasn’t following something.

  “I quit.”

  Those two words took far longer to register than they should have, and in response, I blinked slowly.

  Chris just watched as my mind registered what he’d said.

  And when I could finally speak words, I almost hollered in his face, “Why?”

  A relaxed grin tilted the corner of the right side of his mouth, and something akin to happiness danced in his eyes. He reached up with his left hand to touch the side of my face and kissed me lightly once more. “I didn’t want you to have to choose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Monday morning when you got out of the truck. You were worried about anyone finding out about us and losing your job. I didn’t want to put you in that position again, the one where you had to pick between me and your dream job.”

  Monday morning, Jasmine and I hadn’t had the conversation about me not being able to have both Chris and the job—that didn’t happen until that night. “But it was your dream, too.”

  He held up my wrist and stared at the bracelet he’d asked me to put on when I was ready to start our life together again—the one I’d put on Tuesday after finding out the team had all but landed the Abiti account. “This was my dream. Seneca was just a job.”

  The smile that spread across my lips probably only served to make me appear insane. The two of us hadn’t had a chance to talk since he’d dropped me off Monday, and we’d both made monumental life decisions regarding the other without so much as a peep.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get the promotion, Lexi.”

  “I did.”

  “Then why did you quit?” He stood in front of me looking as lost as I’d felt for the last few years without him around. Then suddenly, when he was back, everything became clear.

  “For the same reason you did.”

  He cocked his head to the side, waiting for me to elaborate.

  “I couldn’t have both.” My eyes welled with tears.

  “But you can. I know Martin will give you the job if you want it. You don’t have to leave.”

  I hadn’t planned to have this conversation sitting next to the sink in my tiny kitchen, but it seemed as good of a place as any. “I chose Seneca over you three years ago. There was no choice to make, Chris.” I shrugged. “I think maybe I just needed to know I could do it. That I had it in me to go the distance. But once I’d proven that to myself and my concept landed one of the largest accounts in Seneca’s history, I didn’t need it anymore. It’s not what I want to do.”

  Somehow, we’d both come to the same conclusion at the same time. I didn’t know how it had happened or if Jasmine had somehow played a hand in his decision the way she had mine; all I knew was we’d both chosen something else three years ago, and today we’d chosen each other.

  “I don’t have a clue what we’ll do from here. And I’m sure money will be tight until we find jobs. But, Lexi, I swear to you, I’ll never pick anything before you again. If I have to work three jobs to keep us on our feet, I will.”

  The laugh I barked out was kind of ill-timed. “You won’t have to do that.” I wasn’t laughing at his promise to do what was necessary, rather that he believed he’d have to do it. This was the part of telling him I’d quit Seneca that worried me most.

  “Lexi, we both quit our jobs. Unemployment won’t be an option. And the bills won’t stop just because we took a hiatus from work.”

  I pushed off the counter in front of him and ducked under his arm, not wanting to see his face when I made this confession and hoping he took the time to listen instead of casting judgment. He followed closely on my heels as I led him to the living room.

  “You should probably sit for this,” I warned.

  “You’re freaking me out right now, Lex.” But he did as I suggested, still holding the ice on his hand.

  I took a deep breath and let it out before starting. “There’s no easy way to tell you this—”

  “Whatever it
is, we can get through it…together.”

  “I’ve kind of had a side business for years that has blown up recently. I’d like to focus on that. And I’d like your help growing it.”

  He scooted to the edge of the cushion, eager for more information. “Okay, what is it?”

  I twisted my hands in front of me, wringing them like a wet towel. “Have you ever heard of Dr. Fellatio?”

  Chris’s brow creased, and the look of excitement he’d just worn morphed into confusion or maybe disgust. He nodded and stayed silent, waiting for me to continue.

  I held my arms out to my side and gave him a cheeky grin as if to say, “Ta-da!”

  “You’re Dr. Fellatio?”

  I wasn’t sure three words could have been said any more slowly and still resembled the English language. “In the flesh.” I kept the enormous grin plastered on my face, hoping it would ease some of the tension I felt radiating between us. It did not. “Say something.”

  “You’re working with Carl?” That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say.

  I huffed and took the spot next to Chris on the couch with my knee folded so I could face him. With his hands in mine, I did my best to explain, and in turn, hoped he didn’t think I was a prostitute. “I learned a lot from you in college.”

  He smirked and raised a brow in question but remained silent. So I forged on.

  “You know how tight things were with it just being my mom and me, and then when she got sick, that made it even worse. I took out student loans, but there were still things I needed.” If I didn’t make this concise, I’d get bogged down in insignificant details. “I’d started telling my girlfriends at school some of the things you taught me. Word got around campus that I gave really good advice, and subsequently, they assumed I also gave really good head.” I felt my cheeks blush with that admission.

  The smirk on Chris’s face went from a hint of a grin to a full-fledged smile, clearly remembering all he’d taught me. “Fair and true assumption.”

  I swatted his arm playfully, thankful he hadn’t freaked out and run out the door. “Anyway, once I had girls at school approaching me that I didn’t know, I started charging for my advice and techniques. But I never touched anyone else. I’d never even had a male approach me. My identity was a well-kept secret through college.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t know how you’d take it. I guess I was afraid you’d think I was doing something wrong, and I needed the money.”

  He leaned back as the smile faded. “I wouldn’t have made you feel that way.”

  I didn’t want to linger on the past. “Anyway, after you left and I had student loans to pay back along with living expenses, I started to get really selective about my clientele. Instead of poor college girls paying me to teach them to please their boyfriends, I had desperate housewives with lots of money throwing cash at me to help them save their marriages.”

  “And you’ve continued doing this on the side while working at Seneca?”

  I tucked my hair behind my ear and glanced down at the cushion where I picked at the material on the couch. “Well, yeah. Not only did it continue to supplement my income, it made me feel good about something. It reminded me of you, and I got to share a piece of us with other people.”

  His fingers found my chin and lifted it to force eye contact with him. “And you’re afraid I’m going to look down on you for that?”

  “I just don’t want you to have some twisted image in your head of what I do.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that however you make this happen is aboveboard. You told me you haven’t been with anyone else, Lexi, and I believe you.”

  “I had a client tell me recently that she thought I should change my name from Dr. Fellatio to something else, although she thought Dr. Love was taken and Dr. Romance was silly.”

  “Sounds like something CeeCee would say.” He snorted, but the laughter died on his lips when I didn’t correct him. “Seriously? That’s how you two met?”

  “Meh, what can I say? It could be worse, right?”

  “It explains a lot about the doctor she was seeing that she couldn’t talk about who didn’t have a medical license…and Dr. Woman, although I don’t want to know how that came into play.”

  “Anyway, long story short, she called me right before she moved in with Christopher and convinced me I do more than just teach women how to give amazing blowjobs. Part of that is recognizing where their relationship went off course, to begin with, becoming aware of their partner’s needs, and bringing the love the couple had to begin with to the forefront so that pleasuring them is fun again.”

  “There’s really a market for this?”

  I couldn’t believe he didn’t realize just how large that market truly was. “I knew there was a demand for it; I’ve just never been able to devote more time to it because of my job…until Carl decided to join my team, uninvited.”

  “What does Carl have to do with it?”

  “He decided to appoint himself…promotional director for Dr. Fellatio.”

  “And that means?”

  “That he brought in close to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars before lunch on Monday and has me booked through the end of the year.”

  If he’d been drinking anything, Chris would have spit it all over me. “What?”

  “In cash.”

  “You have over three hundred grand in cash for services?”

  I nodded. “And a waitlist. And that was with me still working full time at Seneca. So now that I can make it a full-time job, the sky is kind of the limit, right?”

  “That’s why Carl needed the calendar.” He made the statement more to himself than me.

  “What?”

  “He asked me for an interactive, secure calendar. I didn’t believe he was really working with Dr. Fellatio.”

  “You’ve heard of me?” I felt my eyes bug.

  “I hadn’t, not until then. I did some research after he left. You’re quite the legend. Gotta say, it makes me proud.”

  “That I teach women everything you taught me?”

  “That it meant enough to you to want to share it.”

  “Well, I was hoping you’d want to join the endeavor.”

  “I don’t think other men would be receptive to me teaching their women.”

  “No, silly. I mean helping me make it a real business. I need a calendar, scheduler, website. I want it to be legitimate. I don’t want to fly under the radar anymore.”

  We’d spent the rest of the afternoon going through the ins and outs of Dr. Fellatio’s past, where she was in the present, and how to take her into the future. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe Chris would be a part of my life again, much less this aspect of it. By the time Jasmine came through the door, we were curled up on the couch talking about the website Chris was going to start building tomorrow.

  “Nice to see the two of you so cozy after you both sent Seneca up in smoke by quitting the same day. A little notice would have been nice.” She dumped her purse by the door and then took the recliner in front of us.

  “Are you going to close the door?” I asked as I sat up, removing myself from Chris’s embrace.

  “Nah, Carl can get it.”

  I stared at Jasmine like she’d lost her mine. “Why would Carl get it?”

  “He’s right behind me. He brought the safe.”

  “Oh, crap. Chris, go help him. That thing is heavy.” I patted his leg to encourage him to get up.

  He groaned but sat up to do as I requested.

  “Don’t worry about me. Thankfully, I’ve been playing golf like crazy and built up these pythons. Where do you want this thing, Alex?”

  “You can set it down in my room, I guess.” I didn’t have a clue where to tell him to put a safe. “Is the money still in it or were you able to make a deposit?” I called down the hall as he moved past us.

  “The bank wouldn’t let me open an account in your name without
you signing some papers. I don’t know, something about nine eleven and heightened security against terrorism. I tried to tell them you were Polynesian, but the teller just kept saying they didn’t care about your heritage, just that you weren’t there with a picture ID.”

  Only Carl could have thought the bank teller knew anything about my lineage with a name like Alexia Cacinicz. I rolled my eyes, even though he wasn’t in the room to see it.

  Jasmine leaned back in the recliner and bounced her foot to rock the chair.

  Carl joined us and immediately started talking. “You two caused quite the uproar this afternoon. You wouldn’t believe the talk going around the building. Alex quit because she didn’t make the ad team.”

  “Not true,” I tossed in with little umph.

  “Patrick quit. Although no one is quite sure why, so rumors are hovering the way flies swarm horse shit.”

  “Let ’em talk.” Chris had never been one to care what other people thought.

  “And then there’s the whole part about you beating the crap out of Brad outside the building. Care to shed any light on that?” He turned his focus to Chris and raised his brow.

  “Not really.”

  Carl took a seat on the armrest of the chair Jasmine slouched in. They both eyed us as though they were waiting for some revelation.

  “Neither of you plan to elaborate on anything that happened today?” Jasmine eyed me hard. She’d get the truth eventually, but it wouldn’t be with Carl in tow, unless she planned to resort to torture.

  I just stared back at her, and Chris got up to get a beer out of the fridge.

  “Fine. We’re going out. You guys want to come?”

  Jasmine tossed the offer out to both of us, but it was me who found it odd. “We? As in you and Carl?”

  She shrugged, looked at him, then back at me. “Yeah. Why not?”

  “You two hate each other!” I beat Chris to the sentiment we both shared. “It was one thing when we were just talking about you guys being…friends with benefits. Hanging out after work is too much.”