Sweet as Sin

by J. T. Geissinger

  Nico unzipped my jeans and yanked them down over my hips, tearing them off. He tore off my panties next. With one hand on my shoulder, holding me down, he unzipped his own jeans and freed his erection. Hesitating, he glanced up at my face, his eyes dark.

  The question was there in his gaze.

  Once, I thought, delirious. One time and then it’s over. “Condom,” I rasped, barely able to breathe.

  He gave me his weight, leaned across to the nightstand, retrieved a condom from the drawer, tore it open, rolled it down the length of his cock, then shoved himself inside me with no preliminaries, without even so much as a word.

  I cried out in shock. My nails bit into his back so hard I was sure I’d broken the skin.

  He turned his face to my ear. “You wanna make me bleed, baby?” he said, his voice rough. “Go ahead. Won’t be nothin’ new. You been doin’ it every single fuckin’ minute since we first met.”

  He thrust even deeper into me. I groaned, wanting more, hating him, hating myself.

  His teeth grazed my shoulder. His fingers dug into the tender flesh of my hips. He thrust again, and again, each time harder and more mercilessly.

  This wasn’t making love. This was fucking. It was raw and angry and hopeless and devouring . . .

  And it was exactly what I needed.

  I said his name on an exhalation, dragging my nails down his back, my hips moving in time with his. I slid my fingers beneath the waistband of his jeans and cupped his hard ass, pulling him deeper into me. He started a new rhythm, one thrust alternating with an amazing, fluid swirl of his hips that dragged his pelvis across my clit and around an incredibly sensitive spot inside me.

  This time when I said his name, it was more of a helpless moan.

  His hand gripped my throat with just enough pressure to alarm me. My eyes flew open. A flicker of panic winged through my chest.

  “Come and you’re mine,” he panted, his face hard. “That’s the deal, remember?”

  “Fuck your deal! No deal!”

  “Fine, then. Don’t come.” His smile was evil. His hips continued their torture. He bent his head and sucked my nipple into his mouth, and I couldn’t stop the gasp of pleasure that escaped my lips, not for all the money in the world.

  Against my breast, he chuckled.

  “I hate you.”

  It was a whisper, nothing more, but Nico reacted as if I’d shouted it to the hills. He reared up on his elbows, sank his fingers into my hair, and said, “You’re a fuckin’ liar! Tell me the truth, Kat!”

  Something inside me broke then. I felt it, like someone had taken my heart and just snapped it in two, as if it had no more strength or substance than a toothpick. I began to cry.

  “You’re the liar! And I do hate you! I do!”

  Nico pressed his cheek to mine. His heart pounded frantically in his chest. “If you wanna call what you feel for me ‘hate,’ then I hate you, too, baby. I hate you with my whole heart.”

  I shuddered. Tears streamed from beneath my closed lids. There were no words to describe what I felt. I had never been more confused, more angry, more hollowed out. It was as if every emotion I’d ever felt had decided to run rampant at full throttle through my body.

  Humiliation was near the top of the list.

  Because even though he’d left me alone all night, even though I still had no idea if what he’d told me was the truth or not, even though I’d just told myself it was over, I still wanted him. I wanted more than one night.

  I wanted all the nights, and all the days, too. All the highs and lows, all the wreckage. No matter how stupid or self-destructive it was, I wanted everything he made me feel, because, more than anything, he made me feel alive. I sobbed, clinging to him.

  Nico whispered, “That’s right, sweetheart. Give it to me. Don’t hide from me. Give your man everything you’ve got.”

  He cradled my face, wiping away my tears with his thumbs. When he flexed his hips, driving himself deeper into me, my moan was broken. He cut it off with a kiss.

  Then it was nothing but a frenzy.

  There was so much urgency in our kisses, in the way our hands explored and our bodies crashed together, it might as well have been our last few minutes on earth. When finally I cried out, the first waves of orgasm gripping me, Nico’s whole body shuddered, shaking mine. He slid a hand under my bottom and squeezed.

  “Fuck, baby. I can feel that beautiful pussy milkin’ my cock.” He groaned as I continued to come, harder than I ever had, every nerve ending in my body honed to an exclamation point, my heart cracked wide open.

  “Look at me!”

  Though my mind had spun far away, my eyes obeyed his husky command. He hovered there above me, face strained, looking exactly as ruined as I felt. I took his face between my hands. He said my name, his eyes locked to mine. Then he fell apart in my arms.

  He throbbed and twitched, deep inside me. His breathing stalled. All his muscles clenched. With an animal sound, he came, his fingers digging so hard into my hips I felt the bruises forming. Then he collapsed on top of me, panting.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for our breathing to slow, for our hearts to resume a more normal beat. He pressed kisses along my jaw, to the corner of my mouth. He slid his arms beneath me, then rolled me over so he was on his back and I was on his chest, my head resting on his shoulder. He cradled me like that, stroking my hair, caressing my back, calming me.

  Outside, the sky was lifting to a clear, blinding blue. Another perfect day in LA.

  Watching that beautiful sky, I knew, to the marrow of my bones, I’d just signed my own death warrant. I’d just handed over the keys to my happiness to a man I knew almost nothing about. Except that he was volatile and came with more baggage than even the Titanic held.

  And, if our ship was destined to sink, I was too smart to be so stupid. I had to buy myself a life preserver.

  “Promise me something,” I whispered.

  Nico answered without hesitation. “Anything.”

  I swallowed, watching a lone seagull sail across the sky. “If I ever need to walk away . . . if I ever tell you it’s over, let me go. Don’t try to convince me to stay. Don’t follow me. Just let me go.”

  He was silent so long I glanced up at his face. I’d wounded him. I saw it in his eyes as he studied me. “If I say ‘yes,’ are you gonna tell me you’re walkin’ away right now?”

  Sniffling, I shook my head.

  He brushed the hair off my forehead. “You need that so we can move forward? Me givin’ you my word that I’ll let you walk away if you want to?”

  I nodded.

  “All right. I promise.”

  I felt relief tinged with sadness, mixed up with elation and fear. Until Nico spoke again, and then I just felt frozen.

  “If you admit you don’t hate me and tell me the truth about how you really feel.”

  My lips parted, but nothing came out. I looked away, but he held my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him. “Tell me, baby,” he whispered.

  I moistened my lips, closed my eyes, and told him the truth.

  “I’m scared. I’m scared as shit. I’ve never felt anything like this before, and I’m pretty sure you could break me. And . . . and . . . ” I faltered, my voice shaking. “I’m falling in love with you. And it’s way too soon. Way too much. All I know is that you make me crazy and happy and miserable and insecure, and . . . fuck.” My chest got tight. “I need a few days to figure this out.”

  He froze. His voice dropped to a dangerous level. “You did not just come all over my cock, give me everything I been wantin’ you to give, tell me you’re fallin’ in love with me, and then say you need space. Tell me I didn’t just hear that.”

  I opened my eyes, only to be pinned by Nico’s burning stare. It was hard to swallow around the rock in my throat. “Can’t you understand how hard this is for me? You, those girls, Avery . . . everything? If the shoe was on the other foot, how would you feel?”

>   He didn’t answer. But his nostrils flared and his lips thinned, and I knew he knew he wouldn’t like it one little bit.

  Time to go for broke.

  “Why did she come here?”

  He knew who I meant, of course. A muscle worked in his jaw. “She’s got nowhere else to go.”

  “And the next time? And the time after that? Are you always going to have to rescue her? Are you always going to drop whatever’s going on in your life to take care of Avery?”

  Into his eyes came a look of pure torture. He inhaled deeply before he spoke, as if he knew the effect his words would have on me beforehand, and was steeling himself for the blowback.

  Nico whispered, “Yes.”

  That was it. There it was, in black and white. Funny, I never knew a heart could break more than once in the span of a single hour.

  Then, with horror, I realized the man I’d just laid myself bare to, body and soul, had reciprocated by telling me that another woman would always be his first priority while he was still inside me.

  Ice formed in crackling long fingers along the length of my spine. It became almost impossible to breathe. “You . . . you . . . ”

  I couldn’t find the word. “Bastard” was too nice. “Son of a bitch” didn’t cover it. “No good, lying, untrustworthy, piece of philandering shit” didn’t even begin to make a dent.

  I flew off of him before he could stop me and staggered to my feet, desperate to get the hell out of that room, out of that house. I found my discarded clothes on the floor, dressed in record-making time, went to my duffel on the dresser, and shrugged on my jacket. The entire time Nico watched me silently from the bed.

  At least he had the decency to zip up his fucking jeans.

  On my way through the door, Nico said, “You’re not even gonna ask me why?”

  He sounded bitterly disappointed in me, which pushed me past the breaking point. I spun around and shouted, “Why doesn’t matter, Nico! It doesn’t change anything! It doesn’t change how you feel!” I put a hand to my head, almost dizzy with another sickening realization. “God,” I whispered. “I should have known. I did know. What an idiot.”

  Nico sat up. He swung his legs off the mattress and sat staring at me with the light streaming in behind him. His face was in shadow, but I didn’t need his expression to identify the anger in his voice. “Should’ve known what?”

  I turned away. I walked out the door. It didn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, it really didn’t. But I’d only gone a few feet past the threshold when I turned back to look at Nico one final time.

  “You remember that story I told you about the reason I hate my birthdays?” I was surprised my voice was so steady when everything inside me was dissolving into dust.

  Needed you to know I’m a man who’s gonna take care of your heart.

  Beautiful lies from a beautiful liar. I angrily wiped the moisture from my eyes.

  “I left out one little detail. When I said “I should have known,” I meant I should have known better than to get involved with a musician. Musicians are unreliable. There’s always something more important to them than you.”

  He watched me, waiting, his shoulders rising and falling with his uneven breath.

  “I know because my father was a musician, too.”

  Nico stood from the bed, moving toward me, but I was already gone.

  I went to Grace’s.

  I walked down the long hill, tears streaming down my face. At the end of the hill I called a cab and waited under the shade of a flowering jacaranda. It was only once I was seated in the back of the cab and had given the driver Grace’s address that I realized I wasn’t wearing shoes.

  The soles of my feet were raw, blistered, and bleeding. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

  Grace lived in a high-rise condominium building in Century City that catered to wealthy older people, celebrities, and women recuperating from plastic surgery. The security was top-notch. There would be no paparazzi, and no uninvited visitors.

  She opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “Oh, honey.”

  I fell into her arms.

  Without another word, she led me to the guest bedroom, where she used an antiseptic wash on my soles and applied bandages, then covered my feet in a pair of ankle socks. She made me a cup of chamomile tea, and made me drink it, along with a Valium. Then she put me under the fluffy duvet on the queen bed and rubbed my back until I fell asleep.

  Girlfriends are sometimes the only thing that make life bearable.

  I slept deeply, without dreams. When I opened my eyes in the muted twilight of early evening, it might have been the same day, or a thousand years later. I used the toilet, avoided my reflection in the mirror, then shuffled into the living room to find Grace working on her laptop at the dining table.

  “Rocky Horror Picture Show is on at the ArcLight,” she said, not looking away from the screen. “You up for it?”

  It’s an incredible blessing, when someone who knows you well understands you’re in pain, yet allows you to take a breath before expecting you to talk about it. Grace had long ago mastered the art of the gentle handling of wounded souls. It was comforting to know that if I didn’t want to, I’d never have to talk about what had happened between me and Nico at all.

  Even more of a blessing: there would never be an “I told you so.” From Grace, anyway. My own conscience was already kicking and screaming about it.

  “Sounds good.” I went directly to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and poured myself a glass of wine from the corked bottle in the door. I sat across from her again. Grace didn’t bat an eyelash at the size of the highball glass I’d poured the wine into.

  “It goes on at nine. I was going to order from Electric Karma first.” Her level gray eyes met mine above the lid of the computer. “Can your stomach handle it?”

  Indian food might not have been the best idea under the circumstances, but, surprisingly, I was hungry. “Only one way to find out.”

  A smile lifted her lips. “Atta girl.”

  She phoned the order in. The food arrived thirty minutes later. In the meantime, I drank another highball of wine. I did a serviceable job with the naan bread and tandoori chicken, but the smell of the curry from the lamb tikka turned my stomach sour before I even had a bite.

  Throughout dinner, I struggled to fight back tears. When they spilled over, Grace would just hand me a napkin and continue munching on her kebab.

  “Don’t you have that work thing in Santa Barbara this week?” she asked around a mouthful of marinated beef.

  I’d been booked for a fashion shoot at the uber-swanky Bacara Resort, for the fall collection of the couture wedding dress designer Reem Acra. It was scheduled to be shot over the course of four days. I, along with a small army of models and support staff, were scheduled to arrive midweek and stay through the weekend. I’d been so excited about it—the trip was all expenses paid—but now I was grateful merely for the fact that I could escape LA for a few days.

  I nodded, pushing my plate away. “Perfect timing.”

  Grace didn’t have to ask to know what I meant. Better than anyone, she knew that burying yourself in work is one of the best ways to avoid real life.

  Real, shitty, painful life.

  “You can stay here as long as you want, kiddo. You know that, right?”

  The tears began to spill over my lower lids again. I stared at my plate, watching the remains of my meal swim. “I hate men,” I whispered.

  Grace reached over, took my hand, and squeezed it. “Hey.”

  I looked at her.

  “If you ever want to go lezbo, I’m totally on board. I’ve been a certified man-hater for years. The only thing they’re good for is their cocks. And half the time they’re not even good for that.”

  She grinned, and I had to laugh through my tears. “You like cock too much to give it up.”

  “That’s unfortunately true. Maybe I could just be a part-time lesbian.”

  “I’m p
retty sure that’s not how it works.”

  Her grin grew wider. “Honey, you’d be surprised.”

  I groaned. “God, that just sounds like twice the heartache.”

  She squeezed my hand again, then rose from the table to clear our plates. “The trick, my love, is to not let your heart get involved in the first place.”

  I watched her scrape food into the trash, load the dishwasher, and tidy up, all the while contemplating what she’d said. I didn’t think it would have been possible to not let my heart get involved where Nico was concerned, even from that first day we’d met. But Grace was a serial, short-term dater, never getting serious with anyone, never settling down. I knew her lack of memory about her past made her distrustful of the future, so she didn’t count on anything but the here and now.

  Most of the time that made me feel sad for her. Right now it made me think she was a genius.

  “I’m going to change before we head out.” I rose from my chair, rounded the table, and was about to give Grace a hug when something on her computer screen caught my eye. I stopped dead in my tracks.

  She’d been checking her email. On the right side of the screen there was a bar of rotating ads, and the one currently appearing at the top was for TMZ. Its headline read, “Supermodel Goes Supernova.”

  The picture beneath showed a wild-eyed Avery Kane screaming at the photographer.

  I couldn’t help myself. I leapt on that computer and clicked on that teaser before you could say “glutton for punishment.”

  The article was short and full of speculation. Avery had disappeared from rehab the day prior without notifying staff, only to surface hours later at a prominent producer’s house party in Malibu, where she was photographed pacing around a pool, shouting into a cell phone. She was next photographed on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, emerging from the Hermès store wearing enormous sunglasses that did nothing to hide her sunken, sallow cheeks. A store employee, carrying an armload of boxes, accompanied her to the Rolls at the curb, where she got into a scuffle with a Japanese tourist who was trying to take her picture with his cell phone. The article quoted the tourist as saying Avery was “crazy” and “high.”