by C. D. Reiss
I heard him, but I couldn’t create intelligent questions or make a good joke. I had nothing but the friction of my body against him.
“You should see your face,” he said.
My lips parted. “I can’t.” I glanced at Nicole. Even sleeping, her presence was going to keep him from finishing me.
He put his foot on the floor. It felt like he was ripping off a Band-Aid, and I gasped in disappointment. He leaned forward.
“You have two choices.”
“Yes?”
“Behind that curtain is a sleeper. Behind the door is a bathroom.”
“Nicole in the sleeper.”
We vaulted into action. He scooped up Nicole, who didn’t wake, and I headed for the bathroom. It was small, but not as small as on a commercial flight. There was room for two, and it was clean and warm. I was barely in when he followed, snapping the door behind him, and suddenly the space was half the size and twice as hot. He pushed me against the counter, face smashed to mine, popping my jeans open.
He took his lips away from mine. “I want to see you. Lean back, beautiful.” I leaned back, putting both hands on the counter behind me. He slid his hands down my pants, unceremoniously finding my wet clit. I vibrated everywhere.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Like that.”
He pulled one of my legs up until my foot was on the opposite wall.
“Go on,” he said. “Come on my fingers. And look at me.”
“I want to tell you something,” I said. Barely.
“I’m not stopping so you better start talking.”
“I’m with you. You. Small-Town Brad smoking behind the candy store. That’s who’s touching me right now.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
The sensations got harder and hotter, growing into a ball of pleasure bigger than my body. I kept my eyes open for him, letting his face fill me.
“I’m going to—” I stiffened and came, open mouth, no sound, eyes closed. With his free hand he held my jaw, rubbing past when he should.
“Stop!”
He didn’t.
“Look at me this time,” he growled, putting two fingers inside me, pressing my clit with the heel of his hand.
“God, fuck,” I said through clenched teeth as another orgasm pushed through. My hips jerked. I kept my eyes open, letting him own me fully. I was blind with pleasure, but I could see the satisfaction in his expression in the warm lights.
I pulled my body forward and I fell against him.
“Thank you,” I said, chest heaving.
“I had no idea you were so hot. I need time to figure out just how hot you get.”
I pushed away and went right for his fly, popping the button open.
“Let’s start with the next ten minutes.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I unzipped him with one hand and pulled his dick out with the other.
“I really like what you have here, Brad.” It fit in my hand like it was made for me. It put me in control. I licked my lips and put my mouth close to his. “Kiss me now. The next time you kiss me I’m going to taste like you.”
He grabbed me by the hair on the back of my neck and smashed his lips on me, open mouth, tongue tasting me. Then he yanked me away by the hair.
“Start sucking then,” he said through his teeth.
I kneeled. Took a breath. Been a long time. I licked the length of it, tongue flat, making it slick and wet as he gripped my hair.
“You’re teasing me,” he groaned.
I looked up at him, mouth poised on his tip, holding it by the base.
“Make me take it,” I said, then opened my mouth.
His eyes went to surprise, then to heat as he gripped my hair even tighter and pulled my head into his dick. I opened my throat and took him, fighting the urge to gag, still pushing forward. He went down my throat and I let him push my head forward until my nose was pressed against him.
He pulled me off him and I breathed.
“Jesus.” He was in pure shock. Then he smiled and I had to smile back up at him. I didn’t know how much longer I could surprise him, but I loved the ride.
“Keep calling him and he might show up. I’d hate for the second coming to be anywhere but my face.”
He tried to keep a straight face, but laughed anyway. Then I laughed. Me and Small-Town Brad. I was sure I’d like him with or without the fancy career.
“All right,” he said, weaving his fingers in my hair more tightly. “You asked for it.”
I sucked in a deep breath and took his dick. Sliding, sucking, breathing him in. He thrust harder and faster, letting me breathe when I yanked back. I went into a zone, using his rhythms, groaning deep inside. I was wet again for him, throbbing with every thrust. I wrapped my hands around his shaft, sliding along the length when he pulled out.
“Come in my mouth,” I gasped before I opened up and took him again, using my spit as a lubricant for my hands.
A long, deep groan escaped him, and he pulsed as he came down my throat.
When he was done, I swallowed and dropped back against the cabinets. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor with me.
“Fuck.” He shook his head in fascination. “You’ve got a whole other side.”
I rubbed my aching jaw. “I was out of practice.”
He leaned forward and kissed me.
“No one at home’s going to understand you.”
“I’m not that complex.”
“I mean that you’re a nanny. What that means.”
“And the fact that we’re fucking?”
“That should probably stay under wraps. They don’t care you’re the nanny, they care we’re not married.”
“I think that’s all right. I still don’t want to confuse Nicole. So I’ll just be your employee out there.”
He stroked my face right there on the bathroom floor.
“The shoot in Thailand. It’s in ten days,” he said. “Are you guys coming? I’ll have her back in time for school. And I’ll have you back so sore you won’t be able to do anything but beg for it again.”
“Can’t wait.”
I couldn’t. Even knowing it was all going to end soon enough, I wanted him. Impractically, foolishly, shamelessly, I wanted him.
CHAPTER 51
BRAD
Dad drove us from the airport, just like he did when I didn’t have money for a cab. He and I sat in the front, Nicole and her nanny in the back. Cara rooted around her bag for the first few miles.
“My phone. I swear it was on the table and now it’s nowhere.”
“When we get home you can call the hotel and see if they have it,” I said.
“So frustrating.” She kept looking at the bottomless pit of her purse. She didn’t know the meaning of frustrating. Frustrating was leaving it under my pillow in the hotel and feeling like a shit heel.
“So,” Dad looked at Cara in the rearview, rubbing the spot where his right pinkie used to be, “what are we calling you?”
I wanted to kick him. I knew he didn’t like the idea of me getting help with Nicole, but if he was going to be an asshole about me bringing Cara, I was going to kill him.
Cara didn’t seem to mind.
“Cara’s fine. Nicole calls me Miss Cara.”
Dad nodded. “Good. Children need to have respect. This first name business really puts me off.”
“What should I call you?” she asked.
“Grandpa!” Nicole chimed in.
“He’s your grandfather, sweetheart,” I said. “Not Miss Cara’s.”
“Milton’s fine,” Dad said. “My wife’s Ermine. Everyone calls her Erma.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“You got any . . .” He waved his hand as if trying to clear the dust off the right word. “. . . whaddya call? You a vegetarian or anything?”
“Nope. I eat everything.”
Dad turned down our street and nodded as if she’d just told him everything he needed to know.
&nbs
p; “Good. That works.”
Mom and my sister, Susan, waited on the porch with a passel of grandkids. We weren’t even all the way up the drive before they were banging on the car. Worse than paparazzi. Nicole freaked out, hiding in Cara’s armpit.
Once she got out and saw Grandma, she laughed and clapped. Dad picked her up and swung her around. Susan shook Cara’s hand. My brother slapped my back. Aunt Janie pinched my cheek and told me I was skinny. My old Uncle Walter, who was six three and 160 if he was an ounce, agreed with her, grabbing at my waist to feel the love handles that weren’t there. Nicole ran to the porch with her cousins, holding up her stack of pony trading cards. Cara tried to catch her, waving twinkling sneakers.
“Nicole! Put your shoes on!”
I grabbed her arm. “Leave her. If she doesn’t get dirty, we’re doing it wrong.”
“We?”
I didn’t have a chance to make up an explanation for a slip of the tongue. Buddy from next door, who ate his boogers every day at lunch until third grade, who knocked up and married Vicki Sommer before he left high school, tackled me. He smelled like motorcycle grease and sweat.
“You didn’t bring Paula?” he asked.
“Nah, I’m not here to work.”
In third grade, when Buddy worked on the seven and eight times tables he got a look on his face that was half twisted out and half relaxed fugue. It had meant things weren’t computing, and rather than work it out he usually just accepted a D and moved on. He got that look when I mentioned Paula’s absence, then shrugged and took his D.
“You have to see Margie.” He punched my arm. “Man, she’s gorgeous!”
Margie was his Harley. He’d been fixing her since he was seventeen. He never looked twisted and fugued with his hands in an engine.
“You been fucking it?” I waved my hand in front of my nose. “You stink, bro!”
“Bradley James Sinclair!” Mom shouted. “You got a mouth like a cesspool.”
Buddy threw his arm around Mom. “I’m glad you’re back. Now she can get off my case. Come check Margie out. She roars and purrs.”
I didn’t look to my parents or my siblings, but to Cara, who was talking to my sister about I-didn’t-even-know-what.
“Hey,” I said, and she turned. “I’m going to go next door for a minute. You’ll be all right?”
“We’ll be fine. Have fun.”
I trotted over to Buddy’s garage to see his bike and glanced back at Cara talking with my sister on the way to the house I grew up in. I didn’t feel anything. Nothing.
Just at home.
CHAPTER 52
CARA
So. Many. People.
The oldest person I met looked as though she wasn’t a minute under 150, and the youngest had just been born a few weeks earlier. I caught as many names as I could and tried to keep an eye on Nicole, but I got pulled in a dozen different directions before being placed in front of a pile of carrots and a cutting board.
“Nanny?” his sister asked. I repeated her name to myself. Susan. An uncle or two came in for beers, but the uncles were indistinguishable from cousins. The gender rules seemed set in stone. All the women got dinner on the table, all the men sat outside. Everyone helped with the children.
“Nanny,” I replied.
“What kind of word is that?” She cleaved an onion, and it opened into two rocking half-spheres.
“Shorter than caretaker?”
“Leave her alone, Suze.” Brad’s mom, Erma, was in constant motion.
“I’m being interested.” Susan had her brother’s jawline, which was both disconcerting and striking on a woman.
“You’re talking without saying anything.”
Susan rolled her eyes and sliced a thin crescent of onion. “Seems all right’s all I’m saying. Taking care of kids? I don’t get paid.” She bit the edge off the onion slice, then munched it down to her fingertips.
“It’s great,” I said. “I have the best job in the world.”
Because my boss has the dick of a god.
“Is Paula still around?” Susan tried to look casual as she cut the rest of the onion.
“Yeah.” I was conspicuously silent. Not another word would pass my lips.
“She and Brad still doing it?” Susan ate another sliver of onion and looked at me intensely with her gray eyes.
“Susan.” Erma punctuated the name by slapping a slab of raw meat on the island. “Why are you poking this woman?” She put her clean hand on my shoulder. “Ignore her. Paula gave her grief when she went to visit. Acted like the queen and someone’s looking to take her down a peg.”
“She treated me like a servant. Then she told me not to bother my brother when they were working and don’t ask questions. Like I don’t know his ‘big secret.’” She froze with air quotes suspended and the onion hanging from her mouth half-eaten. She glanced at her mother, who shook her head and put her attention back on tying the meat.
“She cares about him is all,” Erma lilted. “Bless her heart.”
Aunt Rochelle, who didn’t express anything beyond nonverbal reactions, snorted derisively as she measured out two cups of rice.
“Sure does,” I said, cutting my carrot. More words about Paula were going to pass my lips despite my best intentions. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not technically. Not outwardly. Not to me. “And bless her heart for it.”
Brad had his mother’s smirk. She didn’t look at me when she tried to hide it, but I saw. He looked just like her.
Susan was less circumspect. She laughed and clapped. It sounded just like him.
She stopped abruptly when the windows started shaking. LA earthquakes shook the windows. If it was strong and you were in the hills, you could hear an unnerving rumble. The blubbering engine fart that rattled the side windows was much louder than that.
“Buddy!” Susan shouted with an offhandedness that could only come from issuing the same warning hundreds of times. “Get that thing off our property!”
Brad’s mother opened the window over the sink.
“Bradley! You know better!”
“Where’s Cara?” he shouted over the rumble. “I can’t find her.”
I abandoned my carrots and leaned over the sink, knife still in my hand. Brad sat on a Harley that barely fit in the driveway. In the night dark and the flood of the headlight, he looked like James Dean, but sexier, sweeter. With sneakers instead of boots and hair unweighted by grease. I didn’t realize I was biting my lower lip until it hurt.
“Let me take you for a ride,” he shouted.
I loved the feel of his attention, and I let myself enjoy it before I answered. I was the nanny. The staff. Not the first person he should be thinking of when he wanted company on a motorcycle ride.
“Nicole would love it,” I called out the window, deflecting the attention.
“Oh no!” Erma shouted. “You are not putting that little girl on that monster.” She plucked the knife from my hand. “Go. Please. Before he gets exhaust in the roast.” She shooed me away exactly like her son shooed.
“You sure?”
“I need to give Susan the carrots before she eats all the onions.” She squeezed my forearm. “Please.”
She pushed me out. Literally pushed me.
I took the hint and ran outside.
CHAPTER 53
CARA
The last wedge of sun had slipped below the horizon five minutes earlier, and the sky darkened to teal on the east and glowed orange on the western horizon. Margie rumbled between my legs and my arms wrapped around the hard tight shape of Brad’s waist.
He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and hadn’t offered me one. The safe cocoon of his family must have already formed around me, because I thought nothing of it. Rounding a highway, through a wooded area, down a main street, I was lost in five minutes. I pressed my cheek to his back, smelling the leather and the wind, and let him take me wherever he wanted to go.
He turned at a wooded road and stopped where the road
ended. When the engine cut I could hear the trickle of a creek and the click of the kickstand going down.
The headlight flickered out. When the bike was stable I got off.
“How you feeling, teacup?” He swung a leg over the bike.
“Fine. That was a nice ride.”
“I was worried you’d toss your cookies.”
“Take me for a ride on the teacups again. You’ll see some cookie-tossing.”
He took my hand. I hesitated. It was too dark. I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.
“I have you.” He pulled me forward, telling me to watch my step when a root jutted up, until the trees cleared and I could see the edge of the starry sky above and hear the rustle of the brush and trickle of a creek.
Brad pulled off his jacket and laid it on a boulder on the bank, then took my hand again. He helped me to the ground and sat behind me, legs around mine, arms around my waist, chin on my shoulder.
Words to describe how that felt. None in English. Best thing ever with a shade of this-is-wrong. Comforting and disconcerting.
“Your family’s very nice.”
“I feel like I live on another planet,” he said. “They don’t know why I can’t clean my own house as it is. They don’t understand why I brought you.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“And there’s something else. It’s about Paula. Buddy clued me in.”
“Okay?”
“Paula’s from around here. She’s been in the habit of suggesting I was just having my fun until I settled down and married her.”
“Really?” I said sarcastically. “She’s open-minded. If you were promised to me, I would have put a cowbell on your dick.”
He laughed. I heard some relief in it, as if he expected me to be mad.
“Word got around and, well, people don’t take to being lied to. She’s gonna be embarrassed. No telling what she’ll do.”
“Are you going to ask her about it?”
“Nope. Doin’ it the southern way. Keeping it courteous. No fuss. But I thought you oughta know in case someone brought it up.”
“Noted. I’ll zip it.”