“I love the way you squeeze around me. Your little pussy almost milks my cock, begs for it. Do you know that?”
My eyelids clench together harder, almost painfully hard, as I touch myself in just the right way. The burn begins low in my stomach, the rumble getting louder with each and every movement of my hand.
The lace of my panties causes friction against the back of my hand, just another bit of sensation that sends me on a spiral higher and higher.
“Think of how good it feels when I hit that spot in the back of your pussy,” he coaxes. “The way you let loose. How your legs shake as you flood my cock with so much fucking juice that it almost shoves me out of you.”
“Dom,” I utter through clenched teeth as the tremors of my orgasm hit me full-on.
“You coming, baby? You coming thinking of me buried inside you?”
“Yessssss.”
My body hums at the imagery he’s painted for me, the thought of him doing all of those things sending me on a high that could only be topped if it were him doing them.
Sucking in a breath, I hear him follow suit, as I whimper at the aftershocks of my climax. My legs relax, the riot in my stomach eases, as I let my head fall back with a contented, satisfied sigh.
“Damn, lady,” Dom says just as I’m piecing myself back together. “That was ridiculously sexy.”
My cheeks heat as I drop my hand to the side, my body now spent. Embarrassment rears its ugly head as I realize, without an orgasm-needing brain, what just happened.
“Cam?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I ask, trying to keep my tone light.
“Don’t be embarrassed.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I hear it in your voice and you’re a terrible liar.”
“That’s the second time I’ve been told that today,” I laugh.
“Who else you lying to?”
“Lincoln, but I wasn’t really lying to him. He was just being an ass.”
Dominic takes a deep breath before blowing it out slowly. “Did that conversation have anything to do with me?”
“Why would it? They don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You mean slumming it?”
“Stop it, Dominic.”
He chuckles through the phone. “I’m kidding.”
“Do you want to meet them?” I ask with hesitation. It would be a bloodbath, most likely, and my family would definitely have reservations. And questions. And issues. Still, I can’t deny the leap in my chest that maybe his reaction is because we’re there. To the point where he does want to admit to being serious. To—
“Hell, no.”
My spirits fall like a piece of confetti out of a sixty-story building. “I didn’t think so.” I stand up and get my skirt smoothed back down. “My froyo is melting on the table.”
“That could be fun.”
“What?”
“Melted ice cream. If I would’ve known that was happening, I could’ve added it into my little fantasy.”
Still reeling from the hopes of a few seconds ago, I watch the chocolate treat create a little puddle on the white tabletop. “You should remember that next time.”
“Noted. But, in the meantime, I’m gonna get off of here so I can go get myself off. That little show you just put on has my cock so hard it’s ready to explode.”
“If you came over here, I’d help you out with that.”
“I bet you would.” I hear him groan and he moves. “You have any plans for tomorrow?”
“I’m having lunch with my mom, Sienna, and a couple of my brothers’ wives. There’s a charity thing they want to put together and I volunteered to head the effort. What about you?”
“Working then heading to the gym straight after. Maybe we can hook up late?”
“I’d like that.”
He pauses. “Me too, Cam. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Later.” And just like that, the line goes dead.
I pad down the hall and into the master bathroom, washing my hands, teeth, and face. Dressing in the yellow robe that I know now is Dom’s favorite, I climb into bed.
Looking around the white walls, white carpet, and pale pink furnishings, I think back to last night. This time yesterday I was snuggled up in Dom’s bed. His ratty blue comforter, eighties-style wood paneling, and grey shag carpeting that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy is almost preferable right now to lying here alone.
Without him.
“Come on, Cam,” I admonish myself, burrowing in the down blankets. “You can’t expect anything. Not from him.”
And I shouldn’t expect anything from him. Worse, I shouldn’t want anything from him. He’s not what I need.
I need stability. I need a five-year plan. I need someone that can raise a family and give me and my future babies a solid foundation. He’s none of that. I’m not even sure he’s capable of it. Worst of all, he’s made it obvious he doesn’t want it.
He doesn’t even want to integrate me into his life or be interwoven into mine. He doesn’t want me at the gym, at Nate’s bar, and he’s not about to go to the Farm for Sunday dinner. As wonderful as he is when we’re together, he has a way of making it clear there’s a line between my world and his, and that line will remain. I’m an interesting addition to his collection of women, and while I know he likes being with me, I also know there’s nothing between us that will last forever.
It can’t. All of those dreams I want to come true aren’t possible with him.
“Uh,” I grumble, trying to get comfortable.
My stomach sours as I imagine working him into my life. Explaining to my family the man I love fights for a living. Can barely pay his rent. Is related to Nolan—the man that tried to ruin Barrett’s entire career.
Closing my eyes, it’s the memory of his face that greets me. I imagine he’s behind me, his chin resting on my head the way he does when he’s waiting for me to fall asleep. It’s this feeling, this warmth, that makes me want to blur the line he so carefully creates so I don’t have to eventually let it go.
Five
Dominic
Climbing out the shower and wrapping a towel around my waist, I rub the fog off the bathroom mirror. There’s a small cut over my right eye that shouldn’t look too bad by morning. My face lights up in the glass as I picture Camilla’s reaction to the scrape if she were here.
She hates me fighting. It seems barbaric to her on some level. She can’t imagine someone being so down and out that they would willingly go into a brawl to get a payday. I tried to explain it to her the first time it came up in conversation, but that was the last time I wasted my effort. She won’t get it. How could she? She just swipes a card if she wants something or asks her brother for the money from her trust fund if it’s over a certain amount.
That’s what I can’t imagine—letting someone else control my shit. They control everything about her from where her money goes to who she dates to what she does with her afternoons. It’s wild.
It’s also one of the reasons why this little thing we have going on is temporary. It’s carried on a little longer than I expected it to, but that doesn’t mean an expiration date isn’t stamped on it somewhere. Her world isn’t just the other side of the tracks; it may as well be the other side of the fucking universe. My side? It’s no place for a girl like her, a girl that not only nails that fifty-one percent, but aces the other forty-nine. A girl that’s way outta my league.
My phone rings in the bedroom and I shut the light off behind me before heading across the hallway. It’s buzzing on my nightstand when I pick it up.
A little drop of disappointment hits me when I realize it’s not Cam. “Hey, Nate,” I say, sitting on the edge of the bed. “What’s up?”
“Just got Ryder to bed. Chrissy let him have way too much sugar tonight and he wouldn’t settle down. It was rough, man. I pulled out all the stops, even singing that twinkle star song.” He laughs
. “Hell, before it was over, I was singing the old Oscar Meyer hot dog commercial theme.”
“What a way to spend a night,” I laugh.
“Yeah, but fuck it, Dom. I mean, what else is there, really? I had three chicks on the bar tonight, basically doing a strip show by the time we closed. Juicy asses, big titties, lips carved to wrap around a cock. There was a time in my life when that was the end to a great day. Now, I just wanted to get home before Ryder went to sleep.”
“I get that. He’s your boy.”
“Yeah,” he sighs through the phone. “I don’t know. It’s more than that. It’s … Remember Dad not being home? Hell, half the time Mom wasn’t either? We’d let ourselves in after school and pour some shredded cheese on some stale tortilla chips and watch television? I want to give him something more, something better than what we had growing up.”
“You’re doing that,” I say, running a hand over my damp hair. “He never has to worry about where his next meal is coming from. That’s more than we had a lot of the time.”
“I was thinking … maybe when the loan goes through, and I get everything caught up, maybe I can start thinking about changing the atmosphere in The Gold Room.”
“To what?”
“Something more respectable, I guess.”
“You’re going yuppie on me, aren’t you?”
He barks a fit of laughter through the phone. “Fuck, no. I just mean clean the place up some. Change our reputation a little. Maybe pull in a different group of customers, ones that have more money than Joe and Copper.”
“So you mean ones that have any money?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“Joe ever paid his tab?”
“Nope.”
“Did you stop letting him charge?”
“Nope.” Before I can respond, he keeps going. “Sometimes that ham sandwich is all he eats all day. How do I cut him off, Dom? He doesn’t ask for much. A drink and a sandwich sometimes. And he pays when he can.”
My heart tugs at the predicament. The hollowness in my stomach -- from being hungry and scared and not seeing a clear way out after Mom’s death came a year after Dad’s -- is never too far away. “I feel ya. Maybe think it through some between now and the loan going through and get a plan in place.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. This is either going to have to be a long-term, successful thing or a really expensive headache.”
His words spark something in my brain that I’ve been toying with for the past few months. Maybe it’s time to start looking at the HVAC job as a career, that I might be at the point in life where things just are the way they are. Go in all the way because … this is it.
I’ve always felt like something was going to change, that if I peddled along, busted my ass, kept going for long enough, eventually there would be a turning point. That things would get easier. That I’d get the stability and straightforward life I’d always craved.
Maybe that’s not true.
Maybe it’s always a struggle. Realization is starting to set in that maybe this life is my life. Whatever hopes I had of rising above my current situation, of starting my own business, of making something out of myself, isn’t really going to happen. Maybe the stars were just stacked against me from the night my inebriated father fucked my mother.
I’ve been considering I need to accept all this and move forward accordingly, being real with myself about what’s what. Before that can work its way into my psyche, my brother groans.
“Ryder is moving around. Shit.”
“So I have that to look forward to,” I say, half-kidding.
“You still want us? Look, Dom, if not it’s no big deal. We’ll figure—”
“Damn it. If I didn’t want you to come, I wouldn’t have offered.”
“You know I appreciate it, right?” he says. The relief is evident, lingering on the last note. “I’ll help out with the rent. With groceries. Whatever you want.”
“We’ll figure it out.” I look across the hall into the dark bathroom. “There’s a bed in the guest room. If you want to bring his kid bed with you, you can fit it in there. Or one of you can take the couch.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it all sorted.” He heaves another breath. “Did you mention it to Cam?”
Her face pops up in my mind and I fall back on my sheets, wishing she was lying a few inches over and waiting on me to end the call and curl up next to her to listen to her lecture me about the cut above my eye. “Yeah, I told her.”
“She okay with it?”
“It’s not her decision.”
“So that’s a no?”
“It’s a ‘I didn’t ask her opinion,’” I tell him. “Why would I? I fuck her sometimes. That’s it.”
“Oh, that’s it, huh?” His laugh makes me cringe. “I think not, little brother.”
“Okay. I fuck her often. Better?”
“Sure. If that makes you happy, I don’t give a shit. But I think it’s a little deeper than that.”
He waits for me to respond, but I don’t. Not immediately. I think about his question and how I can navigate these waters. Was my assessment of my relationship with Camilla accurate? Fuck no. But should it be? Definitely.
It’s my fault I see her so damn much. I can’t help myself. And as much as I’d like it to be just for the sex, even I know it’s not. That’s what fucks me—the non-fucking. That’s where I’m going to get so burned I’m afraid I’ll be unrecognizable.
“You know, it’s okay to actually feel something for someone, Dominic.”
“You’re using my whole name now. Is that some kind of hint that you mean business?”
“That’s my way of telling you to listen to me before you go messing up a lot of shit,” he sighs.
My abs strain as I sit back up, my eye starting to pulse like it’s swelling. “Look at me,” I laugh, “and look at her. I’m sitting here with the taste of blood in my mouth from the cut inside my lip, and she’s lying on some thread-count bullshit I don’t even understand. You don’t think this isn’t already messed up?”
“No. I don’t.”
“And you claim to be the smart one,” I joke. “Look, I’m okay with this as-is. I see it for what it is. But don’t go telling me, ‘It’s okay to have feelings for someone, Dominic,’” I mock, “because it ain’t real. You don’t have feelings for something that’s gonna be busted in the days to come.”
“You’ve been with her almost a year,” he tosses out like he’s some kind of genius.
“Okay. Fine. You wanna go with me to meet her family? I mean, let’s just do the family-to-family thing. You’ve already made friends with her brothers, yeah?”
“Fuck them,” he growls.
“My point. That’s before they even know our uncle is the guy that almost tanked Barrett’s campaign. How’s that gonna look in their press release in the next election cycle?” I point out. “Look, I hate Nolan too. But that doesn’t matter. It’s all about appearances with these people, Nate. This would be a PR nightmare, and they’re all about avoiding the problem.”
“Again, fuck them.”
I shrug, even though he can’t see me. “And then the shit about—”
“Don’t tell me you’re going there. Our piece-of-shit father has nothing to do with anything.”
“But he does.”
“But he doesn’t,” he hisses. “Use whatever reasoning you want for not locking that girl down, but don’t let that motherfucker play a part. That’s not fair to her or you.”
“Fair or not, it’s life,” I say, feeling defeated.
He yawns through the line, saying something I can’t make out.
“I’m guessing you said you’ll see me tomorrow,” I say, glancing at the clock. “I gotta try to get some sleep.”
“Me too. I’ll start moving our stuff in tomorrow?”
“Sounds good. I’ll be working up north, but you have a key, right?”
“Yeah. Thanks again, Dom.”
�
�No problem. See ya tomorrow.”
“Bye.”
Dropping the phone to the blankets, I lie back again. My head feels foggy like it usually does after a sparring session.
Closing my eyes, I see Camilla’s face. The fact that I’m beginning to associate her with my life—that she’s what I envision when I have six seconds of quiet or how I automatically hope to see her in my bed—worries me a little. No, it worries me a lot.
I get why. She’s the full one-hundred percent. The problem? I’m not.
Six
Camilla
“Camilla, would you wait a moment, please?” My mother gives me her best no-nonsense look over her clasped hands.
“Sure.” I fight the anxiety in my chest as I say goodbye to my sisters-in-law and watch them walk out of Picante, a restaurant nestled inside a ritzy hotel downtown. We had lunch and discussed a charity launch the family is putting together through Landry Holdings. It’s been a nice afternoon … until now.
I know the look on her face. This isn’t Mom wanting to get pedicures tomorrow. This is her wanting to talk. Real talk. The kind I’ve been avoiding.
Smoothing out my dress, I retake my seat. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to see how you were, sweetie.”
“I’m fine,” I say, furrowing my brow. “Why would you ask?”
It’s a rhetorical question. There’s no doubt why she’s asking. The only thing I’m unsure about is why she hasn’t done this before now. Still, I’m not offering information freely. If she wants something, she’s going to have to ask for it.
She gives me a knowing smile. “It’s nice to see you in love.”
“What are you talking about?” I scoff, feeling my cheeks heat.
Her laugh makes me feel like a little girl called out on a white lie. “Darling, I’m not blind. Or deaf,” she sighs, rolling her eyes. “Your brothers—”
“It was Lincoln, wasn’t it?”
“No,” she giggles. “It wasn’t.”
“Then it was Graham.”
“Camilla, stop it.”
“They’re overbearing, Mother,” I hiss. “They won’t leave it be. I don’t have to parade whoever I’m seeing in front of the family if I don’t want to. Shit.”
The Landry Family Series: Part Two Page 25