by R. R. Banks
After several long sucks, Mason grabbed my head and pushed me closer, forcing my mouth open further so that his cock slipped into my throat. He groaned and tucked his hips forward, holding himself deep in my throat and tightening his fingers in my hair. A moment later, he released the tightness of his hips and started rolling them, thrusting into my mouth. The feeling was nearly overwhelming, pushing my arousal to a new level, and I couldn’t hold off any longer.
I slipped my hand under the waistband of my pants and let my fingers dip into my core, feeling the hot fluids already dripping out of me. Using the fluids to ease my touch, I ran my fingertips over my swollen clit in concert with the guide of my mouth along Mason’s cock. Suddenly he grabbed me by my upper arms and lifted me up to my feet. He reached into a small cabinet on the wall and pulled out a condom. I took it from his hand and tore it open, taking my time as I glided it into place to tease him. As soon as it was on, Mason turned me around and pulled my pants down my hips. He pushed me so that I toppled forward, landing with my hands on a cushioned bench. In an instant Mason filled me and I arched my back, savoring the feeling of his cock stretching me.
Looking to one side, I noticed that we were positioned in a way that allowed me to watch our reflection in the mirror beside us. I moaned, biting down on my lip as the image of Mason fucking me hard and fast spiked my arousal and made me feel wanton and wild. As if he could feel the floors disappearing and the elevator approaching his apartment, Mason reached around my hips and massaged his fingertips into my clit. The fact that we were partially dressed only made our need more urgent and it took only a few seconds of his touch in combination with his hard thrusts and the sound of his balls slapping against my thighs to send me crashing into a dizzying orgasm.
My screams seemed to fuel Mason and he let out a deep grunt as his cock pulsed and then throbbed powerfully within me. He stepped away from me gasping for breath and we straightened our clothes. By the time the doors glided open at the end of the hallway leading to Mason’s apartment, we were dressed again and locked in a deep, seeking kiss.
Chapter Seventeen
Mason
“Are you sure that you can’t spend the evening here with me?” I asked.
Ella shook her head, gripping my fingers tighter where she held them between us.
“I have too much to do,” she told me. “Apparently Molly got herself into some kind of trouble and I have to fix it for her.”
“What kind of trouble?” I asked.
After even the brief encounter I had had with Molly, I wouldn’t put much past Ella’s sister.
“I’m not entirely sure. I couldn’t fully understand her. But our neighbor is baking cookies with Edmond this afternoon so that I can help, and they’ll be done pretty soon, so I really have to go.”
“I want to spend more time with you,” I told her. “Come back here tonight and we’ll have dinner in the Café.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Molly isn’t going to be around tonight. I don’t have anyone to take care of my son.”
“Bring him,” I said.
Wow. What is it with this girl? I know she has a child and I still want her.
“I can’t bring Edmond on our date,” she said.
“No. I mean bring him to my apartment. Faye will take care of him. She loves little children. She has so many grandchildren that I can’t even remember all of them. She’ll love to spend time with him.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
I nodded, leaning down to kiss her lightly.
“Say you’ll come. I can send my car for you if you want.”
“No.”
“No?” I asked, feeling my chest crush slightly.
“I mean, no you don’t need to send your car. I can drive here.”
“So, you’ll come?”
“I will.”
I smiled and hugged her closer to me.
It would only be a few hours between when Ella left and when she would return for dinner, but it felt like I was waiting endlessly. I wasn’t accustomed to waiting. It was simply something that I didn’t do in my life. I wanted something and it was there. Somehow, though, waiting for Ella made me want her more.
I expected Edmond to be asleep when she arrived at the apartment. I had even had Faye set up the guest room for him. The truth was I didn’t really know much about children. I was an only child, had no cousins, and had barely even been near a child that was younger than the sixth-grade daughter of a person who worked in the office. The hour, however, made me assume that he would have already been changed into his tiny little pajamas and be ready to sleep his way through our date, maybe even giving us some time to ourselves afterward. When they arrived, however, I was immediately proven wrong.
I opened the door and Edmond immediately ran inside. He was giggling, his hands up above his head as he rushed past me. Ella stepped inside, looking embarrassed.
“Edmond!” she called out. “We don’t run inside, baby. Don’t run in Mr. Mason’s apartment.”
I turned and saw the little boy rush back toward us. I was helping Ella take the bags that she carried off of her shoulders and wondering at the sheer amount of stuff that such a little child needed for a few hours somewhere other than his house when I saw Ella’s eyes open wide.
“Edmond, no! Don’t touch.”
I turned and saw Ella’s son standing next to the table that the staff had put back into the foyer. One chubby little hand was grasping the side of the silver frame, trying to drag it off of the edge toward him.
“Stop that!” I shouted. “Get your hands off of that frame!”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Edmond’s little face scrunched up and I saw tears forming in his once bright, smiling eyes. He let out a wail and I felt Ella’s hand grasp my back. She yanked on me, whipping me around to face her.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” she shouted in my face. “Don’t you dare talk to my son like that.”
All of the sweet softness that had been so appealing about her was gone, replaced by sheer fury. Her teeth were gritted so hard against each other that it seemed they would break. But I didn’t care. He could have pulled the frame down onto the floor and damaged it.
“He shouldn’t be touching that,” I said. “What have you been teaching him? To just go into people’s homes and touch whatever he feels like touching?”
Ella looked stung and she took an aggressive step toward me. Her hands were clenched at her sides and she had pulled herself up to her full height, forcing her chest toward me with everything in her. I could see her shaking, the anger building up inside of her until it was ready to explode.
“How dare you say anything to me about how I parent my child? Who are you to judge me, my son, or my parenting? You know absolutely nothing about raising a child. You know nothing about anything in the real world. You live with your head so far up your ass that you think that the way that you live is normal and that everyone has it exactly the way that you do. You don’t know struggling. You don’t know just going about your day without people fawning on you. With all of the staff that crawls all over this place, I wonder if you even know how to go to the bathroom by yourself. You think that you are so damned important that you can just push everyone around any way that you want to, and that everyone should bend to your will. It makes you think that it is perfectly alright for you to treat anyone like absolute trash if they dare do something that you don’t like. Like it’s alright for you to scream in the face of a tiny child for touching an empty fucking picture frame. A frame that’s probably empty because you don’t have a single person in your life who matters enough to put them in there.”
I was so stunned by her outburst that I barely registered Ella pushing past me to scoop Edmond up into her arms and hug him close, cooing soothing words to him before she picked up the bags that she had brought and stormed out of the apartment. The door slammed behind her, leaving me standing alone in the foyer. I
felt like the silence of the space was closing in around me. Her words reverberated through my mind and I struggled to process them all, to put them into something that I could understand and that wouldn’t bore through me the way that they were.
I couldn’t. She had sliced into me, bringing up thoughts and emotions that I hadn’t felt, that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, in many years. I turned my eyes away from the door toward the small table. Edmond jumping away from it when I shouted at him had caused the frame to tip over and I reached out to put it back in its position in the middle of the table. Once it was in place I looked at it for a few seconds before picking it up.
I carried the frame with me into the living room and sat down on the couch, holding it in both hands so I could stare down at it.
“Is everything alright? Where’s the little one?”
I looked up at Faye, who stood at the entrance to the room, looking at me with concern in her eyes. I shook my head.
“He’s not here. Ella decided not to stay for dinner. Thank you, though.”
Faye nodded, but didn’t say anything else. I knew that she had heard the screaming. She had to have. But she would do what I had done for so long—just pretend it wasn’t happening. Faye walked away and soon I heard the door to the apartment close. I was still staring at the frame in my hands, thinking about what it meant to me and why it still sat on that table after so long. Soon my mind wandered to Ella and what she could mean to me if I only let her.
Chapter Eighteen
Ella
My phone rang, and I picked it up, already knowing whose name was going to be on the caller ID. I looked at it and let out an exasperated groan, tossing it aside so that it skittered across the surface of the kitchen table and away from the bowl of obscenely sweet fruit-flavored cereal that I had been trying to get through for half an hour.
How did he get my number? …Oh, wait. Money and power. The same way he gets everything that he wants.
I tried another bite, but I just couldn’t deal with the overpowering sweetness.
Molly isn’t allowed to do the grocery shopping anymore.
I was standing up to bring the bowl to the sink when I heard my phone start ringing again.
“For the love of all that is good and pure in this world, will you please answer the damn phone?” Molly asked as she came into the room.
“Aunt Molly said a bad word.”
Edmond came in after Molly, gripping his dinosaur and rubbing sleep from his eyes. When I was pregnant with him people always told me that I was going to have to get used to early mornings because children like to get up with the sun and go full force from the moment their eyes open. Not my son. Edmond was like a little old man who hadn’t gotten his morning coffee yet.
“Yes, she did,” I said, pulling my little boy up into my lap and nuzzling into his hair. He smelled sweet and fresh like the green apple shampoo he had chosen because of the cartoon character on the bottle. “She shouldn’t say things like that.”
I cringed thinking of all of the bad words he had heard Mama say a few weeks before when we were standing in Mason’s apartment. He had been crying too hard to admonish me for them, and part of me didn’t know if he had even heard them, but I knew I had said them. Mason had earned every single one of them, though, and I wasn’t going to feel bad for saying what I did, just the fact that my son was only a few feet away when I did it.
“I’m not answering,” I said. “If I had wanted to talk to him, I would have in the last 300 times he’s called me.”
“I don’t understand why you’re being like this.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the way he talked to Edmond.”
“He yelled at me,” Edmond chimed in.
“I know that,” Molly said, “but he was in Mason’s apartment touching things that were probably really expensive.”
“Thing. Not things. And where do you get off being on his side? You’re my sister.”
“I’m not on his side,” Molly told me. “I’m just saying that you really didn’t give him an opportunity to say he was sorry or to explain himself.”
“There’s nothing that he could say that could explain that,” I said. “I’m just glad that I got to see him for who he really is now, before…”
I stopped before I went any further.
“Before what?” Molly asked. I didn’t respond, and she grabbed a cup of coffee, settling into the chair across from me. “Before what?”
I kissed Edmond’s head and patted his hip.
“Why don’t you go get dressed? I put some clothes out for you on my bed.”
Edmond slipped down off of my lap and headed toward the room we shared. I looked at my sister.
“Before anything else happened,” I said.
“From what you told me, there really isn’t a whole lot else that could happen between the two of you.”
She laughed, but I just shook my head.
“That’s the thing. There is. The sex was amazing. I’m not going to lie about that. But that’s all I thought it was going to be. One night of blissful, blistering sex and then I could go back to my life. Then I woke up and he was right there beside me. He had his arm draped over me and I just completely freaked out.”
“Why?”
“Because I felt something,” I said. “We had barely spent any time together, yet I could tell that I was developing feelings for him. It wasn’t something that I expected at all, and something that wasn’t at all welcome.”
“Oh, obviously,” Molly said, nodding. “A gorgeous, exorbitantly wealthy man with muscles you could do laundry on falls for you and wants to spend more time with you. I can definitely see why you’d be so conflicted. Nobody would want something like that.”
She glared at me over her coffee cup as she took a sip and I sighed.
“You just don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t been with anyone since Branden died. I didn’t think that I was even capable of having those feelings anymore, and now it’s like I’m betraying him.”
“You aren’t betraying him. He would want you to be happy.”
“That might be true,” I said, standing and picking up my cereal bowl. “But it won’t be with Mason Dupree. I never want to see him again.”
“Then let’s hope he’s not at home this evening.”
I put my bowl in the sink and sighed, knowing that that couldn’t be a good introduction.
“Why?”
“I got us another job at The Avalon. We’re supposed to be there at eight. I’ve already talked to Mrs. Moskowitz next door and she said that Edmond can come stay at her house. They’ll make more cookies.”
“My son is going to think that the food pyramid is made up of 11 different kinds of cookies.”
I dreaded the thought of going back to The Avalon, but after how uncharacteristically supportive Molly had been in the weeks since I had left Mason in his apartment, I knew that I couldn’t let her down.
That night Molly and I walked into the lobby of The Avalon at exactly eight. I had insisted that we leave early so that we didn’t have a replay of our race from the night of the party. She hadn’t forced me to wear the horrible uniform that she had chosen for us, instead encouraging me to wear a pair of black slacks, heels, and a soft mint colored sweater. It felt like a strange outfit to wear to an event gig and I was starting to worry that she really had added escort to our list of services when I saw Mason come out of the Avalon Café toward me.
I started to turn around, but Molly grabbed me by my shoulders and turned me back to him.
“Thank you, Molly,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”
I looked over my shoulder at my sister.
“You did this?” I asked. “You knew all along?”
“Yep,” Molly said. “I got tired of listening to your phone ring a couple days ago, so I answered it and it was Mason. We talked for a while and I really think that you need to hear what he has to say. So, we arranged for this little dinner for the two of
you. Have a good night.”
I glared at my sister as she walked out of the apartment building and back toward her car before turning back to Mason.
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” I said.
“Please just hear me out, Ella,” Mason said. “Just give me a few minutes. You don’t even have to stay for the whole dinner if you don’t want to. I just want to apologize.”
I let out a sigh and nodded. As much as I didn’t want to look him in the face anymore, I also felt the same powerful draw to him that I had since meeting him and couldn’t resist being close to him, even if only for a few minutes. I didn’t want my last memory of him to be the look in his eyes when he screamed at my son.
Mason gestured toward the Café and I walked toward it, extremely aware of how his hand hovered just over my back, not quite touching me but somehow guiding me just with its presence. As soon as we walked inside I noticed that there was no one else in the restaurant.
“They were kind enough to let me rent out the place for the evening so that we could have privacy,” he said as though he had read my mind.
I nodded, and we made our way toward a table that was decorated with glowing candles and trailing sprays of roses. He pulled a chair out for me and I sat. As soon as he sat across from me, Mason looked into my eyes and let out a long sigh.
“I think I need to explain to you why that frame is so important to me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Mason
Ella let out an exasperated sound and I could see that she wanted to just get up and leave the restaurant. I reached across the table toward her.
“Please,” I said imploringly. “Just give me a minute.”