We are nearing the end, the explosion, the finale that will surely leave me ravaged and unconscious. If every thrust feels like infinite electricity undulating through me, then cumming will be a storm that I cannot possibly hope to survive intact. I grab his forearm to clench in fear as I feel myself getting closer, closer…
It happens. He cums, I cum, we cum. Jets of hot semen geyser inside me while my body rocks, twitches, and convulses. From the soles of my feet to the prickly skin of my scalp, every inch of me is alive with silent spasms. I open my mouth to moan, to ease the pressure, but nothing comes out – the muscles of my throat choke it off in their ecstasy.
I see darkness. I see ghosts. I see stars. I see ethereal light through the back of my eyelids. In that light a shape takes form. It's Garret.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I wake up next to Garret. His heat radiates over me in waves. One of his bare arms dangles across my chest, its weight heavy but reassuring. I run a gentle finger through the fields of fine blond hair on his forearm.
I poke my head under the sheet. His smooth form runs long and lean, devoid of any clothing. The rigid glacier of his abs tempts my touch. I give in, taking my hand from his arm and rubbing lightly against the muscle. I check his face – no reaction.
A devilish smile steals across my face. Moving slowly, I rise to my knees, letting the sheet fall from my breasts. Sunlight carves through the blinds and splays over my naked porcelain skin.
I stretch one leg over him so that I am straddling his calves. He hasn’t stirred. A ripple of adventurous sparks is flowing just below my abdomen. It jitters and excites me. One glance at his jawline, stippled with a three-day growth of scraggly blond beard, exacerbates the current.
I reach a hand up and slide it along his smooth thigh until it encircles his cock. Biting my lip thoughtfully, I grasp it, lower my head, and take him into my mouth.
Upon the sensation, he wakes up, grumbling until he takes stock of his surroundings. He props himself up on his elbows and looks down at me. I stare back at him with his manhood between my lips as I run my tongue in slow, deliberate circles. He grins.
I shiver as the river of sparks begins to course throughout my body. The sun slants against the crown of my head. I begin to bob up and down along his shaft, one hand caressing his chest and the other cupping his testicles. He sighs and leans his head backwards.
My pace redoubles with every noise he makes. Every sound of satisfaction that slips between his lips adds kindling to the fire. The sparks aggregate into fireworks that threaten to erupt in my hips and the furrow where my thighs meet.
He is hard now, and when I draw him into my throat, he gasps, almost silently, his mouth opening in a black O.
I want to make him moan. I want to make him cum.
I lick from base to head, dragging my tongue slowly over every inch of exposed surface. He puts a hand on the back of my head and pushes me down. I oblige, obeying him, loving the sensation of Garret’s thick member against my cheeks.
I suck hard at the tip of him while my hands wring and pump his cock. He coughs and sputters, then looses a guttural growl as he cums into my begging mouth. Satisfaction blossoms like sunflowers in my flushed cheeks even as my thighs are dampened by the desire seeping from between my legs.
I roll his sticky white cum between my lips, loll out my tongue for him to see it, then swallow decisively. He grins. I grin back, then flop next to him, breasts and hair askew, lazily enjoying the tides of pleasant electricity that still dance over my skin.
The sun rotates downwards a few degrees as we lay and I catch my breath. We stare together at the ceiling, content to remain silent.
After a while, Garret pokes me in the side. “Don’t you have to go to work?” he asks.
I jolt upwards and fumble for my cell phone on the bedside table. The time is 11 a.m.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I stammer, leaping from the bed. I am almost an hour late already. I curse as I stumble around the room. I haphazardly assemble an outfit, button a shirt, and strap heels to my feet as I scrounge for the remainder of my belongings, which are strewn around Garret’s apartment.
He is lying in bed, wrapped in the covers and shirtless, laughing at me. I whirl around to glare at him.
“What’s so funny?” I snap as he chortles.
“Nothing, nothing,” he demurs and raises his hands to pacify me.
“No, come on now. If it’s so funny, then tell me.”
He shrugs but says nothing.
“Well?”
“You just care so much.” He finally says.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means who gives a shit? Fuck your job. Stop worrying about it. It’s not that important, you know.”
He lights a cigarette and drags deeply, running a palm through his hair. The exhaled smoke mushrooms towards me, acrid and strangely intoxicating.
I have never smoked before, but I walk over towards him and plop down on the side of the bed. He smirks at me and offers the cigarette. I reach out, then pause for a moment, hand in mid-air.
The old Jodie would never be late.
The old Jodie would never smoke.
But old Jodie would never be shacking up with a no-fucks-given rock star, either.
I pluck the cigarette delicately between two fingers, raise it to my lips, and puff. The fumes billow in my lungs and skitter between my veins. My vision takes a dizzy, heady edge. I smile. The paranoia, the fear of Bellamy, and the weight of my obligations all vanish instantaneously. The arch of my posture slouches, vertebrae wheezing happily.
Taking to my feet, I sashay out of the room. Just before I exit, I lean against the door frame and blow Garret a thick, sarcastic kiss. He laughs again.
“Hurry home, darling!” he trills jokingly. He takes another drag. I leave.
I look around and can’t help but feel that the corporate assistants buzzing around the atrium have lost a certain brilliance to their sheen. They are as polished and trim as ever, but a luster is missing, a kind of icy distance between them and me that used to seem overwhelming. They still seem frigid, but now it is the stiff cold of the ignored, the chill of the vacant or the unloved. In contrast, I float through the cavernous room in a warm haze of euphoria.
The elevator doors clang open and a stream of Nordic blondes spew from its innards. I slice through the middle of their pack, bumping shoulders with several and neglecting to look back or apologize. I almost want to giggle to myself at the shocking lack of concern I feel.
I glance at my watch and see 11:45 a.m. stamped in red, glowing digits. I was due at my desk at 10:30 this morning, on the dot. My mind tracks backwards to my first day on the job, when Carla had slammed a bulging file folder onto my desk and leaned forward to hiss subtly to me, saying that “Mr. Bellamy does not tolerate tardiness. Be here on time, or don’t bother coming back.” I once shivered when she spoke. Now, thinking back on it, I roll my eyes at her melodramatic antics.
The ride upwards is smooth and silent. I close my eyes and breathe in the stale air; it reeks of bronze and industrial cleaner. When the doors open, I roll lazily forward.
As soon as I step into the office, all eyes pivot towards me. No one budges. I pause in the doorway, hesitating for a moment, then sidle forward in the direction of my desk. I pass by a co-worker and he whispers a warning to me from the corner of his mouth.
“You’re fucked, Sutton.”
Midway down the opposite wall, I see my desk. The papers are as sloppily stacked as they had been the last time I was here, handfuls of pens are sprayed across the desktop, and a half-finished can of soda lingers on the mouse pad – indifference personified.
The only noticeable change is the redheaded office manager seated primly in my swivel chair. Carla does not look pleased.
Her nose wrinkles as I draw closer. She surveys me up and down, then purses her lips further, forming hollow divots in her cheeks. When I am within ten feet of her, she stands up and gestures towards t
he now-empty chair.
“Jodie, please, darling, take a seat. You must be exhausted. Did you get enough sleep last night?” Her tone, dripping with false concern, whips out through the frigid office murmur. Heads pop up from work stations everywhere as my colleagues tune in. They are expecting a massacre.
“I’m fine,” I say, forcibly keeping my voice neutral. “I’ll stand.”
“No, please, I insist.” This last word slithers out like metal on rock, every syllable punctuated and lethal.
I stand my ground. “Carla, do you need something from me?”
Her eyes flash. She smiles. “No, no, dear, I don’t need anything. Welcome to work,” she says. She pivots on one outrageously tall heel and begins to stride away. A thought strikes her. She cranes her neck backwards over her shoulder and calls to me, pitching her voice to fill the entire, low-ceilinged room.
“Mr. Bellamy, however, would like to see you. I believe it’s about the state of your employment.” She simpers like an excited little girl as she leaves.
The door clicks behind me. I should be scared, I know, but the squirming part of my gut that would normally be riddled with bile and fear is mysteriously absent. I draw air into my lungs and feel every capillary expand to receive it, to drink it in, to relish in it. Behind my eyelids, I see a shirtless rock star, laughing at me.
It’s not important, you know.
“Sit, Jodie,” says Bellamy. He points towards the chair in front of his desk.
He tents his fingers and stares me down. The silence lashes out and roils between us.
“Jodie, we have a bit of an issue here, wouldn’t you say?” His pupils are trained on me. I swallow the tentacles of revulsion crawling through my stomach.
He doesn’t wait for me to respond. Instead, he stands, folds his hands in front of his waist, and paces slowly around his sprawling desktop. Grabbing the chair next to me, he spins it around and sits backwards on it. The arrangement is grotesquely familiar.
Bellamy bridges his fingertips—long, spindly, and pale—together again. They are long, spindly, pale. I stare closely at the wrinkled ridges of one knuckle, observing the hatch-marked skin and tiny hairs.
“I would say. I would say that we have a problem, indeed,” he says softly. “We, as in this company, have a problem when our employees do not report to work on time. Punctuality is an important part of any job, is it not?”
His words hang in the air like noxious gas, spreading, enveloping, absorbing.
I say nothing. He continues.
“I think that this is quite a problem. You have been developing a reputation for tardiness, Ms. Sutton – Jodie.” At the mention of my name, he grins, as if surprising himself with the weight of its connotations.
“But we – that is to say, you and I…” He points at me and then at himself, stabbing the space between us with his emaciated finger. “… we have found solutions before, haven’t we?”
His eyes zero in and the shark’s grin spread on his face. He senses the blood in the water.
“And it is my personal assertion that those, shall we say… solutions, have been highly successful in resolving any issues that might crop up between us. Would you agree?”
I feel something explode in me with a shocking force. No, not exactly explode – disintegrate is more accurate. An invisible shell against which I had been straining suddenly collapses violently into dust and splinters and a muscle, a visceral power flexes itself. It contracts once, like it is stepping into the light for the first time. It feels strong. I feel strong. I open my mouth and let the energy flow forward without restraint.
Bellamy is saying, “I asked you, would you agree…?”
My words cut him off.
“No. No, Mr. Bellamy.” I pronounce the title with pungent sarcasm. “No, I would not agree. In fact, I would disagree. I would disagree strongly.”
I take to my feet. As I rise, it feels like I am a titan stretching up from the earth. My heels are rooted in the floor and they draw strength from its solidity. My veins are thick and engorged; the blood surging through them is rich with an immaterial vigor.
“Here is my solution. I propose that you leave me the fuck alone. I propose that you don’t ever ask me to do anything for you ever again. I propose that you get out of my life, promptly, and remain there, permanently.”
The lights are gyrating before my eyes as I feast greedily on this newfound energy. The fury in my speech crescendos. I look straight into his eyes, all fire and brimstone, as I deliver my last line.
“Fuck you,” I say. “I’m done here.”
***
Silence.
Silence.
Icy sickly silence, the kind of foreboding moment devoid of all noise, the kind where you wake up sweating about it three nights or a week later, the kind where the blood pounding in your ears sounds like the drumbeats of bloodthirsty jungle savages who know their way through the shadows far better and cleverer than you do.
Bellamy has stood up. He towers above me. The fire in my gut immediately cools. His gaze is ice, ice that threatens to extinguish the bravery raging through my bones.
His eyes are slitted half-crescents and the light seeping out from under them roils with flickering cruelly. His hands clench and unclench, clench and unclench. In my imagination, I see him in the jungle, leading the headhunters, plucking still-beating hearts from the corpses of foolish fat girls who tried to run away between the trees, raising them up and letting the blood run in rivulets down his chin…
Stop it, I tell myself. Focus.
One of the fluorescent lights overhead is dying. Its beams spasm and contort with every erratic jolt of electricity flowing through its veins so that the patches of darkness under the hood of Bellamy’s eyebrows and the hook of his nose run rampant with the sputtering illumination. The clock overhead reads one o’clock.
His lips are pressed together so tightly that the fleshy beams of tendons running through his jaw are vividly perceptible. When he starts to speak, I can see them flex.
“You’ll be back,” he growls.
The sound of his voice is like a freezing cold claw swooping under my rib cage and scraping at my insides, stabbing through guts that shiver and shy from the predation. I shiver once, but stand my ground.
“You’ll be back and I’ll be waiting.”
For the first time since we began talking, Bellamy smiles. I have never before seen a grin so devoid of warmth. It freezes and chills and makes my spine twist in place, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention like icicles. I back out the door slowly, never looking away from him until I am safely outside his office. As soon as I am out, I bolt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I can almost hear the invisible shackles crumbling from around me. I am walking down the street, bouncing merrily on the balls of my feet. Every time I step forward, I feel as if my body could disregard gravity altogether and take off into the air, soaring between the jagged antennae on top of the city’s buildings and flying pinwheels with the pigeon flocks. I haven’t felt like this since the day I left home.
The murky fear that always coats my skin and taints my tongue after an encounter with Bellamy is sloughing away with every stride. It's startling to think that he is actually gone from my life.
He’s gone, I tell myself. Actually. Finally. Permanently. Gone. I laugh out loud at the thought. A man in a boxy-shouldered suit gives me a strange sideways glance as he walks by, jabbering into a cell phone. I laugh again.
The wind is fresh and insistent on my cheeks. The blood against my temples is reminding me that my heart is pumping and my lungs are breathing and everything is moving forward as it should. I am leaving Bellamy’s – forever. I am going back to Garret’s. School, bills, stress – these things are afterthoughts, casually irrelevant, practically nonsensical. I weigh each of them briefly in my mind and discard them like unwanted wrappers. The wind picks the thoughts up and carries them away – Lord only knows where to.
I laug
h. The sun is bright today.
I wonder for a moment how I ever lived before this.
I survey my surroundings – hundreds of unfamiliar faces reveling in the throes of the same emotion, the same tumbling ecstasy that is swelling in me. The pitched ceiling arcs above us, swallowing the sound and sweat as it flows upward and outward in waves from the crowd. Hands pierce the air – raised fists that thrust and undulate in time with the music that pours from the monstrous speaker stacks. The speakers’ gaping maws, though restrained by intertwining mesh, stare out at the gathered masses hungrily.
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