The Pickup Line

by Louisa Trent

Not her! Swiveling, she sprinted for the exit.

  As she knew would happen, two steps later she was caught. Held against a hard body, an erection of awesome proportions branded her bare bottom. Very nice.

  “You're not going anywhere,” Lou rasped against her ear, his hands roaming her body. Pinching the ends of her breasts, kneading her belly, cupping her mons. Even nicer.

  “Fuck you,” she said succinctly, leg lifting to knee him.

  Before her target was met, the blow was deflected.

  Thank goodness! The very last thing she wanted was to render Lou incapable of performing.

  Her wrists were locked in the vice of his grip, forced behind her back.

  “Christ, your tits drive me crazy,” he said, as her reddened nipples jutted to the ceiling.

  While holding her wrists behind her back, he lowered his head and took one in his mouth. Bit it. Savagely.

  She'd wear the mark for days to come, she thought in victory as she was dragged away from the door.

  Her lungs on fire, her breasts heaving with the exertion of her sprint ... and with arousal ... Lou forced her down to the floor, onto her knees, then onto her back. Her wrists were wrapped in his leather belt. Manacled together, her arms were raised over her head. The leather belt was looped around the leg of the table, fixed there so she couldn't get away. All right-

  He stood over her, looking down upon her. “Open your legs.”

  Yes, yes, yes..."No!” she cried, all offended pride.

  “We can do this easy or hard. Your choice.”

  “Go to hell,” she spat, her knees glued together. Hard, hard, she wanted hard. Give it to me HARD.

  His neatly pressed white shirt was wrenched off, balled up, tossed. The creased trousers and standard white boxers went after the shoes and socks. Naked, he stepped between her legs and widened his feet; his positioning effectively pried her thighs apart until she was wide open to his gaze.

  “Your cunt is beautiful,” he whispered. “And I intend to fuck you the way you need to be fucked.”

  Finally! What took him so long?

  “Let me up! I don't want this,” she said all a-tremble, role playing at its finest.

  He lowered himself where he stood until he knelt naked between her splayed legs. Without preamble, fingers were pushed into her pussy.

  “You don't want me to fuck you? So why are you wet?”

  Duh. Because no mater how good she was at role playing, there were some somatic reactions that could not be kept secret.

  She was wet. Very wet. Her pussy was slick with sexual heat. And he knew it, dammit. He knew she was aroused.

  She fell back on maidenly denial. “No! No! If you do this, it's rape.”

  He shrugged. “So, it's rape. I used to be a cop. For years, I was a detective. I have a medal in a drawer that says I'm a fuckin’ hero. I'll get off light. Doing what I want with you will be worth any time I serve.”

  “Don't do this,” she said, trying to close her legs, but all the time thinking: Lou a cop? No wonder her wrists were so expertly cuffed!

  A hand smoothed down the inside of her thigh. “Where do you keep the lube for your casts?”

  Lest he correctly interpret her quivery vocal cords as lust, she refused to answer; she kept her gaze turned away lest he rightly translate her scalding tears as hot desire.

  “Easy or hard,” he said again. “Either way it's getting done.”

  Oh, God. Lou was so authoritative! She should have suspected that he was a former cop. Her body was actually vibrating in readiness.

  To distract him, she said, “The lube is above you. Top left-hand drawer.”

  “Stay right there. Don't go anywhere.”

  She blinked.

  Dominance and a black sense of humor too? Could a tied-up girl get any luckier?

  Now that Lou was otherwise occupied hunting down the tube of lube, she let her eyes roam his nude body.

  As an artist, the human form was no mystery to her. She painted and photographed and sculpted male nudes all the time. For heaven's sake! She did cast impressions of penises. And had always felt nothing.

  She felt something now. How could she not? Even on his knees—perhaps even especially on his knees-Lou was a fiercely masculine sight naked to behold. In a sort of mystical fascination, she watched that perfect reddish-purple specimen club the air almost a foot out from its black nest of curls at his groin. She'd held that hard male flesh in her mouth, and yet had no bruises on her throat, testifying to the superiority of Lou's control. How had he kept himself in check?

  He was not in check now. Thrilling.

  “The first time, just the knuckles,” he apprised her, lubing his hand.

  That said, sexually conservative Lou slowly sent his hand up between her legs to begin the fisted penetration.

  As the fingers of his hand pressed deeper between her open thighs, as he began to stretch her with his lubed fingers, a cry tore from her dry throat. She moaned as his fingers slipped in and out of her. Sobbed, as he closed his hand and she felt that fist against her opening.

  Oh, God. The pressure! The tremendous, awful, blissful pressure of those four large knuckles pushing into her.

  Her lips curled back. “It hurts,” she cried her pleasure.

  “Shh,” he soothed her. “It's almost done. Just a little more now. Next time will be easier.”

  Next time...?

  “Christ, Christ, Christ,” he recited, as he owned her with his hand and she wailed her surrender to him.

  Her thighs went taut as the orgasm built, and she heaved up off the floor, her separated legs bending at the knee, accepting the pained pleasure of those large knuckles inside the tight gate of her vagina.

  “Yes, Lou. Yes, Lou. Yes, yes, yes,” she screamed, the knuckles of his hand lodged inside her.

  * * * *

  “The scent of sex will linger long after the night is over,” Lou said, raising her hips and placing his jacket, silk lining up, underneath her.

  After the fisting, he'd let her rest, though not for long, and still woozy from her over indulgence of wine, she looked at him blankly, not comprehending what he meant.

  “That jacket might be all I'll have to sustain me in the weeks to come,” he explained, rising above her on his elbows, looking down into her face.

  She was moved, and trying to hide it, as he jack-hammered his hips and impaled her, burying himself deep, seating himself up high, the head of his penis knocking on her cervix. His cheekbone to her cheekbone, his pelvis to her pelvis, his testicles smashed between, shivers playing tag up and down her spine, he pushed and drove and plummeted her body.

  Her head crashed back against the floor, her skull thumping to the harsh rhythm of ungentle sex.

  “I can't wait. Your cunt, your cunt, your cunt is milking me dry.”

  The knowledge that he couldn't wait was enough to push her to the edge.

  He held off just long enough for her to get hers-even when out of control, he was a gentleman-and then drove up two more times. His body jerking, he came on a hot stream of semen.

  Still lodged deep inside, he growled, “Raise your legs around my back. I want into you all the way.”

  Helpless not to, dizzy, boneless, happy, and yes, hurting too, she did as he told her to do.

  Then.

  And then again.

  * * * *

  It was much later.

  She was on her belly now. Her wrists were no longer tied, but she was still very much Lou's prisoner. Enslaved by her sexual attraction to him, there was nothing she wouldn't do.

  “Talk to me, Blue,” her accomplice in unbridled lovemaking said. “Tell me what's going on.”

  “I don't know if I can,” she moaned into the black satin pillow, but wanting to, wanting to talk to Lou.

  “I love you,” he spoke quietly into her knotted hair as he opened her up in back.

  He loved her?

  After seeing her naked with another man, how could he tell her he loved her? H
ow could he say the words so easily, like he meant them, like the words wouldn't change, no matter what she did?

  He loved her!

  No man had ever said the words to her before, not even Gil. Though he had loved her, just not the way she wanted him to, not the way she needed him to love her. She had offered herself to him countless times, and in just the way Lou was about to take her now, and he had always refused.

  “Talk to me,” Lou ordered, rubbing a cool droplet of lube carefully into her anus with the tip of a finger.

  She got up on her elbows to make it easier for him to manipulate her back opening.

  What was there to say? Didn't her body say it all?

  Her body was lifting, her bottom cooperatively pushing back toward the finger that would enter her. Where was the need for words?

  “Come back a little more,” he instructed.

  Nodding, she rocked back on hands and knees, eagerly accepting the long digit he offered her. In and out the finger went as she moved back, then forward at his prompting.

  She was scented with cum, sticky with cum, her hair knotted and stringy with cum. Lou had held nothing back. Neither had she. Apart for those words he wanted her to speak.

  During the long night, neither of them had said much. Lou told her what he wanted her to do, and she had wordlessly complied. When he said he expected anal intercourse, she hadn't objected. And so now he would sodomize her. What more was there to say?

  He stilled her, held her hips steady, his penis replacing the finger between her buttocks. She bit her lips as he made a shallow probe between her raised cheeks.

  “Talk to me,” he coaxed, the wide head of his enormous sex prodding, pressing, pushing at her back opening.

  How could she speak the words? How could she tell him that in a crazed desperation, for six years she had ignored the female side of herself in order to make herself more attractive to the man she had loved but who could not love her in return? How could she explain that the boxers she wore were no political statement, that they were left over from a time when she had used them as an allurement? After all, she was tall, flat-chested, narrow-hipped, her bottom was tight, her face wasn't feminine; she could swear like a sailor. On her belly in the dark, how would Gillian know she wasn't one of his many male lovers? She was not opposed to pretense. What was the big deal and where was the difference?

  How could she tell Lou that she would have done anything to share a bed with Gil? How could she reveal the twisted pathology of those emotions to another?

  She began slowly, one halting, unfunny, truth at a time.

  “It wasn't how it looked, Lou. Jason was here to draw me. I was his model. He was only touching my leg to show me the pose he wanted. I never would have had sex with him. But then you arrived, and I ... and I wanted you to go berserk.”

  “Well, you succeeded. I have gone berserk.”

  “The way I've been behaving—What must you think of me?”

  “What I think is that I'm glad Pete is a vegan, glad I stopped by Sprout's Friday night, glad the place was so friggin’ crowded. I'm so glad I met you, Blue. I love you and I want you in my life.”

  “You can't mean that. You don't need a wrinkled mess like me in your life. You need somebody who's got it all together, or at least someone who's permanent pressed. I don't even own an iron. I don't use coat hangers,” she said somberly.

  “No?”

  “No. I hang my fuckin’ clothes on the floor.”

  “Boy, in the scheme of things, that's pretty serious.”

  “It's pink,” she said out of the blue.

  “What's pink?”

  “My favorite color. My favorite damn color is pink. Do you believe that? Me, liking pink? But I do. I like pink. Feminine, girly-girl pink. And lace. I adore lace. And occasionally I like to wear a dress.”

  “Okay.”

  “Spring is my favorite season. As to my favorite books and movies, I'll write you out a reference list.”

  Naked, on all fours, about to be anally penetrated, was probably not the best moment to make such a revelation to a man, but she thought that perhaps she could tell Lou about Gil now.

  She whispered the confession. “I was once involved in a love union.”

  “Okay.”

  “He was a gay man,” she panted.

  “Okay.”

  “His name was Gillian,” she continued. “I held him in my arms as he died.”

  Reaching beneath her doggie positioning, he squeezed the fall of a bruised breast as his penis relentlessly pushed between her buttocks.

  “Aids?” he asked.

  It was a common enough assumption. But Gillian had been a fanatic about practicing safe sex, and so that plague wasn't responsible for his death.

  “Gay men do die of other illnesses,” she said, defensively, though Lou didn't deserve it. “It was leukemia.”

  “I'm sorry for your loss, Blue. Gillian must have been a fantastic man for you to have loved him. I'm grateful to him.”

  “Grateful?”

  “Because he helped make you the woman you are now, the woman I love.”

  Jeremy had proved to her that sex could be good even when the emotional component of love was missing; Gillian had proved that love could be present even when sex was not. What would Lou prove to her?

  “I love you,” Lou said again.

  She didn't know if she could ever love someone again as purely as she had loved Gillian, but what she felt for Lou had a depth to it that brought tears to her eyes.

  “You can see how much I want you,” she told him, eyes stinging. “I'm totally naked here and I wanted to be totally honest too. Honesty is so important-” Her voice drifted away, then came back strong. “My head isn't on straight right now and I don't know if I can make you any promises.”

  A hot kiss was placed on her nape. “I don't expect you to decide anything right now. I'll wait. No promises needed.”

  There was no more talk after that; there was only wordless honesty as Lou pushed forward to make that sweet and forbidden entry.

  Screaming, as though each of them were wounded, they both came apart.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “That's it. All packed,” Blue said, tossing her last pair of jeans into her knapsack, closing the flap, and hefting the canvas bag onto her back.

  Lou walked her out the door, through the hotel lobby to the parking lot.

  “You know, I think you were right,” he said.

  Her heart stalled. “About what?”

  “About this truck you drive. She is a shitbox.”

  She felt like laughing in relief; she felt like crying too. And that's why she had to leave. Her head was all messed up, and until she could get it together, she couldn't stay.

  Lou's hand was on her shoulder, tight on her shoulder. His tension was tangible, and she hated that she was the one hurting him.

  “I can't stay, Lou. There's something I need to do. Something I haven't been able to do.”

  “It's okay, Blue. I understand. You'll come back to me. I know you will.”

  Then he knew more than she did! In an unfeeling adherence to honesty, she'd given him no assurances that he'd ever see her again.

  He pressed something ... a letter ... into her hand.

  “My address. And phone numbers, at work, at home, my cell,” he said. “I won't search you out. I won't hunt you down. I know you need your freedom. But call me, would you, so I know you're all right?”

  “Yes. I'll call.”

  “You'd better. You've got my heart, Blue. You'll carry it with you wherever you go. I love you.”

  She nodded, but she didn't say the three words back.

  “I'll be here waiting until you return.”

  She sniffed back the tears that threatened to fall and kept her laugh of relief to herself. “You're so sure I will?”

  “I'm sure of you,” he opened the door of her beat-up pickup and helped her inside, though she needed
no such help.

  They didn't kiss goodbye.

  She gunned it. Got the hell out of Fenton, driving south fast, and kept driving. Through the day, through the night. For the next three days she drove, stopping only for nature trips and something fast to eat, until exhausted, she reached Key West.

  She hadn't stepped inside her studio since Gil's death, couldn't face the walls.

  Trembling, crying, she faced the walls now.

  She had started her art career as a portrait painter. And she'd been a damned good one too. Gifted, she was told, as she had the knack for not only capturing her subject's physical presence, but also his or her soul.

  Lining the walls of her studio were finished and unfinished studies, all done of Gillian.

  He was such a physically attractive man, but his soul! God, his beautiful soul! His lovely spirit is what had drawn her, what had held her, what had compelled her to love him.

  One by one, she looked at all of the portraits, every last canvas, feeling the comfort of Gillian's beautiful soul envelop her as she told him goodbye.

  * * * *

  Lou had only just hung up the phone-Pete's weekly duty call to his old man-when the damn phone rang gain.

  What? Was that his kid calling back to say he had changed his mind and now he wasn't coming home for the holidays after all, that he was going off to his new girlfriend's house instead?

  It would kill him not to have his son with him, but Pete was becoming a man, and his dad had to let him go, Lou thought, facing the inevitable as he picked up the phone. “Oh, Ruiz!” he chuckled into the receiver, relief swamping him. “I thought you were my kid there for a sec. What! Hey, hold on! Why now? The club is closed tonight. Who let her in?”

  Lou shouldered the phone, reached for his tie, slipped it on around his neck. “You did? Okay. Okay. Since you're vouching for her, I'll give her an audition. But she better be as good as you say she is.”

  Lou checked his watch. “Pour her a cup of something, and I'll be there in ten minutes or so.”

  Why not give the dancer an audition? He had nothing better to do tonight anyway, except eat another lonely microwave dinner and playback the memory of Blue in his mind for the millionth time.

  Three months. That's how long she'd been gone. And he hadn't talked to her directly. Oh, she called him once a week, just like she'd promised. Messages left on his answering machine at The Pink Flamingo. She had a real knack for calling on his day off; it was almost as though she knew his schedule and timed her phone calls accordingly...