by Kari Gregg
"No, it really is a woman this time," Mitch said, chuckling, "but our relationship isn't a marrying kind of thing."
His partner snapped elastic around the file to close it. "Does she know about—?" Artie nodded at the door, where their employees outside waited to be divided up to work that day's contracts. Artie knew Mitch liked to keep his personal life private so he wouldn't go into detail where the men might hear. Instead, Artie scuffed his work boots into the carpet. "You know. Does she know about it?"
Mitch frowned.
Did she know about what?
That he'd run away from home when he was fourteen?
Yeah. Liv knew that.
That he'd whored himself to put food in his stomach and an occasional roof over his head until Artie had yanked him off the streets two years later?
Uh . . . no.
About Rita and Gary?
Hell no.
His sexual kinks?
He settled on the last. The easiest. "Liv hasn't run from my bed screaming yet." Granted, he'd reigned in his whoremones so far, started her out slow. The free show he'd given his neighbor in the parking lot, a little light bondage, the gentle initiation of his cock in her ass. He'd even hung curtains in his apartment when she'd asked, but she hadn't protested that he never drew them shut. Maybe she was as hopeful as he that Sam would spy them fucking again. He needed to step up the pace with Sam, get that ball rolling. Liv was ready. There was no doubt in Mitch's mind that she'd take two men between her legs with little to no hesitation.
Livvy, he'd come to surmise, regarded him as her sexual liberation. Mitch was more than happy to comply.
He pushed his chair back, snagged his hardhat from the desk, and climbed to his feet. "She knows."
Artie stilled, his hand frozen on the doorknob. He turned his head. He focused wide eyes on Mitch. "You told her?"
Mitch snatched his own expandable file, stuffed with the jobs he'd assign and the ones he'd work personally, from the desk. "Yeah. So?" His partner pivoted on one heel, now blocking the door and Mitch's escape.
"What about the rest?"
He didn't want to talk about Liv anymore. He slung his hardhat onto his head.
"Our employees are waiting."
"Your record, your stepmother—"
Mitch's temper flashed. "Liv doesn't need to know that crap."
"She didn't need to know you think a guy's butt is cute, either," Artie pointed out. Mitch clenched his teeth. "She has a right to know my sexual history." Especially, since he was still fucking her bareback.
"That's a first. I think Andrea's the only one of your women who knew you were the least bit bent in bed and the only reason you told her that much is because, deep down, you knew she didn't give a shit." Artie snickered, clapped a hand to Mitch's shoulder. "Bring this Liv around to supper. Barb will want to meet her."
"It's just sex." Mitch yanked away from him. "Nothing serious."
"Anybody who puts that gleam in your eye isn't just sex. And telling a woman that you pitch for both teams?" His partner's eyes shone with pity. "Son, it don't get more serious than that."
Chapter Eight
Artie's ungentle pushing ate at him all day and when he got to Gary's, the son of a bitch had hocked his Ativan. Rita was long gone, boozing it up on her share of the cash, so Mitch found his father drunk, crying, and laying in his own piss. It hadn't improved Mitch's mood.
He'd cleaned Gary up, called his oncologist, and bartered for replacement pills with the promise of round-the-clock care to make sure the drugs went into Gary instead of a street punk's pocket. Mitch already stretched every dollar to absorb the cost of his father's day nurses. Next up: his 401K.
What the hell?
Why not?
He'd be able to retire someday.
He played the lottery, didn't he?
Mitch laughed, a hard bitter sound that jerked Liv's gaze to him. "What?"
"Nothing."
Her eyes narrowed.
His mouth twisted to a smile. "I've had a crap day and Gary didn't help." He kissed her frowning lips. "Don't worry about it."
They'd made it to his apartment late, not only because he'd been on the phone with a list of private nurses to arrange babysitters for his father. Liv had also spent most of the night helping her little sister haul heavy garbage bags and pieces of broken furniture to the end of her driveway. Mitch hadn't heard screaming. An old fight then, one Liv had missed. Thank God. Clearing the debris had grooved worry lines around her soft mouth and her eyes had dulled with soul-deep weariness when she'd turned to him.
Liv was hurting. Bad.
She didn't need Mitch's shit, too.
"Maybe I want to worry about it." She shifted in his arms. "Maybe I—" She rested her cheek on his chest. "Never mind."
They were both tired. Once they'd reached his apartment . . . the sex had been outstanding. It always was. Mitch's scalp still tingled with the intensity of his orgasm and his shoulder stung where she'd dug her fingernails into him when she'd come. But neither one of them'd had the energy to be creative. Not then. Instead, he'd kissed her, tumbling her back on his bed. Rose up over her. Covered her.
They usually talked after sex. About Liv's dad, her sister. Gary's cancer. Who else were they going to talk to? The people they worked with? Friends? They didn't know what it was like, how it felt. Not really. They hadn't lived it—lived with it—not like he and Liv had, every day.
"Gary gave Rita some of his medicine to sell on the street because—and I'm quoting here—he ran out of cigarettes."
She grimaced. "You thought that was funny?"
"No." Mitch snickered. "Cashing in my retirement to hire nurses to baby sit that asshole seems pretty fricking hilarious, though. All things considered." Her gaze darted to meet his. "You have a sick sense of humor."
"Tragic irony." He closed his eyes. "It's laugh or cry, babe. I'd rather laugh." She lifted off his chest. Her hair trailed over his skin as she scooted off the bed. He listened to her feet pad to the bathroom, the rush of water from the faucet. Liv showered in the morning, but she cleaned herself up before settling down for bed. Scrubbed the makeup off her face, brushed her teeth.
Exhaustion sapped him, weighing down his limbs and pulling him toward sleep. He didn't fight it. The sounds of Liv moving around his place, the familiarity of it, soothed his ragged edges. "Did you get the raise?" he called to her. Liz had been up for her annual review on Monday. Mitch had helped her work off her nervous energy last weekend, and boy, wasn't the memory of that enough to make his dick twitch.
"Only ten cents an hour. Mr. Swanson said the economy hit the practice hard." Mitch grunted.
Economy, his ass.
People divorced and fought over their kids whether they had the money for it or not. As far as Mitch was concerned, getting ugly and mean when things fell apart was an essential facet of human nature. A shitty economy would only make people meaner.
"You could look for a job with another lawyer. Experienced paralegals make more than what Swanson's paying you." Mitch knew. He'd asked around. "He should be contributing to your IRA, at least."
"Mr. Swanson hired me when nobody in their right mind would pay a Winslow to do more than suck cock," she said from the door. "He took a chance on me when no one else would. I owe him."
He sighed.
Yeah, Mitch knew all about those kinds of debts. He opened his arms and Liv crawled beside him in bed. She turned off the lights.
"My partner wants to meet you."
He knew it was a mistake by the immediate stiffening of her body. "He thinks you're after my money. I reminded him that, thanks to my last divorce, I don't have any money. I told him that you want me for sex, but he doesn't believe me. Says I'm that not good." He smiled, though his gut clenched and his mind scrambled at how to smooth it over. "I thought about giving him an interesting website to visit to prove him wrong. The pictures are free. Watching the video would cost him twenty bucks, though." He squeezed her in his arms, pra
ying to God the glib charm would disarm her. "He's so cheap; no way he'd fork over the twenty so there's no hope for it. You'll have to meet Artie and convince him that I'm your slut."
She reared up over him, jaw gaping. "You have a porn flick on the 'net?" Thank God his kink so easily distracted her. "I didn't know I was launching my film career at the time." He chuckled. "The pictures are fantastic. Want to see?" She blinked her wide eyes at him. "Maybe. Is it weird? What you're doing in the pictures?"
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Liv knew him that well. Already.
Mitch grinned. "What do you think?"
Her eyes snapped shut. "You have no filters, do you? No shame." Mitch climbed from the bed, fetched his laptop from the dresser. "I'm not ashamed of having a good time or giving a good time to whoever I'm with." Sprawling across the bed, he booted up the laptop. "These were taken at a private party ten—no, thirteen—years ago." Mitch clicked through to the file, opened it. With the tap of a few keys, the slideshow started.
He smiled as Liv stared at the first photo. The camera had caught Mitch's lean, summer-tanned body as he'd bent over a man, fish-belly pale and fifty pounds overweight. The man's light brown hair had thinned on top, his face hidden in the chaotic red curls of the twig-thin woman beneath him. Bob and Elaine. A married couple in the next town over, they'd often picked Mitch up for extra play in bed. Before Artie had saved him.
When Mitch had still sold himself as a whore.
Mitch remembered his fierce gratitude for the repeat business, but Bob and Elaine hadn't just kept his stomach fed. They'd taught him to enjoy what they did to him and to each other. To embrace it. Hell, as an adult, Mitch understood now that teaching a fresh-faced fourteen year-old boy to love whoring for them had been part of Bob and Elaine's kink, but he was grateful, anyway. None of his other johns had cared if he liked what they did to him, if he got off on it. Bob and Elaine had insisted. No cash until Mitch came. That was the rule. Their only one.
When Mitch ran into them again at seventeen, his whoring days had been over. He'd still slept in a shed in Artie and Barb's back yard and he hadn't trusted them with his last name yet. But his belly was always full. He'd stopped expecting Artie to beat or bang him. He'd begun to want the life Barb and Artie were offering him, had started to trust it.
He'd still followed Bob and Elaine home when they'd asked him, though. He'd stayed the weekend and Artie had told him in later years that disappearing like that had scared him and Barb to death. Until Mitch had finally wandered home, sore, hurting and stinking of sex, they'd thought he'd returned to his old ways, that they'd lost him for good. But Mitch hadn't gone back to whoring.
That time, he'd fucked for free.
In the picture, Elaine crouched on all fours in the center of the couple's rec room, the furniture pushed aside. Bob had mounted her. Liv wouldn't be able to see the guy's cock lodged hard and thick in Elaine's ass, but Mitch remembered. He remembered all of it.
Especially the belt.
The camera had picked up the first pink stripe glowing on Bob's pale, dimpled ass. The furtive photographer had snapped the shot when Mitch had raised his arm, muscle already building. He'd doubled the thick leather strap of the belt around his fist and it trailed in a wide arc as his arm had swung. His lips had curled back over his teeth, his eyes glittering with the feral arousal Bob and Elaine had taught him.
"Don't come," he'd told Bob. "Don't you dare come." In the background, a handful of people in various stages of undress watched the twosome crouched on the floor. One had taken the snapshots. Later, most of them had joined in.
Liv gasped at the next shot, a close up of the belt striking Bob's fleshy butt cheek. Whoever had created the montage had inset a sharp focus of Bob's face, the pleasurepain that caused his eyes to squint, the gaping maw of his mouth as he'd groaned when the strap of leather had landed.
"You whipped him?" Liv said, flashing stunned dark eyes at him. "With a belt?" Mitch nodded. "Bob liked welts that made sitting comfortably impossible." He'd taken a great deal of pleasure in beating those same welts into Mitch's fourteen year-old ass, too. "He wanted a reminder that lasted a couple days." When the picture dissolved into the next, she jerked her attention back to the laptop screen.
This one focused on Mitch. The camera had captured him studying Bob's abused ass, cheeks now glowing a fiery red. His young face had sculpted to a mask of intense concentration as he'd leaned in to slide the punishing length of leather across the welts he'd inflicted. Mitch's hand had dipped to distractedly stroke his own cock, which had hung hard and heavy in the V of his legs.
Liv squirmed in the bed sheets.
Mitch arched an eyebrow.
The next shot showed Mitch crouched next to Bob and Elaine. Mitch could clearly see Bob's fingers buried in his wife's cunt, the pleasure etched on Elaine's face as her husband fingered her. Mitch's hand had reached out to rub the red marks he'd beaten into Bob's thighs. The older man had looked over his shoulder—
"He's crying," Liv said.
Mitch noted her beaded nipples, the rosy flush that had swept over her nude body, the shallow breaths she pushed past her parted lips.
"He begged me to fuck him."
The next picture showed Mitch lining his condom-covered prick to Bob's puckered hole, the belt still clenched in his tight fist.
Liv's eyes snapped shut.
Mitch tapped at the keyboard, freezing the scene.
She stiffened when he danced his hand over her thighs. "This is where I'd beat you," he said, rubbing her tender skin between his fingers. "I'd bring the belt down until your thighs burned like an inferno. Until you cried so hard, you didn't have the breath to beg me to stop. I'd spread you. And fuck you. Every thrust excruciating, each slap of my hips against your thighs sweet agony."
She shivered. "Why did he let you do that to him? Why would he want you to?" Mitch's lips curved. She wanted to shift the attention to Bob, didn't want to acknowledge the arousal that heated her body at the unabashed kink, but Mitch wouldn't allow her that subterfuge. No. Not when he was as open and eager for it as she was rapidly becoming.
"Beating you will reduce you to raw emotion. You won't be able to think. You'll disconnect from every thought, every inhibition, every rule you ever believed should limit you. You'll be a bundle of crude, primitive instinct." He pinched her thigh between his fingers, unsurprised at her gasp or the red mark his fingers left on her skin. "Pain makes your pleasure sharper. Your orgasm will be so powerful, so overwhelming. You'll be consumed by it."
When her lashes lifted, Mitch nodded to the laptop. "Click on play," he said, then spread her legs wide.
"I don't want you to use a belt on me." Her hands skipped across the keyboard. Mitch settled his head between her thighs. "You will." He licked her.
She moaned.
"Watch the slide show." He opened his mouth over her clit, sucked it inside. Her spine bowed.
The crack of his palm striking her thigh rent the air, followed by her startled scream.
Mitch knew the images on his computer had shifted. When he'd found the slide show, he'd watched it until each shot had etched into his memory. His grasp like a vise on Bob's shoulder to force his older, softer body down on his cock as he rammed into his ass, as deep as Mitch could go, until the head of his cock pounded Bob's prostate. Bob's tear-streaked face when he matched each brutal stroke, using the force of Mitch's thrusts to jam his own dick into his wife's asshole. The indescribable joy that washed over Elaine's face as she took the vicious fucking.
Liv buried her hands in Mitch's hair, pushing his mouth into her cunt. He slapped her again.
She yipped in pain.
Her fingers stiffened, splayed.
He ran his tongue over her clit, worked her pink folds with his lips. Crack!
Her ass jerked, yanking her drenched pussy from his mouth. He wrenched her back, buried his face in her cunt.
And smacked her stinging thighs again.
Li
v yelped, her hips wriggling in earnest now, but Mitch held her immobile for his licking and sucking. "If you want me to stop, if you genuinely want me to stop, yell red. That's your safe word, babe. Red," he said, then dipped his chin so he could lap at her pussy lips. "Say it," he growled against her steaming hot hole. "Red." She shuddered. "Red."
He reared back, settled on his haunches, his cock proudly jutting between his bent knees.
Stared at her.
Hard as a brick, hurting with how badly he wanted her, he stared. And waited. Waited for her to understand the power of her safe word, to know that nothing would happen that she didn't want.
Liv gulped, but lifted her hand toward him.
Mitch shifted out of reach. "Tell me what you want me to do to you, Liv." She bit her lip. "Lick me."
His heart thumped hard in his chest. "And?"
She shook her head no, but her eyes screamed yes.
Hot arousal gripped him by the balls and made his hands shake when he crawled back between her thighs, several red marks already marring the creamy white skin. "Remember your safe word, honey," he said, bending his head to her pussy. "Red. Red means stop."
"Yes," she breathed, arching her hips to his mouth.
Mitch lapped at her engorged clit.
Raised his open hand.
And brought it down on her splayed thighs.
She jerked, whimpered.
He licked at her.
Lifted his hand.
She shrieked when the blow landed, reflexively closed her legs. Mitch shoved them wide, uncomfortably wide. "You keep them open, Livvy. Don't move a fucking muscle. No matter what. Got it?"
Panic sheened her eyes.
Her head jerked to a nod.
He stared into her eyes, watched them darken with fear—and heat—as she watched his hand rise.
He brought it down hard on the reddening skin of her tender left thigh, harder than he'd smacked before. His palm stung at the intensity of the blow. Her eyes glistened.
His cock hardened to steel.
He slapped her right thigh with the same harsh strength.
The resounding crack of his hand striking her vulnerable flesh echoed in the bedroom.