Big Daddy

by Ava Sinclair

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  He turns me to him and smiles. “Something wicked.”

  “What?”

  He picks me up, carries me to the end of the long table opposite where we had our dinner. My clit is throbbing madly. I’m writhing as he lays me down. He removes my apron, reaches for the neckline of my dress, ripping it down and off. The bra follows. I look down to see my destroyed clothes lying on the floor. He’s looming over me, his cock rock hard from where it peeks between his shirttails. He’s removed his pants and now the shirt follows as I watch.

  I’ve never been so excited, so anxious to be touched. The alien pressure in my bottom combines with the hot, throbbing sensation concentrated at the apex of my cleft. I’m only wearing my Mary Janes when he spreads my legs.

  Max flicks my clit and a jolt of sharp pleasure pain shoots through my pussy. The flick is followed by a gentle caress. I raise my hips to his hands.

  “Who do you belong to?” he asks. “Who takes care of you, protects you? Who keeps you safe?”

  “You,” I say. “Only you.”

  He leans over, stares into my face.

  “I’ll never leave you,” he says. “I promise.” The intensity of his vow takes my breath away. I wait, wondering if he’s about to tell me he loves me, but then shoves his cock inside of me, driving away all thought. My engorged, throbbing clit combined with the fullness in my bottom and pussy is too much. I immediately tip over the edge, crying out helplessly as he thrusts. The orgasms come in waves, and each time I’m pulled under, I hear his words of encouragement.

  “That’s my girl. Yes, that’s my girl. Come for me, Jill. Come for me.”

  I come until my body wilts from exhaustion and I sink, whimpering, back onto the surface of the table. At some point, he came, because I can feel his seed spilling out of my body. I turn my head to the side. On the counter, the cake I made still sits on the glass stand, uncut. It’ll have to wait. I’ve had all the dessert I can handle.

  Chapter Ten

  He’s taking me to an art gallery, to see ancient Grecian art. I’d awakened to prepare for another day of studying and doing whatever else I liked, only to have Max ask me if I’d like an outing.

  I’d smiled. Of course I would. I love art, and as excited as I am to see the collection, I’m equally excited that he’s taking me out with him. In public.

  The Warren Art Museum is a sprawling block building, its plain design misleading when one considers the treasures it holds. It boasts a massive collection of paintings and sculpture, and regularly hosts traveling exhibits like this one.

  This exhibit is elaborate, with a model ship surrounded by rectangular pedestals holding pieces of art from ancient Greece. I’m especially attracted to a cracked vase and am reading the label with Max when a curator walks over.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s from archaic Sparta.”

  “The Spartans were interesting people,” Max says. “They sent their sons away at seven to be trained for military service.”

  “Made them strong,” the curator says.

  “Strong,” Max says. “And probably angry.” He nods to the curator and takes me by the arm, leading me from the room.

  There’s more pottery here, too, and bronze sculptures. He seems agitated, and I can’t determine why, but calms down when we’re arrive in front of a sculpture of a horse. We walk from piece to another. Max gives me the history on some of them, and I surprise him by displaying my own art knowledge. I took a lot of art courses in school, and I can tell he’s impressed.

  “You’d like Greece,” he says. “I know a place where you can dive for artifacts. It’s…”

  He stops in midsentence, staring, and I follow his gaze to where he’s looking and nearly gasp. It’s her. She’s walking toward us.

  “Max,” she says. “We need to talk.” She glances at me. “Alone. Please.”

  Max looks down at me. “Go to the café, Jill. I’ll wait for you there.”

  I step back, and she starts talking again, distracting Max so that he doesn’t look back to see if I’m obeying his command. I know I should, but I don’t. I want to know who she is, this woman I photographed. I want to know what she means to him. I want to know whether the life I’m coming to love is an unsustainable fantasy.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Lydia?” he’s asking, his tone low and livid. “Are you stalking me? Do I need to get a restraining order?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic.” She crosses her arms. “I’ve not called you, or come to your office. But you will talk to me. So I’m asking you one last time, and yes, I did follow you in here because this is the one place you won’t yell at me.” She has a deep, husky voice, the kind that’s sexy even when she doesn’t mean for it to be. “Please,” she says. “This must be resolved, for the sake of closure. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”

  “Closure,” he asks. “For you or for him, Lydia?”

  “He’s sorry, Max. He never meant to hurt you. Please.” Her eyes dart at him. “If you would just talk to him, you’d see.” Her eyes move to me. “Who’s this?”

  Max looks back then. “I thought I told you to go to the café!” His tone is harsh. He looks back to the woman named Lydia. “As far as you’re concerned, she’s nobody. Nothing I do is any of your business, understand? Or his. So tell him to fuck off.” He turns away, glancing back at the woman named Lydia for a parting shot. “You two deserve each other, you know.”

  “Fair enough,” she says. “But it’s only a matter of time before you open the newspaper and feel regret—and you will, Max—just remember that I tried.” She pauses. “I did care about you, you know. I always have. I’m sorry you won’t accept my apology. Or his.”

  Tears glitter in Lydia’s eyes, and her voice is shaking with barely controlled emotion as she turns away.

  But Max is still angry, and now he turns that on me. “I told you to leave,” he seethes, but I’m too hurt to move. Did he just refer to me as nobody?

  I don’t move. “Who is she, Max?”

  “She’s nobody. And we’re leaving.” He takes hold of my arm, but I pull away.

  “So we’re both nobodies?”

  “This is not the time or the place, young lady,” he says. He grows quiet. “Go to coat check and get your coat. We’re leaving.”

  And now I realize the price of my dependence, because I have no choice. Not really. I don’t want to leave with him, not after the way he dismissed me. But I don’t want to make a scene in the museum, where even our soft-spoken exchanges are starting to draw irritated glances.

  I trail him to the coat check, seething. This morning when I’d put on my soft white cashmere sweater, tweed skirt, white tights, and loafers, I’d felt cute, submissive. I was still basking in the glow of last night’s sex. I’d felt loved. Now I feel unsteady again, unnerved.

  He says nothing on the way home. He’s brooding as the car navigates through traffic, his handsome face grim. He doesn’t speak as we exit the car. Once we’re out, his hand stays on my lower back, propelling me toward the elevator, and he’s silent here, too. Only when we’re inside does he finally address me.

  “Go to your room, Jill.”

  “No.”

  It’s the first time I’ve openly defied him.

  “What?” He’s incredulous, but I’m upset.

  “You hurt my feelings, Max.”

  “Good lord, Jill…”

  He turns away, and I walk around to face him. “You did!”

  “It wasn’t my intention.”

  “Who is that woman?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “It is,” I say.

  “Why?” he asks. “Why, Jill? I give you everything you need. What does it matter?”

  “Because the one thing you promised me above all else is security, but how can I be secure after something like that?”

  “After seeing me have one run-in with someone you don’t even know?” he asks.


  “It’s not the first time I’ve seen you with her.”

  He grows quiet. “What do you mean?”

  I look at my shoes. “A few weeks ago. When I was out with the camera. I was shooting across the lake. I swear, it was an accident, but I saw you through my long lens. I saw you come out of a restaurant with a maroon awning.”

  “Jesus…” He runs his hands through his hair. “You fucking spied on me?”

  “I wasn’t spying!” I say. “And what if I was?” Tears sting my eyes. “You’ve pulled all the secrets out of me, Max. Every one. You told me last night that you didn’t take advantage of my body when I was drunk, but you did take advantage of me! You took advantage of my mind. But every time I ask you about your life, your past, you change the subject! How can I be secure when you keep yourself locked away?”

  “Listen, young lady,” he says.

  “Don’t call me that,” I reply, shaking my head. “Don’t pull the daddy card on me just to shut me up.”

  “You don’t get to choose,” he says, walking over to me. But I’m too upset to be afraid.

  “I disagree,” I say. “If you get to pick and choose when you act like the kind of daddy who gives me real security, then I can decide when I’m your little girl.” I’m surprised when he sighs and steps back, but I’m more surprised that I found the strength to confront him.

  “Look,” I continue. “I’m not trying to pry. I promise. And maybe I have no right to ask you about this, Max. Maybe I’m assuming too much about our relationship, and if this is just temporary for you, then it makes sense that you’re keeping me locked out. But if we have something real, and you want me… really want me, then I want to know if there’s an unresolved relationship in your life. Obviously, this Lydia was your lover, and whoever she betrayed you with was important too, or else…”

  “Lover?” He interrupts me, an expression of incredulity on his face. “That, young lady, is why we don’t assume.” He shakes his head. “Lydia isn’t a former lover, she’s my father’s wife.”

  Chapter Eleven

  How could I have missed the signs? In retrospect, I realize it’s because I was so immersed in my own reality that I failed to see the parallels—the failed past relationships he alluded to, the flashes of anger, the attempts to erase or forget the past…

  I’m not the only one with daddy issues. Max has them, too. The son of a sickly mother and overbearing father, he grew up lonely, a child in a gilded cage with everything but love. When his mother became critically ill, his father—wanting to be spared the hard questions children ask about death—packed him away to a boarding school in his native France while he remained in America. Max learned of his mother’s death via the principal, who had the awkward task of telling him that there would be no funeral, because his father found such observances pointless.

  Still, Max begged to come home, and as his secrets spill out, I find myself aching for him in ways I didn’t know were possible. He wanted to go home, to go to her room, he says, to touch her things. If nothing else, he wanted to take her clothes and hold them to his nose and inhale her scent. He’d loved her, and she’d loved him. He knew she hadn’t wanted him to be sent away, and the last time he’d seen her, she’d cried and cried and would not tell him why. He says afterwards he realized it was because she knew his father was about to separate them. To this day, he says, it still torments him.

  He was a good student, but in his adolescence, he became sullen, aggressive, and angry. He was expelled from one French school, and then another. His father finally shipped him home to the states, where he was put in military school and encouraged to channel his anger and aggression into sports. There, Max experienced a growth spurt, and on the football field learned to be a leader. He rarely saw his father, and when he did, he remained cold and remote.

  Eventually his father remarried and he was invited home at the behest of his new stepmother, Lydia, who was hoping to get her husband to reunite with his son. By then, Max tells me, he was a muscular twenty-year-old. His new stepmother, at twenty-five, was a trophy wife only five years his senior.

  “I didn’t want to like Lydia,” he tells me. “I felt like it would be disloyal to Mom. But she was kind, and we actually became friends.”

  But the friendship of his young wife and handsome son was perceived as a threat by Max’s father.

  “I never realized how insecure he was until that fateful day,” he tells me, describing how he finally broke with his father for good.

  His father had berated Max over something he couldn’t remember now, and Max had left the room and gone to the parlor, where he’d knocked over a chair in frustration. Lydia, hearing the noise, came in and asked him what was wrong. Max, upset, had begun to cry.

  “It was the first time I’d cried since my mother’s death,” he says. “But I was so overwhelmingly sad and frustrated. I was ashamed to be showing emotion in front of Lydia, but she hugged me. Then… my father walked in.”

  Max tells me his father accused him of trying to ‘steal’ Lydia, and refused to believe their denials. An argument ensued that ended with a permanent rift between father and son.

  “He threw me out. Disinherited me,” Max says. “If I hadn’t channeled my anger into sports, I’d have been sunk, but I had a full ride scholarship. I studied business, and a few years playing pro ball just out of college gave me enough money to start a business when I was permanently sidelined with an injury. I inherited my father’s penchant for success, but nothing more.”

  All these years, he says, he’s resented Lydia for staying with the father he grew to hate so fiercely that he legally changed his last name in his last year of college to Iver, his mother’s surname.

  So much makes sense now. Renee Beaumont, Max’s father, is dying, and apparently desperate to apologize. The letters, Max says, started coming several months ago when he was diagnosed with cancer. Max tore them up. Then the phone calls started; he had his number changed. Finally, Max’s father sent Lydia to make a personal appeal.

  “I’ve never told anyone this,” he says. We’ve been talking late into the day. The shadows are long coming through the windows of his penthouse, and I look around, seeing it with new eyes. It’s always been so sterile, so formal, like a picture from a magazine. Maybe there’s no feeling of home here because Max has no experience of home to draw on.

  “I’m sorry I pried,” I say, reaching out to take his hand.

  He shakes his head. “You aren’t the one who should be apologizing, Jill. You’re right; I have no right to keep my life closed to you after forcing you to expose yours.” He sighs. “And you’re also right to ask for clarification about our relationship. About what it is.”

  “And what is it?” I ask.

  “I’ve had three serious relationships, Jill. Each time it was with a woman who understood my need for dominance and control. The longest was with a young woman named Stacy. She was my first little one…”

  My heart clenches at this admission. I suspected I wasn’t the first, but still…

  “It’s a quirk in me that I’m attracted toward women who need what I offer, who can be with a man dedicated to control her environment so that she never gets hurt, to a man who wants to guide her. But I’m not perfect, and Stacy outgrew me. The man you’ve seen? The controlling, dominant man? It’s who I am. Not all women can live with my demands, my limits. I don’t have to end relationships, Jill. I don’t have to leave my lovers, because they leave me.”

  My eyes fill with tears and I move to put my arms around his neck.

  “Maybe,” I say, “we’re more alike than we realize. Maybe we are both so sure that the people in our lives won’t stay that we drive them away.” I pull him close. “Max,” I breathe into his ear. “Don’t drive me away. I won’t outgrow you. I need what you offer. I need you.”

  He turns his mouth to mine and kisses me. The kiss is gentle, and he stands, lifting me with him, and takes me to his bedroom. He moves over me, loosening his tie.

/>   “From now on,” he says, “my little Jill sleeps in my bed. And do you know why?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because I’m stepping up my game, baby. I’m going to make you feel safe not just on the outside, but in here, where it counts.” He taps his finger over my heart. “And just so there’s no doubt, I love you, baby. I don’t just love that you submit. I don’t just love that you make a mean chocolate cake. I don’t just love that you’ve got a spankable ass and are the most fuckable woman I’ve ever met. I love you for who you are.” He brushes a strand of hair out of my face. “Do you believe me, baby?”

  I nod, tears constricting my throat.

  “You know what I’m going to do now?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to make love to you, Jill. Again.” He kisses my forehead. “And again.” He kisses my nose. “And again.” His mouth connects with mine, and then our hands are everywhere, removing clothes, touching skin.

  This new gentleness is a turn-on, because I can still feel his power, feel how he’s controlling it just for me. I arch my back as his mouth finds my nipple. His hands slide between my legs, rubbing my clit. His huge cock is hard against my leg as his mouth moves up the column of my throat to my ear.

  “You’re mine,” he says, and my soul takes flight at the sound of the words.

  His. I like the sound of that.

  My legs go around his waist as he pushes his cock into a pussy that is hot, wet, and ready to receive him. He sits back to kneeling, pulling me to him. His eyes are locked onto mine. The tip of his thumb finds my lip. I suckle it as he rocks back and forth. I’m riding his cock, finding the motion along with him, moving with him. At this moment, we are equals. We are one. We are two abandoned people who have navigated our way from a lonely forest of emotions to find comfort in one another—him through dominance, and me through submission.