by Lila Younger
Each stroke leaves me gasping, pain and pleasure swimming together in an intoxicating cocktail of sensation. His pace is unrelenting, pushing deeper inside of me until I can take no more of him. He lifts one leg for leverage, opening me up to him further. His thrusts come hard and fast, the steady rhythm becoming erratic as he nears his finish too. I feel the pleasure compounding, more than I’ve ever experienced, until one touch onto my clit, and the ball inside of me releases entirely. I seize up, my vision exploding in stars. It’s like a volcano, an endless eruption of blinding hot pleasure that sweeps me away. My whole body squeezes tightly around his cock, and Logan grunts as he pushes into me one last time through my orgasm to his release.
I feel his whole body go rigid as he comes inside of me, filling me with warm seed that overflows and puddles beneath me. My whole body melts into the sofa, and I feel Logan collapse onto me, hot and sweaty and solid. He slowly pushes himself off of me, scooping me up.
“Where are we going?” I ask, content as a cat.
“The bedroom,” he replies with a grin. “There’s a lot more I’ve been wanting to do to you.”
Logan
“I should go,” Mikayla says to me. She’s stretched out luxuriously across my bed, her slender porcelain frame almost glowing against my dark sheets. She looks almost virginal as she sleeps on peacefully, but of course, I took care of that. I push the blanket lower down and trace a finger along her delicate spine, over the rise of her ass towards her pussy. Her skin is incredibly soft, like silk, and I can’t stop myself from touching her over and over.
“What’s the hurry?” I ask as I dip my head towards hers for a kiss.
“I’m hungry,” she says, kissing me back. “You weren’t kidding when you said you had takeout all the time. I didn’t even find milk in your fridge.”
“There’s wine.”
“As much as I would love to get drunk and stay here in bed with you all day, I got to eat. I’m a chef; we love our food.” She pulls away reluctantly. “You’re making it difficult.”
“Of course I am. You belong in my bed,” I growl. “Besides, it’s raining and you don’t have a car. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have someone come to us with food?”
“You only say that because you haven’t had my bacon carbonara,” she says.
“No I haven’t.” I look into her eyes, which looked almost green today. “You should make it for me. Tonight. I’ll drive you to the grocery store in fact.”
“So I have no choice but to come back with you?” she teases.
“Exactly.”
I don’t know what it is about Mikayla, but I’m not ready to let her go yet. But I can’t get enough of her. I want to show her everything, see the look of bliss on her face as I turn her on and make her come again and again. I’m getting hard just thinking about it.
“Come on,” I say, rolling out of bed and extending a hand. She takes it, and I pull her up, my hands dropping down to cup her ass and lift her, impaling her wet warmth onto my cock. I hear her gasp and it just makes me harder. “Let’s go take a shower.”
**********
It’s another hour and a half later by the time we leave, and even my stomach’s feeling pretty hollow. Mikayla directs me to one of the chic neighborhoods in the city, brimming with local boutiques and upscale apartments mixed in with older, single story homes. There’s a local farmer’s market here every weekend, and it’s one of her favorite places to stop for brunch, she tells me.
“They have these amazing omelets,” she says reverently. “Fluffy eggs and the freshest, quirkiest ingredients too. That’s the sign of a good chef you know, when they can make the perfect eggs.”
I’ve never heard anyone feel this intensely about anything. My previous girlfriends, if you could call them that, were mostly focused on money. How much they had, or their friends had. A few of them wanted to be models or movie stars, but beyond that, there wasn’t much. That’s probably why it never got beyond sex. It’s not going beyond sex here either, I tell myself, only half believing it. It can’t be. But I admired how excited Mikayla could be about her job, her passion. She’d found what she wanted to do, and here she was doing it. There’s something inherently admirable about a woman who isn’t afraid to do that. She catches me watching her intently and blushes.
“Sorry for going on and on,” she says.
“Don’t be,” I say. “I think it’s great that you’re this into food. You were definitely the right choice for the company. Have you always known you wanted to be a chef?”
“Since I was young. It wasn’t approved by my parents though. I got decent grades, and they thought that college would be a better bet. They wanted me to get an office job, something where I wasn’t standing all day working with my hands. I can’t blame them though. They worked really hard so I didn’t have to.”
“But you went for it anyways.”
“Yeah. I had a good friend who told me I had to try. She forced me to apply to culinary school even. Maybe you’ll be able to meet her sometime,” she says lightly.
Her eyes are on the road, scanning for a spot. Meeting friends would take things one step closer to a real relationship and I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Luckily I found a spot in that moment on the side of the road. I parked the car, grabbed the umbrella in my backseat, opened it up, and went around to Mikayla’s door. She smiled at me as she took my hand and got out. We walk together down the sidewalk and she points out various places to me. Clearly this is a neighborhood she knows well.
Most of the people on the sidewalk are moving towards the same place we are. The farmer’s market is held in a large, almost warehouse-like space. There’s got to be over a hundred shops here, and despite the rain, it’s full of people. Mikayla drifts toward a stall with a variety of honey products. The smell of food makes my stomach growl.
“Food first,” I say over the din. “Then we can look around.”
“Good idea,” she says. “This way.”
She leads me almost to the heart of the warehouse, where a large cluster of food stalls are set up. There are tables and chairs in a ring around them, chock full of people with their purchases. Lines snake out from the counters. My eyes jump from a classic French bakery piled high with pastries, to an Indian curry shop, to a Panini sandwich place, to a seafood stall. Mikayla leads me over to one of the corner stalls, which has more room for a tiny row of little tables.
“Here we go,” she says. “They get all their ingredients fresh from the market. Everything on the menu is good, I promise.”
“But the omelets are the best?”
“Definitely,” she says with a grin.
Mikayla waves to one of the girls behind the counter and chats while I go over the menu. I’m starving, and I figure I should follow Mikayla’s lead on food, so I go with the Colorado omelet. We order, and head straight for the tiny table at the very back.
“How did you find this place?” I ask.
“My very first teacher in culinary school told us to come, so we could see how real ingredients looked like, not the packaged, Styrofoam stuff in a supermarket. And I just kept coming. I spent a lot of time here after-” she paused for a moment, and something flickered in those light eyes that sent a surge of something like protectiveness though me. That couldn’t be it.
“After things got a bit hard for me. She’s not here today, but Carla, she’s the owner of this place, she’s like a grandma and she was really nice. Let me hang around even though the market packed up in the afternoon. I worked here for a bit too one summer.”
I skirt the sensitive topic even though I’m curious. Instead I steer the conversation towards what else Mikayla enjoyed here, and then towards recent movies and a popular band that’s touring here next week. Talking to Mikayla is easy, and I find myself enjoying her company. Our lunches together were this way too, but we were discussing work. I didn’t expect to find myself having so much fun with her.
Once we are done with our brunch, we grab coffees and wand
er the market. I couldn’t help it; my hands instinctively go to Mikayla’s waist, her back, that delicate curve of her body that gets the blood rushing to my cock. Tiny touches that I knew better to do, but I do them anyways. It is a damn good thing the farmer’s market is too busy for people to get a good look at my jeans. I’m finding it impossible to suppress my desire for her. I would have taken her back home then and there if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s introducing me to a few of the local suppliers for our new menu. It was good to meet these people, to listen to the work that they do to make their food as well as for their communities. It reassures me that this was the right direction to take with Red Canyon Steakhouse.
Mikayla asks her friends about what’s good and turns to me.
“Would you like lamb for dinner?” she asks.
“Lamb?”
“Well you said you wanted me to cook...” she pauses uncertainly. “They’ve got a lovely rack of lamb. I figured I could do a mint sauce too, maybe some potatoes on the side. But I don’t have to if you’re busy with work stuff.”
“It’s not that,” I assure her. I like that she wants me to stay this weekend. “I thought you were going to make bacon carbonara.”
“I can do that tomorrow night.”
I think of another twenty four hours with Mikayla, and it sounds good.
“Tomorrow night then,” I say. “And I’m holding you to it.”
What I think will be a quick ten minutes turns into a lot longer as she carefully selects her ingredients. Where I see just a slab of meat, Mikayla notices the marbling of the fat and the color of the meat. She presses mint between her fingers to smell for freshness. The dedication she takes with her food is fascinating and deeply admirable. She didn’t just say she cared about local, fresh food to get a job. She lived it. I can’t remember the last time I dated someone who wasn’t artificial. Mikayla’s like a breath of fresh air.
“Okay,” she says once she’s taken us around the market and picked up a few things for dinner. “I’m ready to go back if you are.”
I can see a smile tugging at her lips. She’s as excited as I am to go back.
“Good,” I say.
Taking her hand, I cut a path through the crowd. I don’t want to waste another second out here. Not when there’s so much more I want to do with her. We’re almost at the exit when my phone rings. I pull it out.
“Damn it,” I mutter. It’s Sean. I don’t want to deal with work. I want, for just one day, for the company to not be in a crisis. “Hold on a second Mikayla.”
I take a few steps before I hit the button to pick up the call.
“What is it?”
Sean gets right down to it. I listen for a minute, a tight fury building in my abdomen as he tells me what he’s found out.
“Thanks,” I say once he’s done. “I’ll come in right away.”
I slip my phone back in my pocket. Mikayla’s at a flower stall, bending down to smell a flower, her cloth bag bulging with the feast she is going to prepare for me tonight. I like the way she moves, easily and gracefully unaware of her own beauty. I’m surprised by just how reluctant I am to put her aside for work, yet another first. But there’s nothing for it. I need to get rid of the poison in my father’s company. Only then can I relax, and what? What else did I have in my life aside from work?
Mikayla?
Mikayla
Even though I’ve finished up with creating the new menu, work hasn’t stopped. There’s the next season to think about, plus extra menu items that didn’t make it into the relaunch, like desserts, appetizers, etc. But I haven’t been able to focus on any of that. It’s been almost three days since Logan and I talked. Not that I’m obsessively keeping track or anything, but of course I sort of am. After he got off the phone at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, he explained that something important had come up at work, something he’d been working on for a long time now. It was supposed to hopefully ensure that Red Canyon Steakhouse never got into the situation it is in now. So of course I told him it wasn’t a problem. I thought it would only take a day or two, but since then I haven’t gotten a chance to even see him. I guess that work thing he had must not be going well.
I toy with the idea of going to his office and seeing how he’s doing, but I stop myself. Sure we had a fantastic weekend, and sure it seemed like we were getting along great, but we are in no way a couple. I shouldn’t be trying to find him just to... what? Talk? See how he’s doing? Ugh. Not only am I a virgin in bed, I’m pretty inexperienced at dating too. Thinking about sex reminds me of how Logan made me come over and over in just one night. How the hell had I gone for so long without such mind-numbing pleasure? I tighten my thighs together. God, the last thing I need is to get turned on at work.
The minutes drag by until finally I can go. Another day without Logan. I grab my purse and decide to head over to Violet’s. I’m not in the mood to be all alone at home. I shoot her a text, stop by the liquor store for a bottle of wine, and head to her apartment.
“Hey-”
I walk through the door and flop onto the couch. She’s already got two wineglasses out, and I waste no time in pouring out a glass for me.
“Can we just order pizza tonight?” I ask.
She frowns and sits down, curling up in the armchair like a graceful cat.
“You’ve got it baaaaaaad,” she observes. “Did something more happen than just sex?”
“Well, there was a lot of it,” I say as I take another sip.
Violet sighs.
“Mikayla, you can’t just give away your heart to some guy after one night,” she says. “That’s not the definition of a rebound.”
“Can you even call it that when it’s been years since I broke up with Jake?”
“Yes. I can when you still haven’t properly processed it. You just shut down that part of your life completely.” Violet’s expression softened. “I know he hurt you, but that doesn’t mean that all men are horrid. You just came across a bad one.”
“Can you blame for avoiding them if I’m all worked up after just one night?” I shake my head. “The worst thing is, it’s not like he ever really led me on you know, to think that there would be something. I just need to get that through my brain. Anyways, lets order and put Netflix on. I’m ready to dive into a sappy movie and forget about Logan.”
“Sounds good,” Violet said. “The usual?”
Our usual was pepperoni, Italian sausage and olives. It’s my one guilty pleasure and concession to fast, processed foods.
“Yep. Let’s put extra cheese on top too,” I say, topping up my glass of wine.
Just then my phone rings. My heart jumps and I sit up, grabbing my phone way too quickly. Only this time, it actually is Logan. I almost decide to make him wait, but I’m crap at playing games like that. I hit the button and put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
His voice is rich and dark and sends my breathing into overdrive.
“Hi,” I say hesitantly.
“Mikayla. I’m sorry that what’s happening at work has dragged on for so long. But I was wondering if maybe tonight we could have that dinner you talked about.”
“Dinner. Oh! You mean the pasta? I-” I glance over at Violet, ready to say no, but she’s gesturing for me to go. “I would love to. How about six-” Violet holds up seven fingers. “Seven.” I frown at her, and she mouths the word shower.
“Seven sounds perfect,” Logan says. “I’ll be there.”
I end the call. Violet’s already tugging me out of the sofa and pushing me towards the door.
“You don’t have a lot of time,” she says. “You need to take a shower and do something with your hair.”
“Do I really look that bad?” I wonder. I check my reflection in the hallway. My hair’s definitely creased from being in a ponytail all day, but I don’t look terrible.
“Well, you could look better. This is only your second date. Plus seven gives you time to do a load if you don’t have any cl
ean, matching underwear.”
“Thanks for looking out for me Vi,” I say dryly. “You don’t think I should put some distance and cool off a little?”
She puts both hands on my shoulders and looks me in the eye.
“No. I think you’re finally putting yourself out there and it’s about time. Logan sounds like a nice guy. Just make sure you use protection and call me tomorrow morning, got it?”
**********
There’s a part of me that wishes that Violet had said eight so I could have more time to prepare. The first thing I do when I get back home is run around picking up everything and dumping it into the washing machine. The apartment might be airy and spacious in the kitchen, but it definitely lacks storage. It doesn’t help that I haven’t had time to go to Ikea to pick out some furniture, so all my stuff is either in boxes piled up or on the floor. Not exactly the sexy vibe that I’m going for. I dig out a candle that Violet gave me as a Christmas present a few years back. It smells nice at least. As soon as everything’s been shoved away, I run and take a shower, taking the time to really make myself look good.
But then comes the clothes, and I’m at a loss. It seems ridiculous to me to put on a dress to cook dinner, especially when it’s at home. He knows I’ve just come home from work, why would I put on something more uncomfortable? At the same time, I don’t want to wear what I normally wear- sweats and an oversize tee shirt I got from my last 5k race. After standing in front of my closet for far too long, I decide to go with a light maxi dress that I always got compliments on. Not that I routinely wear dresses, but hey, Logan doesn’t know that yet right?
With how much I had to do, I barely have pasta finished when he rings the doorbell.
“Hi, come in,” I say shyly, stepping back. “Sorry for the mess in here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
His eyes take in my body in my dress, and there’s an intensity to them that makes my heart stop beating. I want his strong hands all over me, but I can’t just lunge at the guy when he hasn’t even walked through my door.