Jahleel

by S. Ann Cole

  Head still lowered, he raised his eyes to me. “Yes.”

  Thrown by the intensity of his stare, I laughed nervously. “You sound as twisty and peculiar as all those other artists.”

  The humour missed him, as he set down the sketch and walked over to me. “No more storytellin’. I came down here to sketch you. So let’s get to it.”

  “How do you want me?”

  He led me over the chaise lounge. “In the exact position you woke up in when you slept over on the night I was sick. I’ve wanted to sketch you ever since. Think I outlined and shaded you with my eyes a hundred times before you woke up. Your moans and whisperings of my name while you slept was my music.”

  Ah, the morning I woke up with my hand down my knickers. I’ll never live that down. Heat percolated my cheeks. “That was embarrassing.”

  “It was unforgettably sexy.”

  Grasping the hem of my tank, he pulled up to take it off, and I raised my hands, allowing him to drag it over my head, tossing it on the scattered sketches on the floor.

  He moved in, the heat of his body clashing with mine, created unbearable steam. His chest pressed against my breasts as he circled his long, muscled, tatted arms around my hypersensitive torso, and though I hoped it would be a tight, sensual hug, it wasn’t, because his fingers landed on the hook of my brassiere and undid it with one skilful flick.

  His hands came back around, pulling off the brassiere at the same time. My breath spiked with anticipation.

  Throughout the entire process, his eyes stayed on mine, as he seemed to find immense pleasure in building my hopes up, only to deflate them. The brassiere got tossed in the same direction as the tank.

  As he hauled his own tee over his head, his warm bare chest now against my aching, hardened nipples, I had to ask, “Are we still sketching or…?”

  That damn crooked grin popped onto his face as he took a step back from me and pulled at his cotton tee again and again until it was in shreds. “Told you to stop thinkin’ about sex, Sassy.”

  “Are you even serious right now?”

  How could he expect me not to think about sex while we were both half naked?

  “Take off your jeans,” he ordered, shaking his head, grin still present.

  When I did as he asked, he positioned me to his desire on the chaise lounge, strategically draping his ripped up tee over me to his liking, one of my breasts covered, one perfectly exposed from the shreds of material.

  When he was satisfied, he backed away to the high stool and picked up his sketch pad and a pencil.

  “Should I stick my hand down my knickers, too?” I joked.

  His laughed easily. “If you feel the need…”

  Then the sketching began.

  Tick. Tock. Tick.

  The thing was, I wasn’t big on sitting still for long periods of time, especially without a smoke or music, so in no time, I was bored.

  Jahleel was intensely focused, quiet, the only sounds between us being the faint scratching of pencil lead against paper.

  “I feel like that girl from Titanic,” I muttered, breaking the ear-splitting silence.

  “Except she laid still for Jack,” he uttered low under his breath, pencilling away. “She was perfect.”

  “And I’m not?” I shot back indignantly, forefinger idly poking at the chaise cushion.

  “Fuck no,” he replied, laughing now. “I think you’ve scratched a non-existent itch on your right thigh about ten times in the last five minutes.”

  My eyes went heavenward. “Okay, I probably should’ve told you I’m not good at keeping still.”

  “No shit,” he agreed.

  “Maybe if there was music or something…?”

  Eyes never leaving his pad, he mumbled, “My whole life is music and movements. This is where I come when I wanna wind down.”

  His brows pulled together, two soft creases forming between them as he held the sketch pad out at arm’s length and examined it. “But I think I can tolerate you singing. My choice.”

  Glad to! Beats lying here in silence. “Which one?”

  He lowered the pad and began sketching again, taking a few minutes before answering, “Coming.”

  The name of the song came out so low, I almost didn’t hear him. Funny how he chose that song. It was about him. The whole award-winning album was about him, as a matter of fact. But that particular song was a retelling of the first time I ever saw him. ‘Coming’ was a number one hit right off the bat.

  “You like that one?” I fished. “It’s an oldie.”

  “A favourite,” he confessed. “Now sing so I can sketch.”

  Watching his strong hand manipulate the pencil into a smooth flow across the pad, I cleared my throat and sang a song he had no idea was written for him.

  A bout of shouts

  A bright white light

  A fresh false start

  Shining, blinding, recognizing

  A grab of a wrist

  A kiss and a smile

  A promise for more

  Bigger, better, forever

  An obscure beauty

  A red colour of love

  A fool of me, no senses

  Tripping, falling, gaping

  Ignore what the eyes can see

  Ignore what the heart can feel

  Ignore what the world says to be

  But please, please, don’t ignore me

  Because I’m coming

  I’m on my way

  I will be there

  Don’t give my heart away

  I’m coming, coming

  Stray not too far

  I will be there

  Don’t love while we’re apart

  Wait, wait, wait,

  I’m coming for your love

  You, You, You,

  Will give me all your love

  Long after I finished the song, neither of us spoke. Jahleel kept his head lowered as he sketched. I avoided eye contact for fear I might reveal the truth: that rich and famous as I was, I was also a pathetic stalker who was obsessed and irrationally in love with him.

  The silence now was different. It was a contented, peaceful silence. A quietness that, instead of being fidgety as before, I now succumbed to. I closed my eyes and envisioned how different this day would be if I was the one who could have chosen what we’d do. The sex we would be having… And on those futile imaginations, I fell asleep.

  Even as I slept, I felt him. My eyes flicked open to see Jahleel sitting at the edge of the chaise, watching me with an amused expression. It took me a moment, while I yawned, to realize my hand was down my knickers again.

  “Oh crap.”

  Jahleel flashed me a half-smile and I didn’t bother removing my hand.

  “I ruined the sketch?” I asked him.

  He held up two separate sketches. One was half-complete with me awake, and the other was complete with me asleep, hand down my knickers.

  The completed sketch was awe-inspiring. Faultlessly done. Vivid even without colour. Even my curls looked as they would in a camera snapped image.

  “Wow,” I whispered, “You’re really good at this.”

  Nodding at the compliment, he set the sketches aside. “I need to feed you.”

  “I want to come,” I blurted. My dream had left me in a semi-aroused state.

  “You didn’t come in your dream?” he asked, a smirk on his lips.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, sorry about that.” He made to get up, but I grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “Please. Make me come.” As he started to protest, I pleaded, “Please.”

  Staring at me for a long moment, he gave in. “No sex, okay?”

  “I know.”

  Moving between my thighs on the chaise, he took off my knickers, spreading my legs apart; one crooked on the top of the chaise, the other hanging off the edge.

  Wide open, wet and wanting in front of him.

  He removed the ripped up tee and tossed it to the ground, leavin
g me completely naked, heated, squirming, waiting for the first touch of his fingers.

  Lowering down on top of me, he braced his jeans covered erection against me. His navel kissed mine, his abs kissed mine, his chest kissed mine, and his lips hovered above mine—no kiss.

  Flexing his hips so the friction of his erection made me moan out, he whispered, “My hands are yours. Tell me, what do you want me to do with them?”

  As he circled his hips again, I whimpered, “Anything. Anywhere. Just touch me.”

  Easing back a fraction, he ran his fingertips down my neck to my nipples, passing his thumbs over them in gentle circles. An indescribable sound left me at his touch.

  “Is it me you’re hot for, or anyone else would do?”

  “Yes. Just you. Always.”

  My breasts mourned the loss of his touch when his hands left them and smoothed their way down my stomach, down my pelvis and settled on my inner thighs.

  “Lie,” he refuted. “You just want to come. And I just so happen to be the man in the room.”

  “Fuck you, JK.”

  The words were meant to be venomous, but came out in panted moans instead.

  Jahleel ignored the curse and brushed his knuckles against my sopping folds. “You expect me to believe it’s just me?”

  With the question, he caught my clit between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed.

  “Oh God!” I cried, almost exploding into something unexpected. “It’s always been you, JK.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he hissed as he drove two fingers inside me, making me cry out in sheer pleasure. “Wasn’t it just last night you were ready to choose someone else?”

  As his fingers moved in and out of me in a smooth, slow rhythm, a familiar tingle crept up the back of my knees, alerting me that my orgasm was near.

  “I wouldn’t have,” I told him in a mewl. “You know it.”

  “I don’t know jack-shit,” he shot back before I even got the last word out.

  Removing his fingers from inside me, he caught hold of my clit again.

  Half-conscious, half-consumed with pleasure, I gazed up at him through hooded eyes. “Are you still mad at m—”

  “Shut up,” he cut me off, then squeezed my clit again, commanding, “Give in, Sassy. Now.”

  As he fingers applied pressure, my body yielded to his command and I spiralled into a loud, writhing mess. “JK…Ohmigod, JK!”

  Jahleel pressed his palm over my folds, keeping it there until I calmed. Getting up from between my spread thighs, he fetched my clothes and handed them to me.

  Sprawled out on the chaise, clenching with desperation to feel that part of him inside me, I resorted to begging, “I know you said no, but, please, just this once—”

  “Aren’t you hungry? Sure you are,” he cut in, his mood a bit off, eyes avoiding mine. “I’ll head upstairs and fix you something.”

  “JK—”

  “Every girl just wants to fuck!” he erupted, surprising me. “All of you, the same. You all just wanna fuck me because I look or act a certain way. None of you really want to know me. Women claim they want ‘more’, but I don’t give them shit, because their definition of ‘more’ is for me to tell the world I’m with them so they can slap a label of ownership on me, even though they know nothing about me, except the length and width of my dick, or the flexibility of my waistline. Tiara? The same. She was obsessed with my cock and that’s it. Naming me as her boyfriend in a high-profile magazine, when I’m pretty sure if they asked her my date of birth, she wouldn’t have a clue.”

  Glancing wildly around the room, he shoved a furious hand through his hair. “I wanted you to be different. Convinced myself you were different. But the only difference between you and the others is that I actually want more from you. Yet I have to fuckin’ force it out of you.

  “I’m tryin’ to share parts of myself with you that I’ve never shared with anyone else. Not even Krissy knows I sketch. But you don’t want more. More bores you. You just want to fuck. Like the rest of them. So you can say you’ve fucked me. Because apparently I’m some type of achievement? The popular face of the season? What? I dunno. I’m still tryin’ to figure that out.

  “You don’t seem to care about protecting your emotional state or what I could do to it. See, I’m an asshole, and I know I’m an asshole, and I wanna get the most out of you as a person before I fuck you and end up doing or saying some fucked-up shit, as I tend to do. Because when I do, you’ll want nothing more to do with me. And that will be that. But at least I’ll have memories like what I’ve tried to create today to hold on to. I wanna know that the moment I slide my cock inside you, you’ll know whose cock is inside you. Not just my name. But absolutely everything about the man who’s on top of you. Fucking you. Sharing himself with you.”

  He threw his arms out. “My efforts here are futile, though. You’re disappointingly just like the rest. A woman’s definition of more is evidently different from mine. Or maybe I’m the one who’s the bitch?”

  Shirtless, barefooted, my cum on his fingers, he turned and strode out of the basement.

  Halfway up the stairs, he stopped, stood there for a moment, before slowly turning to calmly say, “You have me, you know. But you’re not ready for me.” Pausing, he bit down on his bottom lip pensively, then went on, “You have the power…But you’re not yet constant.”

  Then, he was gone. While I laid there, mouth hanging open at his explosive tirade.

  What the fuck just happened?

  Chapter Nineteen

  I got attached.

  As if being obsessed and in delusional love wasn’t enough, now I went and got a-friggin-ttached. As in, I needed to hear from him, whether via text message, phone call or email, before I started and ended each day.

  He wasn’t complaining yet. And I was making the most of his non-complaining compliance. Not after his harangue when he accused me of wanting him solely for sex.

  Unable to refute his postulation without giving off I was a stalker and a creep, who had obsessed about him and not his cock for over five years, I didn’t address the topic that day after I joined him in the kitchen. Instead, I stopped bringing the conversation around to sex all the time and gave him the ‘more’ he wanted.

  We spent every free time our busy lives afforded together. Doing unbelievably mundane things in unbelievably mundane places. But every moment spent with Jahleel was, for me, extraordinary. More didn’t bore me. That was all in his head.

  I already lived an extraordinary life, doing extraordinary things. Jahleel, he was the equanimity I needed. The balance. The ordinary in my over-the-top life. He wasn’t a normal guy, but he managed to live his life that way. Got no idea how he did it, but he made everything seem natural.

  I loved him.

  Our favourite hangout spots were down in his basement, where we ate crap, got drunk, talked about nothing and fell asleep locked in each other’s arms. Or in my theatre room, where we cuddled and watched movie after movie, ‘til we fell asleep.

  Weird enough, cuddling and watching television was one of his all-time favourite things to do. Not usual for men. But here I had Jahleel, a complete movie addict.

  Want to calm him? Just put on a good movie and he’d just immediately go placid.

  Nature taking its course I see…

  Too bad I’m not there to fuck with it.

  I will, though.

  As soon as I’m back on U.S. soil.

  *Don’t reply*

  I smiled at Chad’s message as Amanda steered the vehicle into Jamie’s neighbourhood.

  Don’t reply. Such a muted command.

  Not that I would’ve replied anyway. After getting so much closer to Jahleel, more than I ever thought possible, I was being prudent in not frigging it up.

  For all I knew, Chad was testing me. He’d said it himself that he would never do anything to screw Jahleel over, so if he was positive I was in Jahleel’s corner, he wouldn’t come after me.

  Amanda steered
the vehicle down Jamie’s street. We were both knackered. I had spent the day in a bloody hotel suite, doing back-to-back ten minute interviews for a truckload of magazine journalists. Question after question. Most of them repetitive. Ennui didn’t even begin to describe it.

  After that, on to training and rehearsals.

  We’d expected Jamie to show up at the studio, but she never did so Amanda and I decided to swing by to check on her. More Amanda than me, as a matter of fact. If it were me alone, I would have directed Thomas to take me straight home. But one of Amanda’s functions was to provide rational, thoughtful behaviour to my life. So Thomas took Ferbie home, while we set off for Jamie’s.

  The night was a windy one. Wild winds. The clouds, a bloated puff of coral meets tangerine, covered the sky in one uniform colour. Not a single star dared to peek, and the moon’s shine was non-existent, hidden by swollen clouds biding their time before they unleashed their wet wrath over the city. The thunder grumbled on, rattling the earth, but had yet to release its growl, its roar.

  One of those nights perfect for dragging on a pair of thick socks and curling up under a thick blanket with a large cup of hot chocolate, your significant other nuzzling your neck.

  But such a life was for the contented poor, wasn’t it? Fortunate as I appeared to be, I didn’t have a significant other to curl up with whenever the rain decided to pound in unrelenting showers.

  For the past two hours I’d tried ringing Jahleel to no avail. So shower and bed it would be for me tonight.

  Amanda pulled up outside Jamie’s, while I mindlessly scrolled through text messages. “Go check if she’s breathing,” I mumbled. “You stay longer than two minutes, I’m driving off.”

  “Shite,” I heard Amanda mutter under her breath.

  Before I could question the reason, she swung the car into a neighbour’s lot to make a U-turn. “Her car isn’t here. So she’s not home,” she rushed out.

  “I told you this was a waste of tim—” I stopped short as Amanda got the car around, me on the opposite side now, able to see what she didn’t want me to see: Jahleel’s bike parked in Jamie’s driveway.

  “Stop the car.”

  Amanda ignored me and kept driving.