by Claire Adams
I smiled and stepped back to let him in. It was nice of him to worry about me. “Sure, thank you.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Don’t thank me. None of this is your fault. Thank you. I’m just so sorry about all of this.”
“It’s really fine. You can stop apologizing. I was just going to fix myself some dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Always,” he said with a grin.
“Okay, I’m not sure what I have but I’ll find something.”
I went out to the kitchen, stopping to look once over my shoulder at him as he got ready to drill holes in the door for the chain. God, he was hot, and now he had power tools as well. I forced myself to tear my eyes away and go start on dinner.
I had some boneless chicken in the refrigerator. I took it out and cut it into cubes. I was thinking about making it with rice and vegetables, but then I thought about Paul’s upcoming fight and I was sure that he needed his protein. I pulled out the peanut butter and made a spicy peanut sauce that a friend of mine in college had showed me how to make. It was easy and quick and packed with protein. I put the cubes of chicken on metal skewers and put them in the oven while I made the sauce. I made the brown rice while the chicken cooked, poured on the sauce and it was done. I fixed out plates and carried them out to the dining room table. Paul was cleaning his mess up by the front door and the shiny gold chain lock was in place.
“Good job!”
“Thanks,” he said. “That smells good.”
“It’s ready.” He went in the bathroom to wash up and met me back at the table. Sitting down with him for dinner was a little weird and uncomfortable at first, but eventually I asked him about fighting and the conversation grew from there.
“So your match that I went to last week was the first one I ever watched live. You’re good.”
He grinned. “Yes, I am.”
“Oh, and you’re modest too,” I said.
“There’s no room for modesty in fighting. When it means the difference between getting your ass kicked or not, you have to know that you’re good.”
“True story,” I said.
“So why have you never been to a match? Don’t you train fighters all the time?”
“I train with some. I haven’t really been out of school that long, so I can’t say all the time. But, it’s just the idea of watching someone get beat up that bothers me.”
“Well, at least you’ll never see me get beat up,” he said with another grin.
“It never happens?”
“Never…not anymore anyways. I might not be able to take them down, but I do know how to protect myself.”
“That’s always a good thing,” I said. I was thinking about Mitch now and hoping he could protect himself against an angry cop and apparently jilted boyfriend.
“This is amazing by the way,” he said of the food.
“Thanks. I like to cook. It’s hard just cooking for me. I haven’t had this peanut sauce in a while. I like it.”
“Me too,” he said, cleaning his plate.
“So this fight at the end of the week, this is a pretty important one for you?”
“Yeah, really important.” He didn’t even really have to speak; I could see it in his eyes. He genuinely loved what he did, that was good…I guessed. It was strange to me to think about being in love with fighting. “If I win this one I go up against the champion next. Winning the championship gets me professional status…endorsements and the whole bit. It’s what I’ve been working for all these years.”
“Then I’m glad I made you protein and not carbs,” I said with a grin. I was also glad to hear he had goals and ambition. It was one thing my ex was seriously lacking.
“So you just got out of college this last semester?”
“Yeah. I graduated in June.”
“Good deal. I wish I would have gone sometimes. With fighting and Marie and Victor…things just got too out of focus for a while. When I began really focusing again, I put all my energy into winning this title. How was it, going to college? Did you live in the dorms or a Sorority house or something?”
“No, I lived with my mom. I had to subsist mostly on grants and loans so I couldn’t really afford school and room and board.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
I laughed. “You probably wouldn’t say that if you knew my mom.”
He put his fork down and looked at me seriously. “Relationships with parents can get really screwed up sometimes.”
“Yeah, tell me,” I said. “I’m not the best at relationships in general. I studied really hard in college…I got straight A’s, I worked out hard, I ate right. I was healthier physically than I’ve ever been and I loved it. It was good for me.”
“But…?”
I laughed. “You heard that, huh? Nothing really. It’s just that while I was pursuing my goals, I got a little off track with trying to help others pursue theirs. The ‘but’ was a guy I met during that time.”
“Uh oh,” he said with a smile.
“Uh oh is right. He was a mess and I thought that I could ‘fix’ him.”
“He was unfixable?”
I laughed again, nervously. I didn’t usually talk about Justin. It was one of those really low points in my life that I’d love to forget. “Yeah, he was. It took me way too long to figure that out and when I did, he didn’t want to go away easily. It’s true that you can’t change a person. They have to be determined to do that for themselves.”
He was quiet for a few seconds and then he said, “Can I ask what was wrong with him that you wanted to fix?”
This was the part that I hated telling him. What did it say about me that I dated a drug dealer, and how did I tell someone I barely knew that I’d met him through my mom? “Don’t judge me?”
“The day I am in a position to judge anyone,” he said with another grin. “I won’t judge, I promise.”
“He was a drug dealer,” I said.
“Oh, yeah…definitely he had issues.”
Laughing, I said, “That sums it up, pretty much. The lifestyle was unbelievable…Constantly partying and constantly paranoid and worried about getting caught, running from the law. Me putting up with it for two years even more unbelievable I guess. He was addicted to it. Not the drugs, but the money, the power it gave him, the partying and having people calling him at all hours of the day and night…even the adrenaline that came from worrying about getting caught…all of it. I thought he loved me and me him. I finally had to accept that he was a creep and I was a codependent, but I was too naïve to realize it for a long time.”
“What did your mom think of him?” He of course would think that my mother would have objected. Most mothers would have, but mine was definitely not the norm.
“Oh God…I think that’s a story for another dinner,” I told him. That would just be way too much disclosure. Telling a guy I was just getting to know that my mother was an addict who encouraged me to date a dealer…way too much information. Too much self-disclosure was not a good thing sometimes.
“Okay,” he said. He stood up and picked up our plates. “I’ll tell you a sad story while we clean up. It’s only fair.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Tell the story?”
“Oh no, you owe me that,” I said with a laugh. “You don’t have to clean up.”
He ignored me and took the plates to the kitchen. I followed him and opened the dishwasher. While he rinsed, I loaded and he talked.
“When I was sixteen I got into working out. I was always looking for something…anything that made me feel…alive, I guess. My sister was gone off with Mitch at that time and I was stuck at home. Our home life left a lot to be desired. My father didn’t win any awards for his parenting skills. He was a gambler first, before everything else. He gambled everything he could get his hands on…even if he had to borrow it from dangerous people to do it. I was going to the gym every day and running every evening. I had a job after school and I used every penny I
made to buy healthy food and pay for work-outs and jiu jitsu classes. Then one day right before my seventeenth birthday I came home to find the old man beat to a bloody pulp on the doorstep.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yeah. He borrowed money and he lost and lost and lost. He didn’t pay them back and by then the interest was astronomical. He was crying…I’d never seen him cry. He said they were going to kill him. I spent a lot of my life angry with him but I didn’t want him killed, you know?”
“I do. More than you know,” I said with my mother in mind.
“Anyways, I heard about this underground cage fight. The first prize was fifteen grand but you had to be eighteen. I told the old man about it and a light-bulb went on in his head. He somehow got me an ID that said I was eighteen and entered me. I won and he took all the money.”
“Oh wow. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t care about the money. I’d finally found something I was good at. It was something I knew I could get better at. More than anything it gave me a purpose, something to look forward to. That’s when I started fighting all the time. It gets in your blood.”
He stopped talking and all of a sudden, the room was completely silent. He turned toward me and I knew he was going to kiss me and I knew we would have sex. It was one of those moments…if I leaned in for the kiss, the wheels would be in motion. My body completely overrode my brain and I just went with it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kissing him felt like…I didn’t even know what to compare it to. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. It was just so good. I had to wonder how someone got so good at kissing. Was it experience? Natural talent? Did it really matter?
He put his hand on the side of my face and brushed my hair back with his fingers. It tickled and I shuddered. Then he guided my head and my lips where he wanted them. Once we were aligned, he attacked my lips with his. A full-on assault with not just his lips but with his tongue taking long, slow strokes into my mouth and his teeth nibbling on my lips…it was so erotic that for a few seconds my mouth was the only part of my body that mattered. But then I felt him pushing on my tank top and I remembered how badly I wanted him to touch the rest of me too. We broke the kiss long enough for him to push it off over my head and he resumed the kiss while his hands found my breasts, cupping them tenderly at first and sending goose bumps racing down both my arms. I was so into it that I barely registered when my bra was unhooked and slipped off…until I felt the cool air on my hard nipples and he broke the kiss again to lean down and take one into his mouth. Then the fireworks started going off in my head.
He had the hard nipple of my right breast between his lips and he was flicking back and forth and up and down with his sweet, wet tongue. I threw my head back and he reached a hand up while he sucked on the other nipple and pulled the elastic band off my braid. He deftly unbraided my hair and sucked my nipples at the same time. He definitely got points for coordination.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to get involved with this man…it was a bad idea…right? I moaned as he sucked my right breast into his mouth. He kept the suction going while his tongue continued to work the nipple…There was nothing at all bad about what we were doing. It was all good. It was sex between two consenting adults. Who the fuck cared about a relationship? I could’ve lived on this alone. I felt him pushing down on my shorts, then, and I helped him, wriggling free of the elastic band and then stepping out of them when they hit the floor. I was still in my pink lacy thong, but that was it, right there in the kitchen. He had pulled his mouth up off my nipple and was looking at me like I was a steak and he was a lion. I was ready to be devoured.
He kissed me again and I felt his hand between my legs. I opened my thighs for him and felt one of his fingers slip under the thin layer of lace and press against my entrance. I groaned into our kiss and I felt his lips curl up into a smile.
“You’re so wet, baby,” he whispered against my lips. I didn’t respond, with words. But I thought the movement of my hips told the story. As he said that, he shoved his finger into me and I moaned loudly. He slid another one in to meet it and we stood there in the kitchen while he kissed me and finger-fucked me, and it felt like the most natural, right thing in the world. “Do you want me, Jessie?” he asked, kissing me again. His tongue searched mine out and wrapped it up in such a tight embrace that I couldn’t answer.
When he finally pulled back, my legs were shaking so hard that I could barely stand and in a breathless voice I said, “Yes…oh yeah I do!”
“You do what?” he said with another grin.
“I do want you…so bad!” I wanted him in an almost animalistic way. I wanted him there in the kitchen on the tile floors, or the tile counters…I just wanted him. He could’ve pushed my ass up against the cold stainless steel of the refrigerator and taken me right there, and I wouldn’t have complained.
“Mm, good,” he said as he moved his fingers around inside me. He put the other hand on my ass and squeezed it as he pulled my hips harder into his. I could feel how hard he was, his cock was stretching the fabric of his jeans, begging for release.
He pulled his fingers out of me and I watched, still shaking all over as he drew them across his lips and then licked them clean. I reached down and unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and pushed down on them. He helped me and then we attacked the white T-shirt. We were on even ground now, both of us in our underwear. He had his hands in the tops of my panties as he suddenly twirled me around to face away from him. I reached out for the counter to steady myself and I felt my panties being swept down my legs. I stepped out of them and when he leaned into me again, his were gone too. He pulled my hair out of the way and attached his lips and teeth to a soft spot on my neck as the thumb and forefinger of his hand worked their magic on my now engorged nipples. I could feel his hard cock boring into my ass cheek and the evidence of my own arousal was slowly running down the insides of my thighs. He played with my nipples with one hand and I could feel the other sliding the condom he must have had in his pocket over his throbbing erection. Once he had it on, he slid his hands down across my abdomen and my pelvis, finally reaching the tops of my thighs. He squeezed them and then gently pushed them apart. Then he put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me forward just a bit until I was completely exposed to him from behind.
I was ready, more than ready, and when the head of his cock found the slick, hot entrance to my pussy and he thrust into me, I cried out. He let his cock slide all the way into me, filling me up with his full length before pulling back again. He plunged forward again with a grunt as I gripped the edge of the counter and pushed back against him. He would pull out and plunge in and every time he did I would push back and he would hit bottom. He was fucking me slow and deliberately and it felt great, but at that moment, I needed more.
In a throaty voice that I almost didn’t recognize myself I said, “Harder.”
He made another grunting noise and obliged. He grabbed a hip in each hand and began to really fuck me. I felt his body slamming against mine as the sweat began to drip and run all over our skin became slick with the friction. He slid his right arm up, leaving the left hand on my hip and he wrapped that arm around me just above my breasts. It was almost like being restrained, I couldn’t move at all…but I’d have to have been crazy to want to. He was in control now. He was doing all the work…and I was experiencing pleasure that my brain could barely comprehend. It wasn’t long before he cried out again and pushed me forward so that his head was against my back as his cock twitched and swelled and finally exploded.
We stood there like that for a few seconds, both of us panting and the sweat so thick between us it would have been impossible to discern which drip came from whom. When he recovered, pulled out and stood up, he brought me up straight with him and spun me around to face him. He gave me a long, sweet, sensuous kiss…and then dropped to the floor on his knees in front of me. Liftin
g one of my legs, he pulled it up so that it was resting on his shoulder and without any warning, his tongue pressed tightly against my clit. I gasped when he slid two fingers into me again as his tongue massaged my swollen clit. I looked down the length of my own body and watched as he pleasured me with his tongue and lips. He sucked my clit in between his lips and then wrapped his tongue around it, making me want to scream…then he let his teeth graze it and I may have screamed. I knew I was shivering as I felt the muscles in my pussy begin to contract. He shoved his tongue up deep inside me and I could feel his face pressing up against my clit and I moved my hips up and down and back and forth across his mouth until at last the orgasm ripped through me and I dug my fingernails into his shoulders and moaned loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
He licked me softly until I recovered and then pressed his lips to my mound before standing up and shoving his tongue into my mouth. I could taste myself there and kissing him like that made me want him again. I ground my hips against his and I wasn’t surprised to feel that he was already getting hard again. I was pressed up against the cold kitchen counter and I realized that the only thing that could make it better would be the bed. I pulled out of the kiss and he opened his eyes and looked at me. I could seriously lose all powers of speech and rational thought if he did that for too long.
“Bed,” was the only word I was able to utter. It was enough for him. He took my hand and turned and headed out of the kitchen and down the hall to my bedroom. He stopped at the first one and I said, “Keep going.” By the time we got to the second one I was pawing at him like an animal again. He pushed me down on the bed and straddled me, giving me another hot, slow, deep kiss. I felt his hands sliding back down toward my pussy and his now rock-hard cock pressing against my belly. I trailed my fingers down over his chest and stomach until I could reach it and I took it into my hand. When I touched it, I felt his whole body convulse. It was exciting to know I turned him on so much. I stroked up and down the shaft while he kissed me, letting my fingers pay close attention to the head before I stroked my way back down and ended with a brush against his balls.