by Bebe Wilde
As I came, I grabbed onto his face and pulled his mouth to mine, sucking at it and his tongue. Then I felt him come, pumping into me, exploding with passion for me. Once he was finished, he fell on the bed beside me and breathed heavily.
That had been the most intense fuck of my life. I wanted more, too. I turned to stare at him and smiled.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “But when you recover, I’m ready for another round.”
* * * * *
“You’re a little bit submissive,” he told me one day.
“A little bit submissive?” I asked, almost aghast.
“You are,” he replied, nodding slightly.
“I am?” I asked.
“Yes, you are, a little bit,” he replied, considering his words. “A little bit submissive.”
I couldn’t really argue. He was right about that. Well, at least where he was concerned.
I’d never experienced anything quite like this before. However, while he was a wonderful man to have sex with, he was a hard man to love. I never knew quite where I stood with him. But then again, it could have just been me, as I had a problem with love and definitely with commitment.
His name was Roman.
He was slightly rugged looking. Handsome. Ice blue eyes. Dark blonde hair he kept cut short, almost in a buzz cut. Sometimes he let his beard grow out for a few days so that it was rough against my skin and felt so good. When he didn’t shave he looked tough and so damned handsome it made me ache a little. I loved it when he grew his beard out as it made him look a little different, like someone else, someone more rugged and rough and tumble. But then he’d shave it again, returning to his sophisticated self and I loved that look too, that man who knew things, said intelligent things but still fucked like wild man he was.
He had a slight accent, French, though he’d lived in the United States since he was a teenager. He sometimes tasted of whiskey and tobacco, just the way a man should taste. He was just so masculine it drove me crazy. He read Kafka, if that tells a person anything. He was also successful, very successful, which is always an aphrodisiac.
He told me I was beautiful. He would touch my strawberry blonde hair, slide the back of his hand down my cheek and smile at me. He’d stare into my eyes, telling me he’d never seen such eyes, commenting on the color of green they were, talk about how different they were and how much he liked that. He loved my skin, the freckles on my chest and the ones on my nose. He liked the ivory tone of my skin, the fact that I couldn’t tan, that I burned like butter on toast if I was in the sun too long.
He loved my body, which he would comment on. He would tell me that it was perfect, that my proportions were absolutely exquisite. He said things like that, used adjectives like exquisite. He said them with his slight French accent, which was like a song, so sweet, so lovely to hear.
He was everything that I wanted and yet, I didn’t want him. At first, anyway. I didn’t want love. I was slightly afraid of it, slightly hesitant. Love, to me, was this big, gigantic, all-encompassing thing, almost like a black hole. I was holding back, sure I was. But he wouldn’t drag me into it. He’d do what he did best and see if there was a crack in my veneer. Then we could move on, if we were meant to move on.
With him I had gotten everything I’d wanted in a man, but I was still me with the same problems in the end, the same fears of losing myself in another. He had set me free. He had given me the push I needed to get through the pain and the pain became pleasure. I didn’t go looking for a lover. I went looking for myself. With him, I had finally found myself, if only I could let go. He wanted me to let go, I could tell that, but would I? Could I? Could I give myself over to someone else, someone like him? I didn’t know. I just wasn’t sure.
“Tell me about that bastard who broke your heart,” he said one day.
“What?” I asked.
“There was someone, wasn’t there?” he asked. “Who was he and what did he do?”
How did he know that? Yeah, there had been someone, a long time ago. Well, not so long ago. Well, there had been that someone, then another someone else before him. In my life, I’d loved two men who had each ripped my heart out and left me, both making me mistrust love, to be afraid of it.
The first man I loved I had met during my first year of college, before I had met my ex-husband, who had been my rebound several years after the fact. Yes, I was that guarded. And, well, it hadn’t worked out. He ultimately rejected me, which hurt. A lot.
“He was my first love,” I said. “Well, first or second.”
“First or second?” he asked, staring into my eyes.
“First,” I said. “He was the first.”
“His name?”
“Adam,” I said and cleared my throat, thinking about it. It was odd to think about him now. He’d caused me so much pain but now when I thought of him, I didn’t feel any of it. It was like what we had never existed, or existed in a space of time I no longer connected to.
“Why didn’t he want you?”
His words sent a sting of embarrassment to my cheeks. Even so, I replied as honestly as I could, “Because I had sex with him too soon.”
“Men are like that sometimes,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, I know. And most of you are bastards. And more than a little predictable.”
He studied me before replying, “Yes, we are and don’t ever forget that.”
“Does that mean you’re going to break my heart?” I asked.
“Why? Are you in love with me?”
“No,” I said, though I was, even if I wouldn’t admit it to him or anyone else, let alone myself. I pretended I didn’t love him, hoping that I didn’t. I said, just to make him laugh, “But I am in love with your cock.”
He laughed but then got serious. “You’re looking for something and I know that. When you get what you need, you’ll no longer want me. I know that you’ll leave soon and I won’t be part of your life after you do.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, feeling like crying.
“Why not? It’s true.”
“It’s not true,” I said.
“So you’re not leaving?” he asked. “When the fun wears off you won’t go?”
“Will you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t like to think in such black and white terms—leaving or staying. I like to live in the now, to enjoy what I have. You, on the other hand, have to know. You have to make plans. I can see that; you’re a planner. You’re planning your escape right now. You will leave. I can’t do anything about that.”
I looked away. I didn’t know if I was leaving or not. I’d just put off thinking about it. I knew it was probably the right thing to do; someone like him was hard to pin down. However, I was having the time of my life with him, with this intense sexual relationship we were having. I wasn’t ready to screw it up just yet. I didn’t want to go back to my old life. I wanted to stay there forever with him but I was afraid. He was giving me what I needed but I was afraid that he’d take it away. I just wanted to run before he had a chance. I couldn’t suffer another heartbreak over this. I’d been through that pain before and it wasn’t something I wanted to experience again.
“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” he said and touched my arm.
We stopped talking and soon he left. He never stayed the night. I never met him for dinner nor did we ever go out in public together. Which was just as well. We weren’t dating; we were fucking.
At least that’s what I told myself.
My Real Love
But before Roman, before our relationship, I was obsessed with something entirely different. I was absolutely obsessed with my career and “obsessed” is putting it mildly. I was in love with my career. It was my real love, my true love.
Unlike most young women, I didn’t come to Hollywood to be an actress. I went to be a real estate agent. Sure, sure, it wasn’t as glamorous as being a starlet, but it was never boring. Just the antici
pation of a big sale was like nothing else. I’d be on a high for days, sometimes weeks, afterwards. It was better than sex. It was better than anything. It was my addiction.
My love of real estate started at an early age. It might have been because I grew up in a tiny, older home that never got any fresh paint or new furniture. I would ride the school bus and stare out at all the houses, wanting one for me and my family, wanting to see what they looked like on the inside, wanting to know what it felt like to live in such a place. The small, Southern town I grew up in was growing at a rapid rate and new houses were going up in record time. I longed to just to see inside of one or even buy one, if only I had the money.
Once I turned sixteen and could beg for my mom’s old station wagon, I got a job working fast food, saving every penny I could for a down payment on a first home. That’s how obsessed I was with real estate. While other girls shopped for prom dresses or the latest jeans, I went to open houses and scanned the classifieds for houses for sale, taking in how much square footage they had, how many baths, bedrooms, did the kitchen have new appliances? Was there any work to be done? What was the condition of the roof? An odd obsession for a young woman, but one I loved. I thought in time I, too, could be the proud owner of a new home. Or an older home that was recently renovated. I couldn’t help but tingle at the thought.
But I knew I couldn’t afford a house, not at that early of an age. However, one day I realized there actually was a way for me to see all those houses and make money doing it and that was by being a real estate agent. I longed to sell houses, to show them, to tell people about them. I longed to put one of those “for sale” signs in the front yards with my name up top, as the listing agent. It was all I thought about. Me, Teagan Finney, real estate agent extraordinaire. Let me show you around the place…
However, it didn’t quite work out like that. Once I graduated high school, my mother insisted that I go to college instead. And she insisted that I spend all the money I’d saved on my education. This killed me. I argued with her for months on end, begging her to just let me go to real estate school and become an agent but she said there was no money in that, that it wouldn’t work out, that I was too young and had to go to college and get a stable job making real money. We’d never had any of that. My father had left us years before and because she had no real job skills, my mom worked a low-paying factory job. My younger brother and I both worked jobs here and there and gave when we could to help out with the bills. She didn’t want that for me. She wanted me to have a good, solid job. I could see her point as far as college went, but at the same time, I knew I could make it big as a real estate agent.
Even so, after months of fighting, I gave in and enrolled in a college about an hour away from my hometown and majored in business. Mom helped me buy an older car, but I had to foot the payments. I also had to live in a dorm on campus, and buy all of my books and food, all of which I also paid for. It was so expensive I had to get two, sometimes three part-time jobs waiting tables, clerking at clothing stores, doing stuff like that just to keep my head above water. I worked around classes, on weekends, through holidays, anything I could do to get money. I never stopped working! It’s all I did. And then when I wasn’t doing that, I had to study and find time to do class projects.
It was hell.
After two years, I had used all of the money I’d saved and was taking out student loans, even though I worked several part-time jobs in addition to going to school full-time. Again, it was hell. One day I woke up and thought, “What am I doing here?” My college experience, to put it lightly, hadn’t exactly been fun, what with working so hard and having my heart broken by Adam, the asshole I’d fallen in love with and let use me. So, I didn’t know what I was doing. Spinning my wheels, perhaps? I knew I sure as hell wasn’t doing what I would have loved to do. I wasn’t in love with school nor was I in love the fact that if I kept going in debt for school, I’d never get out of it. And who knew if my business degree would even help me get a good paying job? The more time I spent in school, the more I realized that it was a complete gamble. My mother had been wrong.
It just didn’t make sense to continue, especially when this wasn’t what I wanted to do. So, I decided to quit. I didn’t tell myself that a big part of it was because I’d occasionally see Adam. But I did recognize the fact that he was a catalyst for me to quit school and, for that, I thanked him. Well, later on I did. I still hated his guts at that time.
So, without telling my mother, I quit school. I kept a few of my part-time jobs and saved every cent I could to go to real estate school, every cent, that is, that wasn’t paying for rent, gas or food. When I was able, at about age twenty-two, I had enough money and finally got my real estate license. And I loved it. I knew this was my thing. It was right in my wheelhouse, as the cliché says. I dove right in and never looked back.
Naturally, my mom was furious when she found out I’d quit school but I didn’t care. By the time she found out, I already had a job with a well-known and established real estate agency and had started to work. Growing up with very little money had put the hunger in me to succeed and I would stop at nothing to get my first sale.
However this took me a little longer than anticipated and I had to keep my part-time jobs for longer than I wanted to. It took me almost a year of showings and open houses and multiple offers that always fell through to finally get my first sale and, though the commission was low, I was on a high for days. I made a sale! I made a sale!
From there, I was able to get more listings and make more sales. As I went along, I refined my process, showing houses and expanding my client list. Soon, I started selling more regularly and getting momentum. Soon, I was able to quit my part-time jobs, which left me more time for selling houses. The great thing was that the more I sold, the more people wanted me to work with them. After a while, I became the highest performer at my firm. I was on a perpetual high. Selling houses became my obsession and I couldn’t get enough.
I was very happy with myself at age twenty-five. I had all of my debt paid off, was renting a nice townhouse and drove a nice car. I had nice clothes and sometimes, nice men to buy me dinner and, occasionally, take care of matters in the bedroom. However, I didn’t really attach myself to anyone, especially after the fiasco in college when I had gotten my heart broken. I wasn’t interested in love. I was interested in money.
I’d never had any long-term relationships in my past and just didn’t really see the need for it. With Adam, which was more or less just a short fling, it had been mostly about sex—to him anyway. I had wanted more than that from him and being so young and vulnerable, I thought I could immediately have it. I didn’t know guys liked to play games and sleep around. It was hard for me to understand that. He hadn’t been in love with me, as I had with him. I was one of those girls who fall hard and fast and I’d fallen for him. But it was first love, probably never meant to last. And, because of that, because of him, I just distanced myself from love, thinking I didn’t have to have it, that I didn’t need it. And so, yes, I did have sex occasionally with the men I dated because a girl does have needs. But I never allowed myself to fall for any of them. It was too much trouble, love, and I was having too much fun being a real estate agent.
So I left my love life to happenstance. If it were meant for me to love again, then I would. If not, I had my career. And I was in love with it. There wasn’t really enough room for anyone else. The sales got bigger, the listings got better and the better it got, the more I wanted. It was always about the sale. I didn’t think I could be so happy doing what I was doing. I thought I’d do it forever and I liked that.
I was happy. I was settled. My career was going great. What more could I ask for?
Well, everyone always wants to improve on their circumstances, don’t they? I was no different. Things changed for me when one day I heard about this magical place far, far away. In this magical land ordinary houses in ordinary neighborhoods were selling for what mansions went for in
my Southern town. There were also million dollar homes in this place where commission checks could go into the six digits. Yes, six digits and sometimes even higher! Even higher! It was a land of plenty, with lots of inventory if only I was willing to make the move. I couldn’t imagine such a thing. It sounded like a fairy tale, something too good to be true. The town was called Los Angeles and it beckoned to me. After I heard about what was going on in real estate there, I began to obsess about moving there, getting a good job with a good agency and making millions of dollars.
I tingled at the thought. Millions of dollars… Could it be possible? I did my research and it seemed so. I didn’t tell anyone I was thinking about moving but I did start to really, really save every penny I could. I knew I’d need some start-up money while I waited for my first sale.
But could I move? Should I move? It would mean leaving everything I had. It would mean leaving my family. It would mean leaving my cute townhouse and it would mean leaving the real estate company that had been so good to me, that had taught me everything I needed to make it in the business. I’d leave a good network of friends, some occasional fuck buddies and my security. I’d leave everything I had worked for but, somehow I knew it would be worth it.
The bug to move and seek my fortune elsewhere had bit me and I could not ignore it. I couldn’t stay where I was, only making good money, when I could simply move and make great money. After much soul searching, I brought it up with some friends who rallied me on, telling me to go for it, that I could do it, that they would definitely visit once I was settled. After that, I told my mother, who told me that it would just be “plain stupid” for me to go out there. But that was coming from the woman who told me to stay in school and in debt. She’d been wrong about that. So I figured that she was probably wrong about this, too.