Preach to me Baby

by Hazel Parker

  As they lay together, breathing hard, Nolan looked at his girlfriend and said, “I need to tell you something Em.” Emma tilted her head.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m going to stay with you and Sophia.” He paused. “I turned down professional football to stay with my family.

  *****

  THE END

  Bad Boy Allure

  I sat miserably on my barstool, feeling like hell as a piercing migraine split through my temples, wanting to close my eyes and diminish into the scenery, but knowing that I had other purposes being here, and that I needed a release too badly right now to blow my chances by giving up the fight. I took a hard blink that was a little bit more than just a blink, my eyes stinging a little bit with moisture as much needed tears reinvigorated them, pooling up and dripping out through my tear ducts, then rolling along my cheeks so that it must have looked like I was crying.

  I sniffed and snorted, trying to suppress this fact, and wiped away the not-crying tears with the back of my hand. I then cleared my throat, raised my glass to my lips, and downed the remainder of liquid still sloshing around in the bottom of the thing. It burned my throat as it sizzled on down inside me, and I sloshed my tongue around for a while through the ice cubes rolling up toward me, loving their coolness and the sound of their clinking against the glass.

  With the glass still to my lips, I sucked in a heavy breath of air, as though to attempt to still my nerves, vain as an attempt though it may have been, and then let out a heavy, labored sigh, which fogged up the inside of the glass as my nostrils flared, and at last I set the thing down upon the bar.

  God, how I wished I was a smoker...

  I'd never even touched a cigarette, but the rumors of nicotine I'd heard about made it seem like the precise sort of de-stressor I needed right here and now, something to mitigate how awfully damn shitty I was feeling, something to make my life in its present state just a little bit more bearable, at least for the time being.

  I knew, however, that this present state of mind would eventually come to pass, whereas a nicotine addiction would linger on for some time afterward and quite possibly make things far shittier for me, and I therefore decided to forego taking up such a nasty habit in order to compensate for my momentary unhappiness. Still, though, I found myself flexing my fingers slowly, watching them tremble slightly as I did so, as though I was already going through withdrawal symptoms from the stuff without ever having smoked a puff in my life.

  I had to start looking now, to find a means of distraction for myself as soon as humanly possible.

  I turned only very slightly on the barstool, scarcely even shifting my body to any extent that was noticeable, but just enough to tilt my head to the side, craning my neck over my shoulder in as subtle a way as possible, and my eyes scanning the room like the camera of some machine, scoping out the place without wanting to seem at all obvious about what I was doing, discreetly flipping through my options without anyone around me knowing that I was interested in seeking out something.

  It was hard to see with complete clarity with my eyes squinted into two snakelike slits as they were, but it was still readily apparent to me as my pupils traced out the room that there were few viable candidates here for that in which I was interested. Mostly, I was surrounded by other souls who were even sadder than myself, older or more haggard in appearance, and the prospect of hopping into bed with them making me even more depressed.

  Rather than distracting me in the manner which I so desperately needed at this point in time. I felt a cold chill of disappointment run through me at my failure, kicking myself for the fact that I couldn't even manage to get picked up at a damn bar, but my resolve still somewhat intact and the night still young.

  My need was too great to give up the fight just yet, and I decided to turn back to my empty glass for the time being, to wait and see if the situation changed to any extent. My expectations low but my hopes so high that disappointment seemed inevitable. For now, I focused every drop of energy in my weary veins on the empty glass in front of me.

  I debated whether I should ask the bartender for another drink, or whether I should allow my sobriety to remain intact in the event that someone did come up to make an advance. I didn't want to be so drunk off my ass that I made some egregious misjudgment of character, and woke up in the bed with some complete and utter mistake, an additional pang of regret to add to my already expansive collection, leaving me feeling even shittier once all was said and done.

  No, no I didn't want that at all...

  All I needed right now was a good lay, some strong, sexy man to scoop me up and spirit me away into his bed, to plow me mercilessly back into my old self, to renew my confidence after it had been so harshly shattered by my most recent mistake; a night of unbridled, no strings passion to get me back to where I needed to be, nothing more complicated than that...

  I began to grow nervous in spite of myself, however, thinking for certain that the opportunity I was seeking would continue to elude me, that I wasn't fooling anyone but myself in hoping for this, etc., etc., etc., my ability to see my own self-worth fucked over big time by the circumstances that had ended up leading me here.

  I began to rotate my glass upon the surface of the table, drilling it around and around and around, staring into the melting ice from above as though hypnotized by it somehow, all the while doing the one thing in the world that I knew would make things even harder for me to withstand, beginning to ruminate on the circumstances of my life that had left me so damn unhappy to begin with.

  I thought of Zach...

  Christ, how my emotions fizzled and popped and stirred for that goddamn son-of-a-bitch, how I wanted to fling myself into his arms and kiss him vehemently and punch his fucking lights out all at once. And yet how I knew how any such attempts at rekindling what had been so viciously lost would only ever be in vain, how I felt certain, with every fiber of my being, that I could never trust that beautiful, lecherous bastard again no matter how long I lived.

  I really thought he'd been the one...

  After so many years of dating and disappointments, of searching in vain for something I'd begun to give up on ever truly finding, I had actually deluded myself into believing that I had indeed found it with Zach. That he was the man who would be different from all the other men who'd so transiently stepped into my life only to slip back out again like it was nothing at all. My existence a steady string of disappointments and promises that never ever seemed to stick.

  Zach, meanwhile, not only made the sort of promises that I wanted to hear, but delivered upon them more often than not- or, well, I should say he always did for the extent we were together... There were of course many things he'd said would eventually happen that I truly believed might have come to pass at some point.

  But the relationship was terminated before many of these things were brought to full fruition. So I'm not entirely sure whether to chalk such things down to outright broken promises or to give him the benefit of the doubt and show some faint shred of mercy, to assume the best and that he did, indeed, eventually plan on going through with what he told me he would.

  God dammit... God dammit...

  How wound up, how god damn fucking entangled I had allowed myself to become in that man. Knowing all the while that ending up hurt was inevitable, that I couldn't possibly be putting so much trust in another human being as to seem blind to the reality of human nature. Christ almighty...

  How I really must have swooned for that son of a bitch. How I'd really let all sense of logic and reason fly straight out the window. How I'd really pulled the fucking wool right over my own eyes, and how I'd somehow been surprised when it inevitably came crashing down around me, as any semblance of common sense might readily have predicted it would.

  I mean, fuck... The two of us had been dating for years, had gotten to know one another more thoroughly than any other person in either of our lives, or at least so I had thought... Hell, there had even been talk of the two
of us getting married at some point - nothing concrete, obviously, no specific date in either of our heads or any engagement rings exchanged, nothing quite so traditional or straightforward.

  But still, the two of us had formulated plans of building a damn life together, for God's sake, had mapped our futures out together under the apparently flawed assumption that the two us would be mutually present in those futures. That neither of us would just up nor disappear into the ether with scarcely a moment's notice...

  And yet, here we were...

  Lord God almighty, how I was kicking myself at this point in my life, how stupid I was feeling for having allowed my heart to have been played with in the manner that it had. In spite of my full knowledge that doing so was only hurting me further. I simply couldn't stop myself from ruminating on what the two of us had lost, from envisioning that sweet face of his.

  His masculine features and his devilish, seductive smile, his penetrating eyes that seemed to bore into my soul any time he ventured to pay me a casual glance. His warming demeanor, the manner in which the force of his presence soothed me so greatly, could turn a bad day into a good one without any sort of effort whatsoever. How I always felt so secure and happy when I was wrapped up in that son-of-a-bitch's arms.

  In spite of myself, I began to recall the last time the two of us had made love. The grinding, humping, thrusting of our entwined, sweaty bodies, pushing, pumping, squeezing, caressing, touching and exploring one another with the reverence of it being the first time every time, Each experience of the two of us fucking somehow more glorious than the last, each touch producing even more caustic sensations, each collision of flesh into flesh becoming a greater and greater shock to our systems as we rolled and wrapped and sliced our bodies to bits.

  The room seeming to shrink around us as we twisted up in the sweated sheets, the force of penetration from that tremendous cock of his routinely overpowering me, pumping me so full of his love that there was no room whatsoever for anything else, and the clamping of his tight, muscular body around me so painfully sweet that I could scarcely contain myself.

  Moaning at the top of my lungs, screaming into his open lips as they pecked and popped and slurped against my own, my flesh trembling from head to toe as I came like hell from the force of his love. My body braced, my spine arching from the sweaty pool of our love, and my toes curling as my sweet, sweet lover ejected himself into me, coating me with his essence, and overwhelming me thoroughly.

  I recalled the splendor of the afterglow, the two of us wrapped together in the sticky, sweaty haze, kissing and licking and savoring one another, whispering sweet nothings into one another's ears, until gradually he fell off into slumber, and I followed close behind in his wake, my eyelids on the verge of closing, but my mind, somehow, remaining active, refusing, for reasons I could not explain, to conform to the wishes of my body.

  I can't even explain what it was that made me do it. What gave me cause to investigate this irrational impulse? What source said irrational impulse might even have had to begin with? Call it a woman's intuition if you will, or paranoia, or me just being fucking nosy. But my nostrils began to flare as I watched him sleeping beside me, and an uneasy sense of insecurity began to overtake me without any particular cause for doing so...

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

  I crept silently over to Zach's discarded jeans, peering over my shoulder to ensure that he still remained asleep behind me. And when it was clear that that was the case, I stooped my nude, sweaty body down, and silently pulled his smartphone from the front pocket, entering his password, and unlocking the screen.

  And there they were...

  I scrolled through them, horrified, shocked at what I was seeing, photo upon photo upon photo of the same naked woman having been sexted to him. Stockpiled in one continuous gallery for me to gaze upon in miserable astonishment, my reason, perhaps, for this invasion of privacy lacking to some extent, but the ends, quite clearly, justifying the means now that my deepest fears had been so unsubtly realized.

  I didn't even give him a whiff of breath to explain himself...

  Still snoring on the bed, I yanked the pillow out from beneath his lying, cheating head, and began to smack it repeatedly against his face. Screaming bloody murder at the little motherfucker, telling him to get the hell out, get the hell out, get the hell out, even though, of course, it was our shared apartment, and he had every bit as much right to be here as I did, the goddamn little bastard...

  Things unraveled promptly after that, the two of us splitting apart a mere number of minutes after he'd just gotten his cock out of my pussy. This final cleaving apart of our flesh, I realized, perhaps the most poignant symbol imaginable for the demise of our oh-so-sweet-union, and my life, almost instantly, losing all sense of meaning whatsoever.

  It had only been a couple of days since then, and I'd been staying with a friend during that period while I tried to get my bearings about me and get things sorted out to the extent I needed to. But the hours seemed to roll by with agonizing slowness, the moments going nowhere and my misery increasing as I continued to reflect on the injustices done to me.

  It somehow tore me apart inside to think that he would be walking away from this affair of his with everything. Keeping the apartment to himself and already having a nice pink pussy ready and in store for him straight out of the gates. Whereas I was left destitute and heartbroken, without anything in the world to alleviate my pain at the moment, and everything, as a result, seeming completely and utterly hopeless.

  In the present, I was just about ready to give up on the prospect of getting laid for the evening, when suddenly the bartender sat a drink down in front of me without me having requested it. I looked up, and melted just a little bit inside to see a face looking down at me from the other end of the bar, smiling devilishly, and his bedroom eyes gazing over at me with such clarity that it was tantamount to an impossibility for me not to realize his intentions with resounding, almost shocking definition.

  He stepped over to me, and I straightened up, expecting some effort at seduction on his part, at least, but willing to settle for the bare minimum from the looks of this most savory gentleman as he ambled up close to my vicinity...

  2

  Mark was the man's name. That was about the extent of the information I bothered to collect about him. My head spinning slightly from tipsiness and my desires for becoming acquainted with his lordship happening to be almost purely physical in nature. I was, quite honestly, an easy sell to say the least, and before I'd known it I was in the back of a taxi with the stranger. Inhaling his beautiful face with such furious intent that I just about came close to suffocating on his flesh.

  The two of us stumbled wildly into his apartment. The night spinning around us as he kicked open his front door, whisking me away into his bedroom and slamming the door shut behind us.

  It was the first time in quite a while that I'd engaged in this sort of behavior to any extent whatsoever - that is, sex with a complete, total, and absolute stranger. A one night stand with a man at a bar who could have been any Dick, Joe, or Harry. An individual whose character I could not have guessed in the least, and which I did not care to guess in the least.

  Turned on and wet at the pussy at the excitement of danger, of mystery, of screwing without consequences and then never seeing this man again. Putting him out of my mind in the manner that men often did to me. Using him up and them spitting him out to get on with my life, enjoying the ride all the while as I did so.

  I was particularly vehement as the efforts of our one night love unfolded. Zach's betrayal had somehow unleashed something primal and lecherous inside me. A need to fuck and be fucked, to be brought within a hair's breadth of my limits and then pushed over the edge, screwed into oblivion in a night of brutal, strings-free passion.

  I actually began to feel just a little bit bad for the poor son-of-a-bitch as I plied him with kisses. Tilting his head back so fiercely that I could scarcely imagine h
im being able to breathe as my tongue knifed toward the back of his throat, slicing so deep into this body that I came close to being inhaled. My entire anatomy so lit up with desire at this point that I was actually beginning to shiver on top of him. Christ, how long it had been, how long since I'd felt the warm, foreign embrace of a new lover, felt the taste of his lips on my own and the tingling of his sweaty, sticky flesh against mine.

  I began to moan, and Mark began to ravish me, catching up at last with that which I was presently throwing at him. Doing his damnedest to match my efforts at loving by pushing his greedy hands all over me. Feeling me up and groping me through the fabric of my blouse, kneading up my tingling tits like two pliant balls of dough beneath his working fingertips.

  My body, all over, reacting positively to my own sweet sluttiness at having pounced on my prey this quickly. At having jumped so abruptly into bed with this new man so shortly after things had went down the tubes with the old one. Making me feel, quite honest, like a goddamn alpha female, a real take charge kind of girl who got what she wanted, and could gain access to as much sweet cock as she so happened to desire.