by KT Morrison
She picked up her phone and looked at the screen. She swiped it, then flicked through folders and folders, finding a file buried deep in her phone. She pressed play. She watched Omar’s manhood, huge in the foreground, bob eye to eye with the camera then slump to the side over Omar’s thigh as he had sat himself in front of a laptop so he could make her watch him. She watched his hand wrap around it and stroke it, watched it get firmer in his grip. It was a beautiful, big thing. She watched expressionless as he got going faster, and faster, his balls swinging and going up and down. Even his balls were over-sized. She watched it right to the end, her blank face never changing. She watched him erupt over his belly and chest, and pour over his hand, then the screen went black when it was over.
Maureen slipped out of the flat without her parents noticing. She’d skipped breakfast and got dressed right after her shower. She’d heard them in the kitchen and she’d froze in the hall. Her bag was on the table by the door and she picked it up, slung it over her shoulder and got out. She closed the door behind her without making any noise. They’d been confronting her more and more about what she was doing with her life. Wanting to know what her plans were for the future. She didn’t even know what to tell them any more. She didn’t know. She was doing her CISI Level Four because she felt like that was what she was supposed to do. If you were a business admin student with good grades and you got a job at a great Investment House you took advantage. Was she going to be a trader? She guessed so; what else was she going to do at this point?
She made it out of the building and down the front steps of their ten story building in Hounslow. She put her earbuds in and headed for the bus stop.
Her parents put her through her school. Paid for her and for her four brothers to go to uni while working with her uncle around the clock at their takeaways. They had a right to know what she was going to do. They had a right to know when she was going to move out. They wanted her married and making babies like her brothers were doing but she didn’t see that happening soon. She was saving money, paying for her own schooling now too, but she had no husband prospects. She might have been in love but marrying her man could prove tricky.
She was aware of the car following her before she saw it. She had music in her ear but she could see the lane next to the sidewalk was empty of traffic, cars were going past in the next lane over. The cars seemed aggressive, like they were roaring past an obstruction. She kept walking and could see a black car shape crawling along next to the sidewalk out of the corner of her eye. She moved away from the edge of the roadway and kept walking. Now the car got alongside her and she realized whoever it was driving was interested in her. She wasn’t unattractive, she knew that, but she was dressed for work in worsted wool and had her hair back in a tight professional bun; this kind of attention seemed unwarranted. She chanced a look over. It was a glossy black sedan, four doors, maybe an Audi, tinted windows. She took her earbuds out and put her head down. She walked more determinedly, she could see the bus stop up ahead, four figures there already waiting. She didn’t shake the car though, it kept pace with her. She felt a little mad, enough now that she looked into the passenger window, challenging the driver.
She felt stupid when it hit her. She knew the car. She absolutely knew the car. She looked around quickly and walked to the curb. The car came to a stop for her. She opened the door and got in hastily even though no one around here knew who she was.
“I wondered who the hell was following me,” she said.
“Come here,” Derek said and he leaned in for a kiss.
She was shocked at his passion, so early in the morning. She kissed him back, putting her hand on his neck and breathing him in.
Sometimes when she kissed him she could get a flash of the picture on his desk, the one of him and his wife and his kids on holiday somewhere tropical. She knew that if she squinted hard enough, scrunching her face right up she could push that image away.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him when she managed to pull away.
“I just couldn’t stop thinking about you this morning, I had to see you.”
She kissed him again. He got his hands back on the wheel when he heard a honk behind him and he got them moving.
“We can’t be seen together, Derek. We can’t go in to work like this.”
“I know Maureen, I just wanted to spend some time with you. I needed you…”
She knew what he meant. He’d let her know his feelings for her about half a year ago, working late one night with four other executives and their secretaries. He got her alone in a hall and let her know how he felt about her. She already knew it, she’d been flirting with him since before last Christmas. Not so much flirting as flattering him and responding to his very mild advances, letting him know it was okay. He moved slow and that made it hot. Sometimes maybe a bit tortuous, her wondering if they'd ever make it happen. Sometimes she’d like to think he would just come out and kiss her, push her up against a filing cabinet and put his soft lips over hers. But now they were a couple she liked the way it had played out. She forgot about all that worry that he didn’t like her, that he just flirted with everybody and it didn’t mean any thing when he did it with her. Derek wasn’t like that, she thought. He wasn't some hound dog who put his hand on every pretty girl’s knee. His feelings for her were genuine. Crazy but genuine. He was married with kids. He was fifteen years older than her. She didn’t care.
They were together in his expensive German sedan, she felt warm in his leather seats heated by the sun. That’s what was important. Derek pulled down the first side street and she told him to pull in somewhere. The first opening he saw he took it and they were in the parking lot of an Anglican church, empty but for three cars. She climbed into the back seat while he parked. He left it running and climbed back with her, no one could see in past the black tint. He pulled her to him, on his knees between her legs. She locked her legs around him. He kissed down her chest, unbuttoning her cotton dress shirt as he went. She pulled her skirt up for him and he gave up on the shirt, diving his head between her legs and biting with his lips between her legs over her panties. She got her shirt open while he did it, unhooked her bra.
“Shit,” he said, “I don't have a condom.”
“Just pull out,” she said.
He undid his pants and let them drop, pulled his shorts down so his cock stuck out and he pushed it into her. Not how she thought she might spend her morning. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him while he fucked her, holding her panties to the side to give him access. Right now she should be on the bus, earbuds on, forty minutes out from work. But here she was safe and warm, her lover inside her, making out like high-schoolers, but in the backseat of a car that probably cost as much as her parents flat.
“What the fuck is happening?” she said.
“What?” he asked, and stopped.
“The seats, they’re—”
“Massage seats, they’re—”
“Don’t stop keep going…”
He pounded into her, he grunted and groaned, and she loved every moment of it. Her handsome successful man driving into her, her head thrown back with pleasure while his fancy car seats massaged her back.
“Ah shit, oh no,” he burst out.
He pulled himself out and she saw he was already coming, spurting his thick seed onto her mound and splashing the turned up inside of her skirt.
“Oh, no, I came a little inside you,” he said. He seemed worried, not that she could get pregnant but that she might be mad at him.
“It’s okay,” she told him and she pulled him back to her, pulled his mouth to hers, and hugged him tight. She could feel his throbbing erection still hard between her legs, felt his wet seed running between her legs and out of her. She put her hand down between them and grabbed him; felt him still rock hard.
“Do it to me again,” she said, “you feel so good. Make me come.” He slid back inside her and was less urgent now. He was like steel inside her and she clamped on
him and closed her eyes, got him angled so he was touching her in all the right spots. She wondered how her parents would take this news. Fucking her rich, married boss in his backseat. Going to work and sitting all day in their dirty sexual evidence. They would not like this at all.
Mitch parked the Range Rover in his reserved spot next to Derek’s Audi, armed it with the press of a button and made his way through the underground to the elevators. He arrived in perfect time as the gold-hued aluminum doors set in their concrete bank slid open and a woman in a wool suit stepped out and brushed past him. He got in the elevator cab and turned to watch her walk quickly through the parking, her heels echoing off the concrete. Had she been crying? He pressed the gold lozenge on the panel with the number thirty engraved on it in a bold serifless font. A pleasant and pretty voice above him confirmed the number he pressed. The doors slid quietly on rubber rollers across the sill and closed off the scene, then he was gently lifted and carried up and on his way.
The cab flooded with daylight as it emerged from the underground into the centre of the building. Three walls in crystal clear lucite and he could see the cavernous atrium rising up eighty feet through the centre of the complex. The elevator hissed and the voice told him they were stopping on the ground floor. The interior of the elevator was shaded now under the blossom of one of the honey-locusts growing in curved marble banks that swerved through the atrium’s foundation. When the doors opened he saw Maureen standing there waiting to step on, her hands held together in front of her, both hands looped through the handles of her knock-off purse.
“Good morning, Maureen,” he said.
She looked surprised to see him, then smiled and wished him a good morning as well before stepping into the car. They rose up slowly through the atrium and Mitch asked her how school was going.
“Very well,” she said.
He imagined she was doing well. She was very smart, the kind that did her homework and excelled at testing. Not necessarily having a complete understanding of the subject, not some complex knowledge that pierced through the material like tendrils, expanding and anchoring, but smart enough to know what was going to be asked of them and for that he knew her grades were near perfect.
“I saw your father the other day,” he said. Mitch knew where the Mehrotra’s had their restaurants and he made sure to pick up some takeaway at least once a month. He would drive the extra forty minutes in traffic just to make that contact with them, he wasn’t even sure why he thought that was important.
“You did?”
“Yeah, at the restaurant, you know they’re both really proud of you—”
Her reaction wasn’t what he’d expected. Her neck craned back and her face frowned, her eyes narrowing as if to comprehend something difficult. He looked over his shoulder when he realized it wasn’t him that was confounding her, it was something in the atrium.
They were up high now looking down over the centre of the atrium through the transparent sides of the elevator. They could see the people below, coming into work from the street and up from the parking. The shops along the edges were closed and shuttered still, but there were two cafes open and there were lines already formed. There were two sets of stairs, tiered concrete slabs painted white with steel railings, and they ran up both sides for the first four floors. Mitch saw it then, what had attracted her attention. A man was running down the steps, his feet pumping as he hustled past people coming up, bumping them. It was Derek. He could see his suit jacket flapping, buttoned still at the front, his lock of hair bouncing as he descended.
Then they were cut off from the atrium as the cab slid behind the steel beams of the complex’s structure. Mitch and Maureen both turned and they were now looking out at the morning sky over the City of London, puzzled frowns on their faces. They rode the rest of the way in a perplexed silence. The elevator stopped on the thirtieth floor and the doors opened onto an iron catwalk that ran along the glass side of the building. They stepped off together, Mitch extending an arm to usher her out ahead of him. She smiled and lowered her head as she passed.
They could see ahead of them where the catwalk emerged into the wide v-shaped entrance of the Investment House that there was some sort of commotion. The faces and figures he was used to seeing as they moved swiftly around the offices were there but frozen in inaction. A dozen foreign figures at the centre and all faces turned blankly towards them. Eight uniformed police officers and a handful of superiors with them in cheap grey suits.
Maureen looked up to Mitch but he kept his eyes forward, wouldn’t know what to say to her. He kept his stride and walked into the fray. A petite black woman recognized him and she stepped from the officers and showed him her badge.
3
Gold Coast
Kate walked as quietly as she could through their apartment at two in the morning, fully clothed but for her bare feet. She walked on the balls of her feet trying to make as little noise as she could. Mitch was still sleeping in bed. She’d never fallen asleep, had laid there since ten until she knew what she had to do. She just couldn’t take this anymore.
She’d watched Mitch sleep, he was troubled. Not the optimistic fellow he had been at breakfast when he wanted to run away somewhere nice with her. He felt like she’d let him down, didn’t he? She knew that dealing with depressed people had a breaking point. A point where you just didn’t care any more how bad they felt. She felt like she’d disappointed him not booking a trip and that maybe he was tired of her shit. She didn’t deserve him. He was anxious at dinner like he had something terrible to say but he was putting off broaching it. She thought she knew what it was and she couldn’t face this.
There was nothing in her that could enjoy time away right now. Something dark and menacing still loomed over her and it needed to be confronted. Maybe she’d never be right in the head again but she knew what the first step to recovery was now. She just had to put that foot forward. And that was what she was doing, putting herself into motion. She stepped out of their apartment and slipped her shoes on and headed for the elevator.
Kiley hadn’t heard from Jay at all for a month now so when she saw that there was a message from him she worried. She still had no recollection of what had happened that evening after she skied all day and then drank way too much, sitting naked with him in a hot tub. He was fully clothed of course, not drunk, and who the hell knows what happened. She worried about it sometimes. But a month later it had faded a bit and the constant dread she lived under had waned. Now it was back. A message from Jay. Please, please be just something about work.
She crossed over the old iron bridge on North LaSalle Boulevard, radio turned off, the cabin filled with that rubber over metal grate hiss. She turned on to Kinzie then looked like a hawk for his side street. She did not want to mess up the directions again. Once was bad enough, you did it twice and people would think you were a flake. She didn’t need to endure another ounce of embarrassment with her best customer, that was for sure.
His place was a condo in an old mansion somewhere along here in Chicago’s Gold Coast. She was flooded with horrible thoughts on why he would have her meet him at his residence. Did he want to terminate the business relationship? Not make a scene in a public place. Possible. Another one: while she was sure she hadn’t had sex that night in the hot tub it wasn’t completely impossible that something else hadn’t occurred. Something horrible. What if she’d done something awful that night? Blown him in the hot tub because he was responsible for a big chunk of her commissions and she was just so gosh darn thankful. That really wasn’t likely. But who the fuck knew. She drank so much she couldn’t even remember. She did recall accidentally exposing herself to him. Her little titties coming up out of the water. Then doing it again a bunch of times, letting him see them again and again, for who knows what reason. What if when she had passed that blood alcohol level that keeps you sane, she stood up and gave him a real show and asked him what he thought of them, shaking the pretty things in his face. Then likely throwing
up red wine into the hot tub. She cringed and gripped the wheel. She grimaced and shook her head. Why did she drink too much? How could she have been so foolish?
She found the place, a red brick Gothic behemoth with modern windows and a steel and glass atrium. She had memorized his instructions this time, knew where to go when she got there. She found the narrow private parking lot and pulled in past the guard who didn’t even lift his head. She saw Jay’s Audi parked where he said it would be and he owned a second spot right next to it and she pulled into that. She sat a minute and looked at the numbers on the spaces, re-read his instruction. Yes, she was satisfied, this was the right spot. She sat and collected herself a moment, thought about a few different scenarios and how she might handle them. She shook her head, wished things were different, then got out and locked up her Mercedes and headed to his door.
His place had street access, but it was behind a tall iron gate and she had to buzz him. She pressed the button set into a black and gold metal box, part modern, part old world. There was no answer through the speaker, but a mechanical buzz and the sound of metal teeth scissoring away. She pulled the gate open before it stopped. Jay wasn’t giving anything away.
What if she had done something untoward in the tub? Like she had seduced him. God, what if she had sucked his cock in there? So very unlikely…but what if she was being summoned to the private abode of Jay Shaker, heart surgeon, for a follow up? What if he thought she’d be available whenever his fifty year old balls needed emptying. She had to completely give up drinking. She would think about it.
Kiley climbed the eight steps up to his glossy black front door. So glossy she could see her reflection coming up to nervously knock on it. She dressed professionally for the appointment. All business. Navy skirt in wool, bam, right down to her knees. Flats and tights, an ironed white shirt under a blue suit jacket that went with the skirt. She wasn’t here to fool around. She left her hair though—left it wild, didn’t pull it back. That mane of hair was her trademark.