by Demi Donovan
Locked in a kiss with her, she feels very fucking real.
Her body presses against mine and the exchange turns more frantic. My cock is hard and hurting in my slacks and I want nothing more than to bury it in her, but one of the two of us has to have some control and it can’t be her. I break the kiss abruptly, grabbing her chin and tilting it up so she looks me in the eyes.
Her lips are so deliciously puffy from the kissing.
“I don’t want you to fuck him,” I tell her. “Not before I say you can.”
“He doesn’t want me to fuck you either,” she says back, a ghost of a smile on her lips.
The little bitch. I just might fall in love if this keeps going on.
“I guess we’re at a standstill then,” I grin.
With her lips so close, I slip a thumb between them and she suckles on it, keeping her eyes on mine. Whatever the case may be, she’ll definitely be the end of me, no matter what happens with Parker and me over the course of this.
“What I do want you to do, is fingerfuck yourself tonight, thinking of me. Will you do that for Daddy, kitten?”
She nods, increasing the pressure on my thumb, her tongue swirling around it. As I let her go, releasing her from where I had pinned her and leave her in the archive room, I’m not fully convinced that I’ll be the only man she’ll be thinking about tonight.
And somehow, that’s okay.
Thirteen
Cassie
“I’m not done with you”
That text has been staring at me for more than a day now and I haven’t brought myself to delete it. I also haven’t replied to it. There’s something about stoking obsession that I’m beginning to understand far too well now and I don’t want to drive Mark on.
Besides, it’s not like I don’t have stuff on my mind more important than my upset quasi-ex-boyfriend, who deems me worthy of his time and attention now that I might have come into some wealth. It is of course a lie, I barely have anything of my own, exactly as it has always been, but I don’t think I could communicate this to Mark in a way that would leave him satisfied.
How am I supposed to tell him with a straight face that I am living with a man twice my age, working for him, and there’s nothing for him to gain from it? I stole from my mother, I imagine him telling me, why couldn’t I steal from him? It would be a valid point, if I wasn’t trying to not become a horrible person in the meanwhile.
Without noticing it before I’ve been doing it for a minute or so, my hands keep going to my neck, rubbing it where Sawyer’s fingers sunk into the skin. He didn’t leave marks but he wasn’t far from it. It should probably frighten me, the fact that he can be so easily aggressive and domineering, but it turns me on. It’s a sick combination of lust and anger I feel for him most of the time and he affects me like a drug shot straight through my veins.
It’s so different from what I feel for Parker, but equally as strong.
Which basically makes me the worst person ever, right?
I lick my lips, shaking my head and focusing back on my work. I did what Parker asked me hours ago – proofing and formatting the memos on the Tesla project. Now, I’m going over some of the math they’re using for the battery charge. I find it fascinating.
Though most of it is over my head, I’ve been googling the formulas and educating myself on how all of it works. I’ve always been good with math, numbers just make sense to me and formulas have a sort of rhythm to them that I enjoy and parse without thinking about it too hard. I’ve always thought of it as a neat distraction, but here I get the first glimpses of how this can be an actual career. A ticket to something bigger and better.
I wonder if my dad felt that way when he was my age. Did he look into the future and think he saw light at the end of the tunnel, only to have it turn into a train ready to run him over?
Biting the inside of my mouth, I brush that thought aside and refocus. Between obsessing about the two men in my life that I can’t choose from and trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of a large engineering firm going full throttle, these moments of quiet and somewhat introspective study have been true lifesavers.
I feel like I can recenter myself through it and that’s something I’ve rarely felt before. I think it might have something to do with the fact that even with the best of teachers, high school tends to be too easy. This math, these formulas and schematics, however, are something hard and beyond me and that’s exciting to me.
Maybe it’s the same kind of brain chemistry that goes around when I’m alone with Sawyer or Parker. They’re both beyond me as well, or so I feel anyway, and yet when I understand them, when I unravel them, it makes perfect sense. Those moments I spend alone with them are crystal clear for me and not for a second do I feel out of place or out of my depth.
Today’s a Friday but I doubt the weekend is going to mean much to either Parker or Sawyer. At least they don’t give me the vibe of being the kind of guys who drop their work at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday and not think about it until Monday. The day is slowly grinding to an end and other than my stolen scene with Sawyer in the archive room, I’ve barely seen the two of them around.
When I have caught them together, they’ve been looking at one another like they’re a wave of a red flag away from another round of fist fighting. I know I’m going to have to do something about it, help them resolve their newfound grievances with one another, but how am I supposed to do that?
The only way to fix anything is to choose. Either one of them, or neither of them. It’s not a choice I’ve been able to make so far, so why do I think it’s something that will magically become available to me in the near future?
The most probable course of action here is likely one that leaves me a mumbling, tongue-tied fool, unable to make a choice between the two most perfect men I’ve ever met. Or maybe they’ll just realize that I’m an eighteen-year-old who doesn’t know any better and both give up on me?
That thought fills the pit of my stomach with dread and I scribble a black box on the corner of the page of the notebook I was on, my focus drawn from the math and onto my predicament once again. It’s difficult making rational decisions when your whole body acts completely fucking irrational whenever it is around one of those two. Or, god forbid, both of them.
With the lump in my stomach seeming to get heavier by the minute, I’m roused from my dark thoughts by my phone buzzing again. It’s a call this time and as I reach to decline it, assuming it to be Mark calling, my hand stalls.
Dad flashes over the screen.
I don’t remember the last time he called me.
Grabbing the phone, I get up from the desk and rush to the archive room, locking the door behind me with a jittery hand. A part of me is absolutely convinced that he found out somehow. That one way or another, he has heard of what I’ve been doing with Parker and Sawyer and he’s calling me to let me know how disappointed he is with me.
I mean, I called both of them Daddy, for fuck’s sake. Who does that?
“Hey, dad,” I say into the phone, leaning against the small desk space Sawyer had me pushed up on just a couple of hours ago.
“Hey, bug. How’s my little girl?” he asks, sounding uncharacteristically sober and alert.
He hasn’t called me bug since I was twelve.
“I’m… I’m all right. How are you?”
“Oh you know, always dying, never dead,” he jokes, a bit of humor I never learned to appreciate. “How are my friends back at SCP?”
“You mean Parker and Sawyer?”
I bite my lip. I shouldn’t be bringing them up by name if I don’t have to.
“I’m sure there are one or two people down at engineering who I might remember too, but yes, I’m talking about Parker and Sawyer. My former partners, you know, the guys who ruined my life?”
In my head, I’m telling him that no one ruined his life besides he himself, but I keep my tongue behind my teeth for that tidbit. I’ve rarely heard him speak so bitterly about Parker and Saw
yer, usually he would reminisce about the good times. It wasn’t until last year that I actually heard the story of what happened between the three of them to cause a rift that couldn’t be mended.
“They’re okay,” I say tentatively.
“Are you three getting along?” he asks, prying.
“I, um, yeah, I guess. Parker’s been really nice to me.”
If we define nice by going down on me and giving me the orgasm of a lifetime, which I do. And that’s on top of everything else he’s done for me.
“Good, good,” he mutters on the other line, quieting for a moment.
“Dad?”
“I’m here. Look, bug, you’ve been doing good. You just stay there and keep getting along with Parker and Sawyer and you’ll make your dad a happy man, all right?”
“Okay,” I answer.
It doesn’t sound like something he’s saying as encouragement. I don’t think it has anything to do with him wanting me to succeed or flourish in the situation I am in, but something different… Something I can’t name and I’m not sure if I want to.
“I need to go now, bug. I’ll get in touch soon. And oh, bug, don’t tell Parker or Sawyer that we’re talking to each other, all right? Can you do that for your old man?”
“Sure,” I say, frowning.
The line clicks dead and I’m left staring at my phone in puzzlement. It almost seems as if I’d be better off chucking the damn thing out of the window because other than the texts I’m sending with Callista, nothing that comes from it has been anything resembling positive.
There’s an eerie feeling building in me. Something is going on with my dad and I don’t think I’m going to like it. After a minute of thinking about it and coming up with no great solution to whatever this new layer of bullshit is in my life, I skulk back to my desk and throw myself back into the math.
At least that makes sense.
Fourteen
Parker
“Where’s Cassie?” Sawyer asks as he rushes into my office unannounced but not uninvited.
“I sent her out for a dinner run,” I tell him, shrugging my shoulders.
I picked a spot a couple of blocks from here so I’d have time to have this conversation with Sawyer before she got back. It’s been a long time coming and I don’t want her to witness me and him at each other’s throats again. Not after what we shared last night.
“You don’t want her around?” he asks with a smirk, shrugging off his jacket and casually rolling up his sleeves.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d assume he was getting ready to pay me back for the impromptu punch the other day. But I don’t think that’s Sawyer’s style. He’s a vindictive fucker, but he lets people know when he’s coming.
“I thought it would be best if we got to talk when it’s just the two of us,” I agree, Sawyer moving to peer out of one of the windows overlooking downtown Boston.
It’s always busy, even when it isn’t. Probably why I like the city so much. There’s a lot of motion, but it isn’t overwhelming like it can be in New York or LA. Regardless of where I travel, I’m always glad to come back to Boston. Being a Montana boy, the fact that I’m so attached to a city like this probably says things about me I wouldn’t like. My mother certainly doesn’t approve.
“All right, so shoot,” Sawyer says, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Or would you prefer punching me again?”
“Maybe later,” I answer, both of us grinning at that.
I’ve never hit him before yesterday and he’s never hit me, though there have been times where I’m sure both of us have wanted to beat the other into agreement. I find it curious that it took Cassie to cause a rift like that between us and I’m not certain whether the fact that we’ve been driven to fighting over her like schoolyard bullies tells me something about her, or us.
Probably a little of both.
“For Cassie’s sake, we need to stop fighting among ourselves,” I tell him, leaning back in my leather high-back office chair, pressing my fingers together. “This is not why I brought her here and I think you and I both know that if Cameron knew what was going on-“
“Cameron’s a loser who would sell his own kids for another bottle of vodka,” Sawyer growls.
“I think he’s more of a scotch man,” I comment, doing nothing to alleviate the point.
The truth is, I don’t necessarily disagree with Sawyer. Cameron is no one’s definition of dad of the year and as much as I consider him a friend and a personal mistake for letting him get so far off the rails in his life, I can attest that other than the rare moment of fatherly care I witnessed during our last conversation, I haven’t seen him giving much of a shit about his family. At the very least, the amounts of money I’ve been shoveling his way over the years would have added up to two fairly plush college funds.
“Well, regardless. She’s eighteen. She’s the daughter of our former partner and she’s here on my watch. I looked her mother in the eye and promised her that I’d keep Cassie safe. I don’t think what’s going on at the moment is anyone’s understanding of safe or normal.”
Sawyer doesn’t react for a moment but eventually, he shrugs his wide shoulders, electing to keep staring out of the window with his arms behind his back.
“So what are you suggesting here?” he asks.
When I went over this conversation in my head before buzzing Sawyer to come meet me at my office, it was perfectly chivalrous in my mind. I was going to say that we should both take a step back and because Cassie has told me she can’t make the choice, we should remove the option altogether. We’re grown men, we can control our urges. We would simply agree that Cassie is off-limits for the both of us.
That would be the sane, well-reasoned and adult thing to do. What I’m about to say, faced with the option of never getting to taste my sweet babygirl again, is the opposite of it.
“I’m suggesting that you admit that you’re no good for her and you take a step back.”
Before I can even go on, Sawyer has spun around, pure, honest rage burning in his eyes. This is going about as badly as I figured it would.
“What?” he growls at me, the muscles in his forearms coiling together.
“She was entrusted into my care and unlike you, I don’t have a history of fucking my way through the underbelly of Boston and leaving a slew of tied up, messed up women in my wake,” I say, hanging onto the last shreds of my composure.
I know what I’m saying is just a hop and a skip away from being cruel, but I can’t help myself. The moment I started talking, I knew I would never be able to give up Cassie.
“She’s living with me. She admitted last night that she’s wanted to be with me since I picked her up from Prestview. Honestly, Sawyer, is there a universe in which you think you would be a better choice for her than I am?”
Of course, I’m willingly leaving out the fact that Cassie also told me that she can’t make up her mind about us, but what Sawyer doesn’t know can’t spur him on.
“So your whole argument here is finders keepers, you saw her first so you get to have her? No, Parker, I don’t think that’s how this shit is going to work. I don’t care what the fuck she told you last night because when she was wrapped around me today, she had something entirely fucking different to say.”
I’m out of my chair now, charging at Sawyer. I thought seeing red was just an expression but the corners of my vision are pulsing scarlet now and I’m more pissed off than I’ve ever been, with maybe the slight exception of last night. Walking in on Cassie and Sawyer, with his cock in her mouth, is not an image that brings me inner fucking peace.
“You need to leave her the fuck alone, Layton, or you won’t enjoy the consequences,” I say, my hands gripping the front of his shirt.
The punch comes inevitably, knocking me back but not off my feet because I’m holding onto Sawyer. He couldn’t put his full weight behind it because I was so close to him, but it still fucking hurts.
“Fuck you,” he hisses. “She�
�s not your fucking property, you don’t get to tag her and keep her.”
“Stop, both of you!” a horrified voice screams at Sawyer and I still in our shitty rendition of office combat.
Cassie’s staring at us from the door, a comical copy of what I must have looked like last night, the bag of food scattered next to her feet.
“Let go of each other right now,” she says and we oblige, though begrudgingly.
The look Sawyer gives me is one of promising a decent beating the moment he gets me alone somewhere. I can only respond with the same. With the amount of adrenaline that is pounding through my veins right now, I feel like I could tear him limb from limb and not feel a lick of remorse for it.
“You, sit down,” she says, pointing at me. “And you too,” she continues, pulling the door shut behind her after motioning for Sawyer to take the second of the two armchairs in the room.
My office here is minimalist, unlike the smattering of antiques I have in place at home. It feels like a cold backdrop to a fight that is all about emotion and anger. At least I won’t feel too bad if we break a couple of things.
I quietly count my blessings that I had the wisdom of waiting until the executive floor was well and truly empty on a Friday night to try and ‘talk’ to Sawyer, but I guess I should have seen this coming. After all, how could I let go of Cassie?
She’s dressed in a navy skirt and matching top that fit her like a glove. Her hair is swept back in an intricate braid and she’s wearing the butterfly earrings I bought her. Right now, with her expression etched with disappointment and worry, she doesn’t look like the girl I picked up at her house a scant week ago. She looks like a woman.