Mr. Personality

by Carol Rose

  So overpowering was the sensation of her palm wrapped around him that he, gasping, had to withdraw himself.

  “Wait. Wait a moment,” he growled, delving gently between her legs. Her wet folds promised the heaven he craved. To be drawn in and held by her, to feel himself cradled in the depths of her body. Pausing there between her legs, Max traced her delicate dampness, his own hunger rising with her mewling response. So eager, so needy for him. Feeling the urgent pounding in his groin, he let his fingers inventory her silken treasure. Her trembling thighs, the sweet, swollen labia, the small, hard kernel of her clitoris.

  Bending forward to suckle again at her ripe breasts, he knelt before her, feeling weak and incredibly powerful in the same moment. They were both weak before the cataclysm of their flesh. On her back in the middle of his bed, her knees bent and open to him, she held him captive. The lure of her wanton arousal kept every particle of his attention. For him, this woman writhed and moaned. She craved his touch, yearning to know again his member cleaving the aching void in her. No power on earth could dissuade him from joining his body with hers.

  His mouth joined with hers, a hand stroking and brushing her nipples, he toyed with her wet heat, entranced with the slippery, welcoming orifice. So lost was he in the sensation of her beneath his touch, he didn’t realize her intent until she reached for him and pressed his member against her cleft.

  With a groan, he sank into her. Slowly, they merged, her body engulfing him. He felt so huge and hot he half-expected a sizzle when he thrust into her. Dizzy and blind with sensation, his body trembling and overcome with the pleasure of loving her, he gave himself up. This moment, this joining, this encompassing experience comprised the total of his existence. She moved against him, rising up into his thrusts, his name on her lips. Her hands clutching at his shoulders, his hips, she urged him forward.

  Trying to make it last, he pulled out slowly and reentered her over and over, the effort almost superhuman. With each movement, he lost himself in her, hilt-deep, the marvel of her catching in his throat. He felt her rising tide, heard her panting breath between their kisses. Her body tightened around him as she arched her back, a high, keening sound breaking from her throat. Pushed almost to the brink himself, he strove on, withdrawing and cleaving into her, each stroke more powerful than the next.

  Driving into her, slick flesh against flesh, his body tight and rigid, he could only thrust deeper.

  Still moving eagerly beneath him, Nicole kissed him wide-mouth and, her hands on his hips, pulled him into her harder and harder until he was afraid of doing her damage. But then, her body tightened again, sweetly encircling and rippling around him. Past bearing it, he buried himself in her and bucked as he lost himself to orgasm.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Half an hour later, Nicole sighed contentedly, wondering why anyone would do anything else. With sex this great, how were they going to get anything done? Maybe that was why men were designed with a waiting period between erections.

  A bagel with cream cheese and strawberry jam in her hand, she chewed contentedly and watched Max. He lie naked on the bed next to her, his strong back and tight butt hers for the admiring as he read the newspaper.

  She didn’t know what the future held, but right now, she couldn’t care.

  “I thought you read the paper first thing every morning when you got up,” she said, trailing her toe down his hairy, muscular leg.

  “Usually, I do,” he said, his voice absent. “Today, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked, more to mess with him than out of a need to know.

  “I don’t know. I just got up and went to work.” Still apparently intent on his paper, Max captured her questing foot and held it.

  “Oh, a foot rub,” she teased, “that would feel almost as good as what you were doing with your hands a few minutes ago.”

  “What the fuck!” Max dropped her foot abruptly and hauled himself upright bringing the paper with him. “The mother fucking dirtball! How the hell—What gives him the right—“

  “What?” She leaned forward, concerned. “What happened?”

  But Max didn’t answer. Bent still over whatever had offended him, he gripped the newspaper with rough hands as if he barely managed to keep from rending it. “I’ll have his ass for this! Does this no-talent jerk off think he can get away with this? And he’ll want to interview me when the damned book does come out!”

  “They printed something about you?” She slipped a comforting hand down the long curve of his back. “Let me see.”

  He lifted his head and stared at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “What?”

  “Let me see,” she said, her voice concerned.

  Max’s face hardened as he deliberately balled the newspaper up, crushing the entire section into a wad. “It’s shit. Not worth reading.”

  Launching the ball of newsprint across the room, he jumped off the bed and went into the bathroom. The sounds of opening and closing drawers followed.

  Her half-eaten bagel returned to her plate, Nicole left the bed to retrieve the wadded paper. When she smoothed the sheet out she found a literary column with the headline “Has Maxwell Tucker Lost His Touch?” Scanning the piece, she shuddered over the phrase “…once breathtaking prose deteriorated into over-blown repetition….” The column went on to say Max’s work had grown derivative and flat. His current work was, the author claimed, hardly worth a glance. “He’s lost his golden touch,” the man concluded with something resembling pity.

  Pity was something Max would never take well, especially about his work. Hadn’t he reared back on her when she’d said something about feeling sorry for him?

  Dropping the paper, Nicole looked up as Max came back in the room fully dressed. “This is nasty! And so wrong!”

  Max’s cool smile was a contemptuous offering. “He’s welcome to take his shots, the sanctimonious bastard. I’ve been leveled by the best. He doesn’t even come close!”

  It was as if a different man had emerged from the bathroom. His face almost as saturnine as the first time she saw him, Nicole felt her heart give a lurch.

  “But this is so…mean. It has to hurt you,” she insisted, the crumpled paper still in her hands.

  “It’s nothing,” Max dismissed in a hard tone. He lounged over to the scatter of notebooks on the floor by the window, every line of his body casual and…distant. He’d withdrawn, it seemed, into the disconnected, uncaring Ogre.

  Staring at him in consternation, Nicole felt a sudden urge to cross her arms across her bare breasts and run for cover…as if she were in the room with a stranger. Watching him in near-disbelief, she tried to piece together her scattered thoughts. She knew he was a loving, much-misunderstood man, but this sudden transformation seemed so complete. It was like watching a human being morph into an alien.

  With one flip of a switch, he’d turned off his heart.

  Or had he, she wondered. Was that hurt and fury emanating from him like a high, fine vibration despite his casual words?

  Max glanced up at her, his face holding a shallow kind of compassion. “Are you worrying about my feelings, sweet Nicole? Well, don’t. I’m accustomed to low-level, profoundly mediocre literary hangers-on taking shots at me. This guy makes his living wanting to be me and, being unable, he makes do by writing this kind of dreck.”

  His every scornful word was laced with an arrogance and a contempt that slipped easily from his mouth. As if he’d donned an familiar attitude with his shirt and jeans, he wore his condescension easily.

  There was disdain on his face and denial in his words, Nicole thought with consternation. She knew he was upset despite his refusal to acknowledge it. His mask of cool ruthlessness was belied by the anger flickering at the back of his eyes.

  Slouching back over to the bed, Max lifted her bagel from her plate and took a bite. “Like a lot of columnists, he strikes out from ineffectiveness. A masking of his own hidden deficiencies, which from what I hear, are as personal as they
are profound. He’s trying to prove his manhood, which is obviously in question.”

  “Max, it’s okay to be upset about this,” she told him uneasily. She hated seeing the man she loved revert so completely to his tough shell. “Anyone would be.”

  A contemptuous smile flickered on his face. “Don’t waste your concern on me. This guy is insignificant.”

  Nicole shook her head, unable to keep from saying, “He writes a book review column in a major paper. Thousands of people read this.”

  “Nonetheless, he’s of no matter. One testosterone-challenged, panty-wearing, limp-wristed columnist out to meet his deadline isn’t reason enough for me to even blink,” he said crudely.

  The ugly slur jarred her. “Max! Just because a man’s gay doesn’t mean his opinions don’t count.”

  “Is he gay?” Max lifted his brow. “Not that it matters, the gender of his preference is as insignificant as his thoughts on my work. I was referring to his inability to get it up for anyone.”

  With this last scathing remark, he sat down in front of the window and started to write as if nothing had happened.

  Watching him helplessly, Nicole struggled to understand how the sane rational side of the man she loved had so effectively disappeared. At this moment, he seemed like nothing so much as the cold bastard she’d first come to New York to challenge.

  * * *

  “What do you mean there’s a problem with the book?” Max snapped. Standing in the office the next morning, the phone receiver pressed to his ear, he turned away from where Nicole sat working at the computer. Like he hadn’t had enough shit from that damned columnist. Bracketing a hand across his forehead, he tried to ease the tension band clamped there.

  “Well,” Cynthia hesitated. “I…looked over the first two hundred pages you sent—“

  “So, what if you did?” Max asked, his gut balling up as his voice sharpened. He’d sent the first half of the book over so she could get started on the editing, but he hadn’t done it without a qualm. This book was different. Hell, he’d been different writing it. Had he lost his touch? Was that fucking columnist right? He didn’t write this kind of book. He was already screwed, missing his deadlines, his brain refusing to work until just a few weeks ago. And the stuff he’d come up with. It was…so different. Was he cutting off his own legs letting this work go out?

  “I’m a little…worried,” Cynthia said. “It’s very…different. We had an editorial meeting and, to be blunt, several people are concerned about how a story like this from you will be received. You know, you don’t usually write…upbeat, everything-is-going-to-work-out kind of things. This isn’t what readers look to you for.”

  Behind him, he heard Nicole’s chair squeak, his brain registering the sound with a faint sort of consciousness. But the only thing that seemed real in a surreal moment was the phone in his hand and Cynthia’s voice telling him the book was shit.

  Cynthia who had worked with him for years, the one person he most trusted with his work.

  This book had sprang up in him differently over the last few weeks. Never had a work been so entwined with his daily personal experience. The words came to him all tangled up with his heated images of Nicole. As if the hunger he felt for her had entered his bones, he’d felt propelled by the positive energy that characterized her. The story had taken on a life of its own, all right, but not one he readily recognized. It was as if she’d infected him with new tender emotions that had eventually taken over the story. As he was writing it, he didn’t mind so much, but now….

  Was the book crap?

  “Listen,” Max said quickly, scrambling to regain his precarious balance. Cynthia was his friend. Yes, he respected his editor’s skill, to a point, but she was just as fallible as the rest of her profession, wasn’t she? Maybe he simply had to play this thing through. After all, he had no other story coming to him. “Listen, Cynthia. I told you this book was different. You assured me you trusted my judgment, so what’s the problem?”

  “Well,” Cynthia hesitated, no doubt reacting to the blunt anger in his voice. “It’s the happy ending you outlined. Several people here think it’s kind of…sappy.”

  He trusted this woman—this editor, Max thought, the concept revolving uselessly in his brain. Not often did he need a guiding hand with his work, but Cynthia had a solid, objective ear. She’d been his friend—and his partner in his work—for years.

  Feeling rooted to the spot, he was aware that the vice around his head had spawned a buzz in his ears. It was shit. The entire book…his career…everything was shit. And his career was everything. It was him. Yet, once again he’d let his experience with a woman twist him inside out. So what if Nicole wasn’t married to his brother? The heated, sexual glow between them must have polluted his brain, only this time instead of cutting his brother’s heart out, he’d thrust an ice pick into his own.

  “Are you there, Max?” Cynthia asked, her voice worried now. “We need to talk.”

  “Yes,” he said, the hollow word seeming to come from someone else.

  “Well…do you want to think about it and let me know?” she ventured. “We could meet at the pub, if you don’t want to come into the office.”

  “Yes, I’ll let you know,” he said automatically, the breath harsh and strangled in his throat. What the hell was he going to do?

  “Good, I’ll talk to you tomorrow or the day after, at the latest?”

  Max carefully set the receiver in the cradle, the muscles in his jaws feeling locked. All these weeks when he’d thought he found his salvation, it had been a glittering illusion. Yes, he’d been writing, but he’d written dreck. When would he learn!

  The real world wasn’t supportive and encouraging, it didn’t wrap people up in a glow of well-being. Reality sank its teeth into you and shook hard like a feline harrowing a mouse.

  How could he have forgotten? Once again, he’d lost his perspective in a cunt…only this time, he’d given more than his dick to a woman. He’d almost given Nicole his career.

  Fisting a hand, he slammed it into the wall above the phone, pain instantly radiating up his arm.

  “Max!” Nicole exclaimed. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m such a fucking idiot!” he snarled, wheeling around to glare at her. “A blind, stupid, fucking idiot!”

  “Hey,” Nicole said, eyeing him warily. “It can’t be that bad.”

  He looked furious, she thought, as he stood there holding his wrist with his other hand, his face dark with anger. His features contorted with rage, he seemed furious, all the sudden. Angrier than she’d ever seen him.

  Max’s mouth twisting bitterly, his voice ringing in the small space, he said, “Yes, dammit, it can be that bad! Not every damned thing is rosy, Nicole. Sometimes—a lot of the times—things are shit!”

  With his eyes wild and dark, he was almost a stranger. She didn’t know what to do or say to him.

  Her hands outstretched as if to settle him down, she said in a calming voice, “All right! Tell me what the problem is. Your editor—Cynthia?—thinks the book is bad? Has she actually read it? She’d have to be nuts not to like this book! It’s the best you’ve ever written.”

  “What the hell do you know about it?” he roared. “Are you in the publishing field? Do you know any damned thing besides fucking high school level history?”

  “Hey!” Nicole protested, jerking back as if she’d cut herself on an unexpected knife. Starting to get angry herself, she said, “You don’t have to be so nasty!”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me how to behave?” Max yelled, the veins in his neck bulging.

  All at once, she was reminded of his cruel nickname. In the time she’d known him he’d never seemed more ogre-like.

  This couldn’t be happening, she thought numbly. She’d seen Max cold and cutting, but this white-hot anger—it scared her and made her mad, at the same time.

  He was upset and hurting. She didn’t want to be angry with him, but he’d turned into a roarin
g fury.

  “I’ll tell you who I am. I just happen to be the woman who’s in love with you,” she snapped, getting up from her chair to do battle. “And you don’t need to talk to me like this! If something has happened, we can deal with it without getting ugly and hurting each other.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that!” Max yelled. “All this damned time, I’ve been thinking about your ass and your tits and how I want to do you night and day and, dammit, caring what you think about me and my brother and I’ve been pissing my life away. Just throwing it away and forgetting what it’s really about! I’ve been writing crap! All this positive shit! It’s a lie! People hurt! They deceive and cheat with no reason whatsoever other than they can! You were so upset about me messing with Alexa? It meant nothing! Not to her and not to me! This is how people are, Nicole. They’re sick and they’re hopeless and the only good moments are rare!”

  “That’s not true!” she said on a sobbing breath. “Don’t say that about yourself and certainly don’t say it about me.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he raged. “This damned book is as much a caricature as Bondage, the book your father plagiarized. That book skewered business and corporate America, but this one takes on the really big deceit! Love and fidelity in America! This book illustrates that none of us know what the hell we’re doing when sex gets involved!”

  His laugh rang out mockingly. “I see the end of the story now. The characters will learn the grim truths they’ve been denying and they’ll embrace a refreshing reality! We all want to fuck each other and you can’t trust anyone! Reality! We all have to live there sooner or later! I see it now. With a few revisions, I’ll have a book that’ll really sell!”