by Laura Day
“Yes,” he said, and he was relieved that his voice didn’t crack. “I assume you have condoms?”
She grinned at him, at the affect she was having on him. “You assume correct. Strip off, and come over here.”
His erection was hard and upright as he stripped off for her, and she didn’t give him a chance to come to her; she crawled, sinuous and sexy, across the floor, taking him in her mouth as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. He groaned, his knees weak for a moment, bracing himself on her shoulders. “Jesus, Trish.”
She laughed, her mouth still around him, and the vibrations made him shiver. She sucked him hard for a moment, so hard that he had to focus on breathing to make sure he didn’t suffocate.
“Not gonna last long like this. That what you want?”
She laughed again and pulled back, circling the base of his dick with her hand and squeezing him softly. “Your girl not taking such good care of you?”
“She takes amazing care of me. But you know how it is. One great bike makes you want two more.”
“That’s my Mason,” she said. “Never satisfied.”
She suckled him for another moment, her hand cupping his balls and gently stretching his sac down, and he fought to keep his hips still. He wanted nothing more than to grab her hair and fuck her mouth until he spurted down her throat, but there was more happening here, more that he didn’t quite understand yet. But he was sure this wasn’t in the plan.
“You ever played with a violet wand?”
He forced his two remaining brain cells to rub together and make a spark. “Shock toy, right?”
She reached past him and brought out a wand with a flog attachment made out of narrow metal chains. “I’m going to suck your cock,” she said, conversationally. “I’m going to suck it as hard as I can. And you’re going to flog the shit out of me.” She gave him a wicked grin. “If you don’t leave at least one bruise, I will be incredibly disappointed.”
He started to ask her how this was supposed to prove anything, but her mouth was around his cock again, nibbling and suckling, and holy hell it felt amazing. Too many guys he knew thought of oral as useless unless it was followed up by them getting to stick their dick in something, but he’d always loved being entirely at a woman’s mercy like this, knowing that she knew it too.
He forced himself to focus, and reached down to lay the chains of the flog along the base of her spine and draw them slowly up her back. She shivered, and all suction on his cock vanished as she gasped around him, the tip of him so far back in her throat that he could feel her throat working against him.
The sensation was utterly amazing, and he was close to trembling. He drew the flog back, and she drove her mouth back down onto his cock, licking and sucking and nipping at him as he groaned and gasped and kept fighting for focus. He brought the flog down on her back, gently, and she gasped again, hard, her mouth tight around him.
“Yes,” she murmured, and he drew back and hit her again. “Harder,” she said, and he complied. “Harder!” She glared up at him. “You fucking coward, hit me already, grab my hair, fuck my mouth, make it fucking worth waiting for!”
A small corner of his mind told him to stop, to wait, but her mouth was so hot and tight on him, and it was so much what he wanted. He wrapped his hand in her hair, shoving her onto him in the perfect rhythm, the flog falling in an off-beat pattern.
She was groaning into him, moaning and meeting him, suckling him, and he was so fucking close to coming, his balls tight and hard against his body, but just as he started to swell, the tone of her cries changed. He heard the panic, heard her whimper “stop.”
It wasn’t a scream, it wasn’t a cry, just a tiny little word, and he heard it, and no matter how fucking close he was, he couldn’t make himself pretend that he hadn’t. He let go of her hair, pulled back from her, and as his knees gave out, his balls turning into burning pebbles of pain between his thighs. He shut off the wand and let it fall to the floor, and his hands gently cupped Trish’s face. “Trish? You okay?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, but she was smiling. “No,” she said. “I’m really not. But I think maybe I’m gonna be.”
He was aching so much that it was hard to think past the pain in the moment, though part of him savored the swollen hot feeling. “Trish, I love you, but what the hell are we doing?”
“You, baby, are going to fuck me until I scream for you, and then you are going to make sure that son of a bitch is never coming near me or those kids again, and then I’m going to get them some help. I know who to talk to. I can make it go smooth.”
“Trish, I—thank you, but what the hell?”
She shrugged. “It’s all well and good to say you’ll stop when someone asks you to. I needed to know you would. That you were still my Mason, deep down under all that leather and those broken eyes.”
She reached out, and they tumbled down into the pile of pillows. His nuts were aching. She was stroking him softly, and he thought he’d be able to get past the pain. She slipped a condom on him, easy as that, and then turned over for him, spreading her thighs and nudging back against him, the tip of his cock pressing against her swollen body.
“Trish—are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you, you don’t have to do this.”
She looked back at him over her shoulder and gave him a grin that turned him inside out. “I want to, baby; do you? If you’re done, if it was too mean a trick, I get it, I’ll still help you.”
His balls told him, in no uncertain terms, what they’d do to him if he walked out of here when he didn’t have to. “I just want you to be sure.”
She answered by pressing back against him, seating him deep inside of her in a slick, smooth, hot motion. He shuddered as she slid him all the way inside of her. This was his favorite moment—not the flirting before, not the orgasm at the end. This moment, this second of joining, when they both trembled, acknowledging the moment that they were sharing.
She moved first, pulling back from him and then sliding back, her thighs slapping against his, and on the second stroke he met her, his hands tight on her hips, showing her what he wanted. She sighed with pleasure and leaned down, her head supported on one hand, her other coming back to find her clit.
He felt her tensing around him as he throbbed into her, fast and hard, dancing so close to the edge already. He waited for her, though, waited with his teeth set into his lower lip, until she cried out, her fingers moving like lightning bolts over her clit, her pussy pounding hard and fast around him, pulling him deeper in. He couldn’t contain himself, then, and he came after her, pushing hard into her body, holding the girl he’d cared about for so very many years as she finally trusted him.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Caroline gave in. She’d been staring at the clock in the guest bedroom for an hour, and she wasn’t sleeping. At home she would have pulled out a book or played a game on her phone or done something else to distract herself from the insomnia until her brain gave up and admitted that it was time to sleep. The room that Jack and Missy had given her was gorgeous, but it was a guest room, and there was nothing here for her.
She sighed and threw back the covers. She’d get a glass of water, and she’d seen bookcases in the living room before. Her own reading tastes were pretty broad, so she could find something there. She’d curl up on the couch and wait for sleep to find her.
She heard rustling in the kitchen before she got there. It made her heart pulse, and she had to focus for a minute. This wasn’t a movie. The sounds were too quiet to be someone who was trying to wake her up, and too loud to be someone who was trying to keep from being noticed. The odds were that either Jack or Missy were up, in the kitchen as well.
But she still crept down the hallway and through the living room, forcing herself to move as quietly as she could. She peaked around the corner into the kitchen, and then took a deep, sighing breath. Missy was standing in front of the refrigerator, staring as if she’d find the meaning of life in the crisper
drawer.
“Hi,” Caroline said, hoping to keep from startling the other woman; it didn’t work at all. Missy jumped six inches in the air and yelped, her hand going to her chest.
“Holy crap,” she said, laughing as she realized who had surprised her. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you coming down the hallway. Did I wake you?”
“No,” Caroline said, moving past Missy to sit down at the bar. “I couldn’t sleep. You?”
“Same.” Missy finally pulled a bottle of iced herbal tea out of the fridge. “Want some?”
“No, thank you. But water would be great.”
Missy nodded and poured a glass of iced water out of the freezer door, passing it over to Caroline. They were quiet for a few minutes, Caroline sitting at the bar, Missy hoisting herself up to sit on the counter, until Missy cleared her throat.
“Is he worth all this? Your Mason?”
Caroline hesitated, thinking back to the first time Mason had turned up in her office, clutching a handful of paperwork and a lot more chaos than she’d ever had to deal with. “I think so? I don’t honestly know yet. I know how I feel about him, and I know that I want to give it a try. I know he’s been through hell, and I know he hasn’t gotten anything like the kind of help that he needs for that yet. I don’t know if he ever will, and I don’t know if I can stay with him if he doesn’t. But—”
She trailed off, and Missy picked up the thread. “But you want to stick around and find out?”
Caroline nodded.
Missy smiled, her eyes far away. “It was like that for Jack and me. When I met him, it’d been so long since I dated a guy that I’d stopped bothering calling myself pansexual and just called myself a lesbian. It was easier and required less explanation. And then he came waltzing in at a party, catching my attention, and talking about numbers and accounting of all the fucking things.”
Missy laughed. “I used to be a punk rocker. I had safety pins in all my clothes, a dozen piercings in my ears. I still have ink all over my back. But the way his eyes lit up when he talked about balance sheets—I couldn’t walk away.”
“Was it hard?” Caroline asked. Missy cocked an eyebrow at her. “Adjusting to it all. To the different lives you two had led.”
Missy stared down into her tea for a bit. “It was never hard for the two of us, together. We got each other. He’d go to punk shows with me, and I’d listen while he railed about the most recent Forbes editorial. But our social circles… that part was hard. My punk friends were horrified that I was fucking The Man, my queer friends were convinced that I was just conforming because being queer was hard, and his friends thought I was some kind of prostitute who’d eaten his brain.”
She smiled. “In the end, I think we lost most of our friends from that time, and then when we couldn’t have kids…” A darkness passed over her face that dwarfed the darkness in the kitchen. “Well. We take care of each other. We have fewer friends than we did before, but the friends we have are the sort you’d lay down in traffic for.”
“Sounds good, in the end.”
“It is in indeed.”
They sat in silence for a little bit longer. And then Missy laughed, kicking out with her foot to gently jostle Caroline’s leg. “Why is it that women like us always end up sitting in kitchens talking about the menfolk? Let’s change the subject. What do you like to read?”
Caroline laughed and kicked back. “Fantasy, a lot of the time. Sci-fi. Doesn’t matter the flavor—urban, punk, cutting edge, classic, paranormal, whatever. I love it all.”
“Would a good book help you get some rest?”
Caroline nodded. “Or keep me busy until it’s socially acceptable to be awake. I’ll take either one.”
“Come with me,” Missy said, leading her into the living room. “Let me show you a few different things.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Mason stroked his hand over Trish’s back one more time, watching her relax into sleep, and then stood up. His phone had rung half an hour ago, and he had a feeling he knew who was calling. He hit redial without bothering to check the voicemail that had been left.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” Declan said in place of “hello.”
“I hear you’ve been corrupting something that means more than the world to me,” Mason responded.
“Last I knew, you wanted a piece of that action.”
“Last I knew, you were a human being. An asshole, sure, but human.”
“I guess we were both lied to.” Declan said.
“I guess.”
“I don’t imagine you’ll take your bitch girlfriend and just wander off into the sunset like a good little cowboy?”
Mason found his mouth stretching into a cold smile. “Unlikely.”
“Shame. She’s going to find out that you’re a pretty shitty lay when you’re dead.”
He laughed, then; he couldn’t help it. “Really? Is that all, Declan? I'm sure you can do better than that.”
Declan ignored the jab. “So should I watch my back? Peek around all the corners in the world?”
“I’d prefer to discuss this face to face,” Mason said. “Like men.” He considered adding that he was giving Declan a lot of benefit of the doubt there, but it wasn’t necessary.
“Meet me at the garage in an hour,” he snarled, “and I’ll show you how men settle things.”
“No,” Mason said, as much as he wanted to agree. His plan was barely formed, but it was sound. Solid. “I don’t need a bunch of assholes cheering me on to kick your ass. Meet me at the high school. It’ll be deserted this time of night, and we can talk. See if we can work this out.”
“You just don’t want anyone to see me kill you,” Declan said.
“Seems like you wouldn’t want anyone to see that, either,” Mason said. “I mean, your dirty cop can only cover up so much.”
Declan’s laugh was cold, and sharp enough to cut. “He can cover up more than you think. The death of some dirtbag biker? Easy as pie. I’ll see you in an hour, asshole. Say goodbye to your girlfriend.”
The connection died, and Mason took a long moment to control his sudden nausea. He’d killed before, in battle and in cold blood, but always in the context of the military. This was—different.
This was for his sister. For those other girls, who were probably so far beyond scared that “scared” sounded like a Disneyland vacation. Some people used up all their chances.
He rooted through Trish’s closet until he found a pair of heavy work gloves, then picked through her purse and her keychain until he found her apartment key. He let himself out, then locked the bolt from the outside and slipped the key back under the door. He’d find the rest of what he needed on his way.
***
Declan was punctual. An hour after their phone call, he arrived at the school, parking his bike next to Mason’s. Mason was leaning up against his bike, and he’d parked far away from the arc lighting that brightened the parking lot, even at midnight. “Declan,” he said. “Long time no see.”
“Mason.” Declan stepped off his bike and stood still, his posture loose and ready. “Where do you want to do this?”
“I assume only one of us is leaving alive.”
Even in the darkness, he could feel the edge of Declan’s grin. “You assume correct.”
Mason nodded shortly. “I’d say we should go back to the edge of the forest, then. Stay away from where anyone can see us.”
Declan agreed, which surprised Mason. He’d expected a lot more argument.
Declan rushed him as they approached the edge of the woods but Mason was ready. He let Declan swing first and then pulled both of them to the ground. He rolled with the motion, moving so he landed on top of Declan and smashed the man into the dirt.
He was tempted to let the bastard up, just so he could pummel the jerk a little longer, but that wasn’t necessary. He’d learned the hard way, on duty, that when you had your opponent at a disadvantage, you didn’t monologue, you didn’t give your op
ponent a chance to redeem himself, and you didn’t reconsider.
Once you’d engaged lethal force, you didn’t stop until you or your target was eliminated.
Declan was stunned by the rush to the ground, and by not coming up to straddle Mason like some grade school kid in the playground. Mason slipped an arm around Declan's throat even as his fingers clawed at Mason’s arm, his feet kicking frantically at the ground. He bucked hard as his autonomic reflexes kicked in, his brain losing oxygen.
Mason held on.