by Roxie Rivera
The sound of the side door opening interrupted my note taking. I glanced at the arched doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen and smiled at Hagen as he returned with bags crammed with takeout. Even before he reached the island where I sat, I caught the familiar and delicious scent of spicy Szechuan eggplant from our favorite Chinese restaurant. When my gaze landed on the pretty pink box from my favorite bakery—a place I only indulged every few months—I lit up with happiness.
Hagen laughed and set the box down in front of me. “I thought you agreeing to move in here was worthy of a cake.”
I peeked under the lid and gasped with excitement when I saw the fluffy, rich buttercream and sprinkles. “Birthday cake!”
He laughed even harder and noisily kissed my cheek. “Don’t ever change, Cass.”
“Do you mind if I finish my notes while we eat?” I didn’t want to be rude, but I was right in the middle of an equation.
“You don’t have to stop working on whatever the hell that is,” he said, gesturing to the equations I was carefully writing. “Derivation of dispersion relation?” He read my notes and shook his head. “Is that even English?”
I rolled my eyes and bumped his arm with my shoulder. “Stop. I’ve seen your math skills. I know you understand derivatives.”
“Maybe,” he replied cagily. He didn’t like to admit that his book smarts matched his street smarts, especially when it came to math. It was how he had been able to make so much money. He had a keen eye for risk and probability. “But that,” he pointed at my notes, “is way harder than anything I’ve ever done.”
“You could learn,” I remarked as I followed the equation to the next step. “I could teach you.”
“Yeah? What are your tutoring fees?”
“For you? I could give you a deal.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe we could barter something you have that I want.”
“Like?” The gleam in his eyes matched mine.
“Oh,” I said, drawing out the word as I walked my fingers up the denim stretched across his powerful thigh. “Maybe something like this?”
He inhaled a sharp breath as my fingers brushed across the outline of his cock. “I’m listening.”
I leaned closer and cupped him, filling my hand with his hardening shaft and only too aware that my hand wasn’t even close to holding all of it. I stroked him through the denim, and his breaths grew sharper and faster.
“You keep that up, and we’ll be eating cold Chinese later.”
His warning had the opposite effect, and I squeezed his cock. “We have a microwave.”
With a growl, he snatched me right off of my stool and dragged me onto his lap. My squeal of laughter echoed off the kitchen’s vaulted ceilings, but Hagen’s insistent mouth silenced it. Unlike last night, when he took his time and drew out my pleasure with slow caresses, he was ravenous. He used his superior size and strength to place me onto the counter and yank off my shoes. He gripped the waistband of my leggings along with my panties and tugged them down my hips and thighs before pulling them right off my feet and throwing them aside.
Panting with excitement and anticipation, I leaned back on my palms and waited for him to pounce. He dragged a pair of fingers through my slit and grunted when he found my pussy wet for him. He held my gaze as he slipped his fingers inside me, massaging and coaxing even more wetness to flow.
With his fingers buried deep inside me, he used his free hand to unbuckle his belt and unfasten his jeans. The thick head of his cock peeked out the top of his boxer briefs, refusing to be contained a moment longer. He roughly shoved down his briefs and freed his shaft.
When he stepped closer, I wrapped my legs around his waist and welcomed him into me. The fingers that had been thrusting into me now gripped my inner thigh, marking me with my own wetness. He didn’t waste time with slow and easy thrusts. Hagen slid deep, his cock stretching and pressing into me until my head fell back and I moaned.
There was nothing to do now but hold on tightly for the ride. The counter was the perfect height for him to fuck me with ease. He didn’t have to worry about supporting his weight or mine. He just had to snap his hips and pound into me until we were both panting and clutching at one another.
Hagen held my gaze as he licked the pad of his thumb, slicking his skin, before he placed it over my clit. I hissed at the sharply pleasurable sensation of his finger there, and then moaned as he began to rub in tight circles. He had studied my body enough to know all its secrets, and stimulating me there was no different. He knew the exact combination to make me scream.
And scream I did.
Loud, keening wails of ecstasy as my climax descended with a crash and my tight sheath gripped and fluttered around his still thrusting cock. He didn’t take long to follow me over the edge, thrusting so hard and fast that my bare bottom slid across the cold, smooth stone countertop beneath me. I shuddered beneath him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders as he leaned over me, settling his face between my breasts and his ear against my heart. It was a tender moment after something so wild.
The chime of the washer finishing its cycle interrupted our lazy kisses and whispers of love. At any other time, it would have irritated me. Now, though, it was only a small nuisance. Wasting time on laundry wasn’t going to cut into the short time we had together before I had to go home or leave for class. Soon, we would have all the time in the world for little moments like these.
Hagen rucked up the front of my shirt and dotted ticklish kisses around my navel. “Your laundry awaits, Cinderella.”
“Stop!” I giggled at the sensation of his stubble raking over my sensitive belly. “You know your stubble is my weakness.”
He laughed against my belly before punctuating each word he spoke with a noisy kiss. “Laundry. Dinner. Studying. Shower. Sex.”
Closing my eyes and reveling in the excitement of our new arrangement, I said, “Deal.”
Chapter Four
“So, as we dig deeper into this topic, you’ll begin to understand how much of a profound impact these nonlinear dispersions have on the propagation of wave packets,” Dr. Symonds said as she wrapped up her lecture. “I think we’ll stop here today. If there are no questions?” She paused and waited for anyone in the lecture hall to raise their hand. “Okay. Feel free to email me or come by the office if you need some help.”
The small class erupted into movement all around me. People started packing away their laptops and notebooks while chatting. I did the same, tucking my notebook into my well-loved backpack and hefting the straps onto my shoulders.
“Cassie? Do you have time to walk with me?” Dr. Symonds called from the front of the class.
“Yes, ma’am.” I squeezed through the wall of much taller bodies blocking the stairs and worked my way down to the front of the lecture hall to meet with my mentor.
“Did you have any problems following the lecture?” Dr. Symonds asked as she picked up her worn leather messenger bag and travel mug. “You seemed to be the only face in here not frowning or looking back at me in a panic.”
“I did the reading over the weekend and took some time to work through the examples.”
“Smart girl,” she said with an approving smile. Gesturing toward the side entrance, she indicated we should walk. As I fell into step beside her, she said, “Have you given any more thought to your grad school picks?”
“Yes. I finalized my list yesterday.”
“And?”
“CalTech, Stanford, Princeton and MIT,” I listed off my top choices. Staying here at Rice was my backup plan, as she well knew.
“What was your verbal score?”
“162.”
“And your quant?”
“166.”
“And writing?”
“5.”
She tallied up the GRE score. “333 is a strong score. With the right essays and recommendation letters, you’ll get some really strong offers.”
“I hope so,” I said, letting worry s
eep into my voice. “I really want this, and it’s so scary to think I might not have what it takes to make it at CalTech or Stanford.”
“You have exactly what it takes,” Dr. Symonds assured me. “You’re smart, yes, but you’re tenacious. You’re a hard worker. You aren’t afraid to make sacrifices. You are going to do great things someday very soon in astronautics and space engineering. Believe in yourself the way I believe in you.”
Her pep talk hit me right in the feels. “I will.”
“Good. Now, come see me later this week, and we’ll start working on your list for recommendation letters. You also need to schedule a meeting with the grad school advising office to practice your interviews. You want to nail those. Make a great impression. Make them want you in their programs.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
She patted my back, and we separated, her heading into her office and me toward the lab where I worked part-time. I had been extremely lucky to snag a spot in the lab as a sophomore. Dr. Symonds had recommended me, and I had started off as nothing more than a glorified gofer. After a while, I had earned my place and learned so much about black holes, magnetars and pulsars. I was able to observe laser-driven plasmas, and now helped collect, input and refine data on dark matter detection. The work I did wasn’t very exciting, but it was vitally important to the research being done in this lab.
While I worked, I pushed all thoughts from my mind and concentrated on what was right in front of me. Even though I had a million things on my seemingly never-ending to-do list, my focus remained on the scads of data and the modeling I had been tasked with creating. Dark matter had always intrigued me. It was a peculiar thing, something that the scientific community had only just started to study in any depth and puzzle out with the help of computers. The implications behind dark matter—about what it was and the purpose it served—were just as mysterious as its name. I hoped that someday my work here in the lab, no matter how boring, would lead to some of the answers we all wanted.
The alarm on my watch buzzed, and I wrapped up my work, saving and closing my files and straightening my workstation. I grabbed my backpack, waved to my supervising grad student and hurried off to my afternoon class. I found my usual seat in the middle of the small classroom and checked my phone since I had a few extra minutes.
Hagen: I’ll be home late. Do you want me to grab dinner?
Me: I’ll cook.
Hagen: OK.
Me: I’m stopping by my place to do a mini purge and declutter. Cut down on the number of boxes I’ll need.
Hagen: Text me if you need help. Call me when you get home.
Seeing the professor walk in the side door, I quickly sent Hagen a thumbs-up emoji and stowed my phone in my backpack. I pulled out my notebook covered in planet stickers and found the last page I had written notes on and drew a line underneath. I printed Radii and Temperatures and turned my attention toward the front of the class where the professor was already scribbling hasty equations on the blackboard. He wasn’t the easiest teacher to follow, but his lecture notes were all provided online. I’d had him in a previous course and knew he liked to sneak in little interesting facts and tidbits during class that would end up on his final exams. Those were things I tried to catch in my notes.
“Hey, Cass,” Kunal, one of my classmates leaned forward as the lecture ended, “I hate to ask, but can I get your notes from the stat course you took last spring?”
“408?”
“Yeah.” He made a face and admitted, “My course load is heavy as shit this semester, and after dad got sick—”
“Kunal,” I reached out and touched his hand, “don’t worry about it. You can have them. I’ll bring the notebook to class on Wednesday.”
“Thank you, Cass. It’s just…it’s been hard, you know?”
I nodded, understanding only too well how difficult it could be to adjust to the loss of a parent. His father had been their family’s breadwinner, and after he died of a sudden stroke, Kunal was shouldering his late father’s responsibilities to his mother and younger sisters. “If you need anything, ask. I mean it. I’ve been there. When my parents died, it sucked. Whatever I can do to help, I will.”
“If I can think of anything else, I will.” He smiled. “I’ll bring you some of Mom’s pav bhaji in exchange for the notes.”
“Yes!” I grinned excitedly. His mother’s food was so damn good, and the first time I’d gone to his house for dinner, I had gone home with plastic containers crammed full. “You throw in some of your mom’s samosas, and I’ll take your tests for you.”
He laughed. “If it comes to that, I just might.”
We left the classroom together, and he asked me about my GRE and my plans for grad school. “I was talking to Dr. Symonds earlier about my options. I’ve got a shortlist of schools. I feel pretty good about my chances. You?”
“329,” he said with a pleased smile. After a moment, he added, “I took the MCAT.”
“What?” I glanced at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you were interested in medical school.”
“I wasn’t,” he admitted, “but I had some time to think over the summer. My family is going to need me, and I love astronomy and astrophysics but…”
“The money,” I said, understanding exactly what he meant. “We’re definitely not going to get rich in this field.”
“No, and I owe it to my mother and my sisters and my wife and kids someday to be able to support them well.”
“Well, how did the MCAT go?”
He grinned and said, “521.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I busted out in shock, stopping to gawk up at him. “521! Holy shit. Good for you, Kunal!”
“Thanks.” Bashfully, he confessed, “I’m shooting for the stars on my apps. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Penn…,” he listed off the top schools. “If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.”
“What kind of specialty do you think you’ll end up in?”
“Radiology,” he said with an air of certainty. “I think I’ll enjoy that the most.”
“I can see that. Radiation is a part of astrophysics and astronomy. The sun and all that,” I reasoned.
“Exactly.”
Giving him a hip bump, I drew a smile from him. “Keep me updated. I’ll make you a cake when you get your acceptance letter to Harvard.”
“Deal.”
We split up as we reached the main entrance of the building. I hefted my backpack a little higher on my shoulders and started walking toward my car. My stomach growled, and I stopped at the Chick-fil-A closest to my apartment complex for a ginormous sweet tea and a box of their cracktastic nuggets. I munched and listened to music until I parked at my complex.
After I stopped at the office to sign the paperwork ending my lease on the upcoming first of the month, I made my way back to my apartment. I embraced my inner Marie Kondo and started in my bedroom, picking through hangers and my dresser drawers to find the clothing that brought me joy. As the donation pile grew, I realized how long I had been holding onto things I no longer needed or wanted. There was a reason for that, something deeper I wasn’t ready to acknowledge yet. Probably a side effect of losing my parents as a teenager or having to deal with Ronnie’s irresponsible and dangerous behavior.
I sorted the clothing into garbage bags and wrote donation on the outside of each bag along with what it contained—tops, bottoms, dresses and skirts or miscellaneous accessories like belts and scarves. When that was done, I moved to the kitchen and started filling my canvas grocery bags with perishables from the refrigerator and freezer to take back to Hagen’s place. I grabbed a few things from my pantry—oatmeal, a half-full box of cereal, some cans of soup and an unopened jar of peanut butter—and put them in another bag.
Arms loaded down with bags, I left my apartment and carried the groceries to my car. The sun had finally started to set, but the change in temperature was negligible. The suffocating, humid heat left me grimacing as I hefted the bags into
the backseat of my car. On the return trip to my apartment, I decided to grab all of the remaining bags and loaded them up my arms. Straining a bit under the weight, I closed up my apartment and turned toward the parking lot.
The sun had set completely, and the night was dark, no moon glow in the sky tonight. Crickets chirped and cicadas rattled noisily in the trees. My mind was so occupied with dinner ideas that I never even saw it coming.
Something hard slammed into the right side of my head. I gasped as pain exploded along the side of my skull. My legs gave way, and I fell forward onto the uneven, broken pavement. My knees skidded across it, rending the thin fabric of my leggings, and my arms, heavy with grocery bags, hung uselessly at my side as my jaw and then cheek impacted the pavement.
I had barely managed to draw in a shocked breath when I felt another impact, this one on my upper back. I could hear something jingling as another burst of pain knocked the wind out of me. Coins, I realized in a daze. Coins in a sock that was being used to batter me like a mace.
An angry hand gripped my loosely coiled bun and jerked my head up, forcing my back to arch unnaturally. “Tell your loan shark sugar daddy that the next time he comes after my man he better make damn sure he puts me in the hospital, too. If Travis dies, I’m going to kill you. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t make sense of what Janine was saying. My ears were ringing, and my head was throbbing.
Janine fisted my hair even tighter and punched me in the side of the face. She was a bigger, stronger woman, and the impact left me reeling. “Do you understand? Huh? You skinny bitch!”
“I under—under—understand,” I stammered, my tongue feeling heavy in my mouth. I tasted blood and felt it running down my chin.
Janine let go of my head, and I didn’t have the strength to hold it up. My chin cracked against the pavement, and I saw stars. Still angry, she kicked me twice in the side with a final kick aimed at my backside that sent me sliding across the hot, uneven pavement, scratching up my exposed skin. “You can replace your laundry baskets with this.”