by Adira August
He pumped hard in futile pursuit of his orgasm, too excited by the feel of her around him, transfixed by the sight of his cock hard against her chest, squeezed by the firm globes she locked against him. He fucked her tits and her mouth determinedly, but could not get deep enough.
The sight, the thought, the feel, the frustration, her tongue flicking into and out of his slit with every pump, brought deep growls of primal need from him and Avia moaned and writhed in response. Her arousal pushed him to the edge, an edge he was desperate to fall from.
She leaned her weight on his thighs in an attempt to keep him still.
“Teasing fucking bitch!” He sat forward and drove himself into her throat. She didn’t fight him, but reached for his hips and yanked him deeper.
He roared with an orgasm that obliterated everything but the exquisite pulses of cum that emptied him into her.
Ben collapsed back in his chair, chest heaving, one knee throbbing. He’d slammed it into the edge of the kickspace where Avia huddled on her knees with his cock still in her mouth.
“You okay, Ben?”
Hugo was in the open doorway.
Ben raised his post-orgasmic face to the president of his company, willing his eyes to focus through a sweat-soaked riot of curls flopped down over his forehead. Avia giggled, and the vibration around his dick made him spasm again.
Hugo’s eyes went to the solid wood that covered the kneehole but failed to conceal a stocking-clad foot that peeked out at the bottom. “Text me when you’re ready for the ten o’clock,” he said brightly and shut the door.
Ben groaned and pushed back. His dick popped out of Avia’s mouth and she wiped her wet chin. He was definitely going to have to change his clothes.
“Listen,” he said, helping her out and pulling her up his body. “I don’t care how many therapists I have to hire, we have got to get back to normal.”
He lifted her skirt and spread her thighs.
“My turn.”
MIDNIGHT ON THE SOUTH CHINA SEA. Should be the title of an impressionist painting, the man thought, guiding the cabin cruiser to the starboard side of the tramp cargo ship. A flashlight blinked on—a deckhand clinging to heavy rope netting along the side of the ship.
The man throttled back. The cruiser’s momentum to carried it close to the looming hull. The man reversed quickly and cut the motors. He secured the bowline to the netting.
The deckhand, a boy of some Asian-island mix, motioned him aboard. The man scrambled up, hand-over-hand, quickly and smoothly. It was faster than finding footholds.
At the top, the boy flashed an appreciative grin at the tall man he could barely see the starlight, except for the peppering of light hair across his skull and a gleam of scar over one dark eye. “Watch it,” he said. “But don’t touch.” He handed the boy two heavy coins. “More when I get back.”
BELOW DECKS, the Captain led the man he knew only as Anders to the shielded electronics bay.
“The satellite link-up is rock solid, the servers prepared to transmit. I have three operators set to upload, download, distribute. I got two specialists if anything breaks down.”
Well over six-feet, Anders inspected the set-up with his head bowed. “Cargo?”
“Couldn’t take on an extra box of condoms. Like UPS at Christmas. We’ll be hoppin’ port-to-port like always.”
Anders nodded. “Let me see their living facilities.”
“Living? You said twenty-four hours tops.”
Anders gave the Captain a laser-edged stare. “Two hours or twenty-four, they are my guests, not cargo to be shoved in a corner.”
“Understood. I have to be up top. Stovall will take you.”
“If we go early? Say, twenty-hundred tonight?”
“Not a problem if I have the shipment onboard. I start counting from the minute I accept the cargo. Twenty-four hours and one minute, I’ll dump it.”
Anders’ pale eyes glittered in the reflected light from the computer array. “It won’t be necessary.”
AN HOUR LATER, when the cruiser was a safe distance from the ship, the man gunned it. He’d timed his visit to a brief satellite void for this singular spot on the open water. He needed to be in another spot of open water in less than five minutes.
He rubbed his eyes. He was homesick and exhausted and about to launch an operation entirely of his own devising, assuming an authority he had not been given, using vast sums of money that was not his. He checked the compass. He didn’t trust autopilots.
And he really hated the fucking ocean.
“WHERE’RE YOU GOING?” Avia asked as Ben followed her onto the elevator. “You’re already late for your ten o’clock.”
“I’m walking you to your car,” he said. “Hugo will wait. You have any idea what we do at the ten o’clock?”
“You send him anything you thought was important in your worldwide newsfeed. At ‘the ten’ as you call it, he briefs you on what came in overnight that’s internal to Hart Enterprises Global Initiative for World Sex Domination”—a slap on the butt was supposed to interrupt her but she went on as if he hadn’t bothered—“and the conversation rapidly devolves into you waxing rhapsodic about whatever new toy or character or other thing you just dreamed up. Then you go to lunch so Hugo can get to work running your company.”
The elevator doors opened. Two staffers walking by kept him from planting a more solid whack on her backside as they exited.
“So you do understand that I have plenty of time to walk you to your car,” he said. He grabbed her hand and led her out a side door to enjoy the morning sun.
After they’d been caught by Hugo, he’d tormented her for a while on his lap, then given her two orgasms. They’d showered quickly, which didn’t stop him from making her come again as she jacked him under the warm spray. They were insatiable around each other.
They’d dressed hurriedly, almost all of her clothes still in her closet in the Keep. And even now, after everything they’d done, he wanted to drag her to the grass and fuck her under the open sky and not care who might be watching through the tall, geminate windows that lined each floor.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Walking with you?”
“Thinking about sex. I can feel it.”
“Can you?” he said in a tone so weighted with promise it made her core clench and she almost stumbled.
“Come back home,” he said.
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Yes, something has. You told me the truth. We told each other what we were feeling.”
“It’s a place for us to start. But it’s not a place for me to stop. I have a lot to do for myself. And we have a lot of negotiating to do between us.”
“We do?”
“Yeah, Ben. All that stuff you said we’d do when you got back from Macau. Only we didn’t.”
His eyes flickered when she mentioned Macau. She hurried past it, knowing it was still a painful memory. “Let’s start with you punishing me in your office. If I had been anyone else refusing to leave, what would you have done?”
He frowned. “I don’t know anyone but you who’d have the audacity.”
“Ben!”
“Have security show them out.”
“Yeah. In future, if I’m behaving like an ass, treat me like you would any other ass. You aren’t my father. You don’t get to corporal punish me at your whim. You hate doing it and it makes me feel like shit. Like you don’t love me. So no. Hard limit, as they say.”
“You’re making rules?”
“I’m doing what you told me to.”
“I’m not recalling this order.”
“On Flagstaff mountain, after we had sex,” she reminded him. “You said if I was really submissive with you, I’d want what you want to give me. But you also said that didn’t mean I want exactly what you want. You said I must, that was your word, must stop you if I was frightened or uncomfortable. Well, I am.”
He looked surprised and chagrined. “Why didn’t you safewor
d?”
“Because the pain never got intolerable. That’s what I thought you safeworded for. You did that on purpose, right? Controlled the amount of pain?”
“Of course, it’s not supposed to be torture,” he said as if this should be obvious.
She stopped and grabbed his arm, looking up into his face. “I get to want things, too, right? To have the kind of relationship I want, too?”
He kissed her gently. “Non-sexual discipline is off the table. We can revisit at a later date.”
She reached for him and they kissed, long and deeply. Her hands moved over him, wanting as much of the feel of him in her body memory as she could get before she left. One hand slipped between his legs and cupped his heavy sac.
“Avia.” His voice thick. “You’ll never get out of here like that.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered into his shirtfront. “I just love your balls.”
“You what?” He didn’t know whether to laugh or be shocked.
“I never told you that?” she asked, her hand still between them, holding him, hidden from outside view. She squeezed a little and his knees opened slightly, so he nestled into her hand more fully.
“They’re like you, big and solid. And everything gets so firm and full and…” Her thumb stroked the base of his cock where it met his scrotum. “I keep wanting to use both hands and put my lips right here and”—she looked up from under heavy lids, pupils wide and dark—“would that be okay to do, sometime? When it’s my turn?”
He put his hand over hers between his legs and squeezed hard. “You’re going to be doing it behind this bush in a few seconds.” He pulled back and grabbed her hands. “Are you teasing me on purpose, sub?”
“No. I was just so worried about telling you and then it was fine and then you were holding me and kissing me and …” She took a few steps away. “Go have your meeting. I’ll work on repairing my life.”
“Text me.”
She grinned. “Yes, Sir.”
BUT AVIA COULDN’T so much as leave the barbican parking lot until she figured out where she was going. She had her phone, her laptop and her fear. She also had an almost desperate desire to move on.
It was like she had her foot caught in a trap chained to a tree. She’d been living her life with the chain stretched taut, looking away, pretending the trap wasn’t there. But the pain was always there. So she’d pretended the pain was from something else.
She had to watch the video. But even here in the safety of her car in sight of the domain’s security building in broad daylight, she didn’t feel safe enough. Where could she possibly go?
FATHER TIMOTHY KANE selected a fat, beeswax candle to replace the one in the sanctuary lamp, flickering and almost gutted. The sacristan usually took care of it, but Bernice was in the hospital again and she did hate anyone “upursing” her duties as she put it, while she was gone. Bernice was what his mother would have called a cantankerous old biddy.
But Father Tim knew what the old woman’s life had been and that she would not come out of the hospital this time.
Thursday was the one day the church was quiet for several hours—after morning Mass and before the children’s choir rehearsed at three. It had been a while since he’d done something as simple as replace a candle. This candle should never go out when the Host was present, of course. Bernice had seen to that for twenty-four years.
Picking up the low stool, he opened the connecting door between the sacristy and the Sanctuary and hesitated briefly before taking the few steps to the right and positioning the stool underneath the lamp. He hadn’t expected anyone to be in the Sanctuary praying. It wasn’t unusual, of course. The prie-dieux and the short bench he’d installed against the wall under the large Crucifix were there for that purpose.
But usually the more dedicated pray-ers didn’t show up until noon and they tended to be much older than the beautiful young woman on the bench, clutching what he supposed was a laptop bag. He didn’t recognize her in the split second it took him to get on with his task and give her privacy, even though she did not have her head bowed, but sat looking straight at the Tabernacle.
He set the red glass chimney on the credence table next to him and lit the new candle from the flame of the old one. After removing the old candle with his left hand, he seated the fresh one and replaced the lamp with his right.
He carried the old one into the sacristy and ran a little water on it in the sink. Bernice allowed no one to blow out candles in the Sanctuary, lest she had to scrape tiny dots of breath-blown wax from walls and tables and Tabernacle. Her outrage stemmed from knowing the hot droplets had been accompanied by tiny amounts of saliva. An adolescent alter server spitting on the brass casket that housed the Body of Christ was not to be borne.
“Is Bernice ill, Father?”
The young woman he now recognized as Avienne Grace Rivers came inside and put the low stool in its proper place under the window.
“She’s in Saint Joseph’s. Pneumonia.” He answered her as if he had last seen her at Mass on Sunday instead of almost two years ago.
“She’s in her eighties, now?”
He nodded. “Eighty-seven.” He saw her search his face and find the truth there.
“Oh.”
He put the used up candle in the trash and wiped his hands. She had come seeking something, but decorum required he not stand around with her in the close quarters of Saint Michael the Archangel’s sacristy. He ushered her out the side door and into the nave.
Taking a seat in the front pew, he waited for her to join him. She did, sitting a respectable distance away.
“I didn’t expect to run into you,” she said. “Or I would have made an appointment.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. He usually required appointments or his scheduled duties became impossible to fulfill. “But to my great surprise, I have some time, now.”
“Can we talk in the reconciliation room?” She looked away and down. “Even if I don’t exactly confess?”
“Do you feel a need to confess?”
“I’m kind of awash in mortal sin, Father Tim. I killed a man, for one thing. But I have no regret. Contrition precedes absolution.”
He pulled out his cell, sent a text and shut off his phone.
AN UNPREPOSSESSING MAN about Avia’s own height, Father Kane had receding brown and gray hair, and wore glasses with black wire rims that did not make him look learned and wise. He was soft around the middle and getting a bit jowly. Without his black clothing and reverse collar, Tim Kane looked like an actuary who didn’t get enough exercise.
But Avia liked him. Trusted him. Found his homilies had depth and compassion. He displayed an erudition that spoke of commitment to understanding, rather than the need to flaunt intellectual achievement.
Avia explained about the recordings, and what her role had been. “Do you remember the home invasion at the Hart property?”
“I recall a brief story that said you and your sister were there and your involvement was ‘unclear at this time’ and police were still investigating,” he said. He’d suspected this was what brought her back. “I never saw anything else. That story disappeared under another school shooting and riots and the presidential race.”
She nodded. “Ben’s very influential. He’s also part of my mortal sin tsunami, but sins against chastity are the least of my issues, right now.”
“And if they weren’t?”
She shrugged. “I still couldn’t confess. Or take Communion. … I miss Communion.” She felt the tears following the curve of her cheeks. “I thought I could watch this here. The recording. I thought I’d feel safe.”
Father Tim waited, wondering if she knew, herself, what she needed from him and wanted from God.
Avia felt the weight of his patience. But her own patience with herself had run out. She dashed at her tears, lifted her head and fixed him with a direct look.
“I intended to kill before I ever entered that room. I knew there were dangerous men wh
o had guns and had my sister inside. I heard them hurt her. I went inside armed and planning how to get my gun into my hand and on them before they could react so I could kill at least one of them. I intended to kill unless there was a very different scenario than the one I found. I didn’t hesitate, have second thoughts or experience regret. I’m not sorry.”
“Did you enter wanting to punish them for what you believed they’d done?”
“No, I didn’t think of anything but saving Talli.”
“I see,” he said. “If things had been different when you went in, if you could have saved her without killing, would you have killed anyway?”
Avia was appalled at the idea. “No! Unless they did something.”
“What’s your concern right now?”
She sighed and shook her head.
“Let me put it this way,” he amended. “Who are you mad at?”
Avia felt the rage boil up and knew she couldn’t stop it. “Why did He do this?! Why did He make it so when I need Him the most I can’t get to Him because I can’t feel sorry? I’m so fuh- … alone.”
So many of them were mad at God. Father Tim understood, having shouted his own rage at his incomprehensible Father more than once.
“You feel alone so God must not be with you. Because your feeling makes God what He is? You’re essentially saying you invent and control God. It’s possible that thinking is faulty.”
Avia blinked. But she did not answer.
“Moving on,” Father Tim said. “You decided you committed a mortal sin. Not really your job which is when a priest can come in handy. Did you think to read the Catechism on the subject? You’re a reporter, you do research for a living. It’s online now, you know.”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t know or didn’t bother?”
“Both.”
“My impression of you has always been that you possessed a high degree of physical modesty. I don’t read minds Avia, but I suspect your feeling of distance has more to do with the sins against chastity you believe you aren’t concerned with. It’s Benedict Hart you’re involved with?”