And so I finally fall asleep, content, eager for tomorrow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ASHTON
I STRAIGHTEN MY TIE IN the mirror, thinking, This is awesome.
I’ve never had a relationship like this. I’ve had a few semi-committed things, but I’m terrible at maintaining them so they never lasted long. I didn’t like being told what to do, where to be, where it was acceptable to put my own dick.
I’ve had lots of one-night stands, one-day stands, fifteen-minute-in-a-theme-park stands. I’ve had stands with multiple girls at once. But those single-serving relationships are their own, inverse kind of complication. Because they’re detached, alienated hookups by nature, meaning I’ve never been able to go back for seconds. Girls I hook up with all tend to be mental cases, so whenever I try to fuck them again, they either obsess and go Fatal Attraction on me, or get all lovey and want to discuss what it all means.
But this thing with Jenna? It might be the middle ground I’ve never quite achieved. It could be the best of both worlds. She might be the hottest girl I’ve ever fucked (and that’s impressive company), but she’s also bound by a contract and salary. I don’t pay for sex (and I’m not this time; our agreement is for appearances, she’s just getting my purple-headed incursions as a bonus), but offering financial compensation, even in this sideways manner, has serious advantages. It means our roles are defined. We can’t break up even if we wanted to — we’re legally bound, financially linked, and never truly together.
So for the next six months or so, Jenna and I will be constantly shoved into mutual situations.
We’ll be expected to hold hands, kiss, and do all that romantic bullshit.
And because that kind of thing gets women wet, she’ll obviously want to fuck me.
I’ll get regular sex from a super-hot girl without all the other crap. Without any questions about what it all means. Without the mental illness that makes some women want to cook my rabbit.
And today we have our first interview.
Slim hands slide around my neck and fidget with my tie.
“You look very handsome, Boyfriend,” Jenna whispers into my ear. She’s using the word sarcastically, so it doesn’t annoy me. But I am bothered by the way she’s still adjusting me.
“Hands off my tie. What makes you think you know how to tie a tie?”
“I’ve tied ties before.”
“Yeah.” I laugh. “For guys who make under a hundred grand a year.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
I turn to face her, and now she’s screwing with it from the front. “Jenna.”
She looks up. She’s maybe seven inches shorter than me, enough that she needs to tilt her head back to meet my eyes. I don’t know why, but I get hard every time. Something about that doe-eyed expression.
“What kind of ties did your Wal-Mart boyfriends wear?”
“I don’t know. Blue ones?”
“What were they made of?”
“Fabric?”
I look down at her meddling fingers. “Do you know what this tie is made of?”
“Different fabric?”
“Mulberry silk. The most expensive silk in the world. Do you know why?”
“No, Ashton. Why?”
“Because Mulberry silk is made from the Bombyx mori moth. They’re fed an exclusive diet of mulberry leaves 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. After about a month they’ve built up enough energy to spin their cocoon. To harvest the silk, the cocoons are placed in water to soften the filament. A single filament can be up to 1,600 yards long. It takes 4 to 8 of the filaments woven together to create one mulberry silk thread. My tie has hundreds of thousands.”
“What is that supposed to tell me?”
“That you can’t tie this tie like you’re lassoing a bull.”
“Where exactly do you think I come from, Ashton?”
I push her hands away and look back into the mirror, fixing the subtle damage she’s done to my otherwise perfect knot. I brush my suit and pick at my pocket square.
“I never see you use that thing,” she says.
“What?”
“Your handkerchief.”
“It’s a pocket square.”
“What’s the difference?”
I turn in a huff, but can see that she’s fucking with me. “Why are you in here?” I ask.
“It’s supposed to be hot when a girl adjusts her man’s clothing. Straightens his tie, fluffs his hanky, stuff like that.”
“Not when the girl knows so much less about fashion than the man. Do you even know the difference between half-Windsor and full-Windsor?”
“Which one is across the bridge from Detroit?”
I ignore her.
“Hey.”
I look over.
“You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“This is where you tell me that I look great, too.”
I give her a long once-over. Truth is, she looks great. I’d like to bind her hands with my tie and fuck her speechless. The skirt stops just north of her knee. Her legs are tan and perfectly shaped. I want to spread them. I want to eat her pussy like a fat guy at a buffet determined to get his money’s worth.
Instead I say, “Don’t be needy.”
“I’m not being needy.”
“Sure you are. You’re already in fake-relationship mode. You want me to shower you with compliments and buy you flowers. You want me to open car doors and throw my blazer over puddles.”
“You can afford to ruin a blazer or two.”
“Yes. But it’s a crime to ruin a jacket like this.” I open one lapel to admire the stitching. “It’s not about money. It’s about offending the suit.”
“You’d rather offend me?”
“Yes. You’re an employee.”
I turn back to the mirror. I feel a slap on my easily-offended blazer’s arm.
“Hey,” she says.
I look again.
“You know I’m fucking with you, right?”
I watch Jenna. Imagine her lips wrapped around my cock. “Of course.”
“No you didn’t. You thought I was serious.”
“I knew you were kidding.”
She’s totally on to me. Now that I’ve failed to call her bluff, Jenna is laughing at my expense. I want to be annoyed, but it’s devilishly cute. She’s usually laughing at me, when she’s not pissed. It should be infuriating, but it isn’t. Jenna’s an obnoxious pixie whose pussy is always on my mind.
“Hey there, Champ. Listen for a second.”
I ignore her.
“I know what you think of me. That I’m going to get all grabby on you. You think that every girl wants a relationship. You think we’re going to get five minutes into this farce, and you’ll say something on camera about how we met, in this imagined bullshit love story, and the part of me that wants to make babies and get fat will light up and start saying that I don’t care if it didn’t mean anything to you, this whole fake relationship meant something to me. I’ll start demanding that you care about me for real. That I’m going to expect flowers and foreplay.”
“Foreplay?”
“For some boring-ass sex like married people have. Like, once a month. Once a week at most. And I’m going to lay flat on my back while you go to town, yawning, until you’re done. I won’t want to blow you, and I’ll never even get on top. Or get kinky. Then I’ll let myself go and you’ll have to search through flaps to find the right place to fuck.”
“Is this supposed to be turning me off?”
Jenna grabs me by the chin. Her fingers are as soft as my face. A lot of guys have nice wardrobes but fall flat on personal grooming. Not me. I keep a barber on my house staff and get hot shaves with a straight razor most mornings.
“Listen to me, asshole,” Jenna says.
I blink at her.
“I don’t want love poems. I don’t want flowers and a white picket fence.”
“Okay.”
“I want your money. I wan
t to saddle up and ride your bone.”
I know she’s being satirical, but my dick is hard as an ironing board.
“If you want more than to fuck me, you’ve picked the wrong girl.”
Jenna lets go of my chin then stares me down, fake-serious, fake-pretending to insist I get the message. We’ve already had this talk, before we set up for the interview. At first I thought she was telling me what I wanted to hear — and to be fair, I did want to hear it. Jenna said that she didn’t think I believed her. She insisted on proving it by sucking me off, then told me she needed to get hers, and demanded that I finger her to an ear-splitting orgasm.
It’s interesting. Jenna and I started out on a strange keel.
First we were attracted to each other. Then we met for real, and hated each other.
Then I beat back Cole Ellison’s feeble attempt to one-up me, pointing out that Jenna could squeal on him as easily as I could squeal on myself to her, and of course that turned her on.
Then we had a moment that almost went too far and required correction — which I then handled tidily in Chemise’s bathroom.
I figured she’d come back humbled. Maybe guilt-ridden. Women are hard-wired to want guys to give them shit and be nice. Fuck that. I usually need to train them out of it by beating their spirits to nothing, but that’s not how she came back to me. Jenna returned tall and proud. You want to fuck me shamelessly for months? Fine. I want to fuck your face off with no strings attached, too.
It’s the best of all worlds, and already my head — or really, my cock — is spinning with possibilities.
If there are no strings, I can still fuck other girls, right? I haven’t, because Jenna’s been keeping me busy, but I totally could.
I guess that means she could fuck other guys. I’m less thrilled about that — I’m not a fan of digging where another man has buried his treasure. We’ll need to discuss it. Maybe Alyssa can add it to Jenna’s contract.
Or maybe I can get her to let other girls join us. Best of all worlds. I’ll fuck other bitches in front of her, and she can do the same.
I’d love to see Jenna with a face full of pussy.
“Fortunately,” I say, “I don’t want anything more than to fuck you.”
“Lies. You want to sing me love songs.”
I laugh.
“You want to write poetry and take me on horseback rides by moonlight.”
I roll my eyes and shake my head.
“You want to introduce me to your parents.”
Okay, that’s one step too far. It’s not even funny.
Jenna must see the shift in my eyes now that she’s crossed the line, so she backs off, biting her lower lip in a way that makes me want to spread her open here and now.
“Make it through this interview,” she says, “and I’ll let you come in my mouth.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. Her knees start to bend.
“I said after,” she tells me.
I reach for my belt. I unbuckle it. She sighs and puts her hands on me, rubbing me to a raging erection.
There’s a knock on the door. The magazine’s production assistant, who’s been cockblocking me since our arrival. “Thirty seconds, Mr. Moran,” he says through the door.
Jenna starts to unzip me.
“Save it,” I say, pulling her up. “You’re supposed to be a lady today.”
“I can be a lady with your hard cock in my mouth.”
I groan.
It takes all my willpower to pull Jenna the rest of the way up and compose myself. When we approach the interviewer hand-in-hand, I’m still hard enough to hammer nails.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JENNA
WE’RE ON A NONSTOP PUBLICITY campaign for the next two weeks. I don’t know where Alyssa is finding these press outlets, but she seems to have decided that at least with our opening PR salvo, more is better. We’re talking to magazines, newspapers, and morning deejays that Ashton wants to strangle. Anyone and everyone to create as big a stir as possible.
Somehow the story of billionaire Ashton Moran’s monogamy has leaked into the world, and now he and his new beloved are determined to get in front of it all. That’s our story and we’re playing it to the hilt.
I have to give Alyssa credit. I’m rolling my eyes through half of the interviews, but they’re all a precisely choreographed dance. I don’t know if she’s somehow orchestrating social media as well, but our buzz has been perfectly feverish. You’d never know that Ashton was hated by large segments of the population only days ago. A redeemed cad, it seems, is better than an average Joe making good.
We go wherever Alyssa directs us. Speak to whoever she tells us to. She’s either phenomenal at getting interviewers to follow a script or has a sixth sense about what will be asked, because she provides us with answers in advance. We rehearse until they’re right and are never surprised.
It’s fascinating to watch Alyssa work. I don’t know much about PR, but I know enough to see that she doesn’t approach it in a typical way. Most publicity starts with the person being publicized: Ashton Moran, in this case, issuing a press release about his relationship. But that never actually happens.
As far as I can tell, there’s been no proactive publicity from Ashton’s camp. Not once has Alyssa reached out intending to put news out into the world about us. Instead, she seems to have contacted other outlets on other people’s behalf, to supposedly halt the spreading of rumors. Nobody knows for sure where the rumors originate, but they circulate all the same.
Alyssa then books us to respond. It strikes me as so much more effective and real — I’d buy it myself I weren’t in on the game. We’re positioned so that we don’t have to brag about our fake relationship. Instead we act humble, embarrassed that we’re obligated, by external forces, to discuss it.
It’s just so mortifying to be called out like this, we say. We just want to go away quietly, away from the cameras, and get to our private business of building a life together.
We’re the perfect amount of sweet. Ashton doesn’t hold my hand around the public because the world knows that assholes don’t hold hands. He plays the role of a reluctantly sweet rake — a turd with a diamond center. He does so masterfully, and it works because Ashton can mostly be himself. Interviewers are already convinced that he’s in a committed, devoted relationship, so our job is to good-naturedly try and deny it … until we’re reluctantly backed into a corner, forced to admit our false love.
Oh, okay, I’ll say. He really does make me breakfast in the mornings.
Or Oh, okay, Ashton will admit on-camera. You caught me. I really do think she’s beautiful without her makeup on.
Ashton’s old image is so reprehensible and chauvinist, the standards required to make him look decent are ridiculously low. Whereas a doting leading man type might need to declare his love in skywriting to make the public ooh and ah, Ashton merely has to not insult me when I say something kind about him.
If he hands me a rose on an interview set, sixty million uteruses skip a beat. If his frown falters once when he looks at me, the world becomes convinced that we’re this century’s Romeo and Juliet.
We’re always with each other, looking one another over for the benefit of our onlookers, always touching incidentally as we show the world our bullshit breed of love. For two weeks, it’s constant.
I think he’s cute when his hair is messed up, I’ll say.
And the audience goes, Awwww!
Maybe I’ll take her to the opera or something, Ashton will say, rolling his eyes.
And the audience goes, Isn’t that sweet!
Then the lights go off and we shake hands. Alyssa tells us good job and delivers tomorrow’s assignments. But not once, after our duties are done for the day, have we made it home before engaging in what can only be described as an act of sexual anarchy.
After a long day of acting like lovebirds, Ashton and I don’t just fuck each other. We fuck the world with our frenzied bodies.
I
t’s aggressive.
It’s acrobatic.
It’s the opposite of sweet and beautiful.
It’s pure distilled lust, born of sweat and hot breath and adrenaline. It’s like we want to erase all the family-friendly shit we devoted our day to. Like we feel this need, with our interlocking parts, to show the universe that there’s nothing between us but lubrication and semen.
We fuck. And we fuck. And we fuck.
We don’t stay over. There’s no spooning afterward, no cuddling, no waking together to watch the sun rise. Ours isn’t that kind of relationship. I go home if we’ve made it to one of Ashton’s residences, tiptoeing into my father’s home like a teenager past curfew. Or we both go home if we’ve shaken the foundation of somewhere new and hot and strange.
We don’t kiss when we depart. There’s already too much of that during our days to carry it into our fevered nights.
I sleep well. I’m too tired, in mind and especially in body, to do otherwise.
I usually wake sore. Sometimes chafed. Definitely satisfied, but with a growing itch to greet the new day.
Then I shower. I brush my teeth and put on my makeup, donning a sweet face to match the adorable billionaire’s girlfriend the world increasingly knows me to be.
And we do it all over again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JENNA
APPOINTMENTS SLOW ONCE WE’RE PAST those first two weeks, moving from an everyday torrent of publicity to a few times each week.
For the first time I wonder how Ashton has managed any of this. Now that the interviews have become interruptions in our schedules rather than our full-time jobs, my mind sees them differently.
I’m reminded, every time I see Ashton sauntering into wherever-it-is wearing an immaculately stylish suit to match the immaculately stylish thing he’s purchased for me, that he’s a busy man. He runs a huge company. Billionaires work to become billionaires; they don’t just get lucky then sit around all day eating filet.
So how has he carved out the time for all this press? I’m almost afraid to mention it. I’m sure that if I do, I’ll remind him how much he hates all of this and how much he’d rather be working.
Trillionaire Boys' Club: The Clothing Mogul Page 9