“Oh, hey Lizzie,” he says, as he pops up out of nowhere and steps beside me into the elevator.
“Brody? What are you doing here?” I ask slowly, afraid of the answer.
He smiles in that dishonestly humble way he has, and suddenly I remember so many things that I never allowed myself to hate about him.
“I work here. Our office just expanded, so we own the top two floors of this building now.”
“Oh, wow. That’s…great.”
He nods way too enthusiastically, like I’ve just given him a huge compliment. Brody was never very good at picking up my emotions.
“Yeah, it really is. I’m one of the heads of the new department.” He looks me in the eye, “With all the benefits that entails.”
I look at him with an expression that is one-part disgust, one-part surprise, and three-parts kill-me-now-please. This is the man I spent almost half my life with. A man who refers to his company as ‘we,’ and who thinks telling me he got a pay raise is going to make me fling my panties off with excitement. For the first time ever, I’m actually hoping that Brody’s phone rings and takes his slimy gaze away from me.
I’m saved the torture of his attention by more people entering the elevator, including Brody’s buddy, a shady-looking guy with a pot belly and a sly grin that makes you wonder what kind of horrendous white collar crime he’s just gotten away with.
“Brody! First day here, looking forward to it?”
“You know me, I’m always looking forward.”
I cringe and step backwards into the shadows, praying to all the major religions that this elevator works both smoothly and quickly today.
“You’re not still thinking about that redhead from last night?” Pot-belly chuckles, smacking his lips in a way that makes my stomach turn. “Wow. She was really a knock-out. I mean, a girl dresses like that, you know what she wants. But her? Damn. She was really a ten. Kudos to you, my friend.”
“Well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks,” replies Brody – my ex-boyfriend, I’d like to remind you one more time.
“What was her name?”
“You know what,” he says, making no effort to bury the conversation, “I don’t even know.”
They laugh loudly together, and I suddenly feel the need to take a long shower with bleach.
Pot-belly leans in to Brody’s ear and says in a conspiratorial, low murmur: “What was she like?”
Brody’s eyes shift a little as he makes sure I’m within earshot – not that he’s keeping his voice down when he speaks.
“Let’s just say that she was very quick and to the point…”
They laugh again, and it grates on every pore of my skin like a Chinese torture device. The elevator dings on my floor number and I push through the crowd like it’s every woman for herself.
“It was nice seeing you again,” I quickly say, as I step out.
“We’ll be seeing each other a lot I imagine,” he says, his face still plagued by that grin like it’s a zit he can’t get rid of.
“Yeah,” is all I can say, and I turn away as quickly as I can.
I walked out of that elevator a different woman. Suddenly, my killer heels are hurting, and the skirt I’m wearing feels way too short for a workplace. Suddenly, I’m staring at the ground a few feet ahead, wondering how I walked with those long, easy strides a few minutes ago. Suddenly I feel like I’m not wearing enough make-up, and that I really should have combed my hair a lot flatter.
I get to my desk and slump over it like I’ve already worked eight hours, then I grab my head in my hands and breathe deeply, trying to suppress the urge to cry right there in the middle of the office.
What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I going to do? Wasn’t there a circle in hell devoted to making people listen to their exes’ sexual exploits? Right next to the one where you’re forced to see your ex every day at work? If there wasn’t, it should be there, because that was the most awful elevator ride of my life.
Maybe I really should call in sick. Maybe a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, a DVD of Casablanca, and a party-size margarita is what I need. Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake.
My head is still in my hands when I hear my phone vibrate in my purse. It takes another minute of deep breathing before I’m ready to pull my head out of my hands and check it.
It’s a text from an unknown number, and all it says is:
Are you ready for your first lesson?
Jax: The man with perfect timing.
Chapter 7
Jax
Yes. I am ready, she texts back, in what must be a record-breakingly fast reply time.
Interesting. Usually girls wait before responding. A few minutes so that they don’t seem over-eager. An hour, perhaps, if they want me to think they have rich, fulfilled lives and haven’t been thinking about me. Sometimes they misjudge how much I care and wait an entire day – by which time I’ve usually deleted their number.
It’s all part of the tango. Of the chase. The grand game of bluffs and gambits between the sexes.
But to text back immediately, that’s something. There are only two reasons a woman would do that: One, she’s desperate and doesn’t care who knows it, and two, she’s confident and doesn’t care what you think.
In Lizzie’s case, I’m not even sure. She went from cold to hot quicker than a microwave meal, and gave me both a sassy rejection and some great head in the space of a day. Then again, we only have a week. Maybe, in her mind, there’s simply no time to lose.
Still. There’s a part of me that’s asking: ‘What are you doing?’ I’m a ‘never-see-you-again’ guy. A one-ride-ticket. You don’t go to Niagara Falls or the pyramids every day, but you remember them forever. That’s what I offer. An unforgettable night, and a taxi ride home.
Maybe it’s the challenge of turning Lizzie into the best damn fuck the city of LA has ever seen. Maybe it’s the power trip of taking control over the woman who dared to blow me off. Or maybe it’s the fact I’ve spent the whole morning sitting on the terrace of my favorite coffee shop, watching the world’s greatest collection of glamorous, fit, and well-dressed women, but all I can think about is getting my hands on Lizzie’s tight ass and sweet tits once again. It’s rare that I fuck a woman as well as I fucked Lizzie, and still feel like there’s unfinished business.
I lay down my espresso and text her the address of a lingerie shop across the street.
My phone beeps before I’ve even put it back down on the table.
Now? I’m at work. How about 4?
It’s my turn to give a quick response. One word.
NOW.
She doesn’t respond. I check my watch, and imagine her scrambling her things into her handbag, her cute nose screwed up with exasperation. I sip my coffee picturing her using those innocent brown eyes of hers to make an excuse to her boss, before gliding out of the office on those toned legs.
It takes about ten minutes, but she comes. Stumbling through the crosswalk on heels, like a toddler on stilts, pulling down her skirt constantly. She pulls on the lingerie shop door, drops her phone, picks it up, then pushes the door open and enters.
I laugh. She’s a walking disaster, but damn if she doesn’t still turn me on.
Really, though, what the hell am I doing?
I drop a ten on the table and get up. Adjusting my sunglasses, I cross the road and enter the lingerie shop.
It’s a big place. Classy. All dark wood and tight corners. I stroll through the racks and see Lizzie tucked away in the back, looking around with wide eyes, trying to act inconspicuous. I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry by how cute and clumsy her act is.
I do neither. Instead, I sidle up behind her, place my hands over her eyes, bring my mouth close to her neck, and whisper: “Say something sexy.”
She freezes for a moment. “Jax?”
I take my hands away and she spins around to see me.
“That’ll have to do,” I say, grabbing her by the hand, taking a quic
k look around, and dragging her to a large changing room surrounded on two sides by mirrors. I draw the curtain, lean back on the wall, and take a good look at her.
“That’s a hell of an outfit,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, still wearing an expression like she took a wrong turn somewhere.
“But you wear it terribly.”
Her mouth drops in surprise, but it’s true. Fury flashes across her face, and I have just enough time to brace myself for her wrath before her words spill out of that perfect mouth.
“You know what, I have had one hell of a morning. My ex-boyfriend of eight years just transferred to my building, I’ve just made many enemies by dumping a load of work on them and ducking out for the morning, not to mention a boss who now thinks I’m a flake – three weeks before a review, I might add – and I haven’t even had my coffee. So excuse me if I’m not all ‘prim and proper,’ for…whatever it is you brought me to a pervy underwear store for!”
She’s gesturing wildly with her hands and snarling those delicate lips as angrily as she can, and all it does is make my pants feel tighter and my smile more genuine.
“Well, I just backed out of a seven million dollar deal in New York, and told one of the biggest contractors there that he has a personality disorder – but you don’t see me looking like I just crawled out of a garbage truck.” Her eyes narrow, and I can tell she’s thinking about slapping me. “I mean, look at you. Your shoulders are hunched forward, your clutching yourself like it’s the middle of winter, you’re pulling on your skirt like it’s an emergency stop. Your balance is all over the place. Are you wearing those heels, or are they wearing you? From where I’m standing, it looks like you’re hoping your clothes will make you look good, when it should be the other way around.”
I can hear her frustrated exhaling, and her cheeks flush with rage. She’s a couple of degrees away from breathing fire. I see her fists clench – it won’t be a slap, it’ll be a full-blown punch.
“You… Are…”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” I say. “You talk too much as it is. Drop the bag and stand here.”
I gesture to the middle of the dressing room.
“Come on, stand here and look at yourself,” I continue. She looks up, as if for a guardian angel, then down at the floor, where there are no answers either, and then gives in.
She steps into the middle of the small room and looks at herself.
“So you had a bad morning, and now you feel angry, stressed, tired, right?”
She nods.
“And now you look like it too. See that person in the mirror? Are they someone you wanna be around? Someone you wanna meet? Someone you wanna fuck?”
It takes her a second, but then she shakes her head.
I step behind her, and press my hand against the small of her back.
“What…” she mumbles, before I reach my other hand around to her front, trace the curve of her abdomen up to her chest, where I cup her breasts and bring them up and out. I push my own chest into her back, and pull her shoulders back onto me, then reach my fingers around her throat, and gently lift her chin up, until she’s standing a full inch taller. Proud and upright, like the beautiful girl I met at the bar; like the ball-breaker who had me seeing naked flesh in my dreams.
“Now,” I say, stepping back to admire her, “just breathe.”
I don’t need to say anything else. I can see some of the fire coming back into her eyes. The good fire, the one that made her push back in the pool, the one that made her slam my dick against the inside of her cheek. Some of that sexiness comes back into her eyes, and when she cocks her hip to the side and puts an arm on it, both my cock and my confidence in her start growing.
“I do feel…better.”
“Good,” I say. “Now strip.”
She whips her head around to face me.
“You heard me,” I say, “take your clothes off.”
For about the third time in the past few minutes she considers whether to hit me, or listen to me, but she eventually sighs slightly and starts undressing.
“It’s not like you haven’t seen it all before,” she says.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying seeing it all again,” I reply.
In the mirror I keep my gaze riveted on her body as I watch her slip off her clothes, partly because I wanna see what’s underneath, and partly because if I catch her eye I know I’m gonna just fuck her right here and forget the whole purpose of our meeting. Finally, she slips the skirt down her legs and kicks it off to the side.
“Wow,” I say.
She smiles with grateful delight.
“No,” I say, “no, not that. I mean, yeah, your body is amazing. But I think you wore your mother’s underwear by accident.”
She looks down at her high-waisted grey boy-short panties. “What’s wrong with these?”
“Are you planning to model for a nineteen-twenties underwear catalogue?”
“What?”
“I’m asking you. Do these double as a parachute in case of emergencies? ‘Cause they could.”
“Ok. I get it.”
“Seriously though, are you sure you got these in the underwear section? They look like the things my mechanic wipes his hands with.”
She crosses her arms over her chest, maybe not realizing it only accentuates the delicious cleavage she’s got there. I regretfully tear my eyes away as she hisses, “They’re comfortable.”
“Hey. I’m sure sandals with socks are comfortable. Oversized shorts are comfortable. Bad sex is comfortable. Do you want comfortable? Because somewhere out there is a grandpa with comfortable loafers, and a comfortable toupee who would love these panties.”
I walk up behind her.
“I don’t think they look that bad,” she continues, but some of the sass has gone out of her voice.
I run a finger down her ass cheek, caressing the limp cotton fabric, and sigh loudly. “Jesus Christ. Where is your ass? I know you have one. These panties don’t. It’s like a magic trick. Wow. To put these panties, on that body; it’s like graffiti on a Michelangelo.”
“They’re just panties,” she exclaims, back to her previous frustration.
“No,” I say, sharply, “they’re never ‘just panties.’”
Lizzie opens her mouth again but then closes it. Point.
“Where are you going?” she says, as I slip out of the dressing room and start prowling the racks. It’s a relief to get out of there. As bad as those panties are, as hard as they try to make her look frumpy, Lizzie’s body still drives me wild. That dressing room is big, but I’m rarely two feet away from a woman without being about to, or in the middle of, fucking her, and that habit is hard to suppress.
I load my arms with panties, bras, stockings, corsets, and anything else I want to see Lizzie in – though to be honest, every instinct in my body is towards undressing her. This is the first time I’m actually trying to convince a woman to put her clothes on, rather than take them off.
I swap glances with a couple of teenage girls who can’t take their eyes off me.
“You gonna wear them yourself?” one of them giggles, gesturing to the underwear draped over my arm.
“No, but I’ll be taking them off myself,” I grin, causing their dimples to run red with embarrassment.
I get back to the changing room and find Lizzie clutching herself shyly.
“Where were you?”
“Try these first,” I say, handing her a couple of things and hanging the rest on the rail.
“How did you know my size?” she asks incredulously.
I settle onto the bench in the corner, tossing off a nonchalant grin. “Easy. I’m good at this. And I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you going to watch me dress?” she says, as I lean back against the wall.
I make an elaborate gesture of turning my head away and looking at the wall to my left. Not that I need to watch her to get hot. I can smell her perfume, hear the rustle of silk agai
nst that soft skin, see her arching limbs out of the corner of my eye. I’m breathing deeply, trying to hold tight onto my raging libido, but unless hell is going to freeze over within the next hour, this situation is going to end predictably. Wonderfully predictably.
“Ok,” she says, after a few minutes, “you can look now.”
I spin around, catch a glimpse, and then I have to close my eyes again. Stockings up her thighs, panties that accentuate the line of her leg into those grabbable hips, a bra that sets her breasts off like explosions of sexual perfection. Absolutely flawless.
I open my eyes again, and find myself biting my fist absently, a gesture I haven’t used since my hot high school teacher came to work in a miniskirt one lucky Wednesday.
“How do you feel?” I say.
“Well,” she says as she adjusts her bra straps with a little side-to-side jig, “it’s kinda tight.”
I tut. “Let me ask that again. How do you feel?”
She looks at me, pauses, and caresses her thigh slightly. “It’s… different?”
I shuffle in my seat. “Third time’s the charm, right? How do you feel?”
She looks at me, then back at her reflection. She pushes a knee forward, curves her hand towards her chest in a coquettish gesture, muses a while, and says: “I feel… Hot. Sexy.”
“Good. Hold that thought, and spin around for me.”
She turns around slowly. I drink the lines of her body in like I’m witnessing a miracle.
“I’ve never worn anything like this before,” she says, breaking the tense silence.
“Why not?”
She looks at me with confusion.
“Honestly?”
“Sure,” I shrug.
“I don’t get it. I mean, if you’re going to have sex, then you just get undressed and do it. So what’s the point?”
I prevent my jaw from hitting the floor. “Are you for real right now?”
“You’re naked, or you’re dressed. So what if you’re wearing these underneath? Just for those few seconds between taking off your clothes, and actually doing the thing?”
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