The Sweetest Fix

by Bailey, Tessa

  Reese’s scream was muffled by her coat and the sweet, strangled sound of it almost ended things for Leo, then and there. Right on the edge of his willpower, Leo gripped her hips and gave her three rough pounds, almost knocking her off the perch of his boots.

  “Too hard?”

  “No. It’s so good. Harder.”

  Jesus. Starved for release—hers and his own—Leo wrapped her in a bear hug to keep her steady, bent her body over slightly and drove into her repeatedly, his own grunts echoing in his ears. He pumped himself into her with such force, he was almost ashamed of himself, but her hips cinched back to meet him every time, her voice chanting more, more, more, and so he couldn’t stop, couldn’t temper himself, his world whittled down to Reese and the wet pliancy between her thighs, welcoming every slapping thrust of his cock.

  “Did you wear those little tights for me?” he rasped above her head. “Did you know they’d make me so fucking thick when I saw them?”

  “Yes,” she panted, clenching around him, milking his flesh eagerly. “I knew.”

  Leo’s balls wrenched up, telling him he didn’t have long. Oh God. Oh God. This girl. She broke him so easily. His muscles were starting to vibrate, the base of his spine pulling back like an elastic band getting ready to snap. “Play with yourself, Reese. Think about what you did, teasing me like that.” He heard the shift of material and knew her hand moved to follow his instructions. “Making me obsess over how goddamn tight you are when I’m trying to eat. If that’s what you wanted, you got it. Make it up to me by getting off, sweetheart.”

  “I’m coming. Leo,” she said shakily, her back stiffening against his front. “I’m…oh…”

  He kept his bruising pace, burrowing his face into the crook of her neck and breathing, breathing there, waiting for her climax to hit, ready to beg for it so he could stop holding back his own. A wrenched sob fell from her mouth, followed by the wet pulsing of her pussy. It pulled like a trigger, the delicate muscles tightening around him in waves—and he blew. No stopping it when feeling her come was the hottest turn on of all time, her thighs shuddering against him, his name leaving her in sexy whimpers.

  “Oh my God,” he said through his teeth, hissing at the straining in his stomach and balls, the intensity of the pleasure/pain that came before relief. He tightened his bear hug around her and thrust several more times, vision depleted, nothing existing or mattering except for the wet, delicate clench of her, the triumph of bottoming out, leaving no part of her untouched, his seed leaving him in hot bursts. “Fuck. Reese. Nothing feels like you.”

  “You either, Leo,” she sobbed brokenly.

  Several moments later, he finally came down the other side of his climax and gathered her close, breathing into her hair until he regained his equilibrium. Keeping one arm wrapped around Reese lest she disappear, he reached down and pulled her panties and skirt back into place, sliding his lips up her nape and kissing her hairline, reveling in her sigh of contentment. Wanting to hear it every day of his life. A loud group of people walking past the building brought Leo back to reality, however, and finally he let her go, disposing of the condom in a nearby wastebasket and zipping back into his jeans.

  He turned back around to find Reese flushed and glassy eyed, slightly off balance on her usually nimble feet. His heart flipped like a pancake in his chest. Not holding her through the night after sharing a physical experience that mind-blowing…it felt wrong and he hated it. But he forced himself not to push. “I’ll let you get some sleep,” he said gruffly, reaching out to cup her cheek. When she leaned into his touch, they each moved closer until her chest met his stomach and he couldn’t help but add, “Are you going to call me tomorrow, Reese?”

  Her eyelashes fluttered, a soft expulsion of air leaving her mouth. “Hell yeah I am.” She went up on tiptoes and kissed his mouth, good and thoroughly, her fingers curling in the material of the jacket covering his shoulders. Just when he started to get hard again, she broke away and sauntered around him to the door, pulling a key from her coat pocket and sliding it into the lock of the second door that led to the apartments. “Good night, Leo.”

  “Night, sweetheart,” he said, battling the urge to reach out and draw her back for another kiss, possibly more. “Good luck tomorrow.”

  She wet her lips, nodded in thanks, and disappeared into the building. And Leo walked home counting the minutes until he saw Reese again, staunchly ignoring the intuitive ripple in his gut telling him that he was missing a piece of her puzzle.

  It would come. All in good time.

  He had no way of knowing his time with Reese was running out.

  Chapter 16

  On Sunday morning, the night after the single greatest date of her life, Reese shouldered her duffel bag and limped down Forty-first. She’d forgotten to bandage her blisters before the workshop and paid the price dearly. A cold wind blew through her sweaty hair, so she pulled up her hood to prevent getting sick. Up ahead, a group of fellow dancers skipped along merrily, stopping every so often to execute one of the moves they’d done in the class this morning, laughing, trying to outdo one another.

  Cori waved at Reese to catch up with them, but she shook her head. Took her phone out of her pocket and pointed at it, signaling that she needed to make a phone call. A week into her Broadway quest and she’d still had no luck. More than anything, Reese had wanted to wait to call her mother until she could share good news, but none had been forthcoming—on the dancing front, anyway—and a catch-up conversation with her mother couldn’t be put off any longer.

  She tapped the phone against her thigh, took a deep breath and pulled up her contacts and dialed. In true Lorna fashion, she answered on the first ring. “Hello, my darling girl!”

  “Hey, Mom.” Reese could picture her mother sitting in bed as she usually did on Sunday mornings, the Today show on in the background while she planned classes for the week in her notebook. “It’s nine-thirty, so you’re trying to talk yourself out of a third cup of coffee, huh? Just have it. You never win that battle.”

  “My willpower is weak.” Lorna chuckled, and Reese heard the sound of her closing the notebook, settling into the bedding for a chat. A wave of homesickness caught her around the throat. She’d have given anything in that moment to lay her head in Lorna’s lap and zone out to the news. To eventually plod downstairs together in their slippers and make pancakes. Instead, she had bloody feet, seven days left to become gainfully employed…and a man she couldn’t stop thinking about…who believed her to be someone else. A successful someone. “Well?” Lorna prompted. “How are things going?”

  Perfect. Terrible.

  Reese swallowed and straightened her spine. “I just came from a workshop put on by one of the choreographers of Rained Out.”

  “Oh, Reese. Wow. How was it?”

  “Hard.” Her rush of breath was visible in the February air. “Really hard. But satisfying.”

  A beat passed. “And the open calls you’ve been going on?”

  “Nothing yet,” Reese said quickly, doing her best to sound upbeat. “I made it through the first couple rounds of one last week. It was a great, you know…experience. It just wasn’t the right fit. But I have a slew of auditions coming up this week. I feel really good about them.”

  “Fabulous, honey.” There was a stretch of silence. “Are you doing okay for money? If you think you’ll need a little longer, I can see about adding some classes to the schedule at Cedar-Boogie, asking the parents to pay in advance. Or—”

  “No. No, Mom. Don’t do that.” She’d lost count of how many similar sacrifices her mother had made in the past to keep Reese dancing. To be able to afford shoes and costumes and hotel rooms for competitions. This was it. No more leaning on Lorna. The pressure of making it was solely on her shoulders now. “No, I’ve got a week. One more week.”

  She could all but see Lorna wringing her hands. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m positive.” Instead of following her friends farther west, Reese
found herself veering toward Times Square, suddenly wanting to lose herself in the chaos. “Go back to the Today Show. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.” The homesickness swelled. “I hereby give you permission for that third cup of coffee.”

  Lorna laughed hesitantly. “And I give you permission not to put so much pressure on yourself. Okay, kiddo?”

  Reese closed her eyes. “Okay, Mom. Bye.”

  It wasn’t until Reese saw the Pikachu up ahead that she realized she’d been seeking him out. Kind of like a sinner showing up for confession, secure in the knowledge that everything she said would be confidential. She sat down in the very same stone pillar she’d occupied the last time, after missing her audition with Bernard Bexley. Leo’s father. Duffel bag in her lap, she waited for the Pikachu to finish taking a selfie with someone in an I Love NY T-shirt.

  He did a double-take when he saw her, ambling over. “Well, well. Look who’s back.”

  “Hey, Link.” She waved. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me, considering you see thousands of faces every day.”

  “This might come as a shock, but I don’t have a lot of meaningful conversations dressed like this. You stood out.” He fell onto the pillar to her right and produced a cigarette, lighting it. “So. You stuck around, huh? How’s it going?”

  “I met someone.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of your fault. Remember how I missed that audition? When I left you, I was on my way to convince his son into helping me out…”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s my someone.”

  “Damn. Did he? Help you get the second audition?”

  “I never asked him. I changed my mind. But he doesn’t exactly know why I showed up in the first place. Turns out, he’s had people use him before. To get to his father. And I didn’t want him to see me like that, so I lied about being employed. I’ve been lying about a lot of things and now I can’t see a way out of this without losing him. Or hurting him.”

  The Pikachu gave a low whistle, pulled hard on his cigarette. “This is a quandary. It reminds me of my second marriage.”

  Reese looked over at him. “How so?”

  “Mid-twenties. I’d lost my job as a plumber. Did you know that people’s houses don’t have the same rules as hotels? They don’t want you to take the towels, robes and soap.”

  Reese blinked. “Oh. You don’t say.”

  He paused in the story to take a picture with two children, not bothering to put out the cigarette. Then he came back and picked up in the middle of his story. “I didn’t tell her I’d gotten fired. I mean, I was going to get another job, right? I just needed some quick money to get me over the hump. So I left every day dressed for plumbing. But she was a smart one. Smarter than me. She tracked my phone to Aqueduct Race Track where I’d been playing the horses every day for a month. Turns out, gambling with the grocery money is frowned upon.” He squinted over at her. “The moral of the story is, they always find out.”

  A pit opened up in her belly. “This isn’t me. I don’t deceive people. What am I doing?”

  “You’re saving him from one type of pain. Replacing it with another, worse one.”

  “Ouch,” she breathed. “You were encouraging last time I was here. What happened to that positive rhetoric?”

  “Ah, we’ll get to that. There’s a method to the Pikachu’s madness.” He tossed down his cigarette, ignoring the glare from a passerby. “So you never got that audition with this guy’s father, right? What have you been doing instead?”

  “Trying to make it on my own. Hitting every open call. Trying to catch someone’s eye at a workshop. Practicing. I’m giving it everything I’ve got, but it’s not…” She took in a slow breath. “It hasn’t been good enough.”

  He considered her. “You know, lies aside, you did technically do the right thing. You didn’t use the guy. You adjusted when your conscience said it was wrong. If he’s reasonable, he’ll appreciate the effort you put in instead of trying to take the easy road.”

  “I don’t know.” She thought of him holding her in Bryant Park, the swaying motion of their bodies, the thundering of their matching heartbeats. “It’s gotten serious.”

  The man hummed, leaned back on the pillar. “Well if you’re not employed, how are you still here?” He narrowed an eye. “Did you come here looking for a gig? I hear Dora the Explorer got a stress fracture. Maybe you could fill in?”

  “I’m…good. Thanks. I have enough money for one more week.”

  “And then?”

  “And then…” Her mouth went dry. “If I haven’t gotten hired by then, I go back to Wisconsin. I won’t be able to justify sinking any more money into this…fantasy. Money that I didn’t even earn.”

  “So the problem with the guy might take care of itself, right?” He shrugged and stood up, scratching a chin that looked like it hadn’t been shaved in days. “Give yourself the week. Hard work always pays off.” He spread his arms wide. “Just look at my success story.”

  Reese tried to swallow a laugh and didn’t quite succeed.

  “All right, we got a laugh out of her after all.” He opened his arms for a couple of tourists to rush in, slinging them across their upper backs and throwing a wink in Reese’s direction. “This is New York City, kid. Miracles happen. You’ll get yours.”

  She wasn’t so sure of that, but standing and shouldering her duffel bag, Reese could admit to feeling better after confessing her transgressions out loud. Being honest with someone other than herself. Not quite ready to return to her rented closet, she went into a bodega and bought some Band-Aids, patching up her blisters as best she could. Then she roamed around the city for a couple of hours, stopping for a hot chocolate and walking the Hudson.

  More than anything, she wanted to go to the Cookie Jar and see Leo. Get one of those priceless hugs, experience that security and happiness he made her feel. But if she were a chorus line dancer in Daliah’s Folly, she would be getting ready for the matinee performance, wouldn’t she? So she shot him a text, instead.

  Nap date, tomorrow? I’ll bring sandwiches?

  Best text I’ve ever gotten, he responded, immediately. Hands down.

  Her lips curled up into a smile. I promise not to touch your utensil drawers.

  I want your hands all over my…utensils.

  Reese snort-laughed loud enough to draw the attention of a couple walking by. It’s a date, she typed back, unable to ignore the helium-like feeling in her belly. It carried her along the path for several blocks, before she turned back and headed for the apartment, mentally preparing for long hours in very cramped quarters. With her dwindling lack of funds, going out wasn’t an option. She was probably better off studying dance tutorials on her phone anyway. Maybe watching some old competition footage and look for areas of improvement.

  Just before she reached her apartment building, memories of her tryst with Leo playing in Technicolor in her mind, a push notification came up on her phone from the app she’d been using to find open calls.

  Casting chorus line dancers for the musical Chicago. Coordinator states: Seeking an extremely limited number of polished, experienced dancers, preferably with Broadway experience. Familiarity with the material a plus. Open call on February 14th at noon. Arrive early. Participants to be seen only if time permits. 200 West 49th Street.

  Reese couldn’t breathe.

  And then all of a sudden, she was breathing too quickly. So fast that she stumbled to one side and wedged a shoulder up against the closest building in order to remain standing. Chicago. Her dream musical. God, there would be hundreds of dancers there, eager to get this kind of steady work on the iconic show. She’d be an even smaller fish than she’d been thus far while auditioning for less established productions.

  But she had to try. She had to take her shot.

  The open call was one week away. Valentine’s Day. Her last full day in New York if she didn’t get hired. Between now and then, she would dance her
ass off. Hit every audition possible. And if she didn’t land anything…Chicago would be her last shot. After the music cut out and she’d left her soul on the stage, there would be no doubt for the rest of her life that she’d given her dream every ounce of her effort. If that effort didn’t pay off, she would go back to Wisconsin.

  Right after she came clean to Leo.

  God. He deserved to know. It would just make ripping off the bandage so much easier if she had an actual, real life job in her back pocket when it happened. And she would kill herself trying to make that a reality. For her sake and for his. For the sake of her dream, too, because there was a possibility that if she told Leo now, if he didn’t wish her straight to Satan…he might try to help. Intervene with Bernard. And that would be too tempting. Too easy. She wouldn’t give herself that out. She’d make it on her own merit or not at all.

  Come on, Reese. One more week.

  Make it count.

  * * *

  Leo set down his phone with a grin on his face.

  Plans with Reese. He had them.

  For a moment, he stared down at his work station, completely at a loss for what he’d been trying to accomplish before she texted him.

  The Fixes. Right.

  Seven days to Valentine’s Day. People who’d placed orders were scheduled to begin picking them up in five, meaning he had a lot of work to do creating each individual cake pop. Jackie had ordered personalized boxes stamped with the Cookie Jar logo. There were red ribbons involved, too, but it would be a cold day in hell before he started tying bows. That was all Jackie and Tad. He just needed to focus on the pops themselves.

  Usually at this point, he would be heading home for a few hours to sleep after an early morning of baking, but there wouldn’t be any downtime if he wanted to complete all the Fixes by the 14th and still leave space in his schedule for Reese. And he did. Very much want to leave space for her.

  Over the course of the next few hours, Leo mixed ingredients, creating several flavors of cake batter, baking, forming them into balls. Whipping up buttercream. Melting white chocolate and dark for drizzling, leaning sideways to read his notes on each one of the printed-out order forms. By the time he’d worked through three dozen orders and placed them in boxes, the clock—and his stomach—told him it was dinnertime.