by JD Hawkins
“I could play with you all night,” he growls behind me.
“Fuck…” I groan, once again pushing into his roaming fingers. “You’re killing me, Nate…”
When I feel his cock press against me I gasp—freezing at the apex, head up, staring out the window, mouth wide open. No longer writhing, air stuck within me, no longer moaning. As wet and soft as he’s got me, I can’t do anything but remain distilled in this half-pleasure as a cock bigger than any I’ve ever had pushes inside.
“Oh God…” I moan. “Yes.”
I barely feel the hand he has reaching around, down across my belly, until he squeezes and presses my clit, and suddenly I’m softening, pulsing, allowing him to go deeper.
“So tight…” he growls, so low I can only hear him because his mouth is buried in the hair by my ear.
“You’re so…big…” I manage to say, drawing out the words so they sound like gasps. I put my arm over my shoulder to find his hair and grab it, if only for something to steady myself against as he swings inside of me, seeming to go deeper each time. Long, firm strokes that seem to crack me open a little more each time.
I give up on trying to meet him halfway, on playing my own part well. He’s got me grasping and clawing for just a crumb of reality, unable to do anything but try to cling to sanity as he pounds himself into me. It feels like he’s trying to crush me beneath the weight of my own pleasure, that he’s hitting spots I never even knew existed, each one like heavy explosions of unfiltered happiness going off.
“Nate…Nate…more…” I chant, like some incantation to maintain this trance he has me in. His name the only word that makes sense to me right now. Pulling his mouth into my neck, his other hand grasping at the bed helplessly.
He fucks me like he hasn’t had sex in far too long. Too horny to savor it, to take his time, but I don’t care. All I can do is savor it anyway, and time doesn’t matter when something feels this good. I feel like a beautiful mess now. Nothing but delicious heat; shimmering, sweaty skin and breathy moans of glee.
More than that, I can feel how much he likes it, how much he wants me. His roaring breath right by my ear, his hands clenching my breasts, my sides, like he wants to experience all of me at once, but most of all the way he fucks me like I’ve got something he wants so badly, something nobody else has…
I feel him quicken inside of me. Wild thrusts like he’s losing control of himself, as if he can feel every white-hot twist of ecstasy he’s making in me. I don’t want him to stop, but I want him to find the thing he’s searching for even more. I grip his hair a little tighter, pull him a little closer, and in a tone I could never recreate sober, that I could never do any other time, I beg him.
“Fuck me, Nate. Give it to me.”
And as if realizing that he’s not in control of even himself anymore, he growls back as his body lurches and stiffens, as his cock thrusts inside of me with increasing necessity.
“God…Hazel…you drive me wild…”
He’s plunging in and out of me frantically now, groaning like an animal. Each blow making me cry out, louder and louder, and then I start to come before I’m even realizing it, my last bit of resistance gone, high-pitched squeals emerging from me involuntarily.
My orgasm slams into me in waves, and I’m gasping for breath. Drowning in the sensation of heat rushing out of my body, a beautiful lightness rushing in. And maybe it’s the looseness of my body, but in his final moments he feels even bigger, even harder, until that hardness erupts inside of me in a hot rush that slowly, lusciously fades.
Holy shit. I have never been fucked like that before. There is no comparison.
Both of us spent, I feel the comforting weight of his body against my back as he rests a moment. My skin tingling, so sensitive that I feel the intimacy of his slowing breath on my shoulder. I purr low and soft when he strokes my damp hair a few times with his hand.
Then he pulls away, lifting his weight from the bed, from me. By the time I roll over dizzily to sit on the bed, he’s already in the bathroom. I breathe deeply, even the air seeming laced with that shimmering, heady sparkle of my skin.
Somehow I catch my breath, pull up my panties, lower the hem of my dress a little, remove my heels, sweep back my hair. The motions are automatic, my mind still soaring in the place where he sent me. As I lean back, hands behind me on the bed, head facing the ceiling, and continue to inhale the tingling afterglow, I suddenly realize that I’m smiling.
After about a minute, he emerges from the bathroom. Zipped up, but his shirt still messily untucked over his pants, his hair a wild, dark fire that he tries to tame with his hand.
His typical seriousness has returned to his face. He looks at me the way he did when he first visited my hotel room—his poker face. Only the intensity of his eyes reveals that something else is going on inside of him.
“I…I should go,” he says, the words too hard to read anything into.
Any other guy and I’d be offended. Self-conscious. Regretful. Not that I expect him to stay and massage me to sleep—I know the deal with one-night stands. But even with one-night stands, there’s a better way to leave things. To rush out immediately afterwards with nothing but three short, stern, cold words is a loser move. Cowardly.
But Nate’s not any other guy; definitely not like the kind of guys I usually make the mistake of doing this sort of thing with. I know he’s not running from me, from who I am—he’s running from himself, and his own moment of weakness, the fact that he broke even his own principle of self-control.
“Nate…” I say, after he’s turned and moved toward the door. “Hold on.”
He stops and looks back. I stand up and smile at him. “I’ll go on that boat trip with you tomorrow,” I say, breezily. “If you want, of course.”
An incredulous laugh bursts from his mouth and his expression relaxes, eyes softening a little. “God, Hazel. You’re…fucking incredible. But you don’t have to,” he says. “You’ve already done so much for me. Too much.”
I shrug and tell him, “Like you said: it was kinda fun, right?”
He nods, seeming to mull it over, then shakes his head. “It’ll probably be tougher than tonight,” he says hesitantly. “They’d ask you so many more questions. The ‘real housewives’ would be all over you. And we’re heading out early, around 8 a.m. I couldn’t impose—”
“I’m sure I can handle it,” I reply, meeting the deep concern in his voice with the frivolous confidence of my own. “A day on a boat…I like boats. It’s either that or another mudpack for me tomorrow.”
Nate looks at me, chewing it over, and I suddenly feel silly for the suggestion. I wave it away with a gentle laugh.
“You know what, forget it. I shouldn’t have suggested it. You’re right—I don’t want to risk your whole thing just so I can hang out on a boat.”
“No,” he says, stepping away from the door, toward me, “if you’re genuinely up for it, I’d really like for you to be there. It would be a massive help to me. I don’t even know what excuse I could make otherwise. It would be great.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” he says, looking directly at me, as if to show how much he means it, but then glancing away, as if he might reveal something else he doesn’t want to show.
“Okay,” I say, cheerily. “It’s a date.”
He looks back at me and smiles. “It’s a date, then.”
6
Nate
This hotel’s supposed to be famous for its spa therapies, but I haven’t used a single one, and I feel better than I have in years.
Physically, at least.
Mentally, I’m still a dark cloud of knotted thoughts and a feeling that something’s wrong. The thing is, I’ve been feeling like something’s wrong for years. A wrongness when Nicole pulled away from me, when I was dead broke and struggling to stay afloat, when I started lying to get this job, and now…what happened last night.
At this point, I can’t tell which o
ne of those things is actually what’s twisting me up. It’s all just the same feeling that things aren’t the way they should be. But at least with Hazel, I felt my muscles relax for the first time in a long time. She’s something else.
I’m an early riser, so I decide to get in a quick workout before getting dressed and heading to her room. Even as I push myself, heavy music thrashing in my earbuds, I can’t stop thinking about it, about her, about what happened, about what’s going to happen today. When you analyze a business, gather data, you’re not supposed to go with your gut—and yet I agreed to bring Hazel on my boss’s yacht based on nothing but a feeling.
Sure, she did a great job at dinner last night, but this is going to be different. And as they say on the trading desks: “Past performance is not indicative of future results.”
What the hell am I doing? I ask myself for the millionth time this year once I’m done with my workout, in fresh clothes, and heading to Hazel’s room. As if the lie, and the pretense last night wasn’t enough, I had to go and fuck her too, just to make things even more complicated, even more risky.
She was too beautiful, too kind, too likeable, too easy to be around, too much of a turn-on…
No. I can’t think like that. As if I’m trying to “blame” her for it. That was all me. All my own lack of self-control.
Perhaps the situation made it easy for me to think of her as an ally. She knew the truth, after all, and still agreed to help me maintain the lie. And she said we’re friends. Me and her against the rest. I ended up trusting her. I had to trust her. But even that was something I swore I’d never do again. In my experience, trust is a weakness.
I knock on her door heavy in thought, feeling chewed up by my worries, tensely prepared for whatever’s about to come. The door swings open a few seconds later.
“What do you think?” she says. “Orange bikini, blue one-piece, or red bikini?”
Her bright smile and happy tone feels almost like a shock to my darkened mind. More than that, she’s holding the red and orange bikinis on either side of her—but I can only stare at her breasts in the blue swimsuit.
“I think…uhh…that you look amazing,” I say.
She laughs and rolls her eyes, as if my answer was useless, then spins back into her room, toward the bathroom.
“I’ll try on the orange one for you, just hang on there.”
I close the door behind me and step inside, glancing at the small gap in the ajar bathroom door, but not seeing anything. Eddy messages me and I reply quickly.
Hazel emerges from the bathroom moments later in the orange bikini. A hand on her hip as she strikes a couple of playful poses, though her expression seems doubtful.
“So? What do you think?”
I take my time looking at her, as if I need that long to decide. “Bright…colorful…” Sexy…tempting…so good I want to tear it off… “Suits your personality.”
She smiles so brightly I can’t help mirroring it.
“That’s so sweet. Okay—just give me a few more minutes and I’ll be ready,” she says, heading back into the bathroom.
“No rush,” I call back. “Eddy just messaged me. A few of the guys are going to be late as well.” She turns before entering the bathroom and looks at me. “If you want, I could come back and pick you up in an hour.”
She rolls her eyes and shrugs. “Why would you do that? What would I even do?”
I nod and look around. “What do you want to do?”
“We could go have breakfast? Isn’t that what husbands and wives on vacation do?” she says playfully.
It takes me off guard, but I smile when I realize how good it is that she’s already in the swing of things.
“Sure. Sounds good,” I reply.
Five minutes later we’re heading to the outdoor terrace of the hotel café. Hazel’s wearing a semi-see-through tunic dress over her bikini, and it’s enough to distract me from the most incredible morning sunlight that’s spilling over the mountains.
Though the terrace is half filled with people, a few of whom I recognize from the conference, there’s a quiet, early morning peacefulness about the place. As if everyone is a little humbled by the incredible scenery. Even I feel more relaxed than I should be, though Hazel probably has something to do with that.
We order a couple of coffees, I get eggs Florentine, and she gets a large English fried breakfast, and when the waiter leaves she looks at me with a guilty smile.
“I’m absolutely starving,” she says. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
The impulse to match her playful tone and say I think I have an idea rises in me but I hold myself back. I’m starting to find myself doing that a lot with Hazel. Not the holding back—I do that anyway—but the impulse to flirt, to be silly. I guess she’d bring that side out of anyone.
We say nothing else to each other, taking in the view and the cool morning breeze in companionable silence until the coffees come, and then even until our food comes. Not because we’re awkward or have nothing to say, but because there’s a placid calm between us. A sense of patience and presence that we’re sharing in. When our eyes meet she smiles, and I soften a little. It’s just nice. Comfortable. As if there’s nothing to say because we already know everything we need to know about this moment.
If I were here with Nicole, we probably wouldn’t be talking either—but only because she’d be on her phone, oblivious to the world around her, to me. And if she did speak it would only be to complain about the food, or the service, or the weather, or to make me take endless photos of her for her social media, until one met her approval.
“Oh wow!” Hazel murmurs with her mouth full, making an expression that’s almost indecent. “These sausages are amazing. They’ve got herbs or spices or something in them. Here, try a bite.”
She cuts a piece and holds her fork out across the table. I look at her blankly for a moment, remembering that she did the same at the dinner table last night. But then it was for show, or so I thought. Suddenly I’m wondering if we’re blurring lines a little too much, if this is getting a little too messy.
“No thanks,” I say as politely as I can, looking back at my own plate. “I’m good.”
“You have to,” Hazel insists with a laugh. “Trust me. They’re so good.”
I look back up at her and let her cute smile weaken me a little. Maybe blurring the boundaries a little would be okay. Just a little. I take the food from her fork and then a moment to appreciate it. I nod at her in agreement.
“Yeah…” I say. “Rosemary…a little thyme. Sage maybe?”
She laughs and looks at me with glinting eyes before turning back to her plate. “All I know is, they taste amazing.”
There’s that beautiful, contented silence between us a while more, as we take our time eating, sipping coffee, pausing to look out at the view, and a few times even at each other. When Hazel speaks again, the clarity and thought in her voice feels almost like cold water.
“You know…you’ve hardly asked me anything about myself.”
She smiles when she says it, so that I know she’s not offended, but just making an observation. I look at her with interest, hoping my expression shows that the question surprises me—that if she was offended, I didn’t mean for her to be.
“Didn’t I? I’m not trying to be rude or anything,” I say, taking a sip of coffee. “If I didn’t, it’s just because it would make…this a lot harder. If I knew you more as a person, what you like, what your hobbies are, what your real life is like back in…”
“Los Angeles,” she says with a laugh.
“Then it would be harder to pretend. Harder to fake you being my fiancée.”
Hazel swirls her coffee and scrunches her nose a little, thinking about it, then says, “That’s fair.”
I look away, feeling like that’s the end of it, but then she says, “I get the impression you’re not much interested in people anyway.”
I laugh, if only to hide the fact that I’m fee
ling anything else. There are things people say with all their venom, all their anger, intending to offend you, to blindside you, to cut you down. And then there’s something like that—said with a smile, without malice, and yet it slices right into you and touches something inside that you never wanted anybody to even know existed.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, turning back to my coffee, trying to play it off as nonchalant humor. But the comment cut deep, and as much as I want to keep my mouth shut, I can’t stop myself from bleeding in front of her a little. “Why should I be interested in people anyway? They only disappoint you eventually.”
“Wow…that’s so bleak.”
“You think so?” I ask.
“Of course it is!”
“I don’t think so,” I say confidently, for some reason allowing myself to speak thoughts I’ve kept to myself for a long time. “I think it’s liberating. Empowering. Once you forget about depending on other people, on trusting them, on pleasing them. I’m done with people. Done with women. Once you realize in the end you’re alone, a single person, and nobody else is going to help you or hurt you without your permission—that’s the opposite of bleak. It’s comforting. My only regret is learning it too late in life.”
After a second, Hazel replies, “Well, that’s one way of looking at things. But I couldn’t disagree with you more, Nate.”
“I figured you would.” I look up from my coffee to her intrigued eyes. “I might not know what you do for fun on a Sunday afternoon, but I know that about you for sure.”
She laughs again, then strokes her hair, and I catch myself wondering about her, wanting to get closer to her, to prove her wrong and ask about her life. We haven’t even addressed what we did last night, as if we can just pretend it didn’t happen at all. That it was nothing but a fantasy. Now though, I feel the same rush I felt when I let my body do the thinking, and turned back to knock on her door after saying good night…
Before either of us can do anything stupid, a voice draws our attention.