by Tilly Delane
We settle in what was once the front room and lounge around on Rowan’s enormous bed, talking about everything and nothing, in between me grabbing her and kissing whatever part of her body happens to present itself at the time, much to her squealing delight.
While she is writhing on the bed semi-naked, I’m still in my shirt, pants and waistcoat, and have been ordered to stay decent until we’ve taken delivery of the food, so somebody can actually answer the door.
We haggle over who gets to tip the driver. She’s already paid for the order over the phone, but after playing dirty for a bit, it looks like I’m allowed to dish out the pocket money. I blackmail her consent out of her by kissing her ankles until she screams because, apparently, that’s her ticklish spot. Once I get her to agree, I let go and she crawls over to sit on my lap, her knees by my hips, the way she did in the limo last night. She hovers with her arse in the air though at first, not nestling down on my hard on. Her panties are soaked through and I know she’s being mindful of leaving a visible wet patch on the expensive cloth of my trousers if she sits down on my crotch. But I really don’t fucking care about the suit pants and I don’t care what the delivery guy is going think. I pull her down by the hips, willing to let her smear her cream all over me. I need the contact on my dick or I’m gonna implode.
As soon as she sinks down, settling on the ridge, she can’t help but groan. I fucking love that sound and I fucking love the weight on my dick. I palm her butt, and she starts rocking back and forth as she finds my mouth. I let her take the lead as she kisses the fuck out of me, deep-throating me with her tongue in a way no other woman has ever claimed me. I’m about ten seconds away from coming in my pants, and I think so is she, when there is a knock on the door.
She detaches from me and scoots off my lap with heavy eyes then points resolutely at the door.
“Go! Hunt! Bring food! No food, no...”
She substitutes the word by dry humping the mattress and making porno noises.
I don’t think I’ve ever before been turned on within an inch of climax one minute and laughing to the point my belly muscles hurt the next.
This girl is going to be the end of me.
Kalina
Sex, food and fun.
That’s George Diego Benson in a nutshell, when he’s not too busy being gangsta boss.
I love it.
Once he brings the bags with the food containers in and we dish them out on a tray on the bed, I order him to take his clothes off. He obliges, so when we eat I do it with the view of a cross-legged, shit hot man, wearing nothing but briefs and a devilish smile.
We only get about halfway through our meal, before he decides it’s time to finish what we started before the Thai turned up. He tells me to eat up what’s in my mouth then lifts the tray and takes it over to Rowan’s desk.
With his back still to me, he shimmies out of his briefs before he kind of hunches forward. His right hand disappears around his front and I know he is fisting himself when he makes his next demand.
“Get naked,” he says on a grunt.
I take off my panties and t-shirt, while I watch how his bicep and back muscles swell as he squeezes his cock. He is still holding it tight when he turns around and I see the head is glistening with precum already. He runs his thumb over the slit, spreading the drops and then lets go of it. I whimper at the sight. Despite the fact we’ve fucked I-can’t-remember-how-many-times in the last 24 hours, I hadn’t really seen him yet. In all his beautiful, engorged glory. The sound that leaves my throat when I get the full visual comes from deep within me and takes me by complete surprise. I’ve never whimpered for a man in my life.
He locks on to my eyes and clears the space to the bed in two long strides. The expression on his face is so feral, it makes me scoot up the bed, despite how much I yearn for him. He gets on the mattress and prowls over to me on his hands and knees, until I’m fully backed up against the headboard, knees drawn up.
He sits back on his haunches and his hand goes to the nape of my neck, possessively, just like the night before, and he holds me there, looking deep into my eyes, not doing a thing.
He just looks.
And looks.
And looks.
Until my knees fall away to the side, and my heart wants to jump out of my chest with longing, while my clit is pulsing so hard, I think I’m going to come already. In the periphery of my vision, I can see his cock quiver in answer to my pussy’s call.
They’re singing their own song down there, while we sing a different one up here.
Yet it’s all the same.
It’s fucking insane.
A small smile turns up the corners of his mouth.
“You can feel it, too, can’t you?” he asks, searching my eyes.
I nod. There is no denying this anyway.
“Good.”
He grins, never breaking eye contact.
“Spread ‘em wider,” he demands.
And I do.
He takes a languid look down my body and back up again, and then he takes my left leg with his free hand and hooks my ankle over his shoulder before he lets himself fall forward to line himself up at my entrance.
“You’re gonna come, baby girl. You’re gonna come as soon as I ram home, you hear me?”
I want to laugh.
This is so not my game.
I want to cry.
Because it suddenly is.
Realisation hits me like the Titanic hitting the iceberg.
With this guy, everything could be my game.
I can feel his grip tighten in my neck and I focus on his eyes again.
“I mean it, Kalina. You’re gonna come.” He rams home in one swift, all consuming slam. “Now!”
And my traitorous pussy does just that. She contracts around the sudden fullness he creates, and the world explodes in a thousand colours.
My saving grace?
He’s only about two seconds behind me.
Diego
Kalina is a snorer.
Not a terrible one but not a dainty one either. She did it last night, too. It should get on my nerves, but for some strange reason, listening to the melodic vibrations coming from her nostrils doesn’t irritate me in the slightest. On the contrary, it makes me smile as I tighten my arm around her sleeping body and pull her shoulders more securely onto my midriff, so her head is resting on my abdomen and her breath fans over my belly button.
I like that she has this little flaw, otherwise I think she’d be too good to be true.
I run my hand through her short hair feeling the bleached strands in wonder. She murmurs in her sleep, making my heart beat faster and even breathing a little life into my utterly exhausted penis.
It should be impossible to stir him but stir he does.
She is like a drug.
We fucked again after we finished the second half of our meal, during which we told each other a bit about our ‘previous’. She is so far removed from the innocent I painted her as all this time, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s because continental women start earlier, but she sure as shit has seen a lot of action in her short years. When she told me about her lesbian adventures, I nearly choked on the ice cream she’d found in the freezer for dessert.
Then we did it again.
We fucked and talked and ate and fucked and ate and talked.
Until about an hour ago, when she fell asleep on me.
We never even made it up to her bedroom.
She was still dragging hard from yesterday’s long night and, actually, Rowan’s bed really is fucking gigantic compared to her poxy twin upstairs, so I’m not complaining. It’s easier for me to hold her in my arms, while I check my phone and keep on working, in the vast expanse of a queen size.
Kalina might not be used to waking nights, but this is my normal.
In my line of work, there is no nine to five. I rarely go to sleep before seven or eight in the morning and normally I don’t get up before three in the afternoon.
Julian checked in a while back to say I was right, our guy outside Cormac’s house had spotted Callum and was tailing him now. Our guy was asking what to look out for, and I come up kinda empty. It’s a fucking good question. So I just whisper ‘anything illegal, tell him to get evidence if he can’ into the dictate to text function on my phone, and hit send. Kalina grumbles a little when she hears my voice but settles again when I stroke her cheek.
I don’t know quite who I am soothing more here, her or me.
The more I think about Callum being out, the more bile rises in my throat.
It’s terrible for the kid he hit, but when that happened, I was kinda glad because it finally got Callum fucking O’Brien off my streets and behind bars. I really hoped they’d lock him up for a long, long time.
I’d been waiting for him to slip up on something for almost a decade.
The fact that it ended up happening because of a lousy hit and run sucked for his victim ─ I would have preferred for the coppers to catch him with a few kilos of coke or something ─ but as far as I was concerned, the whole thing was a gift horse, and that scum of the earth was finally gone. Or so I thought. Until the judge handed the sentence down and I thought I’d fucking misheard. Eighteen fucking measly months for leaving a healthy boy in the road with a traumatic brain injury. I could pretend that I was righteously outraged about it, but there is a part of me that seriously questions how much higher above Callum I really sit in the bottom of the emotionally literate barrel, considering I’m still more angry about the cat than I ever was about the kid.
He wasn’t even my cat, really.
He was just a stray tom that used to come to the bottom of the garden at Woodland Drive. But he was my friend. As much as you can be friends with a creature that will take a bloody swipe at you by way of greeting and take your finger off along with the treat you’re trying to feed it.
But there was something royal about him, something that commanded respect, with his bold tiger stripes and his big balls, swaggering around the neighbourhood and fucking kittens into any female cat that hadn’t been spayed yet. It’s why I called him Nuts. ‘Cause that’s what he was, the fucking nuts.
I liked Nuts. A lot.
I like cats in general. They’re cool. They do their own shit and they know no master. I also like dogs, but I don’t want one. Too fucking needy. But they’re cool in their own way. I never understood why people always ask you if you are a dog or a cat person, as if you can’t like both. As if it were a crime to give the ‘wrong’ answer.
In my house, ‘cat’ was definitely the wrong answer. To my old man, they’re something you sic the dogs on, and to my mother they are basically vermin, which is so twisted my brain gives up trying to get on that. But it’s why nobody got why I was so upset when Callum murdered Nuts.
Dad and Cecil laughed at the carnage that little cunt left behind.
Laughed.
My blood starts boiling again and tears shoot into my eyes when I think of the torture Callum put that poor cat through, and not for the first time in the last twelve years am I seriously contemplating putting a hit out on the guy.
I have the connections, I have the means.
I’d be doing humanity a favour taking that arsehole out before he can procreate.
It’s why everything to do with Callum has always been explicitly off the record where Julian was concerned. I wanted to keep my options open, though I’ve kind of blown that now that I told J to put a tail on him and lifted the coms embargo regarding Callum.
That’s probably a good thing, though. Because the problem is, outside of Hollywood, crime novels and a whole other level of society that I am not ─ and don’t ever wish to be ─ part of, other than as an occasional entertainment supplier, there is no such thing as the perfect murder or a loyal assassin. And I really don’t fancy going to prison for any length of time, let alone for life.
Especially not now that I’ve found the perfect little vixen to share my bed with.
The thought doesn’t even freak me out.
Somewhere between looking into her eyes when she came under me last night and fantasising out loud with her about a threesome over ice cream earlier, I decided I want to keep her.
It should be scary, but it’s not. Not even remotely.
It’s just a fact.
And, yes, until now it would have been irresponsible to bring a woman into my life, but I’m so close to going legit, it’s not such a big deal any longer. I’ll be able to keep her safe.
I put my phone away and drag her up higher, so I can press some kisses to the top of her head.
“You’re nice,” she mumbles sleepily into my chest.
“Hey, Kalina?” I whisper.
“Hmm?” she answers, but I’m certain she’s still mostly asleep.
So I risk it.
“Wanna marry me?”
“Hmm,” she answers faintly. “Ask Kristina.”
“Who’s Kristina?” I ask.
But she’s snoring again.
I smile.
At least she didn’t say no.
Z
I knew it was going to get bad again as soon as I heard the ròka’s voice up above.
I cried.
He’d been gone so long that I really thought he was never coming back. The first few months after he miraculously disappeared, I kept waiting for him to return, but then I relaxed. I even dreamed that the óriás would let us go eventually.
The óriás on his own has not been so bad.
I mean, he’d still kill Guppi in the blink of an eye if I tried to escape again, but he’d make it quick and painless. The ròka would get his kicks first. He’d make Guppi suffer, make me watch the torture and when he’s sufficiently riled up, he’d get me to bend over with the promise of saving Guppi.
He’d come in two pumps.
Then he’d get the óriás to explode Guppi’s neck.
He always comes in two pumps. Then he lashes me and calls me a dirty homo.
The óriás isn’t like that. He’s not into us. Or pain. I’m pretty sure he’s into women. Big-breasted and big-hipped. Mama-types with tits he can suckle on. He’s not very bright and I’m not sure he understands pain. He’ll do anything the ròka will tell him, but he generally just leaves us be, until it’s time for the ‘monkeys’ as he calls us ‘to perform’. It makes him snigger every time he says it.
It’s been 760 times I’ve heard that phrase, take away a few for those empty days, after Bonsai and before Guppi, when there was just me, waiting to die, and the cameras on the walls.
And take away another few more days three months ago when nobody turned up for almost a week. The first night he didn’t come down to get the dirty dinner dishes, I heard the dogs bark up top when somebody came to take them. But nobody came to get us. I didn’t try to alert them. I saw the dogs two years ago when I was brought here. Anyone who comes to take them is part of the ròka’s and the óriás’ crowd. That doesn’t mean they know we’re down here, but it means that even if Guppi had climbed the ladder and banged on the hatch, I’m certain they wouldn’t have helped. They’d have taken Guppi and I wouldn’t have been able to keep him safe, because my chain only stretches to about two metres from the ladder. I’m not losing another little one. I need to protect him as long as I can. So we sat stumm until the noise subsided and they were gone.
After a few days, the óriás did come back, his face black and blue, split lip that had been stitched up and climbing gingerly down the ladder.
He seemed relieved to find us in place and alive.
That is the difference between the ròka and the óriás.
The ròka is a sadist and completely unpredictable.
The óriás is like a pig farmer. Sticks to his routine,
cares for his animals, until it’s time to kill them. He tells us what he wants done and how to make it look and as long as we are good performing monkeys, he feeds us three times a day, makes sure we’re clean and that the toilet is emptied before the place starts to stink.
When Guppi got sick, he even took him above and let him sit in the sunlight for half an hour each day, until he got better. The ròka would never have done that. At the first sign of sickness, the ròka would have snuffed Guppi out and gone to get a replacement. After Guppi got better, the óriás even brought us supplements and a daylight lamp.
I miss sunlight.
When Guppi came down after his excursions, I would hold him extra tight through the night, and I could smell the sunlight on his skin.
He smelled of freedom.
Kalina
I wake up the first time around eleven, still cocooned in Diego’s arms.
Diego? George? What am I going to call this man?
I prop myself up on my elbow and look at him in the faint light that falls through the gaps in the curtains. He looks relaxed, peaceful, and I lose myself in studying his features.
This close up, in the semi-darkness, and not blinded by his Northern European colouring, I can see the Spanish influence. In the strong jawline and those luscious, luscious lips. In his beard that has grown so much again overnight that it is now already soft to the touch, rather than bristly, as my gently exploring fingertips find out.
He smiles in his sleep and then begins chasing those fingertips with his mouth, until he catches my index and my middle finger between his lips and sucks them in, licking gently over the pads with the tip of his tongue. The sensation shoots straight to my cervix and my breath hitches.