by Tilly Delane
She laughs at the thought, though I know full well she’s still crying at the same time.
Is it weird? A woman who likes sex but who gets a kind of hangover afterwards? Maybe.
But I don’t care.
I want so badly to wrap her up and hold her until the sadness goes away, it feels like a physical need. I’ve never known anything like it.
“I can’t leave here, right now,” I explain. “Because I’m on call. But I can send a car to pick you up. Bring an overnight bag and I’ll cuddle you, baby girl. Or, you know, if more sex helps...”
I let my voice fizzle out and hope she sees my humour for what it is and doesn’t take it as an insensitive comment.
She is silent for far too long, but I don’t want to push her.
“Are your parents going to be there?” she asks.
I’m confused for a moment, but then I realise that she doesn’t know about the penthouse. She’s only known me as still living with my folks.
“I’m not at Woodland Drive, baby girl. I’m at The Brick. I have the penthouse here.”
“You do?” she asks, surprised.
I can hear by the water splashing that she just sat up straight in the bath. I think I’ve got her intrigued.
“I do,” I answer with a smile.
“So why do you stay with your parents all the time?”
Good question.
“It’s complicated.”
It’s the lamest of lame answers, but it’s the best I can muster right now.
“Can we get seafood?” she finally asks, and the relief I feel at the knowledge she’s decided to come over is second to none.
“As much as you like.”
Kalina
I’m stunned when I enter Diego’s penthouse.
I’ve never been in the apartments part of this building before. I’ve only seen the club and the bar until now. Seeing the rest of it gives a whole new dimension to this guy, who waited for me downstairs to arrive and wrapped me in his arms as soon as I got out of the car he sent.
I was going to tell him that I could take the train here, but he insisted and, to be honest, as emotionally unstable as I still feel, I didn’t want to be out amongst people. So I let him.
I also let him carry my bag and let him keep me by his side with his hand resting lightly against the nape of my neck. It’s an immensely possessive way of guiding someone, more intimate somehow than the classic position at the small of the back. More protective. I like it. It also works better because of the height difference between us. Diego’s not quite as tall as Silas is, but he’s still six foot something and I’m five foot. While Grace and Silas can easily walk with their hands in each other’s back pockets, that is not on the cards for Diego and me.
Having arrived in the penthouse, I immediately step away from his hold on my neck, though, and look around in awe.
The place is gorgeous.
You exit straight from the lift into an open plan living and dining area from which two doors go off. It’s decorated in deep greens and blues and vintage golds and yellows. There are exquisite pieces of antique furniture wherever I look and expensive Persian rugs to boot. It’s nothing like what I expected of Diego, but it’s so me, the real me, it’s ridiculous.
“This is beautiful!” I exclaim. “Can I look around?”
He laughs at that, scrubbing a hand over the back of his head.
“Of course, mi casa es su casa.”
So I shake off my boots and take off, exploring every room. One of the doors that leads off the main room leads to a master bedroom with a four-poster bed and an en suite with a freestanding bathtub. There is a double French door that leads out onto a balcony, full of well-maintained pot plants. The living room’s other door leads into a short hallway, from which you get to another bedroom/study, a guest bathroom and a kitchen.
All the rooms are equally as tastefully decorated as the main room and opulent, but not garish. I realise quickly that the furniture, the paintings and prints on the walls are all real. A lot of the art dotted around seems to pertain to the slave trade somehow, which I feel seriously awkward about, but I know that slavery paraphernalia has been high in the favour of buyers lately. As my father would say, the more questionable the taste, the higher the price. At a quick calculation, I see furniture and art around to the tune of about a quarter of a million euro.
Diego doesn’t follow me around while I explore and by the time I bounce back into the living room, he’s taken his shoes off and is waiting for me on one of the sofas, a menu of the best fish place in town spread open on the coffee table before him. It’s not a takeaway menu, it’s the leather bound one that they give you in their restaurant. I recognize the distinctive logo at the top of the page immediately, because he’s taken us there before.
I guess if you are George Diego Benson, you can order takeout from anywhere.
He pats the seat beside him without looking up from the menu. He keeps his eyes trained on the letters with such intensity, he looks almost like a child who hasn’t learned to read yet but is pretending hard. I know he is pretending because I also know he knows that menu like the back of his hand. I’m not sure why he isn’t looking up at me. There is this odd shyness around him. Almost like he doesn’t want to meet my eyes, now that I’ve seen his place.
I take him in fully for a second. He looks beautiful against this background of pure class, sitting there in his trademark tan suit pants and waistcoat over a crisp white shirt.
I gingerly sit down next to him, acutely aware that I’m parking my butt on an original Biedermeyer couch, and stare at the table in front of me.
I can’t help it.
I have to run a hand over the polished surface of the wood, admiring the patina.
“This is actually a Chippendale, isn’t it?”
I don’t even pretend that it’s really a question. It has the desired result, though. He stops looking at the menu as his head shoots up and his eyes bore into my profile.
“You can tell?”
I turn to him, grinning, and shuffle around to make myself comfortable on his five-grand sofa by crossing my legs.
“You been to my room?” I counter.
“Yeah,” he says, and then it dawns on him.
“What? All that shit you’ve collected while you’ve been here is real?”
“Well,” I say, making a gesture that encompasses my surroundings at large. “Define real. Ikea is real. It’s not as if your coffee cup falls through one of their tables because they’re imagined. My stuff is a bit more real, but not as real as this. It’s gorgeous, Diego, absolutely beautiful. I want a place like this one day.”
He looks around, a little shell shocked and also as if he’s seeing his flat through different eyes. I suppose he is. Through mine.
“I’d get rid of the slavery paraphernalia, though,” I add. “That’s not for me. It worries me a bit that that seems to be your thing. But for your information, it sells for good money at the moment.”
He cocks his head at me, smirking.
“I might look into that. Not that keen myself. I inherited it,” he informs me then narrows his eyes. “This is not just something you dabble in, is it?”
As soon as he asks, my heart starts beating faster.
I don’t want to lie to him more than I absolutely have to.
I weigh up how much the truth here can hurt me. Or him. Probably not a lot.
So I nod, with a proud smile.
“My dad’s an antiques dealer. I grew up with this stuff. Well, not quite as fine as most of yours, but close. Whenever we have anything like this, it doesn’t hang around for very long.”
He frowns at that.
“I thought you said your mother was a scientist and you moved a lot?”
“And?”
“How do you keep a shop like that?”
“Easy. You buy and sell wherever your wife happens to be. That’s the beauty of antiques. You can find them anywhere and sell them everywhere. Ever
heard of an invention called the internet?”
He smiles at my teasing, and then suddenly that hand is in my neck again, pulling me towards him, until his lips are almost on mine.
“So you like my place, huh?”
“I love it,” I say.
I get a gentle kiss for that, before he draws back and searches my eyes.
“How are you feeling, baby girl?” he asks me seriously, and I love that he isn’t just glossing over my low from earlier.
“Better, now I’m with you,” I answer without thinking.
And I realise with a start that that’s true.
He makes the blues go away.
Diego
She stays.
We stay.
We fuck and eat and talk, then do it all over again in reverse order.
And we rearrange the penthouse a little.
I take Kalina’s advice and pack up Nan’s more questionable pieces of art and artefacts to have them taken into storage. I don’t know what to do with them. They’re highly valuable but selling them, making money off them, feels like I’m just carrying on the wrongs of my family. Maybe they can go in a museum one day. But for now, they are in boxes and out of sight, and as soon as the shackles in cabinets and pictures of slave auctions and statues of wrestling Africans are gone, the place immediately feels different.
Then, on Tuesday, while I’m in the office downstairs for a few hours, flowers arrive. Kalina’s ordered a different bouquet for every room, and when I come back upstairs it’s like she has purged the place of resident evil somehow.
By the time Wednesday rolls around, it doesn’t even occur to me to go back to Woodland Drive.
For the first time in my life, I truly acknowledge to myself that no matter what I do, my mother will always be a drunk, and that I can’t protect her from my father’s temper if she doesn’t want to be protected. He might beat her to death one day, he might not. But I can’t carry on living my life trying to shield someone from their own choices. It hurts to admit it, but it’s made better by the fact that I now have somebody to admit things like this to.
Kalina is a master at listening and in only a couple of days I’ve told her more about myself than anyone ever, including Silas. I wish she’d reciprocate more. I’m dying to find out more about her, but somehow, she always brings the conversation back to me, or to general subjects. I won’t press her, though. And I won’t betray her trust by getting someone to dig around her background. I’ve known her for months now and my gut tells me, what you see is what you get. She might not share a lot of detail about herself, but she is honest where it matters.
Like the post-coital depression thing.
It’s not an easy thing to bear when you make your girlfriend come on your face and then again on your cock until she screams with ecstasy, and half an hour later you find her crying in your arms. But it doesn’t happen every time, and I feel honoured that she lets me see that part of her and lets me hold her. She says she never really stayed with any of her bed partners before past orgasm, so we’re on par there.
That’s what she calls them. Bed partners.
I wonder if that’s what she calls me in her head, too. I’ll ask her when she gets back.
I’m standing in the penthouse kitchen, stocked with actual groceries for the first time since Nan died and am preparing some tapas for us ─ because that’s as far as my cooking goes ─ when I hear the lift arrive. Kalina has no idea how much trust it took for me to give her her own lift key. But I wanted her to feel like she can come and go as she pleases.
As soon as I hear the lift door open, my heart does that funny little tap dance it does every time she’s about to come back to me.
She is still enrolled at the language school and studies hard every day for a few hours, though I have no idea why. Her English is fucking perfect by now. I suspect she is now just learning the whole of the Thesaurus by heart. She sure doesn’t need help with the grammar any longer. She has that down pat. I really don’t know why she decided to prolong her stay, but I’m grateful she did.
I don’t go to meet her in the living room. Much as I want to run to her, grab her and kiss the shit out of her, I don’t want to crowd her with too much domesticity. There is a free-spiritedness about her that I feel would make her run to the hills if we started playing house in the traditional ‘honey, I’m home’ way.
I’m fucking amazed she’s still here with me as it is.
So I stay put and wait for her to find me. She takes her sweet time, going to the toilet first and washing her hands.
I’m in the middle of cutting manchega into little squares when I hear her soft footfall behind me. Before I can put the knife down to turn around and finally kiss her, she has slung her arms around me from behind and has plastered herself against my back.
“Hmm,” she murmurs. “Man.”
That sound alone gets my dick to stir. But it helps, too, that she makes her intentions immediately clear by unbuckling my belt. Her dainty hands pop the button on my trousers, pull the zip down and without further ado, she shoves my briefs and trousers down to let my instant hard-on spring free. She wraps one hand around it and gently gives it a tug, making me double over and brace myself on the counter with a groan.
With her other hand, she blindly pushes the chopping board with the cheese to the side, nearly shoving the already prepared, assorted dishes of olives, artichoke hearts and chorizo over the edge. I help her in her obvious endeavour to clear the space in front of me, visions of fucking her as she sits on the counter crowding my lust-filled brain.
But that’s not what she has in mind.
She pulls me around by my dick, and when I face her, she grins up at me.
“Hop up.”
I frown, not quite understanding.
“On the counter, gorgeous man. Get your butt up there. I’m hungry.”
I’m too stunned not to do as she asks.
It’s an odd feeling, once I’m up there. I’ve had a fair few women, while they were sitting on bars and counters and tabletops, but I’ve never been parked somewhere like that.
I don’t get much time to think about it, though, as she shoves my shirttails aside and lowers her mouth to my cock.
She licks over the head and suckles for a moment before she lets off and speaks with her mouth still full around it.
“I’ve wanted this all day.”
And then she goes to work, licking and sucking and squeezing me in that voodoo shit way she has, until I find myself with my fingers digging into her scalp and shooting reams of come down her throat. She takes every drop and swallows then licks me clean for good measure, while I’m still hunched over her, feeling the spasms of sheer after-bliss ripple through me.
When I stop shaking, she kind of snakes up under the shelter I form for her and pulls me in for a kiss. Our tongues tangle for a bit, but then she withdraws and reaches out blindly for a couple of pieces of cheese. She pushes one between my lips and pops the other into her own mouth, grinning.
“Hmm, manchega and sperm. Good combination. What do you think?”
I smile down at her as I gently push her back to give me enough space for hopping off the counter.
“I think you are an evil fairy queen who has bewitched me and is emasculating me a little more every day,” I say as I pull my briefs and trousers up, storing my junk away. “And I like it.”
“Emasculating?” she asks.
I cup her chin in one hand and look at her seriously.
“Taking my manliness away,” I explain.
“You’re wrong,” she says, reaching out for an olive and letting it hover in front of her mouth. “There is nothing manlier than a man who can take as good as he gives.”
She pops the olive in between her teeth and bites down on it with a smile that tells me she knows full well there is no arguing with that.
And it’s in that exact moment that I realise I’m thoroughly fucked.
There will never be another one like her.
>
She is it.
Z
The ròka has been different since his return.
I can’t explain it, but it keeps me awake at night. Not that it takes much to keep me awake.
He’s less confident, maybe. But also less human somehow. If that was even possible.
And he actually lives above now. He used to come here three, four times a week to check on us, and get his kicks, but now he’s around all the time.
I can feel his presence above, like a heavy pressure in the air. But even if I couldn’t, he comes down twice a day now. Every day. Just stands and looks at us.
At Guppi.
I don’t want him to look at Guppi.
The ròka hasn’t whipped or fucked me since he turned up again and that makes me nervous.
I raise my hand in the semi darkness, we always have to keep some light on, in case viewers check in, and gently stroke Guppi’s hair.
He’s lying with his back to me. We were spooning earlier, but then, when he fell asleep, he subconsciously shuffled away. Guppi isn’t gay, he was deeply in love with a girl in his class back home before fate dealt him this shitty, shitty card, and when he’s not awake, his body knows. It hurts every time he puts distance between us, though I don’t blame him.
We are who we are. It’s not like we get a conscious choice.
I’ve always known which way I fall, it’s why the ròka picked me.
And stupidly, I’ve fallen for Guppi.
I tried so hard not to, but at one point, when you are pretending to be a couple twenty-four seven, a loving couple, fact and fiction blur.
My body loves him.
My dick fucking adores him.
And my soul wants to protect him.
My heart soars when he shuffles back against me, takes my hand out of his hair and slings it around his waist.
My brain knows he’s only doing it because I’ve woken him and he’s acute enough to slip straight back into the act, but my heart wants to believe he’s seeking my love.
Kalina