I try to stretch my legs, to brush the balls of my feet against the bedding. To get some control. He’s got me just high enough that I can’t really stand. I bend my knees, lifting my legs and feet up and tucking them behind my butt. My ass throbs. I have to swallow back a moan. The harness around my crotch pulls a little, but it’s not unpleasant pressure. I look down again. The rope that makes the harness looks like it’s coated with a softer fabric.
“What do you think of your predicament?” he murmurs. He wraps his hand around my calf and strokes. “Does it feel good, the surprise I left you?”
The pressure in my ass might be delicious. I can’t tell. I’ve started shaking. I tug air into my lungs. “W-what is this thing? I thought we were having sex?”
“Oh yes. I’m going to fuck you, Cleo.”
“I don’t...” I roll my hips into the air and close my eyes, my body swaying gently from the ceiling. My ass is so full. God, it’s hard to think. “I don’t get it,” I cry.
He runs his palms over my thighs, stilling my swaying body. “Let me show you.”
He takes out a longer, silver remote and I am lifted slightly higher. My pussy clenches as the nerves inside me sizzle from the pressure in my ass.
“You can almost touch the bed,” he says, looking down at my feet. Dangling as they are, just my toes brush the mattress. “But you can’t. What do you think the purpose of this is, Cleo?”
He presses a button on the black remote, and what’s inside my backside thumps against my tender walls.
I moan.
“Let me show you.”
He rises into a crouch and grabs my hips. He lowers his head between my legs and drags his warm tongue through my sopping folds.
“I can do this,” he drags his tongue over my swollen flesh, “and you can’t move—at all.”
I try to shift my hips and swing my legs to prove him wrong, but to no avail. The roar of pleasure in my backside and his slick tongue on my pussy has my legs feeling so weak.
“Oh God...”
“I was going to fuck that pussy, but I wanted you helpless first.” He shoves two fingers into me. I can feel the plug in my backside crescendo, making my hips buck against his fingers.
“Ahhh!”
I stretch my feet again to get a foothold on the bed, but all I manage to do is close my legs around his face, bringing his writhing tongue deeper into me. He flicks against my entrance.
I curl and straighten my legs.
“That’s right, baby. Struggle. Show me how crazy my tongue makes you.”
He adds another finger, and my arms jerk.
“I want to touch you too,” I gasp.
“Oh, this?” He leans away from me, and I can see his cock standing against his abs. Pre-cum glistens in the darkness.
“You’ll touch this. Just your mouth. But now it’s my turn.”
He drags his long, slick tongue between my puffy lips and opens his mouth wider, feasting on me while I screech and throb. He whirls his tongue through my slickness, thumping lightly over my clit, then pushing inside my hungry cunt. My asshole pulses at the whims of what’s inside it.
Somewhere far away, I’m aware of his fingers pulling out of me, of him adjusting the angle of the harness and lowering me back down to the bed. He eases my legs out in front of me and ensures I’m sitting firmly on the bed before he stops the churning of the rope above me. I’m on my ass in a semi-reclined position—with my arms still stretched above my head.
He nudges his hand between my thighs and glides two fingers back inside me. He flexes them, and he must brush my G-spot, because the jolt of bliss is so intense, I come up off the bed.
“Oh shit!”
With one fingertip still curled against the tender spot, another writhing against my inner walls, he gives my pussy a slow, warm tongue-kiss.
I jerk in the ropes. I can feel my moisture seep out over his lips.
“You’re clenching tight around my finger. You’re so wet and swollen. I think you’re getting ready to come soon.” He licks me, from where I’m dripping around his fingers up to my throbbing clit. “How do you feel, with your thighs drenched and your pussy stuffed? That ass of yours is so damn full. Do you feel the egg inside you... ?”
He makes a lazy circle around my clit with the tip of his tongue. I moan loudly. “I can smell you, Cleo, taste you. You can’t help it, can you? You’re so wet, so close.”
I feel him drag his mouth down my sopping slit. His puffy lips tease over me as his fingers, stretching me inside, push deeper. He’s right about how wet I am. I’m dripping down my thighs. I buck my hips, trying and failing to press myself against his hot tongue. I need release, but I can’t move. “Oh please...”
The rhythm of his probing quickens and he rolls his tongue over me, lapping... oh God...”Oh God! FUCK fuck!” I come screaming. Kellan groans into my folds, sending pleasure back through me. “Oh God...”
While I’m still panting from the onslaught, pressing my thighs together and letting my head loll back between my raised arms, he reaches back under me, parts my ass cheeks with the base of his hand, and rolls two fingertips over my well-lubed sphincter.
I gasp because I’m stretched already, stuffed full of whatever he put there while I slept. His fingertips stretch me even more, until it hurts—so good my pussy throbs. His fingers stroke in deeper. I moan as he draws the warm egg out.
“Oh God.”
I feel like... some kind of fuck toy.
My asshole throbs as I sag; the binds around my upper body keep me suspended, swaying.
“You’re dripping everywhere, Cleo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wetter pussy...” With his fingers still in my pussy, Kellan lifts my ankles to his shoulders, and I feel a different pressure at my backside. Something bigger...
“Kellan,” I pant.
His fingers, in my pussy, wriggle encouragingly. “Relax and take a deep breath, Cleo.”
I do as he says, and let out a low grunt-groan as something thick and hard slides into my ass. It spreads me wide, stinging even as the pressure of it inside lights up all my nerve endings. At first the sensations tell me it’s his cock, but then I sway a little in the harness, and I realize that’s not possible.
His fingers, still inside my pussy, stroke. I press my heels against his shoulders, trembling slightly as I move my ass in time with the throbbing pressure inside.
Kellan slides his fingers out of me, and I want to scream. He lets my legs down, comes between them, parts my puffy lips with his fingers, and wraps one arm around me, holding my lower body in place while he works his hard, thick cock into my cunt.
I’m at his total mercy. Swaying slightly. Stuffed. Invaded. His arms coil around my waist to keep me locked against him as he fucks me... brutally. So hard and good I start to cry.
“You’re so big...”
“You’re so tight.”
“It hurts,” I gasp.
He pauses his thrusting, long enough to look me in the eye.
“It’s good,” I moan.
“It hurts me good, too.”
His arms around me squeeze a little, and he clasps his mouth down on my throat. His thrusts are hard—so hard and deep. I feel the frenzy of his breathing in my breasts.
He thrusts harder, and I groan.
He squeezes my hips as his cock plunders me, moving with strong, punishing strokes. I’m so aroused, I feel almost ill. Then he slides his hand down my flank, walks his fingers over my ass cheek, and pushes his palm hard against the end of the dildo.
I see stars.
He barks, low and loud, and I can feel his dick surge inside me, followed by the warm rush of his cum filling the condom.
He lowers me onto the mattress and then frees me from the harness. He licks me up and down my swollen slit, and then he wipes me with a warm, damp cloth.
He rubs my temples and my forehead. He kisses my hair, and whispers, “Thank you, Cleo. Sloth.”
And when I’m half asleep, he leaves.
>
He doesn’t know I’m awake when he comes back. He doesn’t know I feel him wrap his arms and legs around me.
IF THAT WAS NO-ATTACHMENTS sex with an acquaintance, I don’t want to make love, ever.
I wake up like a Georgia kid on a snow day: excited as hell, a little daunted—oh, and really sore everywhere below the belt from kinky sex and a big dildo.
For a while I just lie there, looking at the canopy and wondering what it says about Mr. Perfect that he bothered to put the damn thing back up after harness time was over. When I finally get the energy to roll from my back onto my side, I realize I really have something to chew on.
I’m not crazy. I swear. But... these sheets are not the same as they were. Right, like I’m saying they are not the same set of sheets I last saw on this bed. Those were cream. These are brown.
No, like seriously.
Oh my God, did he change them? Because of me? The thought makes my cheeks burn.
I throw an arm over my head, and wonder if I can sneak out of his house and run away.
Where is he now?
I remember him slipping onto the bed with me and curling himself around me. I was almost asleep at the time, but I held off going totally under for a little while, just so I could feel him tucked around me. Brennan didn’t do that. He never wanted to touch me unless it was for sex.
But... Kellan clearly did. He might have waited until I was asleep to do it, but he needed that. He needed to be close to me. He didn’t get the pleasure of my arms around him, making him feel held and sheltered, but he got whatever pleasure can be derived from sheltering another.
Why did he do it?
Was he feeling lonely? Sad? After our sexcapade, did he simply want to pay some kind of homage to my body?
I slip out of bed and cool air wraps around my skin. I look around the bedroom, cast in shadows, and then walk over to the balcony and pull the brownish curtains open. Sunlight soaks the room in gold.
Something about the sunlight jars my memory, and my mouth drops open as I remember what I learned about Kellan before going to sleep the first time last night. I inhale deeply, still shocked. Kellan was a quarterback. A freshman at the University of Southern California, an alumnus of some swanky Beverly Hills high school, and when the star QB got hurt after USC’s first game of the 2010 season, the Trojans’ coach let Kellan start. And he was crazy good. I read his stats. Once I started looking at his pictures, with that black hair, I even kind of remembered a beautiful, blue-eyed player with “DRAKE” across his back.
I go over to the door, behind which I dumped my bags, and find them propped on luggage racks. Kellan played fabulously until January 2011, and that’s where his story takes a dark turn. Around four-thirty in the morning on a Saturday night, he got into an awful fight at a bar in downtown Los Angeles.
He and the guy—who turned out to be a fellow Trojan: a lineman named Joshua Franks—got thrown out of the club, but the fight continued in a parking garage. By the time someone called the cops, Franks had a fractured cheek, a concussion, and so many punches to one side of his head, he later went deaf in that ear.
Franks was shit-faced, and had allegedly been the one to start the fight. Kellan wasn’t drunk at all, and at the end of the night, he didn’t have a scratch on him.
I try to see it all inside my head as I poke through my duffel, searching for my favorite sleeveless, purple nightgown. I can’t see Kellan being violent. Beating someone so... repeatedly? I can’t see him doing that. I pull the nightgown over my head and try to decide why. I think it’s because he seems so measured now. So in control of things. So in control of me...
My gaze careens around the room, trying to reconcile this drug lord’s palace—and its prince—with a dark-haired college football quarterback, beating a teammate in a fit of rage in L.A.
Kellan is a bad guy.
That’s how it seems.
If I told Lora everything I know about him, she would tell me to leave his house and stay away.
Instead I put on my night gown, followed by my fluffy, hot pink bathrobe, which has been taking up approximately thirty percent of the space inside my duffel. I take a moment to relish the familiar feel of my clothes.
Then I look around the room for what I had on last night, because I want to launder it. It’s nowhere in sight, and I notice while I search for it that the ceiling looks normal again. The ropes and pulleys must be tucked behind the indention at the center of the ceiling.
Kellan Walsh... who the hell are you?
My mind spins like the wheel of a bike, fast at first, then settling into a slow coast as I step into the bathroom, where I find my clothes in a brown wicker hamper. I brush and floss my teeth, smooth my hair down, and go back into the bedroom, squinting a little at the brilliant sunlight. I’m thinking of heading downstairs when I spot my Thomas on the wall over the bookshelf across the room.
What the hell?
I turn slowly around the room and notice “Grans” on an easel in the corner by the wing-backed chair.
I let my breath out. The third painting, one I kept under my bed until I left the house, is called Olive, and it’s nowhere to be found. But these two...
I walk over to Grans and marvel at the easel it’s on. Kellan just had an easel hanging around? This one is the one he asked about in my room, the one with lines from “Tintern Abbey”—which so happens to be one of my grandmother’s favorite poems.
I walk over to the bookshelf with my eyes fixed on Thomas. My dad’s name was Thomas, and this painting truly is for him. Under the paint are slivers of a card he wrote to me, a love note he wrote my mother when they meet in high school, and a button from one of his shirts. Sprinkled over the paint, so sparsely it’s not noticeable, are the soft, soft hairs I got from his beard trimmer and hid in an oval locket that I stole from Grans after he died.
I was only seven, but I had a sense that I should keep every fragment of my dad that I could find. When my mother decided to have him cremated, I stole some of the ashes, too. I stirred them into the paint for Thomas, and I don’t care who thinks it’s weird or gross. This is probably my favorite painting. I did it in high school. It was the first piece of art that ever really meant something to me.
Kellan hung it on the wall for me while I slept.
I’m still thinking about this as I pad downstairs in my pink robe.
The living area is radiant with sunlight, drifting in from the skylights in the ceiling and flooding through the wall of windows that faces the river. Before my foot touches down on the dark hardwood, I hear the frenzied click of dogs’ nails, and Truman bounds across the rug, tail wagging, ears flouncing.
“Hi, boy.” I crouch down and tug one of his ears into my hand. “What soft ears you have. How are you?”
On a whim, I wrap my arms around him: thick and warm and soft and panting. I love dogs because they warm the soul without the baggage of another human.
“C’mon boy... where’s your daddy?”
I find Kellan in the kitchen, making pancakes. At first I can’t see much of him because he’s standing behind an island, so I step around it. I find he’s dressed more casually than I’ve ever seen him, in a pair of loose, charcoal longue pants and a white undershirt that emphasizes his beautiful body—and his gold-blond hair.
I smile a little, and he arches a brow at me. “Daddy?”
I laugh. “You are kind of his dad. Unless you’re his brother?”
He scowls. “No.”
He pushes a plate of bacon at me as I walk back around the island and take a seat at the bar.
His hair looks messy, and there’s some delicious scruff on his jaw. I can’t help noticing his eyes look tired. I feel a pang of guilt for not asking how his night went, although it’s not as if I actually could have. I was already in the harness when he woke me up.
“Okay, bro,” I tease. “Then dad it is.”
“I’m not his dad.” He flips a pancake.
“Adoptive dad?” I want him to smil
e, but he just gives me a blank look.
“Things must not have gone very well last night on your... um, errand.”
I see the muscle of his jaw clench. He doesn’t even lift his gaze to me.
“Okayyy. Well cool beans.” I grab two pieces of bacon off the plate and get up to get myself a drink. If he’s going to be a moody butthead, maybe I’ll go have my breakfast somewhere else. I can sit on the balcony and continue reading news stories about Kellan Drake.
I grab a Mason jar out of a cabinet and a glass pitcher out of the refrigerator. I set it on the countertop.
“You should try some lemons in your water,” I advise. Just filling the silence, I guess. (Cleo Whatley: always awkward).
He doesn’t reply, and my feelings war with each other. Part of me feels sorry for him, part of me is irritated that he’s still so moody—especially after our night last night. Part of me feels pessimistic, like I’ll never really get to know him, and still another part wants to erect a wall around myself.
I pour some water into my glass and feel the warm weight of his hand around my wrist. I look down, then get the nerve to glance up at his face.
“I’m sorry,” he says. His blue eyes hold mine.
“What for?”
“For being a dick.” He lets me go and runs his hands through his hair. He lets a little breath out, like he’s been holding it. “Bad night.”
His voice sounds thick—emotional, even. His cuts his eyes away and then turns back around toward the skillet. The pancakes sizzle, but he doesn’t pick the spatula up. I can’t even see him breathing.
Shit.
I turn around and lean against the counter. “Anything you want to talk about? You have a roomie now, you know.”
I look at his broad shoulders, imagining them in a jersey. Bare and goosebumped while he stands on a surfboard. I imagine them tucked around me last night... the way he pressed his face into my hair.