“Don’t worry about me, Angel. Please.” He stops moving and turns around to look me in the eye. There’s a pleading quality to his expression, as if he’s given this a lot of thought and there is only one outcome. “I’m doing what I have to do, based on the situation that I’m in.”
“You didn’t have to do anything. You could just keep running,” I say hopefully. I’m not sure what I think the end result of that would be, but it makes me feel less nervous than being dropped off at the hospital tomorrow while he goes off to do God knows what.
“When you were talking, it sounded like you mentioned me.”
“I told you, you’ll be cleared of all this shit. Stop worrying about it, Angel. This is the plan we’re going with—one where you go home and forget about today.”
“Oh, right! Like I can just forget it. Okay, cool. I shoot people every day!”
He’s on me in a millisecond, pressing his hand over my mouth and pulling me back against his chest.
“Quiet,” he hisses into my ear. “You’re putting yourself in jeopardy.”
He moves his hand off my mouth, but keeps his arm wrapped around me. I look over my shoulder, up at him. “Looks like we have that in common!”
He clenches his jaw, looking pissed off, and I turn around to face him fully. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, acting like you can just do whatever you want to save the day and I’ll just go home and live in a fantasy land. Do you think that I don’t care about you? That I won’t want to know what happened to you after you drop me at the effing hospital? That I’ll just…magically forget about today, and all the shit before it? Ricardo, you’re my…mine. You’re my…I don’t know, my cosmic fucking destiny or something! I tried to forget you years ago and failed, and you failed, too.” He opens his mouth, looking outright angry now, so I preempt whatever bullshit he might spout. “I remember the pictures,” I say, “so don’t you dare pretend that you don’t give a shit about me, too.”
“I give a shit about you,” he says. “Yes. That’s why I have to insist you lower your fucking voice and forget whatever you think there is between us. I was curious about you, and you the same. We’ve got chemistry, I’m not denying that.”
He starts walking again, and I stride after him. “Is that why you called that night you killed the Aryan? You called me to your room, where you were laid up, having been stabbed, because we have ‘some chemistry’?”
He glances my way. “I fucked you, didn’t I?”
“So I’m a booty call.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”
I inhale deeply through my nose and work to keep from screaming. “If you want to minimize this, you can go for it. But you’re not rewriting history, and you’re damn sure not fooling me. You’re lying to yourself so that it’s easier when we say ‘bye’ tomorrow. Fine. But let me tell you this: I care about you. And if it’s the FBI you’re working with, then you shouldn’t! Aren’t they the reason you got thrown in solitary? Why are you trusting them? I didn’t kill to protect you, so you could turn around and die!”
He stops mid-stride and turns to me with wide eyes.
“Yeah. Ryan died. I am a killer.” I grit my teeth as hard as I can, because I’m not going to cry, damnit!
Beast reaches out and pulls me into his arms. “Angel…” I feel his mouth against my hair; the warmth of his breath. I shut my eyes and feel the rising of his chest. “I’m sorry, Angel.”
“I found out in the gas station,” I whisper to his chest.
He pulls away a little, so he can see my face—and I can see his. I can see the way his jaw clenches and his eyes narrow on mine. I can see him fighting with himself. “You’re right,” he whispers finally. “But it doesn’t matter, Angel.”
His voice is so bitter, so totally filled with pessimism and defeat; I surprise myself by letting out a sob.
He wraps his arms around me. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry, Angel. It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. Everything was my fault,” he whispers. “I just can’t seem to keep myself from you.”
Tingly heat runs through my body. “I can’t stay away from you either.”
I cling to his shoulders, and I feel his erection press against my belly. I lean up and kiss the one part of him I can reach: his chin. He leans down and welcomes my lips into a warm, slow, gentle kiss. I deepen the kiss and immediately feel wet and needy. I rock myself against his dick. “Beast…”
He steps back, running one hand down my arm and catching may fingers in his.
“We need to keep walking, Angel. Make it to the car.”
But he holds my hand as we move. Strokes my fingers.
“I’m worried for you,” I whisper.
“Please don’t be.”
And, after a long time walking silently, listening to the traffic on the road to our left, he murmurs, “Would you talk to me? I’m tired of fighting.” I’m about to ask what he means—we haven’t exactly been ‘fighting’—when he looks down at me and whispers: “Fighting what I want.” He strokes my cheek with his free hand and looks into my eyes. “I want you, Angel. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s dangerous and wrong. But I have you…just for one night. I’m gonna use you if you let me. I don’t have the discipline to let you go unspoiled.”
My body heats to its boiling point. “What would you like to talk about?” I choke.
He shrugs. “You. I want to know the story that goes along all with my pictures.”
I squeeze his fingers. “I still can’t believe you had those taken.”
“I needed them.”
“Why?”
He slows, and I notice we’ve reached a fence around what looks to be an RV sales place. “I needed to know that someone in this world was good, and living a good life.”
“And that was me?”
“That’s you.” He strokes my hair. “That night of the wreck…” His eyes flicker over mine. “You really were an angel to me.”
The words are whispered hoarsely. They’re a gift.
He pulls me close for a moment and kisses the top of my head, and I squeeze him around the waist.
“Think about tonight,” he tells me as he leads me up to the fence.
“I don’t need to think. I want you, like I always have.”
“You really shouldn’t,” he says.
“That doesn’t always matter.”
He helps me over the fence, and climbs over himself, and I oblige him by talking about college as we walk to a black car parked behind the building, and he gets a key off one of the wheels and lets us in. He drives through a gate that opens automatically as we approach it, then headed south, and, with continued prompting, I move on to grad school and my desire to be a therapist.
“I like teaching people new things,” I tell him as he drives toward us down a dark highway. “Things to help people be more confident and less afraid. I really like PTSD. I mean, helping people who have it.” I roll my eyes.
I feel kind of silly for misspeaking, but he doesn’t even look my way. He’s staring at the road like it holds the answers to the universe’s mysteries.
After a minute or so, I touch his elbow, and he jumps.
He looks over at me, and I can tell he’s tired and trying not to be. “What kind of things do you do for these people?” he asks.
I shrug. “Relaxation techniques. Visualization.” I reach across and touch his knee. “Let’s wait until we lie down for the night, and I’ll help you relax. I think you’d really benefit.”
He smirks a little. “My stress level is higher than you like?”
“Much higher,” I say. “I also want to stop at a pharmacy and get something for your shoulder. How is it?”
He shrugs, one-sided, as if to emphasize the point. “Could be worse.” His eyes find mine, and they go molten. “I already told you, Angel, I’ll take anything you’re offering tonight.”
CHAPTER 11
Beast
Angel risks a quick trip into a rural Walgreens, where she g
ets a blanket, cheap scrubs for us both, basic first aid supplies, and a bunch of food and drinks. She feeds me powered donuts as I drive toward the country home of my late manger, whose wife, I read in a celebrity gossip rag online, has recently been moved into a nursing home.
I bounce us down the long, dirt drive and pull into a swatch of forest that folds around the house. I’ve barely got the car in park before I start to tear Angel’s clothes off.
Her shirt goes first, and then her bra, so I can suck her breasts into my mouth. I taste them both, then recline the passenger’s seat and turn her around so that she’s hugging the head rest. “Stay like that, and stick your ass out for me.”
I climb over into the floorboard behind her and yank her pants down. I rip her panties ruthlessly, so that she’s bare before me, wet and fragrant, ready for my mouth.
I lean down and plunge my tongue into her cunt, and she gasps my name—not Beast, Ricardo.
All I need on earth is to drag my tongue between her pussy lips. Drive my fingers into her wet cunt. Make her squirm and pant my name, and when she’s dripping wet and ready, toss her into the back seat and push my cock so deep inside her, she’s screaming.
So that’s exactly what I do.
When I’ve got her on the verge of coming from my tongue and fingers, I lift her into the back seat, then climb into it behind her. I’m hard and pulsing, ready to bury myself to the hilt. Instead, I’m greeted by her hands yanking down my pants and her warm mouth sealing, hot and wet, around my cock.
She sucks me for a minute as I groan, and then she pushes me down onto my back, so I’m lying belly-up across the seat. She climbs astride my thighs, rubbing her pussy on my leg and pushing my knees apart so she can take my dick in both her hands and guide her mouth down over my head.
“Goddamn, Angel.” I twist my hips and tug her hair.
She sucks me hard, taking my head way down into the velvet softness of her throat. Taking every centimeter of me, down to the base, then sucking me in and easing me out, licking me like a lollipop until my balls are drawing up and I can feel my orgasm roaring down the tracks.
I moan and grip her hair, and come into her throat. I sit up and kiss her lips, and then I flip her over, pushing her torso against the door and pulling her ass up with my hands gripping her hips. I nudge her legs wider with one of my knees and punch inside her. Her cunt is hot and wet and swollen, pulling on my taut head and stiff erection like a dream.
I squeeze her ass and shove myself inside, tracing around her clit with my damp fingers as I fuck her doggy style with the biggest erection I’ve ever had.
We come together, and when I try to pull out, she reaches behind her and grabs my hand—telling me not to pull out.
I come inside her like a fucking prince, and when I’m done, she grins and kisses me.
After that, she bandages my shoulder. God, she’s gentle. So gentle and sweet and soft, and despite everything, I fucking swear she smells good. I love having her in my lap. Having her hands on my skin.
It’s been so long since I was touched this way.
She has to clean my shoulder with alcohol, which hurts like a bitch, and when she’s done bandaging it and it’s throbbing, she eases me into a corner and snuggles up beside me. She drapes her leg over my lap and wraps my unhurt arm around her shoulders, pressing her soft, warm breasts against my chest.
I’m so tired, I can almost feel my eyes rolling back into my head, but I fight sleep, because I want so much to be with her. I stroke her back and let my fingers play in her hair. When she smiles at me, I smile at her and say, “I fucking love having you close.”
She strokes gently up and down my abs, making me hard again. Making me throb with needing her.
I groan and thrust my dick up toward her hand. A few minutes later, I end up with her ass in my face. She’s bouncing on my cock, letting me impale her. Sliding on and off me like fucking is a sport and she’s a goddamn Olympian.
It’s perfect sex, and when it’s done, I spread her out in the back seat and suck her pussy till she comes again on my face.
I lean back against the fabric seats, grabbing deep, fulfilling breaths.
She pastes herself against my side and strokes her fingers through my hair.
“Are you tired yet?” She smiles.
“No.” I kiss her mouth. “I want to talk some more. For you to tell me more.”
That’s what keeps me up, with Angel sitting in my lap, my arms around her back, her cheek against my chest, like we’re a couple of high schoolers, yapping through the night in puppy love.
*
Annabelle
“What did you want to do when you were young?”
His cheek presses against my hair as I listen to his heart beat through his warm, thick chest. “I don’t know,” he says after a short silence. “I was always an actor. I did my first commercial for Fisher Price when I was eighteen months old.” He smiles a little. “It was that red and yellow coup.”
“Were you glad about that? When you got older, I mean?” I stroke my fingers up and down his hurt arm, the way he said was good for distracting from the pain of his shoulder.
He makes a sleep, rumbly noise in his throat, and I wonder if he’s finally going to conk out—but a moment later, he murmurs, “I don’t know how to tell if I did or didn’t. It was just what I did.” He strokes my cheek. “What about you?”
I laugh. “I wanted to be a singer—like Mariah Carey.”
He chuckles, and in a soft, pitch-perfect baritone, sings: “’Cause you’ll always be my Angel…”
“And you’ll linger on… Time can’t erase a feeling this strong!” I catch his eye and start laughing, because I’ve got a bad voice. Really bad. I nuzzle my forehead against the stubble on his chin. “You see why I never made the cut for ‘American Idol’?”
“You tried out?” he grins.
I giggle. “No. Simon Cowell would have laughed me off the stage.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“All that meanness is for show?”
He shrugs, a lazy movement of his warm, hard body, like a continental shift beneath me. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t watch that much TV.”
“What did you miss the most in there?” I whisper. “At La Rosa?”
Maybe I shouldn’t be asking questions like that, but the truth is, I want to know everything about him.
His lips twist as he peers down at me. “What did I not miss? A good merlot. Dancing with a beautiful woman.” He drops a kiss on my temple. “The smell of the ocean down in Santa Barbara. Miles Davis, played as loud as the house system can play him.”
I smile, imagining that. “You’re a jazz fan?”
“The biggest,” he says.
My fingers wander over his cock, which I’m not surprised is hard. I start to stroke it through the Walgreens ‘on sale’ scrubs he’s wearing.
“I can go with a little Miles Davis on a Sunday afternoon.”
“Why Sunday?” he asks. He shifts his hips so I can have better access, and as I work him up and down through his pants, his face tightens.
I shrug. “Just seems like jazz should be played on Sunday.”
“Jazz should be played every day,” he breathes.
He shifts his hips a little, making his erection tent his pants. I continue teasing him with my fingers and palm, eager to see his face relax with his release.
“Before I plow into your sweet cunt, Angel, I’ve got a question,” he says.
I squeeze his head gently. “Okay.”
But his face is serious. “Why are you alone?” he asks. “Did something happen? Is there a reason why you…?”
“Why I’m still single?” I smile and shake my head. “Just the busyness of grad school and the strain of taking care of Mom and Ad. No time for romance really. Definitely not with most of the guys I know.”
I must have given the answer he wanted, because as soon as I finish speaking, he pulls me onto his lap, facing me away from him, so my ass
is pressed against his cockhead. I rub my butt in circles till he groans.
“Maybe I was waiting for you,” I whisper as he starts to kiss my ear and rock below me.
“I don’t think that it’s a maybe,” he says.
Then he takes my hot pink, Walgreens, scrubs pants down, lifts his cock out of his pants, and pushes it between my warm, slick pussy lips.
My legs shake as I sink down on him, letting him stretch me, letting him fill me thoroughly, letting him ruin me for anyone else, ever.
CHAPTER 12
Beast
For a wealthy man, I’m not very educated. I never studied music in a college class, because I never went to college. I don’t know the proper names of musical things—not much at all beyond your basic notes and stanzas. I didn’t start listening to Mr. Davis until I got to prison. I told Angel wrong on that. What I truly missed was the chance to hear his music on a real sound system. The kind installed in walls and ceilings. Not a little box inside a cell.
But what I do know, despite my lack of formal education, is that I enjoy jazz because it’s constantly finding and re-finding its rhythm. A lot of it is improv, and improv, I understand. I love the way jazz shifts, so something goes from soft to loud with no warning, and no warning is needed, because when you can make a sound flow so well, there’s no point in prior notice, in the subtle signaling of intentions; you can take it anywhere and it will still be beautiful.
The way I feel for Angel reminds me of a Davis song called “So What.” When I would listen to it on the prison’s old boom box, I’d turn the volume all the way up, and I could hardly hear a thing when the song started. For the first minute or so, the first few times I played it, I thought the volume was broken. The notes rise on their own accord, and find consistency and steadiness in an unexpected way.
And suddenly, it’s loud. Downright fucking loud, and wonderful.
I’m holding Angel after our fifth fuck in this car. I’m looking out the window, looking at the hazy outline of the trees in the night. My hands are on her soft, warm arms and shoulders. My legs are arranged to cradle her. Her hair is in my face. I’m breathing in the scent of her. I’m remembering the way her cunt clings to my cock, and even as I love her smell and feel, the way she breathes, the rhythm of her pulse— Even as I marvel at her beauty, the song of my soul is silent.