Chapter EIGHT
(Matthew)
I waited in the darkened storage room, barely hidden by two industrial wire racks. It was terrible cover, but that didn’t matter. I doubted anyone would be wrapping silverware or replacing tablecloths in the middle of breakfast.
And what would happen if I got caught in there, anyway? Would they fire me?
The door handle pushed down, and I caught a glimpse of Charlotte as she slipped inside. “Matt?”
“Back here,” I whispered, and she wound through the shelves to reach me.
She covered her sudden giggles with both hands. “I can’t believe you brought a fucking bear here.”
“That’s what I do. I make the impossible happen,” I said with a flourish of my hand.
She shook her head. “You’re such an asshole.”
“I know I am. But I also want your brother to have the best wedding possible. He deserves it.” Sure, it had been fun to see Charlotte’s face when she realized that if I could get a bear to a wedding, I could get someone to do a three-way on the roof, but the real point of the gesture was to make the bride and her family happy. “Lauren’s family doesn’t think Scott fits in at all. He’s been struggling with that for a long time. I was hoping that this wedding surprise would make them lay off a little bit.”
Two little lines appeared between her brows. “Oh.”
Something about her confusion made me uncomfortable. “What?”
“Well, I didn’t know that was a problem,” she said, like it was an admission of guilt. “My family kind of assumed it was a good thing he didn’t fit in with them. And I’m a little…”
“Embarrassed by how snobby that was?” I didn’t want to go on the attack, but it was something I’d thought for a while. “Lauren’s family doesn’t have a lot of flashy stuff. They’re not glamorous or polished and they don’t fit in with that upper-middle-class lifestyle your family enjoys, but that doesn’t mean Scott shouldn’t want their approval. He’s marrying their daughter.”
“That’s fair.” She looked down. “I know we’re snobs. I guess I’m surprised that we’re snobbier than the guy who’s the literal billionaire.”
“And I come from old money,” I pointed out. “So, if anything, I should be the snobby one.”
“Well, I think the bear thing is great. Dangerous, but great. And I appreciate you looking out for my brother. I should have been doing that myself.” The sadness that crept into her voice wasn’t my fault, I knew, but I felt responsible for dredging it up.
“No, don’t be hard on yourself.” Scott had always been open with his friends about the weird dynamic in their family that had resulted in his sister’s birth. I knew he felt responsible for protecting her. I never knew she felt the same way toward him. “I’m sorry about what those women were saying at the table.”
“It’s fine.” Charlotte waved it away with a blatantly automatic gesture. “People know the story. It’s not a big deal.”
“It looked like it was a big deal.” I reached down and cupped her chin, tilting her face up. I don’t know why I did it; it felt natural in the moment. “You can be honest with me. I’m a stranger. Are you okay?”
“I am. I’m fine.” She took my hand in hers and lowered it. “I’m used to it. Thank you, though. For checking on me.”
I gazed down at her upturned face for far too long. The moment turned from tender to awkward. I faked a cough and looked away. “Well, I’m sorry, I hadn’t planned for this to be a maudlin encounter. I wanted you to come here so I could finger you up against the wall and make you come before you had to go back out there and make small talk while trying not to think about what you just did.”
She laughed loudly.
I shushed her. “You’re going to get us caught. Take your panties down and get up against that wall.”
She hurried to comply, leaving the scrap of pink lace around one ankle, never bothering to slip her high-heeled sandals off. I dropped to my knees in front of her and grabbed that ankle, pulling her foot up to stand on my thigh. She wobbled on her other foot and gripped the shelving unit beside us for balance.
“Pull your skirt up,” I told her, and she held her sundress up with one hand, exposing the gorgeous cunt I’d been thinking about nonstop since the night before. The delicate pink petals of her inner labia peeked out, and when I parted them, her clitoris twitched in anticipation.
I pressed my thumb to it, and she whimpered.
“You have to be quiet,” I reminded her. “Or we’ll get caught.”
“I can be quiet,” she breathed. “I promise.”
I pressed two fingers against her cunt; she was already hot and wet and inviting. “Is this for me?”
“No, I saw a really hot waitress on my way here,” she quipped.
I pushed my fingers in and curled them upward, feeling for the right spot. Her thigh trembled against my cheek when I found it.
“Let me ask again,” I breathed, kissing the inside of her knee. “Is this for me?”
Her hips arched away from the wall. “It’s all for you.”
I worked my fingers over that spot inside her, rotating my thumb over her clit with slow, purposeful movements.
“At least, for the weekend,” she specified.
“For the weekend,” I agreed. And I couldn’t help myself. I leaned forward to taste her.
She slapped her hand against the wall above her head, then scrambled to grip the wire shelving unit again. Her hips rocked against my face, and she moaned, far louder than anyone having secret oral in a supply room should be moaning.
I paused, lifted her foot, jerked her panties completely off, and set her foot back on the floor so I could stand.
“If you can’t be quiet, I’m going to have to gag you,” I warned, and pressed the lace against her mouth. She opened wide.
Fuck. Me.
I pushed her panties into her mouth and dropped to my knees, giving her calf a gentle nudge so she’d resume our earlier position. Then I bent my head to her again and made it my personal mission to render the makeshift gag useless.
Her breath huffed loudly from her nose as I tongued her clit and worked my fingers inside her. I thought briefly of what had happened the night before, the way she’d squirted hard enough to run down her legs. It would take a lot to explain why my shirt was all wet.
I would risk it.
Her pussy clenched around my fingers as muffled cries fought through the panty gag, growing higher, more desperate with every breath. I didn’t change a thing. Not the pace, not the speed, not the pressure. I kept up with the slow circles over her G-spot and the lazy swirls of my tongue that I knew were getting her closer, closer…
There.
She shouted through the gag, hips bucking, and almost lost her balance. I held her firm against the wall and didn’t stop, no matter how loud she got. I kept it up until I was certain she’d had another hard climax, and she pushed me away.
Yanking the panties from her mouth, breathing hard, she said, “That’s enough. I’ll pass the fuck out if you keep going.”
“Glad to hear it.” I helped her steady herself before I rose; I wished I could pull her against me and claim her mouth, so she could taste me on it. But that seemed too intimate, as absurd as it sounded.
She gestured at my fly. “Should I…”
“No.” I shook my head. “We’ve been missing together for long enough.”
“So what, you’re going to stay in here until your erection goes away, then slink back out?” she teased, stepping into her panties with a grimace. “They’re wet.”
“They were wet when you got here.” I was more than a little proud of that. She’d known exactly what I’d summoned her for.
She gave me a push and an outraged gasp.
“What I’m going to do,” I continued, to answer her question, “is adjust this so it’s less obvious, then walk out there and ask the nearest member of the kitchen staff for a cigarette with my chin still wet from your pussy.”
Her tongue darted across her bottom lip.
“Now you get out there and play perfect daughter. I’ll see you tonight.”
“For game night,” she reminded me.
Damn it. I’d forgotten that Scott had invited the wedding party to play games.
As she walked away, I mentally added, “invent time machine” to my to-do list. Because I wanted to fast-forward to what I had planned.
* * * *
(Charlotte)
“Permafrost!” I shouted.
Scott threw his stack of trivia cards in the air in frustration, as everyone clustered around the coffee table laughed uproariously.
“I don’t think your sister can be beaten.”
I looked over at Matt and felt oddly exposed; it was one thing for the guy to eat me out in a supply closet. It was another entirely for him to see what a huge nerd I was.
“She’s like this all the time,” Scott said with a chuckle.
The bungalow my brother was staying in was way nicer than the one my parents and I had. There were upstairs bedrooms, downstairs bedrooms, a pool in a private backyard, and a full-time kitchen staff.
I had a feeling this was where Matt usually stayed when he visited.
In the enormous living room, complete with a perfect ocean view, a handful of Scott’s friends and a handful of Lauren’s friends all crowded ono the couches and armchairs. Matthew and I had made the decision to not sit with each other via wordless communication as we all settled in with our plates of snacks.
The bear was not present.
“There’s gotta be something that will stump her,” Lauren said, flipping through the box of cards on the table.
“Since when did this go from a trivia drinking game to ‘attack the groom’s sister’?” I demanded, adding a laugh so I wouldn’t sound like I meant it, when I did. Maybe not the attack part. But being made the center of attention did feel like an attack.
“Here’s one.” Lauren cleared her throat dramatically before reading, and everyone fell silent. “This tenth-century ruler and Catholic saint is rumored to be the inspiration for the ‘Red Wedding’ in HBO’s Game of Thrones.”
I sighed, which got everyone’s hopes up. Then, I said, “Olga of Kiev.”
“She’s right.” Lauren tossed her card down. “She’s right.”
Everyone groaned.
“Look, don’t be jealous of me,” I joked. “You all have college degrees. Knowing which saints were cold-blooded killers isn’t exactly a professional field.”
One of the bridesmaids, a Black woman with long braids shot through with the wedding colors, raised her hand. “False. Russian history is a major.”
“Olga is Ukrainian,” another of the bridesmaids, this one a woman with long blonde hair in two braids, wearing the type of jewelry one bought at a street art fair, corrected her.
“Okay, okay,” the first bridesmaid said, holding up her hands in defeat. “I could get into the history of the Rurik dynasty and the destruction of the Kievan Rus’—”
“How the hell am I winning at trivia?” My mind boggled. “I didn’t even finished college.”
“Be glad you didn’t,” one of my brother’s friends chimed in. He was a generic-looking white frat-dude-turned-khaki-wearing-dad-type. If someone had told me he owned an RV dealership, I would have believed them. He went on, “The debt I’m carrying? Phew, they’re gonna repossess my casket when I’m in the ground.”
“You’re not even old enough for college yet, are you?” Lauren’s sister asked.
I wanted to sink through the floor.
“She’s twenty-five,” Scott said. “Do you think I’d be letting my underage sister drink a beer with all my buddies?”
I tipped the neck of my bottle toward him in thanks for the save.
“Twenty-five,” Lauren mused. “I remember twenty-five.”
“When sneezing didn’t cause back pain,” Scott’s nerdy friend with the phone clipped to his belt put in. He groaned when he stood up, as if to illustrate his point.
“When I could stay up for twenty-four hours straight and not even feel tired,” the woman with the braids added.
They seemed to remember their twenties as some kind of paradise. Meanwhile, it was the worst decade of my life so far.
It must have been fun, going to college, commiserating with fellow students over important papers and tests. Relishing those last years of relative freedom while knowing a nice, cushy job awaited.
Of course, if I got the job at the dispensary back home that I’d applied for, I’d have a kush-y job to go back to.
I snickered at my own internal joke, then realized everyone probably thought I was making fun of them.
“It’ll happen to you,” Scott warned.
“And you’ll be there to say, ‘I told you so,’ I’m sure.” I rolled my eyes. “Although, I’m not so sure I want to look back on this part of my life as being the best part of my life.”
No job, no money, living in my parents’ guesthouse, none of that screamed “fond memories” at me. But nobody in the room knew anything about that, apart from Scott and Lauren. At least, I hoped they were the only ones; Scott sure seemed to have aired our business to his in-laws already.
“Matt, you’re unusually quiet tonight,” Scott said, changing the subject suddenly.
“Just tired. Late night last night.” Matt sat up straighter in the armchair he’d claimed—though the art-fair-jewelry woman had perched on the arm of it, requiring me to rein in the daggers I wanted to shoot from my eyes. Which was foolish because I didn’t have or want any kind of claim over him.
And I knew what was going to happen tonight, and it didn’t involve her.
To my surprise, Matt went on. “And I didn’t want to pick on Charlotte because she’s the youngest person here. You can all complain as much as you’d like, but we all know that our twenties were shittier than our thirties.”
“Money-wise, maybe,” cellphone-belt guy said with a chuckle. “Though maybe not as shitty for some.”
Matt held up a middle finger.
“Our forties will be so much better,” the woman with color-coordinated braids said. “At least, that’s what I’m betting on.”
“You go ahead and keep betting on that,” frat-looking-dude said. “I’m going to call it a night. I’m sure Manda is about done with watching the kids while I party.”
“Go be father of the year,” Matt chided him. “Earn that stag night.”
“Oh, do not get me started on that,” Lauren warned.
So, she knew of Matt’s reputation.
“Come on. Do you think Scott’s going to do anything to mess this up?” Matt asked, and I thought he might have sounded a little annoyed. It didn’t seem to register with anyone else.
“Good point. You wouldn’t be marrying him if you thought he was that kind of guy,” art-fair agreed, and she reached down to touch Matt’s shoulder.
Why did that bug me so much?
Worse, he caught the expression I must have let pass over my face too quickly, and he raised an eyebrow.
As with most gatherings, once one person called it a night, the rest of them slowly did, as well. I hung around to help collect plates as everyone stumbled off.
Everyone except Matt, who joined me in cleanup long enough to say, “Leave five minutes before me. I’ll meet you on the path.”
A chill skated down my spine. He said goodnight to Scott and Lauren and strolled out onto the veranda and into the night.
Art-fair leaned her head toward Lauren as she watched Matt go. I didn’t overhear what was said, but judging from Lauren’s “Oh, stop it,” and big laugh, it was probably something I didn’t want to overhear.
“You don’t have to do that,” Scott said, startling me. He gestured to the red plastic cups I was stacking for the trash. “There’s housekeeping service.”
“I know there is. But I’m not a butthole,” I said, sticking my tongue out. “I’ll throw these away and then I’ll leave you to whatever it is you’re going to do.” I lowered my voice. “Talk about pottery wheel techniques, maybe?”
He snorted a laugh that told me all I needed to know.
The weird thing was, I wanted to linger. Not because Matt was staying five minutes behind, but because, frankly, I didn’t know what I was going to be walking into.
But I knew for a fact art-fair wouldn’t be able to handle it.