Chapter 35 Winnie
WINNIE
Icollapse dramatically in the seat in front of Carolina with my coffee. She’s cutting ribbons for wrapping the boxes.
“Someone got laid!” She folds a black-and-white ribbon over itself.
“Girl. You wouldn’t believe. He had a whole-ass sex room in his house.”
“And you went in the sex dungeon?” She sets the scissors down hard.
“Came in it, I believe, is grammatically correct.”
“Oh my god.” Carolina’s speechless for a moment. “Well, at least Fitz fucked the stalker out of your life.”
“I mean, it wasn’t as exciting as alley sex.” I wrinkle my nose.
“No… what? No, no, you cannot still be obsessed with your stalker, and don’t use the excuse that he’s the only man in your life. You have Fitz now. He took you on a date. Multiple dates. You had sex in his dungeon,” Carolina begs.
“It was more of a room. It’s not like it was a gross, leaky basement or anything. Everything was brand-new.”
“Dude, I’m concerned. Especially with the notes. Boring is better than exciting. You can’t have kids with exciting. What are you gonna say? ‘Daddy’s not here right now because he’s out peeping Tommy in his latest victim’s house’?”
“No!”
“Forget the stalker. Don’t girls dream of the fairy-tale stalker prince? Settle for the guy who owns the penthouse and is slightly less emotionally unavailable than usual.”
“I can’t.” I decide to come clean. “God help me, but Fitz is the stalker.”
Carolina’s eyes almost pop out of her head.
“Fitz is the—Fitz was threatening you? He’s the one who’s been breaking and entering?”
“No, that was my other stalker.”
“Your other—”
“You know, I really thought you’d be happy for me.”
“Happy? You’re, like, having a midlife crisis or something,” she hisses. “Next you’re going to tell me you’re thinking about getting back together with Knox.”
“Shh!” I clap my hand over her mouth. Kathy is happily serving customers at the front. “Kathy cannot know about that, okay?”
“You two could bond over your terrible taste in men.”
“It’s just two men. Fitz and the stalker are the same person.” I press two fingers together.
“Do you know that, though?”
“Yeah.”
“But like, do you know that?” Carolina presses. “He’s been lying to you.”
“Well, now he’s telling the truth. He’s even babysitting Fidget all day. He texted me and said he’s taking her to visit his goat farm.”
“What about the other stalker on the loose?”
“He’s going to take care of it.”
“So that’s it? That’s your plan in life? You’re going to let your billionaire stalker boyfriend take care of this other alleged stalker?” Carolina shakes her head. “You’ve been hanging around Loony Laura too much.”
“This means he is actually the perfect guy for me, right?”
“He certainly has made you the center of his fucked-up little universe.”
“You were always telling me to get a boyfriend.”
“A mildly sane one.”
“Well, now I at least have a date to the wedding.”
“Well, I mean, that is the perk of a significant other.”
“He has brothers.”
Carolina is intrigued. “Oh, does he?”
True to his word—so no, he’s not a liar—Fitz has given the Pittsburgh troll football tickets.
“I just think he’s wasted on you.” Shelby sniffs as Brinley flits anxiously around her, both of them wearing brand-new Seattle jerseys that Fitz sent over with the tickets. “A man like that wants a woman who’s demure, who is his silent supporter, who knows her place.”
“No, a man like that wants a woman who’s not a gold digger and who can do more than smile and giggle when he talks about his business,” Gran interjects. “And I guess a man doesn’t want you, Shelby, since you don’t understand that your place is outside in the doghouse.”
“Winnie, maybe you do need to be a little nicer to him,” Mom tuts. “You’re not even going to go see him tonight.”
“I have a lot to do,” I tell my mom. “It’s the end of the month. I need to do accounting.”
“He sent you flowers when he dropped off Fidget,” she scolds me. “You had the poor man babysitting your dog.”
“We better be in a skybox again,” Gran says as I herd them out the door. “I brought tinfoil.”
“Fitz got you a whole hotel suite,” I assure them.
“Does it come with breakfast?”
“I assume so.”
“I better grab more Tupperware.”
When they finally leave, I collapse, ears ringing, on my couch.
It’s the first time in weeks I’ve been at home alone, all by myself.
I wander around my empty house.
I find a note from Fitz, typewritten.
Don’t go to sleep tonight, or else.
It makes me shiver, though in all the best ways.
Fidget rings the bell by her food bowl.
“I know you’ve been eating all day.”
Ring!
“Fidget.”
Ring ring ring!
“Gran said you smelled like hamburgers.”
The dog sighs over her bowl.
For tonight, at least, my house and my room are mine.
Someone—I wonder who!—has decorated my balcony with flowers.
I’m going to fuck you awake.
Yeah, because that’s going to inspire me to be productive tonight.
Am I a sex addict? I mean, I haven’t had sex that much.
Okay, in the past week maybe it was a lot, but if you average it out throughout the year, it’s not really that much. It’s, like, a less-than-normal amount.
I snuggle down under the covers.
I don’t mean to fall asleep, but it’s like for the first time in weeks, I’m finally able to relax, not worry if a family member or unwanted houseguest is just going to barge in and disrupt my peace.
The perfume of the flowers.
The drizzle outside.
The smell of the rain from the cracked French doors.
He’ll come tonight, right?
Is it the silvery light from the moon or the presence of a dark shadow in my bedroom that wakes me up?
It’s him.
Huge, all in black.
I blink up at the shadowy man. “Hey, daddy.”
Fitz doesn’t say anything.
I can already feel myself getting wet. “I thought you were gonna fuck me awake.”
He reaches for his belt.
I slide off the bed.
The faceless black mask follows me.
I slide my hands down the front of the black canvas pants, feel the hard muscle underneath.
The gloved hand grabs my hair, yanking my head forward.
“You know what I like, daddy,” I murmur.
My hand slips under my T-shirt, into my panties.
Above me, he hisses.
I mouth against his cock in the pants, anticipating the fucking I’m going to get.
“Don’t fucking touch her!”
“Fitz!” I scream as the huge blond man crashes into the intruder.
“Fitz, who—oh my god.”
In horror, I realize that I was about to have sex with a stranger, an intruder, because I thought it was him.
Screaming, I scuttle backward, bumping into the nightstand.
Fitz picks up the lamp on the side table and goes after the intruder with it, his eyes black with rage.
The intruder grunts when the base of the lamp crashes into his back. He crashes into the French doors that lead out onto the small balcony then jumps down, rolling and sprinting away.
“That motherfucker,” Fitz snarls. “No one”—he whirls on me—“touches what’s mine.”
“I didn’t—”
“No one.”
He shoves me back onto the bed, his hands all over me in a frenzy, his mouth hot on mine, his teeth sharp on my skin.
The T-shirt rips. He doesn’t even pull my panties down.
He bites my neck, my chin, scrapes down to my tits.
“You will never, ever”—his fingers are hard on my pussy through the soaked panty fabric—“ever let another man touch you.”
He yanks at the panties, making me arch back off of the bed.
The fabric pulls in my pussy, rubbing against my clit.
His tongue shoves down my throat.
I barely register a condom packet ripping.
Then he’s pushing my knees apart and tugging the panties aside so he can ram that thick, hard cock in my pussy.
I moan and whimper, beg him for it as he fucks into me, making me take that huge cock, splitting me as I lie helpless underneath him as he ruts into me, taking my pussy over and over, claiming me, making me his.
His teeth clamp hard on my shoulder as he thrusts into me hard once, twice, then I’m shuddering as he comes into the condom.
“Do you understand me, Winnie?” he whispers harshly in the dark.
“I said”—he slams the flat of his palm down next to my head—“do you fucking understand me?”
I nod. Can’t speak.
“You’re mine. I’ll never let you go. You’re all I ever wanted, Winnie.”
He kisses my swollen mouth, still inside of me.
“You’re what I’ve been waiting for my entire life. The ultimate prize.”
And no, despite my behavior the past forty-eight hours, I’m not really a romantic. I’m a realist. And the realist in me knows a man like him doesn’t fall in love with a girl like me.
The weird thing is, though, I actually believe—sort of believe—him.
Is it crazy to think I’m falling for him?