Chapter 16 – Cora #3
“Fuck.” He jerks his head away, his fingers flying to his mouth. I taste copper. He rolls to sit on his butt beside me. “What the hell, Cora?” he growls.
I push myself up to my elbows. He glares at me warily.
“You can just say no.” His fingers come away from his mouth with a smudge of blood.
An idea pops into my head. I have no ability to gauge if it’s good or not, and no desire to think it through, either. I crawl off the end of the bed, feeling his eyes on my exposed ass and pussy and loving it. He might not love me, but he loves this.
“We don’t need to do this if you’re not ready,” he calls after me as he turns to sit with his back against the headboard. “Come back. Let me just hold you.”
Blah, blah, blah. He’s never once asked to just hold me. It’s like he’s saying what he thinks a sensitive man would say.
I stalk to our walk-in closet. What I’m looking for is on a high shelf in the back. There are racks for shoes under the rods for hanging clothes, but I can’t bring myself to leave shoes worth hundreds of dollars out to catch dust. I store them in their boxes.
I use a step stool to grab the brown box with the white signature and slide on the blush-colored slingbacks with red soles.
They pinch my toes, but they do make my feet look like they belong to someone else—someone so certain of the ground underneath her that she has no worries about balancing on heels so thin and brittle.
I let my hips sway as I return to the bedroom. I’ve stripped for Adrian before. We’ve tried almost everything, at least the normal stuff. Undressing for him is a thing I do when I’m in a good mood, though, like when there’s a good bop playing at the end of a movie.
His eyes lock on me the second I step out of the closet. He’s still sitting propped against the headboard, his hard cock in the air, muscular legs stretched out like a lazy king. When he notices my shoes, a wrinkle appears on the bridge of his nose. He’s bemused. He doesn’t recognize them.
At the pile of his clothes, I lower myself like a lady, thighs together, to root through his pockets for his phone, and then I crawl onto the bed. His eyes darken as he tracks my progress, zeroed in on my full, swaying breasts.
I prowl up his body and straddle his lap. He keeps his hands at his side. I hold his phone up to his face to unlock it.
His eyebrow lifts tentatively. He probably thinks I’m going to record us or pull up porn.
It’s a little after one o’clock in the morning.
The Asian markets will be open. Which cities have exchanges over there?
I’ve gone with him on business trips to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai.
I search up the Hong Kong stock exchange, and click on the HKEX website.
A ticker, a graph, and numbers. Perfect.
I rise higher on my knees, scoot forward, and grab his cock with my free hand. Luckily, I’m still a little wet from earlier. I trace my opening with the head. His hands wander to my ass, and he caresses me gently. Encouragingly.
Interesting. He’s usually not comfortable with me on top. He tenses and reverses things at the first opportunity. Maybe Delaney gave him a taste for switching it up.
He slides his hands up to circle my waist and leans forward to kiss me. His bottom lip is swollen. I kiss him back so hard he grunts.
And then I grab one of Adrian’s hands and shove his phone into it.
I smile at him and say, “You go ahead and scroll while I fuck you.” And then I sink down his cock.
It stings, and I’m not wet enough to make it all the way down.
I can’t help a whimper. My eyes burn and blur, but I watch him closely.
He glances at the screen, his brow furrowing, and when he sees what I’ve pulled up, the dots connect. His face falls—straight tumbles. Something that almost looks like pain blazes in his eyes.
I actually hurt his feelings.
This must be what it feels like to sink a full-court shot at the buzzer—the surprise is a hundred times stronger than the satisfaction.
His pecs tense under my palms as I brace myself on his chest and work myself up and down, trying to take him all the way. My body doesn’t know my heart is breaking, so I get wetter, and soon enough, I’m taking all of him.
His mouth is grim, but his dick stays hard.
“Cora, hey, you don’t need to do this,” he says, his voice raw, as he drops the phone to grab me by the waist.
“Don’t worry. No one’s going to interrupt us.” I try to lift my hips, but his grasp is firm, so instead, I rock my pelvis back and forth.
He’s breathing faster, and his black pupils have eaten the dark brown of his irises except for that gold ring. I’m excited, too. My clit throbs, teased by the split seconds when I’m able to grind at the right angle against his pubic bone. I’m not close to coming, but I’m on the trail.
Before Adrian, ironically, sex was always transactional.
I needed a bed for the night or a friend on my side who could use his fists.
Or I needed to keep the mediocre man of the house happy, so I didn’t have to try my luck with yet another placement that could very well be worse. It didn’t mean anything.
I never came from sex with a man until Adrian, not because I could finally relax, but because I didn’t want to cheat him, so I got a vibrator and figured out how to get myself off. Then, sometimes, especially if I had a few glasses of wine, I could come with him.
“Cora, stop.” He lifts me off his cock, bending his legs so I’m stuck in the saddle, so to speak. His hard, wet cock is smushed between my belly and his, and he moves his hands from my waist to rub gentle circles on the small of my back. “Talk to me.”
“That’s not my job. You’re the one who ruined things.”
He presses his forehead to mine. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“You want things to go back to normal.” I press my forehead back into his, harder, so it hurts. “But they can’t.”
“I don’t want to go back.” He fists my hair and firmly but carefully draws my head away from his, just a little. “I want this.” He brushes a kiss across my lips.
“You want me crazy and angry?”
“Yes.” He clears his throat, his gaze breaking from mine.
He stares at my lips and says, “I want you to be happy again. I want you to include me in all the family shit even though I’m awkward with the girls and don’t know how to be with them like you do.
” He raises his eyes to stare at the ceiling. “I want you to smile at me again.”
He untangles his fingers from my hair and begins to smooth the mess he made.
“And if I can’t have that, then yes, I want you crazy and angry. I want you any which way I can get you.”
“Why?” That’s what I always wanted to know but was too scared to ask. I’m beautiful, but I know very well the effect wears off with familiarity, and men get off on treating a pretty woman as disposable as much as they love showing her off.
His face grows very serious while his hands seem to do their own thing—stroking up my spine and over my shoulders, grabbing my fingers, idly playing with each one like he’s assessing their structural integrity.
Finally, he says, “Because you’re mine. Not like a possession.
Shit. I don’t really know how to say this.
” He stops himself to blow out a breath.
“It’s like whoever made me used half, and you got the other half.
So we’re nothing alike, but we come from the same stuff.
Like I got all the luck, and you got none.
And you’ve got all the love in you, and I just don’t. ”
He places my palms on his chest and covers them with his hands. “When you were happy—it was close enough, you know? Close enough to me being happy. And then I got in my head and broke it. Like a kid with a robin’s egg. What is that? The call of the void? I don’t know.”
His heart thumps against my palm. I’m untethered and floating in a new way. I’ve never talked to someone like this. It’s like hearing a confession, but I’m the victim, and he’s not quite sorry, not in the way a decent person would be.
He ducks his head, kisses my jaw, then settles back against the headboard, quiet for a moment. “When I was kidnapped, you know, when I was a kid?”
I nod. Of course, I know, even though he never talks about it, except to bring it up whenever I screw up security protocols so I’ll take my safety more seriously.
“There were three men. One was driving. Two grabbed me. The side door of their van had rolled shut after they jumped out. One of them had to let me go to open it back up, so for a little while, it was one-on-one.” He licks his lips, nervously.
“The other guy, he wasn’t big at all. Scrawny.
Smelled like cigarettes. He was already out of breath from chasing me down a few yards.
” He strokes my arms like he’s reassuring me.
“I could have taken him. I should have been able to take him, but I got in my head, and I fucked up. Until now, that’s the worst mistake I ever made. ”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He shrugs. “I’m not saying it was. I’m saying I had a shot, and I failed, and that’s been eating at me for over twenty years, and it’s nothing, nothing, to how I feel about what I did.
I know it won’t make you happy, but I want you to know that I’m fucking miserable every minute of every day now, and that I’d rather relive that basement on repeat than wake up every morning feeling the way I do now. ”
He stares sightlessly across the room at the television. I peek at him from the corner of my eye. His face is as hard as stone, his eyes blank, all his muscles tensed.
Suddenly, I feel too naked. I lean forward so my breasts are pressed to his chest. He exhales long and slow like he was holding his breath and wraps his arms around me.
There’s an ache inside me. Or maybe a longing.
What am I supposed to do? I could say nothing, let this strange moment die, and go on being sad because I’m accustomed to it.
I have no reason to trust him and every reason to never let him in again.
But still—