Chapter 6
Daphne
“Food,” he said, standing in front of the open door of the fridge. “There’s got to be something we can make for dinner.”
“Dinner? We’re staying?”
I hopped up onto the counter.
“I called my neighbor. She’s thrilled to cat-sit another day.” He stepped between my legs and gently kneaded my thighs.
“I saw a Chinese place in the strip mall on the way here.”
“Oh no. It’s Christmas Eve Eve. It might not be a real thing, but if we’re going to start making our own holiday traditions, we may as well start here. And we’re going to do this right.”
I kissed him chastely on the lips and reached my hand out for his.
“Cookies?” I asked.
“I think I can throw together a batch of something.” A seductive smile played on his lips as he touched our fingertips together, playing with my hands.
“Gingerbread? I’ve never had gingerbread.”
“Gingerbread it is, then.”
“Sugarplums?”
“I’m not convinced those are real.” His fingers slid down my palms. Intensely provocative for a nonsexual gesture. A shiver went up my spine.
“Movies?”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.” He tugged me closer.
“Charlie Brown. I love the music.”
“I can play the music,” he actually sounded excited by that.
“Oh! Play for me!”
“Of course.” He nipped at my lips.
“This is dangerous, Chris. You’re going to spoil me.”
“Only a little.”
“What if I turn into a brat? A Veruca Salt. I want it now... Daddy. ” I said in a terrible Veruca Salt accent.
His face was inches from mine. He’d been leaning in to kiss me again—or so I thought—and then he stopped. Pulled back. Dropped his hands. His face was… was that horror, or desire? What did I—?
Chris actually squeaked before he looked down and cleared his throat.
I felt like I’d stepped in something and tracked it all over the carpet.
“Right, uh..." He licked his lips and came back to himself. “Follow me.” He spun around and opened the door into a room behind the kitchen. Sunlight shone on black and white marble tiles laid in a harlequin pattern. Black slate countertops housed rows of mixers and toasters and other fancy appliances I couldn’t identify. There were beams in the ceiling. Beams. In a closed-door room. Rows and rows of fancy wicker baskets lined thick, solid wood shelves on one side, while the other side appeared to be reserved for glassware. They must have hundreds of every type of glass, meant for every type of wine or cocktail.
“You have another kitchen behind your kitchen?”
“It’s the pantry.”
“A pantry isn’t something that’s decorated like a Victorian-era pastry shop. A pantry is a closet barely big enough to store a few bags of potato chips and some old phone books from the nineties. You have two sinks in here. Another fancy stove and a fridge bigger than the one in the display kitchen.”
“The only kitchen. A-ha!” He produced a vacuum-sealed package from the freezer and held it up like he expected me to understand. “It’s not a turkey, but these’ll thaw in time for dinner.”
“What is it?”
“Quail. I think.” He looked at the package again. “Maybe partridges. I’m not sure. Anyway, they’re basically the same.”
“From a pear tree?” I scrunched up my face. “Oh no. I don’t think I can eat a bird.”
His lopsided smile was loading. “You eat chicken.”
“Yeah, chicken’s a food bird. Those are like, power line birds.”
“They’re food birds. You’ll see.”
“I can’t cook.”
“I can.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t you have people for that?”
His lips quirked. “I love cooking. Mom and I cook our family meals. It’s the one small holiday tradition I’d like to keep.”
He rooted around in the various baskets meant to organize dry goods; essentially hiding them from view, as if it were uncouth to display anything useful, even behind a closed door.
I’d said I wanted bougie, but being in here was showing me just how uncomfortable I was with the idea of having money. I was someone used to pumping two gallons of gas at a time; just enough to make it to work and back. I would splurge on a Happy Meal when I wanted takeout. I’d gotten good at doing the math so that I always had three dollars in my bank account to cover my $2.99 Apple bill that hit right before my paycheck came.
Hiding the label on a box of pasta was solving a problem that didn’t exist. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the beauty or extravagance. I knew people like the Carters were vital to their communities. If no one could afford to buy these expensive-looking, artisan-crafted baskets, they’d stop from getting made and more people would be out of jobs.
This pantry was great for the economy. It would just take me a lot longer than one day to get used to the affluence.
He pulled out a jar of almonds, a tomato sauce with a Spanish label, and cured meats and cheeses from the industrial fridge. “Grab those potatoes there, would you?”
“Where?”
“Behind you, sweetheart.” He pointed.
“These?” I held up a long, purple finger. “Oh, no. Potatoes are big, brown, and used as vehicles for chili. These are not potatoes.”
“These might just blow your mind.” He reached behind me, pulling out the basket at my hip, kissing my neck as he brushed past. His lips anywhere on me were a direct line to my clit, my heart, my brain. Everything he did was a turn on. He must have felt it, too. The food fell out of his arms onto the counter behind me as he pressed into me, gripping my waist and kissing his way along my jaw, trailing searing lips up to mine.
My fingers threaded into his hair as I pulled him harder against my mouth, desperate for more of him. As much as I could get. My body felt empty without him inside me; my legs were made to be wrapped around him.
He broke off our kiss with a groan as he shifted his hips away from mine and pressed his hand flat against his sweatpants, adjusting himself with a wince. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I can’t stop myself with you. I swear I’m not usually like this. I get one taste of you and suddenly I need the whole fucking feast.”
“I don’t want you to stop. Not ever. As soon as you pull away, I need more.” My words spilled breathlessly out.
“But I want to know more about you. I want to get to know that beautiful brain inside your body. I can’t just..."
“We’ll have plenty of time for that.”
He nodded, still staring at me wild-eyed behind his glasses. I reached up and adjusted his slightly skewed glasses. “Daphne, I need you to know... even though I’m having a very hard time keeping it in my pants, I really like you. I think we could be—”
“Me too.” I nodded. For a moment we both stared into each other’s eyes. I was analyzing the exact shade of chocolate behind his tortoiseshell frames. It was some kind of milk chocolate. A warm brown, not a bittersweet brown, and darker at the outer ring of his iris, before fading toward a more honey hue near his pupil, even as dilated as they were.
His gaze floated over my hairline, my eyes, my cheekbones, my lips, as if studying me. It was up to me to break this seriousness spell. We had a lifetime to be serious together. Right now, I wanted to give him excuses to play.
“Hey.” I smacked his elbow. “Don’t you have any normal food?”
He reached over my head into one of the woven baskets on the tall shelf and tossed me a familiar glossy blue bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. It wasn’t my favorite flavor, but at least they weren’t cooked in tiny batches and flavored with truffles harvested by pigs in the forests of France.
“I don’t know if salt and vinegar counts as normal, but at least you have one thing from a real grocery store. Where’s your wine fridge, Fancy Pants?”
His smile fell. “Uh..."
“Don’t tell me you don’t have a wine fridge.” I arranged my face into a horrified expression.
“The basement.”
“Oh, of course it’s in the basement.”
“No. It is the basement.”
“Oh no. Don’t tell me.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking smug.
“You may as well show me. I’ll need something to wash these down.”
“As long as we’re celebrating Christmas Eve Eve with tapas, we may as well find a bottle of cava.”
“What’s that?”
“Champagne from Spain.”
“Isn’t it called sparkling wine, then?”
“Yes. I didn’t know how much you knew about wine.”
Ingredients for tonight’s dinner tumbled out of his arms onto the kitchen island.
He pulled me by the hand across the room, through another room, across an expansive hallway, and down the steps into the basement. It took us minutes just to traverse a quarter of the main floor. My legs would be sore after today.
“I’m really not much of a drinker at all. I think I only know the sparkling wine thing from memes. I’d love to be a whiskey drinker. Someone sophisticated but chill, who knows exactly the right unpretentious words to describe the smokiness of the whatever, or the butteriness of the tannins.”
“Yeah, those words don’t go together.”
“See what I mean?” Chris tugged me down another set of winding stone steps.
“I want to like some kind of cool alcohol, but that takes time to appreciate and a lot of drinking, which I don’t enjoy. And money, of course, not that I have to remind you. Because even I’m aware I can’t learn to appreciate fine spirits when they... oh…”
We turned the corner and all I could do was stare. I didn’t have to know anything about wine to be awed by the room I was standing in.
Stone walls surrounded me, encrusted from floor to ceiling with racks of bottles, their plump bottoms facing me, daring me to race around the room and run my fingers over their dusty smoothness. But that wasn’t what a cool alcohol girlie would do. She’d probably read the labels and comment appreciatively about dates.
What the hell. I wasn’t her yet.
I didn’t run, but I took a meandering path around the room. I touched stuff, too.
Wooden racks at the center held even more bottles. There was barely enough room to squeeze through the rows and rows of jewel-toned bottles, all lit from some unseen source that glowed from below, as if the foundation had cracked and light streamed in from a fantasy world.
The magical realm of Vintaelia.
“Cava’s a great place to start learning about wine. It’s dry but not too dry, citrusy but buttery. It’s accessible.” Chris startled me as he brushed the hair off my shoulder, his warm breath hitting my neck just before his lips did, making me break out in a fit of giggles. “Sorry. Try that again. I’ll stay still.”
He didn’t exactly kiss my neck; he just ran his lips across my skin. My knees bent and I crumpled in another fit, unable to stop laughing. I wanted to like it. I really did. From an outsider, I could see how sexy it would look. But I didn’t find anything sexy about a laughing fit where I was liable to snort at any minute.
“I’m sorry. I’m so ticklish.” I laughed.
He grabbed me by the neck and spun me around to face him. He loomed over me, looking down with wild eyes. His clenched teeth showed through his parted lips, almost in a sneer.
Slowly, so slowly, he leaned forward, his hand still gripping the side of my neck, his thumb trailing firmly down to my collarbone.
In the span of a breath, Chris had turned into a beast, and I'd lost all sense of autonomy. My heart pounded in my chest; I could feel every squeezing beat circulating the blood in my vessels. When he scraped his teeth along the sinew, it took every ounce of concentration to remain standing.
Nipping and biting his way down to my collarbone, his hot breath no longer tickled to the point of making me want to claw my skin off. Now I needed more of it.
He picked me up and walked with me, kissing me until my eyes closed and I didn’t care what happened to me. I’d already given myself to him. I was his to play with however he wanted. He could be gearing up to throw me into a bottomless pit and I’d smile and moan on my way down.
I was lifted even higher and placed on the thick slab of solid wood.
“I want to taste you again.”
“You’re wild. You know that, don’t you? Out of your mind.” I bent toward him, hovering my lips over his as I spoke.
“For you.” He kissed me deeply, messily, intoxicatingly. Then, he drew back, his eyes even blacker than before. “Can I?” His face was eager.
“Here?”
“God, yes. Here, upstairs. Everywhere. Every second of every day I want you on my tongue or on my cock.”
His words sent a shiver down my arms into my fingertips. My skin was on fire for him. “That’s impossible. We need to eat. Food. Real Food. We need to work—well, I do. You could very well exist in this wine cellar for years without needing to surface.”
He pulled me into him. My back arched in response, giving him more access as he pressed firm kisses along my jaw and neck.
“Is this my cue to shut up?”
He drew back, pulling my head away like I was a puppet. My body was his to control and I couldn’t think of a better feeling than being moved and shifted and positioned by this man.
“Not at all. I love the way you talk. I’m just going to get you naked while you do it.”
Slowly, he lifted the hem of my shirt up and over my head. His eyes lingered for only a moment on my bare breasts—I hadn’t seen the point of subjecting them to the confines of a bra since there was a high likelihood it would end up removed and flung somewhere for the cleaning crew to find. His eyes sparked as they looked up into mine, keeping contact as he leaned in and sucked an already hard nipple into his mouth.
“Oh, God.” I cupped the back of his head as he swirled his tongue around the firm peak. “I love the way you do that.”
He groaned and sucked harder, using his lips to coax my nipple into an impossibly elongated peak.
“Is that what you want me to talk about? The things you’re doing to me? How they make me feel?”
He reluctantly moved away from one breast, fixing his gaze on its twin as if it was a prize he’d won. “It wasn’t what I had in mind, but it’s a very good surprise.”
He closed his mouth over my other breast, palming the first, his thumb mirroring the motion of his tongue. I arched my back and widened my legs. Every lick. Every swirl of saliva sent longing straight to my clit. Even my pelvis canted and writhed with every flick of his tongue.
His mouth popped off my breast and he stood, his lips wet and eyes crazed. “Stay here.” He trailed a heavy hand down my thigh as he left, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether he wanted to leave me here or not.
I groaned in complaint. I was cold, naked, and wet in several places. I hated to think about the pool I was leaving under my ass, my arousal soaking into his family’s unvarnished bar top.
I heard bottles rattling from across the room. “Chris, hurry.”
There was a chuckle as he came back into view, pulling a champagne flute from somewhere behind me. He came around the front again, stopping between my legs but otherwise ignoring my presence.
“Now,” he said, placing the glasses and second bottle on the bar. “There was something you said upstairs.” He twisted the cork in the bottle of sparkling wine that could very well be real actual champagne but I couldn’t see the label. “I think I liked it. I think I need to hear it again.”
I leaned back on my hands, displaying my boobs, while he poured a glass of glittery bubbles.
“Was it about the potatoes?” I reached for the glass but he didn’t give it to me.
“No.”
“Hmm... It was partridges in pear trees, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“What is that you’re drinking? Are you going to pour me a glass?”
He tilted his head back and sipped, thoughtfully, clearly savoring the taste of the wine. He shook his head slowly. “It’s cava. And no, I don’t think I will.”
I pouted, knowing full well what he wanted to hear. Veruca.
“I want it.”
His lips quirked a bit on one side. God, he was sexy. I never thought that about anyone, but it just poured out of him. And he had no idea. I couldn’t believe I got to be the one to flip this switch in him.
He took another sip and stepped closer. “I think you can do better than that.” His breath was hot on my lips as he spoke, our mouths not quite touching, but close. It gave me the courage to say what he wanted to hear from me again.
My voice was low. I could only whisper. “I want it... Daddy. ”
He smiled his crooked smile, but instead of kissing me, he tipped his glass back again and sipped slowly, staring into my eyes.
He held me by the neck, pulling me down until my mouth was beneath his, and the sparkling wine poured from his mouth into mine. His kiss stifled my cry of shock as the dry bubbles fizzed between our tongues. A deep rumble of laughter resonated through his chest and into mine. As he pulled me closer to the edge, I couldn’t help but rock my pelvis against his belly.
“Uhn uh. I’m not done playing with you.”
He raised his glass again and tilted it toward me. My head jerked back as a cold trickle of cava rolled down from my sternum, between my breasts, diverting across the folds of my abdomen before pooling between my legs.
Chris’s breath escaped in a shudder as he watched. “Jesus Christ.”
He was rougher when he pulled me closer, using more pressure as he scraped his teeth over my areola and sucked my nipple so hard I gasped for relief.
He moved lower still, kissing down my belly as his hands came up and kneaded my calves. Suddenly, he stood, his eyes wild as he looked into mine, needy and awed. I moved against against nothing but air, frantic for him to relieve me. I had never needed my pussy touched so badly. I’d give him anything, anything, anything to satisfy me.
“What do you need?”
“I need you, Daddy.”
“What part?”
“I need your tongue.”
“I need your words, baby. Keep talking. Promise you’ll keep talking until you can’t anymore.” He ran his hands up between my breasts and pushed me down flat on the bar.
“Words,” he reminded me.
“Lick me, Daddy. I need to—” His tongue flattened against my pussy in a broad stroke from my vagina to my clit. I cried out. “I need you to make me come.”
“God, you taste good.” His words came out as if they were on fire, singeing his vocal cords with each syllable.
“I love the way you tease my clit. The way you stroke me up and down, slowly, with your tongue.” He did exactly what I liked. Just the way I said I liked it. “Am I doing well, Daddy?”
That word! Why was it rolling off my tongue so easily, so shamelessly?
“You’re doing so well, darling.”
With his filthy-sweet words, I felt another gush of fluid pour out of me, spilling onto the bar.
He poured more wine directly from the bottle onto my clit, washing me with its intoxicatingly cold tap on my nerves while he drank it up from below. The sight of him using my pussy as a luge for his wine had me seconds from orgasm.
My body jerked off the bar, my legs shaking.
He put the bottle down as he kissed my inner thighs. “Look how beautiful your body is. So wet. So perfect. Can you come already, baby? Talk to me.” He pushed two fingers inside me as he lapped greedily at my clit.
“Oh shit.” My legs started shaking harder.
“Say it,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Ah— I’m coming, Daddy.”
“Give it to me, I feel it. Such a good girl, letting me get you this messy.”
“I need... I need..." But I was too brainless, too weak to say what I needed. To know what I needed.
“You need me to fuck you?”
I nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”
“Fuck. Every time you say that I get even harder. So hard, it hurts. I’m going to come as soon as I’m inside you.”
I nodded again. “I just need to feel you.”
I vaguely registered the sound of a condom wrapper before he pulled my boneless body off the bar and lowered me onto a stool.
He circled my clit with his thumb, but he didn’t need to. I was already on the precipice from the way he talked about my body—what I did to him, and how well I did it, even though all I did was lie there and let him give me another amazing orgasm.
He rolled the condom on, then dropped his forehead to mine after a sweet kiss.
“Daddy. Fuck me. I need you inside me.” It took all my strength to keep myself propped on that stool, my legs wrapped around his hips. I was on the brink of collapse. He still wore his t-shirt and sweatpants, only his cock was pulled free, but that only made it even more obscene, considering I was completely nude, wet, and wine-soaked, with my legs wide open for him.
I gripped him and pulled him close, rubbing his cock up and down my pussy, soaking the condom in my juices. I hadn’t squirted again, but I was still ridiculously wet.
In a single decisive stroke, with his eyes burning into mine, he drove himself fully inside me.
And God, he felt good.
Was it the angle that made my eyes roll back in my head? Was it the shape of him that fit perfectly inside me?
Holy shit, sex never ever felt like this. The buildup was so intense, like I’d be climbing forever with no relief. My whole pelvis was tight and straining with need. If it didn’t happen soon, I’d explode and then...
“Fuck, yes, you feel so fucking good inside me, yes, fuck me harder.” It was meaningless—a slew of filth that poured out of me. “Harder, oh God, yes touch my nipples, it feels so fucking good... fuck... yes... feels... uhn... Chris, Daddy, I’m coming.”
His hips jerked, and he made a guttural noise. He pulled out abruptly, ripping off the condom, and stroked himself, his eyes transfixed on the fountain that gushed out of me. “Sweetheart. Look at you. You’re amazing. Your body is amazing.”
My fluid was soaking everything. I could hear it raining down from the high-top stool onto the concrete floor. Chris came closer, slickening his hand with my wetness to stroke his cock harder until his hot cum was spurting onto my belly, and it felt like I was made just for that. Just for fucking him.
I slumped forward, and he caught me in his arms.
I kissed him lazily, drunkenly.
“I love the way you go all limp after you orgasm. Love the mess you make for me.”
“Only you.” Releasing, cleansing tears streamed down the sides of my face as I fought to remain present. I searched for his eyes. “Only ever for you.”
He wiped my tears away as he held me tenderly. “I know sweetheart. It’s going to be only us for a long time.”