Chapter 7
Rafe
I’m towel-drying my hair when there’s a knock at the door. It’s probably Callum, my business partner. He’s the only person who can get through security downstairs without them calling up to me first.
‘Give me a sec,’ I shout, tugging a t-shirt on. That PT session in my home gym really took it out of me this morning.
But I needed it.
This week, my mind has been going places it has no business venturing.
Places that have my fingertips skating over honeyed hair and limbs.
My dick coaxing soft, pillowy lips apart, smearing them with pre-cum, until I can’t take the teasing from her soft mouth, her wet tongue, anymore and I bend her over that massive fucking dining room table in her parents’ apartment.
I can’t imagine how tight she’d feel.
I can, actually.
Like a velvet fucking vice.
So, yeah. My combat HIIT session with Darren was more necessary this morning than most Saturdays. I needed the release badly, and that was despite fucking a couple of women at the club last night.
God help me.
I rake my hand through my still-damp hair and wrench the door open, before standing stock-still.
Oh, Jesus fuck.
It’s her.
She’s a vision, backlit in the sunlight streaming through the lobby’s huge windows. Her long hair is smoothed into a ponytail, but the baby hairs framing her face are lit up in gold, and the golden outline around her body makes her look almost celestial.
More alarmingly, she has far too much skin exposed. She’s in yoga pants and what looks like little more than a sports bra, both in a pale blue that offsets the smooth, tanned skin of her arms and chest and stomach.
Holy fucking crap.
She’s even more fuckable like this than she is in her pretty, prick-teasing dresses. The workout gear leaves nothing of her perfect body to the imagination. Her face is bare of makeup, her skin glowing with health. But the look on her face is even more deer-caught-in-the-headlights than usual.
As soon as I throw the door open (admittedly more violently than I would have done if I’d known the identity of my visitor), she takes a step back from me, twisting what looks like a little sweater in both her hands.
‘Belle,’ I say. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi. I’m so sorry for disturbing you on a Saturday.’ The words come out in a rush, and she glances towards the building’s main staircase as if planning an escape.
‘No problem. I just finished a workout, so…’
‘Me too.’ She gestures awkwardly towards her sexy-as-fuck excuse for an outfit. ‘I mean, I just came from yoga class.’
Yoga? Jesus. Now I have visions of her folded into a pretzel shape, all long legged and loose limbed. I bet she’s limber as fuck. She looks like she would be.
I recover my manners. ‘Come in, come in.’
‘No, I—’ She pauses. ‘I have something I’d like to ask you, actually.
Kind of like a favour. Or a—I wondered if you’d like to go for a walk?
It’s a bit of an awkward conversation to have, so I thought it might be better to have it while walking.
Only if you’re not busy, of course.’ Her hand returns to the sweater, and she wrings it again.
I press my lips together to stop myself from smirking. I’m not sure why seeing her this nervous is so gratifying. Maybe because her current gaucheness makes her even more adorable. Even more girlish.
Besides, she’s piqued my interest. A favour, eh?
Hmm.
‘Not busy,’ I tell her. ‘And I need a coffee. Let me get my shoes.’
* * *
We grab coffee from a kiosk at the edge of Hyde Park. On the short walk over here, we’ve kept things light. Small talk about our week, and how the rest of her evening went at Jean Georges, and how she’s settling into our building.
All the while, I’m calculating what she’s going to ask me.
It’s about art, I decide. She’s come to follow up on her throwaway comment at her parents’ drinks party that I should stop by Liebermann’s.
She could probably use some commission to impress the powers that be, and she wants to sound me out.
Only she’s mortified by the prospect of having to do something as inelegant in her eyes as touting for business.
Little does she know I’d buy up the entire fucking gallery to put a smile on those rosy lips of hers. And also—yes, this makes me a total monster—to have her feel just the slightest bit beholden to me.
As we walk through the rose gardens in all their fresh-faced, early summer glory, I decide we’ve made quite enough small talk, and I’ve had quite enough of trying to keep my mind from going to that dark place in my head where I grab her glossy ponytail and wrap it around my hand as I push her to her knees.
I’m thirty-six.
That makes her fourteen years younger than me.
If she was four years younger, she’d be half my age.
Jesus.
‘You were very mysterious when I answered the door,’ I tell her, shooting her a smile that I hope telegraphs you can trust me rather than I want to fuck your twenty-two-year-old cunt. ‘Spit it out, why don’t you? What’s this favour, and how can I help?’
She shoots me a look of pure terror.
Maybe I misjudged the predatory level of my smile.
‘This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,’ she confesses, and I can’t help but grin, because she sounds like a teenager.
‘I doubt that.’ I throw her a bone. ‘Is it about the gallery?’
‘The—what? Oh. No.’
Okay. I purse my lips in bewilderment and wait for her to spit it out.
She nudges her bottom lip against the takeaway cup, and I tense. Jesus Christ. She’s so beautiful. Her profile in the sunlight is sheer perfection. The gentle upturn of her pretty little nose. The delicate sweep of freckles.
That fucking mouth.
‘You have a club,’ she mutters against her cup, and her mouth is preoccupying me so much that I almost miss her statement.
‘Yeah—Alchemy,’ I manage. This was not where I saw the conversation going. Presumably she hasn’t asked me out to lecture me on morality?
‘Exactly.’ She clears her throat. ‘I wanted to ask you more about a, uh, programme there. Unfurl?’
Well, knock me down with a feather.
I stop, my brain whirring, and gape at her. ‘Unfurl?’ I ask more sharply than I’ve intended. ‘What about it?’
She marches on ahead, and I take a few strides to catch her up.
‘I thought it might be… suitable,’ she mumbles. ‘Like, for me. But I need more details.’
I’m hallucinating. I knew Darren had pushed me too hard this morning.
There’s no way I’m strolling through Hyde Park with my too-young, too-gorgeous neighbour, the one I’ve been fantasising about while fucking my fist (and other people) this week, as she brings up my sex club, and one of its most pioneering programmes, and her interest in said programme.
No bloody way.
I cannot tell you how many people I’ve fucked, how cavalier I am about sex, but my voice is undoubtedly strangled as I force myself to say something in response.
‘Are you saying you’re… you haven’t had sex?’
I sneak a peek at her, and she nods into her coffee cup. That telltale flush has rampaged up her neck and marked her cheek. I tense my jaw, attempt to pull myself the fuck together.
‘Well, thank you for confiding in me,’ I say evenly.
Because this isn’t about me, or the perverted responses of my inner neanderthal to her innocence and her beauty.
It’s about her.
Even if that innocence just got a million times more alluring, because Jesus Christ.
She’s telling me she’s never been fucked. Luke or Carl or whatever godawful university boyfriend of hers I conjured up does not exist.
She’s intact. Ignorant of how transcendent certain parts of the human experience can be.
And, as motherfucking serendipity and celestial intervention would have it, she’s coming to me for help.
Someone up there has a sense of humour.
Or a sadistic streak.
‘Believe me, I’m mortified,’ she says now. ‘I can’t believe I’m even contemplating having this conversation.’
‘I promise I won’t abuse your trust,’ I say. ‘I may be a dodgy fucker, but Unfurl is probably the achievement I’m most proud of.’
It’s true. It is. My own first time may have been forgettable—and seriously brief, given how quickly I shot my load—but I’m well aware, based on the amount of women I’ve polled in my personal and professional life, that for girls, it’s usually pleasureless and uncomfortable at best and traumatic at worst.
Unfurl takes all that away and puts these women in the driving seat. It shows them just how much currency they actually have and how gloriously liberating it can be to spend it.
Belle wraps her spare arm around her waist. ‘Tell me a bit about it?’
‘You’ve read the blurb on our website?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It was… enlightening, but it didn’t actually say much, if you know what I mean.’
I laugh. We’re walking at a fair clip now.
She’s upped our pace, and I can see why it might be easier for her to speak frankly like this on what is rapidly becoming a power walk than face to face.
I consider how best to frame this pet project of ours in a way she’ll get.
In a way that won’t have her running a mile.
‘The first thing to say,’ I begin, ‘is that Unfurl is meant to empower people who don’t feel empowered for whatever reason, usually because they’ve had few or no sexual partners.
That can mean that they don’t know exactly what they like, or they don’t have the experience or the language to communicate their desires.
Maybe they do know what they like, but there isn’t a person in their life they can trust to deliver it.
Sex is so intimate, and yet, for a lot of people, the communication around it is diabolical. That make sense?’
I glance over at her long enough to see her nod her assent.