36. Delilah #3
I have another soft, gushing orgasm. While I’m still twitching with the aftershocks, he pushes me onto my knees, rips off the condom, and stands over me. I don’t know how he’s still hard after so much sex, but he hasn’t lost a single bit of tension. If anything, he’s harder.
“Clean me, Lilah,” he commands.
I hesitate for a split second, the old shyness flickering, but then I look at his eyes—the obsession, the desire, the absolute certainty that I belong to him.
I crawl toward him on my hands and knees, my heavy breasts swaying. I wrap my lips around the head of his cock, tasting the salt and the musk of our previous rounds.
I use my tongue to swirl around the rim, then slide him deep into my throat. I gag slightly and my eyes water, but I don’t pull away.
I want to please him.
I want to show him that I can be whatever he wants.
Kane groans, his hand gripping the back of my head, guiding my rhythm. “Yes... just like that. Take it all, you beautiful little thing.”
He follows me to the floor, pinning me on my back and fucking me one last time.
I’m no longer the shy baker.
I’m a woman possessed, screaming, clawing at his back, begging for every inch of him.
When the final climax hits, it’s explosive. We both collapse onto the tile as the shower rains around us, drenched in sweat and fluids, breathing hard.
After a moment, Kane pulls me into his chest and kisses the top of my head. “I thought I knew how sweet you’d be,” he rasps. “I wasn’t even close to right.”
We lie there for a while. Eventually, Kane reaches up to shut off the showerhead, then swaddles me in two towels and carries me back to the bed.
I’m limp and unresisting. He could stuff me into a cannon and fire me off like a circus stuntwoman and I wouldn’t even emit a word of protest right now.
But he just tucks me into bed, extinguishes the lamp, then slips away into the darkness to step back into his clothes.
I’m too tired to make my mouth move, which is maybe a good thing. Because if I could speak, I might ask him to stay.
And I think we both know that would be too much.
I hear him moving around in the dark. A belt buckle. The rustle of his shirt. The soft clink of his rings going back on one at a time.
I don’t open my eyes. I’m not asleep, either. I’m somewhere in between, floating, my body heavy in a way I don’t think I’ve ever felt.
The mattress dips near my hip. His hand comes down on my hair and stays there for a second. He leans down and kisses my temple, and then his weight lifts off the bed and the floorboard by the closet creaks and he’s gone.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Front door opens, closes.
The deadbolt turns with a key I didn’t know he had.
A car engine.
Then silence.
I lie there in the dark with my hair still damp and my legs still shaking. I could sleep for twenty-four hours if the world would let me. Maybe I will.
I’m sliding under when my phone vibrates on the nightstand.
I almost let it go. But something tells me I should check it.
I reach out, unlock it, and find two messages. Both from Kane.
The first is a photo.
It takes me a second to understand what I’m looking at. It’s me. This morning, in the kitchen. I’m at the steel table with a piping bag in my fist and my hair shoved up in a claw clip and about nine hundred red hearts spread out in front of me.
My apron is filthy. There’s a stripe of raspberry buttercream across my forearm. My mouth is open because I’m talking to somebody, probably telling Cameron for the fourth time that the tall boxes go on the bottom, not the top.
I look busy and sweaty and about as far from the pretty woman in the wine-colored dress as a person can get.
I zoom in on my own face and wait for the old, self-hating reflex to arrive. Double chin. Lunchlady arms. Pooch belly.
But before it finds any of those things, it just sort of putters out and dies.
Because whoever took the picture wasn’t looking at any of that.
I don’t know how to explain it except that I’ve been in ten thousand photographs where I was standing next to somebody the photographer actually wanted, and this isn’t one of them.
The frame is centered on me. Nothing else in it matters. Not the trays, not the wall, not Priya’s elbow at the edge.
Just me.
Then I read the second message. It’s a screenshot of an email.
From: The Membership Council at Dyker Heights Golf & Social Club
Effective immediately, the membership of Mr. Connor J. Boyd is revoked. Mr. Boyd’s guest privileges are likewise terminated. He may not enter the clubhouse, the grounds, or the parking facility. Dues paid through the current calendar year are forfeit per Section 9(c).
Connor loved that club. He didn’t even golf well.
He mostly just went for the bar and the card room and the guys who called him Conn and let him tell the same three stories about his “glory days” over and over and over again.
He paid the dues out of our joint account for six years and never once brought me along, not even just to drive the cart.
It was proof to him that he was the kind of man he always wanted to be.
Without it, what will become of Connor Boyd?
I type out an answer.
ME: You’re going to run out of things to take.
He answers in under a minute.
KANE: No. I won’t.
I put the phone against my chest and lie back down and enjoy it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t.
Then the enjoyment thins out.
Guilt follows.
The car. The casinos. The club. Kane keeps taking things off him, one per holiday, ruthless, efficient, then handing me the torn-up ruins of Connor’s life like fistfuls of confetti.
What happens when that’s no longer fun for him?
What will become of me?
Somebody is going to get hurt. I don’t know who yet.
I type back: Thank you for the evening. I had a nice night.
Then I turn off my phone and go to sleep.