Chapter 13
chapter thirteen
Natalia
Pretending I had a job was harder than keeping my real one a secret. I was planning the wedding entirely from the driver's seat of my car on most days, relying on retail therapy and drive-thru meals to keep me company. If it weren’t for the fear of getting caught and arrested for public indecency I might have also started filming content from the front seat, too.
Our client base declined every time we missed a regularly scheduled posting day. Even when Mateo came home early enough to make some quick magic, we were pigeonholed into short, uninspired bursts of coitus by the looming presence down the hall. I missed my apartment bedroom and the makeshift studio Matty and I used to film most of our sex in when Frankie was still living in Florida. Back when things were easy and I could orgasm as loud as I wanted to whether it was six at night or nine in the morning.
Five o’clock rolled around and I made my way back to the house after yet another grueling day of bumming Wi-Fi from the local library to field important vendor phone calls and emails. In the last week I’d finalized the floral arrangements, sticking to the classic white rose theme that was elegant, but ultimately boring, and mailed the invitations, which were equally sophisticated and forgettable. I had to remind myself several times that black tie was everything I ever wanted for my wedding day, because the more I agonized over the details, the more I realized the dream had more to do with proving my parents wrong than color schemes.
The house was quiet inside. I dropped my bag on the entry table and kicked my shoes into the small coat closet by the front door. The Durans were usually milling around the living room but the television was off and the kitchen was empty. Eventually I heard a hushed conversation happening behind the open crack in the guest room door. Anna was folding laundry into piles on the bed, and David was sitting near the headboard. I would have walked away had I not heard my name mumbled in the conversation.
“She means well,” Anna was saying. “But I have to worry, or what kind of mother would I be? He’s choosing his friends over his family, he’s barely eating, and he’s having panic attacks.”
“Times are different, Anna,” David answered. “Women aren’t traditional anymore, they’re independent. They have full-time jobs just like their husbands, and when they have kids they put them in daycare. It’s how the world is going.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Anna’s voice dipped lower, but not low enough that I couldn’t hear it. “It might make sense if they had a baby, but…she’s here , most of the time. All I’m saying is that Mateo goes to work all day until late at night. The least he should expect is a hot meal when he gets home at the end of it.”
“But he loves her,” David reasoned. “That’s enough sometimes. Maybe when all this honeymooning wears off and reality sets in he’ll smarten up and tell her what he needs.”
“He’s head over heels,” Anna said. “And she’s young and has to learn a thing or two before beauty gets boring.”
My chest felt caged in, lungs swelling against iron bars. I wanted to crawl inside my own skin and hide. Part of me was ready to burst out of the shadows and confront what I’d heard, but most of me collapsed in on myself, regressing back to that young, insecure teenager being scolded by her parents for having no motivation or redeeming qualities. This was worse than that, because all I’d ever tried to do was make Mateo’s parents like me, and they still somehow came to the same conclusion.
What if they were right? Being a partner to someone was more than taking up their space, and sooner or later Mateo was going to realize that I wasn’t the type of woman you’d want as a wife. I wasn’t a homemaker. I couldn’t even blame the staff of chefs and maids that I grew up with for it. I never learned because I didn’t have to. It was pure laziness. I was exactly what Anna and David were saying I was, and now I wasn’t sure if Mateo felt the same and chose to ignore it all this time because I was loyal and good at the one thing every man wants. Sex.
That’s what I got for eavesdropping. Before I could hear anything more, I carefully tiptoed away, folding my lips over my teeth and biding a few extra seconds to get into our bedroom, close the door, and sink to the wood to let myself cry.
As a distraction, I made myself busy doing the pre-production work for our Valentine’s Day shoot. It was the loneliest, horniest holiday of the year, and if it went anything like our previous together, it would also be our most lucrative. We had requests pouring in for video gifts and personalized Hard-O-Grams, as I had named them, and a poll for the livestream showed the current vote for sex position of choice was the pretzel dip. Classic.
I didn’t leave my bubble of sorrow until I heard the front door open long after dinnertime and Mateo’s voice greeting his mom and dad. My insecurities were irritated like a rash I kept on scratching, and every time I looked in the mirror I was more and more unsure that the man I was going to marry was even attracted to me anymore. I’d become too comfortable, I couldn’t cook a roast or iron a dress shirt without leaving it worse than it began, and like his mom said, once the novelty of a wife with a shallow G-spot wore off, eventually I would be useless.
The door to the small laundry room was cracked when I crept down the hall and I ducked my head inside to see Mateo tugging his work polo over his head and tossing it into a half-full washer. The movement tousled his hair, and it fell so perfectly across his forehead and in wispy strands in front of his eyes I leaned against the frame to admire it for a second as he filled the machine with detergent and turned it on.
He noticed me staring and a smile curled his lips. “Hi, angel.”
“Hi,” I hummed back. He tugged his white undershirt from his jeans and unfastened his belt before pulling it entirely out of the loops and setting it aside. “Can I help?”
I didn’t wait for an answer before slipping into the room, nudging the white door closed behind me and twisting the lock. Mateo’s eyebrow lifted at the sound of the soft click. “Are we hiding from something, Natalia?”
“Maybe,” I answered coyly. The rumbling washer swished to life as I wedged myself in the space between it and Mateo. My breasts pressed into the bottom of his ribs, spilling over the low neckline of my tank top. I looked up at him but he was already looking down, gaze hooded, focused where I expected him to be, and then those yellow-brown eyes found mine and need rushed violently between my legs.
Both sides of his jaw twitched, and his throat corded on a swallow as I trailed my long fingertips across the rough denim on his thighs, up to the hem of his undershirt, and slipped them beneath. His stomach pulled taut under my touch, and I drew circles in the light-brown hair that swirled around his belly button and down toward his waist.
“There’s nothing suspicious about doing laundry together with the door locked,” he reasoned. “Perfectly normal.”
“The dryer broke,” I joked, tugging open his pants button then bouncing onto my tiptoes to reach the exposed skin at his collarbone, lashing my tongue against his neck.
“Goddammit, woman,” he said gruffly, his fingers looped into the band of my jeans. “You know my mother’s thirty feet away.”
“I distinctly remember you saying you could fuck me anytime, anywhere, any way you please.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t. But you can’t keep your mouth shut when I’m inside you, Tally. I’m not sure you want everyone hearing you while you cry on my cock.”
My face flamed, the hint of degradation sending me far away from any rational decision making. He knew what those words would do to me. “I’ll be quiet,” I promised, taking the lobe of his ear between my teeth and biting down lightly. The soft groan it pulled out of his chest surprised us both.
“What is this about?” Mateo lifted me to sit atop the washing machine and wrenched my knees apart. When he stepped between my legs our noses were nearly brushing. “Something got you all hot and bothered while I was at work? Tell me.”
I hid my face as his vein-swathed hands rubbed up and down my legs, squeezing gently at the juncture of my hips, and setting my nerves on edge. “It’s not that.”
“Don’t lie. I’ll get it out of you my way if you do.”
Most of Mateo’s threats did the opposite of the intended effect. My blood raced at the thought of a punishment, his hands around my neck, a red ass, edging, withholding. I could turn myself on just imagining it, but he was doing all the work himself.
“I’m not.” His touch climbed up my body and tangled in the hair at the nape of my neck. I let my head fall to the side ever so slightly and Matty’s gentle lips grazed the spot where my pulse hammered just below my ear. “I was working.”
“So I was right.”
“I was thinking about you and how stressed you’ve been.” I slid the zipper of his pants down. “I don’t take care of you enough.”
Mateo’s eyes flitted to the closed door as I peeled the band of his boxer briefs away from his body and slid my hand into them, coiling my fingers around a hot, hard shaft. His hips jarred into it, asking for more while I tugged slowly.
“Fucking Christ, Tal, you’re more than taking care of me.”
He wrenched the low neckline of my top down, uncovering my budding, sensitive breasts and with my free hand I lowered his head, guiding his mouth to suck on them, one after the other. His cock beaded with precum under my fingertips.
“Doesn’t this bother you?” I gestured to the washing machine.
“I have no complaints about fucking you on the washer. In fact I’m thinking about turning you around and bending you over it.”
“No, not that. Does it bother you that you had to do your own laundry? That the washer was full when you got home?”
His head lifted, nose meeting the curve of my cheek. “What?”
“Or do you ever wish I had dinner plated for you in the kitchen when you walked through the door?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t dislike that.”
“So you’re disappointed that it’s not something I do often.” I kissed him, dipping my tongue into his mouth and swirling it against his.
“I didn’t say that,” he mumbled against my lips.
Mateo jerked my pants down my hips, my skin prickling against the cold metal of the washer and I managed to kick out of one leg, leaving the jeans and my panties dangling on an ankle. “Do you think I’m lazy?” I asked. “Am I a spoiled brat?”
“Yes,” he answered half-heartedly, focused on the space between my legs and where it met his tented boxers. With another quick look at the closed door he put his palm out in front of my chin. “Spit.”
“Yes?”
“Spit.” His eyes were all pupils.
“Mateo, this is serious.”
“You want to know if I think you’re spoiled, when this is the third time I’ve asked you to spit and I still haven’t spanked your ass for not listening yet? Yes, Natalia, you are fucking spoiled. I spoil you, I pamper you, and I am a patient man with you when all I want to do is break you because I can’t turn that part of me off completely.” He squeezed my cheeks together, puckering my mouth. “Now do what you’re told, brat. Or I’ll leave you in this laundry room with your pussy dripping and an empty hole where my cock should be filling it.”
My mind looped. I had come into this laundry room to seduce my fiancé as a twisted way of reminding myself he was irrevocably in love with me, desired me, needed me, and that all these insecurities were baseless. All I’d managed to get was half-naked on the top of a washing machine; confirm that I was indeed useless, spoiled, and lazy; and transfer every ounce of control to Mateo in a split second. Now I wasn’t just sad and horny, I was also spitting into a hand like a?—
“ Good little slut ,” Mateo purred. “I knew you had it in you.” He shimmied his pants and boxers down enough for his cock to spring free between us and rubbed my spit down the shaft and over the head while my core fluttered in waiting.
Was this self-sabotage? My fingernails dug into the soft cotton of his T-shirt as Mateo pushed closer, notching himself inside me, even sinking in that tiny amount that had my eyes pinching closed and a dulcet whimper trickling out of me. I almost gave in—I nearly let go and let myself get lost in this little raunchy moment hidden behind our laundry room door with the spin cycle bustling beneath me. But I would have never gotten over it if I did.
“I just want to be enough for you,” I blurted. “I want to know you’re going to love me if all I can cook is a freezer pizza and scrambled eggs. Or if I forget to switch the wet laundry over to the dryer for a day and it starts to stink. And if I don’t leave the house for three days and waste away in the bedroom buried in work unshowered in your sweatpants.”
His dick was at least two inches inside me and came to a dead, pulsing stop as Matty refocused. Like he’d been drunk and splashed with ice cold water. My breathing galloped, juxtaposed between the feeling of us connected and the intensity of his stare. He didn’t pull out.
“Where is this coming from, baby?”
“It’s been on my mind.”
“Natalia.”
“Really.”
He slid out and thrust back into the same spot and my entire body shuddered. “What do you think I did before you?”
I absentmindedly played with the long, soft hair at the nape of his neck. “Waited for me to show up.”
His hum of approval accompanied another push of his hips deeper inside me. My legs parted to accommodate the space he took up between them. “I am a grown fucking man, Tally. I can feed myself, I can wash my own clothes, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but I can even fuck myself. Now, it’d never compare to this”—he enunciated that point with another thrust, bottoming out as my head dropped backwards—“but you are not my keeper. You’re my partner.”
A whine of satisfaction shot out of me as he picked up a steadier rhythm, and Mateo glared in warning. I dug my face into the crook of his neck, picking up all the subdued notes of his aftershave still lingering from the morning. He somehow smelled even better after a long day than freshly showered. “You know how much I want your mom’s blessing.”
“Shhh.” Mateo shook his head.
“Did you just shush me?”
“Did you just bring up my mother while I’m inside you?”
I couldn’t stop thinking about his mother. She was the catalyst to this entire thing. “We’re multitasking.”
Behind the closed door a dust bunny had gathered in matted lint and shed hair and I frowned at how long I’d probably gone without noticing it, and how I would likely never gaze around a room again without thinking about how dirty I’d let it get. The corner of the ceiling was cobwebbed, the decorative circular mirror hanging over the hamper in the corner was smudged, and the light from the window hit it perfectly at this time of the day. When I blinked out of my self-reflecting daze and returned my focus to Mateo, he was already staring back at me.
“What did she say?”
My chin fell. “No, it’s nothing. I’m just feeling shitty about dinner again.”
“That wasn’t even your fault, that was my fault. If I hadn’t gone off the deep end everyone would have eaten your amazing dinner and there wouldn’t even be a doubt in your mind.” His fingers guided my head back up, but I still didn’t meet his eyes. “You’re not telling me something.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, gesturing to my bare boobs and our lewd bodies. “Can we just…get back to this? This is something I know I’m great at.”
Matty butted our foreheads together, invading my space. “Look at me, Tally.” It only took a glance for him to make my walls come crumbling down. He looked at me like the thoughts were written in my irises. “I know you.”
“I know.” I sighed.
“So?”
“The last thing I want to do is cause more of a rift between you and your parents,” I said reluctantly. “It’s not important.”
“If it’s important to you it’s important to me. Let me guess, she said something passive aggressive about housework? Went on a tangent about what she does for my dad?”
“It wasn’t exactly passive.”
Mateo’s brows jumped. “You’re kidding.”
“I wasn’t supposed to hear them talking. I came home this afternoon and they were whispering in the bedroom. Well, as much of a whisper as your mom can manage.”
“Which is a normal speaking voice,” Mateo said.
“Right, and it wasn’t that bad, it just got me thinking. That I’m young, and you were attracted to me based on appearance first, and that probably makes it easy to overlook the things you wouldn’t otherwise. But I won’t always have great tits, and my skin will definitely wrinkle. Plus I’ve pulled no less than five gray hairs out of my head in the last month. So when that all starts to happen, I also can’t cook like your mom, and I don’t pack you lunch every day like your mom, or fold the laundry the same way as your mom, or with nearly enough frequency as her.”
“Then it’s a damn good thing I don’t want to marry my fucking mom.” He pinched the bridge of his nose until the skin turned purple. “You’re not giving me any credit at all here, Tally. Do you think all you are to me is a warm body? Maybe the issue is actually your confidence in me as a husband and nothing to do with what someone might have said about the dirty dishes. Do you think I’d stop loving you over that?”
“Well, that’s pretty selfish.” I crossed my arms. “You were begging me to tell you what’s bothering me, even though I felt self-conscious about it because I know it’s dumb. I was vulnerable, looking for some reassurance, and you’ve gone and made it about you.”
“It’s not making it about me , it is about me. If you think that if you gain a few pounds and grow a few stretch marks I’m going to start looking around at how good of a job you’re doing with your ‘wifely duties’, that is a direct reflection of how you view our relationship.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I countered, frustrated.
“Then explain it to me, Natalia.”
“Don’t call me Natalia when we’re arguing. You’re not my father.”
Mateo’s head tilted and the corner of his lip tugged upward. “Well now that’s opening up a whole other can of worms.”
“That!” I yelped. “ That is what I’m trying to say.”
He squinted. “I’m not seeing the point.” It’d been several minutes since we addressed that our bodies were still very much connected, and I was mildly impressed he hadn’t gone entirely limp noodle in the midst.
“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”
“For fuck’s sake…” Mateo rolled his neck and his Adam’s apple bobbed.
“Answer the question,” I pressed.
“That’s like fucking bestiality.”
My jaw unhinged. “Oh…my… god , Mateo. What am I, the Alaskan fucking bullworm?”
“No, that’s obviously not—” he backtracked, shaking his head.
“Your first thought was, ‘How am I gonna fuck that worm? Where’s the worm hole?’”
He ran a hand across his mouth, concealing a laugh. “You are unhinged.”
“No, now that I think about it, I’m so glad you answered the way you did, because I was right. That was your only concern. Not my personality, or my character, or all the memories we have together. Sex is the most important thing to a man. If it came down to it, you wouldn’t love me if I was a worm because you couldn’t fuck me if I was a worm.”
“I would try,” Mateo said.
“What the fuck?”
“I would try to love you! I would try to love you, if you were a worm. I would carry you around in a little plastic sandwich baggie of dirt or something. I’d become the town psycho walking around talking to my worm bag and calling it my wife.”
“I’d definitely suffocate and die that way.”
Mateo scrubbed his palm down his chin and massaged his jaw. “So how do I win, Tally? What do you want me to say to you right now? This is all about you being insecure. I reassure you day in and day out about how much I love you, how beautiful you are, how deeply I care about you, and today that isn’t enough for some reason. I want you to feel confident in our relationship no matter what outside force gnaws at you. I need it actually, because I’m going to marry you and marrying you isn’t casual to me. So tell me, please. Tell me if I’m not doing enough.”
Guilt rocked through me. Mateo was more than enough; he treated me how every woman dreamed of being treated. I couldn’t help but fall back into bad habits no matter how good it got with him because I was conditioned my entire life to think I wasn’t enough. I was deathly afraid of Mateo realizing one day that I wasn’t either. Worse, the novelty of having a sex-working significant other would wear off for him, or his parents would find out and convince him I was the biggest mistake of his life. Their reaction would be no different than my own parents, that no self-respecting woman would ever take her clothes off for money. And maybe they were right. Maybe my respect for myself laid in other people’s respect for me.
Before I could say anything the door handle to the laundry room started jarring violently and every single hair on my body stood up like lightning had struck.
“Mateo, are you in there?” Anna bellowed, jingling the handle again despite it being locked, like an impatient toddler outside a parked car.
Matty fumbled from inside me and tugged the neck of my tank top up over my tits again, scrambling just as quickly to tuck himself away and zip his jeans closed. Our eyes were wide and frantic, and my skin turned a glorious freshly sunburned shade as I jumped down off the washing machine and hopped gracelessly on one leg to put my pants back on. It was a mess of hushing and pitter-patter; my heel slammed into the metal appliance and Mateo cleared his throat entirely too loudly to try to mask it.
“Mateo?” Anna’s voice was closer, like she was pressed against the door and sniffing it.
“Just a sec!” he answered.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Um.” He looked at me. “Laundry?”
Unhappy with that reply the door handle jiggled again, more aggressively.
“Fuck, she’s gonna know,” I whispered. I’d barely gotten over the embarrassment of the dildo debacle and now we were getting caught in pound town again.
“She won’t.” Mateo paced in front of me. “Will she?”
“We’re in here with the door locked. What else could we be doing?”
“Is that Natalia?” Anna murmured through the wood.
Mateo ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah she—she got stuck in the dryer. I was helping her get out.”
My eyebrows creased and my jaw dropped open. “Stuck in the dryer?” I mouthed. Anna was never going to believe that, and the cliché would haunt me.
“Well, is she okay?” Anna’s voice hinted at genuine concern. “Need help? I can get a stick of butter; it'll loosen her right up.”
“How big does your mother think I am?” I mumbled sharply and Mateo’s palm came down over my lips.
“Don’t worry, she slipped right out of there like nothing when I got her a little wet.”
The bastard had the audacity to wink at me before unlocking the door and swinging it open, dismissing us, his mother, our conversation, and the ever-nagging feeling that sooner or later this was all going to feel like shaking a bottle of soda and opening the cap for it to blow up.