Chapter 5 — Not For Him #3
He guided me backward until my calves hit the mattress. He laid me down, following me, his body covering mine. The weight of him was a profound relief, a pressure that grounded me. He kissed my neck, my collarbone, his mouth leaving a trail of fire.
“Look at me,” he whispered against my skin.
I opened my eyes. His face was above mine, his expression fierce, intent. He wasn’t looking at Ben. He wasn’t performing. He was here, with me. He shifted, settling between my thighs. I felt the hot, hard length of his cock press against my belly.
He reached down between us, his fingers finding my pussy. I was already wet, slick with a treacherous mix of dread and desire. He stroked me, his touch knowing, direct. His thumb circled my clit, and I arched off the bed, a sharp gasp escaping me.
“That’s it,” he murmured, his eyes locked on mine. “Just feel it.”
He added a finger, sliding it inside me, curling it. The sensation was too much and not enough. My hips rocked against his hand, seeking more. The room, Ben’s presence, it all began to blur at the edges, smeared by a gathering need.
Leo withdrew his hand. He reached to the nightstand, where a condom lay waiting.
Ben must have put it there. The clinical, prepared nature of it was a splash of cold reality.
Leo tore the packet open with his teeth and rolled it on, his movements efficient.
Then he was back over me, bracing himself on his arms.
He nudged at my entrance. “Tell me you want this,” he said, his voice rough.
I looked past his shoulder. Ben was leaning forward in his chair, his drink forgotten on the floor. His face was a study in anguish. He was getting his show. The most explicit, raw performance of his life.
I brought my gaze back to Leo. “I want you.”
He pushed inside.
It was a deep, slow, devastating fill. I cried out, my nails digging into his back. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, letting me feel every inch of him. Then he began to move.
This wasn’t the rhythmic, staged fucking of our first time under Ben’s gaze.
This was urgent, almost brutal. Leo drove into me with a focused intensity, each thrust a punctuation mark in a silent argument.
His hips slapped against mine, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room.
The headboard knocked softly against the wall in a steady, relentless rhythm.
“Look at me,” he demanded again, and I did. His eyes were black with passion, with a kind of furious ownership. He was fucking the world away, fucking Ben out of the room, fucking me into a space where only the two of us existed.
My climax built like a storm, swift and violent. The coil of tension in my belly tightened with every thrust, every grind of his pelvis against my clit. I could hear my own sounds, sharp, animal cries that I didn’t recognize. I could hear Ben’s ragged breathing from the chair.
“Come for me, Talia,” Leo growled, his pace becoming erratic, desperate. “Come for me now.”
It broke over me, a wave that crashed through every nerve ending. My vision whited out. I shattered around him, my body convulsing, a long, broken sob torn from my throat. It was intense, overwhelming, almost painful in its reality.
As my spasms began to subside, Leo’s rhythm fractured.
He gave one last, deep thrust and held it, his body going rigid above me.
A low, guttural groan ripped from his chest. I felt the pulse of him inside me through the latex, the final, helpless surrender.
He collapsed onto me, his full weight pressing me into the mattress, his face buried in the crook of my neck.
His breath was hot and ragged against my skin.
We lay there, tangled, spent. The only sounds were our slowing breaths and the faint hum of the city outside the window.
Slowly, the room came back into focus. The taste of sweat and sex filled my mouth. The scent of it, of him, was on the sheets, on my skin. And I was acutely, painfully aware of the third person in the room.
Leo shifted, rolling off me to lie on his side. He pulled out as he moved, the sensation making me flinch. He reached for the condom, dealt with it quietly, then tossed it toward the wastebasket by Ben’s chair. It missed, landing on the floor near Ben’s feet.
A stark, silent offering.
Leo pulled me against him, my back to his chest, his arm draped heavily over my waist. He nuzzled the damp hair at my temple. He didn’t speak.
I looked across the room.
Ben was still in his chair. He was staring at the discarded condom on the floor by his feet.
His face was utterly blank, wiped clean of any emotion.
The glass of whiskey sat untouched beside his chair.
The performance was over. The director had watched his wife fuck another man with a authenticity he could never have choreographed.
He had seen what “real” looked like. And it had eviscerated him.
He stood up. The movement was stiff, robotic. He didn’t look at us. He walked to the bedroom door, paused for a moment with his hand on the frame, his shoulders slumped. Then he left, pulling the door closed behind him with a soft, final click.
The silence he left behind was absolute, a living thing.
Leo tightened his arm around me. “He’s gone,” he murmured into my hair.
But he wasn’t. He was just in the next room. The ghost of him haunted the bed, the air, the space between my skin and Leo’s. The front-row seat was empty, but its shadow stretched across everything.
I lay there, wrapped in the arms of a man who wanted me for myself, and I felt more alone than I ever had in my life.
The hunger had been fed, gorged upon. And now it yawned wider, emptier, knowing exactly what it wanted and knowing, too, that it could never have it without destroying everything in its path.
Leo’s breathing evened out into sleep behind me. I stared at the closed door, at the sliver of light from the hall underneath it.
The watcher had finally left the room. But the watching, I knew, would never end.
It was inside me now, a cold, critical eye judging every touch, every gasp, every moment of stolen pleasure.
I had given Ben the show he’d demanded. And in doing so, I had sentenced us all to a forever performance, one with no curtain call, no applause, just the endless, hollow echo of a desire that had eaten its own tail.