3. Conrad
Conrad
I’ve done my level best to avoid her these past few years, still haunted by that one taste I had of her years ago. She’s all grown up now, and my first glimpse of her panicked, beautiful eyes had enough impact to just about set me on my ass.
I always thought her pretty, but she’s past the awkward teenager stage and well into heartbreaker territory now. Those amber eyes have deep, dark depths, depths I want to dive into, and any man who doesn’t look at that honeyed hair and picture it messy from sex is not a man.
Opening the door a crack, I watch her run down the hall, pushing a maid’s cart and disappearing around a corner. For a second, I consider following her, grabbing her, putting her against the wall—right there in the hallway—and taking her hard and fast.
I don’t, but it’s not because I don’t want to. I really want to. I curb the impulse, though, because it’s too easy. I don’t want easy.
The waitress I came up here with, whatever her name was…she was easy. She was also uninteresting, unenthusiastic, and unaffected by what she begged for.
Phoenix wasn’t unaffected. In spite of the way she ran, she still wants me.
I run the finger I had buried deep in her pussy over my lips, sucking the last of her juices from my fingers. Her come is sweet and tangy, and I want more. I want to drink her pleasure straight from the source.
The only problem is, I’m not the only Titan who wants her. All of us, at one point or another, wanted her for himself. I don’t think any of us has ever fully shaken the schoolboy crushes we had on her.
But me…I was in love with her .
Something about Phoenix was different from the other women we always had chasing and fawning over us. We never felt the urge to treat her the way we did the others, without care or consideration. As an object. Phoenix Jones wasn’t calibrated for that.
Or at least…we didn’t feel that way in the beginning. Now? I don’t know what I feel for Phoenix. Everything is all kinds of twisted up where she’s concerned, my love for her entwined with anger and bitterness and hurt I’ve tried my damnedest to banish over the years.
We were all infatuated with her long before we became the Titans. As far back as middle school, when we were all just a group of gangly kids passing time at their parents’ workplace, we were fascinated by Phoenix Jones.
For a brief while, she was fascinated by us. Or me, at any rate. Then it all imploded in a teary break-up fit for the Lifetime channel.
“I can’t do this, Con.”
“Can’t do what?” I tried to tug her toward the bed we had made love in the night before and woken up in this morning. She pulled free of me, turning away and reaching for her shirt .
“This…” She gestured around the room, her expression panicked. “All of this. You. Me. Did you know I’ve been getting notes in my locker? Messages in my phone…all of them telling me I’m a slut. I’m a whore, and I’m not good enough. And…”
I watched in horror as her lip quivered. “Phoenix…you have to ignore that stuff. It’s just some jealous girl; it’s bullshit ? —”
“No.” She shouts the word and then holds a palm up, visibly calming herself. “No,” she repeats, quieter now. “It’s not bullshit. They’re right. My dad’s a deadbeat, I’m a nothing, and this…this thing between us is going nowhere.”
“Phoenix, don’t do this.” I didn’t understand what was happening. I just knew I was losing her and couldn’t stop it.
Dressed now, she walked toward the door. “It’s what’s best.”
She doesn’t look back as the door closes behind her with a soft snick of sound.
As far as reasons to break up with someone were concerned, I thought hers was lame. I tried cornering her a couple of times and demanding something better, but Phoenix managed to avoid me for the remainder of that year. I went on to college that fall and did my level best to forget about her .
My friends helped. She was a bitch, obviously. Not worthy of Titan dick. Because that’s what we were—Titans. From the time we’d entered high school and women began noticing us for our bodies, or our parents’ money, or our power, that’s what we were.
Titans.
Where did she get off turning up her nose at that? At me? She was nothing.
Women treated us like we were larger than life, like fucking gods , and we let them. We took advantage of it, bending them to our will and enjoying their company, their bodies, and everything else they gave us so willingly.
It held a certain appeal, as long as we kept them an arm’s length away. The last thing any of us needed were clingy women sinking their claws into us. Early on, there were enough close calls with crazies and stalkers that we learned fast to keep things casual…and maybe a little cruel.
I moved on from Phoenix, but I didn’t forget the lesson she taught me. Never again would I give another girl the same kind of sweetness and affection I’d given her. I don’t even know why I bothered trying .
Puppy love, I guess. I can still remember watching her when we were kids.
Her mom was dead or gone or something, and her dad was employed at the resort in the maintenance department.
A nice guy, but weak. From the time she was little, Phoenix accompanied him on the job.
I guess he didn’t want to leave her at home by herself.
When he had the urge to gamble, though—which was often—he had no trouble leaving her to her own devices while he ran off to the casino.
She had no money, no friends, and nothing to do.
We’d see her wandering the halls, or shadowing Evelyn, head of housekeeping.
As she got older, she got bolder and dodged the managers in order to head out to the pool.
Technically, she shouldn’t have been using it. She wasn’t a guest at the resort, and she had no adult supervision. If she had drowned in the pool, her dad could have and probably would have sued the resort. But we made sure no one bothered her.
I was never really sure why we had done that for her.
Maybe it was because we understood the pain of having parents who forgot we existed .
Maybe, as she got older, it was because we just liked the way she looked in that tiny bikini as she lay by the pool with a book and pretended that she belonged there.
Now she’s all grown up, and I know exactly where she belongs.
Under me.
Discovering Phoenix in my closet was like drawing a royal flush in some cosmic game of poker. Against every odd, fate has given me a second chance. Not at love—I’m done with that—but with breaking her heart and tossing her away, just like she did me.
I can’t help the smile plastered across my face as I grab my phone to let the others know who I had just found in my closet.
Con: Guess what I just did.
Maverick: The blonde you dragged upstairs. Congrats?
Con: No. Well—yeah, but she sucked. All bark, no bite.
Atticus: Not the one who asked to see your black card first? The coke whore?
Atticus: Shocked she wasn’t a goddess in bed .
Con: Smartass. No, guess who I found in my closet. Watching me rail her.
Maverick: Sounds kinky. Who?
Con: Phoenix fucking Jones.
Con: Spying from the closet, soaking wet. Dragged her out. Made her come on my fingers. She clamped down like she hadn’t been touched in years.
Storm: Bullshit.
Storm: Why would she spy on you?
Con: No idea. But she did. And after I slid a finger in her ass, she ran out of the room like I lit her on fire.
Con: Mark my words, boys—by the end of this summer, she’s going to be on her knees begging for my cock.
Atticus: Did it maybe occur to you she was in your closet because she panicked? Cleaning the room. Wrong time, wrong place?
Con: Nah. If she wasn’t into it, she wouldn’t have been dripping for me.
Maverick: Or maybe she was into the blonde?
Maverick: Closet spying and closet gay ?
Storm: Honestly more believable than her being into you.
Con: Fuck all of you.
Just as I type out a longer message before heading to my bathroom and finishing what the waitress couldn’t, my father’s face pops up on my phone, and it rings.
There’s nothing quite like a parent calling you to kill a boner.
“Sir?” I answer, knowing that this will not be a pleasant conversation.
“Why?” my father screams. It isn’t really a question.
He isn’t asking anything; he is gearing up for a rant, so I sit back on my bed and wait for him to get through whatever he’s going to say.
I set the phone down on the bed next to me, still able to hear him clearly without even putting the phone on speaker.
It’s always the same.
Blah blah blah blah blah do you know how much we have sacrificed for you? Yada yada yada yada yada you have so many more opportunities than your mother and I did .
It goes on and on and on. I let my mind drift to Phoenix and all the things I’m going to do to her when I get her under me where she belongs.
“I’m serious, Con,” he yells again, pulling my attention back to the phone.
“We cannot have you doing anything like this again. You and your friends have almost destroyed everything I’ve worked for, and one of these days, you’re going to get yourself into something I can’t rescue you from.
This summer I’m hiring someone to watch you, because apparently at twenty-two years old, you need a fucking babysitter.
I just need to find someone willing to put up with you and your?—”
“Phoenix Jones,” I answer before I even know what I’m saying.
“What?” my father barks, clearly not expecting that answer from me.
Hell, I wasn’t expecting it, either, but I sure as fuck am going to run with it.
“Look, you want someone to watch me and the guys, someone that won’t necessarily stop us from partying or having a good time, but someone willing to rat us out if we cross a line, right? ”
“Yeah,” he says, his tone full of suspicion.
“Phoenix Jones. She’s the girl who hung around the resort all the time when her father went to go play on the boats. The one who broke the drunk senator’s nose at the pool that one time. She works for you now…a maid, I think.”
“That one. I remember. You dated her for a couple of months, but?—”
“Hear me out. She’s maybe a year younger than me and the guys, but she is the only girl in the resort that we can’t have bending to our will in a blink. She also depends on the resort for her paycheck. Hire her.”
I have to bite back a laugh remembering how the senator was swearing up and down. He was going to take the hotel, pull our gambling and liquor licenses, and have the girl arrested for assault. My father was pissed off and a little worried, trying to get the asshole to calm down.
The look on his face when I said the girl in question was seventeen, and we had surveillance footage of him grabbing that underage girl’s tit…
it was priceless. He ended up paying us about fifty thousand to co ver that up.
I wanted to give the money to Phoenix directly.
My father gave it to her loser dad, and it was back in my family casino’s vault within the hour.
That was the first time I asked her out.
“Why should I let you choose your babysitter?”
“Because I haven’t been able to fuck her,” I say bluntly. “Neither have any of the guys. We all want to. Give her to us for the summer, let her distract us.”
“This is supposed to be a punishment, not a reward.”
“Look at it this way. You need something that’s going to hold our attention for the entire summer so we stay out of trouble. If you hire anyone else, we’re just going to ditch them. Or worse. You want us to behave…she’s how we do it. These are my terms.”
“And the others?”
“You let me worry about that. I can promise that playing with Phoenix Jones will be far more entertaining than getting into any more international incidents. ”
“Fine.”
My father disconnects the line, and I sit there staring at my phone for a minute, trying to figure out if what I just got us into will be a good thing or a disaster.
Con: Anyway, things just got more interesting. My father called.
Atticus: Did he sense a disturbance in the Force?
Con: After that “Florida situation,” he wants to assign us a babysitter for the summer.
Storm: Fuck. No.
Maverick: I swear to God, if it’s some retired nun in a pantsuit...
Con: Relax. I made him a counteroffer.
Con: We behave—Titan-level behave—if we choose who watches us.
Atticus: You’re negotiating with terrorists now?
I pause for a moment, letting the tension and anticipation build. They’re wondering why the fuck I would agree to something so stupid, so inherently opposite of everything we stand for .
Con: I told him the only person who can handle us is Phoenix Jones.
Storm: Now this I like.
Maverick: I already called dibs on her years ago.
Atticus: What’s the angle?
God, I hate how he can always see three steps ahead of everyone else.
Con: Simple. We move her into our suite. She gets her own room—but she’s under our thumb, 24/7.
Storm: You want her boxed in. Watched. Controlled.
...You sure this is about revenge, Con? Or are you looking to cage something that got away?
That one hits too close to the bone. I stare at the screen, jaw tight.
Con: First one to make her beg for their cock—on her knees, soaking, saying the words—wins.
Maverick: I’m in.
Atticus: Rules?
Con: No dick in pussy until she begs, but we can make her do whatever else we want. I’ll write the NDA she has to sign myself. Also, it only counts if she begs sober. No cheating by slipping her X or molly or some shit. A few drinks are fine, but she has to know what she is begging for.
Storm: If she never begs?
Atticus: Then maybe she wins.
Con: That won’t happen. She’s still mine. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Maverick: I’m in
Storm: In
Atticus: Fuck, me too. Let the games begin.