Chapter 20
CHAPTER
TWENTY
LOVIE
“Lay back,” Rich whispers.
I ease back, resting my elbows on the cold granite while he keeps his heavy hand around my throat.
He pulls at the little strings of thread hanging from the bottom of my skirt while his straight brows wrinkle. “Open your legs.”
I spread them as wide as I can, ignoring the urge I have to thrust my middle toward him.
It turns out that my first design of sophomore year is the best piece of clothing to get head in for the first time. The skirt doesn’t give him any trouble as he slides it over my belly button with his free hand, leaving my soiled panties exposed.
I’m really high now—higher than I ever was in Barnes-Blank Park with Terrica and Meechie.
My arms feel like they weigh hundreds of pounds, and Rich looks like a more perfect version of himself, if that’s even possible.
The purplish-red bruises wrap around his eyes like pretty adornments and solidify the silly back and forth I keep having in my head.
God, he is my type—and he just casually said he’d kill AJ…and I think I might be okay with it.
“Rich?” I gasp, reaching for his scarred chin.
He pulls back just as my fingers brush his skin. “Yeah?”
“I think I’m too high.”
He leans over me, letting out a quiet chuckle as that cold, dainty paw print glides across my bare midriff. “I told you I’d teach you how to fly. You scared?”
I nod.
“What you scared for?”
“What if I fall?”
He blubbers out a loud laugh. “Have I ever let you fall?”
“No. You grab me and hold me like I’m a baby,” I whisper.
“‘Cause you are—always will be. Them folks over on Chantilly never hold you and tell you that?”
“No,” I squeak.
He shakes his head, staring between my legs with his eyebrows furrowed, then hooks his finger through the crotch of my panties, pulling them to the side. The cold air tickles my bare middle while he studies my landing strip that had grown out since I left New York.
“You wet, baby?” he utters.
I whine back an incoherent response.
“How long you been walking around me like this?” he asks, unwrapping his fingers from my neck.
“Ever since you taught me how to breathe.”
He lets out the quietest groan. “Turn around.”
“Huh?”
“Turn around and get on your knees.”
I don’t comprehend what he’s asking at first because AJ never asked me to do anything like that. We never even had spontaneous sex on the kitchen island in our apartment. Everything with him had turned mechanical and sterile—even our kisses.
Rich tilts his head. “You heard me?”
I nod, pulling myself up and reaching for my heels, but he swats my hand away from them. “Don’t do that.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he shushes me by curling his hand around my chin.
“If you gon’ wear shit like this for me, then wear it.
I ain’t AJ. I’ll make you go run my errands in it, then have you come home and fuck me while you tell me how many men you had to turn down all because you like wearing heels to the grocery store. I like when you dress up for me.”
I hold in a ragged moan.
There are so many things I need to say to let him know he can’t have me so open like this, but all that comes out is a raspy, “Rich…”
“Get on your knees.”
I twist my body around, shuffling further onto the island with my skirt hiked up to my stomach. As soon as I get on my knees, my back dips and my ass rises easily.
He hooks his finger back into the side of my panties and pulls them until the fabric digs into my skin and lets out a shrill rip. He tosses the torn panties next to my head, and I let out a ragged sigh while another cold draft blows across my exposed lips.
I feel his eyes on places I’ve never even seen. They trace the puckered hole between my glutes while warmth crawls across my face, but I can’t harp on my embarrassment because nothing hurts anymore—not my side, my head, or my heart. He had numbed it all.
“Slim?” he bellows from behind me.
“Yes?”
“You see what happens when you don’t listen to me? We ain’t supposed to be doing this.”
“But I—”
“I let you taste me to get me out your system. That was supposed to be it, you know that, right? Why you like chasing me? Huh?”
All the reasons dance around in my head. I sift through them one by one, searching for the right one that won’t scare him away because he’s a runner too. He just doesn’t know it.
His hard hand lands in the center of my ass, making me slide forward and bellow out a sloppy, “Oomph.” I swear I hear the sharp crack echoing through his quiet kitchen long after his hand made contact with my skin.
I bite down on my lip, widening my eyes as my nipples harden.
I shouldn’t have liked that.
And I shouldn’t want him to do it again.
“Rich…”
I shouldn’t even be panting his name like I am right now.
“Don’t do that shit,” he rasps in a strained voice.
“Do what?”
“Try to find some safe answer when I ask you something like that. Just answer me. Why you keep coming to me? Why you keep chasing after a man like me?”
“It’s ‘cause you see me,” I rush out. “And I see you. Remember?”
His rough fingers press into my lower back, gliding across it. They stop on my ass, digging into my skin.
“I’m not Rasheeda, Beatrice or…or that random girl who texted you outside.
I know you. I know what you like, what you are, I…
I literally have your smell embedded in my memory,” I mutter out pathetically.
“They didn’t even spend your birthday with you, but I did. And I got you exactly what you wanted.”
“And what was that?”
“Me. You wanted me. Not some stupid cake. You just wanted to see me again…an…and I wanted to see you too. I’m not too proud to admit it.”
He kneads my skin, then drops his hand on the other side of my ass, spreading both cheeks until I gasp.
“You know, I do some really stupid things to get to you. I don’t listen, I lie, I sneak away, but I always come. I always come when you want me,” I moan. “Even when you’re too scared to ask for me. I…I always com—”
His mouth covers the puckered hole between my glutes, and my voice climbs into a piercing yelp that makes my vocal cords tingle. “Ri—Da—Pup.”
All the names I associate with him fumble together into one big unintelligible ball—even the one I keep locked away in my subconscious.
It’s the one that random girl typed out proudly in her text.
AJ always begged me to moan it out when we made love, but I could never say it.
With Rich, it shoots up my throat in a terrifyingly easy way without him even having to bury his dick inside me.
I hold on tight to it in case it tries to fight its way out again.
“Oh my…God…” my voice trembles.
His tongue swirls around the hole, stabbing at its entrance, and the cold pendant from his necklace slaps against my wet lips. I slide forward and try to claw my way across the counter, but his hand lands against my ass in another one of those stinging slaps that hurts so good.
“Where you going?” he murmurs from behind me. “Come back.”
“But… I never—nobody ever did that to me.”
“I know. That’s why you gotta let me show you how good it feels,” he coos.
My body relaxes underneath his hands, and I collapse, letting my face fall against the cold granite.
The coarse hairs from his goatee tickles the thin skin between my cheeks, and I yelp out another carnal moan while I relax my clenched muscles, finally letting him in.
His tongue pushes through—darting in and out in a dizzying rhythm that makes me forget where I am and that certain thoughts are supposed to stay in my head.
“I just want you so bad,” I cry, gasping between each word. “I just wanna be your friend.”
Tears line my tear ducts and coat my lashes while the words pour out of me in a way that makes my fingers curl against his countertop.
Friend?
God, what was I? Twelve?
I drop my head into the crook of my arm, letting out a deep groan.
“But I thought Lovie Sinclair didn’t beg to be nobody’s friend,” he murmurs back, laughing. “What happened, baby?”
“You.” I hiccup.
“What I tell you about friends?”
“That…that they’ll only get me in trouble.”
“Uh-huh. So you gonna let me get you in trouble?”
I nod.
He lets out a quiet tsk. “Hardheaded.”
There’s an embarrassing puddle beneath my cheek made up of tears and drool because I can’t close my mouth or dry my tear ducts.
I choke on a gasp.
Terrica was such a fuckin liar.
She had to know that Rich was everything a girl like me would want. How could she possibly think that I wouldn’t figure out he had always been my type? I was just too busy being blinded by promises of Chanel, Paris Fashion Week, and French 75s.
Rich wasn’t from some affluent suburb, he didn’t go to private school, and he didn’t surprise me with a new Chanel bag after beating me senseless.
He was from right here off Joliet and Pine, he went to Carter Wesley High, he had no plans outside of being a fighter at Lucky’s, and he holds me like the baby I am when I’m scared.
He lays another wet kiss on that one forbidden hole then leaves a trail of them as he journeys to another place AJ never put his lips.
He breathes over my wet mound. “You gonna let me in?”
I nod, croaking out an unintelligible word.
“Then you gonna let me finish feeding you dinner and you gonna go back over to Chantilly, huh? Because we really not supposed to be doing this.”
His warm breath tickles my exposed bottom and my legs slide across the counter while I shake my head.
Another thwack lands against my ass, and I’m happy for it because these are the slaps I should take in stride.
They’re the ones I should revel in and smile at when I’m thinking about them on a random Tuesday.
“How you wanna go back? You want me to take you back over there or put you in another Uber?”
“I’m not going back there.”
He laughs so hard that my mouth curves into a smile just from the sound of it. “You gotta start listening to me. You understand, baby? Kenny will kill me. Tell me you’re gonna go back home after this.”