Chapter 21
I’m roused from sleep by the most incredible dream.
One where Mr. Masculinity himself is devouring me.
His tongue sweeps a slow, deliberate path up my slit before settling his lips over my clit and sucking with the intensity of a commercial vacuum.
His beard glistens with my arousal when he surfaces for air before diving back in to continue his delicious machinations.
Oh my God, this man brings performance to every aspect of life, the boardroom and the bedroom.
“Shhhhh baby, I’ve got you. Let go for me, that’s it.” His affirmation speaks to my soul. My fingertips, buried in fistfuls of sheet, rise to delve into the silky strands of his tousled hair, the fibers still damp from a recent shower, and he smells oh so fucking good.
“Mason?” This is not a dream.
“Let go,” he orders, alternating between licking and sucking. Actual licking and sucking. Mason is perched between my spread thighs, the hazy remnants of dreamy sleep dissolving into alarming reality.
“What—” My head lies heavy on his designer pillowcase. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you my belated birthday present.” He grins, fucking grins at me from his determined position in the V of my spread thighs. “I want to make you feel good, but I’m also concerned about not aggravating any bruising or swelling. By now, I think I know what your body needs.”
Before I can answer, he’s straight back to work, his tongue circling my clit while his thumbs hold me open, exposed.
Pleasure coils its way from my core in a pulse so strong my back bows.
My limbs move with uncontrollable rigidity as he pulls the most filthy words from me in a slew of chants and exclamations.
One last lick, a type of pinch and suck, and I’m floating, the coil of want and need exploding in a wash of satiation I have never experienced before.
Mason winks before withdrawing and resettling my shaking legs as I slowly sink back to post-orgasm reality.
Once my eyes flutter open again, I notice he’s naked and hard.
The plum-colored tip of his crown is swollen and leaking.
“No,” he says with a hint of authority. “I don’t expect anything from you. You’re recovering, your body faced trauma, and I wanted it to experience pleasure again.”
“You don’t want anything more?” He doesn’t want to fuck me. Has the bruising worsened? Arnica can only do so much; it’s not a miracle worker. When I looked at my reflection last night before a soak in the most blissful bath, I resembled a Jackson Pollock original.
His chuckle is deep and resonate. “I do want more. I’m a guy.
I always want more. But I understand boundaries.
The last thing I want to put you through is having to support my body weight while I fuck you.
Even bent over a desk or riding me, you’ll still be uncomfortable.
This,” he says, gesturing to my still quivering limbs, “was one way I could think of that didn’t put undue stress on your healing body.
I, too, can be magnanimous, Sabrina.” He wipes at his mouth with a cupped hand before another wink is fired my way.
Then he saunters, gloriously naked and unaffected, into the adjoining ensuite bathroom.
If there was a positive pulled out of the negative experience of the mugging, it is the stunning morning light fanning across the vacant bedroom floor and walls, splashing everything in a soft gold/ivory glow.
The heavy drapes bracket expansive windows that act as a lens.
This is the kind of studio space Picasso would give an ear for.
“Whatever you need, it’s yours.” His directive is equal parts clear and vague.
He will not allow me back at work until next week, even though the doctor cleared me of any permanent damage.
The tiny cut at the corner of my mouth did not require glue, stitches, or Mason’s insistence on a plastic surgery consultation.
What is it with rich people and their sensitivity to imperfections?
It’s a tiny cut; you let it scab over and heal, not let some gloved specialist make more incisions and close it again with micro sutures.
Who gives a shit? I don’t. Give it a month and you won’t even know it’s there.
In the meantime, I can get creative with lip liner, and no one, other than the three of us, will ever know.
Whatever I needed manifested itself swiftly.
Studio space. I need the comfort of charcoal, the honesty of graphite.
My fingers pulse with a restless hum; a need to be creating again with a blank page and a vision for how the tones will tell the story.
While I was zonked out on painkillers and exhaustion, Trystan had packed up my tiny apartment and relocated my life into the penthouse.
Why it couldn’t have been another apartment, I don’t quite know.
Mason wanted to keep an eye on my recovery.
Fine. And after that? He’s made it clear he does not want me returning to my old neighborhood, and when I think back to his comments inside the elevator, he may have a point.
May have. Where do I go once I’m no longer wincing with bending movements, and I can turn my neck in both directions with ease?
Trystan accepted a job offer that had been presented to him over a year before he said yes.
Is Mason in the habit of perpetual charity?
Coming from a philanthropic family like his, it makes perfect sense.
The bed was moved as close to the far wall as it could go while still leaving room to access its own en-suite.
The resulting free area abutting the picture window is more than generous for a drawing table, chair, two easels, and a bureau containing all of my tools and materials.
I could tenant this space until I die, never move from the cocoon of creativity, and not regret a thing.
I guess being part of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate family affords you a residence like this penthouse with windows that seem to touch the clouds themselves.
Of course, the lighting is better when we’re that much closer to the source, right?
I’ve just unfurled a new page and opened my phone gallery to the photo Trystan sent me when an incoming call lights up my screen.
“Hey, Momma.”
“Hey, Bubble, are you too busy to return my phone calls now?”
“Never,” I tease. I’d spoken to her on my actual birthday, agreeing to a date she’d suggested for our family dinner before tucking my phone away. Mason had been in a bear of a mood, all Kodiak, grizzly, and black rolled into one. For the life of me, I can’t think of the day she suggested.
“I called and left a message for you last Thursday,” she says.
Right. The afternoon I was assaulted and robbed.
Sorry I didn’t call you back. I was busy with the police, and shock setting in, and an eye swollen like a grapefruit.
I divulged none of it, of course. She will only worry more, and the woman does enough worrying for all of us.
“Thanksgiving.” She lets the word hang in the air like laundry.
“Yes!” I love Turkey Day. As much, if not more so, than Christmas.
The amazing food and my family squeezed into our tiny home designed for a family half the size of ours.
Only Thanksgiving is one of the five special days on the contract.
The day worth twenty thousand dollars alone and stipulated as mandatory.
How the fuck am I going to swing this? Do I tell her I’m seeing someone new, and his family is insistent on us spending Thanksgiving with them?
No, that will never work. If it’s so new she’ll wonder why I’m blowing off the Broes and spending the holiday elsewhere.
She’ll want equal rights and insist I bring my person to our Thanksgiving.
Hard pass, as in kidney stones. Mason Mercer will not set foot inside that house, nor ever converse with my brothers.
Holy shit! My dad, full of roast meat and Irish nectar, arguing about baseball, football, or hockey!
I could say I’m working, but she’ll want the details of my union and will format a caps-lock email about the unfair treatment of the working class.
“Yes, as in yes, you’ll be there? Because you’ve been acting strange since you started that new job of yours.” Fuck. Me. The blanket of light bathing the room may well be a settling cumulonimbus storm cloud. I can’t keep lying to my mother.
“I will do my best, Mom. You once said that was all you and Dad would ever ask of us.” Now it’s my turn to let the washing hang. She’s quiet for a beat. I can almost hear the cogs turning in her brain. She’ll no doubt go to dark places like am I on drugs? No, Mom, worse.
“That’s right, Bubble. That’s all we want.
No matter the time, there will be a place setting for you.
You know that.” And I do. My family is the poster for togetherness and understanding.
When I was bullied, they stepped up as best they could while holding Connor back from slapping the ever-loving shit out of my tormentors because he would have been charged as an adult.
Then Kynan was arrested for dealing pot outside the parameters of legalized cannabis.
It didn’t matter that he was dealing, and the dope was his, we rallied because that’s what families do.
We lift, we support, we surround with love and understanding, no matter what, and no questions asked.
We may lack the funds of the Mercers, but our love and togetherness are the same.
“Caity called me on my birthday. And she’s sent me like a zillion Insta memes since then,” I offer, desperate to change the subject to one where any deception won’t spill from my healing lips.
“Aye. She’s been a little down since the injection. I think we all thought there would be a noticeable improvement. The way the doctor was talking, it sounded like it would stop the leaking vessels for good.”
“Is she still seeing jellyfish?”
“She is. Both eyes. Only one, the left one, is so dark with the retinal detachment that they’re not sure how to proceed. They worry that surgery might damage the retina more.”
“Is there another specialist she can be referred to? I have another, bigger bonus coming soon. We need to make sure she is being treated by the best of the best.”
“She is, Bub. He’s a bigshot professor. And her case has been shared with other doctors in the UK and Germany.
This disease is complex. If it occurs in one eye, then the damage is limited to that one eye.
With Caity, she has it in both. Those rogue blood vessels grow when they shouldn’t, and because they are abnormal, they aren’t strong like normal vessels, and their walls break down, leaking blood into the gel of the eye.
They can’t laser the vessels away or use diathermy to seal them like they would a typical bleed.
With Coats disease, new blood vessels grow back, break down and leak, and the cycle continues. ”
This time the laundry hangs heavier than ever before.
That prognosis, grave and cruel, cements my worst fears.
My sister needs a fucking miracle. My sister needs a hug so long and squeezy, we’ll both be groaning and laughing by the time we pull away.
Thanksgiving spent with Mason and his family might well earn me twenty thousand dollars, but time spent with my sister is priceless.