Kick (Songs of Perdition #1)(20)

“And why did you do that?”

“Impulse and instinct. It’s how I do everything.”

“You’re very beautiful,” he says.

“Thanks, hon. You don’t need to flatter me to get under my skirt.”

“I’m still trying to decide if it would be worthwhile.”

“Oh, I promise…” I reach out to touch him, but he grabs my wrist.

“Put them behind you, on the dash.”

Oh. A bossy one.

“You came into the bathroom,” I say. “Do you still have to pee?”

“I’m good.”

“Uh, huh. I don’t know what you’re into, but I’ve done that.”

“You let someone piss on you?”

“It was a give and take.”

“And how was it?”

I shrug without moving my hands off the leather dash. “Scratched it off my bucket list.”

He takes half a pause before he laughs so hard and deep I can see his chest moving. I can’t help but smile. Pleasing him does something for me.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Old enough.”

He’s perturbed by that answer, and he snaps up my bag.

“Hey!”

“Hands on the dash,” he says while looking in my bag.

He flips past my packet of birth control pills and extracts my wallet. I’m nervous, like Sister Elizabeth is standing over me with a napkin and I have a wad of gum in my mouth.

“This your kink?” I say. “Looking in a girl’s bag?”

He flips my wallet open. “You seem quite willing to let me use your body, but you don’t want me to look in your bag. I don’t know if the boundary differences are cultural or generational, but the fact is, I want to keep myself out of jail if you don’t mind.” He rifles through the wad of hundreds to the stack of cards. The Amex Black has a quarter inch of white dust on the edge. He presses his thumb to my driver’s license and pushes it out. “Twenty-two.”

“My birthday’s Groundhog Day.”

He tucks my license back and puts the wallet back in my bag. “What else is on that bucket list of yours?” He tosses the bag aside.

I bite my bottom lip. “Getting nailed in an alley downtown.”

“A real one.”

I would have gotten bored with this shit already, but I want to impress him. I want him to like me. “Ride dressage in the Olympics.”

“Dressage? I would have taken you for a dancer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It wasn’t meant as an insult. You have a gymnast’s body, but the discipline that takes would keep you out of club bathrooms. So I went to dancer. Dressage wouldn’t have occurred to me, even if I knew you rode.”

“I was the only rider at Stanford with an Arabian. And I ride him Prix St. George.” My answer is defensive, not sexy. He’s implied that I’m an out-of-control little girl with a flat chest and muscular legs. Normally a man’s little insults are met with backhanded returns ending in ammunition for dirty hatef*ck talk. But I want this man to respect me.

“Calm, forward, straight,” he says, putting his thumb to my cheek. “And submission to the bit.”

“You’ve ridden?”

“I spent a few years overseas with a certain crowd.”

I turn my head and take his thumb between my lips, letting it slip past my teeth and over my tongue. He smiles when I suck it on the way out.

“I’m going to be honest,” he says.

“Uh-huh.” I take his thumb again.

“I’m not looking for a sex partner.”

“Then what were you doing at Pompeii?” I take his middle and ring finger down my throat, all the way, and watch his face change. He may have just wanted to help a celebutante in distress, but his ideas of what to do with her are expanding by the second. I see it in his willing, wet fingers and the dilation of his pupils.

“Meeting the owner. We’re scheduling an event,” he says.

“What kind of event?”

“Something you might enjoy.”

And my brain, in its super-relaxed state, fell into his smiling blue eyes. At that event in the house on Maundy Street, I would be on my knees with an expert tongue in my *, a vibrating object in my cunt, and my mouth on a cock. So happy, content, satisfied, that when the orgasms came, I felt as if I’d transcended my own skin.

***

I woke with my back arched, out of breath, with Elliot pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” I said, panting.

“Don’t be.” He stared at his watch another second then put my hand down. “You’re taching at one-fourteen.”

“I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.”

“You’re going to have to work harder than that to make me uncomfortable.” His smile was so relaxed, I believed him.

I wanted to work hard enough to make him uncomfortable, just to see what he looked like. “I’ll remember that.”

“Just lie back and relax.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I breathed slowly, trying to slow my racing heart.

“Was that your first encounter with Deacon?”