The walk to our room was silent and separate. She was working hard at staying angry, and as much as I enjoyed the game, I couldn’t relax until she did, and I wanted to fast-forward to the point where we could justbe. Instead of kissing me back, she bit me. Instead of accepting my hand, she demanded I blow her. Instead of letting me hold her, she was going to shy away from me and throw a tantrum until I tied her up and fucked the fury right out of her.
And she wasn’t even furious. No, she just didn’t know how to let herself unwind.
“Stop thinking so hard,” I said as I held the door open for her.
“I realize it’s difficult for you to understand, but someone has to think around here,” she snapped. She tossed her scarf to the chair and kicked off her heels.
She liked to think of herself as grounded. She thought she had her hands wrapped around everything, but she was five hundred miles ahead and flying in her own stratosphere.
“And what would you like me to think about?” I asked. She paced the length of the room. “I know whatI’dlike to think about, and it involves fucking you with your pretty wrists tied behind your back.”
“Do you have any clue what I had to do to get here, Will? And for what? So you can stand there and tell me how you’re going to fuck me?”
“You love it when I tell you how I’m going to fuck you,” I said. She really did.
“My assistant knows. He totally knows. And your sister, fucking hell, nothing gets past that girl. They all know, and you’re just staring at me like you don’t care.”
I knew I wasn’t Shannon’s usual, but I couldn’t comprehend why her assistant—or my sister, for that matter—got a say in who she fucked.
“That’s probably because Idon’tcare,” I said. I cleared my throat. This wasn’t the night to unravel her bizarre family dynamics. “There is zero reason to worry about any of that right now. You know, you don’t have to be so tough all the time. It’s okay to not have all the answers.”
“I could say the same thing to you.” Shannon lifted her chin, her quiet little “fuck you”, and stared at me. “I’m missing important family events, you know. And I’ve been sitting here, thinking you were blowing me off because apparently that’s your thing. You know what? That’s not how this will end.”
“Ignoring the fact I did not blow you off, peanut, and you’re being an overdramatic pain in the ass, tell me how this will end.”
“I’ll blow you off,” she said, her shoulder jerking hard to punctuate her statement.
“I think you’re waiting for me to force you to drop that act.” My fingers curled around her waistband and I pulled her toward me. “Enough bullshit out of you. Get naked.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” she said. “How about ‘Thank you for flying during the busiest travel week of the year’ or ‘Thank you for coming all the way to freaking New Mexico’ or better yet, ‘Let’s get some something to eat and talk like normal people because I haven’t seen you in three months’?”
“Yeah, no,” I said. I had her hands pinned behind her back and her cheek flush against the wall in an instant, and her trousers shoved down to her knees. “Eat later. Talk later. I haven’t seen you in three months and I need to be inside you right now.”
I hiked her knee up, kicked her pants off, and took my cock in hand. Putting everything else out of my mind, I surged into her hard, drowning in the hot perfection of Shannon.
“Is that the best you can do?” she taunted.
I anchored my hand low on her abdomen, pressing my palm to the narrow space below her belly button. Her muscles flexed and squeezed under my fingertips, and she was strung tight enough to bounce quarters. “You feel how tense you are?” I asked, my hand pushing down. “Relax, baby. Just relax. Loosen up for me, right here.”
“Enough with the coaching,” she snapped. “Shut up and fuck me.”
“No,” I murmured against her neck. “No. You’re not giving me another one of those wimpy little orgasms. You’re going to come for me until you can’t stand, then I’m carrying you to the bed and doing it again, but not”—I thrust into her, slamming us hard against the door—“until”—Again—“you stop”—And again—“fighting me.”
Her fingers twined around mine as she moaned, the sound bouncing off the door and around us.
“Let me do good things to you,” I sighed as her body sagged against mine. “My cock wants to take care of you.”
“And what do you want?” she said.
My fingers slid down her tummy until they brushed her clit. “Same.”
*
It was almosta shame to wake her. Sunlight glinted off the red rocks outside, bathing her skin in a pinkish glow. But if I didn’t get her out of this bed now, we wouldn’t leave it for the next four days.
It seemed counterintuitive that, after these months since Montauk, I’d want anything more than her body in my arms, but I was struggling with this arrangement. Shannon wasn’t one of those women who blindly chased any guy with a frogman tattoo and some dog tags. They deserved the same level of respect, yeah, but it was also fair to classify them as a different breed than Ms. Walsh.
To say I wanted to see her only for sex was a shallow representation of reality. I didn’t like her thinking that, and I didn’t like operating that way. And admitting that didn’t mean I had to turn in my man card, either.
