Playroom for public sex
Seven-course meals full of aphrodisiacs.
Naked water aerobics
Fantasy menu
The list goes on and on, and the more I read the more I feel way in over my head. I swallow back the knot in my throat as Lucas comes up behind me and gently starts massaging and kneading my shoulders. “Your muscles are extremely tight, let me loosen them up for you.” I almost jump out of my skin to shift away from him.
“Ah, thanks,” I squeal and whirl around holding out the menu between us. “I think I will look over all the amenities your fine establishment has to offer and get back to you with whatever I decide on.” I quickly walk to the door and hold it open for him. “Buh-bye.”
He smiles and saunters out of my room. I peek my head out to watch him walk toward the elevator and catch a glimpse of Dex being led to the room next door by a gorgeous blonde woman in some sort of crazy-ass tankini. He looks miserable, grimacing down at the carpet, until his eyes lift up and meet mine. His cheeks flush, and his wide beautiful lips look tortured and starved. His hands flex at his sides.
My blood floods with something hot and urgent. And I hear him gasp a quick inhale.
Chapter 16
The bombshell in the tankini finds herself stranded, standing alone against Dex’s open door, staring confusingly at the back of his head as he bypasses his room and heads right to mine.
His expression is a little surprised as he studies my face for a minute, until his lips settle and ease into a slight smile. I shift my weight back and lean myself against the wall, worried the urge to fling myself at him might become too unbearable. The tension around his eyes soften, and I want to fold into his chest and feel his arms wrap around me. For a brief moment, I worry that I may actually do it, just throw myself into his arms and cry all over his shirt. “You’re here. You came,” he breathes a sigh of relief.
“I wasn’t given much of a choice. Were you?” My voice is just as breathy as his.
“No. But you haven’t been at work since Wednesday,” he whispers, stepping closer. “You don’t answer my calls or texts. I wanted to see you.”
I press myself back into the wall as flat as I can. “This project she’s torturing us with is reaching its limits with me. I…I think this will be the last article I do forUPCLOSE.” Maybe that’s what I’ll spend this weekend doing, finalizing my brand-spanking-new plan to get away fromGail the Tyrant Talbertfor good. I’ll send some feelers out to some of the competitors, maybe even write the entire story of what Gail made us do for my first big freelance piece. The Simply Sinister book is scheduled to release next month. I have enough money saved to pay bills until I get some royalties from it. I think.
I’d even move back home with my parents if I had to.
I’m about to end the hallway standoff with him, tell him some stupid excuse about ordering one of those erotic massages or something, when he reaches up and brushes a strand of hair away from my face. His fingertips sweep warmth across my skin. His eyes, like golden honey, follow along the path of his fingers, from just behind my ear along my jaw, settling on the bottom of my lip. A slow shiver rolls down my spine, hitching my breath and quickening the already erratic drumming of my heart. “Is that what you really want to do?”
My heart squeezes tight and aches. “I think it’s what I need to do.”
Dex closes his eyes for just a moment, and when he opens them again, they are full of longing and pain. “You need to be away from me?”
There are thousands of things I want to say to him, millions of things I want to explain, but how can I when I don’t even understand my thoughts and emotions. Every image, every thought I have, boils down to one fiery hot emotion: Pure angry rage. All of it toward him. I was forgotten and ignored. Blamed for situations I did not put him in and then I lost something I never realized I’d been wanting and waiting for and…I can’t even think about it while he’s in front of me. Tears well in my eyes. I refuse to let them fall, but it’s a struggle.
I slip out of his grasp and shift my body though the door to my room. “I have to go. I have a menu of things I need services in.”
His arm thrusts out, his hand slamming against the door, holding it open. “Services? What fucking services?”
I push the door closed with all my strength. Which ends up being me growling and moaning as I lean all my body weight against it, and not moving it an inch. If it weren’t so heartbreaking for me, the situation would be extremely comedic.
“Just tell me, damn it, Jane.”
“The service whereyouget completely douched out of my brain,” I say kicking at the door. “The one where I can’t see everything I lost every time I look at you!”
His hand falls limply to his side. I know his eyes are trying to look into mine, but I just can’t lift up mine enough to make the contact. Then I watch his shoes as he walks away.
* * *
Lunch is an elaborate buffet,brimming with aphrodisiacsandsexual what-the-fuckeries.It’s served atop two extremely naked people, one male, whose unnaturally, enormously large penis is set up like a milk-chocolate fountain. And the other a female, who seems to be enjoying a spirited round of hide the salami with an actual giant link of the before-mentioned cured pork. Spicy meats all up in your tender zones is a workplace hazard in my book, and I stare at her for a bit longer than socially acceptable, pondering the lengths she must go through to scrub her insides clean.
The meal is predictably awkward, as Dex and I watch each other try to gather food that is not actually touching some stranger’s skin. Both of us might starve here. I’m not the type of person who could eat off an unfamiliar body. I once found a stray pubic hair on the knee of my pants while on the subway and I scraped my entire body against a brick building trying to get it off me without having to touch it. I bathed in antibacterial soap as soon as I got home.
Why do we live in a world were random pubic hair flies about?
Wine is served, from a bottle, thank God, not a body part, so that seems to be the only safe thing I will be ingesting for the remainder of my stay here.
