An older patron sitting nearby gave him a suspicious look. Toby was sure the old bastard thought he was hiring an escort.
Tabby made a low growling noise. “You’re fucking with me.”
“I’m not. I want your work. I want you.”
“Fine. I’ll think about it.”
“What’s there to think about? You called me last night, more than willing to use me for money.”
“Well, I guess I sobered up and realised you’re a terrible fucking person and that I wanted to mess with you more than I wanted to lick your taint for profit.”
His gut told him that was bullshit. His gut and the mental image she’d evoked of servicing him sexually. He decided to push. “And the way you looked at me at the Village Belle? Like you were dying to get me back inside you? That’s got nothing to do with it?”
She hung up.
Feeling slightly better and much worse, Toby had stayed at the bar for dinner—why make the cab fare a complete waste—researching tattoos while he ate, looking for something meaningful that suited Tabby’s art style. He’d already had an idea of what he wanted, and as he left the bar, he messaged her a few photos.
“Interesting,” she wrote back and sent her own attachment. “I was thinking something more like this?”
It was a picture of a man’s gaping asshole.
Four drinks in and spitting mad, he’d texted Olive back to say, “Yup, grab your ‘friend’ and come over again. Make this whole night a bad fucking memory.”
Yet as he sat, sweating into his fifteen-thousand-dollar couch, Toby knew better than to think it was over with Tabby. Months of casual dating had taught him that disinterest meantnoresponse, not anger. Or pictures of hairy assholes. Tabby wasn’t done with him yet and he was far from done with her.
In hindsight, he understood their old dynamic better. When he’d met her, he’d been the weird kid from a Christian school who worked as a glorified receptionist and had never seen a boob in real life. And he never felt more like he’d never seen a boob in real life than he did around Tabitha DaSilva. Not only was she beautiful and talented, but she’d also been so self-assured. She had over three hundred thousand followers on social media, sponsorships from makeup brands and guys with big cars and even bigger muscles offering to fly her to the Sunshine Coast so she could ink them. He’d been infatuated, but he’d also been in awe of her, and he’d done the usual no-game thing—hanging around and trying to make her laugh and hoping she’d notice him. And then she had, and it had been the best morning, afternoon and night of his life.
… Until he’d realised that nothing, not even fucking him senseless, would ever make Tabby see him as her match. He’d known then that he had to go andbecomeher match. And there was no way he could do it while he was still fucking around trying to be her friend.
Those first few months of starting a new job, hitting the gym, and trialling new clothes had been rocky. If Tabby had been there to witness it, she and everyone else at Silver Daughters would have given him no end of shit. Instead, he’d gone away and figured out the kind of man he wanted to be—and got some sexual experience under his belt while he did it.
She’d said she wanted a sugar daddy to take care of her, and he was that guy now. He just had to prove it to her.
Toby stood and walked naked to his fridge to collect a Heineken. Cracking open the beer, he pictured Tabby on her knees, her perfect tits casting shadows on her thighs as she begged him to come fuck her harder. He drank deeply, recalling the feel of her skin, the suck of her lips.
Now he had something to compare her to, he knew that one time hadn’t been a fluke. He and Tabby had been fucking incredible together. And back then, he didn’t know half as much about his preferences as he did now. Or how much women tended to like them. He’d had his share of vanilla sex, but more often than not, the answer to ‘You gonna do what you’re told?’ was ‘Yes. Fucking. Sir.’
He pictured Tabby in a custom cage, hot pink bars and white fur lining the bottom.
He imagined her pushing her body against the steel and sticking her tongue out. He’d shove his cock in her mouth and make her suck him as she whimpered. She’d be all dressed up in stockings and pink lingerie, her bra shoved down to expose her tits.
His cock, which had refused to focus an hour ago, sprung to life, throbbing with an urgency that made his head spin. He drank more beer, swallowing fast. Maybe that was part of Tabby’s appeal—all that rebellion begging to be tamed. He’d grown up in a hyper-controlled environment. For better or worse, he knew how to exert that control over others, and he’d craved the dynamic with girls even before he’d really understood what sex was.
Tabby seemed to want the same thing. He’d been a complete amateur in bed with her, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from flexing the dominant muscles, straining to break free. And far from getting annoyed, she’d encouraged it. When he’d held her down, she’d moaned.
Reluctant to return to the couch or his bedroom, where Olive and Lily’s squeaking said they were still very much at it, he wandered over to his window to watch the ocean roiling, black as the night above it. The house was a solid investment, a three-storey, five-bedroom beachfront property with great resale value.
But it was too big.
And it was too quiet.
And he spent most of his time padding around like a kid lost in a shopping centre.
Life wasn’t supposed to go this way. He’d always had a head for numbers, but even he was surprised by how good he was at reading stock portfolios and picking winners. At work, they called him the King. It was a reference to King Midas and meant as a compliment. Only Toby had looked up the story of King Midas, and the moron had turned his wife into a solid gold statue and wound up all alone.
The day he’d left Tabby’s bed, he finally put his parents’ house on the market. It was falling down but on a decent bit of land, and he thought a property developer might buy it. Instead, everyone was outbid by a non-profit that built affordable townhouses for low-income families.
“You’re welcome,” Chase Hansen from Housing For All told him after the auction. “Don’t spend it all at once.”
