The kids will have us up from six. Come when you want. Safe flights.
Safe flights. Right. Because I’ve got money to burn on flights.
I google the prices, and it’s $150 one-way. Three hundred if I want to come home. I’m not sure I do, right now.
And I owe Carol rent. Not to mention inconvenience money for when Alex inevitably beats her door down then finds I’m not there.
But… Alex has got plenty of money, and he’s the reason I have to go. This has just become an Alex-tax.
I might flinch at buying groceries on his credit card, but a break-from-Alex vacation? Hell yes. It’s his damn fault. I’ll consider it an invoice for emotional damage. Or a down payment on my sanity.
It takes me less than five minutes to book a flight on his card, and it leaves at five-twenty later this morning. Time to go home, pack, piss Carol off by waking her up, and be gone.
Hell, he can pay the airport transfer, too.
It means I won’t be able to meet Amelia any time soon, but there are no timescales on Lucy’s case. And it’s the weekend. Maybe I’ll be back next week.
Or maybe I won’t.
Seventeen
Alex
She’s gone when I awake.
I usually sleep so lightly, any noise disturbs me. How did she manage to get out of the bed without waking me?
Maybe she’s in the kitchen, making coffee.
But I don’t think she is. The bed is cold beside me.
Fine. If she wants to play it like this, it’ll be another spanking for having to go to Carol’s and drag her back again.
We’llbothenjoy that. Even if it is a punishment.
It’s Saturday, and I don’t have to get up early. I take my time, having breakfast for once. Her dress is where I left it, but my tux jacket has gone. She can keep it if she wears it for me with nothing beneath. The thought stirs my blood.
As do images from last night. Vicky, naked beneath my hands. Vicky, with her ass raised. Vicky, wet and open and oh so willing. Vicky, begging me to fuck her and coming around my cock.
There have been women before, but none that stir me like she does.
I hit the gym in my building’s basement. Some weights, time on the treadmill.
Whatever I do makes no difference; my mind fixates on Vicky. For some reason, I can’t stop thinking of how we met, nine months ago. We were both present at a closing arbitration for the acquisition of Origin Engineering, on opposite sides of the table. The irony was that I shouldn’t even have been there—at the last minute, DeLuca asked me to attend. Yes, it was my client, but I usually left it in the hands of legal. That day, I didn’t.
We won, of course. And when it was all over, I took their corporate investigator out for drinks. At first, she wasn’t interested. Drinks with the man who’d just helped destroy her client’s case? But I do love a challenge. Besides, I was impressed by her. And intrigued.
How could I not be? She has an indefinable quality that drew me to her. When I first met her, I couldn’t name it. Now I can: vulnerability. It has other names, I suppose. Latent sexuality. Repressed need. Exposed innocence. They all apply to my Vicky.
But she’s not weak. Far from it. And that was clear in the way she held herself, back at that arbitration. A confidence that wasn’t overt, but subtle. Courageous,too—even more so, perhaps, because of that vulnerability she has. For what is courage, if it isn’t acting when one is afraid?
So they say. I’ve never been afraid.
Vicky has, though.
I think she is every day. Yet she gets up, she faces the world, she makes ithers. That’s courage, right there.
Her job, her business. The way she…mingledat the ball last night. Maria coming to me. (That woman is dangerous.) What did she say?
