A Starlet in Venice (6 page)

But Tia wasn’t a sex object. Everyone thought of her as one, and if I’d made love to her right now, when she was still fighting her desire, I would eventually fall into that category as well. I wasn’t going to ask her to make love to me. I wanted to, with a desperate ache that started at my groin, but resonated in my heart and soul. But she needed to make the first move.

“Your parents must be pretty liberal if they are letting us share a room?” she probed as we walked towards the pub. I’d picked the longer way around. O'Donoghue's was either a five or a twenty minute walk, and I figured that time in the winter air could only help cool off some of the sexual heat between us.

“Well,” I responded, “They are both retired science teachers, so they were probably quite liberal anyway. But then Margaret, my eldest sister came out, and I think that caused them to really evaluate how religious they actually were, and what really mattered to them. They picked family over the Church. They barely go to Mass anymore. Just Christmas.”

“Oh,” she said softly.

“It wasn’t such a hard choice,” I assured her. “We are a pretty close-knit family.” I shot her a look. “I asked my mother to put us in the same room,” I confessed.

She stopped walking, and gaped at me. “Why?” she asked quietly.

“A mistake, rabbit,” I sighed. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t fight this thing between us. I wanted to spend the nights with you in my arms.”

“Oh,” she said. She looked stricken, and I wondered what I’d said. I could have tried to guess, but it was easiest to ask.

“What did I say?”

She didn’t meet my eyes. “You said
wanted to spend the night,
” she said. “Past tense, not present.”

My fingers traced a line down her jaw, and I inclined her chin up so that I could look into her eyes. “I still want to, Tia, but you need to want this as well, and without reservation.” I grinned, making a deliberate effort to change the topic. “After Margaret insisted that she and her partner Heather share a room the first time Heather was home for Christmas, there’s nothing that can faze my mother anymore.”

She laughed at that. “But I should still try not to mention the abortion,” she joked wryly, and I reached for her hand to squeeze it for a second before dropping it. Tia made jokes to ease the pain. She’d done it when she talked about the number of film roles she could get if she sucked more cock, she’d made us chuckle by telling tales of inappropriate come-on lines, and now, she was quipping about the abortion. I guessed that when you had a lifetime of pain, you coped the way you could. As always, I found myself a little awed by her strength and resilience.

“Please do try, rabbit,” I matched her tone. “Because while my parents won’t throw us out, if anything affects the quality of my mother’s Christmas dinner, the entire Callahan family will be furious with us.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes Sir,” she mocked. “I’ll make sure nothing affects dinner.”

Tatiana:

After multiple pints of Guinness, we staggered back home. I was falling asleep, and Liam ordered me up to bed. Any other time, I would have rolled my eyes at his bossiness, but today, I was happy to listen to him.

“Shouldn’t I stay up to meet your sisters?” I asked him in a low tone, worried that his family would think me rude and anti-social for being in bed by nine.

“You can meet them in the morning, rabbit,” he said. “You’ve been working since six this morning. Get some rest.”

“Okay,” I mumbled. I said goodnight to Liam’s parents and went to the bedroom. There, I stared at the bed for a few seconds. I was debating sleeping on the floor, then my shoulders straightened in resolution. Liam had said he wouldn’t touch me unless I wanted him to. I trusted him implicitly.

Admit it,
I thought to myself.
You aren’t worried that he’s going to jump you. You are concerned that you are going to jump him.
That night with Liam had opened the floodgates of my libido. I was fighting hard to think with my mind, not my pussy, because all my body could think about was Liam, and how incredible he’d felt against me. In me. Touching me and stroking me, and spanking me firmly.

I bit my lip, thinking of the stinging slaps on my inside thighs earlier this evening. I’d wanted the blows to land on my pussy. I’d wanted to see his palm glisten with my wetness when he hit me, and I’d wanted him to make me lick my juice off his fingers.

Stop it, Tia,
I chided.
Stop fucking with him. Either you are in, or you are out. This kind of in-between indecision isn’t fair to anyone.

But yet, indecision was all I could manage. Had Liam not been as important a friend, perhaps I would have slept with him happily, quite content to trade friendship for amazing sex. But despite whatever he said, I didn’t really believe him when he said he’d never stop being my friend, because that was bullshit. He had no idea what the future could hold. Any sentence that had the words
never
and
always
in it was a lie. Undoubtedly, a well-intentioned lie, and maybe he believed in the truth of what he said. But I had learned in painful ways to not believe the words of men, not even ones I trusted with every fibre of my soul.

After all that, the right thing to do would have been to sleep on the floor, but there were too many unpleasant reminders back to the orphanage I’d grown up in and I didn’t want to open that can of worms in my head. So I settled down on the bed, but in concession to the genuine indecision that I was feeling about Liam, I donned a long t-shirt. Faded and almost shapeless, it was the furthest thing from sexy.

***

Liam:

Well, fuck me, because I certainly didn’t have enough strength for this. The sight of Tia’s sprawled legs, her t-shirt riding up her ass and exposing her pert, round cheeks to me? My dick leaped erect almost instantaneously, and I gritted my teeth and ducked into the bathroom across the landing.

It had been entirely too long since I’d masturbated in my parents’ house, and if I stopped to think about it, my desperation would have seemed quite funny. But Tia in my bed, spread open and soft, and I was supposed to curl up next to her like a saint and not touch her?

Damn right, Callahan,
I thought sternly.
That’s exactly what you are supposed to do. You are not ruled by your dick; you do have a brain and a conscience.

I got back to the bedroom, stripped to my boxers, and lay down next to her. She stirred in her sleep and mumbled something, and I grinned at the sleepy tone of displeasure. You did not wake Tia up when she were sleeping, not unless you were willing to get your head bitten off. My rabbit hated any interruption to her rest.

One hand reached out to curl around me as I lay there. She moved in her sleep, her one leg draping over my hips, and her head snuggling on my shoulder. My heart clenched, painfully, and so did my dick, and because it was Tia, and I was completely in love, I ignored my dick ruthlessly. I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep.

***

I was having the best dream. Tia’s hands were running over my body. She was tracing each and every muscle with her fingers, then lowering her tongue and following the same path. She went lower and lower and my cock twitched and jumped in anticipation.

“Fuck, Tia,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes closed.

Her warm hand slid under the waistband of my boxers, and found my cock. “I hope so.” Her voice was feather soft, and my eyes flickered open. This wasn’t a dream. “Tatiana.” My voice was gruff as I met her eyes, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her so much, but I wanted all of her, and I wanted her to want me with the same need. Because with each passing moment, it became so much harder to do the right thing and walk away.

“What are you doing to me, rabbit?”

***

Tatiana:

He was right next to me. So very, very close, and I could feel every breath he took, every steady inhale and exhale. I wondered if he could hear my heart, beating like a trapped butterfly as I reacted to his nearness. It took so much effort to fight my need, to force myself into lightness, to pretend I didn’t want Liam with a deep, enduring ache.

He looked at me, his green eyes steady. “What are you doing to me, rabbit?” he asked. He pulled me against him so that my back was pressed against his chest. I looked at my reflection in the mirror on the dresser. I expected to look different. I felt different, with his body against mine. I felt soft, yet strong. Nervous, yet perfectly secure.

“I was touching you.” I responded to his question, my voice a thread of sound in the quiet room.

He responded by kissing my neck. I closed my eyes, unable to confront that reflection in the mirror. It was too much. He looked like my lover, but I didn’t get to stake such a claim on him. “There are strings attached,” he said huskily. “When you come to me, Tatiana, you don’t get to leave. When you come, you come to stay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not looking for a quick fuck.” His blunt words shocked me. “I’m not looking for a one night stand. When you come to me, you come looking for involvement and commitment and togetherness.”

Liam was a Dom at Casanova, a BDSM club where submissive women threw themselves at him near constantly, and sex was always at hand. He was my best friend. I’d laughed with him. I’d dragged him to movies that he grumbled about seeing. We watched football games together, me cheering for AC Milan, and him cheering for the opposing team, just to rile me up. And if I were to believe the truth of his words, he wanted to be in a relationship with me.

If I believed the truth of his words…

I had three secrets. I’d already told him about the abortion. But the first secret, the one that shaped everything in my life was both my parents were still alive, and neither of them wanted me, or cared what became of me.

My father had been a visiting Russian politician, and he’d slept with my mother and abandoned her when he found out that she was pregnant. My mother had been eighteen when she’d given birth to me, and she’d been alone and afraid, and had left me in an orphanage to try and resume her life. On my seventeenth birthday, I’d found out I’d been cast away by both my parents.

There’d been three of us at the orphanage, three best friends, who were there for each other. Through thick and thin. Enzo, the oldest, serious and responsible. Antonio, always a daredevil. And me, of course. Yet when I was thirteen, Antonio had run away, unwilling to take the beatings anymore. The next year, a family had adopted Enzo.

I was the one left behind. Many people had visited the orphanage looking for children, yet year after year, no one wanted me. Until my body started to change, and then, I was faced with a different kind of wanting, a leering attention from men that frightened me.

As much as anything else, I’d had an abortion so that I wouldn’t impose the same pattern on a child.

I was a walking contradiction. I’d been abandoned willingly by my parents. I’d been abandoned unwillingly by Antonio and Enzo. Family after family had declined to adopt me. When most men looked at me, I was tits and ass and pussy, and nothing else.

Everyone except Liam, who had taken the time to get to know me. He’d never made a pass at me. He had waited for me to make the first move.

Did I believe the truth of his words?

“You want to date me.” I said those words out aloud, half-expecting him to laugh at my presumption. He was whole and I was broken. How could I even dare to want him?

“More than I’ve ever wanted anything before.” There was absolutely no doubt in his voice.

“Why?”

***

Liam:

She saw weakness when she looked in the mirror. I saw only strength.

Tainted by the way men treated her, yet she still let me in. Constantly judged and envied by women, yet Lucia and Alice were her good friends.

Everything she had built, she had built by herself, rejecting Antonio and Enzo’s help. Sometimes, she struggled, but she forged her own path, and god, I admired her for the way she’d never opted to take the easy road. She took night classes because she never went to university, and I hadn’t ever seen her slack off. She could so easily have become some rich man’s pet. She was beautiful and her body invited sin. Just the image of her kneeling, waiting demurely for me sent my cock aching hard.

But I wanted Tatiana for more than her body. I wanted her because when I asked her last year to be my friend, she’d responded with generosity and sweetness and kindness. I had felt myself starting to get cynical. I had started to take women for granted in my role as the manager of Casanova, and I had hated who I was becoming. And Tia had been there for me, and she’d prevented me from becoming a caricature of myself. She’d given me my humanity.

“Because I think we’ll be perfect together.” She turned to face me, looking doubtful. “We already get along well. The sex was amazing.”

She frowned. “Liam,” she protested. “That could have been a one-time thing. What if I can’t orgasm again with you? What then?”

“Do you think it’s going to change the way I feel about you, Tia? That’s never going to happen.”

She didn’t meet my eyes for what felt like hours. “There are things you need to know about me,” she said. “My mother got pregnant with me when she was eighteen. She’s alive. She lives in Siena. She just left me at the orphanage and went on with her life. My father went back to Russia. That’s why I had an abortion. I didn’t want to do that to my child.”

There was nothing I could say. I just enveloped her in my arms, and hoped that I could convey everything I felt for her in my embrace. Even more so, I was in awe at her strength, and I was in awe that she hadn’t come out of that experience bitter and hard. She was so sweet, my little rabbit.

“Was it hard for you to come here?” Though I hadn’t known, I was inwardly cursing myself. It couldn’t have been easy to see the Callahans, loving and untroubled, when her life had been so much more difficult.

“A little. It was nice though. I got to see a little bit of you that I don’t get to see in Venice.”

I kissed her. It was meant to be a brief kiss, one that told her that I loved her and I wanted her, and she was beyond precious to me. But our kiss deepened. Mouths collided, need grew, tongues danced in a duet, and teeth nipped gently, and we were both panting by the time we pulled away.

She gave me the smallest of nods. “Okay.”

“Okay what?” Wait, did she just agree to date me?

“Okay, I want to date you too,” she said with a smile and a cheeky roll of her eyes. “Keep up, Liam.”

I felt a smile break out on my face, because heaven help me, these were the words I’d been aching to hear for the last year. I spanked her butt. “Brat,” I chided in response to the eye-roll, and her smile dimmed.

“There is one thing though,” she said. She chewed at her lower lip in obvious worry.  “When was the last time you had a relationship with someone who wasn’t a submissive?” My face must have given her an answer. “Never, right?”

I nodded reluctantly. I opened my mouth to tell her this was not going to be a problem. I was entirely in love with her. But she shook her head. “Let me finish?” she asked. “Sexual compatibility is important.”

This time, I didn’t hesitate to interrupt. “Tia,” I said, lifting my fingers and gliding them over her jaw. “I don’t think we have any problems with sexual compatibility.”

“At the moment,” she said pertly. “But Liam, in a month, or in two months, I don’t want you to find some submissive in Casanova and fuck her. I want to learn. Train me.”

“Train you?”

“Train me to be your submissive. The way you would at Casanova. Show me everything.”

I gulped. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, my voice husky, but my cock was a steel rod at the idea of sweet Tia, tied up on a St. Andrews Cross, wriggling her butt seductively as I cropped that tight ass.

She moved her hand and stroked my erection through my boxers. “Actually,” she grinned, “if this is the reaction I get for even making the suggestion, then I’m definitely going to want to.”

“You aren’t going to enjoy it very much,” I warned her, amused.