Decadence (10 page)

She lays next to Chris. Close. Too close. I
don't like the way I'm feeling. Territorial. Jealousy. This is
strange. This guilt and this jealousy feels wrong.

She kisses him.

I half expected her to come out of the shower
looking and behaving sheepishly, wondering when we were going to
take her back to the club to retrieve her car or maybe call a taxi
for her. Instead, she looks as if she's feeling at home...right
there with Chris.

I don't like it. And I don't like the fact
that I don't like it.

They kiss, their tongues
mingle and it looks sensual and romantic, like they've kissed that
way so many times they're both used to it. I'm not used to feeling
like the odd woman out in our own games. I feel like an intruder,
and I can't figure out how to crash the party.
Their
party. I don't
know what to think or how to feel anymore.

Chris's hard on is still there, hasn't gone
down, and he hasn't acknowledged it. For the first time that I can
remember, he was hard and I hadn't immediately offered assistance.
Hadn't even wanted to. It hadn't felt right.

His pole jumps. That one eyed monster of his
seeked a home in a female cave. I know him, know that part of him
better than I know any man's. Even Scott.

He sits up and says that he'll be right back.
I'm not sure if he's talking to just one or both of us. He goes to
the bathroom, I heard a drawer opening, and he comes back with a
tube of lube. Candice has her back to him, doesn't see what he's
holding, doesn't know what he's planning.

But I do. I'm watching his every move.

He stands over by Candice. She turns to him.
His stance says that he is the ruler, he is back in Sir Christopher
mode, he is the dominant.

But when he speaks, his tone is much softer
than that of his alter ego's.

“Candice,” he addresses our little plaything
that seems to be more than a plaything to him. I feel uneasy about
all of this. “All fours. Now.”

She obeys, but shifts into the position
lazily, without urgency, but she's still game. I can tell. Still,
she should've been punished for her nonchalant attitude. Only I'm
not in a punishing mood; I'm don't want to be in character, only
want to be lost in my own thoughts and want Chris there with
me.

He drops the lube on the bed beside her
knees, holds his erection in his hand, guides that pole to her
opening and eases in. They both moan. They both have on their
pleasure faces. I'm the third wheel. I'm the third wheel as he
eases in and out of her slow and sensuously.

I'm the third wheel until he refers to me and
says, “Leila, get a condom for me.”

I oblige. Grudgingly so. But he doesn't know
it. He's not paying me any attention.

I hand him the condom. He opens it and takes
out the rubber as he continues to penetrate her. Continues to ease
that hardened python in and out of the little twenty-one year old
who's joined us in bed.

Then he eases out of her altogether. Unrolls
that rubber over his length. Goes back inside her kitty, but this
time he starts to play with that other hole. He spits, makes sure
that glob of saliva hits his target, sinks into Candice's backdoor,
makes sure her asshole swallows his spit. He pushes his thumb
inside of her. Plays with that hole, then starts lubricating it
with the over the counter warming KY Jelly. She doesn't look as if
she's opposed to what he's doing, looks like she's so deep in
ecstasy she doesn't care what he does, just doesn't want him to
stop what he's doing right now.

He takes all ten inches out of her kitty and
guides it up to where a mound of spit and saliva have accumulated.
He takes all of his ten inches and moves inside that other hole
that he had to supply the lubrication for. He takes all of his ten
inches and stretches that virgin backdoor until it's nonexistent,
gone, only a cave for him to rest that aroused part of him that
aims to break through and destroy.

He goes slow at first. Her moans get louder,
but she looks to be enjoying it. He picks up his pace, starts going
faster, grabs onto her hips, plunges in deeper. Before she starts
trying to get away, crawl away, trying to find an escape hatch from
that madness that's threatening to tear her apart I move in. Those
faces she's making of agony and bliss living in that one moment I
take my position. Suck what needs to be sucked on her, lick what
needs to be licked, rub and play with all that will quell her pain.
Chris disappears and again, only she exists in my world. I only
want the best for her. I only want her to cum. I want her to cum
all over my fingers, I want those juices to rain down on me, I want
to feel those walls moving around my fingers once she reaches her
climax.

I happen to look up at Chris as Candice
screams, as he rocks her body. He's hellbent on destruction. Not so
long ago he'd been looking at her like she was the most beautiful
thing on the planet, like he would protect her from all harm. Now I
see him for what he is. I see the male part of him that lives in
all men. I see why they have the equipment between their legs that
they have. They need it to carry out their mission. They need it to
validate their quest. They need it for their own personal sources
of destruction. Christopher's face tells the tale that no man needs
to speak with his own words. Little boys want to blow up things,
want to set things on fire, want to break and destroy the things
most little girls think are pretty. Grown men aren't much different
from their younger counterparts in that respect. The more beautiful
the girl they find themselves in bed with, the deeper they want to
plunge, the harder they want to pound, the more they want to hear
them scream.

I watch them, observe them, watch their
pleasure, their frustration and their pain. I hold onto Candice as
Chris holds onto her. I pleasure Candice as Chris fucks his way to
his own pleasure.

She cums first. She explodes first. She cums
screaming.

Chris is pushed over the edge by her screams.
Pushed and he falls. He falls and he cums.

He cums screaming as well.

***

It's nearly four in the morning and I'm in
the kitchen drinking a cappuccino. The tub was filling up in the
bathroom when I left the two of them in there. Candice was on a
heap on the bed as Chris was tooling around in the bathroom.

I'm in my robe that's silk and looks more
like a kimono. I feel clean and tired. More than a little restless.
Unsatisfied.

I go back into the room after a while. I
hear splashing coming from the bathroom. I peer in without making a
sound.

Chris is washing her the way he's washed me
before as they talk to one another in hushed voices, as they smile
and laugh together, with one another. And then I see something I
shouldn't. I see something I wish I hadn't. I see them kiss. It's
the kiss of lovers. It's a kiss where they close their eyes and
touch and look like they want to melt into one another.

I tell myself that it's nothing. I tell
myself that they just met and they won't see one another again and
this is just the heat of the moment, she's beautiful, and she
represents freedom he probably forgot a long time ago. I tell
myself all of this as I see him falling for a stranger and the
truth is written all over his face.

***

I'm in the kitchen again when he comes to
me. Finds me. Finds me hiding. We still don't say anything to one
another.

“Come back to the room with me,” he says in
my ear.

I look him. I want to slap him. I feel like
I'm being played even though that's not fair to him. These feelings
I have toward him are unfair and I know it. I know he can see the
hurt written all over my face. Unjustifiable hurt that has no
excuse to rear its ugly head.

He puts his hand in my hand. He kisses me.
An apology kiss. I want to tell him I don't want his apology, but I
say nothing. I pulls me toward the bedroom and I follow him.

He picks me up, puts me on the bed, lays me
there as if I'm a precious doll. His precious doll. I hate that I
like it. Hate and love are cohabitating with me, something I never
wanted. Something I thought I'd grown too much, had come too far,
and was too intelligent to fall victim to. And yet I'm here. I
guess it's in my genes.

His hardness is aimed at me. I want to tell
him that I don't want his apology fuck. I don't want his pity fuck.
I don't want to feel his pity cum inside me. Instead of saying any
of what I'm thinking I close my eyes, moan and grab at his skin as
he enters me.

He fucks me. He makes me cum. He cums inside
of me. He makes me just as much his as Candice is.

I feel guilt. I feel shame. I feel like
crying, but I lay there and try to catch my breath instead.

***

I wake up again at six in the morning. I
hear the sounds of the city coming alive outside as the world moves
on all around us.

I wake up and I see Chris gazing down at
Candice's face, running his hand so gently over her, I know I've
woken up to a private moment he didn't intend for either of us to
witness.

Love. Hate. Lust. It all lives in this bed
with us.

We wanted to do whatever we wanted as
children, and now that we are, I feel lost. We're doing whatever we
want in this den of decadence, this lair of lust, this haven of
hedonism. Our sins, our secrets live here.

I stare at Chris. He stares at me.

He leans across Candice and kisses me.
Tongues me. Tongues me with passion as if Candice isn't right
beside us and we're the only two people who exist.

The only two that matter.

Our lust. Our game. Our repercussions.

Bed of Thorns (A novel)

(for mature audiences)

One annual list. Eleven girls. One annual
college calendar with the power to change a girl’s life
forever.

Hawthorn University’s traditional Bed of
Thorns calendar is what a lot of the senior female students look
forward to being a part of, to see if Isabel “Bel” Thorn,
university president, will choose one of them to be one of the few
selected to be featured, out of over a thousand of their peers, to
pose for one of the months of the year. A lot of them, it seems,
except maybe senior Alicia Goode, who is dealing with her breakup
from her boyfriend of four years.

At twenty-two years old, there is so much
Alicia hasn’t experienced, so much she doesn’t know--and she knows
it. She just wants the chance to explore before she settles down
with anybody. After she does a little in depth research on their
school she realizes that she and Bel Thorn could have a lot more in
common than she ever thought. Not only does she begin to have a new
outlook on the university and her school president, but towards her
future in general.

Then there are the Thorn men, Bel’s gorgeous
and successful sons who offer her some of the experiences she
craves, and if she’s willing, a chance to take her down a road she
hadn’t dreamed of, for a ride she won’t soon forget.

Chapter One

~

Being Human

Breaking up in a hotel, no matter how nice
the room was, felt tacky. Mine and Ryan’s on and off, but mostly
on, four year relationship had its ups and downs, but it had also
had more than its fair share of special moments. Very special. Too
special for me to ever forget. Too special to demean by ending what
we had in a room that people looked at as a reserve for a high end
fuck.

But a hotel room was the hand I’d been dealt
and I had to deal with it because this was my last chance. No
matter how I looked at it, this ending wasn’t going to be perfect;
there was no such thing as a picture perfect breakup.

As soon as I made my way
up to the room he had spent his money on for us for an entire
weekend as he’d been doing for the past six months since he moved
to Charlotte to start his new job, I excused myself, made a beeline
for the bathroom, told him I had to pee. It was only a half
omission; I did have to pee, but I wanted to look at myself one
last time in the mirror before I became my own bonafide monster,
the type of girl who was about to tell her boyfriend,
her fiancé
,
that had done nothing wrong, that she didn’t want to be with him
anymore after he had just asked her to be with him
forever.

When I was younger I couldn’t believe the
girls who did that, who would hurt someone like that. They weren’t
women; they were girls, selfish little girls. I hated them. Now I
was one of them. And I felt bad for not truly being able to say
that I hated myself.

I smoothed down my windblown hair, surprised
that I didn’t look nearly as bad as I felt. I’d expected to see
ashen skin, dry lips, red puffy eyes, but instead I looked fresh.
Tousled at the most; it was the kind of look Ryan always said he
liked. That made me feel worse. He always said it made me look
beautiful when I was just off my bike, like a California girl on
the wrong side of the country.

That was just one of the things I had always
liked about Ryan, he’d never made a big deal about my looks. He
told me I was beautiful, gorgeous, and every other word you could
imagine a guy telling the girl he loved to convince her that her
looks were superior rather than average, reassuring her that she
was better than most, his favorite, and all the while he had never
made me feel as if I were different like the way I had always felt
growing up. The way he looked at me made me feel like the only girl
in the universe, the only girl in the universe that he wanted.

The only time he had really mentioned my
looks in any detail and made me at least realize that he wasn’t
completely blind was when he brought up how I thought our kids
would like if we had any. With my mixture of Korean and African
American genetics and his Irish-Italian ancestry he wondered if the
Asian gene would be dominant no matter what. At the mere mention of
a future together, the possibility of children tying me to another
person as long as I lived, I felt my body go rigid in his arms. I
didn’t say anything. The idea of what he’d just said made me go
numb, speechless.