Unbind (27 page)

“Chloe,” he said, his voice painfully emotional.

What was I ever worrying about? This was right where I wanted to be. My man buried inside me, fucking me. He squeezed a breast so hard, rubbing my tit up and down, the nipple lost in his painful massage.

“Chloe,” he called again, and I opened my eyes to watch him.

He was strained and pounding me hard and fast. Looking into his eyes, I could have roared. I fought the impulse to squeeze mine shut again, to throw my head back and scream. I kept my focus on him while we both unveiled our sex faces in front of one another, no hiding. While his mouth formed an O and he trembled, I bit down on my lip until I couldn’t help but breathe heavily in his face, my eyes probably telling him all he needed to know.

He swelled inside me and came, his strokes of my vagina slower and gentler, edging me from my own sharp orgasm into languid, latent sighs as he worked us both down. I didn’t realise I was crying until he wiped the pad of his thumb underneath my eye. While I sobbed and hiccupped, he washed and dried me, got me out of there and into bed. Laid on his chest, my tears dried out eventually and he asked, “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” My voice sounded weak.

“What’s wrong?” He seemed fearful.

“I won’t take a job if they offer me one. I know myself very well and it’s all too much upheaval while I’m still getting used to even being away from home! I don’t know why but I just can’t force myself to want to work here!”

I buried myself in his chest and arms, seeking a solace I couldn’t find. As far as I was concerned, a job in New York was way beyond me. I didn’t want one, anyway. The people I had been working with all week just didn’t like me, didn’t get me. What had gone from being a week of networking and experience had turned into a nightmare, because I had this thing hanging over me—what if we couldn’t make it work, even though we both so badly wanted it to?

“If you really wanted to be here and stay with me, you wouldn’t have to work. You could go freelance, you’re a good enough writer to be able to do that.” I heard his romantic pledge, his plea for me to move everything for him, but what I didn’t hear was a declaration of a definite future for us.

“I’m not ready to think about all this, yet. It’s as simple as that.”

He seemed understanding, still holding me in his arms. “I understand it’s all moving fast and it’s scary. I’m scared too, Chloe. I really wanna be with you. You make me feel so good. Better than I have ever felt.”

“Really?”

“Totally. I adore you, you know?”

“You do?” I lifted myself up over him and wiped at my snotty nose.

“Really,” he nodded, his beautiful face in defeat. “We’ll figure something out. All I know is we need to spend lots and lots of time together.”

“Yeah. I want that too, I really do.”

He gathered me in his arms. “I’ll set an early alarm so we can have breakfast together and talk more when we’re not so whacked out, okay?”

“Mm-kay.”

He kissed my head and reached for the lamp, switching it off. I fell asleep in moments, the past few days and my worry having exhausted me.

WE didn’t make love in the morning. In my usual neurotic way, I thought it was because he was afraid that every time we made love from then on, I’d just cry like a baby afterwards. We gingerly took turns in the bathroom and headed out for breakfast at a restaurant nearby. We filled up on ham and eggs like we might never eat again. It was any excuse just to avoid conversation.

He rubbed the back of his head and squinted, and I knew, he was working up to something. I was frightened to go first and all he managed was, “What’s wrong?”

Could we do this in a public eatery? With others around?

I tried to sound as calm as possible, leaning slightly across the table to ask him, “Why the gay rumours? It’s non-stop. I just don’t get it.”

He looked uncomfortable—his nose twitching, coupled with that head scratching thing again. “Really wanna know?”

“Umm, yeah. If you want me to stick with you, then I think we need to clear this up for sure.”

Why couldn’t everything be perfect? Why did we need confessions? Rumours? Secrets between us that needed explaining? I hated my womanly need for clarity. I’d survived so long without this demanding pull toward someone else. How had this even happened? I was meant to be a strong, independent woman… damn it.

He whispered so only I could hear. “It’s easier. In my job. It’s not the models… it’s their assistants. Their dressers, their PAs, their dog walkers, their cell phone holders, their goddamned hair and make-up stylists. Can you imagine what lengths they might go to if they knew I was straight? You wouldn’t be a challenge that would put them off, believe me. Not even a wife would be. That my aunt oversees the production of
Frame
… that rumours about family secrets constantly circulate… and they might be in with a chance of getting in on that? Nuh-uh.”

I took a breath for him. “Okay? I can kind of understand that.”

“Keeps the sharks at bay.”

I felt silly and idiotic. Yet letting people think he was gay hadn’t seemed at all like a clever ruse, not to me, the girl he was seeing.

“It will confuse them when pictures of us appear everywhere. That’s if we do end up spending a lot more time together.” I pouted and looked away, playing the jilted lover.

“The more confused the better, perhaps. I don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks… as long as we’re good here, yeah?”

I looked down at the table and arranged things in neat lines even though we’d already eaten and the table was awash with spilled condiments and napkins. “You’re telling me that you might have women throwing themselves at you unless they believe you’re gay. You’re telling me that you have the pick of the crop… so why are you into me?”

I looked up when he was silent and saw a smile that made me melt.

“You don’t know me well enough yet,” I argued, looking away to avoid the face that had me enthralled.

“Neither do you.” He reached for my hand and teased his fingers through mine. “We don’t wanna do the whole upfront thing, do we? I don’t want that, you know? Me spilling my guts over dead parents and you spilling them over… whatever. I don’t think you do either. So c’mon, just let this happen. Don’t sweat it. We’ll figure it out.”

My first instinct was to pull him to me, but my second was to protect him, and he wasn’t letting me. He wasn’t hearing me. “I come from a world so different to yours.”

“I know. Hence why I love you.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it.

I shut my eyes and swooned. “Just that. That. It makes me happier than I’ve been in forever.”

“Me too,” he told me, holding onto my knuckles and kissing those too.

He threw some bills on the table and we walked back to my hotel and went upstairs. Inside, he asked, “Do we have time?”

I glanced at the clock and saw I had ten minutes before I needed to be down at the cab caravan outside. “Yes!”

I went to the bed and got on all fours, fully clothed. He pulled up my skirt and slid my thong to the side. After stroking me only a couple of times, he unzipped and positioned himself. He entered me without the preparation I really required for his size but I didn’t care. I needed him raw for a change.

He gripped my hips just at the tops of my thighs and pulled me back and forth on him. He reached underneath to stroke me and the simultaneous slapping of his balls made me call out.

“I need you,” he moaned. “Your pussy smells so good.”

“Oh god, Cai. Don’t stop.”

I looked forward to walking around all day with him inside me, knowing he fucked me like that.

He made me come so hard, so sharp—I grunted with my face pushed hard in the bedspread. He pulled out and smeared himself all over my buttocks and lower back, rubbing it in. While the air dried his cum, we panted hoarsely. I had to get a move on and stood up with some effort, my arms and legs aching in the aftermath of climax. I slid my thong back into place and wriggled my skirt down. In the mirror, I looked like I’d been fucked. I took a deep breath and smoothed my hair, my clothes. I spritzed some perfume and smiled at him, laid lazily across the bed with his cock out.

“I’ll smell
you
all day.”

“I know,” he grinned, tasting his fingers. “See you tonight.”

I leaned across the bed to kiss his lips and dashed away.

THURSDAY NIGHT AND our last date for a while, possibly. He picked me up from my hotel and the way we greeted each other in the car was desperate. We chewed lips and manhandled one another across the seats. I couldn’t speak, I wanted him so much. Why couldn’t he come back to London with me? In the car on the way to wherever he was taking me, he was quiet. I didn’t ask him anything because I was too afraid I would get an answer I didn’t like.

My thoughts wandered—me being the eternal pessimist—cynic being my default setting. I gave up on blind hope years ago. I’d fooled around with so many men who meant nothing more than sex. I’d always known that, going in, none of them mattered or could. Or would. None of my conquests had gotten to the stage of falling-in-love kind of heartache and disappointment. Maybe it was just that I had been wading a pool where men didn’t get what it was I wanted. Or maybe I had put up a mental block for so long. This proved how strongly I felt about Cai. Years of messing about and then this one guy comes along and tugs at my heart.

In all honesty, I felt entirely certain Cai was what I had been waiting for, all my life. I was terrified. He was American. Me, a Brit. A 30 year old who had gotten to this age somehow, and now, didn’t know what she had been doing for so long. Alcohol, screwing and dreaming had taken up all that time but nothing substantial had ever come along, nothing worthwhile or sentimental.

I didn’t know how he might react to finding out I grassed up my own sister. She did counselling and rehab and community service. My parents hated it that everyone in the community could see their daughter at the side of the motorway, clearing rubbish. She also had to go into schools and give talks about the dangers of drugs, even though she told us that she’d take drugs again when she was old enough to move out and get herself on the dole.

I spent years trying to avoid the repercussions of my decision. Amanda briefly left home at 18, and spiralled again. As though me stalling her wild years had made her wilder when she finally did get to leave home. I’d tried to help her and all it had gotten me was a scar and the hate of my family, who would most probably have preferred it if I remained quiet, brushed everything under the carpet.

I’d lived with all this for far too long, wondering why they didn’t love me enough to have sympathy. Why they let me go my own way without a fight, as if I wasn’t worth holding onto. The strength I’d been forced to find was exhausting some days, because I had to use everything just to get myself through the day.

The dangerous, lurking boxes, the shut files stuffed at the back of my mind, contained my father’s taunts and the look in his eye—the understanding that I just didn’t belong in his comfortable world because I wanted more from life, and I was willing to fight for it. Fight for it I had, but it might have been easier with his blessing. I had the support of so many, but why not his? And why did it bother me so much? Being the strong one had cost me, and sometimes, I wished I weren’t so easily placed in the, ‘she’ll be fine’, box. I was the one everyone relied on—it was my station in life.

Suffering a disappointment from Cai as well might have proven too much. This man represented a possibility—a chance—to achieve the last piece of the puzzle that formed everything I had ever hoped and dreamed of. Either I was finally getting everything I wanted or someone, somewhere, was having a good old laugh at my expense… you know?

The words reverberated around my head:
Pride comes before a fall… she thought she had it all… darn, he wasn’t all that nice after all
.

Lost to my maudlin thoughts, I didn’t even notice where Cai was taking us as he drove the car. I was so caught up. When he pulled up on an alley somewhere back of Broadway, I was jolted out of my twisted, gnarled thought processes.

“Out we get, princess,” he gestured.