Water from Stone - a Novel (15 page)

“Oh, god, Mar, Jesus, they’re so perfect, you’re so perfect,” Kevin moans. She feels his hardness lengthening though his pants and grinds herself into him. “No, no, no, don’t start that, god, Mar, not yet, you’re driving me crazy.”

Mar takes his lower lip between her teeth and begins to suck on it gently while she pleasures herself against the length of him. A wet spot begins to seep through the denim of his pants.  Her own panties became sodden with her need. She moans and changes her position slightly so that she is rubbing directly against him.

Suddenly, Kevin hooks his hands beneath her armpits and lifts her off of his lap. She looks at him dizzily. “Oh, god, I’m sorry…” she begins.

“Are you crazy, woman? You’re about to drive me mad doing that. Now, let’s get more comfortable and slow this down before I’m no longer any use to you.”

Mar smiles and relaxes back onto the sofa. Any embarrassment she had felt about her body, her weight, cellulite or any other real or imagined deficiencies disappear when she looks at his face and realizes that he isn’t kidding. She has turned him on, is turning him on. It is a good feeling, this being a woman a man lusts after. It is strong and powerful and damn exciting. She lifts her buttocks and wiggles a little to help him remove her jeans. Stretching her arms above her head, she smiles at him coyly. “Holy Mother of God,” Kevin’s voice strangles out. “You’re even lovelier than I imagined.”

“Your turn,” Mar counters throatily. She reaches out with her foot and tugs at the top button of his pants with her toes.

“Yes, ma’am,” he grins.

When he sheds his shirt, Mar delights in her first full view of his upper body. Her face flushes hotly as she imagines her nipples sliding over the hair on his chest, his muscular arms clasped around her. Her eyes move upward and she grins appreciatively. Kevin winks at her and begins to open his pants. Breaking away from his stare, she watches him free himself and experiences a moment of doubt. He is huge. Both long and wide. She swallows. “Um, not to stroke your ego or anything, but you’re, um, you’re quite big.”

Kevin grins at her. “I guess we’ll just have to make sure you’re ready then, won’t we?” he asks. And then he hooks his hands into her panties and pulls them off of her. After enjoying a moment of the view this presents him, he lowers his mouth to her waiting need.

Twenty-Seven

Mar.

After singing her to sleep, Kevin had covered her with the blanket, cleaned up the desert and wine dishes and let himself out. When Mar trudges down the stairs later that morning, she finds that he has also cut her a bouquet of flowers from her garden and left them for her in a water glass on the kitchen counter. Along with a note: “Good morning, Beautiful. Didn’t want you to feel awkward, so I let myself out. Please don’t break my heart – have dinner with me tonight.”

She smiles. Waking up alone on the couch had freaked her out. Was she so lame that he’d run away rather than face her in the morning light?
Jesus, Mar, you are such a putz
, she’d told herself as she lay there, arm thrown over her eyes in an attempt to block out reality. It had taken a supreme effort to look herself in the mirror while she brushed away the morning death breath and tried to wet down the bed head that afflicts her every twenty-four hours or so.

As she woke and dressed Lizzie, part of her babbled away to the little girl while the majority of her emotions and thoughts were taken up in mentally beating the crap out of herself.
How embarrassing! I can’t believe you did that. You don’t sit on a man’s face you hardly know. I mean, please, he’s not a bloody gynecologist, he probably didn’t need to get that involved in your anatomy. He’s not goddamned O’Keefe! Most people can’t even say vulva and labia without puking and you went and slimed yourself all over his freaking face! And the moaning. Jesus! He probably thinks you sound worse than a ten dollar whore. Fuck me! Oh, fuck me! You couldn’t think of something just a little more original, Mar? And what kind of jerk screams like that? Scared the hell out of the dog. God! I hope he doesn’t tell Dylan. I can never see Shirley again. This is too bloody embarrassing.

“Well, Lizzie, guess what?” she’d told the sleepy little girl. “We’re moving to Siberia.”

Then she’d gotten downstairs and there were the flowers and the note. “Oh.” And just like that, she forgets all her fears and the raw throbbing between her legs becomes a good thing.

Twenty-Eight

Sy.

The temperature is rising quickly as Sy trudges upstairs to his office. Already, the heady scent of paprika fills the small staircase. By 11:00, when the Indian restaurant on the first floor of the building gets into full swing, the exotic fragrances will turn cloying.

Dora, Sy’s secretary, is at her desk, her ruby-red nails flying over her keyboard. She is a large, buxom woman in her late fifties. For as long as Sy’s known her, close to twenty years, she’s worn her hair the same way, in some sort of twisted-up, semi-beehive. Her makeup has been updated, as have her clothes, but her hair has never changed. If he had not seen it unwound himself, he’d’ve sworn in court that it was a prosthetic, an alien, cone-head kind of contraption that she straps on every morning. But in the years since his wife’s death, he’s seen the do undone on quite a few occasions. He and Dora have that kind of friendship, one where they can lean on each other and find escape in each other when they need to or when they just feel the urge. A kind of after-work-drink-and-a-tumble with lots of laughs and good times and no strings attached.

“Hey there, Dora, how’s things?” Sy asks.

She turns from her computer and looks at him over her bifocals. “Good morning there yourself, Sy. All’s well here, though this weather scares me. I’m hoping it’s not a sign today’s gonna be another fryer. Goddamned deodorant just can’t keep up with it. What do you think?”

He shrugs. You can’t fix it, so you live with it.  “Yep, it’s hot out there,” he answers. “You got anything for me?”

Dora takes off her glasses, rolls her neck around. When her head is back on straight and facing him once again, she replies, “Nah, same ol’, same ol’. I’m just about finished with the Ramirez notes. She’s gonna come over here around 10:00 to pick ‘em up.”

Sy grabs his mail and heads past her. “You want lunch from downstairs, tell me, and I’ll go get it.”

Sy drops the mail into the tray on the edge of his desk and sits down just as the door to his office is flung open. Mrs. Ramirez, tear-stained face ravaged by grief, twisted by anger, throws herself into the office and launches all two-hundred-and-ten pounds at him. Sy barely has time to stand and brace himself before her body barrels into him.

“Ese porqueria de un hombre, ese pendejo, hijo de la gran puta!! Como me ha hecho esto? Y con esa puta? Esa crica pudrida? Comoooooooo???” her fists beat against his chest.

Sy instinctively puts his arms around her to give her less room to wind up. “Hey, stop it! Shit! Dora! Fuck! Hey, I could use some help in here!”

Dora comes into the office and puts the Ramirez file on Sy’s desk. She rolls her eyes and shrugs apologetically before backing out of the office and closing the door behind herself.

Mrs. Ramirez’s great sobs eventually quiet and Sy leads her to a guest chair. It is a mistake. As soon as she rounds the desk, her eyes fall on her file. With a roar, she launches herself at the papers and photos and flings them into Sy’s face, sending his inbox all the way across the room. In the erupting pandemonium, he doesn’t notice the postcard that sails through the air and becomes lodged between two wooden filing cabinets.

Twenty-Nine

Jack.

Jack throws his pen onto the desk. He is frustrated beyond belief. Sy’s investigation is going nowhere. His own efforts have been fruitless. He’d set up a website with Mia’s age projection sketches, had linked them to just about every other website about missing children, and nothing. He’d had hopes for
America’s Mystery Crimes
early on, but that had only brought out the nutcases and psychics. It is tearing his guts out and he doesn’t know what else to do. God knows his career is suffering for it, but he just can’t seem to give a shit anymore.  Of course, the higher ups in the firm have strongly suggested that he get his act together or look for other prospects, and then they’d relegated him to dredging out yet another version of miserable Mrs. Fitzgibbons’ will, this time cutting out one set of grandchildren for some unpardonable offense and reinstating a distant cousin.
The old bat will live to be a hundred
, Jack thinks grimly,
and make her family suffer through every fucking single minute of it
.

Jack’s head is down on his desk, eyes closed, when the door opens. He doesn’t bother to look up. “I thought you’d gone already, Elena. I’ll close up.”

“It’s not Elena, Jack.”

At the sound of her voice, Jack straightens up. He has the grace to look sheepish. “Oh, hello, Caroline, I didn’t realize it was you.”

“Oh, it’s me. I think Elena left hours ago. Along with just about everyone else.”

“You’re still here,” Jack tells her, stating the obvious and immediately feeling like a fool.

“Yes,” a smile quirks at the corner of her lips, “I’m still here. And you’re still here.”

“Uh, um, how can I help you?” Jack clears his throat, which has begun to constrict. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Well, no, not really. It’s just that I saw your light still on. I was on my way out, and it occurred to me to stop by and ask if you’d like to get a bite to eat somewhere.”

Since the holiday party, Jack has barely seen her. She’s been around the office, but the office is large, occupying four floors of a Manhattan high-rise. Jack’s office is on the top of the firm’s floors. Caroline, he thinks, works a couple of floors below him in civil defense, or maybe acquisitions and mergers, he really isn’t sure. In any case, he doesn’t feel like eating anything, much less rousing himself as decent company for this highly attractive, quick-witted woman. “I’ll have to take a rain check,” is what he says. “I’ve got to finish this draft.”

“Mrs. Fitzgibbons?” she asks, arching a well-manicured eyebrow.

“Yes. Uh, how’d you know?”

“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry to tell you, but everyone knows.” She looks at him, right in the eye, from across the length of his office.

It rocks him. Not that everyone in the office knows how far he’s let his career fall, but that she would confront him with it. Suddenly, he is pissed. “Well, fine, but I’ve still got to get it finished. Goodbye,” he chokes out. And turns his eyes back to the documents scattered across his desk.

Caroline doesn’t move.  She stands near the door watching him, no doubt aware that he is uncomfortably aware that she has not left. Perversely, he fumes, she stands there, just lets his discomfort increase. He keeps his head down, unwilling to be goaded into playing whatever infantile game she is after. When the air is all but thrumming with tension, she speaks up, her voice husky, “Jack?”

“What?” he snaps.

“Jack,” she repeats, her voice demanding that he look at her. When he finally does, she continues, “Was it just my imagination, or at the holiday party did we have a, well, a moment?”

Now it is his turn to raise an eyebrow. “A moment?” he sneers. “What is this, some Victorian fucking novel? A moment?”

Caroline’s composure doesn’t waver. He watches, paralyzed, as she reaches out a graceful hand and pushes the door shut. Locks it. “Yes. A moment.” She reaches up and flicks off the overhead light switch, leaving only Jack’s desk bathed in the warm glow of a gooseneck lamp.

Caroline begins to walk slowly toward Jack’s desk. “I thought,” she reaches up between her breasts and unbuttons the top pearl of her blouse. “I thought,” she repeats, moving to the second button, advancing on him slowly, “when we first toasted one another, when you first handed me the wine? I thought there was one slight, but irrefutable, spark of interest.” And the third button, and then the next, opens, revealing a large swell of breast. “Maybe of lust?” And, as she reaches his desk, she shrugs out of the blouse, allows it to slip to the floor.

Jack is rooted to his chair. Not only does his mind not believe what his eyes are seeing, but his cock has immediately swollen so hard, he doesn’t think he could get up if he even wanted to. Mutely, he watches her as she continues.

“I was thinking,” Caroline says, “that I’d at least get a call from you, maybe an invitation to dinner?” She reaches between her large, ripe breasts and unclasps the bra that holds them in place. Slowly, she peels back the bra cups, allowing her breasts to drop heavily free of the lace. Her nipples, exposed to the air and the lust coming off both their bodies, immediately pucker. Jack finds he can’t swallow.

“But, nothing,” she continues, her voice continuing to deepen. “Not even a call. And, I’m embarrassed to admit, I did wait around hoping for one.” She reaches back and undoes her skirt. As soon as she opens the zipper, it slips down around her feet. Now she stands before him wearing only a black thong bikini and thigh-high nylons in her three-inch Manolo Blahniks.

Jack feels himself strain against his zipper. He is sure he is going to ejaculate right then and there. He reaches up and loosens his tie, suddenly unable to breathe.

“Do you like what you see, Jack?” Caroline asks, stepping around the desk and coming toward him. “Isn’t this better than Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s ridiculous will? Would you like to touch?”

Jack can barely hear her through the roaring in his ears. His eyes are fastened on the swaying of her breasts as she comes near him. When she gets to within a foot of him, Caroline slowly bends, allowing him to watch as they change position to hang heavily from her slim body. She puts her hands on the arms of his chair and leans forward. Suddenly, her tongue is licking at his ear. She nips his earlobe, at the same time grabbing his hand and shoving it between her legs, where he can feel the wetness that soaks her panties. “Isn’t this what you want, Jack?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Jack gasps and, without thinking, he is pushing her back onto the desk, sending the papers of the will scattering to the floor. He rips her panties off and pushes between her legs, his tongue seeking out her wet spot, his nose taking in the private smells of her. Her hands come down and push his head deeper. Her heels find his chair and she pushes off, her back arching on the desk.

Somehow, Jack finds himself naked, his clothes heaped around his bare feet, and he is working furiously on her, testing, seeking, finding, until the moment when he can take no more, when she can take no more, and he pulls his face away and bends forward to grab her by the shoulders.  Straining, he finds her and he thrusts himself deeply inside. Caroline pulls his face to hers and as he drives himself ever deeper and harder into her, she damages his lips with her teeth, tears at his back with her nails, deepening his frenzy. Finally, with a roar he muffles into her neck, he comes, filling her to overflowing. She, bucking to the end, meets him with a long, shuddering orgasm of her own.

For perhaps two minutes, they lay like that, Jack half on her, Caroline drained, with her legs now flopping on the chair. But finally, Caroline begins to laugh, at first low in her throat and then with a body-shaking whoop. Jack, unable to help himself, joins in.