“Whatever it is you do that turns me into a fucking animal,” he said, glaring forward. But I knew he could see me from the corner of his eye because when I started squirming, he turned to look. “Isla.” He sounded angry but the second he caught my thighs pumping under my skirt, he slammed his fist to his seat and hissed, “Fuck it,” jerking me onto his lap and immediately moving my hips so that my pussy rubbed hard against his cock. “Take it off,” he demanded, burying himself into my breasts the second I whipped off my shirt and bra. His mouth was wide open as he breathed me in, swirling his tongue over my nipples and sucking them into stiff peaks. Thrusting his hand under my skirt, he pushed my panties aside, sliding two fingers inside me. “Fuck, you’re so wet,” he murmured, giving several deep thrusts and then withdrawing to rub the length of my pussy, over and over and over till a sudden orgasm rocked my entire lower half. Growling with satisfaction, Abram fisted my hair, urging me on with a thousand filthy words in my ear as I came.
“Oh God.” Blissfully shaken, I collapsed onto his chest but for only so long. I needed to finally return the pleasure and clearly, he needed the same because as I lay my body across the backseat, he hastily freed his erection. It stood straight up, a stiff rod resting against his abs. My head in his lap, I immediately wrapped my mouth around it, sucking, pushing his thickness between my lips, my hand stroking in unison. I moaned against his hard flesh when I felt his hand lift my skirt and squeeze my ass.
“Christ, Isla, are you kidding me,” Abram groaned, his fingers thrust in my hair. “Fuck, yes, keep doing that… fuck, that feels so fucking good…”
I didn’t come up for air. I loved every bit of his pleasure. His hard body twitched. His thighs flexed underneath me. The handful of my hair that he fisted grew tighter as his cock grew harder in my mouth. His every breath got angrier as I brought him toward a roaring finish.
“Fuck, I’m gonna come, Isla.” His abs clenched tight as he warned me but I didn’t care, only sinking my mouth as far down on him as I could. “Ah, Christ… Isla I’m gonna – ” I stole his words with a last tight, wet pull. “Isla – ”
His body caged around me as he came hard, bursts of hot pleasure pumping into my mouth. I savored every one, drawing my tongue over the last drop beading on his pulsing helmet. He let out a last, tight groan as I licked him clean like a lollipop. When I sat up again, Abram could only stare at me in silent awe, his blue eyes flickering as he caught his breath. “Fu
ck,” he growled, pulling me by the back of my head to his lips. But an inch away, he didn’t kiss me. He looked tortured as he only stared at my mouth before lifting his eyes to mine. “Crazy,” he finally murmured, breathing hard. “Fucking crazy whatever the fuck it is you do to me.”
We parted on those words.
Hot and guilty, I walked into the Monarch alone. I knew I’d done something selfish just now but it had felt so damned good. For us both. I didn’t know when or how I’d have Abram next so for now, I savored the pleasure of his taste. It still lingered hot on my lips.
chapter eleven
“Isla? Are you alive in there? I’m hung over! I need some brunch in my face!” Rhode called from the hallway.
Try as I did, I couldn’t muster up a response.
From my new bedroom, forty-eight floors above ground, I gazed over the High Line. People-watching the High Line was always good distraction and this morning, I needed that. Badly. Even memories of Abram, of our naughty car ride last week, couldn’t divert my painful thoughts. My heart was twisting in my chest. No matter how many times I wiped my eyes, they streamed new tears. Somehow, l’d woken up like this, my dreams reminding me what day it was before I could even open my eyes.
In a last ditch effort to calm down, I looked outside to remind myself of the sudden and dramatic turn in my luck – my reason not to cry.
At 9AM, the railroad garden below my window was already teeming with both locals and tourists. Among flowers, they laid out on the wooden lounge chairs, gabbing with friends and wearing pretty sundresses. It was officially summer, the time of year that made me want things – new skirts, outdoor brunches, a bright, fresh pedicure each week. All things I’d never had. I was fresh out of high school when the diagnosis happened, so I never had the time or money to spare.
But in my first whirlwind week of working at the Monarch, I’d achieved every one of those summertime fantasies, and about a thousand more.
On the first night, I trained with Rhode, a blonde bombshell with a raspy voice she used to swear like a sailor. She left me to change in the women’s clubhouse, returning shortly with two shots of vodka. “Nervous? Don’t be.” She arranged my hair to cover my stitches. “Once you step foot in there, you can’t think about anything in the world besides smiling, looking perfect and making every man in there feel like he’s got the biggest dick in the room. Ready? You are.”
I went with it and found out that the “room” was an entire floor of the hotel. One step in and the scene took my tipsy breath away. It was massive yet intimate, bathed in a warm, amber glow that radiated from the seventy-foot ceiling. On the left side of the room, vested bartenders flitted back and forth, rattling silver shakers in front of arched shelves of all the priciest liquor. At the other end of the room, there was a heavy black curtain veiling a good portion of the floor.
By day three, Rhode offered the explanation. “The ring is behind there. For fight nights. They’re huge because we get some of the best up-and-coming fighters around the world to come here. There’s a big one coming up soon, actually, which is awesome because I hear Abe will be back for it.”
I tried not to look overly excited. “Abram?”
“Fuckin’ Abram,” she sighed, garnishing an Old Fashioned. “Three years I’ve been cocktailing for his nights and he doesn’t so much as hang out with employees let alone hook up with them. Makes me almost wonder why I decided to work for him. Like, would I rather make a thousand dollars a shift or have just one night in that beautiful man’s bed? I don’t know. But the fact that it’s even a fuckin’ question,” Rhode shook her head.
“Yeah, he’s… pretty painfully gorgeous,” I murmured, hating the fact that I had no idea if he’d even speak to me when I saw him again at fight night. But at the same time, I quietly thrilled over the chance at girl talk. I’d lost half my friends in my breakup with Evan and the ones I had left couldn’t deal with my post-Elle depression. I didn’t blame them.
“Yeah, ‘gorgeous’ hardly covers it but that’s not your fault. Really no words to describe that motherfucker,” Rhode lamented. “Which is why we drink. After we’re done here, let’s boogie downstairs to XIII.”
“Won’t it be closed?”
Rhode looked at me like I was crazy. “Not for us.” My surprise made her flat out laugh in my face. “Hoo-boy, you’ve got a long list of perks to learn about, Bruiser,” she whistled before sauntering off with her tray.
They started that night. After a day of training, I received my first tip out: seven hundred-twenty dollars – the lowest amount I’d make all week.
It was wild.
My brain could hardly process the sudden cash flow – my wallet fattening up so much it began to burst at the seams. Overnight, I went from dead broke to comfortable. By my fifth shift, I’d bought my way out of my lease, moving into a suite with Rhode on the forty-eighth floor of the Monarch. After a night of dancing at XIII, I crashed there and never left. I had no boxes or bags to move anyway. “We’ll have to change that,” she said before taking me shopping in the Meatpacking District, where I charged my credit card so furiously that the bank called to ask if it had been stolen.
It was what I needed to stop thinking of Abram – to stop wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he was okay. If he was bleeding or making someone else bleed. I spent every second with Rhode and the bartenders and had the nonstop, no-care-in-the-world kind of fun I didn’t think existed for people like me. A full week from my first night and I’d dined at a four-star restaurant, danced with a New York Yankee at XIII, filled my new walk-in with a summer wardrobe and skinny-dipped with the staff in the rooftop Infinity. And I’d gotten my stitches out. It felt like I’d made a complete one-eighty transformation. I had a new job, a roommate, new acquaintances and for the first time ever, money. And enough to look at something, want it and then buy it. That was a concept so foreign that Rhode liked snapping random candids of my face when I went shopping.
But all that wasn’t enough.