His eyes were focused on me. I wouldn’t call it an angry stare, but he wasn’t smiling. The sunlight beamed directly into his blue eyes, which glowed and really stood out against his tan skin. Jade was right; this guy was truly gorgeous.
“Blueberry are my favorite,” he said.
“What?”
“Muffins.”
“Oh.”
Jade snorted but stayed silent, letting me take the brunt of this humiliation.
“And I’m not anti-social or a savant. I’m just a good old-fashioned prick…with supersonic hearing.”
He smirked and walked away before I could say anything.
When he was safely out of earshot—for real this time—Jade sighed. “Angry guys are the best in bed.”
“You just can’t stop yourself, can you? Haven’t you done enough damage? I’ve always told you that you’re loud when you think you’re whispering. Now there’s proof…at my expense.”
“You’ll be thanking me later when you’re screaming out in orgasm as the angry artist is Van Goh-ing down on you.”
“You’re crazy.”
“That’s why you love me.”
“It is.”CHAPTER TWOBARKING ORGASMA week later, and Jade was gone back to New York. I already missed her like crazy. The only reason I hadn’t gone to visit her was that Elec lived there now with Greta. While it was extremely unlikely that I’d run into him, I wasn’t ready to visit their territory just yet.
Angry Artist and I had not crossed paths since the incident when Jade was visiting. Even though I hadn’t seen him around, his dogs woke me up almost every morning barking their heads off. Since I worked the afternoon program at the youth center, my mornings were free. I often had trouble sleeping at night and needed the mornings to catch up on some shut-eye.
It was seriously to the point where I couldn’t handle the barking anymore. If one dog wasn’t barking, the other one was. Most of the time, it was a chorus of yelping in unison. I didn’t care how intimidatingly good-looking he was; I needed to address it with my neighbor.
Tuesday morning, I pulled myself out of bed and threw on some sweats. I dabbed on a little bit of under eye concealer before walking over to his door and knocking.
He opened, wearing a fitted white t-shirt. His hair was disheveled from sleep. “Can I help you?”
“I need to talk to you about your dogs.”
“What? No basket of muffins?”
“No. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have the energy to bake, given that I can’t sleep because of your animals’ incessant barking.”
“There’s nothing I can do about the barking. I’ve tried everything. They won’t shut up.”
“What are the rest of us supposed to do in the meantime?”
“I don’t know. Get some earplugs?”
“Seriously. There must be something you can do.”
“Aside from putting a muzzle on them—which I won’t do—no, there isn’t. Anyway, do you hear them barking now?”
For some reason, they’d stopped.
“No. But it’s rare that they’re ever quiet like this in the morning, and you know it.”
“Look, if you want to complain to the landlord, go right ahead. I can’t stop you. But there’s nothing I can do to keep them from barking that I haven’t already tried. They have minds of their own.”
“Well, then that’s what I’ll have to do. Thank you for making me resort to that. Thanks for nothing.” I walked away and heard his door slam behind me soon after.
Almost the second I returned to my apartment, the barking started up again.
Lying back in my bed, I knew there was only one thing I could possibly do that would help me relax enough to sleep amidst the barking. Despite not wanting to resort to it, I grabbed my Bose noise-reducing headphones and placed them on my ears to block out some of the sound. Even though there wasn’t any music playing, they did help. But I slept on my side. They were only a solution if I was lying on my back. The only time I ever lay in that horizontal position was when I masturbated. And why was I suddenly thinking about the angry artist? Sadly, the thought of touching myself immediately brought on unwanted images of him. I didn’t want to think of him that way. He was a jerk; he didn’t deserve to be the object of my lust. But he’d smelled so fucking good, like spice and musk and man. We don’t have control over what we fantasize about. The fact that he was mean and unattainable made him that much more likely to be an object of my forbidden thoughts. Just like I learned in psychology class back in college, thought suppression often leads to obsession. If you tell yourself not to think about something, then you’ll think about it even more.
Slipping my hands down my pants, I began to massage my clit. God, I didn’t even know his name. This was sick, but at the moment it didn’t matter. I imagined him over me, pushing into me, fucking me angrily. All the while, the hint of barking was still in the background as I rocked back and forth, bringing myself to one of the most earth-shattering climaxes I’d ever experienced.