I looked up from my place on my knees into Zeus’s lightning-bright eyes to say, “Happy New Year, Z.”
Then I opened my mouth wide and sucked his entire length down my throat and hummed in triumph as his legs shook, his hands tightened in my hair and his cock jumped in my mouth.
“Fuck yeah,” he growled long and low as he started to cum in my mouth. “Take my cum, little girl.”
A shiver rippled up my spine as his taste filled my mouth, warm and salty, so delicious it made my pussy pulse so close to orgasm all I needed to do was grind my clit against his hair roughened leg to come. So, I did. Gyrating on him like a dirty, wanton girl desperate to get off. He spanked my ass lazily as I climbed up his body to collapse on his chest. He’d wrapped his fist in my hair and taken my mouth, not caring about the taste of himself on my tongue. In fact, loving it because he was a dirty old man and having me young and forbidden in his bed made him want to enact his dirtiest fantasies.
Needless to say, I was loving my life at Zeus’s side, in his house and in his bed.
I’d never smiled so much in my life as I had in the last month of living with him.
I was still smiling when I dragged myself out of his unmade bed to clean up a little in the bathroom. My body felt loose and limber as it only ever did rarely now and always with him. Even my face, gaunt from the chemo, glowed with post-coital satisfaction as I braced my hands on the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My blond hair was tousled all around my face in such aggressive bedhead it made me laugh. I lifted my hands to rake them through my locks and my heart stopped.
Carefully, I continued to pull my fingers to the ends of my hair and brought them down to the sink basin. Thick ribbons of gold silk lay across my palms like an offering to a lover.
No.
No.
I knew this. I remembered it from the first time it had happened ten years ago when my nanny was brushing my hair and it had all started raining down around us like spilled thread.
It was happening again.
I was losing my hair.
A sob bubbled up my throat and burst open in the air.
No.
It was such a stupid, vain thing but I couldn’t stand to lose my hair, not again. Not when I was dating the most gorgeous man I’d ever set eyes on and he looked at me like I was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever dreamt of.
“No,” I choked out on another loud sob that echoed through the big bathroom.
I bent over the sink with my discarded hair in my hands and cried into the porcelain.
Thirty seconds later, Zeus’s rough hands were wrapping around my hips and he was folding his big body over mine.
“Little Lou, babe, what’s wrong with my girl?”
I cried harder.
I hated that he had to go through this with me. He’d already held my hair back while I puked into the toilet until all that was left was bile, putrid and green. He’d taken time out of his busy days to sit with me while the poison therapy churned through my veins, playing poker with me even though he always won and entertaining me with stories about his brothers and his youth. He drove me to every checkup and sat with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed as if he could intimidate the doctors into giving us better news.
And now this.
Now, I was subjecting him to a potentially bald girlfriend.
When I didn’t answer him, he gently pulled my body upright and into his then even more tenderly unfurled my fists. A low sound of sadness rumbled through his chest as he traced a finger over the lost hair in my hands.
“My girl loves her hair,” he muttered.
I nodded, too overcome to trust my voice.
He pressed his nose into the hair above my ear, ducking down slightly so he could do so. Then he started talking in a low voice I felt in my blood, his eyes burnished steel on mine as he traced over my face with two calloused fingertips. “You know what I love, Lou? Love the shape of your face like a heart in my hands, the way your lips look swollen and so fuckin’ lush even ’fore I kiss ’em. Love the way your ribs narrow and your hips curve so there’s this space for my big hand right at your waist. Love the skin behind your knees and ears, at the base of your throat and between your plump tits ’cause it’s so fuckin’ sensitive and it flushes such a pretty pink.”