Beautiful Stranger (Beautiful Bastard 2)

“Don’t close your eyes, don’t you f**king close your eyes. I’m about to come.” I followed, my body shaking as I came, filling the condom. I fell forward, hand clutching at her waist and fingers tightening there, feeling the hot flush of blood pump through my veins.

“Holy . . . ,” she breathed, looking back at me with a small smile.

“Indeed.” I managed to pull myself up and dispose of the condom, and arrange us both on the settee. Sara was pliant, boneless, and smiled sleepily as she lay back on the cushion with a small sigh.

“I’m not sure I can walk,” she said, reaching up to push the sweaty hair from her forehead.

“You’re welcome.”

She blinked over to me. “Always so cocky.”

I grinned, closing my eyes while I tried to catch my breath. At least until I could feel my legs again.

Several moments of silence stretched on. Car horns blared on the streets below, a helicopter sounded somewhere in the distance. The room had grown darker when I felt the cushion shift, and I looked up, seeing Sara stand and begin gathering her clothes.

“What plans do you have for the rest of the evening?” I asked, rolling to my side and watching her slip back into her dress.

“Going home.”

“We’ve both got to eat.” I reached out, running my hand along her smooth thigh. “Certainly worked up an appetite.”

She gently brushed me away, kneeling on the floor to find her other shoe. I didn’t even remember taking them off. “That’s not what this is.”

I frowned. I suppose I should have felt some sort of relief knowing that she wasn’t moving this into needlessly emotional territory. But she was such a mystery to me. Obviously inexperienced, obviously naïve. But she’d come here, quite recklessly in fact, and was putting her trust in me.

Why?

Everyone plays a game. What’s hers?

She slipped into her shoes, straightened, pulled a brush from her purse to smooth through her hair. Her eyes were bright, her face a bit more flushed than usual, but other than that Sara looked perfectly presentable.

I’d have to try harder next time.

Seven

Maybe this was how Andy got so much done every single day. Nothing cleared the head better than a screaming orgasm with a gorgeous stranger who didn’t expect me to go pick up his dry cleaning afterward. Monday morning, I felt energized and completely engaged in the nine o’clock department meeting.

The other executives and their assistants had finally arrived to the new office, and because some things Bennett had been working on came through, we were inundated with the prospect of twenty new marketing clients. I was buried. On the upside, I had very little time to fantasize about Andy-shaped voodoo dolls and castration techniques.

But in between the frenzy—walking from one meeting to the next, a trip to the restroom, a quiet lull after a phone call—I remembered my night with Max, his hard, naked body behind me, my limbs heavy with delicious exhaustion and his hands fisted in my hair.

“Don’t close your eyes, don’t you f**king close your eyes. I’m about to come.”

Despite how much fun it had been, I’d felt off for a couple of hours on Saturday morning. Not regretting anything, exactly, but slightly embarrassed that I’d actually done it. It occurred to me that I was giving Max a very bad impression, showing up in some random neighborhood and willing to let him do what he wanted to me in front of hundreds of mirrors where it was very likely no one would be able to hear me if I needed help.

The thing was, even below that thin layer of mortification, I knew I’d never felt more alive. He made me feel safe, as strange as that was, and like I could ask him for anything. Like he saw something in me nobody else did. He didn’t seem even the slightest bit surprised or judgmental when I’d laid out my terms in his office. Didn’t even blink when I told him we wouldn’t be having sex in any bed.

I sat back at my desk in my office, closing my eyes as the memory returned from the last time Andy and I had had sex, more than four months ago. We’d stopped bothering to argue over his schedule, or mine. Instead, the lack of intimacy in our relationship felt like a dark shadow growing to cover the room.

I’d tried to spice things up, showing up at his office late one night in nothing but a long coat and heels. But I’d have been better off showing up wearing a yellow duck suit, for how embarrassed he was to see me. “I can’t have sex with you here,” he’d hissed, looking over my shoulder.

Maybe he said that because he could only have sex with other women in the office. I’d been humiliated.

Without saying anything, I’d turned and left.

Later that night, he came home and made some effort: waking me up, kissing me, trying to take his time and make it good.

It hadn’t been.

My eyes blinked open, as the reality of everything seemed to hit me in this one, totally random moment. Max made me feel so good, and Andy had only ever made me feel miserable. It was time for me to woman up, and stop apologizing for taking whatever the hell I wanted.

Although I still craved him uncomfortably much, knowing that I would hear from Max eventually let me shut off wondering how or when it would happen for most of the week. But when lunch rolled around on Friday, and he still hadn’t contacted me, it occurred to me that if Max wanted to end things he might just decide to not text me. We had no rules for how to let this go, or how to back away gracefully. In reality, the way I’d set it up meant that the most graceful way to back out would be to simply disappear. There was something comforting about an arrangement that was so tenuous it could just evaporate.

Still, I wanted to see him again.

I put my phone in my desk drawer, determined to not take it with me to the afternoon team meeting. But ten minutes into discussions about a lingerie marketing campaign, and with the memory of Max slipping my skimpy lace panties down my legs still playing on a loop inside my head, I found an excuse to get up and go back to my office to retrieve it.

No message. Damn.

Returning to the conference room, I found Bennett flipping through slides at lightning speed. It was okay for me because I’d seen the deck beforehand, but I could tell the newly arrived junior executives wanted to throw up their lunches.

“Slow down, Bennett,” I came up and said to him quietly.

He snapped his attention to me, his temper barely tied down. “What?”

I swallowed. Colleagues or not, he still scared the hell out of me. “I think you clicked through the marketing segmentation too fast,” I explained. “You just finished it yesterday, when these guys were on a plane. Let them digest it.”