BABY DADDY (6 page)

The plan is: Get him to have sex. Get his sperm. Get out.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

I just hope he doesn’t live in New York or anywhere near there.

“Your basic is too basic,” he remarks. “I can answer your question without you asking.”

Oh really now?
I smirk. “So, you’re a psychic, too?”

He smirks back. “You’re easy to read.”

Whaaat?!
“Excuse me?”

“Your eyes. Too transparent. Both your strength and your weakness.”

Now, I’m not liking this. “So, what’s your answer to my silent question?” I challenge, slightly irked at his keen intuition.

“Yeah, I’ve had sex with more than a dozen women. Yeah, I’m clean. Healthy as a bull.” He flexes his biceps.

Wow.

I’m speechless.

He grins. “Impressed?”

Can we skip dinner?
my ovaries chime in.

I shush them. Shameless hussies.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I retort, peeved at his cocksure demeanor.

“Yeah, and that would be the risk you’ll have to take because I’m not showing you any health card like a prostitute. I get hit on by too many women to beg you to fuck me.”

Whoa! Where did that come from? And here I thought he was a perfect gentleman.

The arrogance in his tone gets a rise at me, but I can believe him. There were five women hitting on him at the bar all at the same time, excluding me, and he chose me.

Not a total gentleman, after all, but I appreciate brutal honesty, especially under the circumstances. Our eyes still clash. Male arrogance gets on my nerves like nothing else.

What are you doing?!
my ovaries are screaming at me.
Don’t start with the feminist shit now. You can go back to that after you get preggers!

I look down at my hands. Indeed, what am I doing? I’m supposed to be charming him to sleep with me, not repelling him.

What are the odds he’s lying about his health?

Guardian Angel, please help me. Give me a sign he’s not lying. I don’t wanna get sick creating my baby. Who will take care of the little one if I’d die of AIDS?

Or I can just quit this crazy mission right now. What on earth made me think it would be this easy?

Yeah, well…

Noooooo!
my ovaries wail.

“I understand. After all, you’re gonna run the same risk with me,” I reply, praying that at some point into the night, I’d see a sign.

He nods, his face, serious. “True.”

Silence.

This time, it’s awkward. The danger of what I’m doing suddenly dawns on me. He’s a total stranger. What on earth am I doing?

He leans forward, extending his arm. “Here.”

He’s holding something and he’s giving it to me. I reach out and open my hand. He drops it onto my palm.

I stare at it.

I wanna burst into tears.

Oh Guardian Angel. You’re so good to me!

I give him my sweetest smile, relief fairly bursting from my heart. He just showed me his Red Cross donor key chain.

“You’re an exception to my rule, Ella,” he states softly.

In that moment, I think he’s able to get past my walls a little.

Just a little, I swear. Nothing more. I’m not promiscuous. I’ve never taken sex for granted. I’d need that little feeling to spend the whole week having sex with him.

He’s looking at me with searing intensity now. I don’t feel awkward anymore. He’s stripping me with his eyes and I want to crawl over to him and ravish him. Dammit, how long would dinner take?

“The food will be ready in a few minutes. Do you like exotic dishes?”

Okay, I’m starting to get convinced the man is really psychic. I hope he doesn’t know he’s turning me into a nymphomaniac. “How exotic?”

He winks. “The kind you’ll get addicted to.”

Oh god.

I’ve never been for long foreplays.
They aren’t needed when I’m squaring it off in the sack with fast women. They want speed and rough play. They even demand I inflict a little pain at times.

Slow is not in my usual sexual repertoire. I really didn’t care much for what the romantics call quality sex. Quality is just a state of mind. At least, in my limited experience. I haven’t had a relationship with a woman yet, the kind that involves more than my muscle man down there.

So far, sex has always been with my dick, not with any other part of me. But I’ve wondered about sex with other parts of me. It’s the artist in me, for sure. I was born to wonder, to seek higher understanding of my nature, of my psyche.

Most artists I know fall in love like an avalanche on a regular basis. They have to have muses and all that Shakespeare blah to be able to create. I’m not that type of artist.

My passion does not center on a single muse. It has always come from nature. The wind. The sun. The sea. The mountains. The rivers. The women.

Never a particular woman.

But now, I feel the urge to pick up my hammer and chisel and start chipping away. I want to make her presence here in this island monumental.

A first in my history.

Phenomenal, this woman.

Later, after I’ve had my fill of her, I’d do that. She’d look majestic standing on the cliff in Punto Fiamma, naked, gazing at the ocean, her hair dancing in the wind.

Slow.

I’m discovering its great merits.

“My god, tell me what this is already!” she asks me again as she dives enthusiastically into her food with her fingers. I’m teaching her how to eat with her hands alone. We’re sharing a huge tray lined with banana leaves and filled with my Thai chef’s specialties.

I maintain my position. “After we finish eating.”

“You’re not gonna make we throw up after this, are you?”

“If it tastes good, who cares what it is?”

She scrunches her face. “Don’t give me that Hemingway shit. I do care about what I put in my innards. And he was a crazy old goat.”

I’m taken aback. My heartbeat picks up. Not expecting that, at all. I’ve almost given up on this. “A woman who reads.”

She raises a brow at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’ve not met anybody who has readily identified the author of that quote, much less recognize it in a different context.”

“Guess you’ve been mingling with the wrong women.”

My muscle man is flexing under pressure now. Exquisite pressure. A Hemingway quote is giving me an unbelievable boner. Even I find that weird.

I shrug and grin sheepishly. “Guilty. But it’s hard to find someone I’m attracted to who also shares my interests. Most I’ve met don’t care talking with me. They’d rather talk to my…uhhh.” I point to my groin.

She laughs, spewing bits of food in my direction. Then she goes into a coughing fit. I reach out to pat her back and help her drink water.

“You find that funny?” I ask.

“Dude, that’s a woman’s line, okay? You know, the talk-to-my-face-not-to-my-chest cliche?”

I look at her ample chest. “I suppose you have a lot of firsthand experience with that. Not that I blame the poor jerk-offs.”

She throws a slice of cucumber at me.

It lands on my leg. I pick it up and eat it.

She’s shaking her head. “You know, I find it hard to believe you’re complaining about your sex life.”

“Why?”

“You’re young and great-looking and obviously successful in whatever you do and most probably single and…who gives a shit about shared interests at this point?”

I stare at her, knowing full well now that I’ve been settling for sex in lieu of a deeper form of communication. Mediocre sex.

God, I want this woman. “I do.”

She gives me a long skeptical look then evades my eyes and reaches for more rice. “Oh lowd, this is sinfully delicious!”

I let her change the subject. I’m feeling a little strange too that it veered towards that tangent. But truth be told, I’ve never had any meaningful conversation with a woman I’m shagging. The reality of that has never been more apparent tonight.

I watch her eat, fascinated with her enthusiastic appetite. I find it absolutely sexy. If she’s going at food like that, she’s going to go at sex pretty much the same. I can’t wait to feel her lick and bite me.

I pick up a piece of meat and feed her. She nibbles on my fingers, sending electric currents blasting through my bloodstreams.

She does the same to me and I suck on her fingers. Hot damn. I never thought alligator meat could taste extra good.

She moans faintly. “I’ll never think of food the same way again.”

“You shouldn’t think when you’re eating. Just savor the taste.”

“Does that apply to sex, as well?”

I smile. What is it about this woman? She’s definitely a master seductress as she got me here when I had no intention of hooking up with anybody, and yet there’s an aura of charming naiveté about her.

“Yeah. It definitely applies to sex.”

She licks the oil from her lips. “Savor the taste,” she repeats. “I’ll remember that.”

Slow has become a torture.

FOUR

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25 CONTROVERSIAL QUOTES FROM THE STYLE EMPRESS

On her former supermodel ex Aiden Ricks:

"He was a stupid, little vice of mine those pimps

sold me at a super jacked-up price, no pun.

I was new at vices so I didn’t know any better.

Anyway, I got rehabbed and

he’s a paid bill. Not cheap but I could afford him.”

Stella Rhodes

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WE RETURNED TO THE ISLAND
in a speed boat as it was already nine in the evening.

Baby Dada is a superhero come to life. Chivalrous deeds come naturally to him like wooing a woman abroad a yacht with exotic food I don’t care to know about now because it was so sumptuous it doesn’t matter what it was.

Like carrying me to the shore so I won’t get wet (made me wetter in some parts:).

Like holding my hand as we trek back to the hotel strip, guiding my path so I won’t stumble.

I hate it when men do things for me. I can do them for me, thank you. But this guy, damn, I feel like a damsel pretending distress.

You have to understand that being in his presence is like being stripped of years’ worth of hardcore cynicism.

I used to be an idealist and then life fucked it all up for me and turned me into the Queen of Eye-roll. But for now, I want to go back in time before life happened to me. When I still believed in fairy tales and knights slaying dragons for their ladies.

I’m in a strange land, with a strange guy. I can drop my armor a little. Just a little to get him talking about romantic stuff. There, that’s really my intention. I’d like to hear him talk more about his feelings on love and sex and relationships.

Jesus, for the first time in a long, long time, my eyes are not Linda Blaring (The Exorcist, get it?) in their sockets over a guy waxing Shakespeare in my presence.

“Do you believe in destiny?” I ask him.

At this point, I’m not wary asking him existential questions anymore. We spent more than four hours in the yacht talking about the silly to the esoteric. He’s quite well-read and philosophical, even metaphysical. In fact, I didn’t understand some of what he was saying. But I was even more fascinated by his depth.

Surprise, surprise! There are very good-looking young men who actually find time to read books and not just simulate braille on women’s bodies.

“Yeah,” he answers without hesitation.

Man, get out of here. You’re too good to be true already.

But oh lowd, not only are my ovaries so into him now but me. ME.

“So, you believe our meeting was the work of destiny?”

“That you bumped into me and got your nipples drenched by frosty shake?”

I laugh. If he only knew. “Some cosmic fluke, huh?”

He stops walking and holds my shoulders. The shoreline is dotted with ambient lamps, casting a soft glow around us.

“What is it you really want to ask me, Ella?”

Why is it that my name sounds so beautiful when you utter it?

“Do you really want to be with me?”

Lame. Oh please, don’t ruin the night by female drama. He’s gonna run any moment now, stupid. Men hate shit like that on the first date. He wants to have sex, not play your psychologist and soothe your insecurities. This is not a date either, and sex is all you want from him, too, remember? Focus on the plan.

He tucks strands of my hair behind my ears and frames my face with his palms. His hands are warm, contrasting with the cool breeze blowing gently on my face.

He kisses me again.