Bad Boy Good Man

Bad Boy, Good Man

Abigail Barnette

Copyright © 2015,
Jenny Trout

All rights reserved.

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Chapter
One

“Oh fuck, oh yes, don’t stop! Don’t stop!”

I stared impassively at my two best friends,
who sat in abject horror as they listened to the bi-weekly
pornographic soundtrack that flooded my apartment on Tuesday and
Thursday nights. They hadn’t believed me when I told them. They’d
thought I was exaggerating.

They’d thought wrong.

“Oh. My god.” Dawn’s hands hovered open in
the air in front of her, as though she could protect herself from
what she was hearing by holding up an invisible brick wall. “That
is disgusting.”

“It’s the slamming headboard that really
makes it, I think,” I mused aloud. My numb demeanor was not for
effect; I had to hear this crap so often, I’d eventually started
tuning it out. “It’s got a nice, rhythmic ka-thump, ka-thump,
ka-thump—”

“Ellie, how can you live like this?” Sarah’s
big brown eyes widened in disbelief. “This has to be in violation
of…something.”

“Honestly, it’s almost worth it, just to see
your faces.” No, it wasn’t. It was a pain in the ass to hear
someone having awesome sex twice a week while I was having none. It
made me surly. “I’m going to have to move.”

“Absolutely not!” Dawn tossed her long, blond
ponytail over her shoulder. “There are laws against this kind of
thing.”

“Against fucking?” Sarah asked, then burst
into laughter, her golden brown skin flushing. “I’m sorry, but this
is just ridiculous. You have to go over there and talk to him.”

“Or I could,” Dawn volunteered. She’d do it,
too; she was going to be the scariest prosecutor in New York, once
she passed the bar.

“Great idea!” I chirped, rubbing my hands
together. “You’re exactly his type. Blond and barely-legal
looking.”

Sarah laughed so hard she almost rolled off
the couch, just as a piercing crescendo of an “Oh!” reached its
pinnacle and cut off mid-orgasm. The slamming of the headboard
picked up speed, and I held up one finger. “Aaaaaand—” I paused for
the long, masculine groan of relief. “Scene.”

“This is totally insane—” Sarah started.

Dawn corrected her with a cluck of her
tongue. “Watch the I-word.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. She and Dawn had
butted heads a few times on the ableist language issue. Dawn worked
with mentally ill teens at a juvenile detention center, and she had
no patience for slurs.

Sarah went on. “You’ve got to say something
to him.”

“Maybe I’ll bake him a cake and leave it
outside his door. And, when he opens the box, bam. ‘Stop having
such loud sex,’ written in frosting right across the top.” It
wasn’t a bad idea; I did make great cakes.

I should have stayed in Connecticut and
become a baker.

Dawn leaned forward and took both my hands in
hers, maintaining eye contact with me as she said, gently, “Do
not
make a cake for this pervert. You need a refresher
course in how to be assertive, but I don’t have the patience for
that, right now.”

Sarah checked her phone then yawned as she
ruffled her brown corkscrew curls. “Yeah, it’s getting late. At
least, now, we know what you’re dealing with.”

“And, we’ll be more sympathetic,” Dawn
promised.

We hugged out our goodbyes, with them
insisting they help me clean up our wine glasses and bags of chips,
and me politely declining in the timeless ritual of seeing friends
out the door. When I’d closed it and dead bolted it behind them, I
leaned against the painted red metal and surveyed my apartment.

It was super small, just a teensy studio with
my twin love seats, a pass-through kitchen, and my bed partitioned
off from the main living area by a lacy, decorative folding screen.
But it was beautiful, with exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and
two tall, arched windows, all original to the building, a converted
textile factory from the early 1900’s. And, every inch of its
lovely five hundred square feet belonged to me.

It wasn’t that I’d disliked sharing a place
with Dawn and Sarah, even though our apartment hadn’t been much
bigger, but after college, I’d just wanted a place of my own. When
my dad had found this place going “for half what it should, in this
market,” he’d put the pressure on me to make the leap into becoming
a homeowner so that I wouldn’t keep “wasting my money” on rent.
And, yeah, he had helped with the down payment—and so had Mom
because she hadn’t wanted to be outdone by Dad—but that’s just a
benefit of being the child of wealthy divorced parents. I paid the
bills and the mortgage, so it was
my
apartment.

But when I’d moved in two months ago, I’d
expected to savor that first and foremost joy of living alone:
quiet. Instead, I had to listen to Mr. Revolving Bedroom Door
banging a different lady friend every other night.

At least, it was quiet while I got ready for
bed. I scrubbed off my makeup, rolled my long, copper hair into a
sock bun, so I wouldn’t have to curl it in the morning, and brushed
my teeth. Angrily. Honestly, it wasn’t so much the sex that
bothered me, but the rudeness of how loud he always was. Or, how
loud he made them get.

I didn’t want to think about that.

Either way, he acted like he was the only
person who lived in the damn building.

I was going to go over there first thing in
the morning and give him a piece of my mind.

After I checked the lock one last time and
made sure the stove was off in the kitchen, I went to my bed and
hopped in. I snuggled under my thick down comforter and ventured
one hand out to turn off my bedside lamp. Then, I quickly covered
my head. I’ve never been a fan of the dark. I felt the lip of my
bed frame until my fingers brushed the handle of the steak knife I
kept wedged there. Reaching farther, I touched the comforting metal
surface of the fire extinguisher on the floor beneath me.

Okay, I was a little paranoid. But it wasn’t
my fault. It’s what a career in risk assessment does to you.

I lay in the quiet semi-dark. I’d realized a
few months ago that the noise of the city didn’t bother me the way
it used to. I liked that. It made me feel like a real New
Yorker.

Through the hollow brick wall behind my head,
I heard a muffled squeal of laughter, followed by a deeper, rougher
voice saying words I couldn’t make out. There was a noise caught
somewhere between a loud laugh and a surprised gasp, and then we
were right back to the moaning.

Great. They were going to go for seconds.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed
to be angry at having to hear them again tonight, or thankful he
didn’t always have this kind of stamina. His record was three times
in one night, but that had been on St. Patrick’s Day. He’d probably
just been bored and avoiding the drunks on the streets.

The weirdest part of the entire situation,
and maybe the only thing that made it bearable, was that I’d never
even seen this guy. I’d been privy to his intimate encounters every
Tuesday and Thursday night for the past two months, but I’d never
so much as passed him in the hallway.

I’d seen the women who emerged from his
apartment on Wednesday and Friday mornings, though. They were
exactly the type of women I would imagine a total player going for.
There were two blondes, one of them tall with long legs and a long
neck, like if someone had crossed a young Uma Thurman with a sexy
giraffe. The other was shorter, with boobs that looked like no
shirt had ever been created that would fully contain them. Her face
had a pouty, baby doll quality that I envied. Then, there was the
redhead with the pixie cut and tattoos on what seemed like every
conceivable inch of her skin; the black girl with impossibly long,
Rapunzel-like twists and cool horn-rimmed glasses; the dark-haired
bombshell who always wore something tight and red like a femme
fatale in an old movie; the Katy Perry look-a-like with a Fran
Drescher voice.

It was like being assaulted with
nuclear-grade hotness every morning, and though I tried not to get
down on myself for my looks, I couldn’t help but compare. It was
like having a window into a world I’d always suspected existed, a
realm of sexy people doing acrobatic things with their lithe bodies
and experiencing sexual pleasure I’d never known could possibly
exist. It seemed unlikely to short, round, ginger me that I would
ever be in that position.

My last boyfriend hadn’t been great in bed.
He’d thought he was great, but his ego had been such a drag. If I’d
tried to even gently suggest anything, remotely anything, that
would help him get me off, he’d been like, “No, I’ve got this. I’ve
never disappointed anyone, yet.”

I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that they
probably just hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings.

Maybe that was the worst part of this whole
situation. Here I was, forced to listen to the kind of sex I’d only
dreamed about, and the silicone substitute in my beside drawer just
didn’t perform like the lothario next door.

Fuck it
. Maybe it was gross and
voyeuristic of me to use Mr. Endless Orgasms as aural porn, but I
couldn’t help myself. I listened to every loud exclamation—I was
pretty sure it was redhead tattoo girl over there tonight—and tried
to picture what he was doing to her. Since I didn’t know what he
looked like, I decided he looked exactly like Tom Hiddleston and
went from there.

I slipped my fingers into my panties, petting
the coarse hair over my slit. I thought of what he could be doing
to her, and pictured his head between her thighs. Sex Neighbor
seemed like the type to take a long time, to savor every drip and
moan.

My fingers dipped lower, finding my own
wetness, and I used it to lubricate them as I slid them over my
clit. An unmistakable, “Oh god!” echoed through the wall, and I
tipped my head back, imagining that mouth between my thighs, that
tongue circling and tapping me. I bit my lower lip to keep from
making any noise of my own; if they heard, that would be beyond
mortifying. I rocked my hips a little, trying to remember what oral
sex even felt like. It had been… I did the mental math, and my hand
stilled. It had been three years since anyone had gone down on
me.

God, no wonder I was masturbating to the
sound of my neighbor having sex. This was as close to sex as I’d
gotten since graduation.

I kicked my underwear down and parted my legs
wider. Might as well pull out all the stops. The woman next door
made short, sharp “Oh!”s of pleasure until she groaned, “Fuck,
yes!” It was easy to imagine her thighs quivering around his face,
since my own thighs were quivering around my hand.

“Fuck me! Fuck me!” she begged, and I
practically upended my nightstand grabbing in the drawer for the
thick, realistic silicone dildo my friends had bought me “as a
joke” for my twenty-first birthday. I ran my fingers down it and
gripped the circumference of it, stroking it the way I would have
stroked the guy next door.

No! Not the guy next door, at all.
Get
your shit together, Ellie.

Still, when the headboard started thumping, I
pushed the head of the fake cock into myself and pumped in time
with them. I used one hand to rub my clit, rolling my pelvis and
straining to hear every breath, every slap of skin against skin.
Realistically, I probably couldn’t hear any of that, but my
imagination had taken over. I opened my mouth on a cry I held back.
My pussy clutched on the dildo, and I arched my back, my orgasm
winding up tight inside me. He pounded her faster; she screamed
louder. He shouted, a primal growl of satisfaction that snapped the
tension in me like an over-tightened guitar string. A strangled
noise stuck in my throat, and I held my breath as wave after
electric wave of pure pleasure throbbed through me. I flopped back
to the mattress, boneless, pulsing around the toy I was too weak to
withdraw, at the moment.

On the other side of the wall, they were
probably basking in their own afterglow, skin-to-skin. A lump stuck
in my throat. Maybe what bothered me about having to hear my
neighbor getting laid two nights a week wasn’t what I was so bitter
and bitchy about. It was hard to go for so long without being
touched.

Glumly, I got up and took my silicone
boyfriend to the bathroom and washed it up, got myself a drink of
water, and gave myself a long, hard look in the mirror. I wondered
if everyone could see how lonely I felt when I was just walking
around.