Beautiful Illusion (2 page)

There was nothing left for me to prove for the promotional video. I opened a 4-set, got the hot babe’s number and kiss-closed in a matter of minutes. It was prime material to show to newbies who were desperate to learn how to pick up women. I could’ve just left right there, but taste of the girl’s bubblegum flavored spit had me thirsty for more.

A few moments later, Cobra swooped in and kept the blonde girl company while I continued working on the brunette, and in less than an hour, I was walking the giggly girl down the hall of my condominium building.

It wasn’t often that I’d bring strange girls home, but when I wanted to, I could and I knew that I’d have success.

My place was inside a mid-rise structure just bordering Sherman Oaks. It was a prime area right off of Ventura boulevard and pretty much stretched my budget to its maximum limit. But having a nice pad was just as important as being able to perform magic. A poor man who walks the street performing illusions for a dollar is scoffed at, no matter how amazing a feat he can do. But a man with profile, a man with class? The David Blaines and Criss Angels of the world could command someone’s attention by pulling a pile of shit out of a hat.

Image meant something.

“Wow, your place is beautiful,” the girl said as I shut my door behind me.

And then there were women. Theoretically, I could bring a girl back to a shack and fuck her if she was worked up enough, but having a nice bachelor pad ensured that was she eager as possible to get drilled and tell her friends about it the next day.

“Thanks,” I replied.

The girl slipped off her shoes and scanned her surroundings, paying close attention to the urban art hanging on the walls and the shiny maplewood floors. I was about to escort her to the kitchen for a drink, but as soon as my Givenchy shoes were off and placed neatly near the entryway, she shuffled her way back towards me and poked her finger in my chest.

“You,” she clucked.

“Me?” I raised an eyebrow.

She poked my chest harder, this time with enough force that I took a step back so that the door was right behind me.

“You are so sexy.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Most of the time, girls like to play games—pretend like that hadn’t already decided that they wanted to fuck you before they stepped your room. They like to waste time sitting around on the couch, waiting for you to fuck up and say something wrong and ruin the moment or make your move at just the right time, so that they can pretend to be taken by surprise. But not this girl. She wasn’t interested in playing any games.

“You think so?” I asked.

“Yeah…” Her voice was thick with need.

I grabbed her poking arm by the wrist and moved it to the side as I pulled her in so hard that there was an audible thud when her chest smashed against my abs. She was short, but most girls looked short next to my 6’0 frame, and her tits felt nice and soft when they made contact.

I wrapped my arms around to squeeze onto her squishy ass as she trailed her hand down the side of my face, and I took her lips into my mine. There was that delicious bubblegum taste again.

Her hand snaked down my neck, to my button-up, and then she started releasing the buttons, one-by-one, beginning with the top. When the last button had been undone, she pushed her hands onto my bare chest and tried to slide them around my back before she suddenly jerked away.

“What’s this?” she asked.

I looked down to see the hidden microphone still attached to my shirt and the wire running around to my back pocket.

Shit!
I had totally forgot about the mic.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I stuttered and darted my eyes around, trying to find an excuse. “It’s just uhhh…”

I was struggling to figure out what to say, so in a panic, I just switched gears to high-speed. I threw my hand out and grabbed the girl firmly by the neck, locking her into place while I bore a hard kiss on to her lips. I could feel her inhale hard, purring, and in an instant it seemed she had already forgotten the secret she found inside my shirt.

I spun our bodies around and pushed her hard against the door, then stuck my free hand right up the front of her skirt. She grew a little tense as soon as my finger touched the warm spot right in the center of her panties, but she didn’t protest—at least, I didn’t think so. It wasn’t like she could say or do much with me holding her throat and controlling her mouth the way I was.

I rubbed my fingers along the silky fabric of her panties a few times, and as soon as she started to relax, I upped the sensations by sliding my fingers under the smooth material. She was shaved bald, and she had big, thick pussy lips. Some guys don’t like that, but I sure didn’t mind. There’s nothing like rubbing your fingers across the smooth layers of a fat kitty.

Our tongues danced together in harmony, pecking each other before retreating back deep into our mouths, then returning to swirl around one another a couple times. That was, until my fingers found her clit. She shivered a bit and jerked back, and then she got a little wild. She rammed her tongue hard into my mouth and clenched onto my torso so tightly that it felt like her long, fake fingernails were going to pierce into my skin. When I tried to dance with her tongue, she sucked hard, trying to pull the whole thing out and into her throat.

She was a little
too
into it. A little kissing was acceptable, but the vacuum cleaner thing was a bit much, and the last thing I wanted to do was have a girl leave marks on my skin with their nails.

I pulled back and spun her around, pressing her face right up against the door.

“What?” she huffed as I held her head in place.

“You know what,” I barked. My right hand continued to press against the side of her head while my right hand fumbled with the belt of my pants and grabbed the condom out of my back pocket.

She pushed her ass out and moaned in anticipation for what was coming, and when my jeans dropped to the ground, I was already fully hard. I yanked the back of her panties down, and when the waistband passed her hips, they dropped the rest of the way to the ground with ease.

Her ass was thick, and I could see her fat pussy lips poking out as I slammed my cock into her from behind.

“Oh fuck!” she gasped and pushed herself up on her tiptoes in response to the invasion.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see her big tits or all the other curves she was hiding underneath her ensemble. I’m a visual kind of guy, and I love the sight of a beautiful naked lady. But a quick fuck up against the door was good enough at the time, good enough for an overzealous girl from a nightclub at least.

After the first hard pump, I eased my way out and slammed into her again. It looked sort of like she was trying to stand on the tiptoes of her tiptoes, trying to gain some sort of impossible leverage on something that didn’t exist.

“You like that?” I growled.

“Fuck yes,” she moaned.

Dirty girl. I loved it.

I grabbed her hips and leaned my weight back as I started fucking her in a hard, rhythmic motion. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, enjoying the feeling of her soft ass splashing against my cock and the sound of her nails scratching against the door.

But even as I fucked her, my imagination whisked me away into a world of my own.

I
was standing
in front of a crowd of thousands on top of a high rise somewhere… maybe NYC… everyone waiting for my next move. Some of the guests were shaky with fear after my last trick, and some of them were wide-eyed, wondering what I’d do next. The air was cold as it cascaded through my short, dark brown hair, and I walked slowly, patiently towards the edge of the skyscraper.

I turned around so that I was facing the crowd and my back was towards the emptiness of below. There was no railing on the highest floor, and with my heels planted firmly against the brink of the building, a strong wind or gust of air could have pushed me off.

The crowd gasped when they saw me so close to danger, and I could see some of them grab onto one another as if they were protecting each other from some imaginary pain that they would personally experience if I were to somehow fall off.

But they didn’t have to wait long.

I tilted my head up to the sky and raised my arms out, perpendicular to my body as if I were asking god to give me wings to flutter away. A small breeze picked up in the air, and I took a deep breath before I leaned back on my heels and slowly tilted like a falling tree, dramatically drifting off the building.

Several people screamed as I fell.

“
Y
es
! Yes!” she screamed as I continued to fuck her, and when I opened my eyes, I could see her body spasming against my door and my cock.

“Fuck!” I grunted and I tightened my abs as her pussy squeezed hard onto me. I yanked myself out of her as I felt my balls rise, ripped the condom off, and I used one hand to push one of her ass cheeks aside, so I could get a better look at her juicy bits while I sprayed my venom all up and down the crack of her ass.

I breathed heavily as she slithered down my door and into a heap on the ground. But before I even finished catching my breath, I pulled my pants back up and started heading towards the bathroom to fetch the girl a towel.

The sex was nice.

But damn, what a beautiful illusion.

I
twirled
a pen in my hand as the two men wound down their presentation.

“And that’s our plan for the New Kings bookstore…” the man on the left, gray suit with a white undershirt and tousled brown hair said as he set the projector remote down on the long conference table.

The light poured into the conference room, sitting high atop a Santa Monica skyscraper. I didn’t own the skyscraper, nor the floor, but my promotion company leased out several offices including the conference room. It was a huge step up from a couple years prior, when I still ran my entire business out of my home.

“So, just to summarize,” I said, “you want to get as many of the top 1,000 authors in the world to publish books on your online platform, and you’ll also guarantee them a placement in any of the brick and mortar bookstores that you’ll be opening across the country automatically?”

“Exactly.”

“Indie or Traditional?” I asked.

“Either, as long as they’re one of the top 1,000 in sales,” the man on the right added with a smile. And while the guy in grey was kind of cute, this other guy was gorgeous. Tall frame, expensive black suit with a thin, red tie running down his chest. I could tell that his slick hair had just been cut, and his pearly white teeth accented a stubbly, strong jawline.

Normally, a guy like that would make weak in the knees, but when it came to business, I had to put my big girl pants on and focus on the work at hand.

I flicked my eyebrows up and looked across the conference table to Kim, my right-hand girl, and she gave me a saucy grin. I wasn’t sure if she was hinting at how hot the guy was or how sizzling the offer sounded.

“And what about the authors not in the top 1,000?” I asked. “What incentive are you offering them? And what about exclusivity?”

“No exclusivity, and we’ll let anyone on board our online platform. If and when they reach a top 1,000 spot, they’ll immediately be kicked into our brick and mortar system,” the man in grey explained.

I flicked my tongue between my teeth and took a big breath. “Well, I guess I’ve gotta say that it sounds like a pretty good deal. I imagine that
lots
of authors will be willing to jump on board.”

The hot guy threw me another grin, and for a moment, I felt a little self-conscious that he might be checking me out. I felt a bit naked wearing just a smidge of eyeliner, and the tan skirt-suit I had on that day didn’t make me feel all that attractive. If I had known we’d be graced by such a handsome stud, I would’ve made sure to wear something a little more business-sexy.

I noticed my hand instinctively going for a long strand of my sandy blonde hair, looking to toy with something and go into little girl, smitten mode, but the business woman in me stopped myself halfway.

“Maybe we should talk money,” I forced.

The handsome man smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Social marketing, Facebook ads, Google, Amazon… We can do it all,” Kim piped up.

“We’ll contact authors directly, try to reach them while they’re on book tours and such,” I added with a wave of my hand.

“We’re pretty much experts at going viral,” Kim explained, “so maybe in a month or two we can have knowledge of your operation in every top 1,000 author’s hands.”

“I’m thinking… $50,000 up front to get started,” I quoted as I looked over to Kim for any suggestion that my estimate was off. “$200,000 on delivery.”

The two men looked at each other for a moment and nodded. “Sounds good to us,” they said in unison.

Kim let out a huff of air as she stood from the conference table. “Great,” she said with a massive smile. “We’ll get you your 1,000 authors. We’re the best at what we do.”

“Well, we can’t wait,” the grey suit replied. “Oh, and by the way, the only stipulation we have for the bookstore is that we aren’t going to carry any gay material. So don’t do any promotion to that genre.”

Kim’s smile turned to a frown and my brow furrowed.

“What?” I asked, hoping that I hadn’t heard him right. “No gay material?”

“Gay, lesbian, bi… What’s that other one?” he asked as he turned to the man in black.

“Transsexual,” the black suit added. “None of that.”

I cleared my throat before I spoke. “And why is that?”

“New Kings is going to be a family safe bookstore. We want a place where kids are able to come and browse without being exposed to any sort of filth.”

“Okay…” I sighed. “So, I can understand you don’t want any pornography, but what about LGBT romance, LGBT sci-fi, historical, etc.—the non-erotic books. There’s several of these types of authors who are popular in the—”

“None of that,” the man in grey interrupted. “We’ll stick to the traditional stuff with heterosexual characters only.”

I could feel my lunch starting to rise to my throat. Not just because my brother was gay, but because I loathed any sort of blatant discrimination, whether it be towards someone’s sexuality, gender, or the color of their skin. And standing before two handsome, white men who probably had never experienced a day of discrimination in their lives, telling me that they wanted to ban any sort of gay books from their bookstores did not sit well with me.

“Well, then,” I said with a sigh. “I guess we’re done here.” I picked up my pen and paper and headed for the conference room doors.

“We haven’t finished signing the documents yet Mrs. King…” the man in black voiced.

“Oh, I think you mean Ms. King.” I pointed a finger upwards and smiled. “And we won’t be signing the documents. Our promotion company doesn’t work with businesses that engage in discriminatory practices. Kim, can you have someone escort these gentlemen outside?”

The two men stood there, slack-jawed as I quietly slid through the conference room doors. Straight through the narrow halls, past the break room and the small chambers of my five other employees, I made it to my large corner office.

I closed the door, let out a sigh, and took a moment to stare out the window, taking in the ocean a mile or so away on the horizon before I finally sat in my office chair. I closed my eyes, placed my hands behind my head and kicked my feet up on my oak wood table.

Assholes
, I thought. I hated working with assholes.

A minute later, my office door swung back open, and Kim stepped inside. “Are you nuts?” she shrieked as she stomped to my desk.

I opened my eyes and huffed.

“That was a $250,000 deal!”

“So what? I’m not going support guys like that.”

“If we don’t promote them, then someone else will.”

I pulled my feet off the table and leaned forward onto the desk. “Well, then good for them. But they won’t be getting any help from Flutterfly. You know, some members of our street team could be gay or lesbian, maybe even some of the temps we contract out from time to time. There’s no way I’d put any of my team in the position to help a company like that.”

Kim sighed and plopped her ass on the wooden seat in front of my desk. “Yeah…” she said and raised her eyebrows while she gazed past me and out the window. “I guess you’re right. It was a pretty big offer though, and such a shame about the hot guy with the red tie… He was checking you out the whole time.”

“Oh really? I didn’t notice.”

“You noticed.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did!”

“Stop it!” I crinkled up the first piece of paper—hopefully not important paper—lying on my desk into a ball and threw it at Kim. “We don’t choose our clients based on how hot they are.”

“Yes… but,” Kim grinned devilishly, “let’s pretend he wasn’t a bigot. Pretty fucking sexy, right?”

I rolled my eyes and sucked in a long, hard breath. Kim and I had been best friends since high school, so I was used to the drill. She was still pretty much guy crazy, which was surprising considering her luck with men. If a handsome guy gave her even the slightest glance, she would fall head over heels with him basically overnight, then spend the next two weeks sleeping over at my house, sucking down ice cream and crying about what went wrong.

Guy after guy.

She was a gorgeous girl with her petite frame and short, dark, pixie cut. If she had just spent a little more time playing hard to get, she would have probably been in a steady relationship already.

You’d think that since she was an adult, since she was a business woman, she would have learned her lesson, but not in the slightest. It was only a month prior that she had a fallout with some playboy who had changed her oil at Jiffy Lube. The oil in her car, and the oil in her… yeah.

“Okay, he was hot. I admit it. But you need to keep your mind in the game. What other kind of deals do we have in the pipeline?”

Kim reached for her smartphone in her jacket pocket and started sliding slowly on the screen. “Just a minute…”

I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling. Sometimes I wondered if I made a mistake by promoting my best friend to Vice President of the company; She was smart and hard-working, but she was more than a little ditzy sometimes. Still, she had been there for me when no one else believed that Flutterfly Promotions would ever make it to anything.

Just four years ago, I had the idea when I was cleaning out my closet and decided to try some old clothes of mine of Facebook. I posted pictures on my feed with a price, and surprisingly the stuff sold like crazy. Before long, my friends were asking me to sell their used clothes on Facebook too. I started a social group for buyers and quickly grew it to several thousands of members.

It was then that I realized the power of promotion. Each day as my list of Facebook followers grew, the promotion of the goods grew easier as well, and eventually I was helping other people grow their own lists. That’s when I decided to start Flutterfly.

From there, I began charging people money to help max out their Facebook friends and followers, and once I was big enough, I started helping small groups in my network organize parties and small events around the neighborhood, and by a year and a half I was making more money promoting than I was at my part time teaching assistant job.

Once the social scene was in our grasp, we conquered paid internet ads and hired street teams who did flyers, radio and TV. Things all just fell into place, and now our company was one of the top promoters in Los Angeles.

“We’ve got a YouTube videogame star who’s been getting a lot of negative press for some political comments that he made recently. He says that if you Google his name, the hate comments are showing above his YouTube page in the search results.”

“Oh yeah? What did he say?”

“Something or another about deportation of illegal immigrants… I don’t know exactly; I’d have to look it up. He wants us to drive traffic back to his YouTube page and help him put this incident in his past.”

I rolled my eyes again. “Alright, get Lee and the gang to take a look a look. And don’t give the idiot any special pricing. Anything else?”

“Some guy says he is an Illusionist and wants to put on his first Magic show in a local arena. Wants us to handle all the organizing, the promo, the getting people in the door.”

“Magic show? We haven’t done that kind of thing before. What kind of pricing is he looking at per ticket?”

“$30 bucks per pop and we’ll keep 20% of the proceeds” Kim said.

I chuckled. “Either he’s a piss poor performer or he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Make the tickets $120 per pop and tell him we’ll keep 50% of ticket sales. And take a deposit from him… 5 or 10 thousand.”

“That’s a pretty big bump... Do you think we can fill the seats at $120? And what if he doesn’t want to go that high?” Kim asked.

“We’re the best at what we do, and if he doesn’t like the price, he can go elsewhere. I want deals that are worthwhile.”

“You can’t keep turning everyone away, Angel.”

“I’m not turning him away; I’m just upping the ante.” I cleared my throat and gave Kim a quick wink. “If you haven’t forgotten already, we just had two guys offer us $250,000 for our services. We’re not running this gig out of my apartment anymore.”

Kim straightened her back and smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s still hard to believe that you’ve grown the company the way you have. You’re fuckin’ amazing.”

“Thanks Bae,” I said.

“Bae?” Kim’s face twisted. “When did you start using that word?”

“I dunno… I heard it on the radio. All the cool kids are using it.”

“Okay… Bae,” Kim retorted. “Speaking of hot guys and turning people away, it’s Friday.”

I held up a palm in protest. “Stop. I know what you’re going to say.”

Kim shook herself back and forth like a spoiled kid in a rocking chair. “Come on Angel. Come on
Bae
!” she stressed. “You’ve been promising me that you’ll go out with me for weeks.”

“I’ve got a lot of things to do this weekend.”

“Liar!” she yelled. “I know you’re going to go home and watch
Game of Thrones
and work when you’re not supposed to.”

She knew me all too well.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know…”

“Not since college,” she reminded me.

“We’ll go to the club, have a few drinks, meet some guys, and have some fun.”

“You know I don’t like club guys… And I’m too old for clubs anyway.”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me? You’re 23! We’re 23! We still have another 20 years of clubbing in our bones. Maybe even longer.”

“Speak for yourself…”

“Oh my god!” Kim wailed and stood from the chair. “You weren’t like this until you started Flutterfly, you know? Now all you care about is work, work, work. What happened to my best friend?”

“She’s still here,” I mumbled. “Maybe I’m just not... I dunno. And I’ve gained like 10 pounds since college. I wouldn’t even fit in the club scene anymore.”

“No!” Kim placed her hand flat on my desk and pointed a sly finger at me. “Underneath that business suit… I hate tan by the way… Underneath that ugly, tan business suit is my sexy, sultry, happenin’ best friend. And tonight she’s going to forget about work, forget about
Game of Thrones
and go have some fun with me.”

I snorted and bit my bottom lip while I tapped my fingers on the desk a few seconds. “Okay…” I caved. “I’ll do it for you, Kim.”