Duplicity (6 page)

Chapter 7

Lilith was no stranger to athletic sex, but she must have overdone
it this time, because Trey called her on it once he’d caught his breath.

“
Not that it wasn’t amazing,
but who were
you punishing just now?”

Still a little winded, Lilith lifted her head to regard him. “You
call that punishment?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“All I’m saying is if you’d chosen professional boxing as
a
occupation instead of this, I’d
be black, blue, and bloody right now.” He stretched, folding his arms behind
his head. “We’ll just call that one my gain.” He looked at her, his expression
more serious. “Now will you tell me what’s going on?”

Rolling off him onto her back, Lilith stared at the ceiling.
“You’re not paying me to bitch.”

She heard rather than saw him turn his head in her direction.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever been asked to do?”

This question she could handle. She didn’t even have to think very
hard.
“Had a guy with a diaper fetish once.
He didn’t
want any kind of sex. He wanted me to change his dirty diaper.”

“
Eww
.”
She
turned in time to see Trey wrinkle his nose. “Is there anything you won’t do?”

“I refuse to do anything involving poop and pee.”

“But you just said—”

“I said he asked, not that I did it.”

He rolled over onto his side, propping his head up on his hand.
“Okay. So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve actually done?”

“I paddled a guy with a hairbrush.” She waggled her eyebrows,
smirking at his shocked, somewhat flushed expression. “You want to talk about
athletic sex—the second that guy
was
off my lap, he
grabbed me, bent me over the table, and had his way with me.”

“How exciting.”
He
paused for a heartbeat before he went on. “Would you let someone spank you?”

The tone of his voice—low and sexy—sent a shiver down her spine.
It was only by virtue of practice that she kept her visceral reaction off her
face. “I’d have to trust someone a lot to let them hit me.”

Trey began to trace the curve of her breast with the tip of a
single finger as he spoke. “Would you trust me?”

Despite her best efforts, Lilith’s voice was barely there when she
answered. “Yes.” She didn’t know how she felt about the act on a personal
level—she hadn’t had occasion to think about her own pleasure—but she knew she
would trust him if he asked.

Feeling too aware of his eyes on her, she cleared her throat and
attempted an unconcerned shrug. “If I trust you enough to stick your
unprotected cock in my mouth, I trust you with a little spanking. But there’s a
sliding scale for
that .
 . . you know,
just for your edification.”

“I see.” His finger brushed down the valley between her breasts.
“Tell me about this sliding scale.” His eyes flitted to hers, and there was
something deliciously dangerous there. It made her press her tongue to the roof
of her mouth to quell the urge to whimper. “You
know .
 . .
for my edification.”

Lilith swallowed hard before she could speak, but then she
grinned. She knew how to play this game. She knew how to win. She rolled onto
her side, pressing her front against him, knowing her nipples were hard and
brushing up against his skin. Taking his hand, she moved it to her ass, as if
she were helping him by illustrating the part of her body they were discussing.
“It depends on how red you want it.” She made her voice ever so slightly
tentative, vulnerable. “A nice pink glow won’t cost you much.”

She heard the way his breath stuttered before he could manage an
answer. “No?” The word was scratchy.

“
No.” She reached back, pressing her palm to his hand. “It
can be so nice. You feel the heat coming off the skin.”

“Is that a fact?” His voice was so thick. His pupils were dilated
and fixated on her lips as she spoke.

She hummed her assent, reaching up to rub his cheek.

As soon as he ducked his head, about to kiss her, she pulled back,
just out of his reach. “Of course, if you want to make it so I have carry a
pillow around to sit down, you’d better believe you’re going to compensate me
for all that.”

His confused expression told her he’d forgotten what the hell
they’d been talking about for a moment. When his brain turned back on, he
chuckled. “Well, I think that’s plenty reasonable.”

Raising his hand, he drew his fingers through her hair. “Will you
tell me what had you so worked up before?”

Lilith growled, throwing one arm over her eyes. “You’re stubborn,
you know that?”

“I’m aware.”

For long minutes, she didn’t answer, and he seemed content to let
her mull it over in silence.

It seemed dangerous. Everything about Trey was uncharted
territory, but this had warning lights and whistles all over it. Sometimes,
this quasi-friendship, business partnership was unnerving. She felt dangerously
close to forgetting the role she was supposed to be playing.

Still, every one of her personas had to have friends, didn’t they?
That was what Trey had called them—friends.
So why not?
Who else could she vent to?

As she began to tell Trey about her birthday party the night
before, she tried to play it off as no big deal. The more she spoke, though,
the angrier she got just remembering how badly the man who was supposed to be
her best friend had hurt her.

Folding her arms, she glared at the ceiling. “You’d think I was
selling drugs to kids or running a slave trade the way he acts. You know, every
once in a while I do get to help someone. I’m not trying to say what I do is
noble, but it’s not
nothing
. Sometimes the guys who
come in are so stressed, and I can help them. And yeah, there are other ways to
go about stress relief, but so what? This is the one I’m good at. Then there
are guys who have no self-confidence. With me, for just awhile, they’re the
biggest studs on the planet.”

She looked at him, feeling small and stupid. “That’s not
nothing
, is it?”

“You do a lot for me, so I don’t think that’s nothing.” He stroked
her hair away from her eyes.

This took her by surprise. “I do a lot for you?”

“Sure.” He grinned at her. “I don’t think you realize how much
stress a grad student has, particularly a younger one like me. Many of the professors
and TAs, like our good friend Francis, don’t think I deserve to be where I am.”
His eyebrows knitted together. “My family has more money than God. That doesn’t
mean I didn’t work my ass off to be where I am.

“Anyway, it’s very stressful, and that kind of stress does
terrible things to the body and mind.” He bumped the tip of her nose with his
finger. “Believe
me,
this is far preferable to some
kind of break down.” His expression softened. “And if you want to know the
truth, you’re a lot better company than most. My brother was right that night.
I don’t get out too much. I don’t have a lot of friends, so this
is .
 . . nice.”

There was that word again.
Friends
.
Lilith turned it over in her head wondering if it fit. She knew Mal and Dana
were her friends. Yeah, she was pissed off at Mal, but that would blow over.

If Trey knew everything about her, would he still call himself a
friend?

Rather than dwell on that happy topic, she shifted the subject.
“It’s not like you can just walk into McDonald’s and get a job. And anyway, I
can’t pay rent on that salary. My apartment is barely a box as it is.”

“Did you know McDonald’s turns away more applicants a year than
Harvard?”

The comment cheered her.
“Yeah, exactly.”

He was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “You could have called
me, you know. I would have been there in a heartbeat.”

Lilith was startled by this revelation. Though she’d thought about
Trey more than was comfortable during her birthday celebration, she hadn’t
thought about calling him. She’d never done more than text him to confirm a
meeting time.

It was a strange association they had.

Before she could think of what to say, he was talking again, his
words careful. “You know I don’t think you should be ashamed of what you do for
a living. But this is a means to an end, isn’t it? Aren’t you working toward
something else?”

Already irritated, Lilith opened her mouth to yell.

Trey put his hands up in a peacemaking gesture. “I’m not arguing
Mal’s
point. If you did work at McDonald’s, I would ask you
the same question.”

He shifted then, moving so he straddled her, holding all his
weight on his arms and knees. Considering they’d been much closer together, it
was odd that this felt so much more intimate. The way he was running his
fingers down her cheek did things to her body that had nothing to do with their
nudity. It was
an
different kind of titillation, and
Lilith allowed herself a moment to bask in its warmth.

“I know what you told me before about what you thought about this
kind of work in the first place, but you must have had some kind of plan. You
must have dreams.”

Had there ever been a plan?

At the beginning, it had been the easiest choice in the world. It
was the difference between Dana’s complete destruction and keeping her friend
on the right side of sanity. When Lilith discovered she could pay rent and then
some, it had been a no brainer.

She made one obvious choice after another. The aforementioned
“then some” went to Dana’s schooling. Supporting both of them, there wasn’t a
lot left over.

Lilith allowed herself a few indulgences - a Kindle and a
subscription to Netflix to feed her fiction habit. She couldn’t get enough of
other people’s happily ever
afters
.

No, to be honest, she hadn’t thought of what came next. She lived
day to day, surviving as best she could. The last time she’d had dreams, they’d
been the impossible kind that only children believed could come true. She had
vague memories of wanting to be president.

People told children they could be anything, but it wasn’t true.

“What’s the point of thinking of all that?” she asked, looking at
some nondescript spot over his shoulder. “When it gets to the point I can’t do
this anymore, I’ll be what?
A twenty-something girl whose
only job was as an exotic dancer?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want to think
about it.”

Her easy dismissal seemed to trouble him. He sat back, gathering
her to him, and pulling her into a sitting position with him. “If you had to
think about it,” he prompted.

Annoyance shot through her, and she shook her head, reaching for
her shirt. “Man, who knows? Maybe you’ll put in a good word for me at your
fancy school, and I can get a job cleaning the floors, emptying the garbage.
There’s nobility to that. Mal would be pleased.”

“And solving impossible math equations out on the board when no
one’s looking?” He picked up on the movie she was referencing with ease.

Untangling herself from him, she looked around for her pants. “I
have to go.”

“
Lilith .
 . .”

“Look, don’t worry about me, okay?” Her tone was sharp, brusque.

He watched her move around the room. He’d drawn his legs up to his
chest and wrapped his arms around them, his expression so
sad,
Lilith couldn’t stand to look at him.

“Why don’t we go to lunch?”

“No.”

“If you don’t want to go out, I could make—”

 “Just stop.” She stood still for a second, her hands
clenched at her side as she looked at him. “Don’t feel sorry for me. This was
all my choice, and it was the right choice.”

“Lilith, I didn’t—”

“I have to go.” Before he could protest again, she was out the
door.

~0~

As much as Lilith tried, she couldn’t get the voices in her head
to shut up. She tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. She turned on her
favorite movies, but the dialogue may as well have been Charlie Brown’s parents
for all she heard.

Her thoughts were twisted, tangled. Every argument Mal made about
why she shouldn’t do what she did, how she could do better if she tried, played
in a loop.

By now she knew Trey’s relentless questioning was innocent. He was
a curious boy, and she supposed, to him, she led a curious life. He hadn’t
meant to be condescending or mean, but his words had a definite effect on her.

When had she started living like this—day to day, merely
surviving?

She saw no future in front of her. She had no dreams. She couldn’t
say whether she wanted a boyfriend, children, or what kind of job she would
have if she had the choice. If someone asked her what she wanted most, she
would say to see Dana and Mal graduate. She wanted to go to
Mal’s
wedding, even if he did end up with Erin. She wanted to see Dana happy and at
peace. But for
herself
, life was a blank canvas,
gathering dust in the corner of a room, long forgotten.