Escort (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (6 page)

“Don’t you think we should find somewhere
a little less-” I start.

“A little less what?” she asks as she
eagerly kisses my neck.

“I don’t know,” I stumble, “a little less
open?”

“Who cares? We’re off the main road, and
if anyone comes down this way, we’ll see them before they see us.”

I’m not sure that that’s accurate, but
she’s doing a pretty good job making her case as she takes my growing erection
in her hand and starts jerking me.

“Take my top off,” she says. “Tear it.”

She
never
talks like this. When we
do
have sex,
it’s usually timid and she’s just as likely as not to stop things before they really
get going.

This is a nice surprise.

Not wanting to kill the mood, I do what
she told me to do and remove her shirt, though I hardly tear it in the process.
This doesn’t seem to matter much.

A moment later, her skirt is up above her
ass and her panties are on the ground. I have no idea whether I had anything to
do with it or not, but she’s pressing me against her now as my tie flaps in the
breeze.

“On the hood of the car,” she instructs,
and I walk her backward, laying her on the dark fiberglass. “Fuck me. I want it
hard.”

I chuckle. “You must really be happy about
this new position.”

“It’s not just that,” she says between
deep kisses of my mouth and neck. “If things pan out all right, I’ll get
another one in six months. Almost double the salary I was making before today.”

“That’s wonderful-” I tell her.

“Shut up and fuck me,” she interrupts,
grabbing my cock and putting it against her wetness. “I want to feel you inside
of me.”

I slide myself inside and we both gasp
lightly with the feeling of it. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized just how
long it’s been.

“Yeah,” she breathes, “just like that.”

She grabs my tie and pulls me down as she
lies back all the way on the hood of the car.

The slight breeze catches her hair,
blowing strands around our faces as the setting sun lends its warmth to the
moment.

She’s biting my lower lip, harder than I’d
prefer, but not so hard that I pull away or ask her to stop. Her breasts heave
in her silken bra, and I try not to think about Yuri’s assertion that Melissa
has implants.

Of course, I know she has implants, but
that doesn’t bother me. It wouldn’t bother me if she didn’t have them. It’s
something she wanted to do, and I’d find her sexy either way because her cup
size has no bearing on how I feel about her.

How
do
I feel about her, though?

This feels so great, but it’s also
strange, foreign. We haven’t really connected, sexually or otherwise, in quite
some time, and I’m not sure what to do with this.

Get
the fuck out of your head and just enjoy the moment.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

This is one of those questions for which
there is no actual correct answer, there are answers that sound corny and
answers that would quickly put an end to what we’re doing right now.

“I’m thinking about you,” I tell her,
going with the corny option as it does also bear the virtue of being true. “I’m
thinking about us.”

“Yeah?” she asks, breathless. “
Wanna
know what I’m thinking about?”

“What’s that?”

She lifts herself a little, just enough to
smack me on the ass, but she doesn’t say anything more. If she’s trying to
communicate something to me, I’m totally missing it.

“Tell me you want me,” she whispers,
lifting herself to a near-sitting position.

“I
do
want you,” I tell her.

“Tell me you can’t imagine being without
me,” she says.

“I can’t,” I answer.

She kisses me on the mouth, her eyes open,
staring deep into mine.

“That’s what I want to hear,” she says.

With that, she pushes me backward, and I
pull out of her as she puts her feet back onto the ground and, leaning forward
over the hood of the car, she lifts her skirt a little further.

The cool breeze chills and dries the
wetness on me, but as I put myself back inside her, the contrast of her heat
sends shivers through my body.

“I want you to film me,” she says.

“What?” I ask.

“Where’s your phone?” she asks. “I want to
see what it looks like when you fuck me.”

Still moving in and out of her, I look
around.

My pants are about five feet behind me,
gathering prodigious amounts of dirt from the road as the wind continues its
mild assault.

“Now?” I ask.

“Now,” she says. “Don’t put yourself back
in me until the video’s rolling.”

It’s almost like I’m with a completely
different person, but I’m not complaining. If anything, I’m trying to figure
out how I can help her get that additional promotion in six months.

I pull out of her again and quickly pull
my phone out of my pocket.

As I return to Melissa, one hand is
flipping through my apps, trying to find the camera while, with the other, I’m
teasing her pussy.

“Make me come,” she says. “Are you
recording yet?”

“Almost there,” I tell her.

“You’re talking about the camera, right?”
she asks.

I just laugh.

Finally, after a protracted search, I find
the camera app and start recording watching my hand in the third person now as
one finger and then two disappear inside of her.

“Is it on?” she asks.

“It’s on,” I tell her.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks, and
I guide my tip to her opening as I pull my fingers from inside of her. “How
does it look?” she asks as I glide back in, slowly at first and then
completely, watching the screen as if it were a clear window, simply capturing
the direction of my eyes.

“It looks pretty amazing,” I tell her.

“Give me the phone,” she says. “I want to
see both of our faces when I come.”

It’s a slightly strange request, but who
am I to deny it?

I hand her the phone and, apparently,
she’s a lot more skilled with it than I am as she stops the video, switches it
to selfie mode and starts it again before another second has passed.

We’re both looking at the screen now, and
I’m trying to avoid the feeling of depersonalization. Being able to see her
furrowing brow and the way her breasts are pressing into the hood of the car,
barely contained by her bra, is more than enough to keep me in the moment.

My face is just out of the frame, but
that’s okay. I’m more interested in looking at her.

Her mouth is moving, but I can’t hear any
of the words.

“What are you saying?” I ask.

She finishes whatever the statement was
and turns her head to look back at me, saying, “I was telling you to fuck me
harder,” she says. “You couldn’t hear me?”

“No,” I tell her. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“Well then,” she says before turning back
around again. “Fuck me harder.”

I grab her hips and watch the screen while
a smile crosses her face and she jerks back and forth.

She never talks like this.

I’ve never heard her say the words “Fuck
me harder.” Hell, I’ve never heard her say the words “Fuck me” at all.

This is entirely new in almost every way
imaginable, and I’m finding it hard to keep from triggering immediately with
her overwhelming enthusiasm.

The sun is going down, but neither of us
are cold as she hands the phone back to me, switching the camera off of selfie
mode.

She must feel the shudder moving through
me, as she turns her head and says, “Come on my skirt and on my back. I want
something more to remember this moment than just the video.”

I’m not sure whether I’m confused by the
way she’s talking or if I’m just delirious from pleasure, but with those words,
I can’t hold it back any longer.

Doing my best to keep the camera steady, I
pull back and angle myself, exploding over her back and, yes, on her skirt. The
camera is shaking in my hand as it comes out in thick ropes of pent-up desire.

I lean forward, putting my free hand on
the hood beside Melissa and she asks if I’m done.

“Yeah,” I tell her, more breath than
voice.

She stands up and slips her skirt down
below her feet, making sure it doesn’t touch the ground.

Handing me the fabric, she asks me to
clean her off, which I do gladly.

“All right then,” she says in a
businesslike manner, her only clothing at the moment being that silk push up
bra of hers. “You’re driving.”

I find my pants and shake as much of the
accrued dirt off of them as I can while, behind me, I can hear the sound of the
trunk popping.

When I turn around, pulling my pants up,
Melissa’s almost completely dressed in clothes she must have packed into the
trunk of the car.

“You planned this out pretty well, huh?” I
ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, anyway, it’s
getting cold. We should get back to the house.”

“All right,” I answer, more confused than
ever at her change in demeanor.

I get in the car and we’re almost back to
the city before I realize I’m not wearing any underwear. The wind must have
caught my boxers.

Laughing, I say, “So, you’re not going to
believe this-”

“Yeah,” she interrupts, “would you mind if
we talk about it later? I’m trying to get this video sent over to my phone and
it’s not going through for some reason.”

“I have location turned off,” I tell her.
“It won’t pick up the network unless we’re around Wi-Fi.”

“Ah,” she says and, after another minute,
she hands me my phone, saying, “I think I might have accidentally deleted the
video from your phone in the process of sending it to mine.”

“That’s all right,” I tell her. “I’ve got
a pretty good memory.”

She just sighs and looks out the window.

“We should stop by the hospital so we can
pick up your car,” she says.

I’m starting to get the feeling that
something’s wrong.

Chapter
Five

Making Friends

Grace

Jace was supposed to be here half an hour
ago to get me in for my MRI, but his assistant says she hasn’t heard from him.

At first, I was worried that I’d showed up
late, but it looks like I’m off the hook. Still, there are better things I
could be doing with my time.

“Is there any way I could have you give me
a call if or when he shows up?” I ask her. “I’ve just got to step outside and
make a phone call.”

“Sure,” Yuri answers. “He won’t be much
longer.”

“Thanks,” I tell her and walk out of the
office.

I’m not feeling that great right now,
thanks to my new round of chemo, but I take the stairs. My phone has trouble in
elevators.

I dial the number.

“Grace?”

“How’s it going?” I ask.

“It’s going fine,” Andrew, my contact in
Ohio says.

“You know what I’m talking about,” I tell
him. “Are we good?”

“We’ve hit a bit of a snag,” he says. “It
shouldn’t amount to much, but my boss is on one of his down home values kicks
and I want to shoot myself.”

“Is there a reason I’m supposed to care
about that?” I ask, taking a break on the first landing and staring down at the
Escher-
esque
view of the remaining stairs to the
ground floor.

“Yeah,” he says, “when he’s in a mood like
this, it’s hard to convince him to take on new out-of-state commercial clients.
I don’t think he’s really in the frame of mind right now to even consider
selling out to anyone.”

“I’m not asking him to sell out,” I tell
him. “I’m not even asking him to change that much of his programming. I just
want M.E. on the bottom left of the screen. We can worry about the programming
later.”

“You’re going about this the wrong way,”
Andrew says. “If you want a takeover, you’re going to have to come up with a
firmer position than that.”

“Do you know how Romans used to pacify the
countries that fell to them?” I ask.

“How?” he asks.

“It didn’t always work and God knows there
were plenty of insurrections, but the Romans found that if they allowed a
conquered people to retain their culture, their religion, everything but the
basic allegiance which the fallen group
was
required to shift toward Rome, taxes and all, that they could keep more of the
people from rebelling most of the time,” I tell him. “Haven’t you ever wondered
why Greek and Roman gods and goddesses seem to be so interchangeable?”

“I have never wondered that in my life,”
he says.

“Well, first off, much of Roman culture
itself was devised from earlier Greek sources, but the two remained relatively
stable in a lot of ways for a pretty significant amount of time because it was
enough for Rome, during that time, to conquer. They didn’t care so much that
people worshipped different gods or had other forms of entertainment. They got
what they wanted: they got more land, more trade, more taxes, more citizens to
fight in their wars, and more innovation than they would have if they came in
only as a conquering force without any regard to the basic culture of the
people they conquered,” I tell him.

“Of course, one of these days, we’ll want
to have every bit of our programming going every second of your broadcast day,
but we’re not going to push that until you’ve had a chance to see that we
respect what you’re doing. If we didn’t, well, we wouldn’t be having this
conversation.”

“That’s a pretty good tactic,” Andrew
says.

“I think so,” I respond, sitting down on
the top step of the next flight of stairs. “Not everyone here thinks that’s the
way to do this sort of thing, but then again, not too many other people here
are ready for Rome to expand, either, so-”

“That’s not what I meant,” he interrupts.
“I mean it’s a good tactic to go off on weird shit like that. I still have no
idea what you’re talking about, but I’m ready to give part of my check to
Caesar. You know what I’m saying?”

“Hardly,” I answer. “I guess we just click
that way. So, you’re going to talk to him?”

“I’ll test the waters,” he says, “but I
really think we’re going to want to wait until after sweeps when he’s good and
depressed.”

“At some point, you’re going to have to
stop dangling your feet and grow some balls,” I tell him and hang up the phone.

I had more to say, but I didn’t want him
to hear what’s about to happen.

What I’m doing right now can’t really be
called running — it could barely be called climbing — but as quickly as I can
with my tortured muscles and my complete lack of energy, I’m trying to make it
at least to the trash can at the top of this flight of stairs.

A couple of minutes later and I don’t
really feel all that much better. I just have a momentary reprieve from the
hell that’s going to keep coming back until this shit is out of my system for a
few days.

It’s worse this time.

Jace warned me that that’s often the way
it works, but I didn’t think it was going to happen this quickly, and I
certainly didn’t think it was going to hit this hard.

I stagger back into the doctor’s office
and Yuri, no doubt accustomed to seeing people come in the way I’m coming in,
walks over to the water cooler and fills a glass, bringing it over to me as I
all but collapse into the chair by the office.

“You know,” she says, standing over me,
“With Dr. Churchill being so late to the office, I really don’t think that
we’re going to be able to get you in for the MRI at your scheduled time. I
would just take you down there myself, but he prefers to sit in with the
radiologist while they do the scan.”

“He seems to have a lot of time on his
hands for an oncologist,” I mutter, curious as to whether Yuri knows about his
other job, but not wanting to be too blatant about it.

“This is actually very unusual for him,”
she says. “He’s never been late to the office since I’ve worked here. Can I get
you anything else?”

“A mint,” I say, “or a stick of gum would
be great — anything to get this rotten taste out of my mouth.”

“Sure thing,” she says and goes back to
her desk. She opens one of the drawers, pulls out a pack of gum and tosses it
over to me.

I take two sticks and chew one while I let
the other rest on my tongue, folded in half. When I go to throw the pack back
to her, Yuri shakes her head.

“Keep it,” she says. “I’ve got a whole
drawer full.”

“I guess it should be comforting to know
this sort of thing happens quite a bit,” I say, doing my best to smile.

“You didn’t throw up in a trash can, did
you?” she asks.

I hang my head a little.

“It’s okay,” she tells me. “Just with the
chemo in your system, we need to make sure that maintenance knows they need to
wear gloves and dispose of the bag in medical waste instead of the normal
trash.”

“Top of the stairwell,” I tell her. “Sorry
about that.”

“It happens,” Yuri says, picking up her
phone, “trust me.”

She’s informing whoever that “one of Dr.
Churchill’s patients” did blah, blah, blah, and I’m not sure whether I’m having
so much trouble concentrating because I’m trying to block out my embarrassment
or if it’s a symptom of something.

Whether that something is the disease or
the cure — I don’t know that, either.

Yuri hangs up the phone and turns back to
me. “I’m sorry you’re having a rough go of it,” she says. “Did you drive
today?”

“I took a cab,” I tell her. “I had a
feeling I wasn’t going to be the safest driver this morning.”

“Well,” she says, “I’ll try Dr. Churchill
again, but at this point, I think you’re safe to head home if you want to.”

I tongue the wad of gum in my mouth into
my cheek and tell her, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to sit here for a little
bit longer. I’m feeling a little weak.”

“Sure,” Yuri says. “You can stay here as
long as you want.”

I sit and I take deep breaths, trying to
get past this feeling I know I’m going to be stuck with for the next four days
at the very least.

Some time goes by and other patients come
into the office, but Yuri informs them that the doctor’s not in. She offers to
set up an appointment with another oncologist for everyone, myself included,
but nobody takes her up on her offer.

After a while, Yuri prints out a sign
saying that the doctor had an emergency and that patients who would like a
referral can simply call the number at the bottom to get in with Dr.
Hoynes
.

With that, she turns off the main light
and closes the office door.

“I should probably get out of your hair,
huh?” I ask.

“No,” she says, “you’re fine. Whether he
shows up or not, I have some things I need to catch up on here, anyway.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What’s that?” she responds, looking at me
over the frames of her black plastic glasses.

“If this is what oral chemotherapy’s like,
is it really that big of an improvement over the IV stuff?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think any
kind of chemo’s going to be really hard on your system. Some people do better
with the capsules, some people do better with the IVs, but I don’t think anyone
has a fun time with any of it.”

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“San Diego,” she says. “My parents moved
here when I was a teenager, and I guess I just never really felt the urge to go
back. What about you?”

“Delaware,” I tell her, and then I get to
the question I really wanted to ask. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could
fire up a J in here, is there?”

“Sorry,” she says. “The administration
frowns on that sort of thing in the hospital.”

“Bummer,” I answer.

“But…” she says, reaching into her desk,
“and this has got to stay between you and me.”

She pulls a vaporizer pen from one of her
desk drawers. “
It’s
strawberry flavored,” she says.
“You can’t even taste the other stuff.”

“You just keep that in your drawer?” I
laugh.

She smiles. “Let’s just say you’re not the
first person I’ve been in here alone with who could use a little relief.”

“Do you have an alcohol wipe or
something?” I ask. “It’s not that I don’t trust you or anything, I just don’t
trust the other patients who’ve-”

“I meant me,” she says.

My jaw actually drops.

“You’re serious?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve got a valid
prescription and everything — it’s totally legal. I’m sure the doc wouldn’t be
too thrilled if he knew I had it here in the office, but he’s never seemed to
notice.”

With that, she gets out of her chair and
locks the door to the office before coming over to me and handing me the
vaporizer.

“You’re not going to join me?” I ask.

“I’m still on the clock,” she says.

I take a puff and, even though Yuri
assured me that there wouldn’t be any illicit smell, it still takes me about
thirty seconds before I feel comfortable exhaling. Even then, I breathe out
into the sleeve of my sweater.

The phone rings and Yuri answers it,
saying,
“
Dr. Churchill’s office.”

I take another puff and try to remind
myself that what I’m experiencing right now is a reality. I’m sitting in a
locked office with the assistant to my oncologist who just hooked me up with MJ
extract.

“Okay,” Yuri says into the phone. “Grace
is still here, should I send her home or should I call down to…uh huh…uh huh…”

I take another puff, forgetting my
still-low tolerance for the fact that what I’m doing really doesn’t feel like
smoking anything except candied strawberries, and I’m already starting to feel
less nauseated, less sore, less pained.

“All right,” Yuri says, “I’ll tell her.”

She hangs up the phone, gets up from her
desk and takes a seat next to me.

I hold out the pen to her as I’m already
starting to feel the high coming on pretty strong, and she takes it.

“He’s not coming in today,” she says. “I
guess he’s already called radiology and gotten you scheduled for tomorrow.”

Her wrist makes an elegant series of
movements as she takes a long pull from the vaporizer and blows out a series of
— I guess they’re still called smoke rings if it’s coming from a vaporizer, but
I’m still pretty new to all this.

“Where do you live?”

I tell her and, apparently, we’re only a
few blocks from each other. In this city, that’s a pretty big coincidence.

“
Wanna
split a
cab?” she asks.

“I thought you had work to do,” I answer.

“It can wait,” she says. “Most of what I
was going to do, I guess Dr. Churchill already took care of, and I’d rather
know that you got home safe than stay here and sit on my thumb, you know?”