Harder We Fade (4 page)

One of the many perks of living with Max was that I no longer dreaded getting up in the mornings. I liked my sleep, always had, and the sound of an alarm clock was something I’d always hated. But now, being shaken out of slumber by that awful sound was becoming a less frequent occurrence.

Max liked to wake me up in other ways. Sometimes it was his hands caressing my back or my legs. I always slept with my back to him, snug in his embrace. So sometimes I woke up to the feeling of him circling a finger around my nipple as he pressed and rubbed himself along my bottom.

But my favorite — and apparently one of Max’s — was the mornings I’d wake up on my back, legs spread, with Max’s head between my legs. He would always have pushed the comforter and the top sheet off the bed to the floor, and it was just the two of us naked there on the bed.

“Good morning,” he would always say, stopping for a few seconds when I looked down my body and made eye contact with him.

But there was a morning, just a few short weeks after he renamed the company, a Monday morning when we were about to hire a casting director for Max’s new film, that I woke up as Max was turning me over onto my stomach.

“Good morning, dream girl,” he whispered into my ear.

I smiled in response, as I turned my head to the side and rested it on my folded arms.

Max moved my hair to the side and kissed the back of my neck. He was sort of hovering over me and I could feel his hard cock against the back of my thigh, then along the cleft of my ass, as he moved back and forth slowly, enjoying the soft friction.

Soft for him, anyway. For me, it was different. “You’re rough,” I said, sleepily, referring to the fact that he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

I lay still in that position, not getting a response from Max. Or maybe he did say something and I just didn’t hear it, because the next thing I knew I was waking up again, and about five minutes had passed.

I heard water running in the bathroom, so I got up and padded across the carpet to find Max in there, sitting on the edge of the tub, with his back to the door.

“I’m sorry I fell asleep on you,” I said.

“No worries, Liv. You were right. I was kind of rough.”

I walked over and sat beside him.

“I don’t know why I’ve never seen you do this before,” I said.

He turned his attention away from what he was doing, looked at me, smiled and said, “Me neither.”

The tub was filling up with water, and I was already naked, so I got in. I sat cross-legged in front of Max as he remained on the edge of the tub.

His groin was lathered up with shaving cream and he held a razor in one hand.

I splashed some water on my body. Max watched it trickle down from my neck, over my breasts, and I looked down and saw a bead of water clinging to my right nipple.

I’m a firm believer that men should take care of themselves down there, just as they expect women to. I’d always liked the closely trimmed look and feel, but when I suggested to Max one day that we give it a try with both of us completely shaved, we loved it and were sticking with it for now.

There’s something completely different and sensual about the feeling of pure, soft, smooth skin-on-skin action. Or tongue-on-skin, for that matter.

“Here,” he said, holding the razor out to me. “I’ve shaved you before. Now it’s your turn.”

My eyes shot open. I hadn’t been expecting that in the least. “Serious.”

“Serious,” he said. “Go slow.”

I took the razor and settled in closer to him.

I started above his cock, letting the blade glide across his taught muscle slowly. He had been keeping up the grooming, so there wasn’t much to shave, but I was still taking my time with this unexpected thrill.

The trust it took for him to allow me to do this was even more of a rush.

With my left hand, I held his length, now growing erect, as I lightly dragged the blade around his balls.

Max got harder the longer this went on, his erection jutting out. At one point, I moved my face closer to him, sticking my tongue out and licking a little droplet of precome from the head.

“Dammit, Olivia, I can’t take this much longer.”

“What? Me holding this sharp object so close to your balls?”

He didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile at my joke. “No. Being this close to your mouth.”

I was finished shaving him, so I placed the razor in the holder on the wall, then filled my cupped hands with water and rinsed him off, removing what was left of the shaving cream. I did this three or four times, completely cleaning him…

And then I took the head of his cock between my lips, massaging it like that, running my tongue over the slit, driving him even more to the edge.

Max moved his hips forward a little, sliding more of his cock into my mouth. I opened wide and took as much of it as I could, closing my lips around him.

He ran his hand though my hair, gathering it in a bunch and holding it at the back of my head — not forceful, but guiding the action.

I felt him throb. He wasn’t about to come. He was flexing the muscle beneath his balls to make that happen. It was a sensation that he had created before, and I had told him how much I loved to feel it, both in my mouth and when he was inside me. He didn’t always do it, preferring instead to surprise me with it.

And he did, just then. I smiled around his cock.

“Bed.” That’s all he said. One word. That was a rare thing with Max, but when he did so, I felt a surge of unique excitement at his blunt command.

He stood, taking me by the hand as I stepped out of the tub, and he pulled me along to the bed, where he spun me around and I landed on my back. We hadn’t bothered to dry me off, so I was still damp from the waist down from sitting in the bathwater.

But, at a moment like this, who could possibly care?

Max’s head was between my legs in a flash, his face buried in my sex — his nose pressing on my clit as his tongue greedily lapped, then entered me.

He grabbed my ankles and moved my feet closer to my hips, bending my knees in the process, allowing me to lift my lower body off the bed. I bucked my hips as he fucked me with his tongue in hungry, excited, but feathery soft wet strokes.

I reached down and took a handful of his hair in my fist. I loved feeling how his head made a circular motion as his tongue massaged my clit.

I moved my hips up and down, faster against his face, and felt the first wave of orgasm ripple through me.

“Come in my mouth,” Max managed to say, his words intensifying the nerve-tingling rush he had brought me to.

He kept his tongue on my clit until the sensation was too great, and I pushed his head away. He rose on the bed, positioning himself between my legs. I felt the weight of his erection against my sex.

Max’s mouth went right for my breasts, first sucking on my left nipple, then my right, alternating between the two. He moved his hips, rubbing the plump crown of his penis against me. His tongue licked and flicked across my nipples, until finally he took one between his tongue and his upper teeth, a feeling I loved so much it made me arch my back involuntarily.

“Offense or defense?” he breathed.

It was a running joke between us — who would be on top to start? Offense was top, defense was bottom.

“Is it my turn to choose?” I asked. “Because right now I don’t care — ”

And just like that, having given him the faintest green light, he plunged the tip of his cock into me, then stopped. He slipped it out a little, then pushed back in.

“I love teasing you,” he said.

“You love trying to make me beg for it.”

Max didn’t say anything. He just kept up that taunting motion.

This too was part of the offense-defense thing we had — seeing who could hold out the longest.

I usually won this part of the battle, because Max always made me come before sex. Sometimes with his mouth, other times with his hand, and sometimes he even did it in this position using just the teasing glide of his rigid length across my wet folds.

Today, though, Max was going to win. After letting me shave him, and after that sheet-clawing orgasm he’d just given me, I wanted him inside me.

“Fuck me,” I said, reached out and putting my hand on his clenched ass, pulling him into me.

He slid in with one smooth thrust.

His head dipped and his lips sealed around mine. He groaned low in his throat as he drove his cock into me to the hilt. I threw my head back and his mouth went right for my throat.

Max then got up on his knees, placing his hand under me on the small of my back, lifting me slightly. It gave him a different angle of entry and he fucked me deep and hard until I felt his cock throbbing — not the kind he controlled, but the kind I always felt as his body geared up for orgasm.

I reached up and placed my palm flat on his stomach. I loved feeling the way his muscles contracted as he moved in and out of me.

The need. The desire. The power. Everything about his intense maleness while he fucked me sent my nearly helpless body right to the edge of orgasm again.

As I clenched around him, his own throbbing increased. I felt the first hot spurt of his come jetting out of his cock, then more, more, our skin-on-skin becoming warmer and slick, until we were both spent.

I had a lot to prove to Max. Not in a personal way, but in a professional one. He had given me a ton of responsibility, trust, and indeed power at OliviMax, and I intended to exceed his expectations.

It was just as much proving something to myself. I knew it had taken a ton of guts to come all the way to L.A. to work in show business. While I didn’t have dreams as lofty as those of the countless aspiring actors out there, they were still my dreams and I wanted to realize them.

Max liked to call me his “dream girl.” I liked to think he gave me my dream job. And now that I had it, I wanted to make it happen in an even bigger way.

So, without becoming a taskmaster bitch of a manager, I found some middle ground between that and being a weak “yes girl” to the people I had to deal with.

I didn’t care if they knew I was the live-in girlfriend of Max Dalton. In fact, I felt no hesitation whatsoever about people knowing that about me and making my job easier. But one thing I didn’t do was play that card on my own. It spoke for itself, and as I learned more about the business and became better at my job, I would soon not have to rely on that at all — I’d be my own woman.

Being around him more and more, I noticed that Max kept a journal. He didn’t keep it on his laptop or iPad, but rather a leather-bound book. Once, when I asked him why he didn’t do it digitally and sync it up with his phone and laptop so he could add to it whenever he wanted no matter where he was, he said he still liked to write longhand sometimes. It was more personal, he told me, and since the journal was where he recorded his most personal thoughts, it was the perfect opportunity to uncap a pen and put real ink on paper.

Trust me, I was tempted to look in his journal at times, but I respected his space. Plus, Max was never one to keep his feelings from me, so I figured I knew everything anyway.

That is, until he started getting quiet just a few weeks before I would be leaving to go to Ohio for Christmas.

We were in his office at OliviMax, on a conference call with the agent who repped Troy McKenzie, the actor Max wanted for the leading role in the new film.

“He hasn’t read the script yet,” the agent said.

“It’s been two weeks,” Max said. “That’s more than enough time.”

“He’s been really busy.”

Usually during this type of call, if I was there at all, I didn’t say much, if anything. But this time I did, seeing how frustrated Max was.

“Listen,” I said to the agent, “Forty-eight hours. That’s plenty of time for Troy to read the script. The offer’s on the table and we’re not going to sit around and wait for him to pick up the pages. Give us a yes or no within two days or he’ll never get another offer from us. Ever.”

I could feel my pulse pounding in my neck. I was so worked up, not just out of anger or frustration, but at the thrill of using the power Max had given me for this job.

I looked up at Max, whose eyes were wide, and I watched a grin slowly overtake his face. He leaned forward, closer to the phone and said, “Gotta go, Ben. Talk to you in two days.” Max ended the call.

We were sitting on the couch. Max was holding a script, and I was sitting next to him. When the call from Ben had come in, I had been flipping through some headshots of various people we were thinking about auditioning for supporting roles for the new film.

I looked at Max. “Surprised?”

“That’s part of it.” He put his script to the side, took the photos from my hand and put them on the coffee table. Then pulled me closer to him, turning me onto my back and lowering me so he was cradling me in his arms. He bent his head down and gave me a long kiss. “The way you walk around here, the way you were on the phone just now,” he said, “like you own this damn town.”

I felt my face start to blush. “I’m sorry — ”

He put a finger over my lips. “No.” He shook his head. “It’s fucking hot.”

A smile grew across my face. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.” He kissed me again, and his left hand slipped under the hem of my shirt, up my stomach, and pushed my bra up over my left breast. He rolled and tugged my nipple as his tongue swept through my mouth.

I watched his face as he pulled away from my lips. His eyes moved down my body, to where his hand was under my blouse, then he looked at my legs, then back up to my eyes. “If I could keep you like this forever, I would. Of course, I’d have to rearrange your position so I could have my way with you.”

“You can already do that.”

My breath hitched in my throat as he played a little rougher with my nipple, something I absolutely loved — the gentle touch of his soft writer’s fingertips, contrasted by a pinch of an ache as he squeezed harder, then back to the tender rolling.

Max said, “I know I can do that, but not like I want to. I want to be inside you 24/7, Liv, never letting you go. I crave you.”

My heart beat faster and I had to take a deep breath. Hearing words like that from the man I loved made me want to shut off the world. And, truthfully, I don’t think I’d care if I ever laid eyes on another human being for the rest of my life.

“I can’t have you like that,” he continued, “and it kills me.”

Something occurred to me and I needed to ask him. It wasn’t the best time, but there really was no good time to do it. “How much of this has to do with that night?”

His jaw clenched and I could see the muscles in his face tighten. He didn’t say anything.

“I know you don’t want to keep talking about it and God knows I don’t either, but, really….if you — ”

“I don’t know,” he said, cutting me off mid-sentence. “I see you differently now.”

I squirmed as he increased the pressure on my nipple. “How so?”

“You like that.” He grinned.

I nodded.

“Good.” He shifted to the other breast, and went back to the slow, easy rolling motion, giving some much desired attention to my other nipple. “The way you are here, at work, this professional side of you — ”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “real professional, lying here getting fondled by my boss.”

Max just smiled. “We talked about that.”

Several weeks ago I had made a joke about him harassing me at work, saying I’d actually like that. Max knew where I was coming from, but at the same time made it very clear that nothing would be going on in the office when other people were present, and he drew a very bright line there.

I whimpered as he drew my nipple to a hard peak.

“So,” he said, “I didn’t think it was possible, but I find myself even more attracted to you now.”

“Because of how I am here?”

He nodded. “You’re so in control. It makes me want you to give up that control to me. Or, actually, I’d rather take it from you.”

I was getting wet listening to his words, and I could feel him growing harder underneath me.

Max didn’t have even the slightest bit of modesty when it came to sex. He knew what he wanted. He would tell me what he wanted. He would tell me how I made him feel with my body. But I knew he was talking about something different.

And he explained: “I can’t protect you from the world. I can’t own you around the clock. But I can make you safe most of the time, and I can make your gorgeous body all mine. Make you come when I want. Have you make me come whenever I want.”

It sounded a lot like how our relationship had been from the start, but there was something different about what he was saying, something he was implying but, unlike his usual directness, he wasn’t telling me right away.

“Yeah?” was what I said, my way of asking him to explain.

He leaned down and kissed me on the mouth, letting his tongue trace around the edges of my lips. “You’ll see….”

“So you’re not going to tell me?”

He shook his head. “I want to have fun with this. You’ll enjoy it. Trust me.”