IllicitImpulse (5 page)

He let go of her just long enough to yank the dress over her
head, long enough to disengage the hooks of her bra with a snap and then they
were skin-to-skin, the close quarters of the room all but vibrating with their
mutual hunger. She faced herself in the window-turned-mirror and watched him
touching her, the golden tan of his skin against the deep brown of her thighs,
between her long legs.

Moving on pure, intoxicating instinct, she made an offering
of her body. She arched her back for him, lifting her ass toward him, spreading
her legs for him. Soon his aggression matched hers and he groped her eagerly,
his rough hands grabbing the full roundness of her ass before rubbing the slick
heat of her mound. His strong fingers found her clit again and parted the
swollen lips of her sex. A cry broke from her and she started to roll her hips
toward him.

“God, Tal, please!”

He let go of her for a moment and she could hear him opening
the condom. She whined with desperation when he moved away from her, but she
listened for the soft sound of the rubber stretching over his shaft. She bent
at the waist, leaning on the desk.

Tal entered her roughly, filling her easily. She moaned,
bending back toward him, and he began to fuck her hard and deep, rough sounds
of masculine pleasure punctuating his long thrusts. His fingers dug into her
hips, but he didn’t have to pull her back onto his cock. She met each push
eagerly, wanting still more, more hard flesh, more heat. More.

“You feel so fucking good,” he growled.

Grace could only moan in response, quickening her pace to
match his. She could see their reflection in the window, and the sight of the
man behind her stirred something deep within.

“More,” she cried. “More.”

Tal ground his big cock deep into her. “You want more? You
want more of that?” The hands on her hips held her in place, but she moved her
hips from one side to the other, reveling in the glorious sensation of his
flesh inside her. Helpless in his grasp and in the face of her own lust, she
gasped and nodded.

But Tal seemed determined to prolong the delicious agony. In
the reflection, his generous mouth curled into his familiar teasing grin, and
he slowed his thrusts, as if to fully appreciate each second inside her.
Frustrated beyond words, Grace began to push herself back into him. She needed
him to fill her, to take her, and she was determined to entice him into fucking
her on her terms.

He matched her pace, riding her hard, until each stroke
threatened to take her over the edge. When she did reach her climax, her
fingers dug into the desk’s battered, pitted surface, and her pussy clasped his
cock hard. Her cry of ecstasy filled the space, drowning out the sound of Tal’s
release before she collapsed, spent, in front of him.

Panting, he eased out of her. “Have I mentioned,” he asked,
“how glad I am that we’re friends?”

* * * * *

From her familiar resting place in Tal’s bed, with her head
pillowed on his chest, Grace gazed into the shadows and considered how
differently this had all played out in her mind.

She’d looked forward to this for such a long time, long
before she’d even admitted it to John.
Friday night with Tal.
The phrase
had taken on its own magical significance in her head. It meant having the
leisure and freedom to have sex all over his loft, returning to favorite places
and positions, maybe indulging in an experiment or two before they ended up in
bed. They might enjoy one last climax between the sheets before she came to
rest right here, where Tal’s slow, regular breathing would pull her gently into
sleep. The next morning, they’d sleep in, maybe hang out in bed, share
breakfast, a shower, stories of his clients. She’d wrap up in the robe she kept
on the back of his bathroom door. They’d laugh and tease each other, like they
had before. Maybe they’d have sex again before she left, before the first of the
weekend clients came in.

Her idea of Friday night with Tal didn’t involve lying
awake, deep in thought. She smiled ruefully into the dark. At least the sex was
exceeding expectations.

She hated to move for fear of waking him if he slept, for
fear of alerting him if he was still awake. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to
go home. She wanted…what?

“You okay over there?” Tal’s dark-honey drawl was slow but
crystal clear.

“Yeah.”

“Want some water or something?”

“No, I’m okay.”

He was quiet beneath her again. How long had it been since
they were wrapped around each other? Just a little while ago, she’d ridden him
hard, they’d shared their X-rated sweet talk, just as they always had. Nothing
had changed. Right?

Tal shifted beneath her, his legs untangling from hers as he
turned over to face her. Grace tucked her arm beneath a pillow and lay down on
it. He stroked her hair and tugged gently at her earlobe, and for a moment, she
wondered if he would somehow start the Impulse-fueled cycle of ice and fire and
desire again.

“Sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.” She patted his chest, relieved that her body
didn’t seem to be responding to him. “I just can’t sleep.”

“I must be losing my touch,” he said. “Jack Daniel’s might
be able to finish the job, if you want.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I
could use a little help myself.”

By the time Grace put on her robe and tied a bandana over
her hair, Tal had pulled on a pair of boxers and set two glasses on his dining
table, along with the bottle of whiskey. She took the chair across from him and
watched as he poured a couple of splashes into each glass.

Tal lifted his drink. “To your friend and his pills.”

Grace touched her glass to his. She swished the liquor
around a bit, but then she pushed the glass into the center of the table. “Impulse,”
she said. “That’s what they’re going to call it.”

Tal finished his drink in a swallow and stared at the empty
glass for a moment before refilling it. “What are they going to call the men’s
version?”

“He said men don’t need an oxytocin-suppressant pill.”

Tal lifted his glass and looked at her over its rim. “What
else did he say?”

Grace raised her eyebrow as if she didn’t know what he was
referring to.

“Did you even ask him?”

“Yes, I did.” She sighed. She hadn’t wanted to start with
this.

“And?”

“And he said exactly what I thought he was going to say. Not
worth losing his job. What if it doesn’t work the way he thinks it does?”

Tal looked down into his glass. “Doesn’t make sense to me.”

Grace did take a drink then, a careful sip that left a
smoldering trail all the way down into her stomach. “What doesn’t make sense?
That he’s not following his dick from place to place? He’s not like you.” The
silence between them seemed to thicken and chill and she watched her friend’s
face. This strange brew of fatigue, restlessness and frustration, now mixed
with alcohol, was making her speak without thinking. She’d meant to explain,
not to argue.

She backtracked a bit. “You know how long John’s been
working on this stuff? You know how close they are to getting it to the
market?” She softened her voice. “He’s not going to throw that away.”

Not that she hadn’t thought about it. They wouldn’t have to
go at it like she did with Tal. John would be gentle and sweet. She’d slide his
glasses off, maybe run her fingers through his hair where it was starting to
get long in front. He’d be very different. She couldn’t imagine those long
fingers digging into her, that patient voice growling coarse encouragement.

Heat crawled over her face and she sipped at her drink
again. She could imagine what would happen afterward, though. The awkward
silence in the dark. The horrified look on his face. The carefully chosen words
of regret. She could imagine that with no problem.

“You trying to get rid of me, Tal?”

He drank about half of what was in his glass. “Me? No. I
just don’t get it, is all.”

“There’s nothing to get.” Grace looked down at her hands.
“You know, I basically gave him an engraved invitation.”

Tal smirked at her. “What, did you kiss him on the cheek?”

“On the mouth, wiseass.”

“Yeah, but how did you kiss him?” He stood and beckoned to
her. “Show me.”

Grace gave him a skeptical look from her place at the table.
She wasn’t in the mood for a blow-by-blow critique of how she’d behaved in the
hallway that night. She already knew she hadn’t been enough to tempt her best
friend. She didn’t need to know why she hadn’t been enough.

“I know, I know,” Tal said. “But just show me.”

She rose reluctantly and joined him. “Now I had just picked
up my keys,” she said.

“Wait, where was this?”

“In the hallway in front of my place.”

“So you would have been coming up from the floor.”

“That’s right.” She put one hand on her hip. “Do you need me
to actually get on the floor? I don’t want to deprive you of any part of this
experience.”

“Now who’s the wiseass? I’m just trying to make sure I
understand what you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes. “So when I got up, I kind of braced
myself against his chest.”

“And what’s he doing?” He smiled down at her and for a
second she felt like a little girl in a school play, reminding herself that
everything was okay, that it was just make-believe.

“Just standing there. He had his hands in his pockets, I
think.”

“Okay. Did you say anything before you kissed him?”

She shook her head, not wanting to linger over the memory of
the moment her friendship with John changed forever. “I don’t think so. I think
I just kissed him.”

“Show me,” he said.

Grace steadied herself against Tal’s chest. She could feel
the steady beat of his heart under her fingertips as she went up on her tiptoes
and brushed her lips against his. For a second, she was right there again, in
the late-night solitude of her hallway, somewhere she’d never been with Tal.
The soft fabric of John’s shirt was beneath her fingertips instead of Tal’s
taut, warm skin. The smooth seam of John’s firm mouth was next to hers instead
of Tal’s full, generous lips.

In a distant region of her mind, she half-expected Tal to
wrap his arm around her waist and take charge of the kiss, fastening his mouth
over hers, coaxing her lips apart with his tongue.

But he did none of those things, and after just a second or
two, the amount of time she had spent kissing John so long ago in her hallway,
she pulled away from him and dropped back onto her heels.

Tal cocked his head thoughtfully. “Mmm. And that’s exactly
how you kissed him?”

“That’s it,” Grace said.

“And what did he do then?”

“For a second… For a second, I thought he would kiss me
back.” She swallowed the memory down before she went on. “But then he said
goodnight and went back to the elevator. Afterward he said all the things you
expect a friend to say. You know, that we were drinking, it wouldn't have been
smart, stuff like that.”

“Had you been drinking?” Tal’s voice softened, inviting her
deeper into the least comfortable part of this uncomfortable conversation.

“Not like that. Not really.” She put her hands back on her
hips and looked up at her friend. “Anyway, neither of us ever mentioned it
again. Satisfied?”

Tal shook his head and sighed. “That still seems strange to
me. But I guess if you’ve kissed like that, and he still walked away, then
maybe you’re right about him.”

“Hey, don’t take it so hard.” She smiled. “It’s actually
kind of nice to have a guy friend who’s not thinking about how soon he can get
into your pants.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Tal pressed his lips to the
top of her head, almost exactly as John had. The gesture might have been
innocent but for the faint scent of whiskey on his breath. “You’re not going
home again tonight, are you?”

Bone-deep exhaustion crept into her, as if answering his
question for her, and she yawned. “No. But don’t let me oversleep tomorrow.”

He chuckled. “I’ll get you up and ready as soon as I am.”

As Tal slept behind her, Grace studied the shape of his
hands in the shadows and sighed. What would it be like to share a bed with
John? She’d never know. But she’d never face that morning-after regret either.

She closed her eyes. That was worth it.

Wall-to-wall interviews, all day long, had turned John’s
metal chair into a torture device, but Grace’s arrival gave him both the will
and the freedom to search for one last comfortable position for the day’s final
meeting. While she got herself, her coat and her purse situated across from
him, he set his glasses on his legal pad and rubbed his eyes with the heels of
his hands.

He slowly stretched his legs and back, a luxury he didn’t
permit himself with other subjects. They needed the professional scientist,
someone who never got uncomfortable in that chair or anywhere else, the sort of
person who’d listened to shocking personal stories all the time without
squirming or flinching or raising an eyebrow. With Grace he might have to hide
a lot of things, but fatigue wasn’t one of them. In fact the promise of stories
from her first Friday night with Tal had started to revive him.

Data. Not stories. It’s data.

She crossed her long legs and laced her fingers together in
front of her knee. “Ready to start?” Her bright, expectant tone made her sound
like the one with the answers. In many respects, she
was
the expert,
here to answer his questions, but her enthusiasm about her role lifted his
spirits.

He slid his glasses back on before turning on the tape
recorder and sliding it toward the center of the table. “I want to hear every
detail.”

“Okay. Here’s a detail for you.” She leaned forward and
addressed the tape recorder. “For a minute there, I thought it wasn’t going to
work.”

His fingers tangled around his pencil and it flipped away
from him across the table. “What?” So much for his buoyed spirits. “What
happened?”

She pushed the pencil back toward him. “That’s just it.
Nothing happened. I took it and waited to get cold and then, you know, get
warmer, but then nothing happened.”

John carefully retrieved the pencil and as discreetly as he
could, he wrote,
delayed onset
in the margin of his legal pad. “But
eventually something happened, right?”

“Yeah, it did. Eventually.” Grace linked her fingers again.
“But it gave me a scare. What if it wasn’t working, you know?”

John circled the word
delayed
twice and put a star
next to it. What if it hadn’t worked? Not long ago, he suspected, her solution
would have been obvious. Now it was cause for concern. Interesting.

“How long before it started working?” he asked.

“I had time to go all the way to Tal’s, drive around in
circles looking for a parking spot and hang out with him for a little while. I
don’t know, maybe an hour?” He had written that down too before she asked, “It
didn’t take that long last time, did it?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.” He tapped the page with
the point of his pencil. “Once it started working, did it work just like the
last time?”

Grace leaned back in the chair and grinned. “Oh yes. Slow to
start, but a very nice finish.”

He swallowed and pulled the legal pad toward the edge of the
table, aware of his accelerated pulse rate. He bit his lip to keep from
smiling. Before long she’d have him trained to respond like this at the
slightest verbal cue.

Right. Like you’re not already there.

“So what did you do in the meantime?” he asked.

“We had more time to fool around first.” She met his gaze,
and warmth slowly spread through him. “You know how last time we were just all
over each other?”

He did smile then. That had been hard to forget. Listening
to her describe it on tape and then visualizing everything she’d done hadn’t
made life any easier for him.

“I remember,” he said.

“This time we went a lot slower. We spent a lot of time
touching each other.” She crossed her legs. “Then I gave him a blowjob and
after that, I felt just like I did the last time.”

John frowned at his notes. “So was it working before the—
Before you performed oral sex on him?”

“You mean before the blowjob? Yeah, I think it had started
to work before the blowjob.” Grace chuckled and he looked over at her. “You’re
blushing again. I haven’t even really started this story and you’re already
blushing.”

He couldn’t help smiling as he went back to his notes. “I’m
not blushing. I’m thinking.” He looked back over at her and tapped the page
again. “So you can say ‘blowjob’ another fifty times if you want and it won’t
bother me.”

“Thinking about what?”

Her teasing voice made him want to look up, but instead he
shook his head. “This isn’t about me, remember?” He devoted his attention to
linking the words on the paper in front of him with horizontal and vertical
lines. “Now what were you saying?”

“I was saying that I went down on Tal before the Impulse
started working.”

“So it started working during the blowjob. As you were doing
it.”

He looked up after the question, mostly to read her
expression. Her full mouth curved into a thoughtful pout.

“Yeah, that’s right. Each time I came up, I got a little
hotter.”

John wrote,
incremental increase in arousal
and
asked, “Is that unusual?”

“To that degree, yes.” Her chair creaked as she shifted her
weight in it. “Kind of like last time, you know? I don’t usually get that
turned-on over a blowjob.”

He underlined
increase in arousal
. “Did you come?”

Heat bloomed on his skin and he braced himself for more
teasing about how he was blushing. But Grace explained that Tal interrupted her
before either of them reached climax. “I don’t think I was going to come
anyway. Not there.”

John wrote,
interruption before climax
and drew a
line across the page to divide this part of her narrative from the rest. “What
happened after that?”

“We went into the other room. Tal has an office at the back
of the gym.” John leaned over to take down the counter number on the recorder
and then drew a quick map of Tal’s office as she described it. Inside a large
square, he drew a rectangle for Tal’s desk, a couple of others for his filing
cabinets, a slanted line for the door. He wrote,
window
in front of the
desk. Grace explained that they were against the desk with the office lights on
when Tal discovered that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath her skimpy dress,
and among his own observations, John gradually noticed that he was holding his
breath.

“You’re right in front of the window?” he asked.

“That’s right.” Desire made her voice dark and breathy, a
temptation unto itself.

He didn’t dare look up, even if the alternative was focusing
on the images brought to life by her words. “You’ve been in front of the window
before.”

“Couple of times.” She chuckled. “It faces an alley. There’s
not anyone back there in the evenings.”

An alley meant another building facing Tal’s window,
someplace where a person might sit in darkness and watch this spectacle
unfolding as Grace described it. Framed by the window, she would twist and bend
in harmony with Tal’s touch, her head thrown back, her long neck exposed as he
filled his hands with her tender, lush body.

“He pulled off my clothes,” she said. “Almost ripped my bra
off.”

“You’re facing the window now, right?” Damn. He hoped he
sounded like an impartial observer and not someone who was doing his absolute
best to resist a hard-on as he visualized the scene.

“Right. His hands were all over me, hard. I felt his breath
on the back of my neck.” She sighed and the sound went right to his cock. “I
was so wet. I could practically feel my pulse beating in my clit.”

John lifted his glasses enough to rub the bridge of his
nose. He slowly sucked a breath through his teeth. He didn’t dare look at her,
couldn’t stand to know if she noticed the way she was turning him on. “And
then?”

“I bent over for him and he ran his hands over me for just a
second before he started fucking me. He was holding on to my hips so hard, but
it felt so good. And then I looked up at the window and I could see our
reflection there.”

From his imagined vantage point across the alley, John could
see them too. Tal riding her hard as she gripped the desk with her unadorned
nails. Her mouth would be open, her tempting lips parted as she panted and
gasped beneath her lover. John shifted uncomfortably to accommodate the
erection he’d tried so hard to avoid, helpless as Grace’s rich voice seduced
him. When she reached the climax of her story, he could see her arching upward
with delight, her irresistible mouth crying out her release. He made a show of
taking a few notes before he turned to her again.

She was still casually leaning back in the chair, her legs
crossed behind her interlocked fingers, but John could see the flush of deep
rose beneath her dark skin. Satiation lay behind her half-smile. He might not
ever see her like this again, postcoital satisfaction softly relaxing her
gorgeous face, and he couldn’t stop to enjoy it now because of the brilliant
predicament he’d put them both in.

“On a scale of one to ten…?” He let the question trail off,
hoping it spoke for itself.

“Hmm. An eight, I think. Very good.” She bit her lip
thoughtfully. “But I think there’s more to be had.”

John’s cock twitched, hearing a challenge in her voice. He
swallowed hard as he turned back to his notes and wished for a cup of ice to
chew on.

She’d come another three times that night—four seemed to be
about average for her nights with Tal—and John let the recorder do most of the
work as he wavered between visualizing her with Tal and concentrating on the
notes he’d already taken. For a moment, he’d forgotten the pills had been slow
to work at first. The delay didn’t seem to hurt their performance, but it
troubled him all the same.

His response to Grace tonight troubled him too. He had his
share of fantasies about her and then some, but tonight his thoughts of voyeurism
had led his mind in a very different direction, and his body hadn’t minded the
diversion at all.

He looked up from his notes and tried to get back on track.
“You know, I really can’t thank you enough for your help with this.”

The sound of her laughter, empty of the heavy sexual tension
that had made the room feel both intimate and confining, reassured him. “I
should thank you. This has really been a game changer for me.”

“How so?”

“I feel kind of weird afterward. It’s really different now,
since I don’t want to sleep anymore.”

John wrote,
postcoital restlessness
on his page of
notes. “Good different?”

Grace’s mouth made that thoughtful curl again. “Just
different. It’s like that feeling you get after a good workout. Tired, maybe,
but not sleepy.”

He’d half-expected this after their last meeting, when she’d
reported not feeling sleepy. Other women had reported having arguments—shortly
before they left the study altogether—and maybe this was why. Without afterglow
or fatigue, there’d be nothing left but honesty.

“Did you go home again?” He indulged the hope that she had,
that she’d awakened late on Saturday morning in her own bed instead of Tal’s.

“No, I stayed. Tal wasn’t sleeping either, so we started
talking.”

Without thinking, he asked, “What about?”

“You, mostly.”

John cast a sidelong glance across the table at her.
Gr
eat
.
Just what he’d hoped for. “What about me?”

She leaned over and put her elbows on the table. “Okay, Tal
thinks this is the best invention in the world. That’s why he has all these
questions about it. I don’t think he was buying your reasons for not doing all
the testing yourself.”

Tal would probably always be skeptical, naturally. John just
couldn’t figure out why he’d keep complaining when things were coming up so
well for him. He set the legal pad and pencil down onto the table and got ready
to deliver the party line again, but Grace stepped in first.

“It’s all right though. I think I explained everything to
him, so he gets it now.”

Why didn’t that reassure him? “What exactly did you explain
to him?” John asked.

“I told him you weren’t like that. You know what I mean.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Sure, he’d surprised
himself a moment ago by fantasizing about watching from an alley as another man
bent his best friend over a desk. But surprises like that were intellectually
healthy.

“Just that—”

“I mean, I’m not a Boy Scout or something.”

“No, no, of course not. I just meant that you’re not that
type.” She seemed to retreat from the table, sitting on her hands. “You know.
The type who would do it in the back of a convertible parked next to the
boardwalk in the middle of the afternoon. Or on a park bench. Or something like
that.”

Had she—? “Top down?” The question was out of his mouth so
quickly, it was as if someone else had asked.

She blinked. “What now?”

“In the back of a convertible with the top down?”

“You tell me.” She raised her eyebrow and grinned, daring
him to answer her. “Would you?”

“We’re not talking about me.” And before she could protest,
he pointed at the tape recorder. “We’re talking about you.”

“Oh, okay. If you want to be like that, we are talking about
me, but we’re only talking about last week.”

He shook his head. “No, no, no. You started this. Now you
have to finish it.”

“Is that what you want?” She grinned. “You want to know if
I’ve done all that?”

He wasn’t sure. But now he’d talked himself into a corner,
hadn’t he?

“Okay then.” She pulled the tape recorder slowly toward her.
“For the record, I have done it in the back of a convertible parked next to the
boardwalk in the middle of the afternoon.”

“My question,” he said, “was whether you had the top down.”

“No. It was July! We needed the shade. Top up.” She raised
her eyebrow. “Windows down.”