ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (20 page)

              Not that in the coming years, Santiago would stray too often.  No, one day, Valentina would prove to be an undeniable asset to him, but right then, he had just started becoming bored of the milky young breasts peeking out from the sweetheart neckline of her red belted suit. 

              I had years to wonder about all the questions that assailed me that first evening as the Rufino couple established me as their personal banker.  I was my uncle’s son, they heard, his most trusted advisor.  Would I be able to help them out with a loan for their godson’s first birthday?  It would be a blowout for the whole neighborhood, as was customary, and the whole family would be invited.  Of course, for the couple who stood in line to inherit a family that spanned far beyond cousins, aunts, or blood ties, the number of guests would surely exceed private funds.  It was my first introduction into the intimate lives of the family’s elite, and a part of me panicked at first, thinking I could no more manage their finances than a mouse scare an elephant, but I was to be proven wrong.  I would soon demonstrate my ability to scour up funds where funds simply could not exist, and this made me invaluable to the Rufinos.

              I, however, was not thinking about any of this that first night as I drank them in a surreptitiously as I could from beneath my calm, measured exterior.  I was wondering how long a couple had to be married for Santiago’s gaze to stop lingering on the gapped cleavage of his young wife, and whether he had ever been particularly over interested in that part of the female anatomy to begin with.  Surely, I was not the first person to ever wonder this about the handsome Rufino future patriarch. 

              As he spoke to me, Santiago Rufino exuded a quiet kind of calm that only just starts belonging to a man in his early thirties; he was short a few years, but his father had been grooming him to take over the family business for a few years, and the heavy weight of responsibility was visible in the grave manner in which he always conducted himself.  I never saw him smile.  But I also did not feel bad for him.  Instead, I devoured his face with my eyes, looking at him only when he spoke directly to me.  To do otherwise would not have been appropriate, and given my history, would have sent me into paroxysms of stress and worry.  When he spoke, his aqua-shaded eyes glowed calmly against olive-toned skin that had been burnished bronze by a recent trip to Nappa.  In those days, family royalty could visit the mother country any time they wished, even if it was for something as frivolously delicious as smooth Italian wine on a weekend away.

              Those eyes that marked his descent from the North were not what captivated, me though.  I followed the slant of the thick brown eyelashes that framed them and dark irises to a proud aquiline nose.  The hard bump in its center, visible only when Santiago turned into profile, was what I couldn’t take my eyes off of.  Classic beauty is one thing, but when a man’s nose tries to take revenge on his face for simply existing, that is what I cannot resist.  Also, the hard line of stubble along his jaw; it made me want to rub the smooth ends of my fingertips along it, to feel the sandpaper rub against my skin.

              I have described what I look like; I hardly think that while I was arranging their loans in those early days, the Rufinos were looking at me with the same amount of interest.  They saw the brown leather band of my watch, the familiar hair grease of an Italian banker, and that was enough for them.  They hardly saw the person behind the big oak desk, handling the black fountain pen, either then nor years later.  They valued the soothing quality of my voice, the one that assured them, both for the loan that day and for all the deals we conducted later, that they would come off Scot=free, that their financial security was ensured just like a baby in a warm crib.  They let me care for them, but they never considered the person behind everything.

              Who does, truly?  Who ever wonders what the story of the man who chooses numbers over people is, especially when he is not using those skills to cure a disease, but rather sits amongst actual bills.  A banker is not a sexy career, but mostly it appears that way to the people who are not actually doing the job. They may not think of me, even now, from the depths of years, but I always remember them.

Certainly, there is far more glitz and glamour when people on the street know your name, when it is your blessings they seek out for their babies.  Valentina did not know then, jiggling one white leg impatiently sitting on the chair before me, that belted skirt suits would take off in our community, that the natural fullness of her curls would taunt young Italian-American princesses whose own genetic heritage had presented them with blondeness or flat hair.

              Not everyone aspires to be a celebrity, but in the presence of the Rufinos, I could see the appeal.  I could see Valentina suddenly stop her incessant leg shaking and look at me, but vaguely, as if I was not particularly present in the room.  She uncrossed her legs, and with her smooth white hands, she gripped the seat of her chair, which extended her elbows fully and gave her the appearance of arching her back, ever so slightly.  She squints those black eyes in a gesture of adolescent petulance and sensuality, and her breasts peek up at me.  There is suddenly nobody else in the room, or Santiago is off the side, smoking a fat brown cigar, gazing at the window and releasing plumes of smoke from his sour man’s mouth.  And I, I behind him, am pushing Valentina’s round bottom with those natural dimples in it, onto my desk.  With one long, fluid gesture of my arm, I am releasing that tempting little red belt and hearing the buckle clatter to the floor.  There is a sea of rust=colored fabric before me, covering a soft body, and I run my hands down the sides of her thighs, to those still-slender calves, fruiting like soon-dead blossoms, and I am savagely yanking that skirt up past her knees, exposing her creamy skin.  Slick nylon covers her still, and her black gaze shows me she feels powerful—she does not know, has no way of knowing, that women alone do not drive me wild—as she rolls the stockings down and they pool in nude-colored heaps on the floor.  She has dirtied my perfectly neat office, and I grasp each plump white thigh in my hands and push her legs apart, revealing a thatch of curly black hair there, covering a split mound that Valentina does not know whether to show or hide.  She squirms, but I know she likes it.  I can almost taste raw earth on her mouth as I lean my face in and breathe in her yeasty, warm smell, the patch of hair softer even than that on her head.  The curls brush against my upper lip, and my tongue darts out to make contact with her split.

              Valentina moans, and I know that it is more the idea of me between her thighs than the actual sensation.  She is of the old world, where men do not place their mouths on the more hairy parts of women, only delight in the soft bobbing of their smooth, clean breasts.  I know better.  I have licked and sucked and fucked enough to know that mouths on places such as these provide great pleasure.  But now I am as impatient as she, who does not understand these things.  So I hook my forearms beneath her plump thighs and spread her legs, flesh puddling just a little, and thrust into her, her lusty Italian cries staining the air with their foreignness as we finally do the kind of coupling she understands.  I drive into the smooth-rough insides of her, feel her soft muscles clench around my cock, and I am glad she is a woman in the most classic sense of the word, a woman who has not been taught to hide her sexual greed or disguise it under something else, a woman who can fuck as a man does, stripped of her oohs and ahhs, and believing in the fact that at the end of it, we are little more than animals after all.

              I sat there that first evening, throbbing hard at the workings of my own imagination as I calmly discussed numbers with the Rufinos.  Valentina did not know about my mental machinations at all, and idly spread her fingers before her to check if the red polish on them was chipping.  What took me by surprise a little bit later, though, was that she could actually voice displeasure.  Santiago ordered four hundred bottles of some alcohol or other—who can remember after all these years?—and a noisy protest filled the air around her as Valentina cried that nobody needed to get that drunk at a one year old’s birthday party.  So she had opinions.  I was to learn so much more about them in the time to come.

              Santiago was more than a match for his young, yet unfamiliar bride, however.  In the long stretch of time before they began working together as a unit, he would often silence her, as he did in that moment, with a simple wave of his hand.

             
Do not distress me, woman
, it said. 
I will deal with you at home if you do.

              Santiago. Brutal, luscious Santiago.  I wondered, as I did with unsurprising ease, what he was like when the heavy weight of burdensome responsibility was taken off his shoulders.  What pleasure did he truly find between the young Valentina’s thighs?  He struck me as a man whose conventional tastes were dictated by the strict macho lifestyle that was the only one accepted in the family.  I knew something about the macho lifestyle.  And I knew what passions could simmer not too far beneath it, the veneer grinding down to a perceptible falseness with the passing of the years.

              I could imagine Santiago leaning across my table and grabbing me by the collar and tie as if he was mad at me.  Angry, cigar breath exhaling into my face, as if I had done something wrong, but in truth just wanting to feel my painfully thin chest close to him, under his palms.  He could not be gentle with me, nor did I want him to.  I liked it when his aquamarine eyes were lit up in fury, like a giant suppressing his rage. 

              I tell him he cannot have the money and he stands.  He is quiet at first, but then one powerful arm sweeps everything destructively off my desk.  He is not even sweating with exertion, and he crosses over to where I am.  He stands taller than me, Santiago does, and he towers over me, the heated musk of him bubbling so close to the surface I can taste him through the tension in the air between us.  He strips himself of the gray jacket and pushes white sleeves up past his elbows, revealing hairy forearms.  Mercy.  I want none of it.  When he frames my face in both of his large hands and savagely crushes it with his mouth, I groan aloud.  I want this.  I want the helplessly hard feel of his cock against my hands as they fumble below his waist.  I want to be his prisoner as he reaches down and squeezes my ass so hard it almost hurts.  I relish this pain, Santiago.

              It is here that I am gentle, it is here that there is room for that.  I sink to my knees and unzip him as he looks away.  If he looks down, he acknowledges that this is real, and the dreams of me will haunt him through the nights spent in the bed of Valentina.  I feel almost undeserving as his cock springs free from a mat of coarse brown hair; I have felt this way before.  He is ruddy-tipped, almost purple, and engorged.  The foolish cock, bobbing in the air for all it’s worth, but I want it all the same.  I open my mouth and pull him into me, and his loud groan fills my ears with its sweet sound.  The heir apparent to the mafia with his most manly flesh in my man’s mouth. 

              I love the rubbery feel of him against my cheeks, the tread tire wrapped in velvet.  He tastes like clean flesh with the faintest hint of urine, and I relish it all.  I open wider and tilt my head back, feeling the full length of him invade my throat like the most long-awaited conquistador in all of history.  There is so much wetness here that we are slipping and sliding to a rhythm matched by hips and heads, and I grab his butt cheeks to hang on.  I am surprised he lets me touch him like this, and enjoy the feeling of those firm muscles in my hands before he can take them away.  Finally, a wrenching groan, male and hearty is heard, and he grabs a palm full of my hair as the hot, salty liquid of him spurts in bursts into my mouth.  I swallow every last drop and lick my lips.  Sitting back onto my heels, I look up at Santiago, mob prince in waiting.  And he gifts me with a desperate glance from those unbelievably smoldering eyes.  The eyes that say he is satisfied.  As long as no one knows.

              Familiar?  Always familiar to me.  Always reminds me of another pair of eyes, chocolate brown, but colored by the same anguish, the same kind of angry despair that needs to blame someone else for a set of circumstances.  Helplessness against circumstances is, after all, the ultimate cage; and the bars do not break. What’s that they say about birds in gilded cages?  Pretty to look at, but branded forever?

              I heard their yells in my sleep. 

              “Faggot, faggot!”

              The poetry of hate.

              Their hoots and yells, like so many unwashed, uneducated animals as they split my skin with their kicks.  The boys rounded up on me until I could not do anything such as call them human anymore.  Blood lust washed over them like a pack of animals, and they canted my orientation at me over and over again as they pummeled my body on the ground. 

              I did not, to say the least, grow up in a forgiving neighborhood.

              Perhaps I always knew that I felt something pink and unusual towards boys, or perhaps it was Tony Fiuconelli that finally did me in.  Tony, with his huge brown nose and pugilistic nose.  Tony with that pack of sixes on his stomach and biceps that rounded out the sleeves of all his shirts.  Tony, with that soft brown hair that stood up from his scalp as if he had been electrocuted. 

              Tony, who dragged me out of the ice cream shop to the awaiting savage crowd of pubescent boys.

              “What kind of faggot eats strawberry ice cream anyway?” he hissed in my ear as he furiously grabbed my collar and punched me in the gut.  The ice cream melted in drips onto the floor, leaving behind a slimy pink smear, all the way outside.