Thor'sday Night - Paranormal Erotica (20 page)

The sky is a second ocean on this splendid
morning, and so close to the airport, the huge metal seagulls of
airplanes keep flying out of the foaming clouds.

Jay drives her to work. Her hair is wet from the
shower they took together, she didn’t have time to put on any
make-up, and her purse doesn’t match her dress, yet she has never
felt more beautifully together in her life. He will be picking her
up again for an early lunch.

Once in the office (only a little upset that he
didn’t kiss her goodbye) she pours herself a cup of coffee, attends
to the faxes, then entertains herself by trying to imagine what his
condo on Brickell Avenue looks like inside. For one thing, there
won’t be any cat hairs on the furniture, which she pictures as
black and stainless steel.

The phone keeps ringing all morning, disrupting
her reverie.

‘Good morning, Seaside. No, I’m sorry, Mr
Peterson isn’t in at the moment. May I take a message?’

He enters their suite shortly before lunchtime,
sees she is on the phone, and shakes his head to indicate he isn’t
taking any calls.

‘Yes, sir, of course, I’ll let him know.’ She
hangs up impatiently.

He holds her eyes as he walks by her desk. ‘Good
morning, Carmen.’ He doesn’t smile.

‘Good morning, Mike.’

She takes her time pouring him his coffee,
self-conscious about her desire to follow him into his office.

He is shrugging off his jacket as she enters. He
drapes it across the back of his chair, and unbuttons his collar as
she ritually places the Styrofoam cup on his desk. He doesn’t take
his eyes off her, and his stare feels like the atmosphere of an
excitingly dangerous world.

‘Do you happen to know anyone who wants a
kitten?’ she asks nervously. ‘I have three to give away. Would it
be all right if I sent a memo around the office?’

He snaps open his briefcase. ‘Of course.’

‘Thanks.’ She turns to go.

‘Carmen?’

She faces him again. ‘Yes, sir?’

He tosses some papers onto his desk. ‘I just
remembered. Linn’s birthday is next week. She might like one.’

‘Really? That’s wonderful. You would absolutely
love Buffy, he’s the most unique Champaign color…’

‘I’d like to see all of them,’ he closes his
briefcase and slips it beneath his desk, ‘and pick one out
myself.’

A delicious confusion clouds her mind. ‘You want
me to bring them here?’

‘Of course not.’ He sits down. ‘I’ll drop by
your apartment tomorrow night,’ he begins sifting through a stack
of messages, ‘at around seven-thirty.’ He glances up at her.
‘Unless you’ve already made other plans.’

‘No… I should be home.’ She is proud of how
casual she sounds.

He begins dividing his messages into three piles
as if dealing cards. ‘Sit down, Carmen,’ he says abruptly.

The firmness of his mouth as he looks up at her
seems to flat-line her brainwaves, so that all she can think about
as she moves obediently over to a chair is how desperately she
wants him to kiss her.

Rising, he walks to the door.

The blood starts rushing through her heart and
she has to grip the arms of the chair, as the floor seems to heave
towards her like the deck of a ship.

‘I don’t like what’s happening here, Carmen.’ He
closes the door. ‘I can’t get you out of my head, and you have no
idea how unlike me that is.’

She doesn’t dare look at him.

‘Let me tell you, if this wasn’t the
twenty-first century, I’d accuse you of casting a spell on me. I’ve
even started dreaming about you, for Christ’s sake.’

She concentrates on the shining front of his
cherry wood desk. ‘I’ve been dreaming about you too, Mike,’ she
realizes out loud. ‘You’re in that recurring dream I told you
about.’

The office vanishes, and a deafening sound like
dimensions being ripped apart drowns out her cry as she jumps to
her feet, straight into his arms.

He crushes her body against his, then his tongue
thrusts into her mouth like a wave surging around hers and nearly
suffocating her. His violent kiss makes her feel totally weak and
helpless, as though she just fell off a ship in the middle of the
ocean. She can’t resist his power because she has no desire to. She
lets the inexorable force of his need lift her dress, and rip down
her panties, finding her balance just long enough to step out of
them before she falls into his arms again.

He wedges his hand between her thighs, forcing
them open so he can thrust two fingers up into her wet, welcoming
cunt. She gasps from the almost painful joy as he plugs her
straight into the anger in his eyes. She clings to his rock-hard
shoulders as he forces a third, then a fourth, finger into her
slit, in which discomfort and pleasure merge into one overwhelming
current of sensation. Only his thumb is left out and crushing her
clit so that there isn’t a single drop of her feeling that isn’t
flowing into his hand. Yet she somehow manages not to cry out
watching his expression as he feels how tight, and yet utterly
yielding, she is.

She feels the hard edge of the desk behind her,
and the look in his eyes pushes her back across it. She is vaguely
aware of message slips rustling like leaves beneath her hair, and
of the cool, firm leather of his blotter against her bare
shoulders; peripheral, meaningless impressions compared to the one
his hand is making inside her. Hanging off the desk, her legs
spread with a will of their own, opening wide for him without
consulting her brain, which cowers in some small and insignificant
corner of the experience. It knows there is nothing it can do now
that her flesh is discovering its mysterious ability to embrace a
man’s power rather than fight it.

‘You whore,’ he whispers, ‘you’re so hot! I bet
you could take my fist!’

‘Oh, yes,’ she breathes, not at all sure she
actually can, but wanting it more than anything.

He pulls his fingers out, then the feel of his
knuckles shocks her with an electric, breathless expectation. She
is afraid her body won’t be able to endure what she suddenly longs
for, but just letting him fuck her again would be too easy, too
normal, and her senses are starving for the unknown and the
forbidden. Her nerve-endings are eager to blossom into unexplored
realms of sensation, to flower wildly across conventional
borders.

Mike’s silence is as focused as a surgeon’s as
he works his clenched hand into her slowly.

His fist is a hard, unnatural embryo pushing its
way back in towards her womb as her heart strains beneath white-hot
pulses of fear and ecstasy. She wants to scream the fulfillment is
so excruciating, so absolute, yet she doesn’t scream, or even ask
him to stop. He is the only one who makes a sound, a deep groan of
cruel satisfaction. She throws her arms over her head and clings to
the edge of the desk; sucking quick, shallow breaths in through her
mouth as she works muscles she never knew she had, straining to
relax them around his hand. Yet only a small part of her is tense
with fear that he will tear her, most of her is simply amazed by
how good his dangerous penetration feels. His wrist is thick and
hard, and his fist fills her up so completely, he might as well be
beating her to an exquisite death through her own pounding
heart.

‘Mr Peterson?’ Beatrice’s voice rises
uncertainly from the intercom, directly in her ear.

She gets a taste of how agonizing labor must be
then when he wrenches his fist out of her abruptly, and his other
hand falls heavily over her mouth to stifle her cry.

‘Mr Peterson?’

He takes a deep breath, and lets it out in an
impatient, ‘Yes?’

‘Um, is Carmen in your office, sir? There’s
someone here to see her.’

‘Carmen is busy at the moment.’ He keeps his
hand over her mouth as his stare pins her down. ‘Tell whoever it is
to wait.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He grips her face, and digs his thumb and
fingers deep into her cheeks. ‘I could kill you,’ his voice is a
hoarse whisper, ‘I could kill you!’

She is aware of her own sea-like scent on his
fingers as she willingly dives into his cold blue stare, because
nothing matters now except how good it felt when he was
fist-fucking her. His hand falls to her throat. ‘Who’s out
there?’

‘Jay!’

‘Are you sure?’ He pulls her up into a sitting
position. ‘Maybe it’s that cop. And now you can add your boss to
your list of conquests. But I’ve got news for you, Carmen; men
aren’t kittens. You can’t play with three at a time and not get
hurt.’

She clutches his shirt, gladly exchanging oxygen
for the thrill of seeing how long he’ll dare sustain the pressure
on her throat.

He snatches his hand away. ‘God, what the hell
are we doing?’ He backs away from her.

She can’t answer as her mind is wiped clean by
another explosive ripping apart of the atmosphere. During the flash
the overhead lights flicker in rhythm with her pulse, then die.

She hears a man curse beneath his breath in the
darkness, then what sounds like a god’s profound sigh as the
emergency generator kicks in, flooding the room with a sunset’s
bloody afterglow.

She watches the tall blond man beside her
hastily thrust the loose folds of his tunic beneath a leather belt,
her brain feeling helpless as a kitten tangled in strings of pure
energy. She can’t think or see straight, as if she has gone
hauntingly cross-eyed. So she closes her eyes and stands listening
to the muted roar of the rain. Or is it the ocean at high tide?

‘Your hair’s wet.’ He caresses it roughly away
from her face with both hands, forcing her to open her eyes and
look at him.

‘Oh, God, Mike.’ She throws her arms around his
neck.

‘Let go of me, Carmen, we’ll talk later.’

She rests her cheek against his unyielding
chest. ‘Are you going to fire me?’

He laughs harshly. ‘I’d like to kill you! Firing
you wouldn’t be good enough.’ He pushes her away from him. ‘I don’t
know what the hell I’m going to do.’ He leaves her to open his
door.

She quickly picks her panties up off the floor,
slips them back on, and smoothes down her dress, as if this will
help her think straight.

He walks quickly back to his desk, and sits
down. ‘I’ll need Captain Richards in here for a ship-to-shore
conference call at three o’clock,’ he says in a loud, businesslike
voice, just as Jay appears in the doorway.

She desperately pretends not to see him. ‘Yes,
sir. Anything else?’

‘No. Your lunch date is obviously getting
impatient.’

Lightning flashes again, farther away this time;
the sound of thunder doesn’t reach them until she attempts to brush
past Jay’s rigid shoulder. ‘I’m ready now,’ she tells him.

‘I’ll bet you are.’

Mike asks coldly, ‘Is there a problem?’

‘You could say that,’ Jay replies even more
frostily. ‘How long have you been fucking your secretary?’

Mike’s powerful body erupts out of his chair.
‘Get out of my office.’

‘Jay, please,’ Carmen clutches his sleeve, ‘you
have to understand; something strange is going on here. It’s not
what you think.’

‘I want you to quit, Carmen, right now.’

‘Jay, it’s not what you think!’

‘Are you telling me you’re in love with him? Is
that it?’

Mike jams a thumb into his console. ‘Beatrice,
how long are we expected to work in this tomb?’

‘I just spoke to Maintenance, sir. FPL says
three lines are down in our area, and they’re getting calls from
all over the place. It’ll be a couple of hours at least.’

‘Then tell everyone to take a long lunch.’

‘No problem, but first can you please tell
Carmen there’s a policeman here to see her?’

‘What?’

‘There’s a policeman out in the lobby asking to
see Carmen.’

Mike says very slowly, as if obeying a hypnotic
suggestion, ‘Tell him to come in.’ He switches off the intercom,
and runs the fingers of both hands through his gelled hair, opening
up vulnerable fissures in its metallic silver-blond. ‘I didn’t
realize you’d scheduled a meeting with all your lovers, Carmen.’
His normal sarcastic sense of humor attempts to take control.

Jay grabs her arm and pulls her into the
office.

A moment later, all the shadows seem to gather
in the doorway as Will appears in full uniform, crescent moons
joined at the tips orbiting the black space of his lean hips…

A third man has entered the cave with her, and
whatever it was they gave her to drink has relaxed her so much she
can’t walk without their help. Vaguely, she is aware of one of them
lifting her up into his arms, then spreading her limp body across a
cool leather skin.

‘Did she faint?’

‘Carmen?’

‘She’s so pale!’

‘Carmen, can you hear me?’

She moans.

‘Carmen, what’s wrong? Look at me.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispers, ‘I can’t see, it’s too
dark!’

‘Calm down, baby, it’s all right.’

She wants to scream yet her voice emerges as a
breathless gasp. ‘No, it’s not. It’s not all right! You have to
help me!’

‘I will, don’t worry, everything’s going to be
all right, just take a deep breath.’

‘What the hell’s wrong with her?’

‘
Quiet… Will you
do that for me, Carmen; will you take a deep breath for me? That’s
a good girl. Just trust me, and you’ll be all right.’

She wants to trust him, more than anything in
the world, but part of her won’t let her, part of her knows he is
going to hurt her. ‘I know you won’t help me,’ she says
miserably.

‘What the hell have you been doing to her?’

‘Do you trust me, Carmen?’

She sighs, ‘I want to.’

‘Then open your eyes, and look at me.’

‘But it’s so dark…’

‘I’m calling a doctor.’

‘Wait a minute. Can you tell me where you are,
baby?’

‘His ship is ready to sail,’ she says after a
moment, ‘and I have to go with him.’