Undone, Volume 2 (13 page)

“It’s going to be
hard for you, Ana,” I teased her, one hand making its way again
down her stomach, down between her legs. “You’re going to have to
stay quiet.” I cupped my hand possessively on her mound, claiming
her, stroking her heat. “You’re not going to be able to make a
sound. Even when I make you come.”

She swallowed hard, her
head falling back against the wall as I dropped to my knees. I pulled
her jeans down and off so I could spread her thighs wider. I brought
one of her legs over my shoulder. I demanded full access. And I
wanted to take my time. It was only prudent, after all. We didn’t
want to rush on out there and get a whole bunch of photos taken of
us, now did we?

No, we needed to stay
good and hidden. And I didn’t want my Ana to get bored standing
around in a closet with me. I needed her to enjoy herself.

I know I’ve mentioned
that I have ADHD, that I have a short attention span, that I tend to
keep up a frenetic pace. But not all of the time. Music, that kept my
focus.

And Ana. She tasted
like honey, sweet and feminine, her sticky desire calling to me. I
couldn’t feel more riveted, my tongue swirling against her making
more. I took my time, going slowly, licking along every inch, paying
attention to every quiver, learning exactly what she liked and how
she liked it.

She liked it when I
nipped her clit. Ana liked it when I got rough with her. My cock
throbbed in response. There was a world of uncharted waters we could
explore together. But just now, I had fun, not giving her what she
wanted, going slow and gentle, making her crazy. I loved it when she
lost her cool, lost her ability to hold back and started clawing at
me, an animal in the dark, no one there to see her ravenous hunger.
She could bare it to me, show me how much she craved me, how
desperately she needed to come. Then, only then when she was about to
die, I gave it to her. A sharp, hard bite right on her swollen, slick
clit.

She smacked her head
back into the wall with a muffled groan of desire and I went back to
slow, long strokes, taking it back a notch. Kissing along her inner
thighs, finding a drop of juice there to swirl on my tongue. She was
literally dripping for me, my sweet Ana, and I couldn’t get enough.

Finally, she could
barely stand on her leg even though I was supporting almost all of
her weight with my hands and shoulder. I didn’t want to stop. I
wanted to keep licking her like a lion, eating and tasting and
savoring every last drop, but she needed to come. My woman needed her
orgasm. Her entire body shuddered and roiled and seethed with
building tension, aching to consume every inch of her. Who was I to
deny that?

With a ferocious suck
and a bite right down where she needed it most, my teeth right on her
most sensitive nub, I growled into her pussy and she came, violently
in my mouth. Her hands fisted and she nearly ripped my hair out at
the roots. I loved the pain, loved the proof of how intensely she
felt all this. I licked and licked, loving her back down to the
ground as she quietly, so quietly melted into me after the fierceness
of her orgasm.

Holding her securely in
my arms, I made my way up her body, kissing her through her clothes,
her stomach, her breasts, her shoulders. She buried her head in the
crook of my neck, her arms thrown around me as if holding on for dear
life. Like she’d been shipwrecked and I was her life raft. That
worked just fine for me.

“Are you trying to
kill me?” she asked, softly.

“Yes,” I agreed,
chuckling.

“You’re doing a
good job of it.”

I held her, thinking
she was doing a pretty good job of it, too. And not in the way Lola
had spoken of, earlier. I didn’t like thinking about that side of
it, the fake façade on all of this. I wanted to stay right there in
the dark with her, where I knew it was real. And where I didn’t
have to think about the inevitable end to all of this, when Ana would
brutally stomp on my heart and leave me forever. Had I thought that
sounded like a great idea a week ago? One of us was crazy, either
that Ash or this Ash, standing and holding Ana like my life depended
on it. Either way, only one of us could make it out of this mess. I
didn’t know which one it would be.

Ana

Ash and I were back on
the grid, big time. Following Lola’s tightly scripted itinerary
(smile under the clock on the corner! Ana take Ash’s arm crossing
the street!), we were definitely not in that supply closet any more.
But boy did I still feel the heat.

The way he talked to
me! OK, I hadn’t exactly had a lot of experience with men, but I
had some experience. Most of it with Stan. Well, all of the sex had
been with Stan. I didn’t think he’d ever talked to me once during
any of it. There was really no lead-up, maybe a “You wanna?” Or
even sexier, “You got your period?” as in, is it safe to touch
you or are you contaminated?

I’d never had a man
talk dirty to me, telling me what he wanted to do to me, making me
tell him what I wanted. Now, as we walked along the sunny, snowy
streets of New York City, smiling pretty for the cameras, it wasn’t
just my mittens keeping me warm. The memory of his nasty words,
telling me he was going to fuck me hard, getting me to beg for it.
Holy hell, my knees felt weak at the thought of it.

“Care for a skate?”
Ash asked me with a devilish grin.

I knew it was all
staged. What romantic movie didn’t feature the ice skating rink at
Rockefeller Center? It was such a cliché. I should be rolling my
eyes.

But it was my stomach
that was flipping over when Ash took my hand in his own and swept me
on to the ice. I stumbled a little and caught my balance on his
shoulder.

“Can you skate?” he
asked with concern, steadying me.

“I can,” I
protested. “I’m Russian.”

“Yeah, but it’s not
like you grew up in the heart of Moscow.”

“My parents did,” I
explained. “And if you don’t ice skate, your Russian ethnicity is
revoked.”

He nodded. I loved how
joking around with him came so easily. Half the time I teased Stan he
thought I meant it and got offended. “It’s like an official
thing?” Ash asked, gravely serious.

“Yes, it’s a huge
disgrace to the family.”

“Well, we can’t
have that. Let’s see your Russian moves.” Together we set off on
the ice. Ash could skate as well. But I couldn’t resist, I had to
hop around and skate in front of him backwards.

“You remember we’re
being filmed,” he teased me. Oh shoot, I’d almost forgotten. I
hopped back into place by his side, much less risk of falling on my
ass facing forward. I could see the headlines now, “Fat Cow Falls
Hard!” with a big picture of me grimacing in front of Ash. Come to
think of it, that would probably still be the headline. They didn’t
even need a real photo of me, did they? They could just photoshop my
head onto someone else’s body and create any version of reality
that they wanted.

But that night, as I
sat in my bed back in my own tiny apartment, I couldn’t find
anything bad online. Everything I found looked like it came straight
out of a romantic storybook. The press were buying our romance hook,
line and sinker. The problem was, so was I.

There we were under a
clock on a corner, smiling at each other. Arm-in-arm at the ice
skating rink, cheerful with red mittens and rosy cheeks. An impromptu
snowball fight as we strolled through the park.

That video I couldn’t
resist playing over and over. Someone had captured it perfectly, 45
seconds of glee, my catching Ash unawares with a snowball square in
his back, him turning on me and nailing me with one right on the
shoulder. But I got him good one more time on the thigh until he ran
up and caught me, spinning me around in his arms, and then letting me
down right in front of him. It was the look in his eyes that got me.
Right then, I paused it. When he rested me there, my feet touching
his, and he brought a hand up to the back of my neck. Right before he
kissed me. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe what a jewel
he’d found in me, the most beautiful woman in the world.

That was some look in
his eyes. A woman could go her whole life hoping for a look like that
from a man, never mind if that man happened to be a tall, built,
gorgeous famous rock star. Who happened to sing some of her favorite
songs in a gritty, sexy voice. And also happened to give her orgasms
so intense they made her forget her name.

All for show, I had to
keep reminding myself. All fake. But like a cheesy Hallmark movie you
found yourself sucked into watching anyway, I couldn’t turn the
channel. You knew it was fake, scripted, every second of it. You knew
this story and exactly what would happen next, how it would end. But
you still got sucked into it, still felt your heart skip a beat when
he finally took her hand in his and admitted how he really felt.

Only the Ash and Ana
story wouldn’t have a happy ending. That was guaranteed. I had to
remember that, no matter how easy it was to forget.

Liv burst into my room,
her now-purple hair all aglow. “I have 10,000 new followers on
Twitter!”

“What?” I sat up,
unused to Liv exuding unbridled glee. Sarcasm, brooding, these I
recognized in her. But now she practically jumped up and down with
excitement.

“Ash! His photo!”

“From the art
installation?” I asked, realizing what she was talking about.

“It’s crazy! You
have to thank him for me!” With a joyful squeal—another surprise
from Liv—she closed my bedroom door.

My life wasn’t the
only one getting changed by Ash Black. Here he was, getting
intertwined with the other people close to me. That thought made me
wince. My parents had heard about all of this. I knew they would, at
some point. My mother had called me yesterday having a serious fit.
I’d managed to get off the phone with a good excuse—I’d had to
get to work, and I wasn’t making that up. I was squeezing in a few
shifts in-between L.A., S.F. and what was that other place? Oh yeah,
Paris. Ash was taking me to Paris.

Ash was taking me to
Paris! I’d always wanted to go. Who didn’t? The amazing food and
fashion, the architecture and the history and museums. I couldn’t
believe we were headed there, the two of us, off-roading, fully
departing from Lola’s script. I was sure she’d hit the roof, but
Ash assured me that she’d come around. We’d make sure the trip
fit both of our agendas, he and I having some fun and her getting
some great romantic pics.

I’d started sensing a
shift in his perspective, as if it were me and him aligned against
Lola and his agent. I liked it. But I couldn’t trust it.

He was at the heart of
this, the whole reason I’d gotten hired. Because that’s what this
was, a contract job.

And the next couple of
days were going to be hard. It was one thing to put on a show for the
general public, the nameless, faceless fans of Ash Black. It was
another thing entirely to lie to family. First, Ash’s lovely
grandmother was having us to tea tomorrow afternoon. She seemed
especially sharp and insightful. I couldn’t imagine that she
wouldn’t see right through us to the truth of the matter in an
instant.

Then, I had to spend
Christmas with my family. I usually loved this time of year, sharing
presents I’d devoted time to picking out and wrapping, seeing
friends at church, sharing an hours-long meal with extended family
and still more friends. I loved it, all of it, from my mother’s
elaborate decorations to the special desserts we made together. And
this year I’d have to do it all under a cloak of duplicity, somehow
finding the right way to talk about it where I didn’t exactly lie
to them but didn’t exactly tell the truth. That meant lying, I
knew. But I’d never really lied to my parents, especially not over
something this big.

The only thing to do
was to play it down. Tell them I’d recently met him and it wasn’t
a big deal, the press was simply making more of it than they should.
Spreading rumors. Who knew, in a week they might even claim we’d
gotten engaged? You couldn’t believe everything you read in the
tabloids. It probably wouldn’t last long. This would all be over in
a heartbeat.

That last part, at
least, was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This would all
be over in about two weeks. I had to remember that.

§

“One lump or two?”
Ash’s grandmother sat straight as an arrow, literally offering me
sugar lumps for my tea in her proper British accent. I felt as if I’d
been clubbed over the head and awakened on the set of
Downton
Abbey
. Even her mailed invitation had seemed delivered
straight out of the past century, with heavily embossed stationary
inviting me to tea with Baroness Kavanaugh of Warwick. A servant
stood by the wall in starched white and black, unobtrusive yet ever
at the ready.

“One?” It came out
as more of a question than I’d intended.

Ash put a reassuring
hand on my thigh, only succeeding in making me more agitated. His
touch didn’t exactly relax me.

“Anika Ivanov. I do
like your name.” The Baroness, Ash’s grandmother, was all
politeness as she offered me a small, square cut of a cucumber
sandwich.

“Thank you,” I
squeaked.

“And how long have
you lived in Manhattan, Anika?”

“Oh, no, I live in
Brooklyn. But I’ve worked here in Manhattan, at a branch down in
SoHo, for most of the past year.”

“That’s where you
two met, I believe?” She inclined her head, looking at Ash for
confirmation.

“Yes,” he agreed
happily, completely at ease. “I ducked in trying to avoid some guys
with cameras.” I wondered if Ash was struggling with the duplicity
like me, and if he also relished the few moments when he could say
something completely honest. But he sat there looking relaxed, as if
he were truly enjoying introducing his girlfriend to his grandmother.
He couldn’t really be, could he?