“I’ll be right back.”
She grabbed two thick towels out of her duffel bag and slid them under Victoria’s hips. Without giving her lover a chance to realize she’d planned for this, planned her seduction and her surrender, Dez slipped the white shirt off, then the bra.
“Tell me if I do something you don’t like.”
But it wasn’t that simple. She knew that some women didn’t like to be touched when they were bleeding like this—shit, she was one of them—but Victoria smelled so fragile and sweet and she wanted her so much that it almost didn’t matter what she had liked before. She wanted to give her this pleasure now and Victoria would take it.
She kept her clothes on—black jeans, red shirt, boots, and socks—as she sampled her body, smelled the woman-scent dripping through her pores, the smell of leaking blood and open pussy and possibility. Victoria lifted her breasts to Dez’s mouth, scented skin, berry hard nipples and a low voice filled with need yet no suggestions of how Dez could fill it. Her fingers clung to Dez’s head, shaping it as Dez pulled down and off the oversize panties and sank—finally—between the heavy thighs with its heavenly treasure of clit, mound, and vulva. Dez burrowed for the tampon string, found it and tugged. Victoria gasped and her fingers dug into the back of her neck. Blood smell sparked in the room, filled it. And Dez feasted on the bare nipples, licking and sucking in the rhythm that her lover liked until she forgot the feel of the tampon leaving her and pulled Dez’s head closer, her voice an uneven melody of moans and whispers.
She felt red and perfect and home, and Dez clenched tight deep inside from just that feel of her around her fingers. Her own skin felt hot and tight, like it was too small to hold her body, this thing intent only on pleasure. Dez felt the fingers on her face, gentle and insistent, pulling her gaze up.
“Look at me.” Breathless whisper. “Look at me.”
Her face was flushed and wet, faint beads of sweat transforming her from fragile to radiant to sexy. She panted. Open mouth. Intent eyes. Hair around her face limp with sweat. Dez’s fingers slid deep into her wet, then deeper still. Their eyes locked, then Victoria pulled hers away. She stared at Dez, made her feel the touch of her gaze through the thin black shirt, over her breasts, and the ridges of her belly. Her hips rocked in time with Dez’s slow, deep thrusts and her body moved snakelike and slow over the bed. She licked her lips. And moaned. A soft “oh,” then her eyes fluttered closed. The tight clench of her body around Dez’s fingers.
Her hands fell away from Dez’s face to clutch the sheets. Another “oh” and she turned her face away into the pillow. Her body shuddered and Dez’s trembled in sympathetic pleasure. Flushed and wet and close. Victoria’s neck tightened and stretched and her hips surged hard against Dez’s hand. A luminous moment of non-motion suspended them, Victoria, bare and lovely, sweat and light gilding her face, the wet mouth, trembling throat, the eyes heavy-lidded and staring at nothing. Breasts and belly shuddering with impending delight. The red smell flared up as Victoria came, gasping into the pillow.
Only after all the tremors died away did she pull her fingers from their resting place, painting the soft thighs red as she withdrew. She kissed Victoria’s belly, breast, and mouth before getting up to go to the bathroom. She came back a few minutes later with a basin full of warm water and a towel. With slow, gentle strokes, she washed her thighs, put her shirt back on, and swept the bloody towels away. Dez went downstairs to get a cup of tea while Victoria put in a fresh tampon. When she came back, the other woman was sprawled in the bed, barely two breaths from sleep. Dez put the tea on the bedside table.
“I’m going to let myself out, all right?”
“All right.” Victoria smiled up at her, eyelashes already fluttering against her cheeks. “Call me tomorrow.”
“I will.”
Dez left the house feeling alert and faintly buzzed, like she’d been sucking on caffeine all night. Her clit had long ago subsided to its normal size and her pants had that post-come cooling moistness that she loved. Part of her didn’t really understand what just happened, didn’t want to, truth be known, just wanted to roll with the unexpected energy that fucking Victoria on the bloodstained towels had left behind. She called Rémi and Sage.
“Want to come out and play?”
Chapter 27
T
he noises of the bar—trance music, rising and falling laughter, the clink of glass upon glass—washed over her as she walked in. Rémi and Sage had agreed to meet her for quick drinks and something extra later on, but she was early. After Victoria, she couldn’t go back to her house and wait. She needed to spend her energy somewhere, needed to feel it coming off other people. So here she was at The Palladium. Energy here was the low-level kind, the preparty, not quite main-event kind. People came here to get a buzz, not to get drunk.
“Hi, Dez.”
She paid respect to the vaguely familiar face and smile of greeting, nodding politely at the curious new ones as she moved through the glass and chrome club. As Dez walked by, a buff boy bent over for his entire table of six, showing off the tattoo growing up from the small of his back. His friends groped, gasped, and stared, all the while throwing their laughing admiration all over his perfect bronze body. One of them, she couldn’t tell if it was a boy, girl, or neither, glanced up then to stare at Dez as she passed.
A quiet waterfall set up behind the bar added to the Zen-like quiet of The Palladium. It was a place where she could either pick up a woman, be alone, just bullshit with her friends, or take a date for a nightcap. There was no place like this in all of Miami, not even Rémi’s club with its gorgeous clientele and inventive drinks. Dez slid up to the bar next to a couple of posturing lesbians, New York-looking types with pierced faces and dark lipstick.
“A Long Island iced tea, Grace.” She waited while the young-looking bartender made her drink and the three other orders thrown simultaneously at her. Grace was seal-slick in her tight black PVC and the short, spiky hair that surrounded what, under different circumstances, would have been a plain face.
“Thanks.” She dropped a twenty on the bar and turned away with her drink.
“You look good, Dez.”
She was glad that she had a firm hold on her glass; otherwise the entire bar would have seen her surprise. Dez forced herself to take a sip of the drink and moisten her dry throat. Her first instinct was to walk away like she had a few weeks ago, but in here he would just follow her.
“Ruben.”
She turned back toward the bar and put her drink down. The mirror above them cast their reflections back at her, showed her blank face and Ruben’s beautiful one. They looked like they used to together—a pair of pretty opposites. She was slim and hard in the three-quarter-length black leather coat, black jeans with its heavy belt and buckle, and the deep red button-down shirt that echoed the natural color in her lips. Ruben was all pretty and sweet in pale blue lowrider jeans and a white muscle shirt. Caitlyn was nowhere in sight.
“Aren’t you hot in all that leather?” he asked.
“No.” Her eyes swept over him again. “What do you want?”
For a moment he looked hurt, like he had no idea why she would talk to him like that. Then his face smoothed.
“You look real good,” Ruben said again, eyes taking in the fit of her pants, the slight swell of breasts under her shirt. He winked.
She didn’t want to hear that, especially not from him. Dez took another sip of her drink and waited.
“I forget how mean you can be to people on your shit list.” He smoothed his eyebrow with his index finger and thumb—a nervous habit she had once found endearing—then seemed to make a decision. “If it’s an apology you want then dammit, I’m sorry. Can’t we . . . can’t we be like we once were, Dez? Friends?” Ruben made a sudden motion toward her, then stopped himself. “What do you say?” He winked again.
She knew he was joking. He just had to be. Then Dez noticed that he was a little drunk. The incessant winking and the yeastlike scent of his breath should have tipped her off right away. To fill the space in the silence, Ruben signaled Grace with a languid wave of his hand. The bartender nodded and smiled when she saw him, then made his drink without asking what he wanted. He had his usual. At a gay bar.
“Where’s Caitlyn?”
He seemed startled by her question. “At home.”
Ruben got his cocktail and took a deep drink. Against her will, she noticed how his mouth fit neatly on the rim of the glass and how the long pink tongue caught an errant drop of the gold liquid and snared it back into his mouth. Dez moved back to give him some room.
“Remember how you used to tell me about those married girls you’d fuck on the sly? Remember? Can’t I be like one of those girls?”
Although their end of bar was far from private, he followed her body with his and slid a hand under her jacket, gripping the smooth muscle of her shoulder through the black shirt.
“I missed you,” he said. But Dez also heard the words he’d thrown at her in New Mexico. “I don’t want you anymore.” She remembered clearly how his pretty face had flinched and twisted when she’d blinked stupidly at him, the clichéd
“why?” trapped behind her heavy tongue. There could be no reason for him to hurt her like this.
“Really?” she asked, trying to ignore the press of his dick against her thigh.
She used to love the way he bent under her, always willing to take what she could give, arching his back up into her, pushing and moaning. His trust in her seemed absolute then, nothing was too strange, or too rough, or too sweet, or too tender. Her love for him was like the rush of coke through her system, overwhelming and immediate. It took a little bit longer to wear off, but looking at him she realized that it truly had. Dez had thought she was over him before, but this was the true test: his tempting beauty flush against her, his mouth saying yes.
“Remember the last thing I said to you in the desert, Ru?”
He shook his head, but she could see that despite the alcohol and whatever else he was on, he did remember. She put her hand on his chest, spacing her fingers wide. And pushed.
“Fuck. You.” Dez punctuated each word with another hard push. “Don’t
ever
come up on me like this again.”
She picked up her drink and went to another part of the bar to wait for her friends.
Chapter 28
D
ez was obsessed. There was no other word for it. Thoughts of a certain woman crowded in on her at the most inconvenient times—in the shower, riding her bike through thick rush-hour traffic, getting ready to eat a meal she’d spent hours anticipating. It would be easier to take if they were just thoughts about fucking. After all, that was their arrangement, right? But it was Victoria’s smile, the way she wrinkled her nose at something Dez said. Sometimes it was her smell. She wanted to talk to her, ask how her day was going and, if it was going badly, help to make it better. Dez brushed her hands through three months’ growth of hair, a knotty bush she was starting to grow fond of, and walked through her kitchen to pick up the keys to the truck.
Dez found herself standing on the same precipice where she had stood with Ruben over two years ago, only back then she hadn’t hesitated to jump. Despite everything that her father had taught her about fidelity, she had jumped. And now . . . she didn’t want to be hurt again, she didn’t want to end up alone at the bottom, shattered beyond repair. No, she didn’t need that feeling again.
The lunch traffic rush was almost two hours away so she made good time to the bookstore, all the way ignoring the trip-hammer rhythm of her heart that sped up the closer she got to Victoriana.
Victoria stood behind the counter with one of the younger girls who worked with her. Her hands floated in the air as she talked, a balletic counterpoint to her intent voice describing something that Dez didn’t know anything about.
Endcaps?
The girl smiled and nodded, punctuating Victoria’s words with the occasional “absolutely” and “you’re so right.”
The girl noticed Dez before she got the chance to speak, looking over her boss’s shoulder for just a moment too long. Victoria turned around to see what had taken her previously rapt audience away.
Dez tried to look apologetic. “Excuse me, ma’am. May I steal a moment of your time?”
“Are you sure that a moment is all you want?”
Dez’s smile widened as she noticed the two pencils and a pen tucked into the neatly scraped-back and bunned hair. “That’s not all I want, but I’ll take what I can get.”
The girl glanced from Dez to Victoria with a look of naked speculation before moving from behind the counter to give her boss some privacy. Her magenta-streaked Afro bobbed behind her as she walked away.
Victoria leaned her arms on the counter and brought her intoxicating scent closer. Tangerines, baby powder, and her morning coffee. The motion of her arms squeezed her breasts together, plumping the soft flesh up and above the neckline of her blouse.
“What can I do for you this morning?” A smile toyed with the full burgundy curve of her mouth.
Dez leaned onto the opposite side of the counter, dipping down low until they were at the same height and their lips were mere inches apart. “Drop everything and come play with me for an hour.”