Authors: Hurt
11
“You know who I am?” he challenged, instantly feeling a pleasant prick of shame at the way he'd put her on the spot.
“Wondering if that’s why I agreed to come in?”
He waited. She was quiet. He tried again.
“Would you normally come into the house of a man you’d just met laying on wet asphalt?”
“No. Not normally. But it’s not a normal night.” She lifted his hand from her shoulder and set it on his thigh. “I figured it out while I was making the drinks."
"It took you that long, eh?"
"Don't be insulted," she teased with an impish grin and a mischievous glance from under mascaraed lashes, "I'm a bit of a pop culture shutout."
"Sure. I suppose if you'd scraped Brad Pitt up off the road, you wouldn't have known, either."
"Brad who?" she deadpanned. "Anyway, fear not. I won’t sell your tragic motorcycle story to The Stranger for their 'celebrity I saw you' column."
“Your . . . eh, sang froid is rather impressive.”
“Because I’m not an autograph hound?”
He laughed. “I didn’t mean that.” His smile faded. “I think you may have saved my life.”
“Because you’d have bled to death from road rash if I hadn’t been here to wrap your elbow?”
“Yes. That, and that car behind me probably would have rolled right over me if you hadn’t thought to pull your car behind me.”
12
“Feeling your mortality?”
Her eyes flickered up to his face and lingered there. The way she was looking at him, it was like a curtain opening. Or a drawbridge lowering.
“A bit. Maybe it’s good. Get a little wake up.”
Nothing like skidding over thirty feet of asphalt to slip you out of your emotional coma. And to stay out? Maybe you just had to hang on to fear and pain. Or find a fresh source.
She hopped down from her stool and circled around him, started in on the shoulder. His body flinched, then went rigid as she began cleaning the wound, but his brain was savoring the sharp sting of the disinfectant, the way her gentle touch tortured his torn flesh. She finished sterilizing and gauzing and taping, then finished off her drink.
“Have another.”
“Not until the surgery’s done. Time for the knee.”
He was aware of her watching him as he struggled to get the cuff of his pants up without dragging the stiff fabric over the tender wound.
“Looks like it’s pants off, Mr. Ross.”
“Maybe I should go back into the bathroom and take care of this one myself.”
“Maybe you should. If you’re wearing women’s panties under those jeans, I rescind my promise about selling my story.”
“Lucky for me, I only wear the frilly panties on special occasions”
“Careful you don't hurt my feelings," she teased as he undid his fly. "You're in a vulnerable position, here."
13
As he finished undoing the last button of his fly, he gave her a look, only half calculated, that seemed to wipe the teasing grin from her face. Not as cool as all that, after all. Suddenly, obviously nervous, she pulled her eyes away and made a pretense of looking for something in the first aid box as he slid his pants down his thighs, then carefully drew the gathers of stiff denim over the tender wound at his knee, and off.
"Why don't you sit there and put your foot up there," she suggested, indicating one stool, then the other.
Galen felt a perverse satisfaction in looking down on the horizontal plane of his extended leg, the knee chewed up, red and raw, clear fluid leaking around the dirt and gravel that had embedded itself in his tender flesh. Much worse than the elbow. The knee had taken the brunt of the fall.
"Oh, Galen. Sure you don't want to go to the doctor's for this? They could numb it."
"It's all right. I want you to do it."
He issued it like a challenge. He liked the thought of this good Samaritan, this woman, hurting him. More than she had already. But maybe she wouldn't do it.
"OK."
She said it lightly, with a smile and a shrug, but she was pale. And as she poured herself that second drink she wasn't going to have, her hand shook. After a hunt for tweezers and some sterilizing ointment, and a few gulps of her vodka tonic, which might have been a double, she dug in.
He wasn't going to faint. He wasn't even going to puke. He concentrated on the carbonated bite of the cold clear liquid he sipped through the cubes shifting and 14
clanging in his glass, and on the nice view he was getting of her tits. No bra under that thin blouse. Kind of surprising—almost as surprising as the fact that he hadn't noticed sooner—she didn't seem the type. And he was so good at judging things like that. But there she was, her tits curving and peaking and swaying slightly under the delicate fabric clinging softly to her as she moved, and each time she bent close to his knee, her blouse gapped away from her body, and he could see her bare skin, right down to her navel between the pale inverted hills of her breasts. And, twice, a brief glimpse of pale pink aureole. It was almost a disappointment when she extracted the last piece of Hillcrest Boulevard from his knee, pressed a piece of Neosporin-laced gauze to the seeping flesh, and began wrapping his knee.
The tough part was over, but she seemed more nervous than ever. She seemed to be avoiding his eyes, busying herself with winding up the gauze and putting away tubes and bottles and tweezers. Her breathing had gone fast and shallow, and he was pretty sure her hands were shaking. Maybe she'd noticed he was hard.
Weird. He'd have thought the vicious poke of the tweezers and the sting of disinfectant on his raw flesh would remedy—not double—the effects of her fabulous . . .
bedside manner. Maybe he'd overlooked an unexpected avenue of sexual gratification.
Maybe he was a pain slut.
He got to his feet, a little too close to her. Wondered, was she feeling him—his size, his heat, his near nakedness. Was she up for something? Was she afraid?
"Just relax," he sighed down to her, amused at how threatening a bit of politeness could sound. He waited until she looked up and he could read her face.
Apprehension. Or full-blown fear. "I'll be back in a minute."
15
* * * *
The memory of the bulge of his stiff cock pressed back against him by his snug briefs sent a little throb through her.
Half ready to go, she ran her fingers over the shape of the key in her pocket. Her heart gave one big thud. Like the heavy echo of a phantom beat. She felt light. Empty.
Frail.
She swiped her drink from the counter, the condensation chilling her skin as her fingers and palm wrapped tight around the base of the tall, narrow glass, imparting a sudden, lucid calm. Strange that fear could be a comfort.
She wished him back. Hurry. Hurry. Now that he was gone, anxiety was sweeping into the void left by his vaguely threatening presence.
Air. She needed air. White knuckled, clutching her sloshing drink, she moved to the slider, clawed the latch open, and got onto the deck.
Breathe. Breathe.
An awning overhead kept the pouring rain off her, but the wind chafed her face and whipped her hair across her eyes, obscuring, revealing, and obscuring her view of the grid of orange city lights below. It seemed like her drink should be fresh, only a few 16
sips gone, but she tipped the glass behind her bottom lip and just a trickle seeped between the depleted cubes. Was she drunk?
Over the hoarse whisper of the wind and the thwapping of the rain, she heard the slider humming in its track behind her. The normal thing to do would have been to turn, to smile, to say something. About the view. The weather. Whatever. But she didn't feel normal. So she stood, silent, and waited. Probably he was about to say, “Aren't you cold out here with no jacket?” Or maybe his hand was about to punch through her vision's periphery, his arm stretching away until it receded into a pointing index finger as he explained what some distant feature of the landscape, wrought by man or nature, might be.
But the seconds were slipping away and there was only the sound of the wind and the rain, and her view of sprawling L.A. was never interrupted except by the whipping strands of her hair. He remained silent. Behind her.
She thought he might touch her. That's what people like him did: fucked random strangers. Had one-night stands. The idea of being touched by someone she didn't know scared her. Seemed ugly. It always had. But the drink was nowhere near doing the trick, and suddenly that ugliness, that fear had a strange, arousing appeal.
So, when she felt his fingers combing into her hair, she stayed still and quiet and savored the little shudder that rippled down her body from the points where his fingertips brushed against her scalp. Silent and slow, with soft strokes he smoothed and gathered her wind-wild hair. Then she felt his body against hers—more heat than touch—and his warm breath pulsed against her bare neck. Taut, stretched thin as wire, she waited for the touch of his mouth on her skin. Only when she sucked in a desperate 17
breath did she realize how anxiously she'd been waiting to be touched. That she'd forgotten to breathe. Now she was panting urgent shallow little breaths. Waiting.
His fingers brushed faintly against her, making her shiver as he pulled her collar toward her shoulder. His lips faintly grazed the sensitive skin just below her ear, and every cell in her body seemed to constrict. Every inch of skin felt suddenly tight and faintly itchy. She waited.
His breath, his lips brushed against her again, a touch that bolted through her taut nerves like electric current, making her nipples and every hair follicle constrict.
Then his tongue, hot and wet and teasing. Then his teeth. Two little nips that almost made her cry out, afraid he'd hurt her, before an unsettling rush of pleasure washed over her.
"Set your glass down."
She stretched her arm to the side and set the glass on the railing. Almost the moment it was out of her hand his body drove hers forward, until her hip bones pressed against the wooden barrier, his chest against her back forcing her upper body to lean over, just slightly, but enough to make her grab at the railing instinctively. In the dark she couldn't discern how high the balcony had her suspended. He mouthed her ear, and the sensation mingled with her fear and her flesh—from the surface of her skin to her organs to deep in her bones—tingled so intensely she started to feel delirious.
"Answer something," he whispered before stroking a particularly sensitive spot on her ear with the very tip of his tongue. "Be honest."
He descended on her neck again, making it hard for her to breathe, hard to answer.
18
"Why did you come in with me?"
He moved over to the untouched territory on the left of her neck. The sound of his breathing, the feeling of his mouth on her skin, of his body pressing her to the railing, had her more urgently aroused than she'd been in years—probably since high school, when everything was new. Fuck, she wanted him to touch her.
"You . . . I came in because . . . I didn't want to go home."
"And?"
"And I was afraid to."
"Afraid to what?"
"Afraid to come in with you."
"You wanted that?"
It wasn't smart. Telling some strange man that you'd come in with him because you liked feeling afraid. She knew that.
"Yes."
"You felt . . . afraid of me?"
"Yes. A little."
"What about now?"
His grip on her hair tightened; she realized that she was unable to move her head. His other hand slid down her side to her hip, crossed her abdomen until his forearm belted her tight against him. Gradually, she became aware of him moving his hips behind her, suddenly sure she felt his erection pressing against her ass, sliding slowly up and down against her with the motion of his hips.
"What about now? Are you still afraid of me?"
19
"Yes," she breathed, still dying to be touched. Really touched. His hand between her legs. Inside her panties.
"Do you want to go?"
His grip on her hair didn't loosen; the insistent probing of his stiff cock hadn't relented.
"No."
Fuck. What was she doing?
Her hair still caught tight in his fist, he backed off her just enough to allow a little gap between her and the railing, and his hand slid from her hip, over, down, and teased over her crotch. Under his delicate touch, minute by minute, a flood of sensation pooled and began pulsing insistently. He hadn't even slipped his hand inside her pants and she already felt her climax building.
But his fingers, working so subtly, so expertly between her thighs, abandoned her just as she'd sighed a desperate little whimper. Now his fingers were trilling up the back of her thigh, slowly, definitely working their way between.
"Don't," she said, softly.
He went still, but his hand was still there, her hair still caught tight in his grip. In that moment an awful feeling of vulnerability made her core soft. There was a dropping feeling. But as she twisted, ready to panic, he let go of her hair and let her turn to face him. He was looking down at her with an air of patient amusement. His gaze was so intense, so direct, she felt suddenly as though he could look right through her skin.
Read her thoughts.
20
She wasn't used to this. Feeling . . . dominated. Instinctively she set out to even the scales. Reclaim her power. Feeling it already, she grinned up at him and pressed her palm eagerly to the blatant bulge in his pants. She loved this part—getting a sense of the size and shape of a man, for his responses to her touch.
She drew the curve of her hand along his erection, aroused to find him so hard.
Riding the wave of her power, she felt a sudden urge to have him in her mouth, to hear him groan as she used her lips and tongue on him. Giving him her best wicked grin, she sank to her knees and got to work on his fly.