My stomach suddenly feels sick as I recall the image and I feel the blood drain from my face.
Leo makes a sour face. “Bad joke. You’re right.” He reaches to touch my cheek, turning my face toward him. “You have to let me protect you, no matter what it takes. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”
His words carry so much weight. So much power. I feel myself being drawn toward him, like a sailor walking toward the edge of the shore, taking step after step into the frigid, dark waters toward the siren’s call, knowing somewhere distantly that I’m walking toward doom, but unable to resist.
He kisses me. His mouth is warm against mine. His touch is like a vortex, consuming all my senses and drowning out my thoughts with the roar of its power. Worries of my mom are temporarily pushed down. For a single knee-weakening minute, I’m absorbed in the moment. It’s only after he pulls back from the kiss, leaving me breathless, that reality crashes back into me with such jarring force that I have to press my feet into the floorboards to keep from slipping down in my seat.
Leo licks his lips, running his hand up my thigh and then slipping it inside my pants. His hand is warm against my flesh as he finds the inside of my panties. I press my hand to his, intending to stop him but only pressing him into me harder. What are you doing, Julia? My eyes squeeze shut and I bite my lip as a moan slips from my mouth. He leans across the seat, kissing my neck and cupping my face with his left hand while his right works between my legs.
“Wait. Wait,” I say.
He pauses, pulling back to smirk at me, hand still down my panties. I feel myself throbbing against him as my body practically begs for more.
“I’ll wait, but can you?” he asks, taking my breath away with a warm, hard kiss.
“It’s common,” I say between kisses, breathlessly. “For subjects of—mmm—shock to make…impulsive decisions…excess endorphins can…cause…”
He pulls back, smirking at me. “You’re saying the only reason we’re about to fuck is because someone tried to kill us?”
I nod. “So maybe we should think about—”
He’s kissing me again, and I can’t bring myself to care anymore. My world gradually fades away as my senses are consumed by him. His fingers circle again over my clit, sliding down my valley, and plunging inside me, pumping rhythmically. I bite his lip, my hand moving up his thigh and finding his cock through the jeans he wears. My eyebrows flick upwards.
“Jesus. I thought I had exaggerated the memory of how big you were.”
I unzip his jeans, freeing his length and feeling a sudden and uncontrollable urge to please him. I want to see this man of power and strength at my mercy for a change, hanging on my every movement, gasping in pleasure as I take control. I have to pull his jeans down to the middle of his thighs to get his cock free because it’s too big to pull through the zipper while erect.
I grip him, still gasping in pleasure as his hand sends electric pleasure through my body with every movement. I wrap my lips around the head of his length, struggling not to scrape my teeth against him. I steal a glance upward and love the way his head is thrown back as he groans with pleasure. I cup his cock, kissing and licking along its length and finding my way back to the tip, taking him in my mouth and swirling my tongue around it. I know I’m doing a good job when he hand freezes inside me, his two fingers held motionless in my core, forgotten as I find my rhythm, loving the way his face is contorted with pleasure.
His breathing grows more rapid, and I know I’m close to making him cum when my phone buzzes. I’m snapped out of the moment immediately as guilt replaces lust. I don’t need to look to know the text is probably from Lauren, wondering when I’ll be by to pick up Roman. I move my mouth off him, finishing the job with my hand, when moments before I was planning to straddle him and let him do whatever he wanted to me, now I just want to go get my son.
Leo doesn’t notice my change of heart, and he sucks in a breath, groaning as his hot cum sprays over my hand. He moves to resume fingering me, but I shift, pulling his hand from my pants and check his center console to find some tissue, wiping the cum from myself as he does the same.
He narrows his eyes at me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. Can you just take me home please?”
I sigh. What’s wrong? Just that I worked all day and left my son with Lauren so that I could come play putt putt and give an ex-con a blowjob in the parking lot. I could try to justify what I’m doing. I could say that I’m a person, too, and that I need to take care of myself. Or that I need to find out if Leo is the right guy to be in my son’s life, but it doesn’t feel right. No matter how I put it, my little guy has been waiting all day to see me, and he needs his mommy. I feel the anger in me rising, and even though my training tells me I’m projecting anger at myself onto Leo, I can’t stop myself.
“You would have killed those guys back there if I hadn’t stopped you,” I say, less a question and more a statement. Whether he admits it or not, I know it’s true.
He starts the car, backing out of the parking spot and heading to the main road. “Yes. I would have.”
“Just like that? No questions, no ‘who sent you’ or ‘who do you work for’? You’d just kill them because you were pretty sure they were the bad guys?”
“This isn’t like the movies. Guys who hesitate don’t last long. Whether it makes you happy or not, I’m never going to let anything happen to you, whatever it takes.”
I look out the window, watching the yellow streetlights streak by. And guys who don’t hesitate probably don’t make very good fathers. Maybe I’m so upset because I’m seeing how much our worlds clash. He comes from a world of black and white, of kill or be killed, and I don’t know how someone like that could ever fit in and function in my world full of grays.
I rub my temples, leaning forward in my desk and sighing. Six patients today and every single one was a parolee. Ted has started exclusively sending the parolees to me, just to save himself the headache of hearing the other therapists complain. Everyone sees what’s going on and has offered to take some on, but Ted won’t budge. His bigger concern is making my life miserable. I think somewhere in his twisted, hair-product encrusted head, he thinks I’ll eventually come to the conclusion that dating him is the only way out of this living hell he has created for me at work.
I open the envelope and frown. Three hundred dollars? My normal check is for a little over two thousand every two weeks. I stand, storming to Ted’s office. I find him leaning back in his chair, tossing a paperweight up idly. Of course he’s not actually working. He just overworks everyone else.
“What is this?” I ask, shaking the check in his face.
“That’s your paycheck. Don’t I pay for vision insurance?”
“Actually no. You make us go through a private insurer for vision.”
He purses his lips, disinterested.
“Where is the rest of my money?” I ask.
“Didn’t you see the renovations I did to the waiting area?”
“You mean the two broken chairs you replaced?”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t pay for themselves. If our waiting room looks like shit, we’re going to lose clients. If we lose clients, then there won’t be any money to pay you.”