Vandal’s hands swept out from behind him and he seized Zero hard by the hair and pumped into his mouth, each vicious thrust enough to make me sympathetically breathless. Zero took it as though he was used to it, opening his throat and accepting everything Vandal dished out, his eyes streaming and face reddened from lack of oxygen.
I watched with rapt attention as Vandal’s cock pulsed, emptying down Zero’s throat. I half expected Zero to spit, but I should have known better. He swallowed like a good boy, not stopping until Vandal pushed him away and collapsed back on the chair.
They were both panting—Vandal trying to catch his breath, staring at the ceiling while Zero sprawled onto his back on the floor, one arm thrown across his eyes, his other hand clutching his balls as though trying to get himself under control.
As for me, I squirmed in my seat, not sure if I should beg one of them to touch me or head up to my room and deal with things myself. Either way, it wasn’t a feeling I could ignore anymore.
“The two of you need to run along and play. I still need to get some words in today or I’m going to fall hopelessly behind.” Vandal tugged the pages out from under my elbows. Rather than wait for us to leave, he got up and went to his office, leaving Zero and I alone.
Zero sat up slowly and shook his head, looking half irritated, half amused. “You’re welcome, asshole,” he said under his breath. He wiped a hand over his mouth and got to his feet, heading out the back door.
So…go upstairs to take care of my own case of figurative blue balls, or check on Zero?
Guilt won out.
“How did the party for your mom go?” I asked, taking the few steps down to the patio and feeling a bit awkward considering what had just happened. Zero was sitting at the table, setting up his laptop. The heat outside felt even more smothering than it had when we’d gotten home from the bookstore, but that might have been because I was used to the arctic temperatures Vandal kept the truck and house set to.
I could tell Zero was still struggling to calm down too, but I wasn’t sure if I should offer to help with his problem. Maybe I should be begging his forgiveness for what happened between Vandal and I when he hadn’t been around.
He gave a casual one-shouldered shrug. “It was what it was.”
“Not fun?”
He frowned. “You might think things between Vandal and I are complicated, but my family makes my relationship with him look simple.”
I smiled sympathetically. “Family can be complicated that way. What is it for yours? Intergenerational trauma? Alcoholism?”
“No, nothing so earth shattering. Just your run-of-the-mill difference of worldview between a guy who’s a bisexual kinkster who writes horror novels for a living, and a family that’s snobby. Mind you, they have no issue with my brother who’s on his third wife. I, on the other hand, am the family scandal. Sometimes I’m convinced that if I cut my hair they’d be willing to let the rest of it slide.”
He winked at me, trying to make light of it, but I could tell their issues with him hurt.
“What about you? It seems pretty bad that I’ve locked you in a basement and held you hostage, and I don’t even know if you have a family that might turn up on the doorstep or a mother you should be calling.”
The familiar ache shot through me at the question. I did my best to brace myself for those sorts of questions and actively anticipate them, but for some reason it completely caught me off guard this time. I wasn’t sure why I was so surprised. Sure, Vandal was a self-absorbed narcissist, but Zero had proven the two of them weren’t cut from the same cloth.
“I have my aunt I told you about. I call her once in a while when I have minutes on my phone, or when I can get free Wi-Fi somewhere. She raised me, but she moved across the country for work.”
“You didn’t want to go with her?”
“I had a boyfriend at the time, so I stayed here. She and I had plans to move me there a few times after that, but there was never money. The job she moved there for didn’t pan out, and my work here dried up, and there hasn’t been anything available that would pay enough for me to relocate. Maybe sex work, but I’m not ready to go there.”
I smiled. He didn’t.
“I thought of chucking all my stuff and taking a bus to her, but I guess I’ve been too stubborn to give up everything and go.” I sat in the chair next to him. I’d left him room to work, but he seemed in no hurry to shoo me away.
“No parents in the picture?”
Of course. The inevitable question. That’s what I got for bringing up his family.
I let my gaze meander down the lawn to the lake, which was dark blue and a bit choppy. The trees on Vandal’s property kept the worst of the wind down most of the time, but the lake often had a breeze.
“They died when I was eight. In a fire.” I swallowed, ready to stop there like I usually did, but feeling that my usual short answer wouldn’t be good enough this time. Not to a writer.
Rather than launching into the usual apologies most people immediately spouted, he waited for me to go on.
“It was my fault,” I admitted, the guilt catching me up and crushing me in its grip the way it did whenever I wasn’t careful to keep it at bay. “I snuck out of bed early to watch cartoons downstairs and my blanket must have dragged off the bed with me and landed on the space heater.”
“You were eight.”
The heat. Someone holding me back. My stuffed elephant, Hannibal, clutched safely under my arm. Saving my elephant had seemed very important, and I waited for my parents to come out and tell me I’d done a good job following the safety plan, but they never came. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. My aunt said they probably never woke up.
“They told me so many times to be careful, but I…forgot.” I smiled brightly at him, wishing I hadn’t told him anything except that they were dead.
“You were a child.”
“It’s ancient history now.”
“I doubt anything like that is ever ancient history.”
“I’ve worked through it over the years, and I’d rather not dwell on it.” I rose and untied the sash of my dress as I walked away, not wanting the knot in my throat to turn into actual tears. Sometimes I could tell it without any drama, but some days it hit me right in the chest, and I couldn’t breathe.
It had been a long, complicated day.
I tugged off the dress and dropped it to the grass, followed by sandals and panties as I followed the gently sloping lawn down to the beach.
Stripping naked was usually the most effective way to distract a man, and I desperately needed to get into that cool water—both to quiet my jumbled thoughts and soothe the lingering ache of the need I’d been feeling for hours.
Zero didn’t stay back. Although I didn’t look at him directly, I couldn’t help but notice as he shucked his T-shirt in that hyper-masculine way some guys did. His skin was sun bronzed, tattooed and gorgeous. He had the kind of broad-shouldered, nicely muscled, narrow-hipped body a girl instinctively wanted to lick. In the afternoon sun, his reddish-brown hair drifted in the wind, and I shivered with the physical memory of those long, silken strands feathering over my bare skin.
“Sadie…does anyone even know where you are?”
The question sounded harmless enough, but the implication held menace. After all, he seemed to be a good and trustworthy man, but he had an evil and untrustworthy imagination.