Fallen Angel (Club Burlesque) (23 page)
Read Fallen Angel (Club Burlesque) Online
Authors: Logan Belle
They dropped to the floor, lying against each other, panting for breath.
“You know what?” Billy said.
“What?” said Tyler.
“I know you feel like Violet has us by the balls right now, and maybe she does. But I promise you, by this time next year, I will find a way to fuck her in the ass harder than you just fucked me.”
“You want to have sex with her?” Tyler said.
“No! I’m speaking metaphorically.”
“Well, speak un-meta whatever you call it. What are you gonna do?”
Billy rolled over and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me surprise you.”
20
W
hen Bette arrived at the restaurant in less than a half hour, she wasn’t alone: she had Alec with her.
hen Bette arrived at the restaurant in less than a half hour, she wasn’t alone: she had Alec with her.
He looked more handsome than Mallory had ever seen him, with a few days’ worth of stubble and his hair longer than he usually allowed it to grow. All in all, he looked in need of a good fuck, and she found herself dying to deliver one to him.
Regardless of how embarrassing last night had been, she was thankful things had played out the way they had. Looking at Alec cross the restaurant toward their table, it was unthinkable that she had almost slept with someone else.
He acknowledged her with a smile, sitting down next to Poppy while Bette took the empty seat next to her. Alec leaned in to put his coat next to her on the bench, and she caught his scent and almost swooned.
“I hope you don’t mind my bringing Alec into this conversation, but he has more info than I do.”
Mallory and Alec locked eyes. She looked away first. And only then did he start talking.
“I knew that Agnes was selling the club,” he said. “Mallory knows that because she and I talked about it a couple days ago. Then I told Bette just yesterday that I heard rumors around the
Gruff
offices that Billy was buying a club. I wasn’t sure if it was the Blue Angel, and I figured he didn’t want to talk to me about it since he knows my relationship to the club. Then I was thinking if it’s not Billy, it would be great if the buyer were someone we knew, someone who loved the Blue Angel and would want to retain its character. So I told Justin Baxter that Agnes was selling it, thinking maybe he would want to throw his hat into the ring.”
Gruff
offices that Billy was buying a club. I wasn’t sure if it was the Blue Angel, and I figured he didn’t want to talk to me about it since he knows my relationship to the club. Then I was thinking if it’s not Billy, it would be great if the buyer were someone we knew, someone who loved the Blue Angel and would want to retain its character. So I told Justin Baxter that Agnes was selling it, thinking maybe he would want to throw his hat into the ring.”
“Great idea,” said Mallory.
“Yeah, but it’s too late. Justin’s lawyers found out that the Blue Angel has already been sold . . . to Billy Barton and someone named Gina Offinici.”
“Who is Gina Offinici?” said Bette.
Poppy turned white. “I have a feeling I know.”
Mallory looked at her, then reached for Alec’s iPhone. “Can I use this for a second?” She opened the browser and went to Google images for Gina Offinici.
“Fuck,” she said, and passed around the photo.
“Violet?” Alec said. “Why would Billy team up with her? Why wouldn’t he come to you and me?” he said to Mallory. “You’re a bigger name in burlesque than Violet. And we’re friends with him.”
“I don’t know,” Mallory said. “But none of the girls are going to want to work for her.”
“That’s the end of the Blue Angel right there,” Poppy said.
“There’s always a new crop of girls. It’s just the end of the show we’ve been doing, the show that Scarlett and Kitty and everyone else have made their names doing. They’ll just have to find other clubs. It won’t be the same.”
“Where? Lavender Lounge? The Fan Club? Those places have their regular girls, and places like the Slit just suck—it’s not even real burlesque.” Poppy said.
“I don’t know, but I’m glad I don’t have to worry about it,” Bette said. “I hope by the time this all shakes out I’ll be on a film set in Boston.”
Mallory and Alec looked at each other. She barely heard anything Poppy and Bette were saying. All she could think about was getting him alone so they could talk. And she knew Alec well enough to know he was thinking the same thing.
“Do you want to get out of here?” Alec said to her, and it was like being in a movie where the action freezes for all but two characters.
Outside, Alec steered her toward Sixth Avenue, and they caught a cab a block away. The air between them was so thick with tension she could hardly breathe. She thought he would want to talk—usually he had a hard time leaving things unsaid. But he just stared straight ahead at the plastic barrier between them and the driver.
“We can get out here,” he said when they reached West Twenty-fourth Street—which made no sense since they lived on East Eighty-third Street. They weren’t even near a subway to switch over to.
He paid the driver and took her by the hand.
“What are you doing? I thought we were going back to the apartment.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
They crossed the street and walked east. In the middle of the block was a nondescript building with a wooden doorframe and a placard that read, simply, HOTEL.
Alec held the door for her. Inside, the front room was more a vestibule than a lobby, with a few small chairs and a guy behind a glass window that made him appear more like a bank teller than a hotel receptionist.
Mallory listened to Alec ask for a room, and he forked over eighty dollars in cash. The guy slid him a key through the glass window, and Alec gestured for Mallory to follow him. He opened a door to the left of the front desk, and she started walking up a narrow set of stairs.
Alec stopped her at the first landing and checked the number on the green plastic keychain. It was a flat oval of plastic with the number seven on it and a single key dangling. It almost looked like the type of thing she had carried as a hall pass in high school.
He opened the door to a small room dominated by a queensize bed covered with an ugly, art deco bedspread circa 1991. There was a small desk, and in the corner—freestanding—a shower.
“What is this place?” Mallory said, half-laughing, halfappalled. “And how do you know about it?”
“We did a piece for the magazine about the top ten hotels you need to know—and not for family vacations, if you get what I’m saying.”
“I think I’m getting it,” she said, opening the bedside drawer. Instead of a Bible, she found two condoms. “You’re crazy,” she smiled. “Why did you bring me here?”
He walked to her, taking her face in his hands.
“It was just an impulse. Thinking maybe if it could be just us for an hour, away from everyone and everything else, we could find our way back. That, and the fact that I can’t wait another second to make love to you.”
He kissed her, and the world fell away—Violet, the Blue Angel, the bar exam. Even that night with Gavin was like a tiny flickering star in an infinite universe. The rightness of that moment, of being held by him in that shitty little hotel room, told her on a visceral level that no matter what was going on externally, they were the center of the world. He was her gravity. She could look for that in other places, but she would never find it.
She helped him pull off her coat. The room was freezing, and he found a space heater near the dresser.
“I think that’s a fire hazard,” she said, eying it.
“We won’t need it to get warm,” he said. The seriousness in his eyes quieted her, and she didn’t say another word as he undressed her. She lay back on the bed and watched him take off his own clothes. Her heart pounded, and she wondered how she could have considered what she felt for Gavin as attraction. It was nothing compared to this primal state of arousal. Every one of her senses felt heightened.
He moved on top of her, and she spread her legs, already wet for him. She reached down to hold his cock, to guide it inside of her, but he held her hand away, pushing his way into her in a way that was as rough as it was satisfying, making her close to coming almost instantly. She clutched his back, kissing his neck and rubbing her face against the rough stubble of his cheek.
She knew, of course, that he could read her body—probably knew it almost as well as she knew it herself—and could sense that she was close to coming. For that reason, probably to prolong their buildup, he pulled out of her. He stood up, at the edge of the bed, and she sat up, slightly lightheaded as she moved her legs on either side of his. She placed her hands on his hips and traced her tongue along his cock before closing the warmth of her mouth over as much of him as she could. She didn’t think there was anything more intimate than tasting yourself on a man’s cock, and she knew that few things turned Alec on more than her willingness to lick her own pussy juice.
While she worked her mouth on his cock, she stretched her hand up to his chest, and sure enough, she could feel his heart racing. He wound his hands through her hair and pulled her head back, off of himself so that he didn’t get too close to coming.
He knelt down in front of her and kissed her so hard she knew her mouth would feel bruised in the morning. She took his face in her hands and kissed his fluttering eyelids, the bridge of his nose, his stubble-sharp jawline.
He leaned back to get something off of the floor, and she saw he was holding the long argyle socks she wore under her boots. He scooped one arm under her and lifted her toward the top of the bed, where he proceeded to tie her hands to the rickety iron headboard. He knotted each sock just tightly enough to make it impossible for her to get her hands free but not so tightly that it would hurt her or distract her.
Now it was her heart that was pounding, and she couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between the way Alec was fucking her and Gavin’s freak-out last night.
Alec trailed his hands down her arms, over her breasts, down her belly, to her pussy, where he stroked her clit before putting his face between her legs. He pressed his tongue inside her, his finger and mouth working in tandem, building the pressure in her cunt to an unbearable degree, making her dig her heels into the bed, wanting to grab him and pull him on top of her but not being able to because of the restraints. She moaned as he stopped touching her, using just his tongue to lick the outside of her pussy. The feeling of air on her abandoned flesh just heightened her arousal, and each warm stroke of his tongue brought her teasingly close to coming.
“Alec,” she said.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“You know what I want.” Now his finger moved inside of her, and she couldn’t speak at all. She spread her legs wider and moaned.
“Say it,” he said. Even after all this time, and everything they did with one another, it was hard for her to verbalize what she wanted.
“I want you to . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence—he had reached the spot inside her that felt so good it almost hurt.
“Tell me,” he said softly.
“Fuck me,” she said.
“I am fucking you.”
“With your cock,” she said.
He moved on top of her but still not inside of her. First, he reached up and untied her wrists. She immediately grabbed him, pulling him so hard she knew her nails were digging into his back. She couldn’t stop herself, and he didn’t complain. She felt she had never needed or wanted anything more than the simplicity of his cock inside her at that moment. But Alec buried his face in the crook of her neck, his hand stroking her breast. She felt him hard against her leg.
“What are you waiting for?” she said, her voice so breathless she barely recognized it.
“I’m afraid when we’re done you’re going to leave and I won’t see you again for weeks.”
She stroked his hair, kissing the top of his head. “I’m not leaving.”
Then, from somewhere in the room, his phone rang.
“I forgot to turn that off. . . .”
“Do you need to get it?”
“Why would I need to answer it? You’re here with me.”
And then she felt his cock nudge inside of her, very slowly despite how wet and ready she was. She kissed the underside of his jaw, and he bent his head to bury it in the crook of her neck. Her pussy throbbed around him as he stroked in and out, and when the pulsing of his cock changed to quick, hard thrusts, her body clicked into that mindless place where she was just one vibrating nerve of pleasure. The ripples of her orgasm washed through her
Alec cried out, and she was vaguely aware—considering that she was barely conscious of anything but the physical sensations taking her over like a possession—that he was feeling the same, that they were, in that moment, almost a single physical entity, because one could not exist without the other.
He pulled out and collapsed by her side. She turned toward him, placing one hand on his heaving chest.
They looked at each other and smiled. He kissed the top of her head.
And she thought about last night and felt guilty. She knew she had to tell him about it, but he spoke before she could.
“I’m sorry about not handling what happened with Violet better,” he said. “I know I’ve given you mixed messages in the past about what I’ve wanted. But I never wanted that.”
“It’s my fault. I’m insecure. When I moved to New York to be with you, I felt like you could have anyone in the world and wondered if you still really wanted me, the girl you’d been with since college. I guess that’s part of what drove me into burlesque—to be someone more than just Mallory Dale from Penn. Because you’re already so much more than the boy I met there. I want to be the one you want and not just someone you’re keeping along for the ride—out of comfort or habit when you’ve outgrown me.”
“I never, ever felt that way about you,” he said, pulling her close. “Mallory, I know I’ve made mistakes. And yeah, part of it is because we’ve been together since college, and maybe for a brief moment I thought I wanted you and more, but I know and have always known that all I really want is more of you.”
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