Look Closer: No Safe Words Here 1-4 out of 5. Boxed Set (3 page)

“What’s up, Lana?”  I cringed at how booming my voice was.

Lana, as usual, didn’t even notice my vocal problems.  She leaned down, her hands on either side of my desk, a lazy smile on her Lip Smacker lacquered lips.

I felt the bottom of my stomach give out.  She knew!

I gulped and leaned back in my chair a little. 
Play it cool, girl.  Be frosty…

Lana slid her hand out toward me and crumpled a folded piece of paper in my hand, winked and then stood back up and sashayed back over to her hot-as-hell boyfriend. 

I looked down and unfolded the paper.  The note was in her loopy, girlie cursive, and she had penned a few pretty hearts with arrows skewered through their centers. 

The note read:

My room, Friday night at midnight.  Fire Man route, per usual.

Shiiiit…

When I looked up again, Lana and Darby were arm in arm, walking toward the out-building.  Darby was probably going to work out—as if he needed it!—while Lana whipped the cheer squad into shape.

With a jolt I realized I needed to get my rump in gear, and get my ass to practice.

Maybe I could cajole the meaning of the letter out of Lana during practice.

Chapter Four

Lila

It was working like a charm.  The rest of the house was a humid, nasty miasma of stale air and cloying air fresheners that were perfectly harmless in a well ventilate home, but were overpowering to nausea now.

And then there was the bedroom, cool—even the scents were cool and calming, vanilla with a hint of jasmine and lavender—crisp, and inviting.  It was cold enough that my nipples were hard.  This fact I played to great advantage through the blood red negligee I’d bought at Victoria’s Secret earlier that afternoon, right after I’d purchased the quietest, most powerful window mounted air conditioner I could find.  Luckily, I didn’t have to lug the damned thing up the stairs and mount it in the bedroom myself.  It was part and parcel with the extended warrantee I’d picked up on it.

I fidgeted with my hair and makeup while I waited for Tom to come up to say goodnight.  He may not have touched me romantically in six months, but he still cared enough to come up and say goodnight.  Ever the civil gentleman. 

Now don’t get me wrong, we sleep in the same room, in the same bed.  But he simply will not come to bed until it’s so late I’m usually asleep. 

And to my detriment, I have never, not once, initiated sex.  Not once in your twenty year marriage.  I just always thought it was below a wife to force the issue.  And until lately, I’d gotten enough in that department to make me feel not so neglected. 

But six months…

Tonight was going to be the first of many nights—I’d decided—that I was going to take what I wanted from my husband.

And he was going to like it!

I hoped…

I heard the bedroom door open, so I came out of my walk-in closet, and stood seductively in the threshold, one hand on my hip, the other raised and languishing on the woodwork of the doorframe. 

Tom was bent over his nightstand, retrieving some notes he must have scribbled sometime during the night.

“It’s late Tom,” I purred, arching my back like they’d told us in
Cosmo
.  “Why don’t you come to bed?  It’s nice and cool in here.”  I let my voice drip with innuendo.

Tom turned around, absently reading through the notes in his hand.  “Yeah, I noticed how…”

And then he looked up at me.  His eyes went wide, and his mouth went slack—all good signs.

I pouted my lips, with their blood red lipstick—that matched the negligee…they had both come from Victoria’s secret.

And then that dumbfounded look on Tom’s face turned to downright stricken.  He shook his head no, as if I’d asked if he wanted to become an organ donor while he was still living and breathing.  At the same time he started like a shot for the bedroom door.

“I’ve got a lot…a lot of city business to get caught up on.  Don’t wait up for me.”

I didn’t watch him leave.  I didn’t have to.  He silently opened, passed out through, and closed the bedroom door behind him.  I stood there with my eyes closed tight, trying to push back the tears that were pooling, hot and hateful, in my eyes.  I was also trying to will myself to breathe again.

I pushed it all back down deep inside—I was, after all, a master at doing this.  It was what I’d been doing for nearly a decade.  What was another night?

I waited for all those pathetic feelings to get locked back inside my soul, waited for the mental storm clouds to pass, and for my still, peaceful center to return.  This was where I lived: peace and quiet…and order.  I swiped what was left of my tears from my eyes, changed out of my ridiculous Victoria’s Secret getup, and pulled on one of my usual sleeping gowns—ala JC Penny. 

Then I thoroughly washed my face, brushed out my hair, and stood staring at my lonely, cold bed.

I tip toed out of my bedroom and down the hall, to the last door on the other side of the hall.  It was a little girl’s bedroom that faced out the back of the house.  There was a small canopy bed, a dresser, a miniature vanity, and tiny unicorn statues stationed with their horns up on metal racks that I’d spray painted to match her walls perfectly.

The room was exactly as Emily had left it ten years earlier.  How she had clung to her little girl ways, even though her other friends had moved on to more “grownup” things.

The room was spotless, just as the rest of my house was.  But it had taken nearly three years before I could even walk into the room.  And I’d forbidden anyone to touch anything in it.  I would stand there and take in the scent of her, and try to forget that she was gone…and would never, ever come back.

Tom and I had had a silent understanding when Emily had died.  We would never try to have another child again.  It nearly killed us both when Emily had died.

But in less than five years Emily’s scent was gone, and no amount of quarantine would bring even that back.

It’s not like the people who brought us “New Car Scent” could invent “Dead Daughter.”

So I’d started cleaning the room, washing the linens once a month, and keeping the room just as she’d liked it.  As if she was going to come home any day from some summer camp.

I slowly lay down on her little bed.  I’d never done this, so it felt so wrong.  But I couldn’t stay this night in my lonely bed.  I needed company, even if it was only the ghost of my dead daughter.

Chapter Five

Marcus

Everyone was asleep.  The night beckoned, the wind smooth and hot, the sound of cicadas as much part of the wind as the scent of pine, or the sound of forever.  I stood at the backdoor, staring out over the backyard.   I could hear the neighbor’s pool filter, and the gentle waves it perpetually caused to ripple across its glistening surface. 

Water was my second home—I’d been all state, and was now swimming for my college team: The University of Arizona, Tucson.  And I’d won every meet this year.

But now I was home for the summer, and my parents and kid sister where all snug in their beds.

Me?

I was looking over towards my neighbor’s fence line.  It was a tall privacy fence, but I’d been scaling over it for five years now.  I just couldn’t resist the water…the smell of chlorine, the sound the water made as it lapped at the sides of my neighbor’s enormous in-ground swimming pool.  

But six months ago I’d gotten an even better reason to climb the fence.  And though I’d been away for nearly three months, I knew I wasn’t the only person awake at this time of night.

I peeled off my t-shirt and kicked off my sandals.  Before I knew it I was up and over the fence, and sliding soundlessly into the warm, soothing water.  My muscles came alive as I glided effortlessly across the pool and then climbed out the other side.  I felt strong and absurdly graceful as I padded barefoot and dripping wet to my neighbor’s backdoor. 

I stood there for a few heartbeats and watched him.  I could feel my heart pound harder just looking at him, and my cock stiffened with every breath I took.  I reached out and drummed my fingers against the panes of glass that separated us. 

Tom looked up from the laptop computer he was busily typing on.  His eyes went wide, and his mouth slack—I loved that look on him.  And then he smiled, saying my name—I could read his lips as he pronounced “Marcus.”

He might be the only person on the face of the planet that calls me by my full, grown up name.

The Wilkes Boy, that’s what everyone calls me, or have ever called me. 

My father had been a small town football star in high school, and then went to college on a full scholarship and became an even bigger star there.  Luckily he never went pro—a permanent knee injury had seen to that.  Otherwise, the entire nation might be calling me
The Wilkes Boy
.

My fucking name is Marcus. 

But my friends call me Marc, or Wilkes…and my parents—though I suspect my father, brawny Jim fucking Wilkes, might think of me that way in his head—call me Marc too. 

The only grown up who ever called me by my full name, and not Jim’s boy, or the aforementioned TWB, was the man I was staring at right now. 

Tom Sherwood, lawyer, mayor of Tempe, and once upon a time, a father.  I’d known his daughter Emily.  We had been the same age, and I’d played hide and seek more times than I could count with her.

And I remembered how she’d looked as she got sicker and sicker…I’d even seen her peering out at me from her bedroom window the day she’d died.  She’d looked so frail, as if she would shatter if you touched her.

So I had this overwhelming sympathy for Tom Sherwood. 

But later, when I was in high school, I’d see him working out at the YMCA, and just looking at him made my heart race—it was like a cardio work out all by itself.  I’d wait, working out and talking to him, until he’d finish and I’d follow him back to the showers.  I’d watch him strip down naked, and I’d shower beside him, asking innocuous questions about his work, his work outs, obscure legal shit I’d read on the internet. 

Anything to have a reason to watch him shower and be near him.

And then one day last year, conveniently right after my eighteenth birthday, I walked into the showers at the Y and found myself utterly alone with a wet, soapy, sexy as hell Tom Sherwood.  And as he turned toward me, he was hard as a brick.

That piece of meat between his legs was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid my eyes on—and though I’ve had a few guys while I was away at the University of Arizona—most of them my own swim team mates—he is still the biggest cock, and the best sex I’ve ever had.

He’d stood, naked before me that evening, the look on his handsome face so fucking serious.

“Mr. Sherwood,” I gulped, stepping closer, step by step until I could feel the hot spray of water splashing off him and onto me.

“Call me Tom,” he said, staring intently into my eyes.  Good god he had sexy gray eyes, the exact color of storm clouds.  They were made all the better for the sexy little crinkles around them.  He reached out and took me by the hand, and pulled me in under the hot spray of the shower with him.

My heart was a jackhammer in my chest, and I was breathing like I’d run a freaking marathon.  But when he put my hand against his chest and just held it there, I stopped breathing all together.  Just touching him was the most wonderful feeling I’d ever experienced—as if I’d been waiting to touch his flesh, the muscles of his powerful chest, my entire life.

And then he let my hand go, and placed his hand on my chest, right over my thudding heart. His thumb rubbed at my nipple, and just that touch stole the breath from my chest.  I was suddenly dizzy and on fire, and I wanted to kiss him so fucking badly.

He stroked his hand over my peck for a few beats, and then smoothed his hand down my ribs, and then down the center of my stomach. 

He looked at me expectantly, so I mirrored the movement of his hands over my body, my hand pressing and caressing the smooth, tan flesh of his chest, his flat, six pack stomach…and then as his hand slid down over my wet pubic hair, and then massaged my cock and balls.  I gasped and fell forward against him.  The feel of his body against mine, and his hand stroking my cock…it was fucking mind blowing.  And it made my cock and balls tingle in a matter of four or five strokes.

“Mr. Sherwood,” I said breathlessly, groaning as my balls cinched up and my cock jerked in his strong, demanding grasp.  “I-I…ohgod,ohgod…” and I shot my load on his thigh.  It was a pretty big load, as I remember, and he chuckled goodheartedly.  But he didn’t let go of my cock, and he didn’t push me off him.  He just held me in one arm as he slowly jacked me off with the other hand, until every last ropey string of my orgasm squirted out of me.

I looked up at him—he was about four inches taller than me then, but now that he was standing in front of me at the back door of his house, I saw that he only had me by a little over an inch now.