Reveal (A Wild Nights Novel) (4 page)

Dimps wiped his nose. “Gone?” he asked, his adorable dimpled-cheeks beaming.

“Sure.” I winked at him.

He smiled. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” I said satisfactorily.

Cori mouthed the words
you’re evil
from her position opposite me.

I shrugged. Maybe I was. Then again, I liked to think of myself as an angel, except under my white virginal gown I wore red lace panties and a corset made for the dirty depths of hell. I had pretty feathered wings and a pronged tail, horns and a halo. Yep, I was good and bad, all rolled into one.

I was a pleasurable nightmare.

As if H telepathically knew what I was thinking, my phone chimed with his message alert. The sound was like a beacon to my body, awakening it in anticipation of his message content. A delightful tingle climbed my spine, and my fingers itched. They wanted to grab my phone and trace the words that always dampened my panties and parched my mouth. They wanted to obey his instruction if, in fact, that was what he’d sent me. And they wanted to open that message there and then and put me out of my amorous misery.

Bad fingers. Bad, bad fingers.

Smiling innocently, I reached for my clutch that was sat on the table and pulled out my iPhone. I couldn’t open the message with Brad and Noah in eyeshot, so I pretended to read a different message before pushing my chair back and standing up. “Sorry, I have to make a phone call. I’ll be right back.”

“Everything alright?” Cori asked, her brows drawn together.

“Yeah, it’s just Sarah.” I rolled my eyes, dramatising my annoyance at my sister’s supposed need for me to contact her.
What can I say? I’m an actress … a damn good one.

Cori smiled her understanding, so I made haste to the ladies’ room, finding a cubicle and leaning against the closed door before opening the message.

Mr Happy: I’m sitting here,

wondering what your pussy tastes like.

My pussy clenched at the thought, a wave of desire flooding me. I bit my lip and sent him a reply.

Em: I can put you out of your misery, if you like.

I pressed send and waited, excitement over his next move almost proving too much. I knew what I wanted him to say, and I knew how I would answer.

Mr Happy: I like. I like very much.

Em: I thought you would.

Mr Happy: So tell me, what does it taste like?

I want you to taste it for me.

Now.

It was exactly what I’d thought he would say. That was how he operated. He dangled his carrot—among other things—knowing I liked to bite, knowing I couldn’t help myself, and knowing I’d dangle my own carrot in return. We just knew what the other wanted, even when it was something that we shouldn’t.

Smiling and sucking in a deep breath, I hiked up my skirt, opened my legs, and slid a finger inside my underwear. I was already wet and yearning to be touched.
Damn! How does he do this? Why does he have such an effect on me?

Our dynamic didn’t make any fucking sense. What we shared were just words—letters strung together into something legible.
Just words? Yep, you keep telling yourself that.

“Fuck you, H,” I growled to myself while sliding my finger inside, as far as it would go. My eyelids fell shut as I visualised him watching me, and that was all it took for my head to fall back and my bottom lip to find its way in between my teeth.
Oh God!
The slide of my finger felt good. So good. And it shouldn’t have. Maybe it was because I was in a public place. Maybe it was because I was doing something he wanted me to do. Or maybe it was because I wanted it as well. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of much where he was concerned. All I knew was that he made me feel good in the worst possible way.

Continuing to visualise his heated voyeuristic expression behind my closed eyelids, it spurred my finger to continue its movement. H would revel in the knowledge of what I was doing and where I was doing it, and that alone made me smile, but more so when the sound of my phone chimed another incoming message.

I stopped my finger’s slide, pulled it out, and placed it in my mouth, slowly dragging it free before I pressed open.

Mr Happy: Now now, naughty girl. I said just a taste.

Em: Mmm …

Mr Happy: Fuck! Tell me.

Em: I can’t. My tongue is busy.

Mr Happy: You don’t need to use your tongue to tell me, love.

Em: My finger is busy, too.

Mr Happy: Fuck! TELL ME!

Em: I taste sweet, of course.

Mr Happy: Tell me something I don’t know.

Em: You don’t know that.

And you never will.

***

I never really understood how I felt after a ‘session’ with H. And I think that was because he left me feeling a wash of emotions—exhilarated, confident, a little dirty, naughty and desired. He empowered me and that gift was priceless. Power was something we all craved. Fuck, wars were started and fought over it. Power led to greed, and greed was a strange little thing. It was the invisible push for more, the intangible force that led to tangible things … like tasting my own arousal while hiding in a public bathroom, because I was greedy for his reaction and also too fucking greedy to say no.
Fuck!

Taking a much-needed breath, I assessed my face in the mirror above the basin. “What are you doing?” I quietly asked myself, my bright blue eyes seeking an answer I couldn’t give … an answer I didn’t have.

Lies.

I had the goddamn answer. I just didn’t
want
to have it. Perhaps I was ashamed, or maybe I was in denial. I didn’t know. And that was the problem.

“Get it together, Em,” I whispered, giving myself a much-needed pep talk.

This form of self-encouragement helped me get by each day, regardless of its validity. It had become the counterfeit shoes on the feet I took counterfeit steps in.

It had become my ruse.

“You’re not a bad person.”
Lie.

“What you do is perfectly fine.”
Lie.

“You’re not hurting anyone.” I scoffed at that last lie because clearly, I was hurting myself. I was at war with me, battling me. And when you’re at war with yourself, there can never be a victor.

Some days, I don’t know if I am weak or if I am strong,

whether I’ll break or stand tall, whether I’ll fight or fall.

Some days, I just … don’t know.

I suffered depression, and nobody knew the extent of it. Not my sister, not my mother, not even Cori. I’d kept my anguish and misery a secret because it was mine to bear. I didn’t want to share it, didn’t want to surround it in neon lights, and for quite some time, I didn’t even want to acknowledge that I had it, because for me, it felt as if it had come out of nowhere.

One minute I’d been vibrant, happy … the world, my oyster. And the next I was lost, my only path a downward spiral. I thought that if I ignored the hollow feeling inside, it would eventually swallow itself.

I was wrong.

It swallowed me.

Every time I looked in the mirror, it would swallow me. Every time I was knocked back for a part in a production, it swallowed me. Every time I failed at a relationship, it swallowed me. And every time I opened my eyes when dawn broke it swallowed me.

Like love, depression was personal. It was never the same for those it consumed. It sewed itself into the threads of your being and became a part of who you were. Sure, friends and family could show love and lend support, but deep down none of that mattered. The threads of depression were tightly knit, and you were the only one who could find those threads and unpick them—they were yours to unravel.

Nowadays, for the better part my depression was under control. Sure, I relapsed when times were difficult, and sometimes when they were not. But with medication, H, my diary, reading and yoga, I was much better equipped to cope on those days. And I did. I’d coped just fine for the past ten months.

The same couldn’t be said for a time two and a half years ago, the point where I was fairly sure my depression began. It was the time of uni exams, late nights of cramming, stress-filled days, and uncertainty as to where my career was headed and if years of study would pay off.

It was the time I lost myself.

But roughly one year later, I stumbled upon H.

I’d like to tell you that it all started with a blind date, followed by a fluffy romance and subsequent textual flirting. But it hadn’t. Not even close. No. My relationship with H started while I was working my second job—mindlessly answering lewd messages with lewd messages of my own. It started when Mr Happy, together with his smiley-face profile picture, appeared on my
SexyTexts.com
home screen.
Yeah, you read that correctly … I’m a professional sex-texter.

I made money by fooling men into believing the cum they just blew into their hand was the by-product of me touching my double-D breasted, size-eight supermodel-like, lingerie-clad body.

It wasn’t.

It never was.

In fact, for the majority of the time I sexted my clients, I was in my Hello Kitty PJs, my hair in a messy bun, sitting on my sofa while scoffing down pizza and chocolate. Yep. Glamorous stuff.

I couldn’t really complain though, as it was quite the cruisy job, which was good for me. With my strict training and dance regime, I could only devote part-time hours—normally three a day—to my sexting role. And when I was in between productions, I could work more hours and earn more money. So yeah, it was a good system. Not to mention the cruisiness extended to being able to work from home, or anywhere I logged onto the interface. That was a major plus. What wasn’t a major plus was the money. It wasn’t great. It was okay, and let’s face it, ‘easy money’, but considering what I had to do, what I had to read, and what I had to see in order to earn it, the money was shit. Honestly, my eyes have been subjected to some of the funkiest looking cock-vomit to exist, and there’s no amount of money that can rectify that eye-rape. Ever!

H was different though—a rare gem—and his cock was not of the cock-vomit variety, thank God. He’d been a frequent client in the beginning, standing out from the others because he was witty, somewhat gentlemanly, a smartarse, and charming.
Damn, was he charming.
He would
always
come back for more, each and every night, and I soon found myself waiting eagerly to chat with him.

A couple of months into our sexting, I’d also learned that he was divorced and had been so when we’d first established a rapport. Mind you, he and his wife had tried reconciling roughly eight months ago.

They’d failed.

I’d been a good girl and done the right thing, ignoring his texts during that time, but radio silence between the two of us never lasted long. I missed him when he was gone, and I’m more than positive he missed me too, because he’d told me so. He’d said that despite the dirty content we shared via our phones, he felt at ease with me, and comfortable, like he didn’t have to hide anything … except for the very thing he and I were—a breach of protocol.

Sighing, I washed my hands in the basin, paying attention to my arousal-covered finger. I didn’t like to think that I was weak when it came to him, but he did have me doing the most outrageous things—toilet-cubicle masturbation being one of them—and all with just his words.
My God, his words.

I wanted the guilt they provided me just as much as I wanted the pleasure they gave.
His words made me feel alive, something I hadn’t felt for quite a time before he came into my life. In fact, the best way I could describe H was that he was an unlikely flicker of light in a darkened time. His attention and his need were different from the others’. They felt genuine.
Real
. I wasn’t just spank-bank material for him like I was for my other clients … and that was okay. In the beginning, it all worked to shift my focus from what I didn’t want to accept—my depression. In the beginning, H was my antidepressant.

Well, he had been, until I finally accepted my condition and gathered the courage to see a doctor and be put on real antidepressants. I was also encouraged to keep a diary, to write notes of how I felt when unsure or scared—a confession or sorts—as reading them back could sometimes help me understand what I couldn’t beforehand. The diary, along with the meds, definitely helped for the most part, as my depression was now loosely threaded. It was no longer tightly-knit, nor was it gone completely—it never would be.

Soon after I began to see my own light once again, I questioned what H really meant to me. I asked myself time and time again if he was just a pleasurable high, nothing more, and if so, why I couldn’t just tell him that we had to stop what we were doing and focus on moving forward with other people? Time and time again I’d asked myself why I couldn’t just say goodbye, and time and time again my questions went unanswered.

They always did.

What I did know was that we both shared an unusual bond, and I wasn’t sure at what point it had formed. Maybe it was there from the beginning, from those very first messages of excitement and lust. Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it developed at the time he sent me a sext saying ‘I don’t need to imagine fucking you today, love. I just need to imagine
you
. It’s all I ever need to imagine’.

I remembered that text vividly. I remembered seeing it on my computer screen and it stopping me in my tracks. I remembered sucking in a deep breath and holding it while the echo of my heartbeat rang loudly in my ears. I remembered wondering … What. The. Fuck?

I also remembered that it was the point when I gave him my mobile phone number, and our communication moved from
SexyTexts.com
to a more private platform. It was also an unpaid platform, which kinda sucked. But it was my choice to move it, because I didn’t care about the loss on funds. I wanted his presence more often than what I’d been getting, and communicating with him via my phone allowed that. It was also the point in time where we’d never looked back.

That was just less than a year ago.

H’s texts were random and
so
spontaneous, and he always played fair. He let me challenge him just as much as he challenged me—like this evening, for example. He’d also tried to call me on several occasions, calls which I never answered, because he could never be more than what he was.

He could never really be
real
.

Rinsing the soap from my hands and drying them at the dryer, panic flushed through me when I realised how long my leave from the table had been.
Shit-fuck!
I needed to come up with a plausible excuse … not that little white lies weren’t my forte or anything.

Hmm… my sister, Sarah, is pregnant and having a breakdown over the phone? Um… no! Pregnancy means baby. Babies are real. And my phone conversation with Sarah wasn’t real.

How about her apartment was broken into? Maybe, although there is a risk of Cori bringing that up in conversation with Sarah, and that definitely would not be good.

Think, Em, think!

Stepping back up to the basin, I placed my hands on the benchtop and dropped my head, homing in on the drain for clarity.
Because yeah, drains are miraculous like that.

“Argh!” I growled quietly, and that was when the best excuse ever materialised.
Sarah was having plumbing issues, and as a result, she was loosing her shit. Yes! Oh, hang on a minute. That sounds all kinds of wrong.

Just as I quietly debated whether or not to use that excuse, the door to the ladies’ room opened and Cori walked in. “Hey! You alright? I was just about to send out a search-and-rescue party for you.”

“Sorry,” I sighed, apologetically. “Sarah was having plumbing issues, and then I had some of my own, if you know what I mean.” I tilted my head and shrugged, the lie pouring out of my mouth like the liquid deceit that it was. It was too easy, always too easy. And I hated myself for that.

“Oh, you’re surfing the crimson wave? Damn, your timing sucks.” She looked genuinely disappointed on my behalf.

I shook my head. “No, no. Not that kind of plumbing issue. The normal kind. The my-bladder-is-so-full-I-can’t-hold-it-anymore kind.”

“Oh … well that’s okay then. So are you done?”

“Yes. I’m done.”

“Good, because there is a set of twins out there who appear to be laying claim to you.”

I laughed and rolled my eyes, deliberately hiding my excitement. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Brad seems a little smitten, and Noah seems …” She paused for a second. “Well, he seems overly keen.”

“This is both good and bad, right?”

Cori’s head slowly began to bob forward and tilt back—a nod of agreement.

“Excellent! Just how I like it.”

***

Could air really be cut with a knife? I mean, if I were to pick up said utensil—that just so happens to lie on the table before me—and performed a Zorro-style slash, would the air fall victim to the blade? Or would I just look like a complete and utter ninja wannabe fucktard.

Glancing down at the shiny silver knife that flanked my dinner plate, and almost prepared to test my query, I decided against the assault on the atmosphere and drew attention to dessert instead—these twins needed sweetening up.

“I want something rich, sweet and bad for me,” I announced, “and I want it topped with cream and garnished with a strawberry.” My finger slowly descended the menu in my hands, scanning what was on offer until it stopped, together with the beating of my heart. My tongue, though, didn’t stop. Oh no, it never got the ‘stopping’ memo, because it practically danced the “Macarena” when I spotted Tim Tam Cheesecake on the menu. “Oh. My. Orgasm! Tim Tam Cheesecake!” I exclaimed, slamming the menu shut and placing it down in front of me. “Yep. That’s me done. No doubt about it.” I smiled eagerly and looked up to find Cori laughing. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said, with an endearing shake of the head. She then turned to Josh, who had his arm around her shoulder. “What do you fancy?”

Josh nudged her cheek with his nose, her head tilting in response, baring the skin on her neck for him. “What I fancy isn’t on the menu,” he responded blatantly, the hungry expression he wore indisputable.

Nice sex wit. He’d be a good sexter. I should totally recruit him.

“Right you are, Camera-smasher Josh. Cori’s pie isn’t on the list.” I gave him an apologetic head-tilt.