So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) (23 page)

“Chase . . . it’s . . .” I could hardly find
the words.

He stepped back to admire his masterwork.
“Fucking tight, huh?”

Before I could respond, a voice behind us
startled me. “And just what the fuck are you punks doing out
here?”

I gasped and spun around. It was a police
officer. With his arms akimbo and a solemn expression on his
mustached face, he was a hulking shadow beneath the street lamp. I
gulped at the sight of the handgun in his holster.

Chase came up behind me, placing a protective
hand on my shoulder. “Be cool, Goldilocks,” he murmured.

“Hey, man, I didn’t mean any harm. I’m pretty
sure this right here is a permission wall.” He spoke slowly, but
there was little fear in his voice.

“The hell it is!” the officer exclaimed,
spitting on the ground in a show of disgust. “Fuckers like you are
turning this borough into a third-world country, but it ain’t
happening on my time.” He turned around and called out, “Hey,
Jenkins, look what the cat dragged in! Says this here is a
permission wall. What does he think? I was born yesterday?”

Another officer came into the light. He was
tall, broad, and meaner-looking than any of the guys I’d met the
other night when Chase had dragged me along on his tagging
adventure. And he didn’t seem amused in the least. “Nice try,
shithead,” he said in a low, booming voice.

At the sight of me, the one with the mustache
let out a small whistle. “And what do we have here?”

“Looks like the little shithead has got
himself an Upper East Side princess,” the mean-looking one
said.

“NYU, actually,” I said in a small
voice.”

“Shitheads like this guy are bad news. You
hear?” He pointed a finger at me.

His partner nodded. “We’ve seen too many nice
girls like you go down the wrong path.”

I wanted to offer up some kind of excuse.
Surely, they couldn’t take someone like me down to the station, so
perhaps if I spoke up some more, they’d actually listen. Chase
seemed to read my mind. “Say nothing,” he breathed into my ear. He
clutched the bag of spray paint in one hand and tightened his grip
on my shoulder. Then he whispered loudly in my ear, “Run,
Annie!”

He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me
along, and we were off before I knew what was happening.

“Hey, you get back here right now!” one of
the cops shouted. I was terrified. I could hear their footsteps
behind us, but Chase wouldn’t let up. We whizzed past street signs,
gloomy-looking tenements, and row upon row of warehouses—very few
of which were illuminated by anything other than the moonlight.

“Whatever you do, don’t look back!” Chase
hissed. I didn’t look at him as I felt the cool air on my face and
the straps of my backpack flapping against my arms. I was so out of
breath, I couldn’t respond anyway.

At some point several minutes later, he
started to slow down. “I think we lost ’em,” he said, gasping and
bending over to clutch his knees.

“What do we do now?” I managed to sputter
out.

He grinned at me and stood. “We’re at my
place, so we might as well go inside, Goldilocks.”

“What the fuck
was
that back there?” I said, still somewhat
breathless, as I slumped against the wall. It was dark and dank
inside Chase’s apartment, which was more like a massive derelict
warehouse than an actual living space.

As Chase peeled off his T-shirt, exposing the
gleaming muscles beneath, he didn’t bother to turn on the lights. I
squinted to acclimate my eyes to the darkness. We’d raced down
Drake Street, through some of the most squalid areas of New York
I’d ever seen, past an industrial-looking patch of tractor-trailers
and long, glorious stretches of murals that I would probably have
found stunning had I actually been able to stop long enough to look
at them.

“It was fucking amazing is what it was!”
Chase exclaimed, moving toward one corner of the long, boxy room. A
flash of light erupted, and I realized he’d just opened a
refrigerator. In seconds he was back at my side, handing me a beer
and cracking one open himself. I took the beer weakly but didn’t
drink.

“It was . . .” I wanted to say that it was
exhilarating, but the words choked up in my throat and the spike of
adrenaline turned into a spike of rage. “How could you do something
so stupid, Chase? I mean, those cops could have shot at us for
being insubordinate. We could have either died or been
arrested!”

I could see him raise an eyebrow. “What are
you talking about? I live here, Goldilocks. Cops don’t shoot at
graff artists. There’d be way too much backlash in the community.
Besides, I could practically smell your excitement. You were just
as into it as I was!”

I raked my fingers through my hair, and I
could feel how sweaty I was. I grimaced in disgust. “You don’t get
it, do you, Chase? This whole bad-boy scenario isn’t going to get
you where you want to go.”

“Oh yeah—where, exactly, is that?” I thought
for a moment he was going to smack me—he looked that angry—but he
just crossed his arms across his perfect chest and looked at me. I
could barely concentrate in the face of his beautiful body and my
own confusion.

“I don’t know . . . somewhere better than
this!” I waved at the scene around me. Massive sheets covered the
windows, which I could tell from the draft in the room were broken.
The skittering sounds across the floorboards made me nervously
imagine a fleet of spray paint–covered mice. I looked at Chase, my
eyes wide. “This is crazy, Chase, and it’s not what I signed up for
when I asked you to work with me. When are you going to realize
that none of this is sustainable? You could have gotten both of us
locked up, on top of that!”

He dropped his beer bottle abruptly, which
made me jump. It clanked on the ground but didn’t break.

“When will you get it through your head,
Annie? I’m not interested in making art that’s enshrined by the
fucking powers that be!” He stepped toward me, and I reflexively
stepped back. “And I know you felt something back there—I know you
got, for at least a second, exactly what I’m trying to do here. So
fucking say it, Annie. Admit to me that you actually liked it, that
it made you high, that it practically made you fucking wet!”

My cheeks blazed as he loomed over me. His
presence was overwhelming, as always, but tonight the flavor was
different. Tonight I feared that the thing that seemed to be
unfolding between us was going to come to a head. I was aroused by
the heaviness of that thing, which seemed to make the air suddenly
thicker and hotter, but I was also confused by it. We’d just spent
the last fifteen minutes running away from the cops, and while
everything about that scenario was utterly wrong, it felt like it
had been the necessary cutaway to this very moment.

I placed my hand out, and it made contact
with his bare chest. I was afraid to look into his eyes. If I
typically felt naked and exposed in Chase’s presence, tonight that
feeling was even more heightened.

“Admit it—you
liked
it, Annie,” he
breathed, covering my hand with both of his.

“I . . . I . . .” I didn’t finish my
sentence. At that moment, everything—all the defenses I’d had in
place to keep Chase at a safe and neutral distance—began to
collapse around my ears.

He was right in front of me, and I could no
longer neglect the burning fire between my legs, in my heart, in my
hands, as we drew toward each other like magnets. As he grabbed my
hair and pulled me into him, I could swear I heard a soft growl—but
I didn’t know if it was from me or from him. His hands were all
over me, setting fire to familiar and aching places, and as we
stumbled around in the darkness, knocking over cans of paint and
empty beer bottles, I thought I would die from the sheer pleasure
of his warm mouth, his warm and slightly callused hands.

“Oh God,” I muttered. “Oh God, oh God, oh
God.”

He chuckled softly and pulled back a little
to look at me. His eyes were almost black in the dim moonlight, and
he wasn’t smiling. “Babe, God ain’t gonna save you here.”

My legs almost buckled at that point, and he
had me in his arms. He was carrying me somewhere—to his bed,
perhaps? I had little sense of space or time—none of it mattered.
My neck was in his mouth, and I felt my body curl into him, wanting
to feel the fullness of him—his heat and hardness, his sweat and
strength and desire. He laid me down and kissed me so tenderly, so
delicately, that it felt like torture.

I was whimpering. “I don’t think I can take
it anymore.”

He laughed, and the sound of it was almost
too cruel for me to endure. “I’m not gonna fuck you until you beg
for it.”

My heart began pounding like crazy at his
words, but I couldn’t deny it was what I wanted, that it was
exactly why I’d come here, even though I’d had no idea how the
night was going to end. But I offered no resistance as he peeled my
clothes off, and then his. I sighed as he lowered his beautiful
naked body onto mine, his tongue flicking across every square inch
of me, exploring me, opening me, feeling me in a way no boy ever
had.

“You’re so beautiful, Annie,” he moaned as
his mouth nestled into my belly.

I sighed and bit my lip so as not to cry out
as I felt an earthquake of an orgasm building in the places where
his fingers had pried me apart, kneading me deeply and
skillfully.

“You know it’s mine, Annie, don’t you? You’re
mine.” There was nothing sinister in his declaration, and it wasn’t
something in my capacity to deny.
Yes, yes, yes!
I cried out
inwardly, because I was afraid that if I moved or spoke, the
marvelous feeling that was coursing through my veins would be
obliterated. My body writhed uncontrollably as his tongue replaced
his fingers, and he licked me relentlessly, down into the darkest
and most secret places. What he was doing to me now, nobody had
ever done before, and the fire surging through me introduced new
revelations to my body, which had previously been ignorant of what
it was capable of feeling, knowing, surrendering to. It felt like I
wouldn’t stop coming, but eventually he eased off me.

For a moment, I was afraid he was going to
simply leave, and panic set in. I sat upright in his bed, reaching
for him. He shook his head and smiled slightly, as if to signal he
just wanted to look at me, to see me in this state of
surrender.

“Annie, do you have any fucking idea how much
you turn me on?” He moved closer when he said this, and pulled my
head back so I couldn’t hide, so that he could gaze into my eyes.
“Do you even know how sexy you are?”

My hunger took over, and the vulnerability of
being so exposed melded into the ecstasy of being so close to him.
A sense of urgency overtook me as I reached for his body, smashing
my lips against his almost haphazardly. I was terrified at the
sheer force of my longing. I moved my face down to his hardness and
ran my tongue over the tip, then the whole length of him, and the
salt of his body sent a new and piercing pleasure through me.

“Please, Chase, I need this, I need you,” I
whispered, as his fingers tightened around my hair and he pushed
himself into my mouth, to the back of my throat. Again and again,
in a delicious rhythm. I would have been content to pleasure him
this way if it was what he wanted—he nearly drove me to the edge as
the gruffness of his moans intensified, his fingers entangling and
tightening their hold in my hair whenever he hit the back of my
throat—but I was still engulfed by a vague and mysterious longing
to be fully possessed by him. Not missing a beat, he pulled me up
into his arms. Now I could see the look in his eyes—devilish and
completely in control—and the last remnants of my resistance were
gone.

“You want this?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, yes! I want this, I want you!” I
was breathing so heavily I could barely recognize my own words, but
I could feel them in my body.

“How do you want it?”

“Any way you want me. I just need you inside
me—I need you inside me
now
!” His mouth was on mine now, and
I was sucking all of him into me, until I wouldn’t have been able
to say where I began and he ended.

In one rapid movement, he pushed me down
until I was on all fours. I could hear him rustling around in the
darkness—then the sound of a condom wrapper being hastily torn
open. I was relieved that Chase was responsible, since I had
recently gone off the pill and hadn’t had sex in quite a while. I
shivered in anticipation. I felt him behind me, pressing into me. I
was so turned on that it was almost effortless, but his largeness
still made me gasp, since it had been so long since I’d been filled
this way.

The feeling of him inside me was like honey.
My entire body wanted to swallow him, the beauty of him. I looked
up through the skylight on the ceiling, which I hadn’t even noticed
until now, and the stars in the sky seemed to flash and churn to
the rhythm of our bodies. It was mesmerizing. His lips and teeth
were on my neck, and his hands were grasping my hips and breasts,
his fingers pinching my nipples. He took me with a violence and
certainty that made me feel faint, moving his hips into mine and
grinding in a way that made me feel parts of myself that I hadn’t
even been aware of before tonight.

“Does that feel good?” he asked, his
breathing growing harder as he pulled my hair back and drilled
himself into me.

“Please, please, please,” I cried out,
although I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to stop or continue. I could
feel another orgasm building up in me, and my hips bucked against
his in response.

He seemed to delight in my incoherency. He
dug his fingers into my hips, and the pain mingled with the
pleasure. “Oh, Annie, you have no idea,” he breathed. “You knew you
were in trouble when you met me. . . . You knew I wouldn’t make it
easy for you. . . .”