TEMPTATION - A Bad Boy Romance (8 page)

Then they disappeared, and the room was dark around me once more. I sat patiently, my stomach no longer filled with butterflies; instead, I was calm. Surrendered, even. I would accept my fate, whatever it was, with grace and submission. I placed my hands again on my knees and lowered my head.

A hand went to my throat and undid the tie of the cape, which was then pulled away from my body. I gasped at how cold it was all of a sudden – the cape must have been keeping me quite warm. Goose bumps sprang all over my naked body. It was quiet again, and nothing happened.

The hand returned, this time caressing my bare breasts. This time, it was unmistakable: this was
not
David’s hand. I had been holding out for the very real chance that none of this was really real; that I could whip off my blindfold any time now and find nobody but my dear sweat boyfriend in the room with me. But something in the size of this hand, in the weight of it against my skin, and its roughness told me in no uncertain terms: there was at least one person in this room that I didn’t know.

My heart jumped and suddenly the butterflies were back again. I began to panic.

The hand traced tentative lines down the rest of my body, over my hips and the curve of my stomach, leaving a trail of tight, nervous skin behind it. Something at the back of my mind was pushing its way to the fore: these people, whoever they were, were going to do things to me. Soon.

I don’t know how long I sat there like this, blind, naked and seen by strangers, but completely unable to see them. I could only track the movement of time by the slow crawl of moisture from my pussy down onto my crouching calves, as though the thoughts in my mind where slowly melting me from the inside. The hand dipped into my lap and grazed against the hot space between my legs. I opened my lips and tried to speak, voice hoarse.

“David? Are you there David?”

I could hear the fright in my own voice. All at once, David was near to me, his warmth, his familiar smell, all right up close to me and his kind voice was immediately in my ears.

“Violet, are you OK?”

Just hearing his voice soothed me immediately. I threw my arms around him and showered his head and neck with kisses, the beginnings of tears stinging my eyes.

“Yes. I’m OK. I love you. I’m OK. I love you…” I said, over and over again. It was as though a flood of emotion I had not realized I was holding back suddenly broke and rushed out of me.

He took my blindfolded head between his two steady hands and kissed me simply, then leant in to whisper into my ear.

“Violet, we’re all going to fuck you now.”

The room was silent. Heavy.

“You know that you can stop this any time you want to. But if you don’t, if you say nothing, we are going to do exactly what we like with you.”

My voice was knotted deep in my throat, and I couldn’t speak.

He hovered in front of me for a moment; I swear I could feel the air around my face and neck distorted as he filled that space. I took a deep, jagged breath to calm myself. Eventually, with an unknown number of eyes on me, and with any number of unspeakable things laying ahead in my immediate future, I opened my lips: “Do you promise?”

I could hear him smile.

“Yes, I promise.”

- THE END -

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BREAK

A Bad Boy Romance

By Gabi Moore

Chapter One

The woman in front of me was being fucked to within an inch of her life.

Her entire face was flushed red, the color extending far down onto her chest and to her two swollen nipples. She was writhing like something possessed, as though she was about to combust into flames at any second.

“She won’t come until I tell her she can,” said her tormentor to me. He flicked a sweat-damp fringe from his face and pummeled into her with more urgency.

“What do you think – should we let her come?” he said through strained breath, flashing deep, laughing brown eyes in my direction.

My mind raced.

A year ago, I had only seen this man in pixelated images. He had been nothing more than ink on a newspaper for me, and now… now he was sweaty and deep in a yelping woman who seemed to be melting before our very eyes.

Maybe I should back up a little. Everything happened so fast that it seemed like one day my life consisted of nothing but the endless cycle of work, sleep, eat …and then
he
appeared, like a dark hurricane, and turned everything on its head.

It started like this: I had gone into work early that Tuesday to beat back my growing inbox and try to get a head start on the madness that the rest of the week would surely entail. I was in that sweet spot where I had successfully started at
Cache
magazine on the right foot, but after six months there, I didn’t need to be so ‘”yes ma’am, no ma’am” as I had been in the first few weeks. I was beginning to relax into my new role a little.

I was young, sure, but sometimes having a lot to prove and nothing to lose is
exactly
the state of mind you need to write well.

“Katie, come in here a sec, would you?”

It was my boss Penelope Welsh, a severe pedant of a woman and dying supernova in the publishing world. She had used that notorious icy voice that could either mean I was about to be praised to heaven or threatened with my life. For Penelope, life was a dreadful bore, and she lived only for those moments of either sublime journalistic joy that made life worth living …or else eviscerating the newbie guts of baby writers like myself.

It being only Tuesday, I hoped it was the former.

“Your Tom Hood piece …walk me through this. What where you doing here exactly?”

Her artsy metal earrings swung on either side of her head. She gestured to her computer screen like an unknown bug had landed there. This looked bad. As far as I could tell, Penelope asked people to “walk her through” things only so she could eviscerate them all the better. Shit.

“Uh, yes, Tom Hood. I wanted to suggest that those nude photo leaks are kind of a new avenue for self promotion for him, that celebrities are looking for ways to manage their image by curating this completely fake online presence, except tha--”

She raised a single bony finger to shut me up.

“He didn’t like it,” she said, revealing a new cryptic streak that was unfamiliar to me.

“
Who
didn’t?”

“Tom Hood didn’t,” she said, relishing how ridiculous this clearly sounded to me. Her earrings had stopped swinging. I opened my mouth to speak, but she raised the bony finger higher.

“He called me, you know. For some stupid reason. He says you’ve been unflattering and he wants an apology.” She turned her face back to the screen with a quizzical look. “As far as I’m concerned you did the asshole a favor with this piece, but what do I know? He doesn’t seem like he wants to cause any trouble. So, will you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh, right. Will you meet with him? He wants an apology. And he says he wants to do a more formal interview and a larger piece on this nude photo scandal crap. I’m going to have to bump Mira’s piece this month and that’s going to burn her ass, but he wanted
you
specifically, and I’m not going to turn that down, so I said you would. You OK with that? We kind of need it this quarter.”

It was barely 5 minutes past 7 and I had already been assigned the biggest story of my short and desperate career. It was a lot to take in.

All at once, Tom Hood was
real
.

I had written a mere line or two of snark about him and now he had appeared right in the middle of my boring Tuesday morning, like a demon summoned with some kind of spell.

I was thrilled. I played it cool.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual about it.

“Good. Just see what he wants. I don’t mind where you want to take it, honestly, but just keep Eddy in the loop, too, you’ll need some photos.”

She handed me a Post-It note with a time and place scratched on it in tight, impatient handwriting.

“
Tomorrow
?!” I said, horrified.

“Yeah? You can’t do it? I can get Mira to try -”

“No, I’ll do it,” I blurted.

I turned quickly to leave her office before anything else happened, but as I was about to close the door she quipped, “Well, have you seen them?”

“What?”

“The nudes.”

Ah, the nudes. Tom Hood had had his phone “hacked” and all his precious dick pics were now “leaked” all over the world, and it was shocking, simply
shocking
to him. Not only did this idiot have the gall to try this stunt, he actually believed people would fall for it. The photos were pure trash of course – grainy candid shots of him in various stages of undress, one with him completely naked, a pair of bikini-clad models in the background, him laughing with an obscenely large dick just hanging there…

“No, of course I haven’t seen them, ew,” I said, crinkling my face up.

“You should. Guy’s
hung,
” she replied and returned to her work, smirking.

Okay then.

I went to my desk, the emails I was dead set on just a second ago suddenly seeming utterly unimportant now. The butterflies in my stomach had not abated. I chewed nervously on the end of a long-suffering pencil and typed into Google, “Tom Hood nude pictures”, looking once over my shoulder.

Chapter Two

By the time I got home that evening, it was already somehow eight o’clock and was drizzling slightly. I was bone-tired, a little scratchy, and in no mood to deal with what I found there.

“Tigger’s got his diarrhea again!” he said, the very first second I walked in the door.

My head throbbed.

Tigger was nowhere to be found, but the vague odor of cat shit lingering in the air let me know immediately what had happened. My boyfriend stood lamely in front of me.

“Jeremy! Really? I
told
you not to feed him scraps from the kitchen, it messes him up,” I said, flinging my bag into the corner. My eyes caught the sight of a sickly brown puddle peeking out from behind the kitchen corner.

I wanted to cry.

“What! You haven’t even cleaned it up yet!” I rushed over and found a guilty-looking Tigger nervously cowering beside the fridge.

“Yeah, he only did it just a moment ago,” Jeremy said.

“Well, when?”

“Uh… I don’t know? I was in a game, babe, so I didn’t actually
see
him do it, you know?”

I glanced my eyes over to his Xbox, a half open bag of Dorito’s spilling onto the floor. I glared at him, fuming.

This was
my
boyfriend, the kind of man who would play Call of Duty for five hours straight, spew Doritos all over the floor and then when feeble old Tigger ate them, would literally watch him shit himself and think, well, Katie will just clean it up. When she gets home. From her
job
.

Anger shot through me. I was too tired to deal with this.

“How long have you been home, anyway?” I asked, slowly and not without a bit of poison in my voice.

He looked away.

“Oh come on, not this shit again, Katie. I didn’t realize I had to check in and out of my own house everyday.”

Something in me snapped.
His
house? I’d had enough. I kicked the fridge with all the energy I could muster, sending poor Tigger scampering away.

“I want you to leave!”

He started to protest, but one angry look from me shut him right up. He stormed out, banging the door behind him.

I stood there and waited for the throb in my big toe to subside, and felt my eyes filling with furious tears. Tigger poked his head round the corner to see if it was safe to come out again. I had had a long, stressful day and
this
is what I came home to? I crumpled down into a heap on the kitchen floor, defeated, and instantly felt my phone bleep.

It was from him.

“Don’t bother apologizing, I’m not coming back,” his message read. I nearly laughed out loud. Apologize? My first thought was to hurl the phone against the cupboard, but somehow I found myself doing something else. I rubbed the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand. With a few easy swipes of my fingers, I was staring at my phone, at
him
again. Why had I saved these pictures? That’s easy: research. He’s a public persona, and one who probably loved the attention anyway, so there was nothing unethical about me having these images. And looking at them. Right?

I stared for a long time at the last picture in the series, the one that had appeared just a few weeks ago across the pages of every junk tabloid in the country, the one that had brandished (large!) black censor bars all over the only parts that people had wanted to see anyway. I stared at his face. At his body. At his face again.

Three lean supermodel types were in the background, frolicking, mid-giggle and each probably no older than twenty. With bleary eyes I focused on a woman in the center back – she was all catwalk model limbs and jet-black hair extensions, some kind of music video whore, probably. But at least she’s not wasting her evening cleaning up cat shit, now is she?

I sighed.

I allowed my eyes to fall on his body again. Surely people didn’t really look like that. Not
really
. I stared for a long time at the almost comically large cock hanging loosely between the two toned, tanned thighs. Was it photoshopped? It was the look of a Spartan still pumped up from battle, but the face was all wrong somehow and didn’t match: it was an easy, mocking face, too comfortable, arrogant even. Familiar somehow. It was the face of someone who’s never struggled, never had to fight for a thing in their lives.