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Fadel really should not have been surprised. Style showed up at every other place he went to during the week; why wouldn’t she show up at the fucking grief counseling support group he attended? How was she even managing to find him at these places? He was pretty sure even Bison didn’t know where he went on Thursday nights.
But there she was, lowering her round sunglasses from her face to nail him with a smug little twitch of her eyebrow, like she knew just how badly she’d caught him off guard and how insanely irritated he was just by her mere presence. She didn’t even seem to realize what kind of group she’d just waltzed into. It was insulting.
“My...story?” she repeated the group leader’s words, her surprise melting into something like chagrin when he explained. Fadel hadn’t realized she was capable of feeling any sort of shame. “Ah. Right. Well.” She cleared her throat, glancing around at the people to either side of her, and her eyes darted to Fadel again, calculating in that way she always was.
“Um. I guess it was five years ago or so. I wasn’t—” She cut herself off and shook her head. “I met this guy.” She settled into her chair, skating her fingers along the side of the hard plastic seat. “His name was Porsche.” Fadel could hardly stop himself from rolling his eyes. Porsche, seriously? She was going to talk about a fucking car? His fists clenched at his side, burning with the urge to snatch the baseball hat from her head and toss her out of the room.
“We hooked up a lot, at first.” Fadel buried his face in his hands. “But he was really nice to me; I thought we were friends, too. But one day,” she paused, and when he made himself glance up at her, she was staring at the other side of the room as though she wasn’t seeing any of them. Her voice sounded odd—was she trying to make it seem like she was going to cry? Give me a break, he thought.
“He was just gone. He stopped answering calls and texts, and when I went to the bar he worked at, they said he quit.” She blinked and looked down at the floor. Fadel’s heart thudded painfully inside his chest, and he rubbed at it without thinking.
Fluke had worked at a bank. He’d had such a regular schedule: 8AM to 4:30PM every day, always on the second teller window inside the building. Fadel used to run tips and cash from the day before to the bank before the restaurant opened—he was running a Thai place, then. After the third or fourth morning in a row, Fluke offered to make him a coffee from the employee break room because he said Fadel looked ‘tired.’ After the seventh morning, Fadel was bringing coffee for Fluke. Fadel would bring him lunch, too, when he could step away—Bison was shit at cooking, but Fadel had taught him some basic stir fry methods, and as long as Fadel could prep the ingredients and pre-measure them, all Bison had to do was throw them in the skillet. Mondays were their slowest days, and Fadel pared down the lunch menu to a handful of basic stir frys just so he could spend one lunch a week with Fluke.
Then one day, it all stopped. Fluke’s coworker said he hadn’t shown up for his shift. His cell phone stopped ringing. His apartment lights stayed off.
Style continued, her voice overlapping with the memories of Fluke’s laughter and the sound of his voice teasing Fadel about his need to keep everything clean and organized, even in Fluke’s apartment. “I went by his house and his little brother was home. He told me that he’d gotten a job on ‘an island with no cell service.’” She huffed out a small laugh and rubbed a hand down her face. “Which is pretty obviously a lie, so I stopped trying to contact him. It’s been a few years, and I still haven’t heard from him or seen him around.” Clearing her throat, she slapped her hands down on her knees and smiled softly at the leader of the group. “It’s hard, you know? Not knowing what’s happened to him or if he’s even still alive. I mean, he’s probably alive, but he was into some, um, sketchy stuff, and there’s always so many motorcycle accidents—”
Fadel couldn’t breathe. He’d run a thousand scenarios in his head about Fluke; his favorite one, the one he never could convince himself to believe in, not even a little bit, was that Fluke was working at a nature reserve somewhere. He’d always loved hiking, and he’d told Fadel he always wanted to work a job outdoors. They were going to move to Chiang Rai; Fadel had gone there, once, just for a week—the longest he could manage to skip town without Mother sending Keen or Bison after him. He spent days visiting every park and forest office in the area; he even stopped at the local banks. No one had heard of Fluke.
After that trip, he couldn’t look any more. He didn’t know where to look. Fluke’s apartment got cleaned out and rented to someone else, and Fadel didn’t even know until he went back to look through it again and found it occupied. The surge of relief he’d felt when saw the lights on in the window was nothing compared to the devastation when the front door opened to reveal a stranger’s face.
Did Style know? How could she? He’d never seen her before, and Fluke would have mentioned her—Style was the kind of person you told stories about meeting to your friends after work. For the first time, a sliver of fear shot through him; Mother had known about Fluke. Had Mother sent Style as some sort of test? As quickly as it came, he shook his head, chasing the thought away. That wasn’t Mother’s style. She preferred a velvet fist; something you could see coming and might even ask for, no matter how much it would hurt in the end. She didn’t play mind games—not like that.
Fadel realized that the meeting was ending as the woman next to him stood, and he stood up as well. He felt drunk. He caught sight of the back of Style’s shirt as she left the room, and he was up and following her before he could think better of it. She was getting a drink of water, and he hauled her away down the hallway to the closest empty room, double checking to make sure no one followed them before he closed the door.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked. His breath was coming too fast. He needed to get control of himself.
Style was never good for his self-control. “I found this place online. What, am I not allowed to go outside now since you might be visiting my neighbor? We live in the same place, man.”
Fadel wanted to scream. He wanted to grab her and shake her; how could she be so infuriating? “This isn’t the place for your bullshit.” He stepped up to her, putting his face in hers, and let his scent go; the peppercorn surged over the coffee and currant, pulsing frustration and anger into the air. Style tried to step back, but she backed into a table, and Fadel pressed his advantage. “This is a place for people with real problems, not some car that was stolen from you.”
“Hey!” Style straightened up and shoved at his chest. “Porsche isn’t a car. He’s a person—respect him. He really did go missing.” Her scent of cherries and amber reached out, peaking with her own outrage.
So Porsche was some guy she fucked and not a car. So what? “Then he dumped you, you mean. He ghosted you. You really think this is going to accomplish anything? What the hell do you want out of this?” Fadel fisted his hand in her shirt, unable to stop himself from the urge to grab her and shake and hold and shut her up. How did she always manage to show up and shove her fingers into his bruises?
“I told you,” she said, tilting her chin up. “I like you. I want you.” Despite Fadel’s angry pheromones and the tight grip he had on her, there wasn’t a trace of fear in her eyes. Even her scent in the air seemed to tease at him, calling for him to lean forward and bite to bring more of it out.
“You want me?” he asked, and he watched her pupils dilate as he leaned even closer. Her eyes flickered down to his mouth. She wouldn’t give up until she had him; she had made that clear. If he had just fucked her that first night, in the rain on the side of the road, would she be tormenting him like this still? Wouldn’t he be free of her by now? “Fine,” he said, and he didn’t recognize his own voice, the hoarse, growling way the word dropped from his lips. “I’ll give you what you want, then.”
Fucking her wouldn’t be a hardship. He’d wanted her since he first saw her. He’d held back; he didn’t want to hurt her, and he didn’t want to hurt himself, either. There was no point in getting involved. But she insisted on getting involved; she entangled herself into every inch of his life and strangled any possibility of escape, and so he could only let himself be taken.
He yanked on her shirt and pulled it over her head, forcing her hands up, and while she was tangled in the sleeves, he bent down and pressed a line of biting kisses along her throat and chest. Her skin tasted as sweet beneath his lips and tongue as he had known it would, and he slipped a hand into her hair to pull her head back to expose more of it, hearing her groan quietly and feeling the vibrations of it in her throat. Finally, he could slide his nose up her jawline and back behind her ear like he had wanted from the moment he met her, laving her scent gland with his tongue until it released a flood of cherry and vanilla, the amber settling into the back of his throat until he couldn’t even smell himself anymore. This close, the trace of vanilla lended almost a sweet edge to the scent of cherries and amber; he wanted to drown in it.
She managed to free her hands, and her calloused fingers tugged at his shirt, pulling it up until he was forced to step back and rip it over his head, ignoring the pop as a button tore off in the haste. When it was off, he made the mistake of catching her eyes; her pupils were so big they swallowed her irises, and she was panting, her chest already gleaming with sweat, and her stomach flexed as she leaned back against the table and ran her eyes down his chest, whining beneath her breath at the sight. “Fadel,” she said, breathless and half sighing. She reached out, tracing a hand down the center of his chest and igniting a pathway of nerves that led straight to his cock.
He collided back into her with a hard shove, gripping beneath her thighs to lift her up onto the table, and she grabbed his jaw and tilted it up. He couldn’t dodge in time—he didn’t know if he even wanted to—and then they were kissing. It was a mess of teeth and biting and tongues until she tilted her head and opened her mouth, and he groaned as she surrendered to him, licking over her teeth and biting her lip before he pulled back to kiss down her throat again. Her hand moved from his throat up his jaw and slid back into his hair on the back of his head, pressing him closer. He slipped one of her breasts free from her bra; it fit so well in the palm of his hand, not a single inch of skin escaping his grip as he squeezed it and sucked a brown-pink nipple into his mouth, catching his teeth on the edge of it as he pulled away with a light suck. His other hand pushed her bra up, leaving it awkwardly sitting above her breasts, but it gave him room to slide over to her other nipple, coaxing it into standing with his tongue before he released her breasts and started kissing down her chest. Fadel couldn’t get enough of her taste; he wanted to keep kissing down, down, down, between her thighs to the very core of her. Would the amber scent get stronger, there, or would the cherries take over everything? Would she be sweet or tart?
She pulled on his hair as he started to approach her navel, pulling him up even as she locked her legs behind his waist and pulled him to her, pushing the hard bulge beneath his jeans directly into her core. Beneath her breath, she was chanting, “No, no, up, c’mere, here.” The noise seemed more for herself than for him. Once he was standing straight again, she let go of his hair to start unbuckling his pants, and then she shoved his pants and boxers down his thighs as he started working on the button on her cargo pants.
“Wait,” she gasped as he started to tip her backwards to give himself room to pull her pants off. “Wait, wait.” He realized he was growling, a low thrumming pulsing in his chest at the thought of her trying to stop this now. Hadn’t she started this? Wasn’t this what she had been begging for?
A foil packet flashed in front of his eyes, and he looked past it to see her grinning triumphantly. Did she just carry condoms around in her pockets? His chest clenched at the thought—the thought that she was always ready for someone, anyone, or the thought that she had planned this, that she had known that she could make him break like this, and had prepared for it—he didn’t know which thought he hated worse.
He snatched the packet from her and opened it, choking back a groan as he slid it over his aching, red cock. Even the pressure of his fist felt like too much; he had to bite back another groan at the thought of how she would feel. She kicked off her pants and stood up, preparing to slide back onto the table with a grin, but he grabbed her arm and spun her around. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t see that smug look on her face while he fucked her, couldn’t see how much she was enjoying the way she was destroying him and the life he had built for himself, piece by piece.
He bit at the back of her neck, tugging at the skin with his teeth. She moaned too loudly in the room, and he pulled her face back toward him to kiss her quiet. He slid into her and had to muffle his own moan in her shoulder; she was tight and hot around his length, and she clenched down on him for just a moment when he pushed in as though she was fighting him before she threw her head back against his shoulder and relaxed with a punched out groan. He wrapped a hand around her throat to pull her back tightly against her chest; she grabbed at his arm, fingers clutching at his wrist, and he nearly growled until he realized she was pushing his arm into herself, holding his hand against her throat tighter. From this vantage point he could turn and see her, her head tipped back as she gasped with each thrust, the way she scraped her teeth over her bottom lip as she whimpered, clenching around his cock as it slid out. He wanted to kiss her again, to feel the vibration of her noises in his mouth.
He pushed on her shoulder to force her face down onto the table and immediately wanted to weep at his mistake. How had he thought this would be better for his control? He could see himself from here, fucking back and forth into her, the latex of the condom shiny and slick. Fuck, she was so wet and responsive, shoving her hips back toward him each time he pulled away. He grabbed onto the waist that had been tormenting him for weeks, pressing his fingers into the dip of it until she would bruise, and pulled out nearly all the way just to hear her whine at the loss. She would feel him tomorrow. She would wear his bruises for a week, and he would haunt her in the same way her teasing smiles and laughter haunted him.
“Fuck, baby,” Style said on a broken moan, and she reached up to grab the edge of the table to give herself stability as he slammed back into her, forcing another cry from her mouth. “Fadel, come on, please.” He wondered how she could still speak and had the vision of himself feeding his cock through her lips to shut her up; he could wreck her throat so she couldn’t speak for days.
She kept talking; little cries and murmurs of his name and please and baby, and he couldn’t take it. He wasn’t hers to call like that. This had to end; he wanted to stay locked inside of her forever. He wanted to take her home and press her into a mattress and fuck her until she screamed. He wanted to watch her eyes glaze over with tears as he used her mouth—she would love it, she had practically begged for him to do just that half a dozen times, and he wanted it so badly his fingers trembled where he was gripping her small waist.
Every punched out moan from her mouth, every taste of her skin beneath his tongue, every moment he smelled her scent intertwining with his in the still air of the room—every moment he spent buried in her, he wanted more. He had never known a greed like this before; had he ever wanted anything this badly, this voraciously? This had to be the only time, but every thrust begged him to stay longer, to find a way to keep this, to linger in her smiles and laughter and soft, wet heat.
His control was slipping—had slipped, ages ago, long before he dragged her into this room. He was inside the room with her, sinking his cock into her and hearing her call his name, and he was in some distant, impossible future where she only ever called his name, where he called her name, where he got to have this forever, and he could never, ever go there, not even in his head. This had to be the only time. This had to be the end. He had to let her go. He had to make her let go.
He slipped his hand beneath her and had to bend down to muffle a groan in the space between her shoulder blades when he felt the stretched skin where he entered her cunt. With his fingers tracing the rim of her opening, flexing with each crush of his hips against her, he could feel just how wet she was, the dripping moisture building on his fingers as he ground into her, relishing the way she whined and reached back to hold him in, to pull him deeper with a hand on his hip. He found her clit and swirled his fingers, and her whine climbed higher and louder, arching and breaking with each thrust he made, and then she was spasming around his cock, milking him as she shuddered beneath his hands, her fingers scrabbling at the tabletop as she came. The feeling of it tipped him over the edge, and he gave a sharp, hard thrust into her once before his muscles locked up, leaving him gasping for breath. He pulsed inside of her, filling the condom, and his hips jerked once, twice, and a final time, helplessly and feebly, before he managed to still.
The room went quiet, filled only with the sound of their harsh panting, until she groaned quietly and shifted, hissing as he slid out of her. Fadel tied the condom off and threw it in a trash can, wiping his hands off on his pants as he picked them up off the floor. They dressed in silence, and Fadel watched the bite mark on her shoulder disappear beneath the printed fabric of her cropped shirt.
He was buttoning up his shirt when she turned to him with a grin, finger-combing her hair back. She was getting ready to say something ridiculous; he knew it. He turned away from her, skipping the fourth buttonhole of his shirt, where the button was missing, and she reached out to grab his wrist.
“Hey, wait, where are you going? This isn’t a hit-and-run. No need to flee the scene.” He pulled his wrist from her grip.
When he turned back to look at her, he’d managed to set his face in a flat, blank stare. “Why would I stay? You got what you wanted. We’re done here.”
She blinked at him, her eyes wide and confused, and then she frowned, her mouth popped open in an offended o. “What I wanted? What kind of woman do you take me for?” She propped a hand on her hip and raised her eyebrow at him. “I told you, I want to date you.”
Fadel bit back a growl; he couldn’t react to her. She couldn’t know just how badly she was making him lose control of himself. Fadel didn’t lose control. Fadel was the only thing in his own life he had any control over. What he said, how he reacted to things—he could hold onto that with a tight, clenched fist, and no one would be able to take anything from him that he didn’t allow. Not even her.
“And I told you, I’m not interested. You want a boyfriend, go out and find one. We’re done.” He pushed her aside and began to move past her out of the room. She slid back in front of him, her arm outstretched like that would keep him from leaving.
“I can’t believe you; you can’t just fuck me and then walk out of here like that.” She searched his expression, her lips pressed in a tight, thin line. A flush was rising on her cheeks, racing toward her ears.
He wanted to laugh—now she felt embarrassed? “Why not?” He jerked his head to the side. “Move.”
Style straightened up. “No. No way. You like me. I know you do, at least a little bit.”
Fadel rolled his eyes and let out a loud sigh. Let her see just how much he didn’t like her, how irritated she made him, how much he wanted to be away from her. “Move, or I’ll make you.”
Style tipped her head to the side and smirked. “You won’t. You like me too much.” She spread her arms out, like she was inviting him to lift her up, and he stepped forward into her space. The room smelled of the two of them; black currant and cherries mixing with amber and coffee, and he laced the scent with peppercorn as he leaned in toward her, biting the inside of his cheek to keep his expression severe even as he fought the need to take a deep inhale of their combined scent in the air.
Without a word, he slid his leg behind hers, and her smirk grew. She reached up like she was going to touch his shoulder, and he wrapped his right arm around her waist and pushed her back and to the side. The sudden shove pushed her off balance, and he swept his foot in to unbalance her left foot as well, sending her crashing to the ground behind him as he stepped to the side and toward the door.
As he opened the door to leave, finally letting in a wave of fresh, unscented air, he heard her shoving herself off the floor behind him, grunting in pain.
“Hey!” she said as he closed the door. “You can’t do this to me!” He turned and looked back through the window in the door, raising an eyebrow at her as she glared at him. She didn’t seem hurt, and he turned to walk away. When he got to his car, he pulled out the pack of wet wipes he kept in the glovebox for when he and Bison finished up a job and needed to clean up quickly. He wiped himself down, scrubbing at his neck and around the collar of his shirt as though it would wipe away the phantom memory of her touch.
After he tossed the wipe into the grocery bag in the back seat, he let his forehead sink and rest on the steering wheel. Breathing in and out, he swallowed back a groan and thunked his head twice on the wheel. His mind replayed the shocked look on her face when he’d turned to leave, the sharp curve of her smile as she declared that she wanted him to be her boyfriend. Somehow, he didn’t think this was over.