taken a four-week-long checkout from my job, my condo, my friends, and the sun on Mission Bay in favor of sketchy internet, sketchier plumbing, and a likely snow dusting or two.
Check, check, and check. Filled boxes backing the bigger truth: that if I cut a one-eighty right here and now, I’d pull any excuse I could to get near Margaux again. And once I was there, I’d find reasons to get my hands on her. Then my lips. As far as where things went from there…
Fuck .
I had a goddamn healthy imagination when it came to that woman these days.
Well, whaddya know. Denali steering wheels made for decent punching bags.
Reversion to adolescence? No shit. But beating up the steering wheel was a better option than taking the road like I was Speed Racer in the Mach Five, the spiffy sexual frustration model.
Damn. I’d really tilted left of sideways—to worse degrees than I’d originally thought. What the hell ? The view was not pleasant. Not one damn bit. Mom had worked, saved, and sacrificed for most of my life so I could be—
What? What are you, Michael Adam Pearson? Who are you ?
Not this.
Not the guy who got tripped up about shit like this.
I was the one with my head screwed on tight and right. The first Pearson through college then law school. The son who said he loved his mom and meant it. The guy with the easy smile and the come-cry-here shoulders. When that was done, I helped the old ladies cross the street before stopping at the coffee shop with the town elders, ready to give them a few chuckles about “life in the big city”.
And yeah, I liked being that guy. Sometimes, even needed it. More importantly, I knew Mom did, too. I was her phoenix, the good rising out of a hell of a lot of bad, reminding us both that tough times didn’t last but tough people did.
I just needed some wisdom about the other times. The moments when I didn’t feel so goddamn golden. When I peeled back the layers and let the animal out. The passions, deep and dark and primeval, that didn’t just ask for release but demanded it. Burned for it.
And with alarming frequency, showed up to collect…every time my eyes locked into the gorgeous green seas of Margaux’s. In those split seconds after we kissed—
When her eyes changed, too.
As if she was calling my animal out to play.
Like she’d enjoy it.
Hell, no.
Delusions. That was all they were. Desperate delusions from a brain the woman had turned to mulch, and the balls she’d turned into—
It keeps coming around to those bastards, doesn’t it?
How had I done this? Turned the most fascinating window in my life into a pane I could barely look through anymore, because of the smears of my depraved fantasies…triggered by the agony of continuing to get near her.
Not anymore.
The vow was an ice pick in the chest, but I forced the thing in. She was Margaux Corina Asher. The Princess of PR. And yeah…sometimes a bitch, too. At other times, a girl barely grown. Then others, a cock-grabbing combo of the two, smart and sexy blended until a guy couldn’t breathe for being stunned in her presence.
But she was always, always , a princess.
Princesses weren’t created for guys like me.
They were made to be spoiled and worshipped, wined and dined, pampered and romanced…
Not groped, fondled, then fucked like a peasant in the hay.
Which had absolutely become my favorite fantasy lately.
Her nipples stiffening against my tongue then flattened between my teeth. Her legs hiked around my waist. The imprints of my hands on her thighs, opening her wider for me, obeying my order to stay that way as I lined up my cock to her pink, tight entrance and—
“ Fuck .”
Four weeks of sleeping on Spiderman sheets suddenly made perfect sense again.
Annnd, with the uncanny timing she always had, Mom called. I jabbed a shaking thumb on the green button, ending the Duran Duran ringtone.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Greetings, beloved offspring.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Had I actually
Learning to Kill: Stories