He reached around to squeeze my ass, I pressed into his hand, his collarbone was right at eye level and I stood on tiptoes to suck its twin cherries. I circled my tongue around one, then the other, then back again. He didn’t respond. I looked up at him and his expression was blank. He wondered what the fuck I was doing. I brushed my hand over his dick and found it stiffening in his jeans, so I sank to the floor. I undid his belt and fiddled with the button of his pants.
“Whoa, kid,” he said, and laughed a little. “Someone’s thirsty…“
Fuck him. He would like it. I ripped his button open and the zipper down. His dick was still half limp, but I threaded it through the slit of his boxers, took it into my mouth.
“Okay, chill, chill,” he said, but he shimmied his pants and boxers down his legs until they lay scrunched at his ankles. I opened my lips over his cock, gulped it down. It started to swell; he thrust his hips, his dick hitting the back of my throat. I grabbed his hips and shoved him farther inside me. Sharp points of gravel pressed into my knees through my jeans. The broad planes of Sam’s face. Dominic’s raised eyebrows. Langham’s belly. I looked up, I was desperate for his eyes but all I saw was the bottom of his chin, his head was tilted back, his gaze directed up, away from me, his quickening breath not meant for me, it was his own private pleasure.
When it was over I ran my tongue along my teeth, that sourness that would take hours to leave. I wiped my cheeks on my sleeves. He blinked his drooping eyelids.
“Wait, are you crying?”
“No.”
His eyes popped open. “I did not make you do that. Fuck. I didn’t make you do shit. Why the fuck are you crying?”
“It’s allergies,” I snapped.
He wrenched his pants back up and skittered out of there. I stayed in the little nook, peering through the slats of the fence as he hurried his bewildered friends up and out of the bar.
Chapter 2
When I’d collected myself—pressed the heels of my hands deep into my eye sockets, brushed the gray film of dirt from my pants, breathed into the denouement that follows a cry, made sure the guy and his friends were really, really gone—I walked across the patio, head down. My face had splotches of heat, the skin around my eyes was swollen, and I didn’t want anyone asking if I was okay. I grabbed the folder from the corner and made my way back inside to the bar.
“Can I get a Dark and Stormy?” I said, eyes downcast. When I looked up I saw with a start that it was the new bartender and had the urge to bolt, but he was already taking one of the steamy glasses from the rack and filling it from the ice bucket. Leave, my mind said, but I was immobile, rooted to the barstool. I prayed he wouldn’t ask if I was okay, that it was dark enough inside that he might not be able to tell. What would I say? That I’d cried while giving a blow job? And why had I? Usually sex was exactly what I needed not to feel a thing. Black Hole, I’d often thought of those minutes—blissful nothing. Blow job: blankness. Fucking: precious void. Sometimes I began fantasizing about the next man while someone was still inside me, as if to cushion against the excruciating moment when we’d have to part. But this time it hadn’t been enough. I was starving.