The Pretend Boyfriend Read online

  That’s why he never gets to know anyone before he fucks them. Too much fallout. Look at what happened to his mother and father. Relationships and marriages are the pits.

  She leaps out of bed, shrieking “Eww, eww, eww, eww.” He bets she wouldn’t be saying that if it was all inside her instead.

  She tears back the curtains. Bright light streams into the room. Her hair is disheveled and her cheeks wear a high color. So she’s majorly embarrassed, but she manages to look good anyway.

  “Oh, stuff it,” she declares. “We’re going to have to go anyway. I hope you’re happy, because the maid who’s going to clean up all this mess won’t be.”

  “So I’ll leave two hundred dollars by the lampstand as a tip.” He gets up. “I’m going to need a shower, sweetheart. Last night was incredible.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re gonna wish you had when you say goodbye.”

  It’s automatic, this snark of his.

  He can feel her eyes on his back and buttocks as he vanishes into the shower, grinning. He hits the hot water, and his grin dissipates when he realizes that he would never see her again after this.

  11

  It’s twelve noon when they finally gather at the restaurant downstairs. Caleb and Cassie are extremely hung over and looking sheepish, for some reason. When the boys take their seats and peruse their menus, Sam pulls Cassie to the powder room.

  Brian says in a loud voice, “Going in there for a girl chat? Don’t forget to tell your best friend how good I was last night.”

  Several diners at the other tables turn. Flushing, Sam walks Cassie away quickly.

  “Did you?” Cassie’s eyes are accusing.

  “No! How could you even think that?” Righteous indignation pours out of Sam’s every syllable. “I’ll be glad to go home and never have to see his mug again.”

  “Ah well, to each her own,” Cassie murmurs.

  Sam is nonplussed as she follows her friend into the female restroom. Then a light bulb goes off in her head.

  She whirls to face her friend. “Oh my God, don’t tell me . . . you slept with him.”

  Cassie has the good grace to blush. “We were both drunk.”

  “But you hardly know each other!”

  “As if that has ever stopped me.”

  Sam’s mind is tumbling with possibilities – all exciting. “So are you going to see each other again?”

  “I don’t know . . . he’s kind of sweet, don’t you think?” Cassie takes out her lipstick from her purse and starts to apply it.

  “Hell, yeah! A lot nicer than Brian.”

  Cassie giggles. “He’s terrific in bed. Let’s say that for a short-ish guy – ”

  “He’s not that short.”

  “ – I said ‘ish’. But he’s certainly not short where it matters.”

  Both of them shriek with laughter. A middle-aged lady comes out of the stall to wash her hands. She darts them a murderous glare.

  “Hey, free country, lady,” Cassie barks.

  The woman hurriedly scoots out of the restroom.

  “You’re so mean.”

  “I know.”

  “If he turns out to be the one, I’m glad for you, Cassie,” Sam says warmly.

  “It’s just one fuck. He may never want to see me again.”

  “He’s not Brian, so cut yourself some slack, OK?”

  Yeah, Brian. It’s a sobering thought.

  “So, let’s talk about Brian,” Cassie says, handing her the lipstick, “is he still flashing his genitals in your face?”

  “Cassie!”

  “Well, is he?”

  “Kind of.” She doesn’t feel too comfortable talking about Brian to her best friend for some reason. It’s as if what she and Brian had together was too personal.

  “You both were really hot together last night. Like, really, really hot.”

  “I know.”

  “You should see Lori’s face. You were her party pooper.”

  “Well, she was the one who insisted I lead the dance.”

  “She wanted you to fall flat on your face. She doesn’t know you’ve been taking Zumba classes. Watch out for her. She’s an evil one.”

  “You shouldn’t say that about my sister.”

  “But she is. Maybe you should get Brian to teach her a lesson.”

  Sam sighs. “I can’t even get Brian to roll over and play dead, let alone fetch.”

  *

  After lunch, they pack up to check out. Brian lugs both Sam’s suitcase and his overnight bag down to the reception, and realizes he has forgotten his phone.

  “Be right back. Don’t miss me too much,” he tells Sam.

  “You wish.”

  He takes the elevator up and re-enters their old guestroom. His cellphone is on the bedside table where he left it. He seizes it and slips it into his pocket.

  He turns to go to the door but stops short.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” says Lori at the doorway. She’s wearing a halter top with a copious amount of cleavage over tight, tight jeans.

  “The sibling object of your affection is downstairs, in case you’re asking.”

  “I know.” She slinks into the room. “But it’s you I wanted to see.”

  Brian’s antenna pricks.

  “Oh? Because you think you’ll miss my spectacular dancing?”

  “You got it.” She’s standing very close to him. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about you last night. All night.”

  Brian stills. Her strong perfume wafts into his nostrils – dangerous and predatory. “Why? Lance Buchner doesn’t get it up for you anymore?”

  Lori slides her hands down his chest. “Let’s just say he wouldn’t be averse to me getting a little on the side.”

  “You sure about that? Or he wouldn’t be averse to not knowing?”

  “So what do you see in her anyway? She’s clumsy, less pretty and interesting than I am . . . and she’s certainly not the type of material who snares a billionaire boyfriend overnight.”

  “I’m not a billionaire, sorry to disappoint you. My uncle is. I’m just a wage worker on the factory grindstone. I grew up eating baked potatoes and living in a hovel.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a Morton and Mortons take care of their own. You own a hundred percent share of Vanguard Advertising, and like the rest of the family, you have shares in every single company in Morton Enterprises Ltd.”

  “Someone’s been doing their homework. Did you Google Lance Buchner before you dated him too? Or did you hire a P.I?”

  “Let’s just say I’d make you a better partner than my sister will.” Her hand dips down to his crotch. “I’m ambitious enough for the two of us. I’m fantastic in bed and I’ll make a great hostess, the kind who will do anything to advance her significant other in any world.”

  “I don’t want a hostess.” His hand goes down to her groping one and seizes it. “I want someone who doesn’t have a reptilian quotient of a backstabbing snake.”

  He can see her wince. Poor Sam. If this is the type of sister she has, no wonder she’s insecure and angsty.

  He says pityingly, “Go back to your fiancé, Lori Fox, and learn how to love him. For Sammie’s sake, I won’t tell her about this. She deserves to think you’re a better person than you really are.”

  With that, he strides out of the room without a second look, leaving Lori open-mouthed.

  12

  Cassie, Caleb and Sam spend most of the time sleeping in the car on the journey back home. Figures. He’s the only one who can hold his booze, fuck all night and still appear bright and coffee perky in the morning. That’s only what he has been doing for the last ten years.

  They drop Cassie and Caleb home with the usual goodbyes and love declarations of “We’ll catch up this very night when we work off our hangovers”. Then it’s time to take Sam home.

  Sam is pensive beside him.

  “Benjamin Franklin for your thoughts.”

  S
he sighs. “They aren’t worth a twenty.”

  “Let me guess. You’re thinking that I’m a bigger asshole than I really am.”

  “I’m just thinking about my family and why I am the way I am.”

  “Funny, I was thinking the same thing too.”

  “About my family?” she says in surprise.

  “About why you are the way you are.”

  “And why am I the way I am, according to the Gospel of St. Brian?” she demands.

  “If I give you the extended version, promise not to claw my eyes out?”

  She turns away with a flinch. “Who am I kidding? No, I don’t want to hear it. You’re just going to say something that will lower my self-esteem and make me feel all rotten inside.”

  That remark strikes him. No, it more than strikes him. It’s like someone has taken a sledgehammer to his kneecaps.

  Ow.

  “Do I really lower your self-esteem?” He crinkles his brow. That would make him no better than Lori Fox where Sam is concerned.

  “Well . . . you don’t mean to, I’m sure, but the world is just one big farce to you. You don’t care about anyone or anything, or at least . . . you give the impression that you don’t through some misguided notion that everyone would think you’re the weaker for it. But behind the scenes . . . ” She shakes her head.

  “What?” Woah. This conversation is getting dangerous. Did Lori say something? “What exactly do you mean by ‘behind the scenes’? You make me sound like some sinister puppet master.”

  “Maybe you are.” Her big blue eyes turn to regard him. “I’ve been talking to Caleb, and he told me what you did for him in a bizarre, roundabout way that led to this weekend.”

  “He’s deluding himself if he thinks I did anything for him.” Brian chortles. Still, his insides are runny all over suddenly, as though they are in a state of melting.

  They reach her apartment building. He stops the car in front of it, aware that this is the last time he would be seeing her again. That is, if Caleb and Cassie don’t decide to become an item, in which case they might string him along just to see who Sam will be fucking.

  She says, “I guess this is it.”

  “I guess it’s your lucky day, being rid of me forever.”

  Her features soften.

  “Thank you, Brian, for the weekend and . . . everything else.”

  The melting feeling hasn’t left his guts. It’s almost as though he’s coming down with the Spanish flu.

  He says quickly, “Yeah, you and I know I was forced into it. Won’t be happening again, you can count on it. You need help with your bags?”

  “OK,” she says gratefully.

  He carries her suitcase up to her apartment, which is a loft. It’s tastefully decorated with the sort of minimalist furniture he hasn’t expected – all modern white sofa set and chrome and glass tables. He would have pegged her to be the rose-and-other-petals type. It just shows that you can’t typecast anybody.

  He can tell that she’s discomfited by him just being in her loft.

  “You want some coffee?” she asks.

  “No thanks. I’ve got to be heading back.” He’s feeling awkward as well. “Well . . . goodbye.” He holds out his hand, well aware that he has been naked with this woman and sleeping in the same bed just the night before. It had never mattered to him before, but Sam is . . . different.

  She takes it. Her palm is soft and firm at the same time, and there’s a slight tremor to it that he can marginally detect.

  He says softly, “I’m sorry for being such a putz to you in middle school.”

  She gives him a crooked smile. “It’s OK. I’ve forgiven you a long time ago.”

  “Well. See you around.”

  He has never said ‘see you around’ to any woman before, particularly to a woman he has slept with. But he has never slept with Sam, so maybe it just came out naturally.

  “See you around,” she says.

  She still hasn’t let go of his hand. There’s a wistfulness in her blue eyes that he hasn’t seen on any woman for a long, long time, and he realizes it’s because he’s never gotten to know a woman long enough to see that kind of look in her eyes.

  It’s exactly what he has been consciously or subconsciously trying to avoid for his entire adult life. He doesn’t want to be in a relationship. He knows what happens to relationships. Just look at his parents. They have seemingly everything – money, beauty, pedigree, even health. Everything except compatibility and happiness.

  He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to end up a miserable alcoholic who takes it out with a belt on his son just because he has got to release that pent-up rage somewhere.

  But Sam is making him very, very uncertain of himself right now. Uncertain of his self-imposed rules. Uncertain if he is making the right decisions for himself of never allowing himself to get too close to anyone.

  She is still holding his hand as she pulls him close for a kiss. A goodbye kiss, he tells himself.

  He leans over and seizes her lips with his mouth. He means it to be a chaste kiss – but upon contact, a different fire he doesn’t want to acknowledge is fuelled. A fire of unquenched passion and raging, hidden desires and everything they talk about in the books that he has never read. He kisses her and kisses her – open-mouthed, with hungry lips and tongue and a roaring need in his loins, and with the blood rushing in his ears so frantically that he thinks he’s surrounded by a waterfall.

  She’s equally in as much fervor as he is, because her hands clasp his face and neck and draw him in for a deeper kiss – a merging of mouths and souls. He finds himself fumbling for the buttons on her blouse, and she’s tugging his leather jacket off his shoulders, and he’s letting her do it. And they are all over each other, groping, grasping, clutching, kissing, never coming up for air, and it’s as if he hasn’t touched a woman in years, like some sex-starved prisoner.

  They drop their clothes on the floor, both driven by a primal energy bigger than the two of them combined. They are both breathing very hard now, and as she rips off his jeans, his cock rears up to almost hit her on the face.

  “Oh wow,” she says.

  “You’ve seen it before.”

  “But never this close.”

  He laughs softly.

  She kneels to take it in her mouth.

  “Wait,” he says between pants. “I just want to say something before you do anything you regret. This is just a one off. I don’t do encores.”

  Best to be honest about it upfront.

  “I know,” she says, her eyes shimmering.

  “So you’re gonna be OK with it?”

  “Caleb told me all about you, so I’m OK with it.” Her voice quavers slightly.

  13

  To be honest, she isn’t sure she’s going to be OK with it, but she sure as hell will try. She has seen his cock before, but it’s another thing to actually taste it – to roll and slide her wet tongue around its crown, the little ridge that separates his head from his shaft, and to press her tip into the little slit on his bulge.

  He is salty and sweet all at the same time, and there’s a masculine musk that emanates from his thatch of pubic hair and his smooth balls, which she cups in her right palm.

  He moans softly and smoothens her hair.

  She takes more of him into her mouth. She has to stretch the sides of her mouth wide to accommodate his girth. His flesh rushes in and fills her up to her throat, flattening her tongue and expanding the sides of her cheeks. It has been so long since she has performed fellatio, and every shred of technique she ever had – or thought she had – flees from her mind. She is now focused on sucking him as though he is a gargantuan lollipop, and taking more and more of him in . . . and out . . . and in, and out. Until she’s practically massaging his thick rod of warm flesh with her hollowed cheeks and grazing his skin lightly with her teeth.

  His appreciative noises only serve to spur her further. Her hands rub and caress his balls, two delicious fruits in their tight c
asings.

  His fingers play with her hair, dance with her tresses and grab bunches of it as she sucks him harder. And all this while, the kernel of need in her core is building and building, and her juices are flowing and melting her insides with heat and making them go all soft and achy with want.

  “Sam,” he says hoarsely, “I need to fuck you.”

  She needs him to fuck her too. The tunnel of her pussy literally clenches with her need to be filled by him. It’s a visceral hunger. A scorching culmination of her manifested desires.

  They don’t even make it to the bed.

  She takes his glistening cock out of her mouth, and he reaches for his jeans pocket to take out a little silver foil packet.

  “Here, put it on me,” he says.

  Her fingers are trembling as she takes the condom packet from him. She rips a tear into it with her teeth. Then she takes out the little circular fold of rubber and rolls it slowly, oh so slowly, onto his stone hard cock.

  “You’re good,” he teases.

  “I wish I can say I’ve had plenty of practice, but I don’t.” In truth she is nervous. Nervous that she wouldn’t measure up to his usual standards – to the hundreds of women he has obviously bedded.

  He senses this.

  He caresses her cheek. “Hey,” he says softly, “just follow my lead.”

  She looks up at him with shining eyes. He is so handsome. So masculine. So much in command of everything he is doing. She wishes she can be as confident as he is.

  Then he grabs her by the shoulders and flips her onto her back with sudden aggression. His eyes sparkle dangerously. She’s lying on the floor, naked, her pointy breasts bare to him and the velvet down of her pussy moist and open.

  He parts her legs and positions himself in between them. Without mercy, he plunges into her – deep and strong and fitfully.

  She shrieks.

  “You OK?” he says, thrusting himself in and out of her all at once.

  She’s too bowled over to answer, but she nods. The pain is instantaneous, sharp but pleasurable. The sudden expansion of walls long left untouched is overwhelming, to say the least. She feels as if she has been sucker punched down there – but in a good way. In a long, pulling, languorous sort of way.