A/N This story is going to have a lot of sexual encounters told through the main character. Not overly descript, but you'll know what's going on.
CH 1
She was still in my bed, face down on the mattress with her head turned to the side and a cascade of black hair obscuring her features.
No matter. I knew the angles of her face, the gentle slope of her nose and almond-shape of her dark eyes. There were other parts of her I knew as well; most of which was exposed: shoulders, back, hips, thighs…
"It's practically noon," I roughly said.
She turned over in bed, carefully taking the sheet with her that had covered her bottom and now veiled her body from the tops of her thighs to the very lowest part of her belly.
With one hand behind her head, she offered a sly smile. "And I know, by that voracious look in your eyes that you have every intention of coming back to bed."
I turned from her and shook my head. It was becoming impossible to sleep alone–not that it was much of a complaint.
She whistled. "Now that should be chiseled and put on display at the Louvre."
"Only from this angle?" I asked over my shoulder.
She laughed to herself and sat up. "All of you, Kimmer."
My breath caught. I both adored and detested the impersonal way that she referred to me. So rarely had she used my given name–if it had been given to me at all. I doubted my mother had trifled with giving me much of anything and my father had given me quite a bit–mostly his surly disposition and unfortunately irresistible looks.
I wore his face better than he ever had, mostly because I was sober and he was a drunken bastard with greasy hair and a scraggly beard.
"Come to bed," she beckoned.
"I can't," I said under my breath.
This was truly getting out of hand, these nights together stretching into my day.
"Ten minutes," she coaxed.
"You know it is never ten minutes."
Again she chuckled. "Fifteen, then?"
I glanced at her. She tempted me, moving the sheet aside. At once my nostrils flared and my pulse quickened. Chiseled marble had its uses, but in that moment I was a hot-blooded male unable to resist temptation.
"You should dress," I suggested.
She came up behind me, hands against my chest, the heat of her bare flesh against mine. Gently she kissed my shoulder and I bit the inside of my cheek.
From there I couldn't deny myself the most primal of urges. I swept her into my arms and she gripped her legs around my hips. Suddenly we were tumbling backwards and I managed to land on the bed with her ravenously seated on my lap. I placed my right hand on the small of her back, the left–the one I knew made her shiver–planted on the mattress.
"Should I dress?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered. "In fifteen minutes."
oOo
Our affair was mindless–and it had the unfortunate sustainability where I was beginning to think I should recall her first name. She called me Kimmer and I referred to her as Guin. I was fairly certain it was her surname.
She riled me. Tempted me. Kept me utterly beneath her wicked spell from the moment we had been introduced. Perhaps the first moment wasn't quite a spell, but a damnable curse.
"You're the one who has a way with women?" she had leaned in and asked me at a party several weeks earlier. Perhaps it was now months since we had been meeting late at night, our words sparse as we inevitably ended up in her flat or mine.
She wore dark blue with rhinestones sewn into the skirt, like an evening sky. The way she looked at me was how I was most accustomed to being stared at by women. She offered temptation, and more often than not, I accepted.
"Are you a woman who has a way?" I'd asked, lifting a brow as I sat across from her.
There was another woman perched on the arm of a chair on the other side of the room whom had caught my eye. Val knew my thoughts immediately and had spent the evening slowly escorting her further away. The other woman continued to glance at me, and I was beginning to think we had met up some weeks earlier at the same dull dinner party hosted by my cousin.
The woman directly across from me answered with the most wicked, close-lipped smile, one that left me intoxicated as I imagined my mouth closing over hers.
"Would you like to find out?" she whispered.
Before I uttered a word, she stood and promptly slapped me–a strike so hard that my face went numb, before she walked away, leaving me on display in front of my cousin's full house of friends.
That viper, I had groused endlessly, leaving the dinner party shortly after that incident. I walked home, replaying the conversation in my mind two dozen times as I slowly recalled the look of horror from the other guests and the gasps that threatened to steal the air from the parlor.
It had been quite some time since anyone had treated me harshly, since I had felt like an absolute fool.
I thought of the last time someone had struck me maliciously, when I lacked autonomy. He had knelt over me, hitting me with his open palms perhaps half a dozen times. I hadn't counted; I'd been seven years of age, mind reeling from the unexpected humiliation.
"Is that what you wanted?" he asked as he remained over me, his body pinning me to the ground. He placed his full weight onto my abdomen and hips and sat forward, hand on my chest.
He had never been a belligerent drunk. Gregarious, yes. Unable to stand at times, absolutely. But he had never threatened or harmed me, unlike his brother.
But this night, a terrible, regrettable night burned into my memory, he had hurt me like no one had in a few years.
"Answer me! Is this what you wanted?"
No, I wanted to tell him. Of course this is not what I want. I love him. More than anything. More than myself. And now I have nothing.
Unable to breathe, I struggled, and he grabbed my left arm and pressed his fingers into the damaged flesh, against a hundred nerves that sent fire through me. He grit his teeth and stared into my eyes, willing me to make a sound.
And I had. I recall that I sucked in as much air as my lungs could hold and yelped like some fur-covered beast in the throes of a violent, bloody death. The sound was so guttural that I barely recognized it as my own.
But Alak knew then that he had done enough. I was never sure if he understood he had done too much. He returned to the house and a while later I crawled to the back door and discovered it was locked.
For a boy of seven, it felt terribly late, as though I had been abandoned in the wild well past midnight. Most likely it wasn't quite ten, but I slinked away, left arm still burning and cradled to my chest. I walked toward the bridge that kept me safe from the creek and found refuge beneath a rotting tree, the roots hard and decaying.
There I sat, bared from the tiny house deep in the woods. It could have been twenty minutes or two hours, but to my mind–my young mind–it was an eternity of being tossed away. The tears came fast and hot, the sobs eventually making me sick until exhausted and with my throat on fire from the bile, I curled up and cried again.
That was when I knew for certain I was alone. Seven and a half years of age, curled up beneath a rotting tree, missing my brother.
Goose flesh prickled my arms, even thirty years later as I thought of the loss I had suffered. Unexpectedly I felt tears well in my eyes as I thought of how the beach had smelled like dead fish, of how the sun set on the beach and the horrid man who I had not seen in years, tugged my brother away, striking him across the back of his head when he had attempted to flee.
The image of my little brother haunted me still, and I suspected it always would. His blackened, swollen eyes. How thin he had become in a matter of weeks. Filthy, as well, his hair unwashed and much of it missing.
That was how I remembered him: injured, frightened and screaming for me. I swore sometimes I could still hear his voice, the desperation and loneliness.
I reached the door to my building and couldn't fit the key into the lock as my hands trembled. My throat was dry, but still I swallowed, attempting to push the lump back down where it belonged.
"Kimmer?" I heard a voice, light and feminine. I knew immediately who it was and didn't bother to acknowledge her.
"Are you breaking into some woman's flat?" she coldly asked me.
At last I turned my head and stared at her. She was still damnably beautiful.
"I have never committed a crime against a woman," I answered.
"What about men?" she asked in an attempt to be playful.
I wasn't certain if what had happened to my brother was considered a crime, but I didn't give her the satisfaction of an answer.
"I shouldn't have done that," she said quickly as I managed to turn the key at last.
"No," I agreed. "You should not have."
"I owe you an apology," she said as I pushed the door open.
Against my better judgment, I looked at her again. She was closer than before, the smell of perfume intoxicating.
"May I make it up to you with a drink?"
"No."
Her eyes widened ever so slightly. Men did not refuse her requests. Beauty had a way of giving certain women whatever they wanted.
"I don't partake," I said, despite owing her no explanation.
"Tea?" she questioned. "Tomorrow at nine?"
"I have class."
"You're a student?"
"No."
She raised an eyebrow, seemingly amused. "You're a teacher?"
I said nothing in return.
"Eight-thirty?" she suggested.
"No," I said before I disappeared into the building and jogged up the flight of stairs to my flat, somewhat surprised that she didn't attempt to follow me inside.
I remained awake until late in the evening, something that had become a bit of an unfortunate habit. It would not have been so terrible to take on the role of a night owl if I had I not been an early bird by nature, waking automatically at four in the morning regardless of the hour in which I retired for the night.
If I fall asleep now, I will get six hours of sleep. Four hours and thirty-six minutes. Three hours and eight minutes. Two hours and… what in the hell would be the point? Two hours was practically a nap.
I managed to sleep for twenty minutes before I woke with a start and sat up in the chair where I had fallen asleep.
Elvira squawked as I had forgotten to cover her cage and she was awake with the sunrise. If not for her screaming, I most likely could have managed an hour of rest, not that it made much of a difference.
"Why must you scream?" I said between my teeth.
"I love you," the macaw replied softly, imitating me. "I'm the only one who does," she added in her sing-song voice.
It was not the best phrase to teach a bird, but unfortunately it was both one of her favorites and absolutely true. She was the only one-or perhaps one of the few-who cared for me in any way that resembled affection, despite biting me on occasion. I supposed if she was a human female she most likely would have slapped me frequently, which instantly reminded me of that terrible woman from the party.
"If I bring you with me to class today, will you refrain from biting my students?" I asked.
"Of course not!" Elvira shrieked.
She was nothing if not honest. Sometimes I wondered if she truly imitated what she heard or if she understood the phrases.
"I will be dismissed from the university if you happen to draw blood again," I said, still insisting on having a full conversation with a bird. "You will stay home."
She whistled in reply, much like a bold man on the street soliciting a beautiful woman who didn't want to give him the time of day.
Thirty minutes later, with our breakfast of berries consumed and my coffee gulped down, I allowed Elvira out of her cage and onto her perch by the window where she could scream obscenities at unsuspecting Parisians for the three hours I would be gone.
"Not too loud," I said.
"Shhh!"
She truly amused me. I shut and locked the door and trotted down the flight of stairs, turned the corner, and briskly walked toward the university with my head down, ignoring everything on the streets to the best of my ability.
There were only eight more weeks left before my miserably inept first year students would become my astoundingly inept second year students in the fall. I was somewhat grateful that I didn't have to see their cherubic idiotic faces for an entire summer, which was a blessing in and of itself. Unfortunately, all eighteen of them had promised to return. Fools.
"The teacher."
The same obnoxious woman from the previous night sat outside of the cafe across from the university. It was eight-fifty in the morning, ten minutes before my class would drag their animated corpses into my studio.
My posture stiffened. I clenched my jaw, but continued across the street, pretending that I hadn't heard her. I assumed the slight pause in my gait was enough to confirm that I had heard her, but unless she decided to chase me into the building, the matter was of no concern to me.
There was a note pinned to my studio door, which I ripped off, read, and crumpled into my pocket, feeling exceedingly annoyed.
Of course Valgarde wished to see me after his disastrous dinner party. Of course he had bothered to visit the university prior to my class starting–the coward. And of course he said he wanted to see me, but left no address or time of where he desired this meeting to take place.
I muttered curses to myself as students filed into the studio and unfolded their easels. They were a sorry, pathetic lot, all of them under the age of twenty with their bright, hopeful eyes and round, youthful faces. In their minds, they were artists. They were on the verge of taking the world by storm.
They were nothing more than diseased fools, afflicted by hope.
I loved them. Dearly.
"Phe-lan!" one of my students exclaimed as I sat with my back to them.
I dropped my shoulders. "What?" I groused.
The tone that had silenced them in the fall no longer worked in the spring.
"Flan," another student said. "How was your weekend?"
I rolled my eyes and spun around in my chair. As a whole they were delighted to see me, like a group of very young students in a classroom where they learned how to count in the morning and nap their afternoons away. Really, there was no different between this sorry lot and the much smaller versions of humanity a street away.
They were studying me, like a model on display for them to analyze in order to perfect their skills.
"What happened to your face?"
I immediately touched my cheek and assumed, by the pulse of discomfort, that the horrid woman had left me with a bruise.
I directed my attention to the young lady who had addressed me. "An incident at a dinner party," I answered. Far be it from me to withhold the truth.
There was a murmur through the lot of them.
"Were you punched?" one of the male students asked.
"Slapped, actually."
Another murmur from the studio.
"Did you deserve it?"
I furrowed my brow. "Honestly? I don't believe I did."
The first girl to speak was immediately on her feet. "Who is she?"
And that was why I truly did love them. If ever there was a group of people prepared to stand by their cause and overthrow Paris, it was these eighteen students. Never mind that it was one woman who had smacked me across the face for reasons I didn't completely understand. If I had known her name, I was certain my students would have hunted her down and demanded an apology on my behalf–even if I was not in need of a champion.
"I didn't catch a name."
"You caught a hand. With your face."
They giggled and I smiled, appreciating the wit. "Shall I be the topic for the next…" I checked my watch. "Hour and twelve minutes? You are wasting precious time today, children, and judging by my last assessment, you cannot afford to waste a single second."
Paints and brushes were pulled from cases, pencils tucked behind ears.
"Who wants to be the model today?" I asked.
They collectively pointed at me, most likely because they enjoyed watching me sit on my chair, forced to turn for them to complete their sketches while they asked me all sorts of ridiculous questions.
"Fine." I rolled up my sleeves and pulled my shoulders back. "Make certain this bruise to my face enhances my features. Or draw me as a donkey, whichever you prefer."