Daddy's Sweet Obsession

take me home and have me please...

One thing about Jason was that he listened like it cost him nothing.

Not the performative kind of listening, where a man nods along and waits for his turn to talk. He actually listened.

I'd come prepared for a certain kind of man, the kind that came with money and age and the quiet confidence of someone who'd never been told no, and he was that, yeah, but he was also just. Present.

I'd forgotten what that felt like.

We talked for two hours before I noticed the time.

'I should...' I glanced at my phone. 'It's almost midnight.'

He looked unbothered. 'It is.'

'I have work tomorrow,' I said.

'So do I.' He didn't move. Just looked at me with that calm, steady attention that had been making me slightly insane all evening. 'Do you want to go?'

'One more,' I said.

He smiled. Signaled the bartender.

✦ ✦ ✦

'Does it get less...' I started.

'Yeah,' he said. 'It does.'

I believed him. That was the strange part. I'd met him four hours ago, and I believed him completely.

The bar called last orders. I looked at my glasses and realized I'd lost count of how many I'd had, which was not like me but also felt entirely appropriate for a Friday in October when your life had recently detonated.

I was warm all over. My thoughts had that particular late-night looseness to them, the kind where things you'd normally keep behind your teeth started making their way to the surface.

I looked at him.

'I like you,' I said. The wine talking, mostly. But also me.

Something shifted in his expression. Warm. Careful. 'I like you too, Mara.'

'I wasn't expecting to like you.'

'That's honest.' he smiled.

'I'm very honest when I've had...' I paused, counted back, gave up. 'Several drinks.'

He laughed. It was a good laugh, low and real, and it did something to me that I chose not to examine too closely.

I leaned forward. I watched his eyes track the movement, watched something in him go still and attentive the way it had been doing all night every time I got close.

The air between us had been charged since approximately drink two, and we'd both been pretending it wasn't, and I was tired of pretending.

'I want to keep talking to you,' I said. 'I also want...' I stopped. Started again. 'I don't usually do this.'

'Do what.'

'Ask for what I want.'

A beat. His eyes on mine, dark and steady.

'What do you want, Mara?'

I should have been embarrassed. I wasn't. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the last two weeks of my life, maybe it was just him — the way he asked it, like the answer actually mattered, like whatever I said he'd take seriously.

'Take me home and have me please,' I begged shamelessly.

The words landed in the quiet bar, and he just stared at me. My heart was going faster than I'd liked. He held my gaze for a long moment, not surprised, not smug about it, just looking at me like he was making a decision.

Then he lifted his hand for the check.

✦ ✦ ✦

His hotel was four blocks away. I found out later he was in the middle of relocating apartments — but that night I didn't ask, and he didn't explain, just held the door and let me walk in ahead of him and I felt his hand at the small of my back for just a second, warm and deliberate, and that single touch after hours of nothing made my breath catch in my throat.

The room was high up. The city spread out through the window, all that light, all those lives. I stood looking at it for a moment, the way you do when you need one more second to decide if you're really doing this.

I was really doing this.

I heard him behind me, dropping his keys on the dresser, his jacket coming off. Then his hands landed on my shoulders, light at first, and I felt his mouth at the back of my neck. Just that. Just his lips pressing into my skin, open and unhurried, and I felt it move through my entire body like electricity finding ground.

'You can still change your mind,' he murmured against my neck, his breath warm on my skin.

'Jason.' I turned in his hands. Looked up at him. 'Stop giving me exits.' 'Take me now please,' I begged drunkenly.

Something in his expression shifted darker, more focused, and he kissed me, not politely. I loved that. He kissed me like he'd been deciding how to do it since I walked into the bar and had finally made up his mind, one hand sliding into my hair and fisting gently at the root, tilting my head back to give him exactly the angle he wanted, the other pressing flat against the small of my back and pulling me flush against him. I felt all of him — the breadth of his chest, the heat radiating off his body, the hard press of exactly how much he wanted me against my hip — and I made a sound against his mouth that I was too far gone to be embarrassed about.

He walked me to the bed without rushing, kissing me the whole way, and sat me down on the edge of it and pulled back just enough to look at me. My hair was coming loose. My pulse was going everywhere. He reached out and pulled the strap of my dress off one shoulder with two fingers, achingly slow, watching my face the whole time like my reaction was the only thing in the room.

'Tell me what you like,' he whispered.

The question caught me completely off guard.

Jake had never once asked me that. Not once in four years. I opened my mouth and closed it and he waited, utterly patient, his thumb moving in a slow maddening circle on my bare shoulder.'Everything,' I said, a little helplessly. 'Right now I think everything.'

He smiled, slow and devastating. Lowered his mouth to my shoulder. 'Good.' I whispered.

He undressed me slowly, like he had all night, like the unwrapping was its own distinct pleasure and he wasn't going to rush it for anything in the world.

He kissed every new inch of skin he uncovered — my collarbone, the curve of my breast, his tongue tracing my n****e until I gasped and arched into him, the plane of my stomach, the sharp jut of my hip, and by the time he'd worked my dress down past my hips and off entirely I was trembling, gripping the sheets with both fists, and had entirely lost the thread of any thought that wasn't him.

He settled between my thighs, spreading them slowly with both hands, unhurried, like he was unwrapping something precious. He looked up at me once — just once — dark eyes holding mine — and then lowered his head.

His tongue found me and my whole body jolted.

He used his fingers alongside his mouth, two of them pressing inside me slowly while his tongue worked in long deliberate strokes, learning exactly what made my hips roll up into him. He was methodical about it in a way that was going to ruin me completely — finding the precise spot that made my thighs shake and staying there, varying the pressure just enough to keep me chasing it, never giving me quite enough and then giving me far too much all at once.

'Jaso...' His name came out wrecked, barely a whisper.

'I've got you,' he said to me. 'I've got you.'

He added a third finger and curled them and I cried out, my hand flying down to grip his hair, and he didn't stop — kept his mouth on me and his fingers moving deep and slow until I shattered completely, my whole body shaking, his name falling off my lips over and over while he worked me through every last tremor.

When he finally lifted his head, he looked at me with an expression of pure focused satisfaction that should have been infuriating.

It wasn't. It absolutely wasn't.

'Come here,' I managed, pulling at him, hands finding his shoulders.

He moved up my body and I got his shirt off, and pressed my palms flat against his chest, his stomach, feeling the heat of him, the solid muscle beneath my hands. He watched me touch him the way he'd been watching me all night, that same focused attention, and when my hand found him he let out a slow breath through his nose — controlled, barely — that told me exactly how much he was holding back.

I freed him. Wrapped my hand around him. Felt him thick and heavy in my grip and heard the sharp intake of breath he couldn't quite suppress, and something in my chest blazed with the power of it — this composed, controlled man coming apart just slightly under my hands.

'Hey,' he said softly, when he was finally poised above me, his weight braced on his forearms, his eyes on my face.

I looked up at him.

'There you are,' he said.

And then he pushed inside me — slow, deep and devastatingly thorough — and my eyes fell closed, and my whole body exhaled like it had been waiting for exactly this.

He moved like he talked — without hurry, without performance, just complete and total attention to me and what I needed. Every stroke is deliberate.

Every shift of his hips calculated to pull sounds from me, I didn't know I could make. I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper and felt him groan against my neck — low and raw and real — and that sound, coming from this controlled, composed man, did something to me that I felt all the way down my spine.

I dug my fingers into his back. He picked up the pace. I stopped thinking entirely and just moved with him, just chased the heat coiling tight and bright inside me until it broke open all at once, deeper, my whole body arching off the bed as I cried out. He followed seconds later, shuddering hard, his face pressed into my hair, my name in his mouth like a prayer.

For a long moment, neither of us moved.

I was aware of his weight, his heartbeat, the sound of both of us breathing hard in the quiet room. The city glittered outside. Somewhere far below a siren rose and faded into nothing.

He rolled to the side and pulled me with him and I went — tucking into the warmth of his chest without deciding to, my cheek against his skin, his hand beginning to move slowly up and down my back.

'You okay?' he asked.

'Yeah.' More than okay. Embarrassingly, devastatingly more than okay. 'You?'

I felt him smile against my hair. 'Yeah.'

I told myself not to read into it. One night. A stranger in a hotel room. I was allowed to have one night. I stared at the dark ceiling and listened to his breathing slowly and felt the warmth of him all along my side and told myself firmly that this was just a night and nothing more.

I was asleep in ten minutes.

I didn't think about Jake once, not even twice.