Grim and Darling

Chapter Three

“Hi,” I sigh and slump into the kitchen chair across the formica table from my father. Everything is a sigh. Everything is a slump. Every look my father gives me is the same, and today is no different. We sit in the kitchen because neither of us can set foot into the living room. I still avert my eyes when I pass Alice’s bedroom door on the way to my own, and he still averts his eyes when he talks to me.

“Hi, baby girl. How was school?” He asks this with a furrow between his brows and that deep heavy thing beneath his skin that darkens his eyes and deepens his wrinkles. He glances at me and then looks away, like he’s trying really hard not to remember something super shitty about me.

I slump further and shrug.

“Fine,” I say, even though I mean terrible. Fucking horrible. Intolerable, even though I still tolerate it. I don’t have much choice.

“I put some pork in the crock pot this morning.” He drops the subject because he knows exactly what school is like for me. I don’t know why he won’t just let me homeschool. Something about him not being around enough to supervise me, but I think it’s because the last time he left me alone and responsible in this house, the unthinkable happened.

“Smells good,” I mumble and study the table top. I have it memorized. Every fleck of silver. Every smidge of gold. Three years of afternoons spent studying it means that I could replicate every spot from memory, and there are a million of them.

We sit in silence for half an hour. This is typical.

He finally breaks. “I’m following a lead out of Seattle. A real scumbag with a rap sheet ten miles long. He was in the area that… day.” He chokes on the end of his sentence like a hard candy cracked suddenly in half and lodged wrong in his windpipe. His face reddens and the newspaper shakes.

“Oh, yeah? That’s good.” I try to sound interested, involved, hopeful, but everything is a sigh and a slump, and I can’t muster up much beyond basic apathy. He can tell, but he doesn’t let on.

“If I can just get a warrant for a DNA test, I may be able to prove something.”

My gaze drops even further to the cheap linoleum he plastered over the beautiful hardwood floor. It’s white and patterned with ugly square blocks, but it might as well not even be there. I can still see it, the brown and blonde and amber of the wood. The glistening ruby red stain, right there in the middle. It wasn’t Alice’s blood though, or Rose’s. The blood in the kitchen, that was someone else’s. It didn’t match the girls. Didn’t match me.

It’s the only thing that kept me out of jail, or juvie, or worse.

Between the black eye Alice gave me that morning and the blood in the bathtub from my misadventures in shaving, I looked suspicious. The fact that I didn’t remember anything between falling asleep at this exact spot at the table and waking up somewhere else entirely, I looked like a red-handed homage to guilt. I might as well have marched myself into the cop shop and ‘fessed up to something I didn’t do. Might as well have lynched myself from the flagpole in the town square for all to see, because they’d basically all decided I was guilty anyway.

I was a murderer. Even though I wasn’t.

“Seems like you’ve been sleeping better lately.” Dad breaks the silence like the sledgehammer that he is, no grace, no subtlety. He’s always been a wrecking ball. I roll my eyes before I look back at him and try to smile, but it hurts, and I can’t keep it up long enough to be convincing.

“Yeah. Sort of.” That’s a lie. He thinks I’m sleeping better because I haven’t been walking, but that’s not the truth. I’m not walking because I’m not sleeping. Between a rock and a hard place, between the walking and the sleeping, there is only the slim, unbearable middle.

Insomnia.

It’s harder than it looks.

The first few nights were easy, losing myself in a book, then a movie, then Tumblr and Pinterest, and some site dedicated to asshole cats being assholes. The next few nights were a little harder, pinching my arms and thighs and cheeks to stay awake. By now, I’m in tunnel vision mode. Zombieland. Everything outside the small circle right in front of me is meaningless and fuzzy. Out of focus. A blur.

Everything outside is fucked.

Next

AN:

Forever grateful for HH.

<3

Grim and Darling

Chapter Two

Dear Self,

September fourth will be the worst day of your life.

You just won’t know it until the next day.

It will start out boring. Alice will wake you at 7:08, which is two hours earlier than you told her to, and she will do it by landing on your face. With her knee. You’ll be pretty sure she broke your eye, and your vision will be fuzzy and faded all day. You’ll barely be able to breathe through your nose. She will want to play ponies and house and dress up, and you’ll end up on the floor of her bedroom with a purple feather boa around your neck, your dead grandmother’s mothballed dress over your pajamas, and a splitting headache pounding around in your skull. You’ll pretend to drink fake tea and pretend to have a baby named Fred, which will really just be a towel rolled up into the shape of a burrito, and pretend to be entertained by Alice’s dance routine to a high-pitched boy band song that you hate.

You will try to get her to listen to the Rolling Stones, to Etta James, to Nirvana, but she’ll scrunch her nose and tell you that you’re weird and that no one likes your boring music before she switches it back.

When you finally escape Alice to take a shower, you’ll slip. You will land on your elbow and twist your ankle and jam the third finger on your right hand. You’ll get shampoo in your eyes and nick yourself behind your left knee when you try to shave with your mother’s cheap pink plastic razor, turning the drain red. You’ll be out of deodorant and have to use your father’s, which smells like something moldy, and you’ll consider for the hundredth time just chopping all your ridiculous hair off once and for all. You’ll even dig out his electric razor, the one he uses when his beard has grown out too far, and you’ll turn it on just to listen to the vibrations buzz through the steam.

You’ll be too much of a chicken to actually shave your head. You’ll put the razor away and brush the knots out of your hair just like you do every day.

Mrs. Hale will drop Rose off at eleven in the morning. Your parents went out of town, but the girls have a sleepover once a month, every month like clockwork, and that night is tonight, come hell or high water. Alice practically threw a shit fit when your mother tried to tell her no, so you stepped in and offered to play the responsible one. You’re fourteen, after all, and they’re letting you carry a credit card in case of emergencies which means you should be able to watch a couple of kids, no sweat.

Mrs. Hale will stay for seventeen minutes, and she will tell you all about her son, Jasper, who is one grade above you and not nearly as cool as she thinks he is. She’ll tell you he’s in a band, but really, he plays the accordion with his weird friend Emmett and writes nonsense lyrics about space and black holes and alien life forms on the bathroom walls with grease pencils. She’ll tell you that he’s on the football team, but he only refills the water bottles and sprays down the jockstraps with watered-down bleach. She’ll tell you that he talks about you, and you’ll cringe a little on the inside, but you’ll smile at her and tell her how nice it is to be talked about.

If only you knew how wrong you were.

When she finally, finally leaves, you’ll take the girls and spend nearly two hours destroying the kitchen in an attempt to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. At one in the afternoon, you’ll give up. There will be flour on the ceiling and chocolate chips in every corner, and Alice will have ruined a whole carton of eggs by dropping them one by one into the bowl, without removing the shells first. You’ll send the girls into the living room to watch that same godawful Disney movie they’ve practically burned a hole through while you open the package of pre-made dough. They will be loud, too loud, singing that terrible, horrible song, just the chorus over and over and over. They will argue loudly that Rose has to be Anna which means that Alice gets to be Elsa, and there’s that fucking song. Again.

It will take twelve minutes for the cookies to bake, and you’re so tired from walking all night long, so you will sit at the table and put your head down on the cool blue formica and close your eyes.

Just for a minute.

When you wake up, it will be 2:37 in the morning. You will be lying in a flower bed, half-naked, and there will be blood everywhere. Your arms. Your legs. Your hands. It will be in your hair. Your eyelashes. Your mouth. You’ll sit there in the grass for half an hour studying the way you’ve turned into a speckled space of bloody constellations. Into a Pollack painting. Into a gore-laced, connect-the-dots drawing.

If you could say anything to yourself right then, sitting in that flower bed in the middle of the night, covered in blood, it would be “Don’t go home.”

Don’t go home.

Don’t go home.

Whatever you do, please don’t go home.

Sincerely,

Me

Next

AN: 

There are bright, shiny people in the world. 

And then there is Hadley Hemingway. 

Y'all are gold, but that girl is diamond plated.

Grim and Darling - Prologue

Prologue: 

The first time I died, I was fourteen.

I don’t mean literally.

It’s not like they pumped me full of formaldehyde. Not like they put me in my one good dress, the blue one with the lace around the hem and the patched-up hole under the armpit. It’s not like they curled my hair or slathered me in makeup or finally pierced my ears.

I didn’t get the velvet-lined coffin. I didn’t get the headstone. 

I didn’t get the maggots.

This death, the figurative kind, was worse than all of that.

There’s nothing quite like becoming the town ghost, especially when you’re still alive.

---

The second time I died, I was seventeen.

And it was for real.

Next

Author Note: 

As ever, I am eternally in love with Hadley Hemingway. She is my sun, moon, and stars.

I have a seven month old baby, which means I have no schedule.

That said - Chapter One posts tomorrow. 

Love you,

HBM

Random news and ramblings

Check-in time:

- It took a bunch of fighting with some not-so-nice nerd type 'helpers' on the blogger forum, but I think I may have solved the email notification problem. Seems Blogger can't handle such a concept on it's own . . . shocking, I know. Come to find out I need a whole separate account with Feedburner in order to notify followers, which then entails burning and pinging and setting default numbers high or lower when it all should probably just be easy. 

*shakes fist at Blogger*

As far as I know, notifications are now working, the first of those notifications going out for chapter three of Don't Look / No Promises.


- I've been asked a couple of times if I'm planning to post Don't Look / No Promises to ff.net. The answer to this is no. I do not like that site, the people who run it, the guest reviewers . . . etc. I pulled my stories for a reason and will not be posting new material there. This is where you can find me and my words for the time being. I have given Hadley Hemingway permission to post DL/NP to her own ff.net site, as the story is for her, but she has yet to make a decision about that.


- On that note: there is a difference between a simple Beta and Hadley Hemingway. Correcting periods and commas is standard but a true Beta, one who takes that term seriously, is someone who steps even deeper into the story. Asks hard questions, points out discrepancies or inconsistencies, pushes their writer toward a better manuscript, a better story. Sometimes it involves kicking and screaming (mostly on my part) but at this point the term 'Beta' just doesn't do Hadley justice anymore. She is a co-author, right there with me for every step of the way, just as invested in these plot lines and characters as I am. Sure, she might correct my missing commas and my run on sentences, but that it only the tip of her giant iceberg. 

I found a treasure buried in the deep, dark masses of this fandom, the best one around hands down, and I'm keeping her. She will never get rid of me. 

- As for future projects . . . Dry spells must come and go in a writer's life, just like forests must burn once a millenia and droughts must break with a torrential downpour. I have a multitude of documents intended for several different fates. Some are destined for book covers, some might find their way here and if I can rope her down, a certain someone has penned a couple chapters of something with me that I'm really excited about. 

- I'm also cooking something . . .  something small but also really, really big . . .  and will tell you about it when DL/NP finishes posting. 

Stay tuned.

XO

HBM

Don't Look/No Promises

One

Summer - 1958

Bella

The girls stole the car at midnight.

It was always midnight. Always a different car. Always half a pint in. Always done with their teeth in their lips trying to muffle their drunken giggles and always for the thrill of it, nothing more than that. It was always boredom, small town life guarded by a great big forest. The options for amusement were few and far between and the girls had been trying to entertain themselves for far too long. By seventeen their creativity was running low, or not running at all, or only ran for the bad sorts of things because the only activities left were either dull and bland, or illegal.

This time it was a Thunderbird. A new one. Shiny baby blue paint and silver hubcaps. White leather seats. Sitting low and squat and perfect for picking.

Rose always claimed the backseat.

Alice always fiddled with the radio.

Bella always drove.

Always.

Bella loved the car the moment it growled to life. Not a purr, not a smooth turnover, but the roar of a mechanical beast. The big engine beneath the hood took up most of the vehicle and for good reason. It churned to life as laboriously as a dragon waking from a sixteen hundred year sleep, loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. The girls squealed as Bella pressed her foot to the gas too hard and the car leapt forward, slamming all of them back in their seats.

Their exit from the city limits took less than two minutes.

Roaring all the way.

Rose started it. She always started it. When she stole her mother’s lipstick in fourth grade and showed up to school with a cherry red mouth, she had gotten detention from the headmistress, a full week of writing lines and another of cleaning classrooms. By the next day, all the girls were sporting contraband makeup. She was twelve when she started to style her hair, bangs coiled high above her forehead in victory rolls and a ponytail that fell in one thick curl against her back. Thirteen when she started to roll her skirt up before school. Fifteen when she bought herself a bra. Sixteen when she let some guy feel her up in the back hall bathroom during a pep rally and almost seventeen when she got busted for smoking a cigarette in the same place. She liked to drink, liked to cuss, and liked to kiss boys just long enough to keep them strung around her middle finger. She was the daughter of a single mother who most of the town considered loose, so it didn’t surprise anyone that Rose was kind of loose herself.

Rose was always the spark and this spark liked to steal cars.

Alice didn’t start it. She always ended it. Buttoned Rose back up and tugged her back down when too much started to show, talked up security guards and talked down teachers when Rose took it too far. Alice put a stop to several things that could have gotten them killed or arrested or worse, beforehand or at just the right moment. She refused to drive to the city for a visit to a bar that had burned down later that night, and she drug Rose and Bella away from a party on the beach that got raided by Bella’s own father the moment they slipped into the trees. Alice was polite as a child, well-mannered as a kid, and polished as a teenager; her mouth and her particular brand of magic had gotten the girls out of many a tough spot, many a time.

Being the mayor’s daughter probably helped.

That left Bella somewhere in the middle. The padding between two rocks, the filling between two cookies. A plain Jane brunette bracketed on either side by a long, lithe blonde and a tiny dark-haired girl with just a touch of dwarfism. She was the daughter of a dead mom and a cop, average by her own standards. She wore the same pink silk jacket and slapped-on lipstick every morning. She drove the cars Rose wanted to steal and smoked the cigarettes she wanted to buy, let Alice dictate where she drove and then let her decide when it was time to return home.

She egged Rose on, but deferred to Alice. Always the enabler.

The girls cruised the backroads in the Thunderbird, gravel and mud and passing trees illuminated by headlights. The car drove like a dream. Like a beast, but like a dream too. Sailing over the ground like the tires weren’t even touching the earth, fishtailing around corners an inch above the dirt. They were halfway to the ocean and almost above the treeline when Rose finally ponied up. She held a little bottle full of amber liquid over the front seat, nudging Alice in the shoulder. Alice grinned as she took the bottle, taking a solid swig without a grimace before passing it along to Bella. Alice might be a good girl, the one who kept Rose on the straight, but Rose was Alice’s excuse to live a little and there was a wild child hiding somewhere just below Alice’s pretty facade. Which meant Alice didn’t put a stop to everything.

“How’d you get this anyway?” Bella took a small swallow and passed the bottle back, watching in the rearview as Rose took it with a smirk.

“I let that guy from the all-nighter in PA get off on my tits.” Rose pushed her breasts together. “Did you know a dick fits right in there between them like a saus-”

“Rose!” Alice squealed and then, “Bella!” as the car fishtailed in the gravel.

“Gross,” Bella chuckled under her breath, getting the beast back under control.

“What? So I let some guy rub himself on me for booze; you’re drinking it,” Rose sneered at Alice, taking a hefty swallow as she said it.

Alice pulled her lips back in the same kind of grimace that should have followed her shot of whiskey, but hadn’t. “Boys are disgusting. I don’t know how you can let them do that kind of stuff to you.”

“I don’t let them. I allow them,” Rose stated. “There’s a difference.”

The beast broke loose.

The tires touched down long enough to catch the gravel and send the steering wheel right out of Bella’s grip. The car twirled like a top and Bella glanced over her shoulder just once while the car was spinning. Alice was, predictably, screaming. Rose was, predictably, mid-drag off her cigarette, singing along to the radio as though she didn’t even care. Three full turns and the beast lurched to a stop in the middle of the road, facing the opposite direction. A bone-rattling shudder before the vehicle sighed one last time and died with a puff of acrid smoke from under the hood, metal grinding as the entire car slumped in defeat.

“Oh, shit,” Alice laughed. “Now look what we’ve done.”

---

Edward

Edward watched them steal his car.

Sat in the dark on his porch with a fading cigarette between his lips and allowed them to pick the lock. Three girls in matching jackets, matching curled hair, matching skirts. Rolled up short and tugged down tight, eyes lined  with wings and lips lined with blood. Hairdos and kitten heels and enough bared skin to make his mouth water.

Which was why he basically let them steal the Bird right out from underneath his nose.

He knew who they were, public school girls from the other side of town. There were no uniforms at Forks Municipal, which left them free to costume themselves. Girls at Highmeadow, his school, were just plain boring. Judies, all of em. Bangs that hid their eyes and collars clasped around their necks. Skirts to ankles, sleeves to wrists, so much left to the imagination that it wasn’t even worth the effort. But these girls, the ones in pink, they were all undone. Three buttons deep and you got cleavage. Two rolls up and you got thighs. One knot to the bottom and you got flashes of stomach. They swept their hair off their faces like they were proud to be looked at and they liked the ice cream shop a few blocks from his house, the tiny rundown one with the blackberry cobbler every Sunday, vanilla cream melting on top more like church than church, if you asked him. Like a message from God that life was a sweet mouthful if you just looked in the right places.

He’d been looking at those girls for a while now.

The blonde was too tall for him, nearly his height, which made him fidgety for some reason. He liked staring down at a girl, liked tucking them under his arm like they belonged to him somehow. But the other one was small, too small, so small he was sure she might still be a child. A near foot under short-statured.

The one he had his eye on, little-big-eyes, that long brown hair and those hips and the fuckme mouth painted pink instead of red, she was the one who got in behind the wheel.

He could have stopped them. But he didn’t.

He let them take off and then he raced the three miles to the reservation. Fuming. Hot. Itchy under the collar and he couldn’t quite figure out why. He threw rocks at the window until he shattered a pane, Jacob’s scowling, sleepy face behind it. Jacob didn’t miss a beat. Picked that rock up and lobbed it right back at Edward. Hard. Edward leapt aside as the rock buried itself in the grass less than a foot from where he stood and glared up at Jacob.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jacob grumbled.

“I got a problem,” Edward hissed. “The Bird was lifted.”

“Lifted?”

“Those girls, the ones with the ridiculous jackets and the ice cream? They fucking took it.”

“What do you mean they took it?”

“Shimmied the door. Got it started. Drove off.” Edward shrugged, not exactly sure he wanted to admit that he’d watched this happen.

“Well, fuck, man. What’dya expect me to do about it?” Jacob rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand.

“Help me get it back.”

They drove for hours, looking but not finding. Nothing on the main roads, nothing on the highway. The pavement was empty, middle of the night, and Jacob’s red Chevy was fresh off the line, brand spanking new. It drove like a champ and Edward knew Jacob was still testing the mechanical wonder but, by the time they had reached the gravel roads that led up the mountain, Jacob was not only testing the truck but Edward’s patience too.

“Will you slow the fuck down? You’re driving like a lunatic.” Edward resisted the urge to grab onto the door frame and Jacob took a turn too fast.

“It’s fun,” Jacob laughed, grinning and gunning the engine harder, spinning around the corner and nearly losing control in the gravel. The truck careened wildly, veering from side to side, slamming both of them around as the cab heaved.

“I said Slow. The. Fuck. Down!” Edward roared, reaching over to punch Jacob hard in the arm.

“Woah, dude, calm down. I got it handled,” Jacob grumbled, rubbing his shoulder without letting off the gas. The forest flashed by so fast it made Edward’s vision tremble. The truck suddenly felt oddly unstable, as though it could fall apart at any moment, a screw loose somewhere and it was only a matter of time. One good bump. One giant pothole, and the thing was going to come apart in a billion little pieces.

Edward hissed, his breath coming hard and uneven. “Pull over.”

“I ain’t pulling over.”

“Unless you want me putting my fist through this nice new dashboard of yours, you better pull the fuck over.”

Jacob didn’t do as Edward commanded. Simply stomped on the brakes and pulled the truck up short in the middle of the road. Edward fell out of the cab in a rage and met Jacob at the hood. Between the headlights and the giant cloud of dust settling around them and the anger, he could barely see anything.

“Give me that goddamned vest!” Edward yelled, red faced and panting. Jacob rolled his eyes and looked away.

“Look, man, you call me out here in the middle of the night to hunt down some girls who stole your ride, and then you give me shit about my driving? Lay off a little, I mean, shit . . .” Jacob complained.

“You think he’d appreciate you driving like a dickwad?” Edward stepped close enough to punch a finger hard to the left side of Jacob’s vest. “Or him?” A finger to the right.  “You wanna desecrate the damn thing, fine, but you aren’t gonna do it while I’m sitting right there next to you.”

Jacob took a step back, his face going stoic.“I wasn’t gonna kill us. I told you I had it handled.”

“Funny, I remember hearing that same thing before.” Edward stomped a few feet off and lit a cigarette, shaking too much to even enjoy it. The woods were quiet, still, but his blood was pumping so loud he couldn’t hear anything over it.

Two small pinpricks of light peered at him from far down the darkened road, hovering steadily just above the ground. A couple of steps forward revealed the Bird. Abandoned. Doors left wide open. Still smoking under the hood.

A hairpin on the driver’s seat.

That little bitch.

Next

Author's Note: 

This hot mess was written for and beta'd by my soul sister, my favorite, my little shining star, who typically goes by the name of Hadley Hemingway (I call her Momma Bee.) We sat on her porch at three am with a bottle of champagne, dreamed it up together, and oh man did we giggle. We finished the champagne long before we finished plotting. 

This is heavily influenced by the latest Arctic Monkeys album, and Alex Turner himself. *fans self* Google image that boy. You will not be disappointed. 

Naughty Knickers

Eight

Edward

I apologized to Bella the best way I knew how.

I tied her up.

Peeled her out of her clothes, rolled her on to her side and used a garter on her wrists. Wound it clear up to her elbows, cinching tight behind her back because I was a sucker for the way it forced her to shove her tits out. I bound her ankles and smoothed the hair off her face, offering her the thigh high I'd stripped off her leg.

"Eyes? Or mouth?"

"Both," she whispered.

"Nope. One or the other, you choose."

“Eyes,” she exhaled and her lashes brushed her cheeks as I wound the sock around her head.

I settled down beside her, my temple to her thigh and god, this girl’s pussy . . . flushed pink, and so fucking tight when I slipped a finger inside of her. I didn’t give her any warning, just watched myself impale her with the rest of my fingers splayed out to the side and she groaned deeply when I pulled out to do it again. She wiggled against her ties, the leather digging into her skin, but I took my sweet time. Played my fingers through her lips with all of the patience I could muster, dragging her slick wet around until she was dripping down her thigh. Thrusting my fingers in and out and around and over every bit of her until she was panting. With three fingers buried I shook my arm, just hard enough to send a tremor through her whole body and she stiffened, digging her toes into the sheets.

"Oh fuck," she stammered, squirming against my hand. "Oh, god, don't stop. Please don't stop." I gave into her pleading, tickling her insides with my fingertips and jerking her around with my wrist. Her steady moan uttered with each shake and when I set my lips down over that pretty little nub of flesh there at the top of her slit, she screamed.

I was so glad she made me cover her eyes, and not her mouth.

She reciprocated, with far less patience than I had shown. Babbling from the sheets as she came down, panting about how badly she wanted my dick in her mouth. I let her blow me with that blindfold on and then took it off, hoisting her to her knees and using the straps around her elbows to hold her upright while I fucked her from behind. I wrapped my arms around her and pinched her tits rough enough to make her gasp. Spilled inside of her and only undid her bonds when I’d caught my breath. She scampered to the bathroom and I lay there in her bed, marinating in her smell, fighting the urge to pass out after all that exertion. When she emerged, her eyes were red and her cheeks were flushed. She sniffled and stood near the bed, naked except for the red marks around her wrists.

“We have to stop this,” she muttered, chin to her chest.

“I thought it was good,” I hedged, pulling myself up onto my elbow, heartbeat gone eerily silent. She wrung her hands together and shrugged.

“It was. It always has been. But I don’t know what I’m going to go through when you leave, and I have a feeling it’s not going to be easy. You should just go now.”

“You think you’re getting rid of me that easily?”

She shot me a hard glare and silently pointed to her bedroom door.

I shook my head. “I’m signing a lease on my apartment tomorrow.”

Her eyes widened and she bit her bottom lip, only releasing it to speak. “Why?”

“I have nowhere else to go. Nowhere else I want to be, more than here.” I was talking about Chicago, but I was really implying that it was her bed, her pussy, her breath, that I wanted to become a permanent resident of. I wanted to see every devilish costume she had tucked away in her drawers and I wanted to make her my muse. Dress her up, strip her down, capture her image a million times over. Then do it again. I sat up, dangling my legs off the bed and glanced up at her. “Does that change anything for you?”

I watched her gulp, the bob in the throat as she swallowed. “No. Yes,” she corrected, before she shrugged again, her voice low. “I don’t know.”

“It changes everything for me,” I said and reached out to grab her. I pulled her close, right between my legs, with both of us in nothing but our skin and our feelings. Neither of us were that great at sharing, but I was gonna try. “I want you. I want you badly enough to stay here despite the shitty weather. I want to spend the next three months convincing you to move in with me and, then, I want to complain when we have to move all your shit. I want you in nothing but my t-shirts, and I want to see you in every single one of those fucking garter belts.  I want to pound this beautiful pussy every day for the rest of my existence.” I slipped my fingers between her legs just to make a point and she thrust herself down onto them, letting me finish my tirade buried up inside of her. “Will you let me do that?”

Bella sighed, clutching my shoulders and barely staying on her feet, digging her nails into my skin as she trembled. Her answer came out as soft and as strong as her orgasm, ripping through her and falling out of her mouth.

“Yes.”

The End

Naughty Knickers

Seven

Bella

"Good to know you're still alive," Alice grumbled at me as I hobbled into the kitchen the next morning. I glared at her and stumbled to the fridge, trying to ignore the bright lights and the loud sound of her chewing her cereal with her mouth open. I’d gotten home at the crack of dawn and I  had a hangover, but not the regular kind. I had an Edward hangover and I was in dire need of orange juice but, of course, Alice had stashed the emptied carton back in the fridge. I threw it across the room at her, wincing when her shriek hit my achey ears.

"Why do you always do that? You know I hate it," I griped at her, finding a bottle of water instead. I swallowed half of it before she spoke.

"How's suspender boy?" She grinned around her spoon.

"Don't call him that." Only I was allowed to call him that. And only in my head.

"You're walking funny. He must have a really great dick for a sadist." She was still crunching her cereal louder than a hail of brimstone and gunfire and I was feeling woozy enough to throw up all over her mushy breakfast.

"He does."

"You should be careful. I hear girls like you can get addicted to that kind of thing."

---

"Tell me everything."

Jane flopped into my chair and stared at me, waiting for a response. I shrugged, not prepared to make something up on the spot. Besides, I glowing a little too much to deny it. "Edward has a magical dick and I don't ever want to let it go. I just gotta figure out what to do about that mouth of his."

"And the old lady?"

"She's a bitch but, damn, does she look good for her age. You would not believe how old she really is."

We spent the next three hours decking Jane out for Edward's next project and googling Esme. Apparently she was an elbow rubber in an elitist group of art afficionados. She had been a coordinator at museums that even Jane knew the name of and had 'discovered' more than a few big name artists, Edward included amongst them. She oversaw charitable foundations and facilitated cross country art loans. She had been married three times, had six homes in five different countries, and made regular appearances at children's hospitals with art supplies. They called her Mrs. Santa Claus.

Basically, it was impossible to hate her, but she gave me an out when she showed up in my office with a rack of plastic wrapped ball gowns, acting as snot-faced as ever.

"Well, don't you look precious!" she exclaimed and sauntered right into the room to inspect Jane's hair and makeup, fawning over her. Jane shot me a wary glance over Esme’s head.

"Can I ask what you're doing here?" I eyed the door pointedly, hoping Esme would take a hint but she just smiled at me. The same kind of smile a rattlesnake gives a rat right before it poisons it.

"Oh, Edward called in a favor. I answered."

"What sort of favor?"

"He needed ballgowns and he knew who to ask.”

“Edward asked you to bring those here today?” I pointed at the rack of dresses, sounding just as full of disbelief as I actually was. I thought he’d told me it was over. That the heartbreak was mutual and that he only wanted me. I thought he said that he was done with her, but apparently, he’d called and literally requested her presence here today.

Edward

I met the girls in the Impressionist paintings, a room full of art that was all up for interpretation. I’d always been drawn to these paintings over any of the others. The cut and dried reality of the standard still life left me wanting more and I could get lost for hours in front of a Monet. The blurred brush of color. The spots of light and dark. The out of focus fuzz that sharpened only when you stepped away. Paintings that made sense from far off, but were even more beautiful with your nose a bare inch away from the canvas.

The moment Bella stepped into the room, the air changed. Or vanished entirely. I wasn’t sure which, but one or the other left me panting. She shot me a glance from across the room and I could tell instantly that something was wrong. She didn’t smile at me, or even give me a halfway version of it. Instead, she reverted back to the icy death glare she’d given me at the start and I had no idea what had flipped her switch so suddenly.

Jane looked perfect, decked out like a princess in too much makeup and a dress that was trying to swallow her. I gulped when I recognized the outfit. It was the same dress Esme had worn to some fancy black tie party the night before we broke up. Red satin. Indecently low cut neck line. Tight to the knees and flared below that, a swish of fabric around the ankles. I’d been so in love with Esme that night, convinced that I would live out the rest of my life with her, that I’d followed her around the party like an ignored puppy, letting her swat my hands away when I tried to touch her.

The devil in question sashayed into the room with an expectant smile on her face and I knew instantly what Bella’s frozen glare had been about.

“Edward!” Her voice jumped twenty octaves and dropped twenty years, immaturity propelling her across the room toward me as though she was only the projectile in some giant sling shot. She wrapped her arms around me before I could stop her and whispered in my ear. “That little bitch of yours has got to go. I don’t like her at all.”

“Then it’s a good thing that I don’t care what you like or not.” I shoved her aside and tried to make my way to Bella and Jane, who were in a far corner, adjusting the dress. Esme grabbed my hand and batted her eyes at me.

“Come to my hotel tonight. We can talk. I’d like to make this work,” she pleaded.

“No way. I wanted to make it work too, but you weren’t interested in talking then. I’m not interested in talking about it now. You need to leave.”

“I can’t stay to watch? Those are my dresses after all.”

My first mistake had been thinking that Esme would loan me something without expecting anything in return. My second mistake had been to make the phone call to ask her, but I wasn’t about to make the third mistake of letting her ruin my life all over again. I yanked out of her grip and stormed across the gallery, fuming.

“Take that off,” I commanded, waving at the red dress as I came to a standstill.

“You just want me naked all the time,” Jane giggled and started stripping immediately, which seemed to be her style. Completely unabashed, even as Bella was studiously eyeing the floor. She had her teeth buried in her lip. On most girls, that meant that they didn’t know what to say. In this case, I was pretty sure she was biting the shit out of her lip in order to keep everything she wanted to say inside. I picked the dress up off the floor and stormed back toward Esme with my arms full of red silk and rage. I shoved it at her, the force making her totter backward on her heels.

“Take them and go,” I commanded.

“Darling, don’t be like this. I only want you to remember how it was between us. I want you, and I know that you want me.”

"I don't want you!" I yelled, my bellow blowing the hair off her neck. "I did, but I don't anymore. Nothing will change the way I feel about you. Stop. Trying."

“I love you, Edward.”

“No, you used me as arm candy because you liked my thirty year old cock. ”

She slapped me.

Hard and fast and stingingly sharp, right across my cheek.

“You insolent little brat!” she hissed. “You always were just a child. I can’t believe how much time I wasted on you.”

“Goodbye, Esme,” I barked and turned away, rubbing my cheek to the faint sounds of her pushing her ballgown disaster out of the room. I was so fucking angry, livid and on edge, and when I saw Bella trying to rush out of the room, it just pissed me off even more. Calling Esme had been a mistake, but letting this girl escape before I had a chance to right things would be the biggest mistake of all. I grabbed her by the arm as she tried to fly by me.

"Don't you dare leave," I growled at her, but she scowled right back at me, matching me one for one.

"I'm not going anywhere,” she hissed. “I just need to go hit something so that I can calm down. I'll be right back." She pulled out of my grip and stormed off down the hallway. I hoped she made back down to the basement level before she found something to lay her fist into. Shit around here was expensive.  

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AN: She's still giggling. I'm still blushing. One more chapter and I'm putting both of us out of our misery.