All other things, p.1
All Other Things, page 1
All Other Things
Charlotte Stein
Bea’s husband Tommy is the sweetest, most gorgeous guy she’s ever met. There’s just one problem—he doesn’t seem to want to have sex with her. Or at least, he shows no interest in the kind of sex she’s craving. Kinky, torrid, passion-filled sex, of the sort a too-handsome and too-fascinating colleague at her workplace is offering.
Kieran is everything that Tommy’s not—dark to his light, triple caramel swirl to Tommy’s vanilla. But Bea will not be tempted. Or at least, she thinks she won’t. Until she discovers Tommy and Kieran have been IMing each other for some time—and they haven’t been talking about innocent things.
They’ve been talking about her, and more importantly, they’ve been talking about what they’d like to do to her. Together. And once Tommy’s buttons have been pushed and Kieran’s been let off his leash, anything seems possible…
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
All Other Things
ISBN 9781419935787
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
All Other Things Copyright © 2011 Charlotte Stein
Edited by Grace Bradley
Cover design by Syneca
Photography: wtmas, Okssi and sapandr/Shutterstock.com
Electronic book publication September 2010
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All Other Things
Charlotte Stein
Dedication
To AH again. That’s far more life than I needed, actually.
Chapter One
She didn’t mean to say it. It just slipped out, in the middle of meaningless talk about customers and IT problems and what had been on TV the night before. Some program with a ton of sex in it, Kieran had said, before giving her that look he sometimes did.
The flat, assessing one. The one that made his eyes look like glaciers, shivering with color and completely devoid of shame.
He was shameless, Kieran, and he proved it now, in answer to the words she hadn’t meant to say.
“And what exactly makes you think he’s having an affair?”
He sounded almost like he wanted to laugh—but that was the other trouble with Kieran. She found it almost impossible to tell what he was thinking or feeling at any given moment. He could have been imagining flying on a marshmallow to Mars for all she knew.
“Nothing. I don’t know. Forget it.”
She winced as soon as the words were out. How fluttering and indecisive they sounded. How spineless. Kieran would have never said “I don’t know” or “forget it”. He would have said, My wife is fucking someone else and I hate the cunt.
Even though he didn’t have a wife, as far as she knew. His rough-knuckled hands were free of rings and the most he ever said to her in terms of his personal relationships was, The woman I slept with last night had a tattoo of a snake on her back. As big as a house, it was!
And now he just stood there, eyeing her side-on. As though he didn’t even have to say anything to get her to confess all. He just knew she’d start up again in a second, when she felt comfortable enough to do it.
She wondered why Kieran always made her comfortable enough to do it.
“He won’t…” she started, but couldn’t finish. Finishing meant she’d have to admit it, and admitting it to someone like Kieran was an almighty and crushing defeat. He made her comfortable enough to talk about things she never spoke about with anyone else, true. But he was also a dirty bastard, a filthy lecher—lust incarnate.
Everyone knew it. The whole office talked about it. Kelly Tyler swore she’d found a sex toy in the neat little laptop bag he carried with him everywhere. And Martin from marketing had passed the rumor around that Kieran had fucked the boss on her desk, on that long, hot Friday when everyone had left at twelve to go to the pub.
“He won’t fuck you?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. People who happened to be lust incarnate didn’t need questions. “That’s a real shame.”
They also didn’t need restraint, it seemed.
God, he was looking at her weird now. The way he sometimes did when she felt at her most awkward and exposed. Hungrily, she thought, but that didn’t seem right somehow. He might well be hungry for the boss and the new receptionist and that girl he’d picked up with the snake tattoo, but he couldn’t possibly be hungry for her.
She didn’t have anything that men got hungry about. Her husband was proof—he was practically legally obliged to fuck her, and he still didn’t want to.
“Have you tried talking to him?”
And there was the other thing about Kieran. He might well have been a dirty bastard, but he could also be pretty…girlfriend-y. He asked the right things—the ones she’d always imagined a nice gal pal would.
Of course, it made it even harder to figure him out.
“What am I going to say? Oh hey, we haven’t done it in a while. Maybe you’re having an affair?”
He never made a sound when he laughed, but she could tell he was doing it anyway. Creases appeared around his eyes. His grin was filled with teeth as wicked as the rest of him—big teeth. Wolf’s teeth.
And then after, he put the cigarette he was smoking to his lips.
“Surely you can come up with a little more tact than that,” he said finally. She watched him blow a streamer of smoke toward the dull, gray sky before he continued. “I mean, you’re usually pretty careful about your words.”
Of course, he was setting a trap. She could see it a mile away and yet somehow ended up in it, even so.
“In what way?”
He flicked ash from the end of his cigarette. Gave her the old side-eye again.
“Saying done it instead of fucked. You couldn’t even use a coy euphemism the first time. You just trailed away into nothing and I had to guess.”
She tried to roll her eyes and missed.
“I can say fucked.”
“Sure?”
“I just did.”
“Can you say it to him?”
“Say what?”
“Fucked. Fucking, fucker, fuck me.”
She turned away from him then. Not enough for it to be noticeable, but certainly enough to give her some comforting distance. He sounded too…something when he said things like that. She could almost imagine his tongue curling around every syllable—and the faint Irish accent didn’t help.
It just made her think of words coated in smoke and whiskey and other nonsense things that had nothing to do with Ireland at all. He did most of his growing up in Bromley, for God’s sake. He was about as Irish as she was, when you really got down to it.
But that accent…
“This isn’t some I’m a prude problem,” she said, and hated him for raising an eyebrow. Of course he put the eyebrow right back down again the moment she turned back to him, but he did so far too late. She caught it.
He thought she was a prude.
“I’m not, Kieran, all right? He’s the—”
She cut herself off before the accusation could come out. Mainly because it felt as though she’d been manipulated into saying something again—but also because she couldn’t be sure. She just didn’t know if her husband was the very thing Kieran had just implied of her.
How did you judge levels of prudery? He didn’t flinch when she swore or act disgusted on the rare occasions they did have sex. He just didn’t seem to want it enough—or at least, not enough for her.
God, it was nowhere near enough for her. She could feel her sex aching right now, right this minute, and for no more than Kieran saying fuck, fucker, fuck me in a voice that curled up at the edges, like burning paper.
“So he just won’t do the things you want him to?” he asked, and this time it was a question. It brushed against her, gently, nothing about it too forward—as though he knew he’d gone too far with the fucks.
“Sort of.”
She thought about Tommy’s face between her legs, licking slow and steady until she felt sure she might pass out. Tommy with his big hands on her hips, that look on his face like someone concentrating too hard on a problem they couldn’t s
“He’ll do some things… It’s more like he just doesn’t want it enough.”
Yes. Yes. That was the crux of the issue. He’d go down on her, fuck her in different positions…most of the usual stuff. He just wouldn’t do it often.
“Doesn’t mean he’s having an affair.”
She glanced at him then. Of course, she couldn’t for the life of her tell if he was just trying to placate her or not. He sounded sincere, but with Kieran, sounding and being were two wholly separate things.
And there was this look on his face too…the low look again. The one that always reminded her of headlights dipping on a car—maybe as it sped toward a deer trapped and hypnotized in the middle of a road.
“You ever see him jerking off?” he asked, and she just couldn’t help it. Her body reacted to him talking like that—in a way Tommy never would. Yeah, that was one thing Tommy would never, ever do.
Talk dirty. He never talked dirty—hell, he rarely even moaned or gasped or did anything to show how good her mouth or cunt felt on him.
“No.”
“Not ever? Middle of the night, in the shower, while you’re watching—nothing?”
She stopped then, and considered. Really considered.
“I’ve never seen him jerk off.”
It seemed amazing to her, this realization. But it remained true, nonetheless. She had never seen her husband touch himself in any way, shape or form. Not even to get hard, in preparation for sex.
“Well believe me, doll, he’s doing it. But the question is—how often? If he’s getting his jollies elsewhere he’s not going to be fucking himself daily, is he?”
“He wouldn’t need to do it that much. He’s just…not very sexual.”
This time when Kieran laughed he made a sound. A real, honest-to-God sound—one that made her flush from head to toe. Lord, he thought she was ridiculous.
“I hope that’s not what he told you. Come on, Bea. You’re smarter than that. Most guys need a little something more than every Sunday night at half past ten.”
The flush deepened, to hear him say those words. How in God’s name did he know about every Sunday night at half past ten?
“Really? How often do you need it?” she asked, then couldn’t quite believe she had. He was going to say something abominable now, something she’d never be able to get out of her head.
“Why don’t you look at me and tell me what you think?”
She couldn’t resist. He had tractor beams attached to her eyeballs, and putting all power to the engines didn’t stop her head from turning.
“Twice a week?” she tried, but it sounded pitiful even to her ears.
His many-toothed smile, the way his tongue curled up to touch his upper lip—those things told her the rest. Or at least, they did until he decided to hit her with actual words.
“Honey, I’m lucky if I get away with twice a day.”
Of course she’d known. She read enough Cosmos to get a pretty accurate picture of what men liked sexually. But everything about this moment, right now, kind of made her wish she read a magazine called Denial Monthly instead.
“Yeah, but you’re pretty disgusting,” she said, then cursed herself for not going with a better word. A sweeter word that more accurately summed up how she felt about Kieran Murphy.
“You really think he’s going to be any different from me? Men are disgusting. We’re disgusting pigs who just want to rut and sweat and fuck everything that walks, and any man who says otherwise is a liar.”
How weird that she suspected—with some sort of surety, for the first time ever—that he was being just that—a liar. He was lying. Though about what, she couldn’t say. He certainly seemed like a giant man-slut.
She watched him flick away the smoldering end of his cigarette, body language suddenly jagged. An almost-sneer curling up the corner of his mouth as he pushed away from the bike-stand they’d been leaning on, in this little sheltered place behind the Werner and Marcus building.
Any second he would go back inside, back to his lair of IT. And then maybe next time he wouldn’t call her over for a chat as she made her way to the door with her lunch in her hand. He wouldn’t say her name—like every other person in this place, who didn’t know her from Adam—and ask her how she was doing.
And all because of the feeling growing inside her. The one that told her she’d said something wrong to him, something that required an apology.
Even if the notion of apologizing to someone like Kieran seemed ridiculous, on the face of it. He didn’t give a shit what people thought of him. He didn’t give a shit about anything. She wasn’t even sure if he regularly brushed his hair or ironed his clothes.
Right there, standing before her in the gloomy light with one hand in his back pocket, he appeared singularly rumpled. The start of a beard scratching over his sharp-boned face, dark hair tangled and half curly. He looked as if he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed five minutes ago.
Though it wasn’t the general air of lustful disarray that caught her attention. It was his gaze, his steady and unwavering gaze, and how cold it should have seemed.
Did the cold ever burn like this?
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean that about you being disgusting,” she rushed out too suddenly, but he didn’t make her feel embarrassed for it. He smiled instead—with just the corners of his mouth. The middle part stayed downturned, and there was only the barest hint of light in those amazing no-color eyes.
“I don’t think your husband’s cheating on you, Bea,” he said, but he was backing away toward the building as he did so. It made her want to go after him, to pull him back, but just thinking about touching him flooded her body with heat.
And then by the time he next spoke he had to almost shout. He had to declare it from the rooftops.
“Because if I was your husband, I’d never stray. No force on earth would make me want to fuck anyone but you.”
* * * * *
There were many things she couldn’t get out of her head after her conversation with the devil himself. The way he’d looked—which just made her feel like a cheating harlot—and the way he’d talked—which just made her feel like a cheating aroused harlot.
Then finally, the words themselves. The ones about never straying, in the imaginary relationship he was having with her in his head. The ones about how disgusting he thought he was—how disgusting he thought all men were. And finally, finally…
The ones about her husband’s masturbatory habits.
Of course, the other words drew her attention more. But she focused on the latter, because the latter was safe. The latter didn’t imply some hidden wealth of feeling inside some guy who wasn’t her husband.
And the latter gave her a starting point. A way to get to the truth in a manner that didn’t involve checking what Tommy had for breakfast and how much cologne he wore on a regular basis.
Neither of the last two things proved anything, the way Cosmo claimed it would. He still ate three rounds of toast and a metric ton of cornflakes every morning—so it wasn’t as though he’d started watching his waistline for some new woman. And he never wore cologne, so that proved a dead end too.
But according to Kieran, he had to be masturbating. Had to be.
She just didn’t know when.
Spying on him in the shower yielded no results. He just caught her watching him through five innocent minutes of shampooing, and asked her if she needed the bathroom.
“You can pee in front of me, hon,” he called out over the rush of water. Then he laughed, because he wasn’t like Kieran. He was goofy and easy to read and full of joy about stupid stuff like his wife of six months being nervous about peeing in front of him.
Surely he wouldn’t mind if she just came right out and asked? Instead of standing there, staring through the frosted glass at his glorious naked body.
Even with the steam and the swirling pattern on the shower door, she could make out trails of water and soap slicking their way down his thick thighs, the perfect curve of his big back, the firm swell of his arse. And when he turned just so, she could see the heavy shape of his cock between his legs, and recall exactly how it felt sliding into her ever-ready body.
