He stares and stares and I begin to notice people around me turning, silently asking why he’s staring, what’s so special about her.
Is he angry with me for spying on him earlier?
This really hasn’t gotten off to a good start.
“And how about you, Tess?”
Shivers course through me at the use of my name.
“M-me?” I mutter, like a village bumpkin who hasn’t quite grasped what we’ve been doing for the past ten minutes.
“Why do you want to be a writer?” he says, growls, and I just know that he’s trying to humiliate me after the spying debacle.
I feel my cheeks flush and then spread down my neck, the most annoying habit in the world because it always telegraphs to everybody in the room that I’m sinking deeper and deeper into a putrid vat of anxiety.
“I don’t know,” I murmur.
Somebody sniggers.
Even Firecracker Red rolls her eyes
“I mean,” I go on, “I know I have to write. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I don’t have one specific reason.”
He stares even harder, his lips trembling.
His hands are clenched into fists and I imagine him telling me that’s not good enough, leaping over the desks and chairs like an unchained beast – muscles heaving, teeth bared – and telling me to get the hell out of his class now.
His muscles tense and throb and I see his arms straining in his suit jacket.
“Okay, then,” he says, turning away as though it takes an effort, like part of him would really like to give me a piece of his mind.
I want a piece of something else, though. No, not a piece—the whole damn thing.
I sit back, letting out a breath, and grip the edge of the desk to stop myself from reaching for my pen and destroying it more than I already have.
I’ve envisioned meeting my idol countless times, and it’s never gone like this.Chapter FourTannerI pace around my penthouse apartment, the place bare since I’ve spent so much of my life overseas, or traveling up and down the country for book tours, always moving, always running away from something …
That night.
It was the night that birthed my most successful novel, even now almost twenty-five years later. I’ll be forty this year and Promenade in the Rain was written when I was fifteen years old, a project that consumed me and helped me deal with – or ignore – the gory scenes I witnessed that night.
I remember the blood and the screaming, and I remember putting that in the book, changed.
The father stood over the man who’d murdered his wife, I wrote, and as he stood there, he knew that both of them would be dead soon. It came over him with a certainty that was almost religious, that at the end of this fight, they would bleed out and …
That was the first draft.
It was changed after that, but the events remained the same.
The father killed the killer and then later died of his injuries. It was a bloody fight.
The son – me – a coward hiding in his bedroom.
The killer was a random, faceless psychopath.
Fiction is always less tangled than life.
Now, I return to my desk that overlooks the city, the sky tinged reddish with the end of the day, the city glowing warmly.
I glance at the page, waiting.
I thought that I might be able to distract myself from the overwhelming lust that’s burning through me like wildfire by writing, but all I can think about is the way she looked in class, the vivid blush that spread over her neck, the tempting way she bit her lip.
“I don’t know,” she’d said.
The honesty of her answer infused me with even more fire, and now it’s still burning, raging, hours later.
To grab those wide hips and throw her onto my desk, push her down and roughly tear off that pink T-shirt, to reveal her bra and then tear that off, too, lose myself in those breasts, bury my face in them and suck and bite and do that for half an hour alone, teasing her, making her crazy with desire and then finally feeling how wet I’ve made her, smelling her tangy scent in the air, and then going down, tasting it, oh, fuck, tasting it…
The desk shivers in my iron grip and my knuckles blaze white.
My manhood is a stiff rod in my pants, so much tension it feels like I could explode.
I need to fuck her wet heat.
I need to taste her.
I need to lick her cream from her pussy.
I’m fucking dying here.
I stand and pace around the apartment, going to the sparsely decorated bedroom and changing into some workout gear. I feel my muscles tensing and throbbing as though awaiting an animal release, and I know that if Tess were to inexplicably walk in here now I’d take her, take every inch of her hot, impossible-to-ignore flesh.