This story is part of the series:
Friday, September 20th, 2:31 pm
The global economy was on fire, and it was my fault.
And I stood next to the window, surrounded by possessions and collectibles that could have fed and housed a family of four for at least a year, sipping coffee that probably cost as much as a high-priced meal. All while feeling sorry for myself.
“Is there anything you can do?” Emily asked.
“I don’t know,” I said into my coffee cup as I took a sip.
“Perhaps you can buy all the banks and—”
The sound of shattering glass cut Natashya’s words off as I sent the mug hurling across the room, where it crashed into one of the bookcases lining the walls. Coffee splattered across books that cost more than some vehicles. “I said, ‘I don’t know!’”
Whirling around, I glared at the dancer, who appeared to be in complete shock at my tone. She glanced at Emily, who also looked equally troubled.
It was understandable. I never acted this way… not around them.
I sighed and pressed my fingers to my eyelids.
“Marcus…” Emily's voice was full of cautious concern.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry, guys. That was uncalled for.”
“It is okay,” Natashya said in her light accent. “Is it really that bad?”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat thick with emotion. I finally looked back up at them and leaned against the window. Part of me wanted the bulletproof glass to just shatter and introduce me to death by defenestration.
“The stock market hit a historical low today. Basically, all of Europe can’t use money right now.”
“And this is your fault?”
I shrugged at Natashya’s question, not really wanting to answer that question.
“You can’t know that,” Emily said, full of conviction.
“Em,” I sighed.
“You can’t know that!” my sister insisted. “No one person can be at fault for something like this.”
“This is Hiro,” I said. “He did this in retaliation for what I just did to him.”
My phone buzzed on the desk. I ignored it, assuming it was yet another call to check up on me, ask me questions, or… anything else. My phone number was kept extremely private—Erin made sure of that, but in this day and age, nothing stayed that way for long. Journalists had begun trying to call me directly. I would need to get a new number soon.
Emily scowled at the phone, then said, “You couldn’t know what they would do!”
I hit the back of my head against the glass several times and groaned in frustration. “I was warned! Amber was in here earlier, telling me that she could give me the information to get a jump on whatever Hiro was planning!”
“Amber?” Natashya, who was looking at her nails, snapped her gaze up to me. “As in that bitch who kidnapped us?”
“Yeah.” I winced, temporarily forgetting that she had shared my fate. No… something worse than my fate. Natashya bore some scars from that event that wouldn’t heal for a long time.
“She was in here!?” Natashya jumped to her feet. Emily did the same but grabbed her girlfriend by the wrist and pulled her in for a hug.
“No,” I sighed, shoving off the window and walking toward my office chair. “She was in one of the conference rooms downstairs.”
“You let her go?” Emily asked. It wasn’t meant to be accusatory, but I was so raw that it felt that way.
“Yeah. I did. Holding her against her will is called kidnapping.”
Natashya narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you have Ryo locked in a room?”
I paused mid-sit and instead planted my hands against the surface of the desk, staring at Natashya.
“Touche…”
The exotic entertainer opened her mouth to say something else, but I cut her off.
“Tash, if you’re about to give me shit about not taking the bitch who kidnapped us prisoner, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m not in the fucking mood.”
Despite looking like she wanted to say something, she shut her mouth.
“Thank you,” I said.
The doors opened and in walked Helen, followed by Erin and Charity—the three Weird Sisters who had stormed the kitchen a few hours ago to deliver terrifying news.
Judging by their faces, it looked like our day hadn’t improved since then.
Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble…
“Marcus,” Helen said. “We’ve got some updates.”
“Where’s the cauldron?”
All three of them stopped short and blinked.
“What?” Helen said.
Emily tittered—trust the theater geek to get it.
“It’s not important,” I waved a hand dismissively as I plopped into my seat. “What is it?”
Erin stepped up to the front of my desk and tapped a handful of manila folders against the wood.
“It’s bad. It wasn’t just one company or one bank. Tanaka orchestrated a multi-layered derivatives collapse using a series of offshore shell corporations—each loaded with toxic, high-leverage instruments. It’s like he built a house of cards out of credit swaps and then yanked the bottom card.
The moment European regulators flagged one of the shells for insolvency, a cascade of margin calls began. It hit Luxembourg and Amsterdam first. Within a few hours, liquidity vanished from half a dozen high-yield funds.”
Erin compressed her lips into a thin line as she snorted in frustration.
“And here’s the thing: he owned some of the exposure. Deliberately. He let a few of his own holdings take a dive so no one would suspect the pattern. Bet you can guess who the actual target was.”
“Us,” I said.
Erin nodded. “Three of our financial partners were exposed—one of them was underwriting a new line for the Dunbar expansion. The other two handled portfolio bundling for your private equity branches. Between market losses, margin calls, and contagion panic, market-wide fallout is already past $45 billion, and it’s still moving. Your personal exposure is about $17 billion, give or take. It might stabilize, but it could very well double.
She paused just long enough to make sure I understood.
“And that’s not counting secondary damage. Our name is all over the headlines—investors are pulling out like it’s 2008 again. Hiro didn’t just want to hurt us… he wanted to destabilize us. Ruin our reputations and shake the world’s confidence in our brands.”
Silence reigned for a full ten seconds as I let what Erin told me sink in.
“He did one hell of a job,” I finally said.
“I don’t understand,” Emily said, laying a hand on my shoulder. She’d approached my chair while Erin had been talking.
Fortunately, I knew enough to put it in simpler terms.
“He took out a few no-name companies, then let them default on purpose. But they were holding the equivalent of loaded guns—these contracts that only work as long as everyone else believes the system’s stable. Once the defaults hit, it spooked the market. Banks started calling in debts. Funds lost liquidity. My partners couldn’t move money fast enough, and we got dragged down with them. It’s like he poured gasoline into the global financial system a year ago… and just now lit the match.”
“Does that mean Marcus will lose everything?” Natashya asked, stepping up next to Emily.
“No,” Erin said. “He still has the majority of his wealth, but a lot of his liquidity is gone, so cash flow is tight at the moment.”
“Which means I’m limited on what I can personally do,” I concluded. “He’s crippled me.”
“I’m working to change that,” Erin said, “But it’s going to take some time… longer than usual. A lot of our influence is gone, right now.”
“That also means,” Chloe said, walking into the room, “that Marcus doesn’t leave the secured floors of this building until I give the all-clear. None of you do.”
“What?” Emily said.
“Why?” Natashya chimed in.
“Resources are stretched, and Tanaka knows it. I’d bet you a year’s salary that he has at least two dozen mercenaries within a few blocks just looking for a chance to acquire you, or take you out.”
Natashya gasped and took a couple of steps back. “I… no… I need to get out of here…”
“Afraid that’s not happening, Miss Larazev,” Chloe said.
Emily reached out to her girlfriend. “Natashya—”
“Emily! I can’t stay here!” The dancer’s eyes shone bright with tears as she clutched her girlfriend’s hand. “They will get me, again!”
Natashya collapsed in Emily’s arms—she wasn’t openly sobbing, but she looked like she was on the verge.
Alarmed, I started to rise from my seat, but Emily held up a hand, signifying that I should stay where I was.
“I’m going to take her to our room,” she mouthed, and the two of them walked out of my study. I could hear Natashya murmuring something about not going through that nightmare again as they exited.
Erin watched them leave, worry for the dancer painted on her face. Charity did the same, looking particularly pale, which was saying something considering her ethnicity.
“Will she be okay?” Charity asked.
“She’ll be fine,” Helen cut in, seemingly unaffected by the younger woman’s breakdown.
“Marcus, INTERPOL has reached out to us, and the SEC has already flagged two of your trades from last week. They won’t find any evidence of insider trading, but they were close enough to the flashpoint that they’re sniffing like bloodhounds.
Some of your partners are preparing suits for fiduciary negligence. Several companies have shuttered their doors in the space of hours. Yunger, Price & VanCamp has already engaged legal in four other countries. This was a nuclear bomb, and the fallout is going to last a long time.”
“Fucking Christ,” I said. “How many people lost jobs over this? Lost their businesses?”
“You can’t do that, Marcus,” Erin said on the heels of my questions.
“Why not!?” I said, popping out of my chair. “I fucked around and I found out, and now a ton of people I don’t know are paying the price.”
“You’ve already lost billions, Marcus,” Erin protested. “And you’ll lose more before we can stop this. I’d say that’s a hefty price.”
“At the end of the day, though, I’ll still have this,” I held up my hands, indicating the finery all around us. “While all those people will lose their livelihoods… their homes.”
“Worry about that, and you’ll go mad, Marcus,” Helen said.
“What? I’m supposed to just go on like nothing happened to… what… thousands of people? Tens of thousands?”
“When two people are fighting for their lives, they can’t be worried about the ants they step on,” Helen said.
I balked at her words—spoken like a privileged woman who hasn’t had to worry where her next meal came from in a long time.
“Fuck off, Helen,” I snapped. “That’s cold. Even for you.”
“I’m being pragmatic,” Helen said, her eyes flashing brilliant blue fire.
“You’re being a bitch,” I shot back.
The two of us simply stared at each other. Besides Bobbi, I’d never experienced the desire to simultaneously want to punch a woman and fuck her.
“I…”
Both of us looked at Charity, who seemed about ready to run away from us so fast that she’d leave a cloud of dust in her wake.
We waited expectantly for her to go on.
“I, um, just wanted to say that social media is on fire. It’s a global crash… it’s all anyone is talking about. There are a lot of people calling for your blood.”
I groaned and turned to kick my office chair, sending it rolling across the floor.
“But,” Charity went on, “There are a lot of people standing up for you! Some are talking about the charity work we’ve been involved with lately, and there are a lot of people who seem to resonate with the fact that you were just a normal guy who fell into a lot of money.”
“Also,” she continued, “the attack in Vegas still seems to be getting you a lot of favor. That got me thinking that maybe there was something to that, so I started floating the idea that the Vegas attack and this collapse are connected. My friends in the influencer space are running with it… hard.”
I looked back at Helen and Erin, who both looked mildly shocked.
“I mean… half the groundwork had already been laid.”
“You thought up a plausible conspiracy theory and spread it to try to buy Marcus the trust of the public?” Erin asked.
“Um…”
“Brilliant!” I said, happy to embrace a small ray of sunshine.
“I mean, I don’t know that it’s a conspiracy theory if it’s true.” She glanced between all of us. “It is true, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. Amber had been there to warn me of Hiro’s attack in exchange for most of the stuff Hiro wanted, but there had to be a connection between Hiro and her. Carla had implied that Amber’s visit to Hiro the night before the board meeting was what swayed him to vote against Chandler and me. Amber was probably there to get me to give up things on Hiro’s behalf before Hiro decided to go nuclear on me.
“Psalter’s here,” Chloe said.
All four of us turned to look in the direction of the door, where Henry stood. The look on his face was dour as he held up a small piece of luggage that reminded me of an old-time doctor’s medicine bag.
“I came here in hopes of smuggling you out of New York, but it looks like I came too late.” He glanced at Chloe. “Security tells me that neither you nor any of your staff are leaving your secured floors. Is this true?”
“Yep,” Chloe said before I could get a chance to respond. “Could be two days. It could be two months. Too early to tell.”
“Fair enough,” Henry said, setting the bag down by the door. Then he started to remove his jacket.
“I once spent a summer in Hong Kong, where I rented a room from a Polish fellow who fled his country before the Iron Curtain fell. He made it into Western Germany, which was an amazing feat in and of itself, but the BND caught him before he even made it a quarter of a mile. As with everyone caught crossing the wall, he was detained. Unfortunately for Filip, his family was well connected to the administration in the Polish People’s Republic, which meant detainment and interrogation.”
Psalter chuckled. “Due to the nature of Filip’s connections, they kept him in some office in an old, abandoned hotel so they could keep it well guarded secret. Between interrogations, he could be left on his own for days at a time.
Two months in relative isolation… people talk about it as if it’s torture. Filip found it rather civilized, actually. He called it a sabbatical with bad room service.
He said the trick was to make it his. Day one, he liberated a broom from the custodian’s closet and used the bristles to brew a kind of ersatz tea. Day three, he’d negotiated with one of the guards for contraband reading material—Greek tragedies and a stack of Playboys from 1979. He developed a sort of parasocial attachment to Ursula Buchfellner… Miss August, I believe. He didn’t know it at the time, but she’d been murdered just a few years earlier.” He shook his head. “A shame, really.”
“He told me that by week two, he was teaching mice to respond to rock music; by week three, they preferred Peter Gabriel to Phil Collins.
He invented a game called Diplomacy in a Bucket. It involves tossing bottle caps into a pail and declaring war on yourself if you miss.
At one point, one of the members of the BND came to check on him and asked if he was going mad.”
Psalter put a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Filip told him, ‘No, Harold, I’ve simply discovered the exquisite company of my own mind. You should try it sometime… though start with a weekend, it’s an acquired taste.’”
And then he walked past me to take a seat in Emily’s chair.
I blinked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Filip had mice and an unrequited love for Miss Buchfellner. You have…” he glanced at the ladies, then back at me, “considerably more. I would count my blessings.”
Jesus Christ. Helen was bad enough. I didn’t need a lecture on cold pragmatism from Psalter as well.
“Thanks,” I said flatly. “Please tell me you’ve got some good news for me.”
“I do,” Psalter said, removing his glasses to clean them. “Ashlee VanCamp.”
That piqued my interest, and I wasn’t the only one.
“You did?” Erin asked.
“Indeed, and I imagine you’ll be as surprised as I was when you learn who she’s been spending time with.”
“Who?” I demanded.
“Tyler Gerrard.”
Psalter was right. I hadn’t seen that coming, so I had no words.
I turned to look at Helen…
Who looked as surprised as I felt.
“I-I had no idea,” she said. “Marcus, you—”
“I believe you,” I cut her off.
Back to Palter, “You saw her?”
He put his glasses back on. “One of my men did. He tailed your brother after he left your aunt’s house yesterday.”
I was torn between caring a lot about Ashlee’s whereabouts being rediscovered and not caring at all. After all, I had bigger fish to fry. Still… I was curious. “How long do you think they’ve been together?”
“I had someone I know who works for Tyler’s cell phone provider. Funny little man. Only does things for me if I can manage to find certain obscure media.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his own story.
“Anyway, he says that Tyler and Miss VanCamp have been in communication for months.”
“Months!?” I looked back at Helen. “Since before we met?
She shook her head. “Again, Marcus, I didn’t know. It’s not like Ashlee and I ever had a close relationship.”
“It was this past spring,” Psalter said.
Something clicked into place, and it suddenly seemed like the floor was going to fall out from underneath me. Even though I should have known better, I felt betrayed.
I remembered having coffee with Ashlee that one time…
I vaguely remember telling her about Natalie.
I’m interested in someone else, and while we haven’t had an official talk, I don’t think I should be making more notches in my bedpost.
She seemed a little too interested in hearing about Natalie. At the time, I’d chalked it up to jealousy…
“So nothing is set in stone?” she asked. “With this mystery girl? Does she know what you’re doing with my mom?”
“Marcus, I’m really good, and I would treat you so well. If you just gave me a try…
Or, maybe she’d been interested for different reasons. Fuck… had she actually been into me at all?
No… she’d come with me to Vegas. Why would she do that if she wasn’t interested in me? Tyler and Natalie had already started dating by then.
It didn’t add up, but at the same time, my theory kind of made sense.
“I think Ashlee is the reason Tyler knew about Natalie.”
“That fucking bitch!” Erin spat.
Helen groaned.
“Wait… this is Helen’s daughter?” Charity asked, looking perplexed.
“Step,” Helen emphasized. “Step-daughter.”
“She was one of the people we suspected of bugging the office early on. You remember… when we grilled Bobbi?”
“How could I forget?” Helen said, with a hint of warmth to her words, soured by the idea that we had been hard on Bobbi for something Ashlee might have done.
“What you’re suggesting is possible,” Psalter said. “From what I understand, your grandfather was known to philander from time to time, and occasionally, the woman was someone influential whom he used for political or social machinations. Like his grandfather, Tyler has been known to go through quite a few female partners. I believe your father had a similar habit.”
He glanced at Chloe, leaning against the wall, stoic as always, “I believe all the Gerrard men have a weakness for beautiful women, but have also learned that the right ones can be a tremendous asset. For the lips of a woman are as honey, but her feet lead to death, and her path to hell.”
“Shakespeare?” I asked.
“Proverbs,” Psalter said.
I nodded, growing quiet, letting all his information sink in. I kept going over the last time I saw Ashlee. She’d been in this very house, going on and on about some guy. At the time, I thought it was her father, but what if she’d been talking about my brother?
Did my brother know where Roger VanCamp was?
I swatted at the air. “Fuck! I can’t deal with this right now! We have way more important things to focus on at the moment. Just please tell me you’ve got some information on Rajesh’s death. I don’t need that biting me in the ass, too.”
“I brought the coroner’s report.” Psalter nodded at the bag he’d brought me. “I’ll save you from having to read it, though. He was found hanging in his room, but he did not die of strangulation or a broken neck.”
“No other injuries on the body?”
Psalter shook his head.
“Poison?” Helen asked.
“The toxicology report came back negative.”
“So did Colin Gerrard’s first toxicology report,” Chloe said.
“Could this have been the same poison that murdered my grandfather?” I asked.
“With the current information we have, I can’t say for certain,” Psalter said.
If it was the same poison, then maybe Tanaka had killed Colin Gerrard, which meant that Tanaka hadn’t just had a beef with me, but my grandfather. Was Tanaka really that butt-hurt over what happened at the board meeting, or was there something more going on?
It was all so messy… so unclear
“Can you find out for sure?” I asked Psalter.
“Given a few more days, perhaps,” he said. “This is a high-profile case, though. Getting that sort of access won’t be easy… or cheap.”
I winced at that. “My funds… they’re a little tied up at the moment.”
“So I gathered,” Psalter said. “Don’t worry. I have my own discretionary budget. You can compensate me at your earliest convenience.”
“So, you’re not jumping ship?”
“You’re paid up until January. You won’t have to worry about me ‘jumping ship’ until then.”
“Thanks,” I said, a tinge of bitterness at the way he’d said it. I liked Psalter. His stories were fun, he was effective, and we got on well. It was only at times like this that I remembered that, at the end of the day, he was just an employee whose loyalty I’d bought.
It was a cynical way of looking at it, but it was true.
“My pleasure. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to attend to.”
“I’ll walk with you,” Chloe said as Psalter grabbed his coat and shrugged it on. “I have a few questions for you.”
“I have to make a few calls as well,” Helen said, holding up her phone.
“Tell your daughter I said ‘hi.’” There was quite a bit of sharpness to my tone.
“Step-daughter,” Helen reminded me, “and I’m not talking to her. She stepped out of the office with her phone to her ear, and I heard her business-like murmur fade as she walked away.
“I’m going to see what I can do about this campaign,” Charity said. “By the way… I tried to call Karly, but she didn’t answer. I’m a little concerned that she might have lost interest since all this went down.”
“I can’t say I blame her,” I said. “Thanks.”
Charity came over to me to give me a kiss—one on the mouth… soft and lingering. “Don’t worry,” she murmured as she broke the kiss, staring up at me with her lovely almond eyes. “We’ll get through this.”
I gave her a weak smile. “Thanks.”
Then she left me alone with Erin.
I dropped onto the couch, feeling hopeless. I didn’t know what to do. I was literally a prisoner in my own home… likely with people who wanted to kill me right outside the door. My finances had taken a big hit. People were threatening to sue me. Charity was doing her damndest to fight a battle to keep the public from turning on me.
A tumbler full of brown liquid came into view, fingers with black fingernails holding the rim. I looked up to see Erin staring down at me, a look of cool concern painted on her features.
“Thought you could use a drink, boss.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking it from her.
“Noooo problem,” Erin said, dropping onto the couch beside me, her own tumbler in hand. Sitting on the other side of her was the decanter. She’d brought it with her.
I threw back the drink, and she did the same before pouring us both another. We sat in silence, shoulder-to-shoulder, drinking as we let the entire situation sink in.
“Hey, Erin,” I said after my third finger of alcohol. “What if I lost all my money tomorrow?”
“Huh?” my assistant asked, not quite understanding what I was getting at.
“Psalter,” I said. “That stuff about having paid up until January. It got me thinking…”
“Oh,” Erin said. She looked back down at her tumbler thoughtfully.
“Would you still be with me?”
She didn’t respond.
I couldn’t blame her. Money had summoned her to my side. Money is what kept her here. If I lost all of it, it made sense that she would disappear the same way Psalter would. Her silence didn’t exactly feel good, but at least it was honest.
I wondered if any of them would stay with me.
Would Helen? She had no husband. No home. If YPV lost me as a client, Karl and William would likely find some way to muscle her out. The only reason she’d made partner was because I demanded it—in exchange for my continued patronage. Carl was a prideful man. Without me applying pressure, I was sure he’d exert his will.
Still, Helen had to have a decent amount of money by now. She’d be fine, even if she didn’t have a job or a home.
All of them would be, really—except maybe Bobbi. She’d been working a dead-end job and living a dead-end life. I didn’t want to paint myself as some kind of savior for her, but I had a pretty good feeling that if she lost me, she’d slip back into her shady ways.
I was pretty certain, though, that she’d go wherever I went.
Or perhaps… wherever Helen went.
Erin was the only one I hadn’t been sure about. But I guess now, I had a pretty good idea.
Speaking of friends, I picked up my phone as Erin poured another drink. There were a lot of missed calls—over a hundred, in fact. My mom. My dad. Richie. Dillon. Jonah. Kwan. Rose…
Twenty-six missed calls from Astrid. God damn.
And, of course, eleven from Natalie.
I needed to call her back more than anyone else. She didn’t deserve being ignored—especially when I was relatively sure that if I lost my fortune tomorrow, Natalie would still… stick with me.
Loyalty. That counted for a lot in the “pro” column for Natalie being a girlfriend.
“I should probably call them back—”
A fierce kiss from Erin cut off my words. Her dainty hand cupped my cheek, and I could feel the faintest whimper vibrate against my mouth.
There was no tongue. This wasn’t that kind of kiss. It was soulful—sincere, and full of need.
We kept at it, lips sliding, hers catching my bottom lip to tug, massage, wrestle. Every pause came with a needy little hiccup—a quiet gasp of air, just enough to survive before diving back into the ocean of heat and hunger.
She slid onto my lap with almost supernatural grace, straddling me. Her tiny ass settled perfectly as she wrapped her arms around my neck and kept kissing me. The taste of her lipstick smeared across my lips was intoxicating, and the floral scent of her shampoo was all I could smell.
And then she broke the kiss.
She didn’t move away—she stayed close, her forehead pressed to mine, eyes closed as she breathed deeply.
Finally, her lashes fluttered open. She looked at me through that heavy, molten gaze, still breathing hard.
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” she whispered.
I laid my hands on her impossibly slender waist, stroking gently. “Okay.”
She kept staring—slow blinks, heavy breathing. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t the most satisfying answer, but somehow it made my heart swell more than knowing Natalie would never leave my side. Erin’s answer felt… real.
“I understand.”
“You think you do.” She shook her head, a faint smile curving her lips. “You don’t.”
“Then tell me,” I said, confused.
“Take me on my date first,” she murmured. “Then maybe I will.”
“I will,” I said. “First chance I get.”
She tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and nodded—then guided my hands between her legs.
I felt the steady click of my zipper as it slid down, opening my fly. Her dainty fingers slipped inside and fished out my cock. It wasn’t particularly hard, so it came free easily.
Something about this time felt different—not bad, just… different.
“I—We don’t have to—”
“I want to,” she interrupted, quiet but confident.
Her cool fingers wrapped around me and began to stroke. Despite everything—the exhaustion, the mess, the uncertainty—I felt myself start to stir. That old hunger, stretching and waking.
By now, Erin could’ve turned me on in her sleep. In less than a minute, I was nearly at full length, thanks to skimming knuckles, grazing fingertips… lips on mine.
We started necking heavily as she lifted her hips and guided the head of my cock to her moist, waiting cunt. As soon as I felt the head lodge between her lips, she slid down with practiced ease.
Her breath came out in a ragged little gasp against my mouth as I sank fully into her.
And then we were joined once again.
Most of our fucks had been fun, frenzied romps—some even borderline romantic. This one felt different. Like it needed to be savored, just in case it was our last.
I knew things might get tougher moving forward… tougher than normal.
That seemed absurd, considering Vegas and Norway.
But back then, I’d only had a few assholes mad at me. Now it felt like it was nearly the entire world.
Somehow, Erin made all that matter a fraction less as she stared down at me, slowly riding me.
She gave a gentle smile, reached for her glass and the decanter. Still moving on me, she poured another drink, downed it, then filled one for me.
And that’s how we continued—sharing a tumbler of brown as we fucked slow, not knowing what tomorrow might bring.
I’m not sure how long we stayed like that. It felt like forever. I remember her coming twice… but I don’t recall getting there myself.
The alcohol got to me first… and then unconsciousness.
Blessed unconsciousness.
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