Chapter 4: Climax
The ache was a deep, lasting purple, a bone-deep throb that made sitting an ordeal for weeks. I ignored the business card from Leo, its edges fraying on my nightstand, and let Arthur’s calls go to voicemail until his messages shifted from casual to concerned. “David, you’re worrying me,” his recorded voice said, a soft crackle of static. “Just let me see you. No expectations.”
I deleted the message, then his contact, the digital erasure a flimsy barricade against the crawling memory of his hands, his voice, the shocking intimacy of being filled. The phantom scent of sandalwood in my sheets made me gag, a visceral recoil that twisted my gut. I needed something clean, something simple and straight, to scour the feeling of those older men from my skin. At a dim dive bar that weekend, I spotted her—tall, blonde, a riot of color swirling up her arms, her laughter cutting through the jukebox’s drone. I bought her a shot, my smile a practiced, convincing thing, and let the electric brush of her fingers against mine promise a different kind of oblivion.
“So, what’s your damage?” she asked, her voice a smoky rasp, accepting the tequila. Krissy was tall with piercing blue eyes that held the bar’s neon light, a stunner whose ink-covered arms told silent, fierce stories. The clatter of pool balls, the murmur of other conversations, it all dissolved into a dull hum behind the specific gravity of her presence. I forgot my long-distance girlfriend, the sticky penthouse leather, Arthur’s disappointed voicemails, everything talking to her. My knee bumped hers beneath the table, a new anchor point, as I leaned in to catch her next words.
“Damage?” I echoed, the word catching in my throat like a fishbone. Her shrug was a masterpiece of casual grace, the tattoos on her shoulders shifting. “Everyone in a place like this is running from something, handsome.” The neon light caught the silver hoop in her nose, and for a second I saw not her, but the glint of a steel collar ring. “My shift at the Velvet ended an hour ago,” she said, finishing her drink with a decisive tap of glass on wood. She stood, her hand finding mine, her grip firm and sure as she led me out into the damp night, my heart hammering a confused rhythm of relief and terror.
The cab’s vinyl seat stuck to my thighs, the city lights streaking past the window in wet smears of color that couldn’t compete with the electric vibration of her leg pressed against mine. “You’re quiet,” Krissy said, her voice a low hum in the dark, her fingers tracing the ink on her own wrist. I wanted to tell her about the silence that had taken root in me after the penthouse, a hollowed-out thing, but the words were buried under the weight of trying to be someone new for her. Her building was a narrow brick walk-up wedged between a bodega and a vacant lot, the stairwell smelling of cumin and mildew, each step upward a conscious leaving. At her door, she fumbled with her keys, the metallic jangle the only sound in the hallway, before pushing it open to reveal a space strung with fairy lights and dominated by a huge, unmade bed.
She kicked the door shut with her heel, the slam echoing in the small space, and turned to me, her eyes scanning my face in the dim, twinkling light. “You look like you’re thinking too much,” she murmured, her fingers hooking into the belt loops of my jeans and pulling me close. HER 5-FOOT-10 INCH BODY WAS INCREDIBLE, TAN AND CUT. I DOVE INTO IT LIKE A GOURMET STEAK COVERED IN BUTTER, my mouth finding the salted skin of her neck, my hands gripping the solid muscle of her waist as if she were the only real thing left in the world. She tasted of sweat, sweet perfume, and the promise of a forgetting so complete it felt like violence.
My hands fumbled with the button of her jeans, the denim rough under my fingers, a tangible barrier I was desperate to cross. I pushed the fabric down over her hips, my mouth already watering at the sight of her, and lowered her onto the edge of the bed. I dropped to my knees on the hard floor, the position feeling like both worship and penance, and looked up at her. I DECIDED I WAS GOING TO EAT HER PUSSY FIRST UNTIL SHE HAD AN ORGASM. I spread her lips with my thumbs, the musky, intimate scent of her filling my head, and leaned in to taste the stark, salty reality of her.
My tongue dove into her wetness, a frantic and seeking thing, before zeroing in on the swollen bud of her clit. “Just like that, you fucking genius,” she groaned, her hips rising off the bed to meet my mouth’s assault. I buried my face deeper, my mouth locked on her pussy, tongue lashing her clit with a brutal, unbroken rhythm until her whole body seized and a broken scream announced her orgasm. She trembled through the aftershocks, her hand smacking the mattress beside her head. “God damn, kid,” she breathed, impressed and ecstatic, a wide, sloppy grin spreading across her flushed face.
She grabbed two fistfuls of my hair and yanked me up by them, her kiss tasting of my own actions. “My turn,” she growled against my mouth, her hands shoving me backward onto the mattress.
I fumbled with my belt, my jeans, everything feeling too slow and clumsy, until I was naked and hard before her. She straddled my hips in one smooth motion, her warmth hovering just above me, a maddening inch of air between my aching cock and her soaked entrance. “You got a rubber?” she asked, her voice a low, practical rasp in the dark.
“No,” I breathed, the word leaving me in a rush of pure, reckless want. She didn’t hesitate. She reached between her legs, took my shaft in her hand, and guided me up into her with a single, slow, sinking descent that stole the air from my lungs.
HE FUCKS HER BAREBACK. The fit was impossibly tight, a hot, velveteen clutch that erased every other sensation, every memory of being stretched and used. HER WET PUSSY SENDS HIM INTO EUPHORIA. Each deep, rocking stroke was a cleanse, a baptism in her raw, gasping heat, her inner muscles gripping me with a rhythmic, demanding pulse that had nothing to do with performance.
I clutched her hips, my fingers pressing into her tattooed skin, driving up into that sublime, slick furnace. “Fuck, yes, right there,” she chanted, her head thrown back, breasts swaying, her nails scoring my chest with bright lines of pain-pleasure. This was different, dominant, a claiming that made my vision blur at the edges. I felt powerful, needed, real.
HE FEELS LIKE A MAN. The thought was a clean, sharp truth that cut through the ghosts of the penthouse, through Arthur’s complicated tenderness. With every slam of my hips, every guttural groan she pulled from my throat, I was reforged into something simple and stark. This was the script I knew, the validation I understood, and as her contractions began to milk me toward my own devastating release, I believed it completely.
SHE RIDES HIM HARD. Her hips became a punishing piston, slamming down onto my shaft with a force that drove the air from my lungs in sharp, ragged grunts. The bedframe cracked a raw, rhythmic protest against the wall with every descent, a brutal clock marking this new, animal transaction.
“Take it, you fuck,” she snarled, her voice shredded, her perfect tits swaying wildly, her sweaty palms planted on my chest for leverage. The moist, clenched heat of her was relentless, a friction so intense it bordered on pain, and I watched her face contort above me, a stranger chasing her own end. My fingers dug into the hard muscle of her thighs, seeking purchase, but she was in control, a blonde storm using me as her anchor, and the power I’d felt moments ago dissolved into pure, raw sensation.
Arthur’s gentle, probing kisses felt like a poison now, a weak and complicated lie compared to this brutal, honest sweat. Each brutal slam of her body was a hammer blow driving the memory of the penthouse, of the collar, of the condom-filled trash can, deeper into a black, silent place inside me. “I’m gonna come again,” she gasped, the words hitting me like spit, and her cunt began to convulse around my pounding cock in violent, fluttering spasms.
The sensation tore a broken sound from my throat, part agony, part surrender, and my own climax detonated, a scalding flood that felt less like pleasure and more like a system failure. I emptied into her in pulsing, helpless jets, my vision whiting out, but she didn’t stop, milking me dry with relentless, grinding circles of her hips until it was borderline torture. Finally, she stilled, slumped forward, her sweat-damp skin sticking to mine, and the room condensed back into the smell of sex and cheap detergent.
We lay there, stuck together, breathing in ragged unison. “Hell of a ride,” she muttered into my shoulder, her voice already drifting toward sleep. I felt so connected to her. Our bodies mingled perfectly.
She chuckled, a low, raspy sound that vibrated through my chest. “You okay down there?” I could only nod against her skin, breathing in the truth of her.
We didn’t leave her bed for two days, surviving on delivery pizza and the canned sweetness of flat soda, the world beyond her fairy-lit walls ceasing to matter. We fucked in the grey morning light, her riding me slowly until we both shuddered into a quiet, sweating pile, lessons of failure discarded like candy wrappers across the sheets.
“Tell me something real,” she’d say sometimes, tracing the scars from old cleats on my knee, and I’d offer her sanitized scraps of my athletic past, my grandmother’s Dutch recipes, anything but the penthouse or Arthur’s sandalwood scent. In return, she gave me stories of the Velvet’s stage, the weight of strange eyes on her skin, and I found a perverse kinship in her professional stripping and my polluted recognition and consented to be a “toy”; we had both learned to commodify our bodies for the use of people uncertain irrelevant.
Mornings were for slow, grinding hangover sex, her back against my chest, my cock slipping into her from behind with a wet, tired ease as we watched dust motes swim in the window light. “Just like that,” she’d murmur, her voice gravelly with sleep, pushing her ass back against me, and I’d move in a deep, languid rhythm, chasing a comfort that felt thinner each time.
Afternoons were savage, against the wall by the door, my hands gripping her ass, lifting her, her legs locking around my waist as I hammered up into her with a violence that felt borrowed. “Fuck, yes, use that athlete’s body,” she’d snarl, her head cracking against the drywall minutes later, her cunt squeezing my shaft in rhythmic, demanding pulses as I emptied into her yet again. We barely spoke beyond the filthy lexicon of the act.
We barely spoke beyond the filthy lexicon of the act, but on Friday night she announced we were going out. “You’re looking at me like I’m a ghost,” she said, applying liquid liner with a surgeon’s precision. “Time to see how the other half breathes.”
WE WENT OUT TO DINNER AND CLUBS. The restaurant was all dim lighting and whispered conversations, a world away from my thrift-store couch. I watched her dissect a scallop, her wrist flicking with a controlled grace that reminded me of a painter, not a stripper. “What?” she asked, catching my stare, a slow smile spreading. “Never seen a girl eat before?” Later, at the club’s velvet rope, her entire being shifted. WHEN SHE WALKED INTO A CLUB ALL DECKED OUT AND IN HEELS THE EYES WERE ALL OVER HER. The sea of people parted for her, a current of turned heads and muted whispers following the sway of her hips in that tight black dress. SHE WAS ELITE. A man in a tailored suit offered her a drink without her asking, his gaze hungrily tracing her neckline, and she took it with a nod that was neither thanks nor promise, just cool acknowledgement. I followed, a satellite in her orbit, feeling both proud and utterly invisible.
Back at her place, the club’s bass still thrummed in my teeth. She pushed me against the door, her mouth hot and tasting of gin, her hands rough as they shoved my shirt open. “You liked that, didn’t you?” she breathed, her teeth scraping my earlobe. “Seeing them all want what you get to wreck.” It wasn’t a question. Her fingers dug into my belt, yanking it loose, and she sank to her knees, taking my cock deep into her throat in one swift, punishing motion. I gasped, my head thudding back against the door, the image of those jealous eyes in the club fracturing into the raw, wet suction of her mouth. She worked me with a violent expertise, her throat fluttering around my length, her eyes locked on mine with a defiant challenge. “Gonna come for me, college boy?” she gagged, pulling off with a slick pop, her lips glistening. I pulled her up, spun her around, and pushed her face-first into the wall, hiking her dress up around her waist. I thrust into her from behind, no preamble, the bite of the zipper on my jeans cold against her skin. Each slam was a punctuation mark on the night, a physical claim against the phantom eyes still watching her, my sweat mingling with the club’s perfume on her neck. “Yeah, fuck, that’s it,” she chanted, her voice a broken thing against the plaster, and I knew I wasn’t fucking her, but every man who’d looked at her, and every memory of who I’d been before.
I came inside her with a final, wrenching thrust, my release hot and endless as it pulsed into her clutching depths. We slumped against the wall, breathing in ragged unison, the taste of her sweat and my own exhaustion metallic on my tongue. "Jesus," she whispered, her body still trembling against mine.
Days bled into weeks in her apartment, a haze of smoke and skin and the constant, wet sound of our bodies connecting. One morning, she didn't reach for me when the sun cut through the blinds. She was staring at the ceiling, one hand absently resting on her stomach.
"I'm late," she said, the words flat and heavy in the quiet room. The club's perfume had long faded from her skin, replaced by something sharper, more anxious. "Late?" I echoed, propping myself up on an elbow, the sheet sticking to my damp chest.
"For my period, you idiot." She turned her head, her blue eyes clear and unnervingly calm. "It's never late."
The air tightened around us, squeezing out all the casual noise of the city outside. I thought of Arthur's warning about consequences, buried under deleted voicemails, and the raw, unprotected loads I'd left in her over and over. "Oh wow," I breathed, the word a dry leaf in my throat.
"Yeah," she said, sitting up, the tattoos on her back stretching with the movement. "I took a test this morning while you were sleeping." She reached over to the nightstand, pulled a small plastic stick from the drawer, and tossed it onto my lap.
Two stark pink lines stared up at me, a verdict written in chemical code. Her hand found mine, her grip firm, and she said, "So, what now, college boy?"
The two lines on the plastic stick seemed to pulse like a sick, binary heartbeat. All the raw, sweaty hours in her bed crystallized into this single, terrible fact. My mouth went dry as burnt paper.
“So, what now, college boy?”
Her voice was steady, but her fingers were cold around mine. The silence expanded, filled with the ghosts of Arthur’s disappointed sighs and the penthouse’s echoing grunts. I saw my father’s rigid disappointment, my girlfriend’s confused tears three states away, the entire architecture of the life I was supposed to be building crumbling to dust.
A wild, tectonic pressure built in my chest, a need to outrun all of it. I squeezed her hand too tight, the words erupting in a frantic, jagged torrent before I could cage them. “LET’S GET MARRIED. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU. FOR REAL. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE SELF.” I said, the declaration too loud for the sunlit room. “I LOVE YOUR TOES, YOUR LIPS, YOUR QUIRKY JOKES. GOD DAMNIT, I LOVE YOU.”
I searched her stunned face for an answer, any answer, as my own words echoed back at me, crazy and insane. I meant it all. I was deeply in love with her.
I was deeply in love with her.
Krissy stared, her blue eyes wide, the two pink lines forgotten between us. A laugh burst from her, sharp and disbelieving, then died in her throat. “You’re fucking insane,” she whispered, but her hand didn’t pull away from mine.
Tears welled in her eyes, spilling over to cut tracks through the remains of last night’s makeup. “Don’t lie to me, David. Please, don’t you fucking lie.” Her voice cracked, raw with a hope she was clearly trying to strangle.
“I’m not lying,” I insisted, pulling her to me, feeling the warm, shocked dampness of her cheek against my neck. She shook in my arms, a quiet storm of sobs muffled against my skin.
“This is crazy,” she cried, her fists clutching my shoulders. “We’re a fucking mess.” She looked up, her gaze searching mine with a terrifying intensity.
“It’s not a lie,” I repeated, kissing her wet eyelids, her salty lips. “I love you.” She kissed me back, fierce and desperate, a clash of teeth and tongues that tasted of tears.
“I love you, too, you stupid bastard,” she gasped against my mouth, the admission erupting like something torn from her. She climbed onto my lap, her thighs framing my hips, and guided me back inside her with a single, sinking motion that felt like a vow.
We moved slowly now, a deep, weeping rhythm, our foreheads pressed together, sharing breath. Each thrust was an anchor, a promise whispered skin-to-skin, as the plastic test stick watched from the tangled sheets.