Chapter 9: Handjob is also art
The jasmine-scented candle on the nightstand had burned down to a nub, a silent hourglass marking the week since the Uber ride. Friday loomed, a massive, quiet thing in the room, making the ordinary feel performative. Their usual bedtime routines—brushing teeth, charging phones, the mundane ballet of domesticity—were now layered with a silent, electric awareness.
Imani emerged from the bathroom, skin still dewy from her shower, smelling of almond oil and her special sandalwood body butter. She wore nothing. The warm light from the bedside lamp loved her, gilding the curves of her hips, the full swell of her breasts, the smooth plane of her stomach.
Alexey was already in bed, propped against the headboard, trying to read a technical blog on his tablet. The words were a blur. He was tracking her movement in his periphery, the way she padded across the rug, the gentle sway of her assets. His own arousal was a constant, low-grade hum now, a background process that never fully terminated.
She slid into bed behind him, her body a line of heat against his back. She didn’t say anything at first. She just pressed herself close, her breasts flattening against his shoulder blades, her thighs slotting behind his. Her arm snaked around his waist, her hand finding his chest, fingers splaying over his sternum. He could feel her heartbeat, or maybe it was his own, a frantic bird trapped between them.
“You’re thinking about it,” she whispered into the space between his shoulder blades. Her breath was warm.
“I’m reading about quantum encryption,” he lied, his voice rough.
She laughed, a low, vibrating chuckle. Her hand drifted down, over the tense muscles of his abdomen, beneath the waistband of his boxer briefs. She found him already hard, straining against the cotton. “Liar. Your body always tells the truth.”
She coaxed him out, her touch firm and knowing. She began to stroke him, slowly, from behind. It was an intimate, vulnerable angle. He was exposed to the empty room, while she remained hidden, a ghost of sensation at his back. He dropped the tablet onto the comforter, his head falling back against her shoulder.
“You’re so ready,” she murmured, her lips brushing the shell of his ear. Her other hand came up, fingers lightly tracing the line of his jaw, turning his face toward her so she could kiss his neck. It was a soft, open-mouthed kiss that made him shudder. “All week, just thinking about it. About me in that hotel room. About him.”
Her pace was agonizingly slow. A long, deliberate pull from base to tip, her thumb swiping over the head to spread the bead of moisture that had gathered there. Then again. And again.
“My hand looks so small on you like this,” she observed, her tone conversational, almost clinical. She shifted her grip, wrapping her fingers around him completely, showing how her thumb and middle finger easily touched. “See? It’s cute. It’s perfect.”
Alexey groaned, a sound of pure surrender. Her words, so casually demeaning, sent a lightning bolt of shameful pleasure straight to his core. He trembled.
“You like that,” she said, not asking. She sped her hand up just a fraction, a subtle promise. “You like me talking about how I can hold all of you. How simple it is.” She kissed his neck again, sucking lightly, surely leaving a mark. “Marcus’s hands are bigger. You saw them. Strong. Builder’s hands. I wonder how much of him they’ll be able to hold.”
The image was instantaneous and vivid: Marcus’s larger, tanned hand wrapped around his own substantial thickness. The comparison was brutal and exhilarating.
Imani’s hand, still moving with that same relentless, slow rhythm, came up to his mouth. Her fingers were slick with him. “Taste,” she commanded softly.
He didn’t hesitate. He opened his mouth, and she slid two fingers inside. The taste was salty, musky, uniquely his own, but filtered through her skin. He sucked, his tongue lapping at her fingertips, cleaning them. It was a profoundly submissive act, and it made his hips buck involuntarily into her other hand.
“Good boy,” she breathed, her voice gone dark and smoky. She withdrew her fingers from his mouth and brought them back down, mingling his saliva with his precum, making the glide of her hand wetter, smoother, louder. The sound was obscene in the quiet room.
“You’re going to be so good for us on Friday,” she whispered, her teeth grazing his earlobe. “Just watching. Taking it all in. Seeing what I look like taking something so… substantial.” Her hand tightened. “I might make a sound you’ve never heard before. A real, shocked little sound. Right when he first pushes in. Because it’s going to be a lot, Lesha. It’s going to be so much.”
He was panting now, his fists clenched in the sheets. The climb was steep and terrifying. He was balanced on a knife’s edge, torn between the visceral need to finish and the desperate desire to live inside this tortured, exquisite moment forever.
“And after,” she continued, her voice a hypnotic chant, “when he’s finished, and he pulls out, and I’m all messy and used and full… you’re going to come up to me. And you’re going to clean me with that wonderful, devoted tongue of yours. You’re going to taste him and me all mixed together. You’re going to own it. You’re going to make it ours again.”
The promise, the graphic, specific prophecy of it, was his undoing. A strangled cry tore from his throat. His orgasm ripped through him, intense and shuddering, spilling over her efficient, clever fingers.
She held him through it, milking every last pulse, her body a supportive cradle against his back. She didn’t stop whispering. “That’s it. Let it go. It’s just practice. A preview.”
When he was spent, hollowed out and trembling, she finally stilled her hand. She brought her fingers to his mouth again. They were coated, glistening. “Clean,” she said, gentler now.
He did, languidly, exhaustedly. The taste was stronger, more complex. He swallowed.
She wiped her hand finally on the sheets, then wrapped both arms around him, hugging him tightly from behind, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades. They stayed like that for long minutes, listening to each other’s breathing settle.
“Cicero,” he rasped into the quiet, testing the weight of the word.
She hugged him tighter. “Not yet,” she said. Her voice was small, a little awed. “But thank you for remembering.”
She shifted then, moving around him until she was facing him. She curled into his chest, her leg thrown over his hips, claiming him in a different way. She looked up at him, her eyes searching his. The playful provocateur was gone, replaced by the woman who loved him, who saw the tumult in his gaze.
“It’s just a thing,” she said, echoing her words from a week ago, but with less conviction. “A weird, hot, complicated thing. But it’s our weird thing.”
He kissed her forehead, unable to speak. The specter of Friday was in the bed with them now, a third presence, real and breathing. It had dimensions. It had a taste. It had the feel of her small, elegant hand, and the imagined grip of a larger, stronger one.
He blew out the candle, plunging them into darkness. In the black, the future felt closer than ever, a shared heartbeat away, terrifying and irresistible.
In the black, the future felt closer than ever, a shared heartbeat away, terrifying and irresistible. Then, it was morning.
A suffocating weight settled over his face, blunt and sudden, pulling him from a deep sleep into disoriented panic. The pressure was immense, a warm, smothering softness that blocked all light and filled his nostrils with a potent, musky-sweet scent. It was her ass, her perfect, full ass, planted directly over his mouth and nose.
He grunted, a muffled, animal sound of confusion. His hands came up instinctively, grasping at her thighs, but she was immovable. The room came into fractured focus. Gray dawn light. The steady click-click-click of a controller. A familiar PlayStation startup chime.
She was playing a game.
Imani sat on his face, her back to his head, her body draped toward the foot of the bed where the TV glowed. She was naked, one leg curled under her, the other stretched out. Her heels dug into the mattress on either side of his ribs, leveraging her weight, pushing his face deeper into the cleft of her cheeks. She shifted slightly, settling in.
“Morning, baby,” she said, her voice distant, preoccupied. The sound of a virtual gunfight erupted from the television. “Don’t mind me. Just a quick match.”
He couldn’t breathe. The intimacy was absolute and annihilating. His world was dark, warm, and composed entirely of her. He managed to turn his head a fraction, sucking in a ragged, desperate gasp of air that tasted of her skin and sleep.
A sharp pain exploded at the crown of his head. She had grabbed a fistful of his hair in her free hand—her other was busy with the controller—and yanked, hard. His skull was wrenched back into position, his nose and mouth buried firmly back in her flesh.
“Ah-ah,” she chided lightly, over the sound of digital explosions. “I didn’t say you could move.”
He moaned, the vibration against her earning a soft, absent sigh. This was different from the previous night’s tender domination. This was utilitarian, almost casual in its control. She was using him as furniture, an organic cushion, while her focus was elsewhere. The dissonance was breathtaking.
His lungs burned. He fought the instinct to buck her off, his hands squeezing her thighs. He tried to turn again, his body jerking in a primal fight for oxygen.
Yank. The pull on his hair was fiercer this time, a crisp correction. “Stay,” she commanded, her tone flat. The controller clicked madly. A victory fanfare played from the TV. “Good round,” she muttered to herself.
The cycle repeated. The ache for air would build to a panic. He’d twist, managing a choked, stifled inhale. She’d pull him back, effortlessly, her grip unrelenting. Each time she reseated him, the fit was more total, her body molding to his features. He was being shaped by her, branded by her.
Time lost meaning. It was measured in desperate, stolen gasps and the ruthless tugs that followed. In the soundtrack of gunfire and her occasional, soft curses or hums of satisfaction. In the growing, shameful, undeniable erection.
His consciousness narrowed to the physics of breath and the overwhelming sensory prison of her. The smoothness of her skin. The slight salt. The incredible, living weight of her. The sheer, boring normalcy of her playing a game.
“Finally,” she sighed, after an eternity. The controller clattered onto the nightstand. The television fell silent.
The pressure lifted. Cool air rushed over his wet, overheated face. He lay there, gasping, blinking tears from his eyes, his chest heaving. The room seemed too bright, too sharp.
Imani turned around on the bed, kneeling beside him. She looked down at his flushed, dazed face, her expression unreadable. She reached out and wiped his cheek with her thumb, then examined the moisture there.
“You’re all red,” she observed, her voice soft now. She traced his swollen lips. “And messy.”
He just stared up at her, his mind blank, his body humming with subjugation and wild, defiant arousal.
She leaned down, her breasts brushing his chest, and kissed him. It was deep and searching, her tongue claiming his mouth. She tasted his breath, the faint, residual taste of her own body on him. When she pulled back, her eyes were dark and focused, all earlier distraction gone.
“Two days,” she whispered, her nose brushing his. “That’s all. Just two days.”
She slid off the bed, walking naked toward the bathroom, leaving him wrecked and perfectly empty on the rumpled sheets. The PlayStation’s idle screen lit the room with a soft, silent blue glow.
He listened to the shower start. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum counting down.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum counting down. It syncopated with the patter of the shower from the other room, a mocking, normal sound. He tried to rub the phantom sensation of her from his face, but it was imprinted. His mouth still felt full, weighted.
“Lesha,” her voice cut through the steam, cheerful and bright. “Bring your towel.”
He pushed himself up, joints feeling stiff from the strange tension of lying so still. His earlier erection had softened into a dull, persistent throb. He found a clean towel, the terrycloth rough against his fingers, and walked to the bathroom. The air was thick and warm, fragrant with the expensive cedar-and-mint scent of her shampoo.
He pulled back the glass shower door. The sight of her, drenched and glowing under the rainfall showerhead, punched the air from his lungs. Water cascaded down the elegant slope of her back, beading on the taut curves of her ass, streaming in rivulets along the sculpted trenches of her spine. Her skin was a deep, rich brown, shining like wet stone in a river, magnificent and utterly alien to his childhood self’s understanding of beauty. He’d grown up in a sea of pale faces in Moscow; encountering someone like Imani had felt less like meeting a person and more like discovering a new, superior species.
“You’re just standing there,” she laughed, turning to face him. Water caught on her eyelashes, dripped from her chin onto her collarbones. Her nipples were dark and pebbled in the warm spray. Her gaze dropped. “And you’re thinking again. I can see it.”
“Get in,” she said, stepping back to make space. He dropped his towel and joined her. The water was almost too hot, a sharp, cleansing sting on his skin. She picked up a loofah, squirted a generous amount of her body wash onto it, and began to lather his chest. Her movements were gentle, methodical. She washed his shoulders, his arms, the back of his neck, as if he were something fragile.
Then her hand slid down his stomach. His body, predictably, reacted. She glanced at his hard-on, now tentatively resurfacing, and giggled—a genuine, goofy sound that echoed off the tiles. She gave it a playful, stinging slap with the flat of her wet hand.
“Still on duty,” she teased, shaking her head. “Relentless.” She soaped him there too, her touch clinical and thorough, before handing him the loofah. “Your turn.”
He took it, numbly. He started on her back, tracing the familiar geography of her shoulder blades, the knobs of her spine. She sighed, leaning into his touch, her head falling forward. He moved lower, over the perfect, rounded hemispheres that had so recently been his entire world. He washed them with a reverence that felt disconnected from the play-slap, from the morning’s casual tyranny.
“Mmmm,” she hummed. She turned, took the loofah from his hands, and placed his palms directly on her slick skin. “Just use your hands.”
He did. He soaped her front, gliding over the heavy swell of her breasts, circling her nipples, tracing the elegant line of her waist and the flare of her hips. She watched his face, her expression soft and curious. His hands moved on their own, committing her to a memory that felt suddenly precarious, like this version of her—glistening, yielding, his—was already slipping away.
“You’re memorizing me,” she stated quietly, not a question. Water streamed between them.
He couldn’t speak. His hands slid lower, over the smooth plane of her stomach, down to the neat triangle of dark, tightly coiled hair. He soaped her there too, his fingers slipping between her folds, and she gasped, her hips giving a small, reflexive jerk forward.
“Stop,” she whispered, but her hand covered his, pressing his fingers deeper into her. “No, don’t stop.” It was a conflict, a raw one, and her body won. She rocked against his hand for a few short, sharp seconds, chasing the sensation, before pulling his wrist away with a shuddering breath.
She turned off the water.
The sudden silence was stark, filled only with their breathing and the drip-drip from the showerhead. She stared at him, water clinging to her lashes, her expression unreadable. A tremor ran through her, a tiny aftershock from the conflict of her own command.
Then she blinked, and the moment shattered. “We’re gonna be late,” she said, and kissed his cheek with a smack. The sound was loud and ridiculous in the tiled enclosure.
Her hand darted out, not playful but punitive, and slapped his hard cock hard. The sting was immediate, electric. He yelped, jerking back against the cool glass.
She giggled, a bright, manic sound, and then kissed him fully on the lips. It was a deep, claiming kiss that tasted of mint and her own wet skin, a total contradiction to the slap still singing on his flesh. He was rigid with confusion, desire, and a sharp, sudden hurt.
She pulled away, yanked the shower door open, and stepped out into the steam-filled bathroom. “Towel me,” she commanded, not looking back.
He followed, dripping, his mind a white noise of sensation. He grabbed the towel and began to dry her, starting with her hair. He blotted the dark, tight coils carefully. He worked down her back, the cloth soaking up the water from her shoulders, the elegant dip of her spine. She stood perfectly still, arms slightly out, letting him serve.
He knelt to dry her legs, the taut calves, the delicate bones of her ankles. He was methodical, reverent. This part had rules. This part he understood.
When he finished, she took the damp towel from his hands and tossed it onto the counter. She didn’t dry him. She just turned and walked out of the bathroom, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood floor. She walked down the short hallway, past the bedroom, and into the open-plan kitchen, completely naked.
The morning sun streamed through the east-facing windows, laying a brilliant grid of light across the pale floor. She moved through it, a dark, glorious silhouette. She went to the coffee machine, her movements efficient and unhurried. She filled the reservoir with water, scooped beans into the grinder.
She knew perfectly well the effect her body had on him.
Alexey stood in the hallway, towel around his waist, watching her. The slap throbbed. The memory of her heel in his rib, her weight on his face, the panic for air—it all collided with the domestic normalcy of her making coffee. Her ass, the subject of his morning’s suffocation, was now just a beautiful part of her, catching the sun as she stretched to reach a mug from the high cabinet.
She was setting the stage, and he was the audience. Every sway, every bend, was a performance for his benefit. It was a power move so casual it was devastating.
The grinder roared, shattering the quiet. When it stopped, the normal sounds of their morning rushed in: the gurgle of the coffee brewing, the hum of the refrigerator, a distant lawnmower from a neighbor’s yard. It was Friday. Just Friday. A workday.
“You want oats or eggs?” she called over her shoulder, not turning. Her voice was utterly normal. Casual.
“Eggs,” he managed, his own voice sounding raw. He walked into the bedroom to dress, leaving her in her naked sunlit performance.
He put on gray slacks, a white button-down. Engineer clothes. He fastened his watch, the steel cool against his wrist. A shield. When he returned to the kitchen, she was at the stove, scrambling eggs in a pan. She had pulled on his discarded t-shirt from last night. It hung to her mid-thigh, swallowing her form, but the view from behind as she leaned over the stove was no less potent. The shirt rode up.
Two mugs of black coffee sat steaming on the island. He took his. The bitterness grounded him.
“Big meeting today?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the pan. She seasoned the eggs with a pinch of salt, a crack of pepper.
“Status update at ten,” he said. “Then code review. You?”
“Quarterly budget presentations all afternoon.” She divided the eggs onto two plates, handed him one. “Gonna be a soul-suck. I’ll need something fun to daydream about.”
She looked at him then, a slow, knowing smile. She picked up her fork, took a bite. She chewed, watching him. The subtext was a physical weight in the room.
They ate standing at the island, the way they often did. The silence wasn’t comfortable. It was charged, brittle. Every clink of a fork on ceramic was amplified. He was acutely aware of the two-day countdown, now measured in hours. It felt like a boulder perched on the roof, creaking, ready to fall through the ceiling.
She finished first, rinsed her plate, and placed it in the dishwasher. “I’ve got a hairdresser appointment after work,” she said, wiping her hands on the t-shirt. “Something a little… different. For tomorrow.”
He nodded, sipping his coffee. The liquid was cooling, turning acidic. “Different how?”
“You’ll see,” she said, her smile turning secretive. She came around the island, stopped in front of him. She took his coffee mug from his hands and set it aside. She straightened his collar, her fingers brushing his neck. “Just a little update. A refresh.”
Her touch was gentle, wifely. It clashed violently with the memory of her fingers in his hair, pulling. He couldn’t reconcile the two women. Maybe there was no reconciliation. Maybe they just existed in parallel, the tender girlfriend and the casual tyrant, and his job was to accept both.
“Tonight,” she said, her voice dropping. “Let’s just be quiet.No protocol. No prep. Just us. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, because what else was there to say?
She went to get dressed. He heard the soft thuds of drawers opening and closing, the whisper of fabric. He stayed in the kitchen, staring at the empty plate, the sunlit floor where her footprints had already evaporated.
She emerged fifteen minutes later in a fitted navy blazer and cream silk trousers, her hair in a sleek, high ponytail. She looked like a weapon. She picked up her leather tote, slid her laptop inside.
“Ready?” she asked.
They took her car. She drove, one hand resting lightly on the gear shift. The radio played a pop song he didn’t recognize. They didn’t speak. He watched the sun-bleached stucco buildings of San Diego slide by, the palm trees standing sentinel in the median. It was all so ordinary, so Californian, so far from the dark, intimate theatre of their bathroom, their bedroom.
She pulled up outside his office building. He leaned over to kiss her goodbye, a peck on the cheek.
She turned her head at the last second, catching his lips with hers. It was soft, lingering. Her hand came up and cupped his jaw. “Cicero,” she whispered against his mouth, the safe word a gentle puff of air. A reminder. An anchor.
Then she let him go. “Love you,” she said, her eyes serious.
“Love you,” he echoed, and got out of the car.
He stood on the curb and watched her car merge into traffic, a sleek blue arrow disappearing into the stream of the ordinary day. The word “Cicero” echoed in his skull, a talisman against the boulder’s fall.
He walked into the cool, sterile lobby of his building, nodded at the security guard, scanned his badge. The elevator doors closed on his reflection: a man in a white shirt, gray pants, his face a careful blank.
Upstairs, at his desk, he opened his code editor. The lines of text were a familiar, logical sanctuary. He could get lost in the syntax, the clean problem-solving of it. For a few hours, he could pretend tomorrow wasn’t a hotel suite, a keycard, a man with swimmer’s shoulders and an eight-inch implementation plan.
He typed. The clock on his screen read 9:14 AM.
Forty-five hours to go.