Bass-Ackwards Read online

  In fact …

  She moved her efforts lower, drawing one of his balls into her mouth. This earned her a growl, and she suckled, stroking him for more.

  The male scent of him tickled her nose, along with curling hair. He had the musk of a man who’d worked all day, but no more than that. Somewhere beneath her skirt, that primal cue had her swelling. Growing slick.

  Goddamnit, no.

  But she was way too far down the path now. She took him to the entrance of her throat and held him. Pulled off and did it again. Again. The tacky spit at the back of her tongue lubricated the head, and more was pooling in the valley where his cock joined his balls.

  When she rose away this time, she did look at him. Wide eyes, open mouth, so he could watch every inch of himself slide out from between her lips in the early evening light. A thin string of saliva drew out between her tongue and his glistening cockhead, and she let it hang there for a moment before leaning in to lick it away, never dropping her stare.

  The look on his face was priceless. Asshole Bill Marshall with his guard down. Slack-jawed and a slave to his manhood. Deep brown eyes rapt. When he didn’t look like he was about to say something blunt, her boss was actually kind of—

  No. Uh-uh. Nope.

  —hot.

  Christina dove down for more, under the pretense of having it over with sooner. Telling herself so many lies. She was not, in no way, never could be, sucking this cock because she liked it. Her own sounds came from effort, not arousal. Her pussy weeping had nothing to do wi—

  “Stop.”

  She blinked.

  “Mm?” Looked up at him.

  “Stop.”

  She pulled back, completely lost.

  Self-control had put his every feature back to their normal, inscrutable places. Christina felt something slipping out of her grasp.

  “Put your hands behind your back.”

  Her heart jerked past a beat without asking.

  “W-what?”

  “You heard me.”

  She did, too. Her whole body heard him. Nipples tightened. Gooseflesh broke out on her thighs, her breasts. Panties felt cool against her lips, too damp now for their own good.

  This way, too. Damn this asshole, he was hot this way, too. She’d just never had the context for it.

  Her left arm went back, and then her right. She held one wrist in the other. Waited.

  Bill inhaled and exhaled at the speed of torture. Stuck his thumbs under the waistband of his jeans, one hand on each hip. Raised a dark brow at her.

  “Again.”

  Heat flooded between her legs. Christina leaned forward and gave him what he wanted.

  It was not such an easy task, with the way dicks tended to point at stomachs, but she got him in her mouth and went back to work. She had no hands to help her now, and there was a lot more bobbing, a lot more play in her neck. The only weapons she had now were suction, tongue, and depth. For about ten seconds, she used them all.

  Then there was a hand in her hair. A fist.

  She stopped again, mouth full. Raised her eyes. He kept his grip and filled her some more.

  This time it was slow. Plumb and draw, no stopping in the cycle. Christina let herself gag when he pushed deep, and watched his jaw tighten in response. This proved an addiction and he began to hold her there longer each time. Her eyes watered.

  The noises were obscene.

  It had almost crossed some threshold into Too Much, when some dam broke for him. Bill traded his game of suffocation for simple fucking.

  She made herself loose and accepted the cock. Let him shove it in her mouth again and again while the fingernails of her one hand bit into the wrist of the other and she knelt for her boss out behind the Haul Ash.

  His face went red. Mouth went into a hard line.

  The bumping head flared at the roof of her mouth and she felt him kick. He rooted into her throat and swore.

  Semen jetted on the back of her tongue. She tried to breathe around the violence of a straining prick, but he was pumping the last of it home and there was nothing to do but choke and mewl until he was finished.

  When the fury ended, Christina risked a journey up his chest with her eyes. His lips were parted. Cheeks ruddy. Fingers still laced in her hair, sealing her in the moment.

  “Swallow.”

  Jeeeesus.

  Christina shivered. Her throat worked him down, once, twice.

  If she counted the time with the condom, Bill Marshall had come in every one of her holes, and in not much more than a week.

  He let her loose and his cock fell back as she sat up straight. She wanted to break eye contact as he put himself away, and failed in spectacular fashion. Things were getting weird.

  Well. Weirder.

  She stood and handed him his work shirt. He took it, leaning forward to slip it back on and letting her look away at last. The breath she’d been holding whooshed out of her lungs. Her knees ached.

  You gotta get the fuck out of here.

  She squinted into the sunset. Made for the door to the back.

  A male grip came around her wrist.

  “Wait.”

  Christina wasn’t sure how much more she could take, but let him pull her beside the chair anyway. Her current stupor wasn’t doing her any favors.

  Bill reached across himself and his other hand lit on the inside of her knee. The first set of fingers kept its circle on her arm, but the second set crept up her thigh. When he got to her panties, she saw the reason for both hands.

  The latter portion of her Fight or Flight instinct kicked in, and Christina jerked against humiliation. Her body had soaked everything beneath her skirt, and Bill Marshall knew it.

  Not satisfied with damp fabric, he worked his fingers under elastic and between her swollen lips. She felt a lump in her throat and bit the inside of her cheek. His touch slid, visiting her entrance before tracing up to her throbbing clit.

  There was no concealing a gasp when he brushed the frustrated little bundle of nerves. He did it a second time, and a third, as though he needed a larger sample size, just to be sure.

  The length of her shadow fell across his lap when he pulled back his hand, but Christina could still see him rub wet fingertips against his thumb.

  “Huh.” His eyes flicked up to hers, which were blinking too much.

  He let go her wrist.

  “Is”—she cleared her throat—“is that it?” The tone of her voice didn’t make it clear whether she was eager to leave or disappointed. None of the bullshit in her head did, either.

  Bill gave her a single nod and she was fetching her purse before the door banged shut in her wake.

  The Bronco roared out of the lot, stirring gravel behind it, as Christina Lee Dodd ran from her asshole boss and whatever sick shit he was trying to pull.

  Everything between her thighs needed relief, and she knew damn well what she was doing the minute she got home.

  Go on.

  Take it out.

  You heard me.

  Swallow.

  She blew through a stop sign and swore.

  What the actual fuck is happening to me?

  Christina closed her eyes and sighed at the futility of it all. Familiarity with the problem could only take her so far. For the rest, she needed infinite fucking patience.

  “Can … can we get rid of the ones on the bottom, Pops?”

  Her lashes blinked open to wait for the response from the other room, staring at peeling wallpaper as she stood, her hands sweating inside the latex gloves.

  “I want to come in there and see them,” her granddad said.

  She bit the inside of her check and controlled her breath. “They’re all waterlogged,” she said. “At least … four inches up. None of ‘em are any good.”

  The eighty-seven year old man picked his way in from the kitchen, steadying himself on the towers of junk as he came.

  “There’s things I might want to read in there,” he said, gesturing with knobby
knuckles at the stacks of newspapers that met him at the chin. “I got to go through ‘em.”

  Patience. Paaatience.

  “I’m not saying get rid of all of ‘em, Pops.” She wiped at her brow with the back of an arm. The ac had been broken for at least twenty years. “How ‘bout I just move the top ones off and we let these ruined ones on the bottom go?”

  He screwed up his face, staring at the piles and fussing with his hands, the decision hurting him in a way Christina had been trying with all her might to understand for most of her life.

  “Here,” she said, getting her fingers under a portion of the nearest stack and hefting it, “let’s just move these over here.”

  “All right,” he said, “I guess you’re just going to come in here and do whatever you want with my things, anyway. Just whatever you want.” He’d crafted his tone to instill guilt, but she was holding strong.

  “I want you to live somewhere clean, Pops,” she said, shifting armloads of newsprint to expose the moldy, disintegrating strata below. “What if one of these gets knocked down? You’re gonna be stuck, and I’m not gonna know until the next time I come over.”

  He was grumbling off toward the back of the house again, bemoaning her lack of respect.

  “And they smell,” she called after him, coughing as she unleashed an eye-watering funk.

  Curse of the fucking mummy under this shit. Jeez.

  Christina tried to breathe through her mouth as she worked. Moving piles of ‘good’ newspapers, none of which could have been any newer than five years, to give her access to the unsalvageable mess covering the floor. Not that any of it ought to be salvaged, but modest progress was better than no progress at all.

  The lowermost layers might as well have been sludge. There had been heavy rains earlier that spring and, because her granddad’s front door had no seal to speak of along the bottom, the flooding on his front porch became the flooding in his living room.

  ‘Living room.’ Pff. Ain’t nobody ‘lived’ in here in—

  “Ah, fuck it.” Christina frowned. She was going to have to do this with a shovel.

  The front door was already open to air the place—despite her granddad’s bellyaching—and she went about gathering what she needed. Hauled the trash bin up onto the porch. Stepped through shoulder-high weeds alongside of the house to pick out a shovel from a cluster of several leaning upright there. Squealed and flapped her hands at a dangling spider along the way.

  What was worse? Getting paid for sex with her boss, or not getting paid for this?

  Into the afternoon she pitched the remains of the papers of yesteryear into the bin. Her Granddad had come out to the porch to rummage in the rows of coffee cans lined up on the floor against the front siding of the house. Some of them were full of screws, others full of old keys or chewed up pencils. From the corner of her eye, she could see him, oblivious to the heat in long sleeves and pants, pulling open lid after lid, on some mission only he understood to find God-knew-what.

  She loved the old man, but this couldn’t go on.

  “Hey there, Christina!”

  The voice came from the neighbor’s yard, and she turned her head, squinting into the slant of sunlight.

  “Hi, Carol.” She set down the shovel and headed toward her granddad’s neighbor, well aware the older woman wouldn’t let her get away with a mere ‘hello’.

  They met where the mostly dead grass of her granddad’s lawn met the healthy green next door.

  “How you doing today?” Carol was polite to her. She was trying to fix the problem.

  Christina shrugged. “Best I can,” she said, glancing back to the porch where Pops had begun on the second tier of cans. “It’s slow going.”

  The woman was holding a spray bottle of weed killer. “Well you done good already,” she said, surveying the last week’s progress. “Looks about a thousand times better now you got all that junk outta the front yard.”

  It was true. She twisted at the waist to take in the work she’d done, starting the day after that last court date. Though the lawn was a patchwork of dead grass and weeds, the vast majority of the junk the county had a problem with was gone.

  To her endless frustration, a good deal of it had moved to the back yard—under the sweat of her own brow, no less—but at least it was not where people could see it from the street. Instead, there were square yellow patches where a derelict washer and dryer had sat. Homeless, confused bugs were probably blinded by daylight now that their protective pile of warped plywood sheets was gone.

  “Yup.” She nodded. “At least it’s something.”

  “How’s he like that, uh … that caregiver you got coming over now? What’s her name again?”

  “Denise?” Christina said. “Um … well …” She gave the woman a helpless smile.

  Carol nodded and had a huff of amusement for her. “Figured as much.”

  “He likes his routines. And she won’t let him go anywhere unsupervised, which is irritating him. I told her not to, or he’ll have this yard full of stuff again in no time.”

  “Well you’re doing a real good job,” Carol said. “It’s tough livin’ alone. A guy his age.”

  “Yeah. It is.” There was a moment of silence in which they both watched her granddad trying his damndest to untangle what had at one time been a ball of twine. These conversations were tedious, if well-intentioned, but Christina needed to disengage.

  “Well,” she said, “better get back to it. Only so many daylight hours.”

  “Yeah. You’d better.” Not a single hint at an offer to help in any way, Christina noted. Very neighborly. “Good luck.”

  Carol hefted the weed killer at her in some sort of mock toast gesture and headed back to her much more civilized looking yard. Back on the porch, her granddad had moved to sorting a rat’s nest of wire coathangers into three different piles, the rhyme or reason behind his choices known only to him.

  At least he was doing something. Better than just sitting and complaining, which had become his habit during most of her attempts at cleaning over the last couple years.

  “Thanks, Pops,” she said. “Thanks for helping.” Positive reinforcement, right?

  “We’re gonna have to let that Debbie woman go,” he said, tugging at a stuck hanger.

  “That’s Denise,” she said, “and why are we letting her go this time?” She’d already heard at least half a dozen of his reasons.

  “Sugar, I can’t afford to pay that woman.”

  “Well you’re not,” she said, closing the lid on the trash bin, “I am.”

  He eyed her, forgetting the hangers. “Since when do you have money for things like that?”

  As hot as it was outside, she could still feel her face panic and try to go red.

  “I got a raise, Pops.” She turned the bin by the handle, fixing to drag it out to the curb. “Now come on. We gotta keep going. Just ‘cause we made it past the first week doesn’t mean we can lay down and do nothing now. Those guys from the county are gonna keep coming by.”

  On her way to the street, dragging the weight of reams of damp paper, Christina snorted.

  Was this worth it? Sell her body for the opportunity to do thankless, humid work?

  Don’t be like that. He has no one. What are you gonna do, just leave him to the system?

  But what would Bill ask for next? Surely she had limits. How much more pride would he ask her to swallow?

  He didn’t have to ask you more than once, though, did he Christina?

  She shoved the bin off the curb and onto the street and turned to stalk, cursing under her breath, back toward the mess at hand.

  ✪

  Friday was one of the busiest days of the week, and that was just as well for Christina. Everyone was on deck at the Haul Ash: her, Jonah, Travis, and Bill, all clattering doggedly through the day. Bill and Travis were out in the shop, attacking the maintenance pileup, Jonah hopped from customer to customer, helping to attach trailers and load smaller equipment, a
nd for once, Christina relished the length of the call list, because it meant she didn’t have to talk to, or really look at, her asshole boss.

  She left yet another voicemail, this time for one ‘Armando Ortiz’, asking him to confirm whether he’d be picking up the twelve-foot truck the next day. People got their hauling done on weekends most of the time, and it was a careful dance to make sure the rental yard had all the moving parts in the right place at the right time to fill the reservations.

  Her shoulder had just cradled the front desk phone under her right ear to call the next customer on the list, when the string of bells clunked at the front door. A man came in wearing a gray porcupine of a moustache and a scowl. He was carrying a chainsaw.

  “This thing won’t start,” he said without preamble.

  Christina saw the number ‘19’ scrawled down the side of the saw’s casing with white grease pen and her mouth came into a line.

  Goddammit. I told Travis we needed to change that fucking spark plug.

  “I do not doubt that,” she said, hanging up the phone and slipping around the counter. “Let me get you the other saw.” The man handed off the misbehaving tool with a grumbled thanks, and Christina bumped out through the back half. The thing was dripping oil and she cursed under her breath.

  The day wore on from there.

  By the time she’d gotten through the rest of the phone calls, it might have been two in the afternoon. Most of the pick-ups happened in the morning and now Jonah was folding a pile of cargo blankets, a likely excuse to come into the office and out of the heat, and Bill had commandeered the computer. Christina eyeballed the clock, debating lunch.

  “There’s a dog out there.”

  “Huh?”

  Jonah jerked his chin toward the front windows. “Right there,” he said, “sniffin’ around by the fence.”

  And there was. Nose to the ground, some yellow mutt worked its way along the chain link where the lot met the highway, snuffling through the tall weeds.

  The counter stool squeaked behind her as Bill swiveled around to look, too. He exhaled through his nose. Stood.