Page 37 of On the Line
Then she pulled away and said, “What are you waiting for?”
It took Mitch’s brain a moment to catch up, to cycle back through their conversation.
When he did, he crawled between her legs and, grasping his dick at the base, lined it up with her entrance. One swift pulse of his hips was all it would take.
But that was up to her.
“I need you to say it, Lex,” he said. “Tell me it’s okay to fuck you without a condom. Say it and I’m yours.”
She settled her hands on his shoulders and wrapped her legs around his waist, digging her heels into his ass. “Please, Mitch.”
A second later, he was buried to the hilt inside her.
Now...
Aboutthreeyearsago,before Brent, before Mitch, back when it was just Lexie, Berkley, Amelia, and Kimber, fresh out of college and ready to take on the world, Amelia got it into her head that she wanted to become a blogger. The girls indulged her, never really pressing her for more info on what exactly she would blog about. Or why she even wanted to in the first place. It was right around the start of the Instagram craze when normal women from across the globe started monetizing their social media presence. They all assumed that was what Amelia was trying to accomplish.
That was, until one day, about a year later, Amelia announced that she had received a job offer with a travel magazine based in Los Angeles. They loved her fresh take on traveling as a single woman and how she had shown her readers the best ways to get the most bang for their buck in cities across the country. Plus, they were allowing her to remain in Detroit, using the hub city as a home base.
Berkley and Kimber were understandably excited for her, asking what the pay and benefits package was like, what sorts of places she was going to travel and write about next, and if her company had any plans to send her on overseas vacations—and if they could join. But something about the entire thing had needled Lexie. At that time, Berkley, Kimber, and Amelia were living together, and it struck Lexie as odd that neither Berkley nor Kimber ever mentioned Amelia traveling frequently. Especially not when Lexie herself was only in Detroit about half the time; the other half she spent…traveling for work.
Exactly like Amelia claimed she was doing.
When Lexie brought this up to Berkley, her friend waved her off, claiming Amelia had been gone quite a lot. They figured it was a new boyfriend—they knew how Amelia could get when a new guy entered her life.
“She probably didn’t tell us because she was afraid she might fail,” Berkley said to Lexie matter-of-factly. “Or maybe she just didn’t want us trying to tag along.”
Lexie scoffed, unconvinced, but didn’t press Berkley any further.
For some reason, she still couldn’t let it go; something about the entire thing felt very off. So she decided to dig into Amelia’s blog and quickly discovered one thing: all of the places Amelia claimed to have traveled happened to be places Lexie had been for work. And not only that, but it seemed as though Amelia had been blatantly stealing Lexie’s experiences and passing them off as her own.
Lexie had no choice but to confront her.
“Okay,” Amelia said a few days later when Lexie finally managed to corner her, hands raised in surrender. “Before you fly off the handle, just hear me out. This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”
“I don’t understand, Ames. Why are you stealing my travel stories and pretending they’re your own?”
Resigned to her fate, knowing she wasn’t going to get out of this without an explanation, Amelia told her the entire story.
She wanted to open a gym. And not just any gym, but a fitness center exclusively for women. Amelia had an exercise science degree from Michigan State, and recognized that there was a massive need in the market for fitness programs that focused on women’s health. The only problem was, she didn’t have the capital to make her dream a reality, which is why she decided to start blogging.
“I’ve been seeing influencers on Instagram make crazy money over the years, and I didn’t think it would be that hard. Only…it was.”
“I still don’t understand. If you want to open a gym, why not blog about fitness? Why travel?”
“Things were taking too long to take off, okay! And you know me. I’m impatient. I didn’t want to wait months or even years to start monetizing my online presence. So I cheated.”
“And what made you think stealing my travel stories and using them as fodder for your own brand would be the thing to take off more quickly than the fitness stuff?”
Amelia huffed out a large sigh, clearly exasperated with Lexie, although Lexie had no idea why. “Because you already were getting a ton of attention for your travel posts! And you weren’t even capitalizing on it.
Lexie crossed her arms over her chest and looked her friend in the eye. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Alexandra,” Amelia said, scolding. “Don’t play dumb. It’s not a good look on you. We all know about the brand partnerships you’ve been offered over the years. And yet, you refuse to accept a single one. Why is that?”
Lexie sighed, unwilling to get into the entire sordid tale. She had never accepted a single one of those offers because she wasn’t about to go back to the days of people using her for her image. She would not allow these companies to whore her out like her parents had done her entire adolescence.
So instead, she told Amelia, “I already make plenty of money from my actual job. And I’m busy enough from that as it is. Why would I want to add more to my plate?”
