Page 29 of Honey, Honey
The door slammed behind him and Lawson Sokolov walked out on me.
Chapter Eleven
LAW
I slammed the door to my apartment behind me and stared into the silent dark space. “What the fuck did I just do?”
Outside the storm was raging. The rain falling in rivers that made it seem like Manhattan was being swallowed up by the sea. Like a modern day Atlantis meant to sink beneath the shit colored muddy waters of the Hudson. I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe deep. In and out. In and out, and then once more before I opened my eyes back up and groaned.
I put out a hand, steadying myself against the door. I’d been in enough brawls, outright put my body to the limit situations, and had never in all those years felt this heavy sort of sick feeling in my stomach. This was dark in a way that had my knees threatening to give, like I’d just been sucker punched.What the fuck?
“What the fuck did I just do?” I repeated. No answer came. My high rise apartment in Manhattan was empty and silent as a tomb. It always was. I wasn’t one to have company over, didn’t throw dinner parties or invite family because there were none. I was a man set apart, and I’d made it like that on purpose. Each and every connection that meant anything that could be used against me I’d severed for their own good.
“You mean for yours,” I gritted out between clenched teeth. “You did it for you.” I stared out into the darkness, the faint city lights giving some relief to the inky black of my living room. I’d had friends once, a family that I called every Sunday. Used to have family dinner weekly. Hell, I’d even used to play pickup games in the park in Queens on the block I’d grown up in. It’d been a different place than it was now. The neighborhood Honey lived in was familiar but not, like looking at my past through frosted glass. I knew what it was at a distance, but up close?
I didn’t recognize it.
Just like myself. I was a different man now. I’d cut my friends, limited my family time, and ditched the games when work had become my focus. When I’d started getting my hands dirty a little too frequently and I knew it was only a matter of time before a capo or some fucker with something to prove came after the people I cared about. I’d seen it happen one too many times to the guys who’d started out doing the same shit as me when we were teenagers.
Ivan’s mother got spooked by a car that tailed her and sat outside her work, Steve’s girl got stabbed on the E train. Tommy’s granny had her front window knocked in by a brick with a shitty misspelled threat tapped to the side of it.
It went on and on, and on, distracting the main target from their work, pushing them closer to losing their cool until they ended up making a mistake and paid for it with their life. Or even worse, until someone, their grandma, ma, or girl got dead. I made myself care about no one and nothing. I didn’t need the complications of it, and there had been that one time...
Now, I knew I could go back, but it was hard to remember just how a man went about playing at being a functioning member of society when he’d been feral for far too fucking long. I’d tried, once, to give someone more. A woman who wanted me, a sub that had wanted it all from me, but it’d been a goddamn disaster from the start. I hadn’t been able to give it. A sour taste settled in my mouth thinking about it, about her, about how we made the other into a twisted anxious version of ourselves.
Jane.
That year with Jane had been hell for both of us, even if she’d been too stubborn to see it. We had been bad together, better apart, and I’d decided then that I was better suited to focusing my restless energy into boardrooms and running numbers, not socializing. Not trying to resurrect a man that didn’t exist anymore. Hadn’t for years now.
I wasn’t a man that worried about feelings or people because that distracted me. Because it put them in danger from shitty men who had no right putting their hands on them, much less knowing they existed. So I’d put distance between me and everything that meant something to me to protect them. But now I was at the top. Now I was legit and free, and I had no one to show for it.
It was better this way.
A clap of thunder made the room as bright as daylight and it reminded me of Honey’s apartment. I pushed away from the door and went further into my apartment, turning on a lamp as I went. It was a big place, not just an apartment but a penthouse, with floor-to-ceiling windows, white and grey marble fucking flooring that was a bitch for my cleaners to keep clean. Not that it mattered. The floor hardly had time to get dirty with the amount of time I actually spent here.
I leaned against the back of the leather couch and turned my head, looking into the dining room from where I stood. The whole place was luxe, top of the line with the newest appliances and a pricey zip code with a door man trained to keep the paparazzi at bay. The building was exclusive and it didn’t matter if you had the money, you had to have the name, the sway in the city, to be given the privilege of cutting the fuckers a check every month.
I’d bought my penthouse outright for 15 million. It was worth it for the peace. The second I stepped inside the brightly light lobby and nodded at the door man, my world narrowed down to nothing. Everything was simpler. Peace was mine. A thing I had chased for years and finally found. But then why did it feel so empty in now? Why were these big open rooms, the ones with the high end finishings and furnishings suddenly not enough?
Why the fuck did I want to be in a drafty barely furnished apartment with a boiler that rattled and windows that shook every time it thundered? I crossed my arms, pissed that the place I wanted to be wasn’t my home.
“Honey, that’s why.” It was her. It had been for a week. I licked my lips and groaned when I picked up the faint taste of her. She’d been sweet and wet for me, pussy eager as anything for my mouth and hands. She would have taken my dick if I’d let myself offer it to her. If I’d let myself stay with her.
But I hadn’t.
I’d left as quickly as I’d arrived. I’d left her.
I could still see her face scrunched up, the way she’d looked impossibly small and lost sitting on her kitchen table with my spit still wet on her pussy lips. She hadn’t wanted me to leave. I’d known that, and I’d still fucking done it even if every part of me had wanted to rush back to her. I’d wanted to gather her up in my arms and take her to bed, to kiss her and undress her. Take my time with her. But that didn’t excuse the fact that the sex I wanted, the way I wanted to touch her, how I wanted her to respond to me, was more than what we’d done.
It was more than most casual encounters ever fathomed. It was a kink, a dynamic that had to be explained and explored with clear boundaries and safe words.
I hadn’t had that with Honey.
I had a drunk girl with a big beautiful smile and a mouth that I wanted to claim, so I’d done what I would allow myself. God, the way she looked when she laughed, her head thrown back, dark curls bouncing over her shoulder and spilling down her back. She was a woman, but she was cute, and that was what sparked my interest. I had a soft spot for cute, for pastels and soft lace. For sundresses, and pink umbrellas with bows bigger than they ought to be. But Honey wasn’t mine to keep, and I wasn’t hers to have. So I’d given her an orgasm. Laid her out and eaten her pussy on her dining room table like it was the finest delicacy, because it was. And something was a delicacy if it was rare, right? I wasn’t going to get another go at her, which made her pussy a meal no chef could ever come close to replicating. I’d eaten her like a starving man. God, she’d been good, naturally following directions and making me question if this had to be a one time thing.
If she could learn why did I have to stay away from her? She’d listened when I told her not to move, her thighs shaking as I went down on her, she’d let me wrap my tie around her and kept her hands glued to the table like I wanted.
She’d been a good girl.
