“That’s it, Bri. Sink down onto my cock and ride me hard.”
He doesn’t need to tell me twice. I drag my pussy along his shaft once, twice. His moan is my catnip, and we both need more. “Now, Bri, fuck me.”
Lining the head of his cock up with my entrance, I sink down until I’m flush with his thighs.
“Ohh.” Our mingled moans are the sweetest symphony. This isn’t business or a contract. This is me accepting him as he is, into my body. This is him at his most vulnerable. A gift I’m not sure I’ve earned but will treasure regardless. His hips thrust up to meet my downward strokes until we find a furious rhythm.
“Goddamn, you are perfect. The way you fit around my dick never ceases to amaze me.” Warm hands vice my hips. He guides my movements to a pace he’s happy with. He may have wanted me to drive, but he’s the one with the GPS coordinates.
“Oh my God, Mason, more.”
“Take it all. Your pussy cinches my cock as if they were made for each other.” My hands fall to his chest, the packed muscle rippling under my touch. Fingertips flex over the dusting of hair and skin I love to kiss and bite when we are in missionary. Leaning down, I kiss the side of his jaw before he turns his head enough to claim my lips with his. His kisses areas hot and demanding as the rest of him. His tongue breaches my mouth and duels with my own. Everything this man does is precise and planned.
“Ride me harder. Bri, get me there,” he demands, low and sensual. A plan, or a plea? His upward thrusts increase with intensity and fervor. The man can fuck. I add a roll of my hips with a forward motion when he’s buried impossibly deep as the veins in his neck pulse with a new fury. He’s so close. He is right there. I did this; I did this to him with my body. I bring this man undone.
“Bri, fuck. Bri.” He addresses the words into my mouth, our kisses turning hungrier and sloppy. Teeth graze over teeth as our pooled frantic energy erupts into white-hot pleasure coursing with an unrelenting pulse of its own.
“Mason!”
“That’s it, baby. Come all over my cock.” His filthy words and thrusting dick send me to the precipice before hurtling over. A sheen of sweat has covered my skin and transferred onto his. Or his to mine. I don’t know and I don’t care. Collapsing onto him, spent and satiated, all I can think about is the shelf-life of the arrangement we’re in. His hand strokes a lazy pattern down my hair from my nape to the base of my spine.It has the tender casualness of a lover’s caress and a skittering unease of foreboding.
“Thanks,” he says, tapping my backside and sliding me off him and onto the cooling sheets. “I needed that.”
Mason throws back the covers and stands from the bed. His sleepy satiation has vanished, replaced with the mask of steel indifference he wore for too many years.
“Are you okay?” My voice squeaks out like a child’s.
“Never better,” he exhales with a minuscule hint of annoyance. Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he moves toward the en-suite. “I’m going into work today. Meetings withmy father, the actual one, not the fake one. It’s going to be a long and messy day. Stay here. Draw. Do whatever you do when you’re not doing me. And make sure you are available and ready for me when I return.”
In an instant, the mask slips back into place, leaving me without question that I’m supposed to knowmyplace. At his beck and fucking call. The wall I thought I could dismantle stays steadfast and strong. He’s reverting to behavior and coping methods he’s relied on for years. Another brick clinks into place.
Try as I might, I can’t seem to pull Mason from the encompassing funk that has settled over him like a fog. I want everything to revert to before the ball dropped, and then the truth bombs. Then again, I want Mason to be recognized as a person and not some accidental mistake. To be seen as the incredible, competent man he is and not a bastard child labeled by a surname linked with an illusion of polished perfection.
Mason has been punished for most of his life by a man purported to be his father, who must have had some inkling that something didn’t add up. Rather than confront his wife, he punished the child, remaining distant. Michael Mercer wasn’t overly paternal at the best of times; my poor broken man had to fight for any remnants of affection.
“He played golf on the day I graduated. Golf! On a course forty minutes away from my college.” He sits with his head in his hands, the sheet pulled up to his waist. These post-coital conversations have increased. Maybe they serve as some kind of therapy because he flat-out dismissed any formal kind, even when Trystan said he visited a lady a few blocks away who was brilliant. Currently, I fill the role of Mason’s therapist, using intimacy and touch to pull him from his darkest thoughts. Almost every sexual act is suffixed with an anecdote about his childhood or a question about my life growing up in a house overflowing with love.
My chest constricts, wanting to comfort him, only when I place a palm onto his chest, he recoils as if burned or butchered. A gesture I try not to take personally, but it is hurtful just the same. I can feel him slipping away. He’s drifting like an unmoored yacht, and as fast as I can swim and kick, he’s drifting just as quickly. It’s not just me he’s distanced himself from. Trys senses it too. His seeing a therapist is a bid to claw his way out of the emotional well he has sunk to the bottom of. His baggage with Mason needs to be addressed, not hoarded in the same well. “An identity crisis explains a lot. It’s giving the whole, it’s not you, it’s me vibes. Maybe it wasn’t me, after all? Remember when I said everything changed about two years ago? He found all this out around then. No wonder his head is so fucked.”
The gamut of raw and flayed-open wounds these two carry is a load far heavier than their frames should ever bear. On the surface, they present as a double-barreled professional success story: friends since middle school and powerful allies. Only I understand the full extent of how they tried to cope with their feelings of burgeoning sexuality and experimentation. What to one amounted to simply fooling around, to the other was his entire world. They rely on each other for more than meeting minutes and contract copies. They are lifelines, mutually exclusive and absolutely necessary. I fear that neither would function properly without the other. I only hope it never comes to that.
When Mason unlockedand poured out his safe of secrets almost two weeks ago, we fell silent with shock. The three of us worked around the clock to secure evidence of Michael’s movements over thirty years ago. A small homestaybooked under the name of his lover, Stella, and photographic evidence of them in the background of more than one wedding snapshot. The homestay abutted a winery, and in a show of true Spanish hospitality, the couple joined the celebration. At a wedding, a cheating American business executive enjoyed a tryst with his secret love before planning to divorce his wife. The rest of the saga poured out like a baby purging its last feed. Gallons of it.
Left alone with her children and desperate to hold on to her husband, Alice Mercer jumped at the chance of some quality time alone while her mother-in-law, and took Mitchell and Monica to the Outer Banks for some beach combing to make the most of the nicer weather before the bite of fall set in. What was supposed to be a week to ten days turned into two, and then almost three. The kids had made friends in the sleepy seaside towns, were exhausting themselves every day with sand and water activities, and Marin loved spending time with them as much as they did with her. When she telephoned Alice to announce they would be coming back, Alice implored them to take all the time they needed and not to hurry home. A mother, separated from her husband, added to the distance and removed her children from the equation for longer than expected. Why? Who does that? Anyone else would join the vacation and make sandy memories with them, collecting shells and taking pictures of washed-up sea life and pieces of driftwood. Not Alice Mercer. She drifted toward different wood. Instead of Magnus working long hours, she tempted him home with meals Barbara prepared under her instruction. Meals featuring mushrooms, like penne con fungi or beef Wellington. Meals Michael Mercer wouldn’t eat because he despised the damn things.
Barbara agreed, cooking dish after dish and recalling howodd it was for Magnus to spend so much time at the Greenwich residence, especially with Marin absent.
“The man stayed home a lot. Very odd for him, considering his wife was away. Alice wanted candles on the dining table and fetched wine from the cellar for each dinner. As soon as they finished eating, both of them would go upstairs, sometimes hand in hand,” Barbara recounted. “The staff were aghast that Magnus’s quarters, the entire other side of the house, weren’t crumpled whatsoever. The nightly turndown occurred as usual, only for them to discover the next day his bed remained unsullied.” Barbara continued to describe a meeting with the household staff where some complained how uncomfortable they felt with a man in his early fifties carrying on an illicit affair with his daughter-in-law. Barbara shut down any such idle gossip until she walked into the bathroom to understand the nature of the leaking faucet Mrs. Mercer had demanded be fixed. A naked Magnus Mercer had an equally naked Alice bent over the countertop, driving into her from behind. Flustered, the housekeeper excused herself and fled the room, only to be fired the next day.
Email correspondence is a piece of cake for a hacker to tap into, although systems back in 1995 were different. A facsimile machine provided more evidence. Instead of faxing the paperwork back to his Manhattan legal counsel, Michael had mistakenly sent it to his home office. Someone in the house took the copy from the machine, and given the only people living there at the time were Magnus and Alice, it’s no guessing who intercepted that fax. She kept a copy with other important paperwork from that time in an archive box at a secure storage facility in Brooklyn. A facility Mason had access to, and Trystan and I set to work sifting through box after box of deeds, titles, children’s paintings and photographs. Dozens of themwhere Alice Mercer had her hand on her father-in-law’s shoulder, or thigh if they sat for a pose. Circumstantial at best until Ava became unwell. Then, the diagnosis of JMML came for little Ava Mercer-Klein. It causes overproduction of white blood cells, crowding out healthy cells in the bone marrow and, if left untreated, is typically fatal. The treatment relies on stem cell transplantation as the primary cure. Here, Mercer money had no value. They couldn’t buy their way to a match; a suitable one needed to be located. Every family member got tested, including staff at the brokerage firm where Frazer worked, along with some friends in Monica’s circle and gallery contacts. Nothing.
While the Mercer-Kleins prayed for a miracle and the Bone Marrow Institute scoured millions of potential donors, Mason Mercer poured over paperwork and laboratory test results.
“I knew I was onto something,” he muses. “I had this burning, almost gritty feeling as I read over the results again and again. I contacted a lab we don’t use for our bloodwork.” He went on to explain that the Mercers have their own supply of ready blood should any of them be in an accident. Rather than accept donated blood and risk infection, they donate their own and have it stored. Royalty and heads of state adopt this practice to ensure their blood remains clear of common folk diseases and preventable infections.
“I took it from there. They could confirm that I was related to Michael; we both shared DNA, but he wasnotmy father. I used Magnus’s test results and a sample of his blood to confirm that he was my father. The man I grew up thinking was my grandfather had been intimate with Alice and created me.”
His shoulders crumpled as he continued. “At first, I thought it might be some mistake. Four labs later and I knew it wasn’t. Then I thought perhaps he had forced himself on her.As reprehensible as it sounded, it couldn’t be ruled out. So, I dug a little further. It was a brief, consensual, forbidden relationship. One played to perfection by Alice Mercer. From that day forward, once I discovered the lengths she went to, she was Malice.”
