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“Well, there’s someone waiting for me.” Her voice came out in a rush, clearly trying to disentangle herself from being trapped with him. Her words dovetailed with his invitation until they had trod over it, eclipsing the offer as if it had never left his mouth. “I should let you get back to work.” Still that high, affected voice, her customer service voice, a reinforcement of what he was.
His fingers pulled back from the cup as if he’d been burned. He felt the sharp sting of her dismissal like a shot of ice water in his veins, and that, too, was not an unfamiliar sensation. Hehadtried before the end of his marriage. When his efforts had been rebuffed, he had pushed back with sharpness, and he fell back on old habits in that moment.
“Lunch date?” It was ridiculous of him to be asking. She didn’t owe him a single thing other than the service she provided at her job, where they were not. It didn’t keep the sharp-edged words from coming out, and when she met them with a succinct confirmation, he felt the small corner of his heart that he had tried to make vulnerable solidify.
“Then I ought not to keep you.” He shouldn’t be disappointed. He had managed to shave several weeks off the project, bringing things to one unsatisfying, if not final, close. “Until this afternoon . . . Violet.”
He didn’t need to waste any more time thinking about the milking technician with the small, soft hands and the wide dark eyes, he reminded himself once he’d pushed through the press of bodies between the pickup counter and the door, the mid-day line already spilling down the sidewalk. He had achieved his objective, and now he knew.
He never needed to think about her again. Sometimes deals fell through, and it was always a mixed blessing when they did so ahead of schedule. He could change his schedule, visit the farm on a different afternoon, or else he could simply click that little red X on the app and be guaranteed that he never needed to see her again.And that’s that.
There would be no need to block her number from his phone or unfollow her on social media. There was no need to do anything at all, not really. Why should he rearrange his schedule, after all? The farmer made it easy to ensure she would not receive his file again, and he could forget about the birdlike chirp of her voice and the way her hands felt heated skin.
Who knows? You may find someone who does an even better job.
For the first time in a long time, he found it difficult to believe the voice in his head. He gulped at his coffee, grimacing as he did so. He tasted like ash in his mouth. He could adjust his profile on the app so that he would never have to see her again, but he wasn’t sure if his hand would ever forget how neatly it rested against the small of her back, tucking against her curves, a perfect fit.
Fear Of Flying
Chapter 7
Anhourlater,hewas practically vibrating in furious anticipation.
He was angry. Angry with himself for getting so wrapped up in his adolescent dreams that he never bothered considering how she might feel towards him outside of the constraints of their clients/technician relationship.
She’sprobably disgusted by you. Probably thinks poorly about all of you, every bull that walks through these doors. She’s human; how could she possibly understand? You’ve been coming every week for a professional hand job. How does that look to a human? Of course, she thinks you’re some sort of pervert; they all think sex is shameful and dirty. And even if she weren’t repulsed at the mere thought, she would probably think you’re too old for her. She probably has a boyfriend. You’ve spent the last two months acting as if this would all go according to some little script in your head, and you never bothered considering how she might feel.
He realized, sitting in the municipal parking lot after stomping down Main Street and lurching across the road, looking more like a drunken centaur than the bull he was, that he could simply cancel today’s appointment and never have to see her again. He had been coming to the farm since they’d opened, and he had never once seen an employee other than his milking technician in the receptionist. They obviously had a separate entrance and exit, separate corridors to traverse, safety measures that kept them distanced from the clientele.Probably for this exact reason, so they don’t wind up with a horny stalker.
He could’ve canceled right then and there, but he had always been thickheaded. He wanted to see her one last time. Maybe it was masochism; maybe he just needed to hear that detached, empty voice directed at him again to ensure that his subconscious accepted that there was no ambiguity left and that he needed to let this go. Perhaps, he thought ruefully, it was all of the above plus a kiss of malice, for he wanted tomakeher face him one last time.Nothing is left up in the air, then. Cut your losses and be done.
The conversation he was having with himself was taking place strictly in his head, but outwardly he couldn’t sit still. He had strode into the milking farm’s doors, practically snorting, ready to charge. Now he sat in one of the waiting room’s oversized armchairs, shaking his legs, tapping his fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair, pulling out his phone to glance at the time, and huffing every few minutes.
There was a woman sitting on the sofa across from him, her eyebrow cocked and a half smile on her lips. Rourke did his best to ignore her.
She was a minotaur. It was always a chore attempting to explain the way their genetics worked to outsiders. Bullish features were passed to sons by their minotaur fathers, but that was where their line ended. A daughter carried the traits of their mothers, regardless of species . . . unless the mother happened to be the daughter of a bull, both parents carrying minotaurean blood.
The woman across from him was tall and big-boned, curvaceous with long, honey-gold hair and a wide mouth. She would tower over a human woman, despite presenting as a human herself. Her name was Gwen, Madoc’s fiancée, and Rourke had met her several weeks ago for the first time. Both of her parents were minotaurs, she had explained to him cheerfully as they sat in the waiting room together, as they did now, leaving no shred of doubt that the child she and Madoc wanted to have as quickly as possible would be the most strapping of bulls, or else, would be a girl as statuesque as her mother, built to carry bullish sons.
“I didn’t want him coming alone,” she had confided that very first week. “We’re both still weirded out by the whole deal here. I’m sure it’s fine, but . . . well, it’s something we don’t mind doing together.”
“I hate to be the one to burst your bubble of innocence,” he had chuckled that day, unsure if her presence in the reception area made him uncomfortable or if she normalized the whole process. “But these milking joints are a fact of life.”
“Oh, I knowthat. We’ve been together for more than a decade. Trust me, I’m not a stranger to the concept of the vacuum sucky-sucky. We have a huge wedding to pay for and a house to buy; this was my idea in the first place.”
Uncomfortable, Rourke decided. She made the whole thing uncomfortable.
“But it’s not as if this place is doing things by the book. At least, not by the book we all know.”
She had continued to accompany Madoc, and Rourke had seen her a handful of times in the reception area at that point. That didn’t mean he needed to be a genial conversationalist right now, he thought sourly. Not when he was in such a tumult.
“You look like you’re ready to crawl out of your skin,” Gwen quipped lightly, crossing her long legs. “Is the handy that good? Or is there an ant hill on that side of the room?”
He glared at her. “I have a mountain of work waiting for me at the office,” he lied, glowering, “and I hate this unnecessary downtime.” That, at least, was not a lie. He wished there was a way he could simply sit outside and be notified on his phone when his milking room was ready.
Rourke tried to imagine what it would be like in two weeks and three weeks, in a month. Would he go back to craving the sensation of a stranger playing with his cock every week? Or would he go back to the stoic days immediately prior to Violet’s start at Morning Glory?Violet. Even saying her name in his head sent a ripple down his spine, and his hooves scraped against the turf carpeting. Would he ever be able to enjoy his treatment here again? Would he fall back into his fantasies as strangers jerked him off every week, as he pretended they were her? Or would every touch by a milking technician feel strange and wrong now?
You need to download the hookup app again, look for that kitsune, and see if she’s still interested in fooling around. You can meet her in Bridgeton and fuck her against the window in one of those hotels that faces Swansea Avenue. It’ll scratch an itch and put all of this out of your head.
