DAMAGED - A Bad Boy Romance (81 page)

A Bad Boy Romance

By Gabi Moore

The woman in front of me was being fucked to within an inch of her life.

Her entire face was flushed red, the color extending far down onto her chest and to her two swollen nipples. She was writhing like something possessed, as though she was about to combust into flames at any second.

“She won’t come until I tell her she can,” said her tormentor to me. He flicked a sweat-damp fringe from his face and pummeled into her with more urgency.

“What do you think – should we let her come?” he said through strained breath, flashing deep, laughing brown eyes in my direction.

My mind raced.

A year ago, I had only seen this man in pixelated images. He had been nothing more than ink on a newspaper for me, and now… now he was sweaty and deep in a yelping woman who seemed to be melting before our very eyes.

Maybe I should back up a little. Everything happened so fast that it seemed like one day my life consisted of nothing but the endless cycle of work, sleep, eat …and then
he
appeared, like a dark hurricane, and turned everything on its head.

It started like this: I had gone into work early that Tuesday to beat back my growing inbox and try to get a head start on the madness that the rest of the week would surely entail. I was in that sweet spot where I had successfully started at
Cache
magazine on the right foot, but after six months there, I didn’t need to be so ‘”yes ma’am, no ma’am” as I had been in the first few weeks. I was beginning to relax into my new role a little.

I was young, sure, but sometimes having a lot to prove and nothing to lose is
exactly
the state of mind you need to write well.

“Katie, come in here a sec, would you?”

It was my boss Penelope Welsh, a severe pedant of a woman and dying supernova in the publishing world. She had used that notorious icy voice that could either mean I was about to be praised to heaven or threatened with my life. For Penelope, life was a dreadful bore, and she lived only for those moments of either sublime journalistic joy that made life worth living …or else eviscerating the newbie guts of baby writers like myself.

It being only Tuesday, I hoped it was the former.

“Your Tom Hood piece …walk me through this. What where you doing here exactly?”

Her artsy metal earrings swung on either side of her head. She gestured to her computer screen like an unknown bug had landed there. This looked bad. As far as I could tell, Penelope asked people to “walk her through” things only so she could eviscerate them all the better. Shit.

“Uh, yes, Tom Hood. I wanted to suggest that those nude photo leaks are kind of a new avenue for self promotion for him, that celebrities are looking for ways to manage their image by curating this completely fake online presence, except tha--”

She raised a single bony finger to shut me up.

“He didn’t like it,” she said, revealing a new cryptic streak that was unfamiliar to me.

“
Who
didn’t?”

“Tom Hood didn’t,” she said, relishing how ridiculous this clearly sounded to me. Her earrings had stopped swinging. I opened my mouth to speak, but she raised the bony finger higher.

“He called me, you know. For some stupid reason. He says you’ve been unflattering and he wants an apology.” She turned her face back to the screen with a quizzical look. “As far as I’m concerned you did the asshole a favor with this piece, but what do I know? He doesn’t seem like he wants to cause any trouble. So, will you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh, right. Will you meet with him? He wants an apology. And he says he wants to do a more formal interview and a larger piece on this nude photo scandal crap. I’m going to have to bump Mira’s piece this month and that’s going to burn her ass, but he wanted
you
specifically, and I’m not going to turn that down, so I said you would. You OK with that? We kind of need it this quarter.”

It was barely 5 minutes past 7 and I had already been assigned the biggest story of my short and desperate career. It was a lot to take in.

All at once, Tom Hood was
real
.

I had written a mere line or two of snark about him and now he had appeared right in the middle of my boring Tuesday morning, like a demon summoned with some kind of spell.

I was thrilled. I played it cool.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual about it.

“Good. Just see what he wants. I don’t mind where you want to take it, honestly, but just keep Eddy in the loop, too, you’ll need some photos.”

She handed me a Post-It note with a time and place scratched on it in tight, impatient handwriting.

“
Tomorrow
?!” I said, horrified.

“Yeah? You can’t do it? I can get Mira to try -”

“No, I’ll do it,” I blurted.

I turned quickly to leave her office before anything else happened, but as I was about to close the door she quipped, “Well, have you seen them?”

“What?”

“The nudes.”

Ah, the nudes. Tom Hood had had his phone “hacked” and all his precious dick pics were now “leaked” all over the world, and it was shocking, simply
shocking
to him. Not only did this idiot have the gall to try this stunt, he actually believed people would fall for it. The photos were pure trash of course – grainy candid shots of him in various stages of undress, one with him completely naked, a pair of bikini-clad models in the background, him laughing with an obscenely large dick just hanging there…

“No, of course I haven’t seen them, ew,” I said, crinkling my face up.

“You should. Guy’s
hung,
” she replied and returned to her work, smirking.

Okay then.

I went to my desk, the emails I was dead set on just a second ago suddenly seeming utterly unimportant now. The butterflies in my stomach had not abated. I chewed nervously on the end of a long-suffering pencil and typed into Google, “Tom Hood nude pictures”, looking once over my shoulder.

By the time I got home that evening, it was already somehow eight o’clock and was drizzling slightly. I was bone-tired, a little scratchy, and in no mood to deal with what I found there.

“Tigger’s got his diarrhea again!” he said, the very first second I walked in the door.

My head throbbed.

Tigger was nowhere to be found, but the vague odor of cat shit lingering in the air let me know immediately what had happened. My boyfriend stood lamely in front of me.

“Jeremy! Really? I
told
you not to feed him scraps from the kitchen, it messes him up,” I said, flinging my bag into the corner. My eyes caught the sight of a sickly brown puddle peeking out from behind the kitchen corner.

I wanted to cry.

“What! You haven’t even cleaned it up yet!” I rushed over and found a guilty-looking Tigger nervously cowering beside the fridge.

“Yeah, he only did it just a moment ago,” Jeremy said.

“Well, when?”

“Uh… I don’t know? I was in a game, babe, so I didn’t actually
see
him do it, you know?”

I glanced my eyes over to his Xbox, a half open bag of Dorito’s spilling onto the floor. I glared at him, fuming.

This was
my
boyfriend, the kind of man who would play Call of Duty for five hours straight, spew Doritos all over the floor and then when feeble old Tigger ate them, would literally watch him shit himself and think, well, Katie will just clean it up. When she gets home. From her
job
.

Anger shot through me. I was too tired to deal with this.

“How long have you been home, anyway?” I asked, slowly and not without a bit of poison in my voice.

He looked away.

“Oh come on, not this shit again, Katie. I didn’t realize I had to check in and out of my own house everyday.”

Something in me snapped.
His
house? I’d had enough. I kicked the fridge with all the energy I could muster, sending poor Tigger scampering away.

“I want you to leave!”

He started to protest, but one angry look from me shut him right up. He stormed out, banging the door behind him.

I stood there and waited for the throb in my big toe to subside, and felt my eyes filling with furious tears. Tigger poked his head round the corner to see if it was safe to come out again. I had had a long, stressful day and
this
is what I came home to? I crumpled down into a heap on the kitchen floor, defeated, and instantly felt my phone bleep.

It was from him.

“Don’t bother apologizing, I’m not coming back,” his message read. I nearly laughed out loud. Apologize? My first thought was to hurl the phone against the cupboard, but somehow I found myself doing something else. I rubbed the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand. With a few easy swipes of my fingers, I was staring at my phone, at
him
again. Why had I saved these pictures? That’s easy: research. He’s a public persona, and one who probably loved the attention anyway, so there was nothing unethical about me having these images. And looking at them. Right?

I stared for a long time at the last picture in the series, the one that had appeared just a few weeks ago across the pages of every junk tabloid in the country, the one that had brandished (large!) black censor bars all over the only parts that people had wanted to see anyway. I stared at his face. At his body. At his face again.

Three lean supermodel types were in the background, frolicking, mid-giggle and each probably no older than twenty. With bleary eyes I focused on a woman in the center back – she was all catwalk model limbs and jet-black hair extensions, some kind of music video whore, probably. But at least she’s not wasting her evening cleaning up cat shit, now is she?

I sighed.

I allowed my eyes to fall on his body again. Surely people didn’t really look like that. Not
really
. I stared for a long time at the almost comically large cock hanging loosely between the two toned, tanned thighs. Was it photoshopped? It was the look of a Spartan still pumped up from battle, but the face was all wrong somehow and didn’t match: it was an easy, mocking face, too comfortable, arrogant even. Familiar somehow. It was the face of someone who’s never struggled, never had to fight for a thing in their lives.

My hand found its way into my pants. Fuck that stupid idiot for taking advantage of me. I wanted all his dumb gaming equipment out, and I never wanted to see him again. I slipped a noncommittal hand into my underwear, still looking at the picture. What was
her
life like? Did she have to put up with a man-child for a boyfriend? Or was it champagne and Gucci, all day, everyday?

I closed my eyes and felt ugly threads of tension slowly leaving my body. The kitchen floor was cold and hard, but I deflated with a huge sigh and try to calm down. It would be OK.
I
would be OK. It was hard now, but I was working for something. I had a
purpose
. Men could wait.

My fingers found the old familiar sensations as I began to stroke my clit, still staring at the same picture I must have looked at a million times already today. I imagined something easy, soothing, something outrageously hot. Why couldn’t
I
be the sexy girl on the yacht with the celebrity? Who would stop me now if I imagined myself laid down on a bed of money, lavished with attention by some airheaded stud with a big cock? Why not?

I moved my fingers more quickly.

My boyfriends had always been kind of weedy, nerdy types. And I liked it that way. Men with big dicks usually
are
big dicks, right?

A soft wet bead of moisture grew at my fingertips as images flitted through my mind. I bet he had so much sex he was bored of it already. I bet a big idiot like him could fuck for hours, like a machine.

Hovering over the edge of a warm, friendly orgasm, I held myself suspended there for a moment, still staring hard at the picture. Each pixelated fold and vein. The small pleat between his hard thighs and the flat of his stomach. What if it was
me
, perched there on his lap, with every last inch of that cock buried inside me? Curling my spine, I squeezed my eyes shut, shuddered smoothly and came, with long, easy twitches.

Damn. Ok. I stood up, flustered. Buttoned my jeans up again and looked with fresh disgust at the picture. I swiped the screen with slick fingers.

“Are you sure you want to delete Image 05?”

Yes!

Delete it all.

I was done with this shit.

I was finally getting recognized at work, finally making strides in a career that took many people decades to get off the ground. I wasn’t going to let some rich jock take up any more space in my mind than he strictly needed to.