The Last Thing You See (7 page)

Harper was right, once we were inside it was a hell of a lot calmer.  All kinds of people came to talk to her as we slowly made our way through the foyer and towards the huge room the event was taking place in.

A-list actors and actresses, directors and people who thought I should know them shook my hand and thanked me for what I did for Harper.  My head was spinning.

Our seats were about a third of the way back from the front row, and Harper had to sit on the aisle because she was nominated in the category of ‘best one-liner’ for something she said in the Dark Fox movie.

The show was awesome. They had actor and comedian Bobby Jenson hosting the show, and several bands performed a song or two each between presentations of awards.  I looked around the audience and could barely understand how I ended up sitting in this seat.

All around me were the most beautiful people the ‘industry’ had to offer.  Actresses and models were everywhere. My eyes widened for a second when I spotted a woman I was sure was a porn star.

“What are you looking for?” Harper said quietly.

“I just had to check something.”

“What?”

“I’m here with the most beautiful woman in the room,” I whispered in her ear.

Harper blushed and fixed me with a smile that I thought would melt me down to nothing.  I had to look down before I could no longer stop myself from kissing her.

It didn’t help much. Her thigh peeked out from the slit in the side of the red dress.  When I looked a little higher, due to our height difference, I was looking right down her cleavage.  There was no escape from her all-encompassing sex appeal.

Then I was right back up to her smile, which had taken on a somewhat-knowing quality now.

“My eyes are up here,” she said innocently, folding her arms across her front just enough to push her breasts together a little bit more.

“I…”

“Nerds quote them,” announced Bobby Jenson from his podium, “they live on long after we’ve forgotten who said them, the writers don’t get credit for them, it’s time to find out who wins the award for the best one-liner!  Presenting this award are the woman who was paid to be topless in The Wayfarer Terminus and the guy who got his junk out backstage for free, Melanie Barr and Henry Ruskin!”

The pair came out from behind some curtains and Henry Ruskin pointed at Bobby Jenson, lifting his mic up.

“You said you would pay. I want my underwear back.  Anyway, the nominees for the best one-liners are…”

The lights dimmed, as they had for the previous categories where a video clip was applicable, and a few scenes were played as Henry and Melanie alternated in reading out the nominees.  Harper was last and I recognized the scene immediately.

The bad guy was in his headquarters, moving forward with his plans for global domination, having recently witnessed what he thought was the death of Dark Fox.  About to take over the television and radio signals around the world, he was just talking aloud to his second-in-command about what he should call himself.  The Red God?  The Godking?

The camera cuts to Harper, in the Dark Fox costume, looking down on them from the rafters with a baseball bat over her shoulder.  Cut and bruised, but far from dead, she makes her own suggestion.

“How about ‘The Bloody Pulp’?”

Then she jumped and the clip ended, to applause from the crowd.  I knew that Dark Fox went on to kick some ass, but it wasn’t my favorite scene from the movie.

I’d seen it on ‘movie night’ back when I was still in the corps.  Harper’s character comes into some money around half-way through the movie and suddenly decides to replace the home-made costume she’d been using up until that point.

That short dressing-montage followed by the big reveal when she opened the door and strode out for the first time pretty much made our day.  Amazingly, Sex Change Steve had put it more eloquently than anybody else when he said ‘holy fucking shit’.  That was the lesbian perspective when Dark Fox officially went off-the-scale sexy.

“And the winner is…” said Melanie, opening a golden envelope and showing it to Henry.

“Dark Fox, Harper Bayliss!” finished Henry.

The screen changed to show Harper in her seat, with my shoulder at the side of the image, looking surprised and happy.  She leaned over and gave me a quick hug before standing and making her way to the stage to accept her award.

Henry and Melanie handed over the little trophy, and there was much kissing-of-cheeks before Harper gave a quick speech.

“Wow, thank you all!  Um… Thanks to the fans for voting, of course.  Thanks to my wonderful family, who support my career all the time, I couldn’t do it without you.  Thanks to the director, Ben Meyer, who ordered about fifty takes of that scene with a different line each time, and all the people who worked on the Dark Fox movie to make it great.  And… thanks to Nick.  Um… that’s about it, thank you all, I’m gonna go backstage now and hope Henry doesn’t get his junk out again.”

“Sorry, Harper, I make them put it in all my contracts,” said Henry, just before the theme music drowned him out and the three of them went back through the curtains.

*****

My hand pressed on Harper’s bare skin and I reached around until my fingertips slid just under the material of her backless dress.  With one hand on the back of my neck and the other on the car seat steadying herself, her Fans Choice award was forgotten somewhere on the floor as we kissed.

It wasn’t until the limo stopped for a moment that I looked out of the window to see us driving into the underground car park of a hotel.  Making out with a girl like Harper would distract anybody though.

“You’re not going home tonight?” I asked.

Harper shook her head.  Her eyes, only an inch from mine, gave me an obvious invitation to not go home either.

A violent war waged inside of me.  On one side, the forces of fear and doubt sent chills up my spine.  On the other, the utter
need
for her threatened to set me on fire.  Harper nuzzled her nose against mine.  Our lips brushed together and this battle, at least, was won.  The war went on, though.

Harper wiped her lip gloss off me with her thumb before we stepped out of the limo, and I was tortured by the necessity of keeping my hands off her until the door to her room clicked shut behind us.  She kicked off her shoes and pushed at my jacket until I shrugged it off and it landed on the floor.

I bent down to kiss her and Harper strained up on the tips of her toes to meet me.  In the midst of our kiss, I scooped her up the same way I had in the gym and she wrapped her legs around me once more, one hand loosening my tie as we both got as much oxygen as we could through our noses.

Harper flung my tie backwards as I reached back to find her bare thigh, which was again being shown off to good effect by the high slit of the dress and exacerbated by the fact that her legs were around me.

Her skin was impossibly smooth, like some kind of supple glass, and my hand slid upwards easily, flirting with the lower extremities of her tight ass.  I felt the top two buttons of my shirt undone before the voice from my nightmares spoke up in my mind.

She would vomit at the sight of you.

A pained gasp escaped my lips and I slowly let Harper down, her lithe body rubbing against the hard evidence of my lust for her until her feet touched the ground again.  I gently grasped her shoulders and slowly moved her an arms-length away.

“I… Harper, I…”

I didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.  I wanted her, and the way she looked at me said she wanted me too, but that would all change if the undressing got far enough.

Harper and I couldn’t work out in the long run.  The thought of her perfect skin contrasted against my injuries was almost ludicrous. No.  If we did this tonight, then that fiery spark of desire in her deep brown eyes would be snuffed out. 

Maybe it was selfish of me, but I couldn’t handle that.  Not so soon.  After everything I’d been through, was it too much to ask for just a little time with Harper’s illusions intact?  Just to let her look at me like that for a little while longer?

“Harper, can we…”

“Wait,” she said.

She stepped backwards and looked over her shoulder, picking something up off the floor that turned out to be my tie.  She held it out in front of her with two hands and then brought it up to her face, laying the material over her eyes and tying it in a knot behind her head.  After a pause that I dared not defile with even the slightest sound of breath, she asked a question.

“What would you do with me if nobody could see?”

Harper brought one finger to her lips in what might have been an expression of curiosity, but in all likelihood was just a hell of a sexy thing to do.  It was a pretty damn good question too.

For a few seconds, everything was silent. I half expected the next thing I heard to be the sound of the door opening and closing as Nick left.  I pulled my finger away from my lips and wrung my hands together nervously as I waited for whatever would happen.

In the world of poker, I supposed this would be called going ‘all-in’.  I wanted Nick and he said he wanted me, but there was something that held him back.  My best guess after our last encounter in the gym was some kind of self-consciousness about his scars.

I didn’t care about them, but I could understand better than most regarding constant judgments about what you looked like.  What would Nick do if he was free from those judgments for a while?  Maybe for the first time since he received those scars?

Nick was still wearing his shoes and I heard him take first one step in my direction, and then another.  The physical distance between us wasn’t great, but it took an agonizingly long time before I sensed he was right in front of me again, close enough to touch if I reached out.

Perhaps the real distance that had to be crossed was a mental one, maybe that’s what took so long.  When I felt his hand on my cheek, touching me as gently as if he thought I might break into a million pieces, I felt like my guess might have been right on the money.

I leaned into his hand, feeling the warmth as my skin tingled in excitement.  In my self-imposed darkness, I could hear Nick’s breathing, which seemed to shudder with every beat of his heart, his own excitement being slowly let out of some cage.

Nick’s hand stroked down my cheek and along my neck.  I shivered, desperate to reach out to him, to feel for the remaining buttons on his shirt or rip it off if I couldn’t find them.

More than that, I wanted him to walk the rest of that mental distance, to really be with me.  So I held myself back, made my hands drop to my sides while I waited.

He caressed along my shoulder and down my arm before I felt his other hand on me, thumb on my cheek and fingers curled around the back of my head, buried in my hair.  I looked up at him, where I imagined his face was on the other side of my blindfold, and couldn’t stop myself licking my lips in preparation for the kiss I fiercely hoped was coming.

I wasn’t disappointed.  The kiss came, starting slowly but quickly becoming deeper and deeper, and I felt his tongue gently touching mine until our lips finally parted.  I rose up on the balls of my feet, unconsciously following him for a few inches before I felt my breasts brush against his torso.

Nick’s hand moved from my arm to my hip, then curled around to my ass and pulled my whole body against him.  Once more I felt that almost intimidating bulge in his pants as I lowered my heels to the floor again, pressing into my belly this time and making clear-thinking all the more difficult.

The excitement made it feel almost like I couldn’t get enough oxygen in each time I inhaled. I was breathing so deeply that my breasts squashed against him every time they rose and fell.  I was at my breaking point. I wanted him so bad.

I felt Nick’s hands move to my shoulders and slip the straps of my dress off so they hung loose around my upper arms.  After pressing myself against him even harder for a second, I pulled away to let him push my dress down far enough so that it slid to the floor, leaving me in just my lacy black G-string and my makeshift blindfold.

“Harper… you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with,” he said.

“So, be with me,” I said.

Nick kissed me again and my nipples brushed against his shirt, sending an unexpected jolt of pleasure into my body.  I broke off the kiss with a quiet gasp and felt Nick step forward, pressing against me so that I had to take a half-step back.

He brought my hand up to the next button on his shirt as I heard first one of his shoes kicked off and then the other.  I began working at them as he steered me backwards in the direction of the bedroom.  With him touching me all over my body and his kisses raining down, it was a quite the feat of coordination, but by the time the back of my knees hit the bed, I was able to push his shirt off.

I strained against him, my soft chest pressing on his hard body.  I blindly sought out his lips again, already breathless but wanting more, and moved my hand from his shoulder, across his pectoral muscles, and then over his abs.

I had to break away from the kiss when I laid my hand on his manhood through his pants, feeling his size with certainty for the first time.  An Amazonian warrior woman might look petite next to Nick, so I was definitely in the best kind of trouble.

Nick pushed me back and followed me down, moving with me as I shuffled further onto the bed.  I reached for the button on his pants, but he gently made me lie flat with a hand on my upper chest.  I arched my back, pushing my breast against his hand as his fingers trailed down towards my hip.

When he gripped the flimsy material of my underwear, I first pushed down with my feet to raise my ass off the mattress, then lifted both of my legs straight up with my toes pointed until he had removed my second-to-last article of clothing completely.  His right hand curled around the upper thigh of my left leg and I bent it at the knee, draping it over his shoulder as he began to kiss my right calf.

Lower and lower he kissed, until my left leg slipped from his shoulder and I was utterly exposed before him, still without the power of sight due to the blindfold.  He was taking his time, seeming like he was going to kiss every square inch of my skin before moving on.

It was delicious, squirmy torture, especially when he reached the back of my knee and the faint hint of stubble tickled at the same time as he kissed.  Nobody had ever spent any time kissing there, and I was caught off guard by how good it felt.

I couldn’t hold back a moan of pleasure when he finally stopped teasing my unexpected erogenous zone and continued up my inner thigh, getting closer and closer to my sex.  I’d never felt anything between my legs like I was feeling now without having even been touched there yet.

Somewhere between an itch that had been begging to be scratched for weeks, an electric tingle, and a slippery mess, I was so ready for his touch that I almost cried when I felt his hot breath on my most private place.  When he finally put me out of my misery, I was almost feral with lust.

Nick soon had my head thrashing from side to side, my fingers running through his hair as he did what no man had taken the time to do for me before.  When my climax took over my body, I lost all coherence and had no idea what I might have been squealing.

I could barely get my words out when the heartbeat pounding in my ears came down to a level that I could hear myself over.  I needed him inside me.

“Get a… condom, get… a condom,” I panted.

Nick pulled away, and from under my blindfold I could hear him rushing through the removal of his pants and the crinkle of foil as he presumably retrieved a condom from his wallet.  The anticipation was a torment until he finally climbed back on the bed and over me.

I reached down and wrapped my fingers around him, and he put his hands on the bed on either side of me, leaning forward to kiss my lips as I guided his length to my entrance.  I let my head fall the last few inches on to the pillow and wrapped my arms around the back of his neck as he filled me up completely.

Nick, mercifully, started slowly, kissing my neck and sending chills all over my body.  Soon, though,  I was holding on for dear life as he let go completely and surrendered to his needs, unleashing God only knew how many months of pent up emotion, self-doubt, and denial.

His hand moved to my hair and firmly grabbed a sizable fistful, giving it an urgent tug that made me gasp in response, and then he held it, exposing my neck to him even more as if he was some vampire making me his prey.  It was so much like the images that had flashed through my mind the first time I’d seen Nick and thought of him as a bad boy.

I had started this, pushed for this, and up until this point, I’d been somewhat in control.  I felt the balance of power, the seat of control, shift from me to him as the feel of him inside me, the power of him holding me, put him in charge.  I was just along for the ride, the sweet pleasure of the ride.

Nick’s tie came loose, fell from my eyes, and I saw him naked for the first time.  His body was a painful work of art, perfectly sculpted and then adorned with tattoos and crisscrossed with scars.

The faint red splash from the acid attack was barely noticeable and might even fade completely with time.  All I could see was perfection though.

I curled my hand around the back of his neck and pulled his forehead against mine, bringing his eyes so close that they were all I could see.  The fire of my second orgasm took over and I struggled against the urge to squeeze my own eyes shut, just wanting to swim in his clear blue forever.

Nick looked back at me.  Even in the haze of his lust he knew that I could see him, and it didn’t hurt anymore.  It didn’t hurt him at all.