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  Outside the locked door of the Quiet Room, someone was urgently knocking.

  “Are you okay?” came the call.

  “Oh, shit!” Patrice muttered to herself.

  As she removed her slippery hands from her panties, she realized where she was and what she had been doing. The room reeked of pussy, and she had probably done the same thing she did when she was at home. Although she made every effort to avoid any possibilities of fucking her deadbeat husband, including making the guest bedroom her own room, she would often have an especially nasty dream and he would hear her moaning. She would find him standing over her in the middle of the night, hard as a baseball bat and wanting to fuck her with a fierceness. She would inevitably be pissed with herself for moaning in her sleep, and she now realized that is probably what had happened there in the Quiet Room.

  She rose from the chaise, adjusted her clothing, and sprayed a little of her Chanel No. 5 into the air, hoping to camouflage the lingering scent of sex. Then, she opened the door, pretending to be half asleep.

  It was Trevor.

  “Are you okay? I thought I heard someone crying,” he lied.

  Trevor, more than anyone else, knew the telltale sounds of passion—and the scent of it. The smell in the room confirmed his suspicions. He had long been attracted to Patrice, but had heard that she was married. He was never one to interfere with a marriage, but the murmurs he had heard from outside the office had made his dick so hard he wanted to throw her down on that chair in the middle of the day and fuck her until she spoke in tongues. However, if he did that, it would probably be the last thing he ever did at Perkins & Brightmon; not that he hadn’t had his fair share of quickies in the infamous Quiet Room. Those were reserved for off-hours, when he was relatively sure no one would be in the office. It did occur to him that he had one damn good perk working as Perkins & Brightmon’s facilities manager. Ensconced in his office was something only a relatively few people at the firm were aware of. One of his responsibilities as facilities manager was to observe what was going on in the firm—who was stealing, staff comings and goings. To facilitate that responsibility, cameras were strategically placed in various sectors of the office. One of those sectors was the Quiet Room.

  No one ever asked to see the tapes, unless something was stolen or someone was hurt (which never happened), so Trevor often satisfied his lustful urges by watching tapes of the infamous Quiet Room. If his boss only knew what went on in there, that room would probably have been shut down a long time ago. The carnal delights that were satisfied after hours between attorneys and secretaries, janitors and partners, would have made media history if he ever published those tapes. But for now, none of those couplings interested him. All he wanted to see was that beautiful little kitty Patrice in action. He always thought she moved liked a feline, but outside that door, listening to her purr reinforced his perceptions. He would wait until everyone left for the day, shut his door, and watch Patrice pleasuring herself while he privately did the same.

  By 8:30 p.m. everyone in the firm had left for the evening. Patrice was terribly embarrassed and sure that Trevor knew what she had been doing earlier that afternoon. She wanted to talk to him, but didn’t want to do it during the day while everyone was there. Besides which, she had been so busy working all day that she couldn’t have gotten a free moment if she wanted. She decided she would wait it out and find her way to his office when she was sure everyone had left—everyone except Trevor. Around 8:45, Patrice took a walk around the floor and saw the light on in Trevor’s office. She was sure she hadn’t seen him leave, so she decided to knock on the door. This time she was the one who heard the telltale evidence of passion. Before she lost her nerve, she opened the door to his office only to find Trevor, dick in hand, looking at one of his many monitors.

  “Why don’t you let me do that for you?” she asked huskily.

  Trevor, shocked and surprised, fumbled, suddenly realizing he hadn’t locked the door and what a stupid chance he had taken. However, he quickly recovered when he realized what she had said.

  “Oh, kitty, please do,” he responded.

  Patrice crossed the office to his side of the desk and was surprised to find, instead of the downloaded porn she thought he was watching, that he was indeed watching her. It was mesmerizing, watching herself fuck her pussy the way she was doing—in her sleep. No wonder her husband would stand over her in the middle of the night, desperate to slide his pole inside. He had probably watched her many a night without her knowing the show she was putting on for him.

  “Kitty, is your pussy still as wet as it was earlier today? Can I taste it?”

  Trevor knocked everything off his desk, except for the two monitors, and grabbed Patrice up in his arms, setting her down on the desk. He pulled down her already saturated panties, spread open her legs, and began lapping away at her pussy with such zeal that Patrice was squirming and squealing within minutes. With the flat of his tongue Trevor assaulted her pussy with such a lashing that her legs turned to jelly. He then probed ever so deeply inside her dripping wet pussy with his pointed tongue, tongue-fucking her cunt until her eyes rolled up into her head. He found her throbbing, erect clit and tortured her sweetly with licks and nibbles that sent electric charges throughout her entire body. Kneeling down on the floor, feasting on this syrupy pussy, Trevor’s dick dripped pre-cum in anticipation of Patrice’s walls capturing his cock and holding tight, while he thrust himself deeper and deeper inside her. He raised himself from the floor, eager to share Patrice’s tasty delights with her.

  “Oh, fuck! You make me feel so good! Make me feel good, Trevor. Please make me feel good! I want your cock buried deep inside of me. Oh, please, please!” she pleaded.

  He smothered her pleas with his mouth. He took Patrice’s face into his hands, gazed into her eyes, and kissed her so urgently, Patrice could think of nothing else but how good he made her feel. He explored her mouth with his tongue, not wanting her to miss an inch of her exquisite taste. She tasted like heaven on earth.

  Trevor lay on top of her on the desk, his head in her breasts, licking them, tasting remnants of mother’s milk lacing them. Suddenly he was reminded that less than a year ago the office had thrown Patrice a baby shower. His dick, hard between her legs, wouldn’t permit him a conscience. All he could think of was the heat radiating from her pussy. He held fast to the desk above both their heads and plunged his stiff, throbbing, anxiously awaiting dick inside her, afraid to move; the sensation was so euphoric he was sure if he moved even an inch, it would be over long before it started. He rested himself there; that is, until Patrice began to gyrate rhythmically against him with her pelvis, grinding him ever deeper inside her pussy. Even from her spot on the desk, she couldn’t control the urge to feel his dick up to the hilt of her pussy. She gazed into his dark, sexy eyes and increased the speed at which she circled his dick with her pussy. Then, something happened that had never, ever happened to Trevor in his entire life. He had had his fair share of pussy, but nothing could prepare him for the earth-shattering orgasm unchartered territory provides. As Trevor continued fucking Patrice relentlessly, she began scooting farther and farther back on the desk so that her back was bent over the desk and her head was hanging down. Her back bent so far back Trevor was afraid he might hurt her, yet the two lovers couldn’t stop, even if they wanted to. It was now out of their control.

  Patrice began a sexual chant that engorged Trevor’s cock even more, then suddenly the combination of unveiled passion and nature caused Patrice to discharge mother’s milk from her breasts so quickly and with such force and intensity it was as though her breasts were cumming, only turning Trevor on all the more. He gripped her with all his might, raising her along with him from the desk and backing her up against the nearest wall, devouring her breasts, biting at her crimson nipples, feeling them grow inside his mouth, poking insistently with his tongue, as he tried in earnest to extract even more of her sweet nectar, burying his head in the feminine curve of her neck t
o muffle his moans before they escaped from his throat. He repeated over and over, “Purr for me, sweet kitty. Purr for me, just the way you did for yourself.”

  Playas of a Greater Game

  Anthony Beal

  He made it so easy most days that in fleeting spaces between the passage of seconds Rosalind could almost pity her lover, Lord Eryq of the shaven head, the brow perpetually scowling on the best of days beneath the weight of the unenlightened world, God bless his warrior’s heart. Let heaven help any woman so foolhardy as to risk seeking to love him on any day other than the best, for Shakespeare never penned tragedy like that which would ensue and had on more occasions than he’d ever admit. Your typical angry young African-American male, Lord Eryq was not, however, and few implications stood capable of drawing forth resentment as magma-hot or as voluminous as did that one. “Typical,” indeed! He was not scornful, he was merely a thinker thinking, because that’s what thinkers do, thank you kindly. Perhaps he did devote an inordinate amount of time to pondering life’s many injustices and humankind’s myriad shortcomings, but that was a problem of which he stood fully aware, and it was all his, not yours. Not unless you wanted to make something out of it.

  And he hoped you wanted to make something out of it.

  Before their relationship had aged a fortnight, Rosalind had successfully learned not only the rules of engagement, but also the best conditions under which to abide by or flout them, coordinating her actions with these right down to the temperature or time of day or part of the city in which they found themselves. Here, a wink of her impossibly blue eye at a restaurant wine steward as he refills her flute without being asked. There, a kiss of greeting applied haphazardly close to the lips of a long-missed male friend who’s known her since the two of them were young enough to share a bathtub at her parents’ home without impropriety. Here again, a smile allowed to linger on her face for a second too long at a coffeehouse barista’s innocent flirtation; textbook flirtation bestowed upon all female customers alike in hopes of encouraging nothing so much as generous tips. Rare was the day that Rosalind’s manipulation of these ostensibly innocuous seedlings of social grace failed to germinate. More often than not, they bore poisonous and irresistible fruit of the sort that would quickly become Rosalind’s addiction; the sort that invariably placed her Eryq at physical odds with the various objects of attentions she contrived for precisely that purpose. His temper, the archetypal gift that keeps on giving, always paid her handsomely for her efforts.

  Nights like tonight tended to place Rosalind’s sympathies with the unsuspecting lambs to whom the slightest extension of her favor deemed superfluous in Eryq’s eyes embodied criminality damning and dangerous. Rosalind might never know whether it was by blind luck or by Eryq’s stubbornness that the altar of his ire always came to collect the sheep, but never their shepherdess. A thing of which she did feel certain, though, was that she would go on leading the unassuming to ultimate sacrifice upon that altar for as long as that scythe that her lover carried in his mouth remained sharp.

  “Fool, I’m talking to you! I said, ‘Do you have a problem?’” Eryq demanded, proving for all time that the grandeur of her art and artifice lay in consistently steering them, her and Eryq, to public locales populated by men as ready and able as oiled honing stones against which to grind him. The light-skinned brother dining alone at an adjacent table on the outdoor terrace of Eryq’s favorite chophouse, the brother with the cleft chin and eyes as green as limes, appeared to be such a stone.

  Those eyes as green as limes retrieved the gauntlet, the one that Eryq’s glare had cast down between them, without flinching. He appeared to have no idea what new and unspoiled worlds of spilled blood and shattered dinnerware had been promised to him the instant he’d returned the surreptitious smile that Rosalind had made such an unsubtle point of delivering to him over Eryq’s shoulder.

  “Did I say anything to you that suggested that I had a problem?” Rosalind’s lime-eyed sacrifice asked Eryq, looking by turns amused and disinterested in a way that Rosalind knew would only fuel Eryq’s anger.

  Eryq shoved his chair back, away from their table. Then things began rapidly happening as the lime-eyed brother’s chair lost a leg to Eryq’s temper. As table linen got dragged to the floor, toppling plates, saucers, and filled glassware over the table’s edge and into oblivion against hardwood floors. As the tip of Eryq’s boot introduced itself to the fragile ribs of a stranger. As fists accustomed to this drill kissed that stranger upon both his cheeks. As the establishment’s manager phoned police. Then Eryq was hauling Rosalind up out of her seat, tossing enough cash onto their table to cover the cost of the meal that they’d not experience the luxury of finishing, and bounding purposefully out of the establishment with long, emphatic strides that left Rosalind the options of skipping to keep up with him or being dragged along the ground.

  Seconds later, the rust-colored Pontiac that he’d probably never stop customizing tore out of the parking lot behind the chophouse with Rosalind at its wheel because Eryq was an angry driver on the best of days, and because Rosalind knew every conceivable shortcut back to his apartment.

  Territorial, the lovemaking that spilled out of the car and into Eryq’s third-floor walk-up. Shedding clothes like serpent skins, their knot of grappling limbs and smacking lips found Eryq’s bedroom. In darkness, her teeth and fingertips stalked onto his body like armies storming an unclaimed continent. Rosalind’s eyes crossed in the dark as his kiss drew the air from her lungs. Feral, his clutch beneath which smoldered libidinous fires that threatened to sear its every sampling of Rosalind’s flesh.

  Nothing Lord Eryq did ever left Rosalind feeling as deliriously wanton and powerful as she did immediately following a dustup between him and some unnamed flavor of the day with whom she’d chosen to innocently flirt. In that invariable instant that always found Eryq confronting the unfortunate, Rosalind was both girl and woman. She was goddesshood unbridled, undisputed, immortal omnipotence through whom flowed and to whose whims bent all the energies of the universe. She was an ebullient child at play, guiding two posturing puppets in circles about one another, choreographing their ritual dance to first blood, a ceremony that fed her evolution like nothing else.

  Rosalind’s hands stole impressions of Eryq’s physique like lusting thieves. Her fingernails bit into his beefy shoulders. Sending his fingertips to swim amidst the curly sable sea of her hair, Eryq filled the windy, berry-painted O of her mouth with his tongue and discovered electricity in her kiss.

  Lord Eryq’s gladiatorial spirit ran as rampant across her ivory nakedness as it had across the jaw of the lime-eyed brother at the chophouse. Rosalind lapped the aphrodisiac of his sweat from his every sinew as he stalked her most sensitive regions. Spreading spastic hues of coral and rose in anticipation of his mouth, she could do little but dance along with his tongue where it raved inside her, coaxing forth honey-sweet viscosity to glaze her inner thighs. Every shiver that he inspired was a village burned, every frenetic gasp a terrain surmounted. He slashed. She burned. And in truth, this was the way she liked it.

  The truth, too, was that instances like this were the only times that Rosalind felt equipped to suffer his company, or to allow herself the briefest respite from loathing him.

  But a deal was a deal.

  “You and your white bitch need to learn some motherfuckin’ consideration for the rest of the people living in this building,” Eryq heard upon opening his apartment door to squint into the light of dawn. He no longer wondered on mornings like this how early his neighbor and onetime bedmate Celestine must have gotten out of bed in order to greet him at this hour, or how long she’d spent crouched beside her apartment door listening for the sound of him opening his door to retrieve his daily newspaper. It disgusted him sufficiently just to know that she had.

  It served him right, and Eryq knew it did, that his every morning-after should begin with the crowing of the harpy next door. With him alone rested all fault for his having bro
ken the first rule of the one-night stand: you never hook up with someone who lives close enough to you to track your every move. He would not seek to blame it on the general air of New Yorkers’ emotional and sexual neediness that had marked that first New Year’s Eve following 9/11, nor upon the fifth of Cutty Sark that he’d helped his partner Tulane demolish at the New Year’s party they’d all attended in those days before Rosalind, before the club to which he now belonged.

  Because he’d heard her voice before realizing he’d heard it, Eryq’s reaction to the head stuck out of the next apartment door down the hall from his was not immediate. His brain had registered only the vaguest impressions of scowling espresso-dark features, of a black gauze headwrap, of words that seemed to lean, indicative of the speaker’s Caribbean lineage. Failing to get an initial rise out of him, she squawked a second time.

  “I know you can hear me, simple-actin’ motherfucker. We sure as hell heard the two of y’all going at each other like motherfuckin’ savages. I got motherfuckin’ children over here. Little ones don’t need to be woke up in the middle of the damned night hearing that motherfuckin’ shit.”

  “Those little ones whose delicate little ears you’re so concerned about,” Eryq replied, “you talk to them with the same mouth you’re using right now to talk to me?”

  Blindsided by the question’s implication, then affronted by it, Celestine raged, “Nigga, fuck you. You and that nasty-ass club you belong to.” A rarity was the conversation between Eryq and Celestine that did not end on such a note.