Brazen Read Free

justice. He’s tall and sculpted, as the requirements
dictate. He’s still violating the harem’s rules by wearing a tee shirt, but I
can tell from the way the cotton stretches over the two crests of his abdomen
and the contours of his chest that he’s got a body custom-made to keep me up
nights. His arms look strong with pronounced triceps, matching veins at the
crook of each elbow that make me think of pumping blood and the smell of male
exertion.
    He’s blocking
the threshold between the hall and the sunroom, and I want him to move so I can
sit by the windows in the latter and wait for the next round of lightning and
thunder. I have a fat candle in my hand as I approach him, and the flame lights
up his face, his straight, noble nose and full lips. Even in the relative
darkness, his eyes are bright. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, but as
I come close he drops one and raises the other, taking hold of the top frame of
the door, casual. He makes no move to quit blocking my way, but to scold him
too openly would dilute my authority in front of the others.
    “No shirts,”
I tell him in an even, bored voice.
    His lips
tighten in the smallest possible twitch of a smile, and he obediently reaches
down and peels his tee up and over his head. Two feet away now stands a body
even finer than the theoretical one I’ve been fantasizing about since the night
he first appeared. Not an ounce of fat. Every shape and shadow of him is honed
to conform to an imaginary manual of specifications shelved somewhere in my
reptilian brain. I want to sink my teeth into the rounded swells of his
shoulders. I want to lap Scotch out of the hollows above his collarbones. And I
want him to get the hell out of my way.
    “Follow me,”
I say.
    He steps
aside the tiniest bit and I slip by, feeling his energy as if I were breaching
a force field. I take a seat on the sofa, below the bay window, beside a young
man who politely sets aside a newspaper he’d been perusing in the candlelight.
He’s European-looking with stylish, long- ish dark
hair and an angular jaw. Black tattoos all up his arms, some kind of tasteful,
intricate design. I beckon him to straddle me and to the trouble-man I say,
“Sit down,” and pat the empty cushion to my right. “You could use a tutorial.”
    The tattooed
man relocates, pushing his knees into the upholstery on either side of my legs.
He’s wearing black boxer briefs, and I run my hands over his backside, hard as
some impressive cliché. I stroke my palms up his stomach and chest, surveying
the thin trail of dark hair that runs down from his navel to disappear behind
his waistband. He’s stiff already, and I admire the long curve of his erection
where it strains to one side against his underwear.
    The
trouble-man sinks into the couch, looking relaxed.
    “Take your jeans
off,” I order him.
    “Sure,” he
says in a voice I never asked to hear.
    “No talking,”
I say with orchestrated nonchalance.
    He stands and
unfastens a thick leather belt, unzips his fly and lets his pants fall to the
floor with a clunk of the heavy buckle. He too wears boxer briefs, gray ones.
His hips make a V that draws my eyes straight down to his bulge. He steps out
of his pants and sits back on the sofa.
    I catch the
eye of another man—the one I made suffer the other night during Cool Hand
Luke . He’s watching from a chair on the other side of the narrow room. I
beckon him over to occupy the remaining empty cushion. He knows what to do, and
I think he’ll set a good example for his worrisome new coworker.
    I begin to
stroke the tattooed man in my lap as my star pupil does the same to himself at
my side. I pull down my man’s briefs enough to free him and my pupil follows
suit. The trouble-man just leans back, one arm draped along the back of the
couch, and watches with a little self-satisfied grin tweaking his lips. He is
distracting in his inactivity. I will probably have to fire him after tonight.
Which is a pity, I