Whiskey Sour Noir (The Hard Stuff) Read Online Free Page A

want another one of these before you go home and get your bedroom all ready?” Cat Avery asked me in a low, sexy voice. He used his shoulder rag to blot the sweat that had suddenly appeared on his forehead. God, I hoped he washed that nasty thing once in a while.
    I slid off the stool and adjusted my wifebeater so that my lower back tats were covered. “Love House, room sixty-one,” I said quietly. “Now don’t keep Tami Lee waiting.”
    “This is most convenient. I can do the long jump and I’ll be in your lobby.” He swung his arms like he was readying to hop hard and far. “I’ll be over less than a minute after I punch out,” he said through a stifled laugh that sounded more excitement than mirth.
    In this regard, he was good to his word. By five-fifteen we were in my bed, clothes tossed around the small hot room, our naked parts mashed up against each other’s.
    He took care of my needs first. His long, rough fingers delved and traced and prodded me into some state of grace I thought only the Tibetan monks were capable of reaching. Eyes closed, I saw a cemetery full of white lights, candle-lit arbors, a fiery suttee. His tongue knew its way to the center of the edge, where I hung by a thread, limbs shaking like fall leaves, until, with one final lick, he pushed me over. I let out a bellow that made us both laugh.
    He climbed on top of me and I eased him inside. His dick was good and long and slick, and he knew how to slide it around until I was back on the edge again. Just as I let go, he covered my mouth with his hand. I groaned and latched onto his fingers, suckling them, and he began to thrust hard, then harder. We rocked the hard times as he gave me a pounding that made my ears ring. The bed left the floor over and over, his thrusting lifting us onto some other plane. Both of us drooled and moaned, and at one point I swear I heard a train coming right for us.
    When he finally let go, it was with the fire-hose gusto of a man who has spent years alone in a bunk bed looking at photos of airbrushed starlets. Not tater tots.
    Still, I listened close when he talked about his case. Which he began to do right after he came, and continued to do quite a lot in the days and weeks that followed. Unfortunately for me, he wasn’t in love with me. No, instead we’d eased into a comfortably familiar fuck-buddy routine.
    After work and a whiskey sour at the Kettle, I’d give him the okay sign and come on home. Pretty soon he’d knock on my motel door and we’d go at it like couple of thirsty camels. Then I’d get us each a post-coital beer and we’d lie around my tousled bed, sipping and talking. Mostly it was him talking, me listening, um-hmming, listening some more. Especially when he went on about the whole child porn thing.
    I wasn’t interested in having a fling with a pervert. I sleep down, but not that far down. From the first time, I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t doing the bump with a creep. From what I know after working at the DIC, your typical pederast likes his girls younger, flatter, much more compliant than me. I’m an aggressive sexpot if I do say so myself. Once I’m set on a man, I aim myself at him like a heat-seeking Parabellum and I go right for the tender center.
    Cat Avery liked that about me. He knew how to please me, and he knew how to please himself too. The man loved his sexing. A lot. I know gay and I think I know perv, and he was neither of those. So Avery’s bad luck story seemed to back up my feeling he was one of the unknown number of not-guilty who’d been tagged unjustly.
    “All the time I was inside, I did some deep thinking about who it could’ve been that set me up,” he said one night, two beers after our last lingering kiss. “You sit in a six by ten alongside a baby rapist with a creative brain the size of a billy goat’s, and you do some deep thinking about how you got to where you are. You think hard and long, all right.”
    I rolled over onto my damp belly and