Читать книгу Tempting Taylor - Joan Elizabeth Lloyd - Страница 7

“He’s going to take me. I’m really going along. It’sgoing to be so great. My first real field trip.”

Melissa Bonner’s squealing voice was so loud that Taylor Barwick had to hold her cell phone inches from her ear. “Slow down, Lissa, and tell me how you finally got him to agree,” she said, her voice pitched to its usually low, husky timbre.

“This trip’s a six-month photo shoot in China somewhere. He’s doing a spread for National Geographic and he’s going to take me along. He’s really going to take me.” Tay knew all about the trip since Lissa had been talking about it for a month. However, she let her best friend prattle on. “We leave somewhere during the first week of April. I’m going. Come what may, I’m going.”

“Okay, I get it. You’re going. He’s going to take you along.” Her slight sarcasm was lost on her friend. Tay had known for several weeks that Dave Bonner, a world-renowned photojournalist and animal-rights activist, was going to spend from six months to a year in God-Knows-Where, China, photographing some endangered species or other. With a deep desire to follow in her famous father’s footsteps, and a talented photographer in her own right, Lissa had been telling Tay how she’d been deviling her dad to let her accompany him. Tay had seen a lot of her friend’s work and she had to admit that Lissa knew how to tell an entire story with one photo or brief video clip. Her father had won numerous awards and his guidance would be of great help to his daughter.

Lissa had explained the art behind great photography several times. “Anyone who’s ever written a short story thinks he or she is a great author and the only thing keeping them off the best-seller list is the time to actually sit down and write the great American novel. We all know that’s not true at all.

“Well, it’s the same with photography. Anyone with a digital camera thinks that taking really great pictures is just a matter of point-and-shoot. Dad learned, and has taught me, that great pictures take time, effort and patience.”

The voice in Tay’s cell phone continued. “Begging, whining and wheedling seems to finally have worked. I’m so excited.” Her voice hadn’t dropped from its original squeal and Tay flipped her cell phone to speaker and held it at arm’s length.

“I’m delighted for you,” she said, trying to sound overjoyed. She’d miss Lissa, the rock that had held her together since Steve’s defection three months before.

Tay and Lissa had met in their freshman year at the Manhattan Art and Technology Institute. Over the seventy-five years since its founding as the Manhattan Art Institute it had added various aspects of computer graphics to its program so that, ten years before, the word Technology had been added to its original name. Lissa majored in photography, both still and movies, studying everything from composition and dark-room work to software and digital editing. Tay had gotten a small scholarship to study Web-page design and programming and from her first class had found that she loved the challenge of combining the artistic and practical.

The girls had met at freshman orientation and had almost immediately become friends. Tay commuted from her family’s home in New Jersey and Lissa took the train each day from Westchester County. Eventually, by taking on various part-time jobs, they’d been able to afford to move into a small loft in SoHo together, which they filled with furniture that they referred to as either Modern Salvation Army or Contemporary Castoff.

In her senior year Tay took advantage of a work-study program to intern with a small graphic-design firm that hired her immediately upon graduation. Tay had worked for them for a few years, then had been wooed away by the large multinational firm she still worked for.

After trying unsuccessfully to get freelance work, Lissa had taken a job with a small magazine, specializing in fabulous photographs of wildlife around the world. Although Lissa knew she had talent, she had confided to Tay that her father’s name had opened doors for her. She’d always wondered whether her talent would have been enough on its own.

Once they were both working, they were delighted that they could finally afford to join the local health club and began to indulge one of their mutual interests, swimming. For years, since her dad had moved to their current house, Lissa had been able to swim several times a week in the Bonner pool. Tay had been on the swim team in high school and lamented that she was going to get flabby if she didn’t get regular exercise.

They swam laps several times a week, keeping their bodies trim, enjoying the rhythmic strokes and racing toward the end to see who could complete fifty laps fastest. Then they’d lounge in the sauna while they unwound and shared the events of their respective days. The talk was usually about the guys they dated and their sex lives. Both women were open about their love of good, hot, steamy sex. It was gradually becoming awkward to combine a good love life with sharing an apartment, but they put up with it, inventing a series of signals to alert each other to the need for the other to “get a cup of coffee” at the local Starbucks.

The two women managed to continue to room together until a year after graduation, when they both were making enough so that Lissa could afford to move into her own place and Tay could pay the rent herself and keep the loft. Tay had continued to live there until she’d moved to Brooklyn Heights with Steve seven months before.

“So begging finally payed off,” she said now into the phone’s speaker.

Tay could hear Lissa’s chuckle. “Yeah, that and persistence, moaning and the occasional tear. I pulled out all the stops. Oh, Tay, I wore him down and he’s really agreed.”

Tay huffed out a breath, genuinely delighted for her friend. “Lissa, I’m thrilled for you. I know you’ve wanted this for a long time.”

She stopped pacing, dropped onto the bed and put her feet up. Now that Lissa had calmed a bit and her voice had gone back to its normal level, Tay flipped the speaker on the phone off and propped the instrument back against her ear. She looked around the small rented apartment, three months later still scattered with bits of her now-ex-boyfriend’s stuff, detritus from their suddenly aborted love affair.

Love affair? Not! Certainly not on his part. It had taken longer than it should have for her to realize that she’d been a meal ticket, a sex partner and little else. Steve had been a taker and she, to her eternal shame, had done the giving until she began to wise up. That had been after a dinner just before Christmas, when they’d been living together for almost four months. They were sitting at the little kitchen table sipping glasses of Burgundy. As she thought back she remembered that as a special treat for him she’d bought a new, more expensive vintage.

“I’m sorry, Steve, but a two-thousand-dollar sound board is out of the question,” she said after he explained the intricacies and importance of a new piece of sound electronics.

“Listen, baby, you can afford it. I really need it and it could be my Christmas present. Without really top-of-the-line equipment the band’s music sounds awful. Think of it as an investment in our future.”

“How is my buying you a new sound board an investment in our future?”

“The band is a business. The new stuff that I’m writing is going to take Steak and Potatoes to the top of the charts. We might even let you do a vocal or two.” Let her?

Dumb name, Steak and Potatoes. She’d been singing along with the band from time to time and had gotten a pretty good reception wherever they’d performed. Steve never said what kind of reaction they’d gotten without her. “You’ve posted a music video on YouTube and very few people have watched it,” Tay said. “You thought that would be your big chance, but it hasn’t turned out as well as you’d thought. Why don’t we just wait until you’ve had a little more success?”

His face darkened. “No one’s interested in it because I don’t have the electronics to make it really great. I need a sound board and some really fine video equipment. But it’s okay. You don’t have any interest in my career. I can see that now.”

“Career?” Her voice rose. “I talked Lissa into letting you use her digital camera and editing software to make that two-minute thing you call a music video and I provided some cash for God knows what. ‘I’ll get it back to you when this video makes us famous,’ you said. Well, Steve, you still haven’t made a dime and I’ve invested mucho bucks already.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said, his attitude softening. “Let’s just let this drop.” He walked behind her chair and began to rub her neck to relieve the day’s tension. Slowly his hands slipped down the front of her blouse, sliding beneath to find her nipples. Pulling and pinching, his fingers immediately caused the flesh between her legs to swell and moisten. “Oh baby,” Steve said, “your body makes me hot.”

Tay let her head fall back against his groin and she could feel his hard erection beneath his jeans. His hands were magical, playing her body as if it were one of his instruments. He leaned over and bit the tendon at the side of her neck, while he efficiently unbuttoned her blouse and rubbed her belly. The zipper of her slacks came next and all thought became impossible.

He walked around her chair and parted her knees so he could stand between them. She quickly freed his rampant cock from his slacks. Since he usually wore no underwear she could easily lick precome from the tip. She marveled that she could so easily excite him.

She sucked and listened to his moans. Then they were naked, stretched out on the bed in the tiny bedroom. He quickly covered his cock with a condom, his only accommodation to her needs, and, draping her legs over his shoulders, rammed his swollen erection deep inside her.

As always she was more than ready for him, and as one of his hands played with her nipple and the other rubbed her clit, she came. He continued to ride her while she rose again and her second climax was matched with his.

The following evening he brought up the subject of the sound board again, and when she again told him she wouldn’t pay for it, he again made love to her. Later that night she told him that despite the sex she wasn’t going to spend that kind of money on new equipment, Christmas gift or no Christmas gift.

“You’re really serious,” he said, incredulous.

“Totally.” She was replete, happy after good lovemaking, but she was slowly smarting up, too. Any time she turned him down he fucked her brains out. As she thought back she realized that, up to now, it had always worked. Not anymore, she thought.

“I don’t get your total disinterest in what I want.”

“It’s not what I want and not what I intend to do.” She sighed. Sadly, it was time they had it out. Steve was going to have to decide whether he was in their relationship for her or her credit card. She was very afraid she knew the answer, but she hoped she was wrong. She had to be wrong.

She wasn’t, and Steve moved out the following day. It had been a Saturday, and after a morning spent in bed, he’d asked again and again she’d turned him down. Furious now, finally realizing that she wasn’t going to change her mind, he climbed out of bed and threw on his jeans and a T-shirt. He flung a few things into his backpack and said, “You’re a selfish cunt. I don’t understand why I’m not worth a measly few thousand dollars. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Well, so be it. I don’t want anything more to do with you.” He turned to her and said, “And your voice isn’t that much, either. I’ll be great without you. I don’t need you.”

Now that a decision had been made, Tay found herself surprisingly calm. She watched from bed as he pulled on his sneakers and stuffed his canvas bag with his precious DVDs and an assortment of video games she’d bought him. Grabbing both bags, he tucked his guitar under his arm and stormed out, slamming the door behind him and making the wood rattle.

The following day while she was at work he’d picked up his keyboard and amplifier and the pair of five-hundred-dollar speakers she’d gotten him for his birthday. For good measure, he also took the two hundred and fifty dollars she thought she’d secreted in her underwear drawer. That had been three months before and Tay was still smarting, not so much about Steve’s leaving, but about her stupidity in letting him string her along for so long. Steve had manipulated her with sweet words, promises of making a life together once his career began to take off, and lots of really active sex. She’d had relationships before but never one like him, sex at least once a day, and she’d gotten used to it. Now she’d been without it for months and missed it. Her vibrator just wasn’t enough. She’d gone to clubs and out with folks from her office but no one had clicked with her. The drought was beginning to get to her.

Tay tried to jam an errant strand of baby-fine deep blond hair back into the French braid that hung partway down her back, but when it flopped over her ear again, she merely tucked it behind.

Lissa squealed again, bringing Tay back to the present. Again she had to hold the phone at arm’s length. “Calm down, Lissa. You’re going to burst a gut and ruin my hearing.”

“Sorry. Sorry. Okay, yeah, right.” The tone of her friend’s voice had changed slightly and slowly Tay sensed that something was up.

“I hear something in your tone. There’s more, isn’t there?” Tay said when Lissa became silent.

“Well, there is one thing. There’s still one obstacle and I need your help.”

What in the world could she do? “Okay, I’m listening.”