Lucky Read online

  “Are you sure?” Jesus. What the fuck was going on here? Simone had warned me about tricky johns when I’d convinced myself that taking advantage of the trendy cash-fuelled Grindr kink was some kind of fucking masterplan—that it wasn’t real hooking because I wasn’t standing on a street corner—but she hadn’t said anything about picking up blokes that were clearly too nice to be paying for blowjobs.

  The man sat up further, and I belatedly realised he was still clutching my hand. “I’m sure,” he said. “I mean…if you’re okay with it? I don’t want to pressure you.”

  I laughed—couldn’t help it—and reclaimed my hand. “You think I’d let anyone do that to me?”

  “No. Um—” And then something changed. Like the man realised his mask had slipped. His earnest gaze faded like it had never been there, and apathy took its place. “Look, there’s an extra ton if you want it. Either way, pass me my jeans, yeah?”

  I missed the nice guy. I couldn’t see much of his face, but his eyes had been kind when he’d stopped thinking so hard. When he’d let his desire get the better of him.

  I liked that.

  Leaning back, I retrieved his designer jeans from the floor, but instead of handing them over I plucked the cash from his back pocket, and peeled off another two fifties to shove in my own back pocket. “I’m sure I want to take your money to let you suck my dick, and seeing as we’re skipping the small talk, I suggest you get on with it.”

  The man shrugged out of his leather bomber jacket. The label inside caught my attention and I tried not to cringe. He’d paid more for his coat than he had for me. What did that say about either of us? That I was desperate and he was a kinky bastard?

  Or maybe he was the desperate one and I was just a whore.

  Not that it mattered. How could it, when having his dick in my mouth, sliding it down my throat, had made my cock so hard that I couldn’t contemplate a reality where he didn’t return the favour?

  I scrambled to my feet, my legs stiff from a prolonged period on my knees, and stepped towards him, fumbling with my jeans as urgency stole over me so suddenly I felt dizzy. Barely ten minutes had passed since I’d refused to take my clothes off for him, now I couldn’t get my dick out fast enough. My hard dick. ’Cause, yeah. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that this bloke was gorgeous, despite how hard he was trying to hide behind that damn baseball cap. Sultry eyes, full lips. Smooth skin and dark stubble. What I’d seen of his bod was killer, and his dick was fucking beautiful. Clean, cut, thick, and long. The moment I’d seen it I’d wanted to ride it, but I’d settled for sliding an uninvited finger into his tight hole instead, because life happened that way sometimes. Upside down, inside out. His startled cry flashed through my mind and arousal throbbed my every nerve.

  Fuck. I’d have blown this guy for free any day of the week.

  I wedged myself between his spread legs and he leaned forward enough so my crotch was level with his face. “You might have to take your cap off to deep throat me. Don’t worry, I won’t look.”

  Silence. The man didn’t move a muscle. Then…slowly, he reached up and pushed his cap from his head, letting it fall away to the bed.

  Keeping my promise, I fixed my gaze on the opposite wall, and finally freed my aching dick from the confines of my super-tight jeans. A sharp intake of breath pierced the air, but I couldn’t tell if it was mine or his.

  He put his hands on my thighs, resting them there at first, and then his grip tightened, and he tugged me closer.

  His breath ghosted over my cock. I shivered, anticipating his lips and tongue, but then a compulsion overcame me and I seized his shoulders. “Wait. I want to know your name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know mine.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Yeah.”

  More silence. I chewed my lip. Had I blown my load without even getting my dick wet?

  Some professional I was gonna be if I ever did this again. Still, I had his money, and I was in enough of a bind to fight him for it.

  “Dom.”

  “What?”

  “My name. It’s Dom, and if you use it against me, I’ll kill you, got it?”

  I got it, even if I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a man whose eyes could be so gentle would ever hurt me.

  Idiot. But the time for thinking was over. Dom wanted to suck my cock, and I was so far beyond gagging for it I could hardly stand up.

  He tugged me forward again. A wet, feather-light tongue grazed my tip, and a shuddery moan escaped me. I clung to his shoulders and squeezed my eyes shut. “Shit. Do that again.”

  Dom obeyed, though whether it was because I’d asked him to or he was going to do it anyway, I had no idea. And I didn’t care as teasing strokes became more purposeful, and then he sucked me into his mouth.

  I stumbled for real, crying out as my dick slid down his throat. Fuck. What was it about this bloke that turned me inside out? This wasn’t how this was supposed to go down.

  Dom steadied me, but didn’t let up his rhythm. He worked me with his tight lips and slick throat, and hummed around my cock, throwing petrol on a fire that was already well lit as I clung to him and tried not to hump his face. But after a while it became clear that perhaps he fucking wanted me to.

  He took my hands from his shoulders and placed them on the back of his head. I fought the urge to look down at him, but gave in to the feverish craving for friction. He had short hair, so I clung to his strong neck and thrust my hips, fucking his mouth as hard as I dared, all the while trying to block out the cautious beast on my shoulder who warned me over and over to be careful. ’Cause Dom wasn’t my boyfriend, or even a casual fuck buddy. He was a stranger who’d paid me to be with him. A stranger who had half a foot and several stone on me, even if I did fight like a psychotic Inspector Gadget.

  His rumbling voice bothered me too. I was vibrating with the need to come, to shoot down his throat, in his face, or even in my own fucking hand, but his groans as he swallowed my cock were deep enough to set my teeth on edge. To remind me of someone I’d come to London to forget.

  Not that my arsehole father had ever sucked my dick. He wasn’t that kind of cunt.

  Like Dom heard the chaos swirling around my brain, his moaning cut off. He brought his hands back to my legs and reclaimed control.

  The slight change in angle sent white dots dancing in front of my eyes. I was gonna come soon, and come hard, spilling out everything I had wherever he’d let me.

  I wondered if he’d try and finger me like I had him. The notion made me clench up, like he was already there, easing inside me, curling and teasing, and my time was up. “Where do you want me to come?”

  Dom squeezed my thighs and kept working me with his mouth.

  I took that to mean he wanted it down his throat, and my climax rushed up, shocking me with its violence. Heat spiked my blood, and my legs seized up, muscles contracting. A loud groan ripped from my chest, and I started to come, spurting into his mouth so hard I couldn’t see how I’d ever stop. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  It seemed like forever slipped away as Dom drained my dick, still working it even as it softened. Eventually, it was too much. My frazzled nerves couldn’t take it. I pulled back enough to slip from his mouth, and then gave him a moment before I opened my eyes.

  He was already jamming his cap on his head and reaching for his jeans.

  I couldn’t make sense of how that made me feel, any more than I understood our entire encounter. My pockets were stuffed full of his cash, I’d swallowed his gorgeous dick, and had the best orgasm of my life—so why did watching him prepare to leave me seem like the end of the world?

  Fucked if I knew, and I pushed the weirdness aside and heeded Simone’s advice to get myself back together as quickly as possible.

  I stepped away from him and pulled up my jeans, patting my back pocket to check the money was still there.

  When I looked at Dom again he was dressed and heading for the door.

 
; “Hey, Dom?”

  He stopped and turned, but didn’t look at me. “What?”

  I didn’t know either. So I stared at him and held out the packet of tobacco I’d reflexively reached for. “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He stared at me, treating me for the first time to the full view of his face. Like I hadn’t already known he’d be a fucking knockout: high cheekbones, chiselled jaw, and dark, troubled eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What?”

  It seemed to be his knee-jerk response to everything, so I stepped back into his personal space, even as he leaned away from me. “Are you okay? You seem a little freaked.”

  “I’m not freaked. Just got somewhere to be.”

  Somewhere that wasn’t a scuzzy flat with a paid-for Grindr hook up.

  I took the hint and let my unconsciously reaching hands drop. “Fair enough. Have a good night.”

  Dom said nothing. Did nothing. Just kept staring, as though now our eyes had met, he couldn’t look away.

  I knew that feeling, but I had a scraping of pride left. Fixing a sneer in place, I turned away. “Shut the door on your way out.”

  “Wait.”

  “Why?” I rolled a cig with one hand and stuck it in my mouth. “No small talk, remember? Sorry I forgot the rules for a moment. I’m over it now.”

  The thorns in my voice surprised even me, but I didn’t look at Dom as I lit my smoke and took a deep drag. This whole thing had been a mistake—no money was worth the whiplash he was giving me, or the churning in my stomach as I couldn’t work out if I wanted him to ask for another round, or just get the fuck out already—

  “Hey.” Dom gripped the hand that wasn’t holding my fag and it forced me to look at him. “I’m not okay, but that’s on me. I had good time…I got Lucky, right? Goodnight, mate.”

  And then he was gone, slipping out of the borrowed flat like a shadow, and leaving me to wonder if he’d ever truly been here at all.

  Three

  Lucky

  “You bloody idiot!”

  I ducked as Jamila swung at me, escaping with a glancing blow. “What? I told you I was doing it—it’s not like it’s a fucking surprise.”

  “That’s not the point. Why didn’t you tell me when it was actually happening? So someone knew where you were going? Shit, Lucky. What if you’d been murdered or something? Who’d have known?”

  “Simone knew, but thanks for reminding me you’re the only one who gives a damn about me.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Jamila retorted. “Simone’s not your friend—you barely know her—and it’s not my fault you don’t have an address where the police could’ve gone when they found your body, or a job that would miss you when you didn’t turn up. What am I supposed to do when you disappear for days on end? Assume you’ve got your hands on a big bag of drone? Or that you’ve snuffed it on Grindr?”

  The crude words were all wrong falling from her pretty mouth. In the past I’d have kissed her to shut her up, but we weren’t doing that anymore. Kissing was too intimate—too complicated—for our unique brand of friendship. And as much as I wanted to deny it, she had a point. Simone had known I was using her flat, but we weren’t close enough for her to bother checking up on me. I hadn’t even seen her, just left her key and a ten-bag under the mat.

  Sighing, I lay back on Jamila’s bed. “Sorry, mate. I didn’t think.”

  “You never do. That’s what’s got you into this mess in the first place.”

  “Not fair,” I protested. “I didn’t ask to get kicked out of the YMCA.”

  “No, but you knew not to take drugs in there, and you did it anyway.”

  I tuned her out and closed my eyes, wishing I’d bought a bigger bag of weed with the money I’d earned from my encounter with Dom, though a bigger bag of weed would’ve meant less cash in the box I kept under Jamila’s bed, and even longer before I could afford a dungeon of a room at the halfway house up the road. I didn’t have enough for a deposit yet, let alone a first month’s rent.

  Jamila nudged me. “Don’t sulk. It’s only because I worry about you.”

  “I know.” I kept my eyes closed so she wouldn’t make me cry. “And I know you’re right too…I just—I can’t see a way out. I’d rather kip outside Debenhams than get a room at the Bay Centre.”

  “Not in this weather, you wouldn’t. It’s freezing.”

  Freezing to death sounded better than the terrifying hostels I sometimes slept in when Jamila’s mum wasn’t working nights. The only good thing about those hellholes were the drugs, but a friendly warden had turfed me out for being off my nut, and I’d wound up right back where I’d started. Scoring some bubble and walking the streets till dawn was an alternative, but drone comedowns, despite urban myth that they didn’t exist, sucked donkey dick, especially when you had nowhere to curl up and die.

  “So…” Jamila poked me in the ribs. “Are you going to tell me about this old minger you sucked off for cash? Was it horrible?”

  I opened my eyes slowly, searching for the words to describe Dom. “It wasn’t horrible. It was…hot.”

  Jamila arched a perfect brow. “Did you do it with the lights off and pretend it was someone else?”

  “No, though I reckon he might’ve preferred the dark. He was pretty fucking skittish.”

  “Married?”

  “Dunno. Didn’t ask.” And I hadn’t even thought about it until now. Hadn’t checked his fingers for a ring. Or considered that the obvious guilt weighing Dom down meant anything, because it didn’t mean anything. I needed his money, and I didn’t care who he’d hurt to give it to me.

  Right?

  As I recalled the rare flickers of warmth in his liquid gaze, I wasn’t so sure, but Jamila had ways of distracting me from most things, and after a while, Dom left my mind.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the old clock in Jamila’s hallway. If it wasn’t for the fact that her grandfather had brought it with him on the boat from Grenada a bazillion years ago, I’d have set the fucking thing on fire by now.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  Fuck my life. I opened my eyes and sat up, mindful of Jamila sleeping soundly beside me. Her share of the duvet was bunched around her waist, exposing her back to the chilly night air. Her smooth skin was marked by my fingernails, barely there indents that were a perfect echo of the light and gentle orgasm she’d drawn from me with her soft hands.

  I’d returned the favour with my tongue, but my mind had been elsewhere as she’d writhed beneath me, and she’d known it too. “You’ve got Grindr brain again. How are you going to pity-fuck me when you’re thinking about dick?”

  Only a fellow pansexual could make jokes like that and get away with it, and Jamila—my faithful BFF-cum-fuck-buddy—had been making them for years, ever since we’d ditched school together to mess about behind the cricket pavilion. It was nights like these I missed our old lives in Brighton. Things had been simpler then.

  She was right about the Grindr brain, though. I slipped out of her bed, snagging a stray condom wrapper as I went, and padded through the silent flat to the cold kitchen. The dinner she’d saved for me was on the side, but I ignored it and opened the cereal cupboard.

  I chose the cheapest brand and poured myself a small bowl, adding the bare minimum of milk. Jamila wouldn’t mind, but sharing her bed with me five nights a week was enough without rinsing her mum’s cupboards.

  With my bowl of frosted flakes, I retreated to the living room, and huddled up on the couch with an old blanket and my phone. I logged into the Wi-Fi, and then opened Grindr, scanning the grid of profile pictures for the torso shot Dom had used—a torso a phone camera hadn’t nearly done justice to, if the scant inch I’d seen of his abdomen the other night was anything to go by. The image attached to Perignon55 seemed pale and nondescript, but the real-life strip of flesh I’d seen was hard, sculpted, and dusted with just the right amount of dark fuzz…the kind
you only saw when you got up close and personal.

  The kind that kept you up at night a week after you’d buried your face in it.

  Is he thinking about me?

  I doubted it. Next to a man like Dom, I was so skinny and pale I was practically transparent. Unless he had a Milkybar fetish, he’d probably forgotten all about me.

  But even as I thought it, my gut told me it wasn’t true. I didn’t know Dom from Adam, but I recalled every sound he’d made—every gasp and moan—like he was coming in my mouth right now. His smell and taste had left me dizzy, but more than that, the way he’d come with his whole body, like he’d been waiting his entire life for a man to touch his cock, would stay with me forever.

  I couldn’t see how he could forget it either, unless—

  His torso pic wasn’t on the active grid. My heart skipped a beat. Fuck. What if he was one of those ghost profiles that disappeared? I felt weirdly sick at the possibility, but couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. He’d left without asking to hook up again, and I hadn’t heard from him since, but coming as hard as that? Nah. No way he’d leave it as a one-time thing.

  There were a million reasons why I’d be wrong, but when I checked our brief message thread, his profile was still there—just without the misleading snap. And he’d been online in the last few minutes.

  My fingers hovered over my cracked phone screen and anticipatory warmth pooled in my groin. Simone had lent me her pad as a one-off thing—a favour for some cheap sniff and cut of whatever I made—but I’d left her good bubble…good enough to persuade her to let me borrow her bed again if she wasn’t using it to blow desperate motherfuckers herself.

  The heat in my blood faded as quickly as it had come. Desperate motherfucker. Did I really think that of Dom? That he was so hard up for blokes he had to pay for that shit? I’d been over and over it in the seven days since that night and I still couldn’t decide. I clicked out of the message thread and scrolled through some others, scanning the dudes who’d practically begged me to take their money before I’d settled on Dom. One bloke had bombarded me to the point where I’d blocked him and wondered if I was out of my fucking mind. ’Cause that was the other thing. For all I knew, paying for sex was just Dom’s kink, which left me with the label of desperate motherfucker.