Skye Blue, page 9
part #6 of Firsts and Forever Series
The cat turned toward me again and tucked his legs under him, so he now looked like a little loaf. As I petted him I murmured, “I was just talking to your co-parent. His name’s Mac, by the way. Or at least, that’s what we call him. I think there’s really something special about that boy. He’s pretty shell-shocked though, so he doesn’t want to be with me. I can understand it. Maybe someday, that’ll change.”
As I ran my fingertips idly through the cat’s soft fur, I murmured, “I told him some stuff tonight, stuff I usually don’t talk about. He didn’t judge me or question me. He just listened.”
The cat closed his eyes and I rolled onto my back. For the second night in a row, I fell asleep to thoughts of a boy I didn’t know, a boy that had been called Mac. A boy that understood.
Chapter Four
I went in to work early every day that week, before the club opened for business. After spending a lot of hours studying instructional videos on the internet, I was practicing what I’d learned. Mr. Sandberg always unlocked the door when I knocked, advised me not to wear myself out before my shift, and then disappeared back into his office. He spent almost all of his time behind the scenes, so I had the place to myself.
I’d been practicing for about half an hour when Dare arrived. With a single look, he conveyed volumes of disapproval. I frowned at him in return as he headed to the locker room.
He’d taken to ignoring me completely, except that I sometimes caught him watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking. He was such an oddity. I loved watching him dance though, because he was so beautiful when he was in motion. It almost cancelled out that personality. Almost.
Dare emerged a few minutes later dressed in a pair of cut-off sweats, a tight t-shirt, and his big knee brace. “What are you doing here so early?” I asked him, barely glancing up from a move I was trying to perfect. It involved climbing high up onto the pole, then letting myself fall before catching myself with one hand and swinging around.
“Sandberg hired another newbie because he lost two more dancers to that new club in the Marina. He asked me to come in and train him.”
“And you agreed out of the goodness of your heart?” Climb, drop, catch, swing.
“I agreed because it means a bigger paycheck.”
“Ah.” Climb, drop, catch, swing.
“You’re doing that wrong.”
Hey, this was almost a conversation! He must be having an off day. “Since I have yet to crack my head open on the platform, I disagree.”
Dare sighed at that, then said, “You’re putting way too much strain on your wrists. I could show you the right way to do that so you don’t hurt yourself. Or you could keep being a stubborn ass, your call.” He climbed the stairs of the main stage where I was practicing, then sat down with his back to me and began stretching his hamstrings.
“What do you care if I hurt myself?”
“The club’s already down a total of six dancers, so we can’t afford to lose you, too. If our staff keeps dwindling it could impact business, and that’s bad news for everyone that works here. Once a downward spiral like that starts, this place could go under in a matter of months.”
“I see.” Climb, drop, catch, swing.
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “So, do you want my help or not?”
I jumped onto the stage and put my hands on my hips. “Fine. But I’m telling you, there’s nothing wrong with my technique.”
He got to his feet and gestured to the pole. “Show me what you were doing and I’ll explain what I mean. Go slowly, one step at a time.”
I climbed maybe six or seven feet above the stage and leaned back, holding on with both hands. “Hold it,” he said, and I tilted my head back to look at him. I met his gaze upside down and noticed for the first time that his eyes weren’t merely green. Rings of dark emerald surrounded irises of pale mint, all of that rimmed in thick, dark lashes.
“Your eyes are exceptionally pretty,” I said randomly as I hung there. That made him roll them.
“You have the attention span of a hyper three-year-old.”
“I know.”
He circled me and said, “Hold on with your right hand and let me reposition your left.” When I did as he said, he took hold of my arm and turned it, then put my hand back on the pole. “See how it’s not bent back on itself now? This is not only far more stable, it’ll also keep you from putting unnecessary wear and tear on your wrist.”
“Got it.”
“Drop down and catch yourself with your wrist locked like that.” I did as he said, then felt his hand on my bare leg as he repositioned it slightly. “The reason you keep this wrapped around the pole is to act as your safety net. You can easily tighten your muscles and catch yourself if you start to slip.”
“Thanks. I’m going to jump down now, because my arms feel like they’re about to snap off.” I leapt onto the stage and shook them out.
Dare went back to stretching as I flopped down on the stage and rested for a few moments. Just to make conversation I said, “It looks like your newbie is a no-show.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Think he got lured away by that flashy club in the Marina?”
“Who knows?”
“What’s so great about it, anyway?”
“Nothing. It just has a lot of buzz right now because it’s new. Well, that and I think they pay slightly better than this place.”
“So, are you going to jump ship too and go for the newer club and the fatter paycheck?” I asked.
“No chance. I owe Sandberg a lot and wouldn’t desert him even if that was a possibility.” As he was talking, he stuck both legs out to the sides in a perfect split and bent over at the waist, hands over his head, so that his arms and forehead rested on the stage. Since he wasn’t looking at me, I could take a moment to admire the graceful, powerful lines of his body. Embarrassingly, my cock took notice, too. Oh jeez, really? I tried to remind myself that this guy was an ass. So what if he was pretty?
I got up quickly and adjusted my shorts to hide my sudden, um, perkiness. Then to distract myself, I jumped onto the pole and tried to execute another move I’d studied in the instructional videos. I also tried to remember what we’d been talking about before my dick suddenly wrestled control away from my brain. When I finally recalled the conversation already in progress, I asked, “Why do you feel you owe Sandberg? And why isn’t leaving a possibility?”
“It was nearly impossible to find a job as a dancer after I got injured. Most places wouldn’t even consider me when they found out about my knee. Sandberg not only gave me a shot, he made me his featured performer, bum knee and all.”
“Should you really be dancing on an injury? Won’t that just make it worse?”
He shrugged and said, “The brace keeps it fairly stable. Also, as you can probably tell, I favor it a lot.”
“Still though.”
He looked a bit annoyed. “Okay, no, I probably shouldn’t be doing this. But what choice do I have? I’m trying to save up enough money to have surgery on it and I’m not really qualified to do any other job paying more than minimum wage. Plus, at least this way I’m still dancing, even if it is in a nightclub.” He said that last part with a fair amount of disdain and I frowned at him.
“Ah, there’s the Dare I’ve grown to dislike. You were accidentally almost nice for a couple minutes there, before you had to go all high and mighty.”
“Whatever. I know this isn’t your dream job either, Smurfette. If you’re still here a month from now, I’ll be shocked as hell.”
“And the insulting, inaccurate nickname’s back. I was worried about you, S.E. Thought you were going soft.”
“That was clearly a record for you as well. You went a whole ten minutes without annoying the shit out of me.”
“I’ll do better next time,” I promised as he got up and turned his back to me. “I’ll lead off with being annoying, so you can bust out that tired old insult even quicker. I know how much you enjoy it.”
“Bite me.”
“I just might. You have it coming.” I then decided to ignore him, climbing the pole and trying to slowly execute a particularly elaborate move where I dropped a few feet in a spiral, caught myself with my legs, and flipped upside down. I was about halfway through the move when he bent at the waist and touched his palms to the floor. My cock almost sprained itself with the way it leapt at the sight of his gorgeous butt. It was so distracting that I lost my grip and fell about five feet, landing on the stage with a thud.
He whirled around and exclaimed, “Shit! Are you okay? You hurt yourself, didn’t you? I knew it was just a matter of time. No way should someone with no dance training attempt even half the stuff you seem to think you can pull off!”
I quickly shifted to hide the bulge in my shorts and told him, “I have formal dance training, as a matter of fact. And it’s not my fault that I fell.”
“Whose fault is it then?”
“Yours.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “How do you figure?”
“You’re distracting me.”
“How?”
“Never mind how.” He just stared at me for a while, and finally I exclaimed, “Oh, quit giving me that look!”
“What look?”
“The one that says ‘I just might be talking to a crazy person.’ It bugs me.” I got to my feet as I said that and put my hands on my hips again.
“You are a crazy person.” I just kept glaring at him. He added, “Did you hurt yourself? And what did you mean when you said you had formal dance training?”
“No, I didn’t hurt myself. And I took dance lessons when I was a kid for three summers, not in a row.”
“Oh, three non-sequential summers as a kid. My mistake for thinking you weren’t serious about this.”
“I’m plenty serious about it! If I wasn’t, why would I have spent several hours this week learning to do this?” I stepped back a few feet, then ran at the pole. I grabbed it up high and hoisted myself up, flipped over and spun around in a wide arc, ending up staring at him upside down with my arms flung out to my sides.
“I hate that you’re naturally good at this,” he murmured.
“Why?” I asked as I jumped down right in front of him.
“Because dancing means nothing to you. It’s a way to earn beer money while going to your elite art college. It’s taken me years to hone my craft, and you just come along and make it look effortless.”
“I’m earning money for luxuries like rent and food, not beer, and do you know how jealous you sound?”
Dare smirked at me. “Jealous? Of you? You’re kidding, right?”
“That’s a really mean thing to say.”
“Whatever. Just stop pretending that any of this means a damn thing to you.” He turned and started to leave the stage, which incensed me.
I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him around to face me as I said, “Don’t walk away from me! We’re not done here.”
He spun on me and growled, “Oh, we really are. Let go of me!” I still gripped his bicep.
“With pleasure!” I didn’t so much let go of his arm as fling it away from me.
“You’re such a total pain in the ass!” he hissed, grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing me against the pole.
“So ironic, coming from you!” We glared at each other for a long moment, his body pressed against mine, his hands still roughly gripping my shoulders.
In the next instant, he was kissing me, wildly, desperately, and I returned the kiss with just as much urgency. My hands came up to tangle in his dark brown hair as he took hold of my waist. Abruptly, Dare swung me onto my back on the stage and climbed on top of me, and I went right on kissing him, driven by pure, burning lust. He filled my senses, the sweet taste of his mouth, his clean scent, the softness of his hair beneath my fingertips, and my cock throbbed in response.
I had no explanation for it. None at all. I just knew that I wanted this. I wanted him. It was visceral, body over mind. The fact that he was annoying didn’t seem to matter, not to my libido, anyway.
He pulled down my gym shorts and jock strap as he slid between my legs, and then his warm, wet mouth engulfed my straining cock. Holy hell that felt good! I propped myself up on my elbows and watched him as he sucked me. His eyes were closed, his expression intense. He needed this as much as I did, I could see that clearly.
He was up on one knee, his injured right leg draped carefully over my left, his big hands grasping my hips as his head bobbed up and down. There was something in the way he held on to me that made me reach out and touch his cheek. That seemed to startle him and those gorgeous green eyes of his flew open. Dare met my gaze, and what I saw in them was even more surprising than what was happening right now. He looked more vulnerable than I’d ever have thought possible. It made me sit up and cup his face in my hands. “You don’t have to do this, Dare. Not if you don’t want to,” I told him gently.
He released my cock for just a moment and looked up at me. His voice was a hoarse whisper when he said, “I want to. Please don’t make me stop.”
“I won’t.” I stroked his hair as he went back to sucking me. He closed his eyes again and held on to my hips a little tighter as he increased his efforts.
Pretty soon I was so overwhelmed by the intense pleasure radiating through me that I fell back onto my elbows and began moaning softly. Part of me was a bit concerned, since we were doing this more or less in public and our employer was somewhere in the building. But this was just too good, too intense and amazing and overwhelming, to stop.
When I was getting close, Dare raised himself up a bit and yanked his shorts and briefs down to just below his ass, never once interrupting the blow job. He started stroking his hard, thick cock with his left hand, his right splayed out on my stomach, almost like he was pinning me down. All of that in combination was so incredibly erotic that I mumbled, “Oh God, I’m about to cum,” then threw my head back and moaned again.
He didn’t stop sucking me like I thought he would. Instead, he took me deeper, his dark head bobbing up and down, milking my throbbing cock with his lips and throat. I couldn’t have stopped my orgasm even if I wanted to. I bit back a yell as I started to cum, arching up off the stage. His arm went around me, holding me to him as he swallowed my cum, his own orgasm spraying across the stage.
A sound almost like a sob tore from me as I threw my head back and rode out that huge orgasm, shooting again and again down his throat. I’d never cum that hard, I didn’t even know it was possible. I got a little lightheaded and pressed my eyes shut, grabbing Dare’s head instinctively, pumping into his mouth while trying so hard not to. “Oh fuck,” I choked out, my body shaking, my fingers twisting into his hair.
When that stunningly intense orgasm finally, finally started to ebb, he sucked me more gently, bringing me back down. Only when it was completely finished, my body reduced to a quivering, sweating heap, did he let my cock slip from his lips.
He’d been holding me in his arms, so Dare laid me gently on the stage, then tugged my jock strap and shorts back into place. All I could do was sweat and gasp for air as my heart seriously considered exploding. He pulled up his own briefs and shorts and stripped off his t-shirt, exposing his powerful, muscular body. God was he gorgeous. He wiped the sweat from his face, got to his feet and used the shirt to mop up the long trail of cum that sliced across the stage. Then he turned and left without a word, jogging down the stairs and exiting through the door to the employee dressing room.
I sat up, pushing my damp bangs out of my eyes, and stared after him. When I realized he wasn’t coming back, I got up and followed, only to find he’d actually slipped out through the service entrance. Really?
I sunk onto the bench in the locker room and tried to make sense of all that had just happened. How did I go from an intense dislike of Dare to oral sex, all over the course of about an hour? And did I really just do that on the main stage at my place of employment? Clearly, very little rational thought had been involved. I’d been driven by straight-up lust, plain and simple.
I needed to clean up a bit before the start of my shift, so I stripped down and headed to the shower. I ended up staying in there a long time, replaying everything over and over, and kept coming back to that moment when he’d looked up at me with so much vulnerability in his eyes. That had seemed so unlike him. Not that I knew Dare very well. Or, really, at all.
By the time I returned to the locker room with a towel wrapped around my hips, Preston and another coworker had arrived, a cute blond named Ellis. They were already in their tight, stretchy shorts, royal blue this time. Every night, the club featured a different color of uniform for the dancers and wait staff.
I dressed quickly in a jock strap and the blue shorts, then ran a comb through my damp hair. I picked up an envelope in the bottom of the locker, which had my name on it and contained some cash. It was my share of the tips from the night before, and I stuck it in the pocket of my denim jacket.
Ellis was still getting ready by liberally applying some kind of slightly shimmery body lotion over his tan when Preston and I left the locker room. My new friend asked, “You okay, Skye?”
“Fine. Why do you ask?”
“You seem distracted.”
“I guess I am.” I made myself smile at him. “No cause for concern, though.”
“Okay.” After a moment, he asked, “Will you dance with me again tonight? That’s been fun.” We’d gotten in the habit of choosing platforms directly across the dance floor from one another.
“Sure.”
Preston took my hand and brought me to a stop. As I turned to look at him, he said, “You really do seem off your game tonight. Do you want to talk about whatever’s on your mind?”
I really didn’t. The last thing I wanted was to confess that I’d had a random sexual encounter with one of our coworkers, or what a total first that was for me. I smiled again and said, “I’m okay. Promise.” I changed the subject by saying, “I learned a couple new dance moves. Come on, I’ll show you.” I kept hold of his hand as I led Preston out into the club.
