Heat, Stacie

Author's Note: This installment of Heat is a largely a standalone adventure for Stacie and briefly recaps how she found herself in this situation. Having said that, additional background about the "drug" called Heat and Stacie can be had from reading the first installment. While my first two installments of Heat were written in third-person limited, I've recently begun to experiment with first-person POV writing, thus my change in style here.

Heat, Stacie

I pulled my rattle-trap Ford Focus into my parking space at the apartment complex. I cut the engine, planted my forehead on the steering wheel and groaned. I spread my thighs and pressed a manicured nail against the crotch of my slacks in hopes of relieving the sex-ache. A warm La Croix fizzle released in my core and I clenched. I bit my lip to hold back the moan. I hadn't come but it'd been close. God, I felt good. And hot. And needy. I climbed out of my car, shaking. I couldn't make myself come in the car because I didn't want to climb the stairs to my third floor apartment with a wet-spot in the crotch of my Trina Turk, double pleat, pants.

I was almost back in control by the time I let myself in my door. My place was a tiny three room deal with a bedroom, bathroom and a great-room that combined living space and kitchen. It wasn't a big "home" but the neighborhood wasn't bad and it was all I really needed. I slipped out of my office attire, I threw my thong in the wash because, ew, slipped on a pair of bikini briefs, skinny jeans and a pink Davis Technical College hoodie. I skipped on a bra.

I exited my bedroom and considered my options. My BFF Amanda would be at the club and my other girls would be working. My entire social circle worked for Holly and Friday nights were busy. I'd be working too if Holly hadn't placed me in her husband's office. I'd been taking media classes at Davis Tech and it turned out Dr. Stoddalman recorded a lot of his patient sessions. I took care of the appointments, books and other administrative shit. I also performed all the audio and visual editing. That was like the best and I adored Holly for landing me the job. She'd promised me a media production position in her porn studio, should I want it, upon graduation. That was why I had zero problems with her request that I seduce her husband, Edward, when she'd asked me to. The stupid man had been in a funk after hypnotizing his latest patient, Katie Fischer. Holly had been busy at the studio and needed someone to fuck him back to his senses.

So I'd seduced my sex therapist boss. And holy crap, the sex. The man could fuck. I'd come like three times because Sex-Ed knew how to make a girl feel really, really good.

Thing was, I'd taken one of his placebo pills because I thought he'd think it was hot. It'd worked. He had thought it was hot. He'd stiffened harder than an aluminum bat. What I hadn't anticipated was how effin' hot it'd make me. I hadn't realized I'd accidently hypnotized myself while editing the video of Mrs. Fischer's hypnosis therapy session. Now my core throbbed. My clit ached. My nipples pinched and I felt like my boobs weighed an extra five pounds. I was hot and tingly and, oh-em-gee, I wanted someone to bend me over. Not someone. Anyone! So long as they had a dick and knew how to use it, I'd be cool with them putting it in me.

Dr. Stoddalman had told Mrs. Fischer that the hypnosis "Heat" trigger would last twelve to twenty-four hours. Despite having had the best sex of my life like two hours ago, I didn't think I could go another ten, let alone twenty-two, hours without some kind of relief. I needed something to distract myself but I couldn't go out, because two minutes with a man and he'd be getting lucky. I wasn't entirely keen on giving it away for free.

But I didn't have a boyfriend, because, apparently, boyfriends got jealous when your other job was escort. Maybe I needed to call Holly and take a shift.

I didn't want to do that. I didn't mind fucking forty year old married men except, it took a shit load of emotional energy and I was tired. They all wanted the girlfriend experience. It'd be so much easier if they wanted the porn star experience—but no, they wanted "girlfriends."

I blamed the men for cheating on their wives. But I also couldn't help but wonder why the wives were letting them see me in the first place. It was so effin' easy to keep a man in the bed you wanted him in. I get it, there are slime-ball, serial cheaters but most men could be led around by their dicks. All they wanted was a little naked affection. Emphasis on affection. Naked was for the bonus points. Men were really, really easy. So why weren't we giving them what they needed so they'd give us what we wanted? Maybe because that'd put a whole lot of girls out of work?

Ugh. I needed to think about something else. Maybe school work. That'd been my plan for this evening before I'd "accidently" taken Heat. I had five hundred pages of technical reading to complete before Monday. It didn't matter how much I loved multimedia, all that text still made my brain hurt and I didn't think I'd be able to concentrate on it. My sex-ache was more distracting than any headache I'd ever had. I could read an Elle Kennedy. The one about Brenna makes me bawl my eyes out every time I read the part where she and her father, Chad Jensen, make up. But Brenna and her boyfriend, Jake, don't get hot and heavy until the midpoint. I needed to get off way, way before that.

Giving up on distracting myself, I rubbed my love buzzer through my jeans. Within moments my whole body was simmering with an electric energy that craved release. I bent forward and braced one hand against the bar style counter that separated living room from kitchen. I panted, my lungs and jilling hand, working faster. Oh lordy, lordy, lordy I wanted, needed, something inside me. I wanted it so bad. My core throbbed, fluttered and clenched.

A wanton, slutty moan so loud it could probably be heard in the apartment below ripped from my throat. I tore my hand away from the seam of my pants and caught myself on the edge of the counter before I could do a face plant. My whole body shimmied and shook. My nipples and clit were wound up so tight my girly bits almost hurt. But again, I didn't come.

Oh-my-God. I needed a distraction like now. I pushed my honey blond tresses out of my face and decided to make an early dinner. I didn't like to drink without eating but I could pop a bottle of chardonnay with dinner and maybe drunk would take the edge off. If that didn't work, maybe shit-faced would. It certainly couldn't make me any more uninhibited.

So thinking, I checked the fridge. My dinner options were blah. I often shopped Friday nights which meant I'd depleted my food supply and didn't have ingredients for anything good, like, lasagna. I was craving lasagna. Well, lasagna and dick. I'd pass on the lasagna if it meant I could get dick. I couldn't go to the store right now because I'd probably mount the man at the checkout counter.

Fingers shaking, I dialed up Nikko's Italian to Go.

A gruff, Harley-Davidson-biker voice answered the line. "Nikko's, just a moment, hold please."

I came so hard I fell on the floor.

By the time he came back on the line I had recovered. Sorta. I ordered my meal. Every time the biker dude spoke in that deep base rumble I wondered what his dick looked like, what it would feel like in my hands, what it would taste like while he came down my throat? I almost asked him to deliver my meal so I could tip him in person. Lordy, the delivery person needed to be a girl, or under-aged, or hyper moral, or I would be fucked—literally.

When the knock on the door came, he was short, pimply and probably eighteen. I'd broken down, again, and started jilling, again, about two minutes before he'd arrived. Still, I had zero interest, thank fuck. Apparently, I maintained some self-control. I still had a type. That type was strong, strapping alphas with deep voices. Like the dude on the phone. If he'd've delivered my meal and looked like he sounded, I'd've let him plow me into Saturday.

I paid the kid who had probably been born about the time I was a toddler and locked the door behind him. I laid out my dinner on the counter, poured myself my wine and tried not to grind on the barstool while I ate. I groaned when a door slammed downstairs. I knew what was coming next. Right on cue, my hot-as-fuck neighbor's girlfriend started an at-the-top-of-her-lungs rant. It was the fourth time this week. Shit, I felt sorry for the dude which was why I hadn't complained. Hopefully they'd break up soon because as sorry as I felt for him, I had to listen to her too.

I poured myself a second glass of wine, cranked Pink! on my stereo and started my post meal cleanup. Of course, of all the totally awesome songs that could've been playing it had to be U and Ur Hand.

I liked the song but, lordy. Tonight it was too spot-on. I threw the dishrag in the sink, moved my bottle to the couch, flipped on the flat-screen, put on my headphones and fired up my game console. Only two things were getting me through this night and a fast paced PvP shooter was the other one. I didn't think I had enough batteries to go all night with my vibrator.

I'd grown up white trailer trash. Dad had given everything to make my life better, but life had beaten him down. Mom had broken him. But even broken he was the manly silent type. The only way he and his girls could connect was shooting shit on the TV. I absolutely adored my Dad and sisters. Not so much my Mom. I got really good at shooting shit.

***

I saw a flicker of movement. I looked left. I'm pretty sure I screamed as I jumped off the roof. My sniper nest turned into so much digital shrapnel. I hit the ground and my health-bar dropped into the red-zone. I didn't have time to take stock of my surroundings. I rolled through the open door of a building. That pop in my ears was an assault rifle. A grenade went off somewhere too close. I made like a jack-in-the-box in an open window and snapped off a totally instinctive shot.

"Fuck!"

I froze. It'd been a couple of hours since my neighbor had told his ex-girlfriend to get bent. This had been punctuated by one last scream and the report of a slamming door. Hopefully psycho-chick was never coming back. But that'd been a whole bottle and a half of chardonnay ago. Had she come back? I wondered who my neighbor was fighting with now.

A couple of shadows flit across my screen—one in the doorway across the street and the other in the gap between wrecked cars. I squeezed off two rounds and dropped two geeks. Then I made tracks. I was pretty sure this six-person PvP free-for-all had become five on one.

I dropped into the sewer through an open manhole and ran like my life depended on it. I juked left, set some c4 on a cracked wall, ducked down another leg of the sewer and blew the crap out of some concrete. I hadn't met many players that knew this entrance to the hospital. I hated to use it and give away my secrets, but this was panic time.

I scrambled through the hole in the wall, dropped in the hospital's basement, pumped up my health with some med-kits and grabbed rounds for my ArmaLite AR10T. I really could've used a frigging grenade but those didn't usually spawn in the hospital. I raced up the back stairs because close quarters was not really my thing. I preferred the open sky—unless the enemy had a gunship.

They were waiting for me on the roof. I dropped two geeks as I popped out the door. I spun, a tube-rocket ripped past me so close my whole screen was washed with pixelated fire. Fortunately the geek on the adjacent roof had been over eager and hadn't taken the time to heat-lock. I pulled the trigger three times.

Shoulder. Knee. Face. Damn, the chardonnay was getting to me. My Dad would be ashamed. At a hundred and fifty yards I could usually bullseye the space between a nerd's eyes as quick as I could blink. I sprinted for the cover of an air-conditioning unit while I scanned nearby rooves for more geeks.

Splat. My avatar fell face down, her pony-tail doing one of those weird dances that happened when the collision mechanics got confused.

"Hell YAY!" my neighbor roared from downstairs. Several more bullets riddled poor, dead Sarah. "Take that bitch!"

Wait! What?

I ripped my headphones off because, what the actual fuck! I'm not sure how my neighbor landed in my game but he'd just called me a bitch! Me! I wasn't the one that had ganged up on another player five on one! Okay, maybe his girl had a friggin' point. I'd join her the next time she showed up to scream at him. Girl Power. Solidarity. Yeah!

No, I'd do it now!

I stormed out of my apartment and took the stairs three at a time. I didn't care that I was barefoot or that the concrete steps were still too hot from the late afternoon heat. What I did care about was how hard I could make my neighbor's door rattle as I pounded on it.

The door ripped open. He was tall, like taller than me, and I wasn't short. He had broad shoulders, but I knew those things. What came as a shock—what had my mouth filling with drool was his muscle game. He usually wore loose shirts, like UofU hoodies in the winter and sports jerseys in the summer. Right now he didn't have a shirt on and, lordy, lordy, lordy, he was ripped with muscles I'd need a medical journal to name.

"Lori, what part of we're thr—" He stopped mid-roar. My door pounding fist stopped on whisker shy of clocking him on the nose. The hot fury in his whisky colored eyes burned with a different heat as his gaze bumped over my features. I was in a hoodie so my boobs weren't like out there but I could tell he liked what he saw. I felt heat tinge my cheeks and my gaze dropped to where this like man-vee of muscle disappeared into the waist-band of his jeans.

Unicorn sparkles danced across my skin and congregated in my crease. Suddenly I remembered why this was a very, very, super-duper, bad idea.

"Uh...wrong door. Sorry!" I squeaked. I did a hasty pirouette and leapt for the stairs.

He caught my wrist and oh-my-God! His hand was big—it shackled my entire wrist. It was manly. It was callused. And while there was no give—I was completely trapped—he still managed to be gentle. I'd always liked big, manly, callused hands because they felt so good when they touched me.

"I know you." His voice was simultaneously smooth, like milk chocolate, and rumbly, like rocky-road. Heat scorched a path from my brain to my core. Everything beneath my bellybutton liquefied. If he added just one more Btu of heat, I'd self-combust. My toes tried to grab the concrete. The dew-point in my panties increased one-hundred percent. In another moment they'd start to leak.

"No. Nope." I popped my P. "I mean. Yeah. We're neighbors but I thought this was Cohyn's place."

"I am Cohyn." He sounded perplexed but his voice was still so sexy my core clenched.

Farts. What were the chances? I'd grabbed the most obscure name I could think of. "I meant a different Cohyn." I giggled. Lordy. I sounded like a bimbo.

"Oh, okay." He released my wrist. He dropped his hand to his side and my gaze followed it until it snagged on his denim wrapped package. My nipples beaded, heat burbled in my core and I licked my lips. Now I didn't want to leave. We stood there for a moment while drool pooled under my tongue.

"Okay," he said after an awkward moment. He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. "If there's not anything else, I've got a game going. I need to get back to it before this chick offs me another eighty-seven times."

My eyes rose to his and I almost lost it because they were hot and smoldery and he was like really, to the third power, H.O.T. hot. "Um...Cohyn." I swallowed. "You know that chick. You called her a bitch a minute ago."

Cohyn had the decency to turn the color of burnt brick. He ran a hand through his wavy, coppery hair. "I...uh...I'm sorry. I didn't realize you could hear me. I didn't mean to offend. I was really excited. I'd finally got her and she's so much better than anyone I've ever played that I'd swear she's using some sort of cheat code even though I know she's not."

He'd apologized, and looked embarrassed doing it, so I knew he meant it. That was effing hot. I bit my lip. I was a little afraid of what words might pop out of them. It'd be far too easy for them to be some version of "fuck me!" I mentally grabbed my proverbial panties and twisted them in a knot. I threatened to yank on them if my girly bits didn't behave.

Gathering my courage, I said, "Cohyn, that bitch is me."

He blinked. I saw the moment my words registered. "Oh fuck..." He clearly didn't know what to say. "You're really, I mean, really good."

"Yeah." I felt heat touch my cheeks. I couldn't quite look at him. I didn't want him to see how bad I wanted to suck his dick.

Another silent, awkward beat.

Fuck it. I wanted him. He'd already called me a bitch and I was in heat. "Did you finally break up with the scream queen earlier?"

He echoed me. "Yeah" He turned so red I thought his cheeks might blister. It was cute. "I'm sorry about that."

"I'm not." I stepped closer. He smelled of sandalwood and citrus. I wanted to taste him. There was less than an inch of space between us and I had to crane my neck to meet his gaze. His eyes turned molten but he didn't reach out and touch me.

"Do you want a rebound?"

He'd only barely started to nod when I went up on my toes and kissed him. It was only a peck. A cautious test of the waters. A quick taste. But before I could ease back down on the balls of my feat, fingers snaked through my tresses to curl at the back of my head. His other hand grabbed my ass and lifted me into him.

Oh, Lordy. His lips pressed against me. His tongue slipped out and teased my mouth open. He tasted of beer, pizza and something else. Maybe of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Nothing gross. I hummed and melted into his body. My hips started to rock—I couldn't stop them—and I moaned when my love buzzer sparked despite the layers of our clothes.

He dragged me inside his apartment. I caught a quick glimpse when he broke our kiss trying to kick the door closed. His place was identical to mine but was filled with man-shit. There was a leather recliner. A TV the size of the Event Center Jumbotron. Workout equipment. A few bear bottles on the coffee table. But no, like, clothes strewn on the floor, empty pizza boxes or piles of unwashed dishes so old they'd started their own petri colonies. Cohyn's place smelled like Pine Sol and meat-lover's pizza. No stale farts.

That was one of the bigger problems with my forty-year-old-married-man hookups. They farted more than a teenage girl—which, dude! It didn't smell like Cohyn had that problem.

"What's your name, B4D41M?" He lipped the diamond stud in my ear and I just about lost my mind. My legs turned to jelly and I started to slither to the floor until he literally picked me up with the hand on my as. I wrapped my legs around him as he kissed his way down my neck and walked me to a leather sectional. "And what's up with the screen name? Is that a Star Wars reference or something?"

"'Leet speak," I breathed as I clung to rational thought by a thread. "Means Bad Aim." My butt crashed to the couch. Cohyn fell on top of me. He nipped the soft spot between my neck and collar bone and then his tongue licked a hot path back up the arch of my neck to my ear.

"Lie much?"

"My Dad named me. I was six. I like to think he's proud when I'm handing everyone else their asses."