Sweet Poison *Updated every Friday @ 1PM*

Four

I never did things like that. Never. Never. Never.

It was insane. We were still strangers. But it felt like we'd known each other for years. Liam drove us mostly in silence, but it was good silence. Every couple of blocks or so he'd glance over his shoulder to check in on me, toss a half-crooked grin my way and brush my hair from my cheek so he could see me blush. Maybe there should have been, but there was nothing awkward about us sharing a tight, quiet space for the fifteen-minute ride.

I wasn't thinking. I couldn't. I could easily blame my delirium on the humidity. It had to be in the high nineties. The heat I felt between the two of us was stronger.

Liam didn't take me straight to his place. He ran in a corner drugstore like a horny teenager and grabbed a pack of condoms. I laughed when he tossed them to me in the passenger seat and watched him jerk his manual shift around until he slowed down at the end of a block filled with historic brownstones.

"You live in one of these?"

"No. I live in one of those."

He pointed to one of two residential towers about five minutes away, a huge edifice that seemed like it had more windows than the sky had stars. We weren't there yet. He'd just slowed down for a red light. I'd never been to that part of Brooklyn before. We were downtown, by the Barclays center. It seemed like a different city, a different world.

Liam pulled into a spot inside an underground parking garage when we got to the brick and glass building he pointed to, then came around to open my door. Before we made it inside the lobby I knew it would be the kind that would be fully-attended with a doorman and other concierges to open doors, call elevators, escort guests, high-class things like that.

"You like tall buildings?"

"I've never been in one like this."

The building looked brand new, shiny and arrogant, the kind I thought only existed in Manhattan.

"There's going to be a lot more towers going up in the area," Liam told me as the elevator doors closed behind us. "My financial advisor suggested that I invest in real estate so I got this one as soon as it went on the market. In a few years it'll be more valuable."

"What floor are you on?"

He smiled and hit the button for the thirty-ninth floor, only one from the top.

Inside were huge windows that went from the high ceilings to light hardwood floors. I could see the Chrysler building from one, the Statue of Liberty from another, and if I squinted out of a couple others I could just about see my old neighborhood in Queens.

As I scrutinized the city through the darkness I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A low frequency hum hijacked the soft purr of the city hundreds of feet below. I stood unblinking, the cityscape disappearing as memory by memory a part of my childhood came back to me. They played like old black and white silent films inside my head. I heard the soft riff of my mother's acoustic guitar, the elegant clink that the neck of her Pinot always made with the thin glass of her long-stemmed wineglass when she refilled it. She did that a lot. I remembered laying in her arms late at night on the weekend and watching old foreign films, my eyes straining through my sleepiness to read the subtitles so I could understand what was going on. Gisele loved to shop. We'd put in miles on Fifth Avenue every weekend, then come home and load up on delicious bad carbs to make up for the burned calories. She'd give me a manicure with French tips, my favorite, strum some notes on her guitar while alternating between her vintage red wine and menthol cigarette. Her nasally accent was so thick when she spoke French, but barely noticeable when she used English.

She adopted me when I was nine years old, divorced her abusive husband a little while after that. She was my best friend, my mother until I was fourteen. That's when she realized she was sick. That's when she was taken away from me and I was dumped back into the system.

"You okay?"

I balled a fist and almost jumped out of my skin. I jerked my neck around and when I saw the grin in Liam's sweet blue eyes, I let go of my breath, relaxed the curl of my fingers. I'd forgotten he was there. I'd been lost for a second, had to remind myself that I was in his million-dollar condo only an hour after meeting him. I wasn't going to be alone that night.

Don't know why I felt so safe with him. Maybe anything was safer than my past.

"It's pretty all the way up here, isn't it?"

His voice was deep and soft, edged with a hoarseness that was as arousing as it was comforting. There seemed something familiar about Liam even though I was positive that we'd never crossed paths before. There was something I felt like I could trust in him even though a voice in the back of my head was whispering no.

I nodded. "I can't believe you have this view."

"I can't believe the view I have right now."
He stepped a little closer, brushed my hair to one shoulder so all that was left was my bra strap. I shivered.

"It's funny. It takes the darkness to see this city's true beauty. But you..." With the nape of my neck exposed, he smoothed a hand down the subtle curve of my spine. "I can tell you're even more beautiful in the morning light."

I didn't know what that meant or why he was saying it. Didn't matter. I didn't have any time to contemplate. His hand slipped from the small of my back to my ass, his mouth moved so close to my skin. I faced the windows again, too embarrassed to look him in the eye as he touched me like that.

He touched me like he knew some of my secrets.
"Come on," he whispered. "Let's go to my room."

I shuddered as his lips grazed my skin, as the vibrations from his soft words beat through me.

___________________________________

Is she going to go in his room? Or bail out at the last minute? Stay tuned to find out!

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j'adore
xx

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