I pause, wanting to turn my head to look around, but Claudio grabs my hair, tugging on it, holding me in place. His other hand then slips around the back of my head as he starts pushing my face forward, in time with the pumps of his hips.
“Oh … fuck,” he cries out as he rams his cock through my lips. He stiffens in my hands, and I look up to see his head fall back, his mouth open, face contorted in pleasure. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He shoots straight to the back of my throat, and I swallow it down without a second thought.
His pumping slows, and I regain control of his cock, pulling it from my lips. I wipe my mouth on my shoulder and then carefully try to get to my feet.
Even though I’m all buzzed out from sucking him off, I’m suddenly very aware that the cage is swinging slightly and moving higher up the mountain. All the trees have faded away to bare rock and, good timing, the next cage coming down toward us on the opposite side actually has people in it.
“You,” he says gruffly as he slowly zips himself up with one hand, his other going to my cheek. “How will I ever deserve you?”
“You can start by not making me ride things like this,” I tell him. I look down again, and we’re at least seventy feet in the air now. Okay, so that was a good distraction for the time being, but I’m going to close my eyes for the rest of the ride.
It isn’t until we finally reach the top and have a drink on the patio of what has to be the island’s most isolated bar, that I finally relax.
“Hey,” I tell him, in between sips of my beer. We’ve been sitting here lost in the view, which runs from one end of Elba to the other. We’re truly on top of the world here, a thousand meters above the blue Mediterranean.
Claudio’s leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head and looking blissed out. “Mmm?” he says, face tipped to the sun.
I lean in closer. “There weren’t people in the cages coming down, were there? I mean, when I was sucking you off…”
A tiny smile tugs at his lips.
Noooo.
I reach out and smack him. “Are you serious!?”
He laughs, and I want to pull his aviators off his face and see his eyes. “No, no one saw.”
That’s not quite what I asked.
And judging by the looks we get in the parking lot later, after we take the gondola back down, I’m pretty sure some people saw plenty.
We took our sweet time getting back to the house. I made Claudio stop by a seaside town, where we were able to stroll, hand-in-hand, like a real couple. It was so nice, so easy, so natural, that I was hit with the inexplicable urge to tell him that I wanted to move here, to live in Italy with him forever. Have a wonderful little place by the sea, just him and me and Vanni. I could write novels in the early morning, watching the sun come up, Vanni and Claudio catching fresh fish for lunch, and we could swim in the ocean at dusk after a few glasses of wine.
I could see that future so clearly that it scared me.
That happiness, it was all there, in sight, and yet not only did I think I wasn’t deserving of a future like that, I knew it was hopeless.
All because of Vanni and Jana.
Maybe Vanni will change his mind. Maybe Jana won’t care.
I’ve entertained these scenarios too. It’s true that Vanni might come around, especially the more he gets to know me, and once he learns I’m not trying to be his mother or replace Jana. And then Jana, well, she might wish me well. And even if she doesn’t, it might not matter enough for her to drop me as a client.
And if she does? If you lose her as an agent?
Well, I better be damn sure I’m making the right choice. I’ve lost so much in my life, the thought of going all in with Claudio and then having it fall apart is too much for me to handle.
I manage to shake those thoughts from my head as we drive inland. It would have been faster to go back around the island the way we came, but I wanted to see what