While Sebastian was downstairs cooking breakfast, Willow remained upstairs like she was a princess locked away in a high tower. Honestly, it sounded worse than it actually was because Sebastian’s bedroom was a complete wet dream. The entire interior was in white and shades of grays, but her favorite room feature was the glass ceiling and the panel of tall glass windows that stretched across the length of the room. She stood in front of them and stared at the cityscape in all its glory. It was late morning now. The skies were a dreary gray. Her cellphone told her it was past ten o’clock. She didn’t have to worry about calling in to work because sometimes, she worked from home.

After having her fill of the scenery, she walked around the bedroom.

He, of course, had a king-sized bed. His room also had a computer desk with three computer monitors sitting on the other side of the room. A white daybed sofa was positioned in front of the glass windows. He had white nightstands on either side of his bed.

She went back to the bed and lied down, as she felt lightheaded once more. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep.

Later, she woke up to the aroma of delicious food. Her eyes fluttered open and there was a plate of buttery waffles dripping with syrup and three bacon strips, a fork and a knife, and a cup of orange juice within a wooden tray that sat on the bed. Her stomach growled in protest and her mouth watered at the sight of the delicious-looking food. She glanced around the bedroom to find Sebastian sitting casually on the daybed, looking at her. The place where he had bitten her on her ankle began to tingle in remembrance.

“I thought you didn’t like waffles,” Willow said.

“I don’t, but you do.”

She gazed down to the waffles and fought the urge to lick her lips. He was absolutely right. She loved waffles. They were her favorite breakfast food, but she couldn’t eat waffles and fit into a size twelve or ten by April.

“Thank you for the offer, but I can’t eat this,” she said. Her stomach grumbled loudly.

“Your stomach thinks differently,” Sebastian replied.

“Well, if I agree with everything my stomach thinks then I’d end up being five hundred pounds,” she said.

Sebastian frowned, “There is nothing wrong with indulging every once and a while.”

“And there is nothing wrong with wanting to make healthy eating choices,” Willow countered.

He lifted an eyebrow and tilted his head to the side. “Starving yourself then exercising aren’t healthy choices. Starving yourself to prove a point to someone is foolish.”

Willow clenched her jaw for a moment. “What makes you think I did what I did to prove a point to someone? What? A girl my size doesn’t have the motivation to want to eat healthy and exercise unless she is trying to prove someone wrong?”

She didn’t want to admit he was right. His words hit a sore spot deep inside of her and she almost winced, but instead in pure Willow fashion, she decided to lash out.

“I am sure you have the motivation to eat healthy and exercise without someone else or something else as the driving force of your reasoning,” Sebastian said, “but something happened that pushed you over the edge.”

Willow gazed down and entangled her fingers into each other, playing with her thumbs. “I have an older sister. She’s absolute perfection. She’s tall, slender, and beautiful. She has everyone wrapped around her little finger. Earlier this year, she got engaged to this up-and-rising lawyer who wants to go into politics. She’s getting married in this coming April. Originally, she wanted one of her skinny best friends as her maid of honor, but it is family tradition to have a family member as your maid of honor. So she was forced into picking me. My mother thought me being the maid of honor would give me the motivation I needed to drop down one or two sizes.”

A tight heavy feeling seized her chest as she told the truth. With every truthful word, she felt her skin get tighter and tighter, making it much younger to breathe. There was something deep inside of her that begged her to tell him everything and that assured she would feel relief if she did so.

“They both thought jogging would be a good form of exercise to help me slim down for the wedding, but even though I’ve lost almost ten pounds so far, it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted me to drop jogging and try something else so I could lose weight faster. I was angry at them. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating. So I skipped lunch, dinner, and breakfast,” she finished. “And you know the rest.”

She then drifted her eyes across the room to him sitting on the crisp white daybed in front of the long panel of glass windows. An uncomfortable silence swirled between them as they played an intense staring contest. Why did he have to stare at her like that? As if her every thought, secret, and sin were inked onto her brown flesh and he was studiously reading them word for word.

Willow closed her eyes and let out a frustrated exhale. “Could you just say something?”

“I want you.”

She opened her eyes once more and blinked twice. Her forehead wrinkled deeply. His words were bold, blunt, and precise. A sensation of heat rushed through her and straight to her core. She parted her lips to speak, but she was absolutely unsure of what to say. So she grabbed a crispy piece of bacon from the breakfast she provided and munched on it gingerly.

Willow should have been worried about all of the calories she was consumed by eating the strip of bacon, but all she could think about were the promise held within those three words.

When she finished eating the bacon strip, her throat felt very tight and dry. So she reached forward and retrieved the cup of orange from the wooden tray, taking a deep sip. She squeezed her eyes shut and wished it were mimosa—heavy on the champagne—or vodka within it. Placing the now half-full cup back down, she plucked another bacon strip from the plate.

“So,” she began, “what do you do for a living?”

“I clean people’s messes,” he answered.

“This place doesn’t look like you earn a janitor’s paycheck,” she teased, “unless you are some housekeeping service tycoon.”

He smiled back. She couldn’t help but notice how his eyes wrinkled when he did so. Humor twinkling in the green depths. “I’m something like a janitor, but it’s more complicated and confidential.”

“Ooh,” she said in between a crunchy munch. “I didn’t know I was talking to Mister Confidential. You must work for the government or the military, right?”

His smile widened but he said nothing.

“I forgot. Confidential. Right,” she nodded her head and gave him a two-finger salute with her spare hand. She ate the remaining amount of the bacon strip at a more comfortable pace and didn’t feel as guilty about eating it.

“Well, I’m a graphic designer at this charity organization that finds shelter dogs, retrain them as guard dogs, and adopt them out to victims and families who have endured rape and abuse,” she said. “I love it there. My parents think I am wasting my talent there and I should work for a big advertisement company or something, but I feel like I can be myself there. I have so much creative control in the things I do and because I am the only graphic designer on the staff, they trust that I will make good choices.”

She reached for the third and final bacon strip. “Everyone cares about each other there which you don’t find often in a corporate workspace,” she paused. “However, I made the utter mistake of caring about someone too much and it bit in me in the ass.”

“The boy you were walking with at the park that morning,” Sebastian stated.

Willow’s eyebrows shot upward in surprise that he guessed correctly. “Yeah,” she nodded. “His name is Simon. He works in the financial department, but we also know each other out of work. Our families inhibit the same social circles and our mothers are good friends. I had this silly schoolgirl crush on him. He jogs at the same park but in the late evenings. After he heard about my twisted ankle, he offered to jog with me when I felt better. I took him up on his offer and immediately regretted it when he revealed that our morning jog would be nothing more than me giving him ‘womanly advice’ about how to ask out the new receptionist at work.”

She snorted a brief sad laugh. “I felt like an absolute idiot. I knew I wasn’t his type, but I held onto this tiny thread of hope that maybe I was wrong. That maybe someone out there actually did want me as more than a chubby girl friend who could hold her own with the guys. Then after he left, you kissed me…”

“And here we are,” he said, running his fingers through his short dark hair.

Willow slowly nodded her head. “Here we are,” she repeated, cocking her head to the side. “What I want more than ever is to get inside of your head and figure out why in the world you would want someone like me.”

“You want to get inside of my head?”

His deep voice carried across the room and vibrated through her. She shuddered and let the side of it hum against her brown flesh.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Finish your waffles and you’ll show my head,” he proposed. Her heart fluttered against her ribcage in excitement.

Willow tugged her bottom lip into her mouth and reached for the eating utensils he provided to her. Slowly, she cut into the now lukewarm syrup-drenched waffles and forked a mouthful into her mouth. She chewed and savored the delicious taste that exploded on her tongue.

“This is really good,” she complimented with a mouthful of waffles in her mouth.

“I’m glad you think so,” he said from his spot on the daybed.

“So how long have you been in the city,” she asked, wanting to keep a conversation alive as supposed to him silently watch her gorge on buttery waffles.

He answered, “A few years.”

“Do you have any kids?”

His face almost looked pained at the question as if she hit a sore spot. “No, I don’t.”

Is that a look of regret, Willow wondered for a moment. She then concluded that maybe he had a bad experience with a previous girlfriend or a fiancée that involved an abortion or a miscarriage. There was also the possibility that he was unable to have children to infertility issues. She didn’t have the nerve to pry any further.

She ate another forkful of waffles. In between her bites, they made small talk about various hobbies they enjoyed. She learned that he had a thing for guns and hunting. He and her father would get along great because his father was a big lover of hunting.

After she finished breakfast, she held onto her stomach and plopped back onto the bed, the back of her skull sinking into one of his pillows. She let out a sigh of satisfaction. “Thank you for the breakfast, Sebastian.”

“You’re welcome.”

Willow lied there on his comfortable bed with a full tummy and a head full of thoughts. A thought that stood out significantly was a reminder that this man wanted her and made it known several times.

She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him for a few seconds. She could count on one hand how many times she had allowed a man to be intimate with her in a biblical sense. Willow Angelique Carter wasn’t a virgin by any means but she wasn’t exactly a seasoned expert either. In her twenty-five years of life, Willow only ever had a total of three lovers—one of them was her boyfriend and one was a good friend of hers.

When she was seventeen years old, she went to senior prom without a date. She wasn’t exactly a wallflower because she took a few sips of cheap tequila in a flask one of her friends had handed to her in the car after they had picked her up. Needless to say, she referred back to that flask throughout the night and woke up the next morning in a good friend’s bed completely naked with the previous night’s memory and her virginity gone.

During her sophomore year of college, she dated a guy named Keith who always sat beside her in their statistics course. To her surprise, he asked her out and they dated for four months. Teasingly, she recalled him as the practice dummy because she explored and experimented on him. He never complained but he did break-up with her out of the blue. It was a typical “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup scene. For the remainder of college, she had no other boyfriends.

The final lover she had was one she picked out of desperation after three sexless years. A stranger at a bar who took an interest in her and she soaked it up like a dry sponge to water. It turned into a bit of a no-strings fling that lasted a total of three weeks. He would text or call her to ask if he could come over and she would agree to it. Then on the nights he usually contacted her, no messages came through. Then days turned into weeks and Willow eventually realized that he was never going to message her again.

“Are you going to show me your head,” she then asked, “as you promised?”

“Come here and I’ll gladly show you,” he said invitingly.

Hesitantly, Willow crawled off of the bed and walked over to him. Sebastian patted his hand on his right thigh as a prompt for her to sit down onto it. She wanted to say that if she took up his offer, she would break his leg. However, then she thought back to him giving her a piggyback ride without protest and scooping her up bridal style as if she weighed nothing when he carried her upstairs while she kicked and screamed.

Sebastian was strong.

He didn’t break easily.

But she knew he was fully able of breaking her if she got caught up in this inevitable thing because her emotions got into the way. What did she have to lose? She had a familiar background in no-string fucks. Maybe that was all he wanted. Maybe it was best that she wanted that too.

Willow sat down onto his lap. She turned her head and peered into his face—into his intense green eyes that were much darker up close. She gathered up her strength and leaned in, brushing her lips against his lightly. Before she could pull back, he reached up quickly and cupped the back of her head. They parted their lips in unison and Willow slipped her shy tongue into his mouth. A squeal vibrated in her throat as she felt his other arm curl around her waist and tug her further into his lap, forcing her to slant her body against his and press her lips deeper into his.

His tongue was a bold sly thing as it began to dance against hers in the most provocative way, taking the lead. She pressed her hand against his bare chiseled chest before sliding it upward to caress the side of his neck. Their lips worked against each other as they kissed each other like two teenagers unchaperoned. Their hands roamed each other’s bodies.

Finally, Willow attempted to break the kiss for a breath of air but Sebastian followed after her, gently catching her bottom lip with his teeth before he released it. She licked her lips before wiping her thumb along her bottom lip to remove the glistening moisture that lingered there.

“Wow,” she breathed as she leaned her head against his chest. Boldly, she slid her hand down to his crotch and pressed her palm against the hardness that lingered within his gym shorts.

“Wow,” she repeated the word with a large dosage of emphasis. She rubbed her palm up and down the hidden length of him teasingly before she sought out the head of him and gave it a little squeeze. “Is this the head you were going to show me?”

“You ready for the show,” he said, his voice low and throaty.

“You ready for mine,” she countered as she stood up from his lap and grabbed the hen of her long-sleeved shirt and pulled it over her head, tossing it to the side. Her dull gray sports bra framed her breasts. She nudged herself in between his legs and leaned forward, bracing herself on either side of his head using the back of the daybed for support. She leaned over him with her baby fat, lumps, and rolls.

What did she have to lose?

Sebastian lifted his two fingers under the hem of her sports bra and curled it into the fabric, sliding the tight binding of the undergarment upward. Her double-D breasts plopped out and dangled in front of him. Not at all perky as the sports bra advertised. She wasn’t ashamed though in this moment. This was her. The real her.

He lifted her left breast to his lips and licked her dark brown nipple with a few flicks of his tongue before he pugged it into his hot wet mouth. Her fingers dug into the back of the daybed as she tried to control herself. She moaned, tilting her head back as he suckled gently at first then harder. Her mouth dropped open as he released the wet erect nub from his mouth. The cold air that circulated through the lofty room tingled against the wetness and she shuddered.

He paid the same treatment to her breast while his digits rolled, tugged, and squeezed her other nipple to keep it from feeling neglected.

When he was finished, he trailed his tongue between the valley of her breasts as he yanked down her jogging pants to reveal her plain pink cotton underwear. She stepped out of her panties too and kicked them aside. She climbed on top of him, straddling his waist. She lifted herself up slightly as he slid his jogging pants and black boxer-briefs down his legs. His hard cock sprung forth and she couldn’t fight the need to touch it.

She grasped it carefully, feeling it throb heatedly into the palm of her hand. He groaned and the sound washed over her. A bout of confidence rippled through her as well. Her curled hand moved up and down the length of him. The pad of her thumb always swiping over the moist head of his dick when her hand moved upward. She loved the way he twitched in her hand and how his breath hitched in his throat when she did that.

He touched her slick pussy with two fingers, rubbing them up and down her slit. His index finger taking a moment to rub her clit in a tight circular motion. She squeezed her eyes shut and rocked her hips against his hand, moaning.

Unable to wait any longer, Willow lifted herself higher and guided him just below her. He moved his fingers away, licking the juices off of them. He didn’t seem disgusted by the taste of her. Oh, no. A look of pure ecstasy came across his face as he liked what she tasted like off of his fingers.

She rubbed the head of his cock up and down the pink of her pussy just as he had done with his fingers a few moments prior before she eased down onto him slowly. It had been a long time since she had someone inside of her. She didn’t want to count the days but the tightness of her cunt were like the rings you find on an old tree stump.

She sunk down onto him, taking her inch by inch. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was gaped open as she felt every bit of him inside of her on the way. Willow sat there for a long moment, adjusting to the fullness of him. She yelped out in pleasure as he bucked his hips upward, making her bounce on his cock once.

It felt as if he did it as a test to see her reaction because after that moment, his big hands grabbed the cheeks of her ass while he thrust upward in a rhythm. It reminded her of how he jogged: even, timely, and effective.

She wrapped her arms around his neck as she rode him on his daybed. With each thrust, she made a noise that showed him how good he made her feel and then he stopped thrusting. He pressed forehead into the crook of her neck as he guided her up and down his cock using his hands that were still gripped to her ass. Soon, she found her own rhythm and took completely control of fucking him.

It was slow and uneven at first like her jogging, but soon she bounced on him harder and faster, rocking her hips back and forth. Her fingers gripped the back of his head, yanking his short dark brown hair.

“You love my cock,” he said gruffly after he had removed one of his hands and played with her clit. 

She shuddered at his dirty words. She bit down hard onto her bottom lip and nodded her head eagerly.

“Tell me, Willow. Say it. Say you love riding my cock.”

“I love it. I love it,” she chanted as she grew closer and closer to her climax.

She screamed as she came. Her fingernails digging deep into the back of his skull. She felt herself pulse and clench around his cock. He came too. She could feel him inside of her doing it.

Her body was still on a high as she melted against him. In front of her were the glass windows that presented her the familiar cityscape she once knew as her home.

Home was supposed to be a place where you felt like yourself with no guilt or regrets.

No longer did Willow Carter feel like herself in the jungle of the city. Sebastian made her feel like herself.

So she had decided that he would be her home.

At least for now, she thought as she snuggled her head into his shoulder.