Until We Burn by Courtney Cole

Chapter One
     
     
    “Harder,” the girl whispers. Obligingly, I slap
her ass again.  Hard.
    The stinging sound
echoes through the night, rippling through the silence of Mount Lee.  A
hundred feet below, the giant letters of the Hollywood sign gleam ghostly white
in the darkness. 
    I smile against the
back of the girl’s pale neck and bite it.  Hard. 
    My teeth sink into
her soft flesh, but she likes it.  She moans, twisting around so that she
can clutch at my chest, twisting her fingers in my tux jacket. 
    “Dominic,” she
sighs.  “I can’t believe I’m here with you right now.  Dominic
Kinkaide is slapping my ass.”
    “Dominic Kinkaide is
doing more than that to your ass,” I point out, remembering how I’d just pulled
out of it a minute ago, how I’d rolled off the condom and flicked it
away. 
    As the coatcheck girl
from the black gala event I’d just vacated, she probably had no idea when her
evening started that it was going to end like this:  with quick, hard anal
sex in public….with me.
    Even though it’s two
a.m. and it’s unlikely that anyone will be hiking up Hollywood Ridge Trail, the
knowledge that they could , the knowledge that strangers might stumble
upon us and find us in this intimate situation, turned me on quicker than anything.
    I finished what I set
out to do within a few minutes and now, I pull away and adjust my clothes as
the girl pulls at her own. 
    I don’t know her
name. 
    Her name doesn’t
matter.
    The girl looks up at
me, batting her eyelashes.  “That was nice.  If you want to… you
know, um, actually sleep with me, call me, okay?  I’ll give you my
number.”
    I look at her in
amusement.  “Actually sleep with you?”
    She looks
embarrassed.  “I don’t mean like… sleep in my bed overnight.  I mean,
real sex.  Not just… what we did.”
    “Anal?” I raise an
eyebrow.  We’re both adults here.  We can call a spade a spade. 
    “Yeah,” she manages
to say, her cheeks flushed.  “Anal.  That’s the first time I’ve ever
done that, by the way.”
    That’s what they all say
and I have a hard time believing it.  This is the twenty-first century
after all.  I grin at her though, deciding to humor her.   
    “And?  What’d
you think?”
    She bats her
eyelashes again, coy now, laying her hand against my chest.  “I think that
you can do anything you want with me,” she purrs. 
    I fight to not roll
my eyes at her sticky-sweet tone now.  She’s too compliant, too needy, too
willing to do anything at all that I ask of her.  Why the fuck are they
always like this?  Are they so desperate to sleep with someone famous,
even one single time, that they’ll do anything for it?
    Nine times out of
ten, the answer is yes. 
    And nine times out of
ten, I capitalize on that.  I’d be an idiot if I didn’t. 
    But to be honest, the
whole thing is getting tiresome.  I’m weary of it. I’m weary of the
shallow people, I’m weary of people using other people, I’m weary of easy women who constantly throw themselves at me. 
    They only want to say
“I was with Dominic Kinkaide.” They want to claim a tiny piece of me, no matter
how small that piece or moment was. 
    In this case,
Coatcheck Girl will be able to say that she claimed ten minutes of my
time.  But from the look on her face, the wonderstruck expression, that
ten minutes was enough.
    “Won’t Amy be mad at
you?” she asks curiously as she runs her fingers through her tangled hair in
the dark.  She doesn’t sound concerned as she mentions the woman that most
people assume is my girlfriend. 
    I shake my head at
thought of Amy Ashby, a woman whose fame is equal to my own, a woman whose
jaded outlook on life surpasses even my own.  She’s beautiful, successful
and savvy.
    She’s also a
cold-hearted bitch.  It’s one of things I like about her.   
    “For one thing, Amy
and I aren’t exclusive,” I answer, turning to walk back toward my car. 
“And for the other,