In Too Deep, Book 2, Part 6

 [image: VitalikRadko]

Chapter 18: Back to normal

“How are you holding up?”

Julia and I were in the car, heading along Highway 1. This time I got to sit up front, windows down, letting the wind cool my overheated body.

I glanced at Julia, her golden hair fluttering like a model at a shoot. She was pretty. She felt more real, despite the over-the-top stuff I’d watched happen that night. I saw her flaws. I saw her as a person.

“That was intense,” I said. “But…”

“Never thought you’d see Amanda do those things.” When Julia finished my thought, it wasn’t laced with the usual ridicule or mockery. She was just making a statement. 

“Never in a million years.”

“She was doing it for the cover,” Julia said.

“Not just the cover.” We both knew the truth now. “She was into it.”

Julia didn’t give me an out. “Yes, she was. But also, I think you had something to do with that. I think she got off knowing that you were watching her. I’m honestly not sure that she could have done what she did without you there. I’ve never seen her so into it.”

We drove in silence for a bit as I thought about that. I remembered the way Amanda had looked at me at the end, and the way she and Julia bantered around me. I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore.

“So what comes next?” I asked.

Julia glanced across at me before going back to the road. I wondered if her good will towards me had run out. I wasn’t actually part of this investigation, after all. But she surprised me. “I planted a tracker on that guy, Oleg. With any luck, he’ll guide us right back to his lab. If nothing else, though, we have a fresh lead.”

“And Amanda?”

“It’s fluid. We’ll pull her as soon as we know it’s safe. The club will probably close, so that’ll be a natural break. Raven keeps her cover, just in case…”

“Just in case?” I asked.

“One thing I’ve learned, you can never be too prepared. She won’t be a witness, she won’t need to testify, but who knows? Maybe something goes sideways. We may still have a use for Raven yet.”

So this wasn’t over. Not yet. 

We drove up to my apartment building, and it felt odd, saying goodbye to her after such an intense experience. “You make a pretty good husband. Look me up if things don’t work out in your life.” She grinned. “Or even if they do. You’ve earned your right to play around.”

With that, Julia drove away, leaving me more confused than ever.

A week later, the bust was all over the news. The FBI had found an extensive lab hidden just outside of the city, from which all the jasmine was flowing. More importantly, the chief cook of the operation was apprehended, too, a man named Oleg Kuznetsov, along with all of his lieutenants.

I ate up the news, constantly refreshing CNN and the LA Times site. I never watched news on television anymore, but I did with this story, following it as it unfolded on prime time. Bradley Hirsch was at the center of it all, eating up the media spotlight, holding press conferences, taking all the credit.

They raided the Gold Club. That was covered on the news, federal agents going in and taking out boxes and papers, but no one was actually arrested there, and Nikolai Kozlov’s name was never mentioned. When Hirsch was asked about the club’s connection, he just said that it was all part of an ongoing investigation, but that they were close to wrapping things up.

I watched the footage of that particular bust and consumed every news article about it. In addition to Nikolai being a ghost, Amanda was never present. Julia and Misty also weren’t ever present during any of the media outings. This was the Bradley Hirsch Show now. It was Miami all over again—same bureaucratic scene stealing, different actors.

*

Three days after Oleg was arrested, Amanda returned to me. She wasn’t dolled up like Raven. She wasn’t even some hybrid version, like Nikolai’s girlfriend. She was Amanda, my wife, my partner, my whole world.

She was waiting for me in the open door of our garden apartment when I got home from work, arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe. She was barefoot, wearing capri-length jeans and a loose blouse. The cornrow braids were gone, and she had a headband holding back her flowing, dark hair. 

I ascended the stairs, wondering if this was an apparition. When she detached herself from the doorframe, meeting me halfway, she felt real enough. When I started to say something, she gently folded her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was a sweet, lingering kiss, the kind we shared all the time before her assignment.

She pulled back, but didn’t step away. “You didn’t change the locks,” she said.

“Locksmith wasn’t free until next week.”

Amanda laughed low and soft. “Lucky me then.” She rubbed her nose to mine and whispered, “And I really am lucky.”

My wife took my hand, pulling me inside. I felt as nervous as I did the first time Amanda and I got together. Which made sense. This was new. In so many ways, this was a different Amanda—an exciting one, a spicy one, an edgy one. I thought of Ty and his flippant remark from a conversation that felt like a million years ago—you have a stripper for a wife. A stripper and so much more.

She pulled me to the couch, sat me on the edge, and climbed into my lap. I couldn’t help but think of her persona as a stripper, and yet this didn’t feel like that. It just felt like Amanda when she had sex on the brain.

We made out like that, beyond the need for words, getting reacquainted with each other. I opened her blouse. She stripped off my shirt and tie. Her bra went next with an easy twist.

Despite the normality, I could see the differences, the changes. Amanda was leaner, stronger, definitely more tanned. She wore a thong beneath her jeans, and when she shimmied out of jeans and thong alike, that move was definitely infused with stripper confidence. And of course, she was still shaved or waxed smooth—and quite recently, I discovered, as I sank into her slippery embrace.

This was the moment that I’d been waiting for since she went undercover. This was the homecoming that I’d dreamt of, one that built and built with each new revelation. Call it a reunion or a reclamation. I called it release.

The smiles gave way to passion. I got lost in the sound of Amanda’s gasps, in the rise and fall of her body on mine. She felt both fragile and strong, like a steel wire stretched taut. She didn’t always fuck this way. She cradled my head to her cleavage, skin against skin, close enough to feel her heart beating. I kissed her neck. I squeezed her hips. I cupped her ass cheeks. 

We were a team again. Together, we were the rider and the ridden. We still had things to work through, but we finally had the space to begin.

We climaxed together, with me pumping her hard, filling her as she cried out and clutched my head to her body. “Oh, yes, David… David…”

“Welcome home, Amanda.”

She didn’t get out of my lap. She stayed there, straddling me, my dick still semi-erect. “And I promise you, this is where I want to be.” She nuzzled my nose with hers again. “I joked about you changing the locks, but I’m serious. I… I put you through a lot.”

“You put us through a lot,” I said.

“I know I did. They say hindsight’s 2020, but I was scared, and somehow I convinced myself that it was all done for this assignment and nothing more. I thought about my dad wasting away after Mom died, and all the young kids ODing on this shit, and… and it was still wrong. I know that.”

A tear rolled down her cheek, and she brushed it away like it annoyed her.

I thought of all that she’d done—the men, the sex, the cheating, the betrayal. Then I looked at Amanda, broken yet still strong, vulnerable to me in a way that she never showed to others. She was no longer the exemplar of justice and the right thing to do—a version of this woman that I’d hoisted onto a pedestal and lived in the shadow of the entire time I’d known her. She was just another person, flawed and prone to making mistakes. Could I forgive her?

“From here on out, we need to do this together,” I said. “No more secrets. No more omissions. Hopefully by now, you know that I can take it.”

I thought about her getting double-teamed by those two guys last week, and started to harden inside of her. I thought of how she teased Nikolai Kozlov about her exploits, and how turned on that made me, too.

Amanda felt it, her eyes flaring.

“It turns me on hearing about what a slut Raven got to be,” I admitted. “The thing that stung was that I was never a part of that. And another man was.”

“I’m not going to make that mistake again,” she said, squeezing my dick with her pussy. I shuddered at the pressure. That was a new move for her. At one point in time, my mind would take that revelation down a dark path. Now, ever so tentatively, I looked forward to learning more.

Thinking about what I’d heard while on surveillance with Julia, how she’d regaled Kozlov with her exploits in the backroom, I asked, “So the next time you have enthusiastic analingus, you’ll tell me?”

“I’ll tell you both giving and receiving,” she said with a snort. “Remember when I said before that I was surprised at my own strong reaction to pleasing men? Turning them on? Getting them raring to go? Well, every time I did something like that—”

“Ass-licking.” I was growing harder and harder, even as we dove into this wild and once totally out-of-bounds topic.

She suppressed a grin and ducked her head. “Yes, like ass-licking…every time I got a big reaction from something like that, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might be like to try it with you…and then I’d think about how afraid I was that you would get grossed out by the things I found turned me on.”

“Like ass-licking.”

She swatted my shoulder but continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “Then when you told me the thought of me getting wild in the sack got you going, well... all I have been able to think about since you said that is how I can’t wait to do all of these things with you.”

“Including ass-licking.”

She wiggled her eyebrows. “Your world will be rocked.” My cock pulsed, deep and fully erect inside of her. “And that response,” she said, “is gonna rock mine!”

“What about the drugs? What about when you were on the jazz?”

She smirked at how I phrased it. “It’s just ‘jazz’. And even then, I was never out of it. It just made everything feel really fucking good. I get why people are ODing on it. A little bit goes a long way.”

“And the coke?”

“A necessary evil. Nikolai Kozlov never got high on his own supply, but he certainly indulged in the adjacent supply—and he loved watching hot girls do it, too. At first I thought it was just a power move. Probably mostly is. But it really got him going.”

“And you’re not addicted, are you?”

“I was able to minimize it.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’d be surprised how unobservant a guy with a burgeoning coke problem can be.”

I continued to look at her, waiting for her to elaborate further.

“Nick’s a hedonist, but he’s also a greedy fucker. He sees himself as the founder of the feast, and I guess Russians tend to ignore what Miss Manners said about avoiding gluttony at your own party. Most of the coke he ‘gave’ me wound up on the floor or sprinkled theatrically on the head of his dick as part of yet another blowjob.”

My cock twitched again. She grinned at me, slipping out of my lap. I whined as my dick left her pussy, but only long enough for her to move to the floor between my legs and take my dick in her hand. “I’d start it off like this,” she said, stroking me slowly. “Up… and down…” She wrapped her lips around me next, bobbing along my length lazily, her eyes on me the whole time. “Up… and down… really sloppy…” She licked the head of my dick. “Get him nice and juicy…” 

I gasped, watching her please me, yet seeing her doing it for another man.

“Then I’d put all that coke on his cockhead. He’d go numb from it entering his bloodstream, and that blowjob became a handjob… just working it in…”

I let out a slow exhale as I pictured her at work on another man’s cock. 

“By the time I went back to blowing him, most of it was gone.” She sucked my dick again, as if to demonstrate, and I blew out another long breath. 

I finally was able to find words. “Sprinkling it on his junk, that was inspired.”

She slurped up off of me. “I can’t take credit for that. Julia suggested it as both a way to keep from doing too much but also to get him feeling more positively towards me.”

“Julia…” My mind flashed back to the blowjob she gave me in the club.

“Has a lot of experience,” Amanda finished for me. “But of course, you know that.”

I heard the jealousy there. We were both thinking about the same thing. I almost apologized, but then why should I? No one was innocent here. Then Amanda surprised me.

“It was actually a real eye-opener, scorchingly hot, watching that,” she admitted. “Probably helped that I was riffing hard on jazz in the moment, but you know what I thought at the time?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

“I thought about how hot it would be to watch you fuck the shit out of her. Put her in her place.”

I laughed. “Never thought that we’d have this conversation together.”

“And I’m so happy that we can.” She squeezed my dick.

“So what happens next?”

“Mandatory, bureaucratic bullshit,” she said. “Mandatory detox. Mandatory shrinks. Mandatory R&R.”

“And is this mandatory?”

Amanda softened, casting aside her bitterness. She snaked her hand down to play with my balls. “Mandatory Bureau procedure? No. But mandatory for me to demo my slutty blowjob technique for my loving, patient, sex-god-of-a-husband over and over and over again until he says I’ve perfected it?” She leaned forward and swirled her tongue around my cockhead. “Absolutely.”

Her head, however, went even lower. She was on a mission. Pushing my legs open and pressing my erection against my stomach, she dove down between my ass cheeks.

“Uhh, fuck, Amanda…” I groaned as she tongued my asshole.

“We’ll do that later,” she said. “Right now, I have a promise to keep.”

I didn’t last long. The sensation of her soft tongue on my asshole was unlike anything I’d ever felt. When she got her hand into it, stroking my shaft, I realized how expert her technique was. She had experience, and I was just the latest recipient.

She even knew when I was about to come. Unlatching herself from between my cheeks, she pointed my dick right at her face. I thought of the last time we were together, in the Master Bedroom, when she told me to come all over her face as she straddled a black stud’s dick. That had been for show. This time, as I painted her pretty face with my come, and saw the pure delight in her expression, I knew this was for us.

“Well that was fun,” she said, hopping up. “I’m going to jump in the shower and wash myself off.” She started for the bathroom, saying, “Then, you know what I’m in the mood for?”

I honestly had no idea. Was this how little I knew my wife now? “What’s that?”

“Let’s get dinner at Fridays. I’m craving something really unhealthy.”

I laughed. “Sounds great.”

Amanda walked into the bedroom, and I followed shortly behind. “So you’re not going right into a new assignment?” I asked. “Not working is going to kill you.”

I heard Amanda chuckle as she rooted through her things on the bed. “I was thinking the two of us could get away. ‘Not work’ together.”

There were still so many things to talk about. The road ahead wasn’t a smooth or straight one, but I realized that I wanted there to be more ahead. “I like the sound of that.”

Entering the bedroom, I saw her standing with her back to me, frozen in place. My body went cold as fear licked up through me. She was holding something, staring at it as I approached.

On the bed was Amanda’s bag, unzipped and spilling the contents of her life as Raven. Everything was small, tight, lacy, or some combination thereof. There was a makeup kit. A small vibrator. A toiletries bag. In her hand, she held a phone that I didn’t recognize, the black case imprinted with a sunburst that matched her tanning bed tattoo—Raven’s burner phone.

“What?” I asked.

Amanda jumped, not realizing that I was right there. She turned to me, her eyes wide and guarded, and for a moment, I wondered if she wouldn’t share. Instead, she held the phone out for me to take. 

I took it from her gingerly, like it was a bomb. My hands shook as I glanced at the message on the screen.

I must see you, solntse. I can’t trust anyone else.

“Is this…?” I began, but I knew. I heard those words ring in my ears, delivered in a confident, cruel, Russian accent.

Amanda nodded. When I opened my mouth to ask something else, though, she shook her head curtly, silencing me. Taking my hand, she led me into the bathroom. When I started to pull away, though, her grip tightened and she shot me an insistent look over her shoulder.

Her face was still covered in my come, and this would have been humorous in any other situation. Instead, it felt like the world was falling out from beneath my feet. I had no idea what was going on.

She turned the shower on and stepped beneath the spray, washing her face at last. I didn’t follow her in, squatting down on my haunches as I tried to get my bearings. I felt dizzy. I felt confused.

Amanda looked amazing, rising above me like a nymph as water cascaded down her curvy, naked form. Her legs were so long, her heart-shaped ass so taut. Her skin that had once been pale, but now was definitely bronzed all over. Those big tits, full and almost out of proportion with the rest of her, peeked around her svelte back.

And of course, there was the tattoo, a raven perched above her tailbone, beak slightly raised as if observing something over its shoulder, all styled in black, tribal swirls. Rinsing her hair and face, she gestured for me to join her.

“What’s going on?” I said as I stepped under the spray.

When she spoke, it was so soft that I almost missed it under the sound of the water around us. “Sorry, I’m probably being paranoid, but we can’t be too careful.”

I furrowed my brow, not following.

“Someone could be listening,” she said, glancing around the room. A bug? I thought. A microphone.

“Someone bugged our apart—”

“Maybe,” she said, cutting me off. “I… I don’t know.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “Maybe no one. I’m not sure.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the shower tile, away from Amanda. “What the fuck’s going on, Amanda? That message—”

“Is from Kozlov. That phone’s my Raven burner. We kept the cover intact because—”

“Because you can never be too prepared,” I said. “Yes, I know. Julia told me.”

Amanda sighed at the mention of her handler’s name. “He hasn’t contacted me since things went down, David. You have to believe me.”

I wanted to—and I did. Mostly. But then I remembered the way they’d looked at one another, how willingly subservient she’d been with him, the way they’d kissed, and it became difficult.

“You’re not going to report the message, are you?” I concluded. “Why not?”

Amanda hesitated, and a drip of cold insecurity ran down my spine. Was she worried about him? Had she fallen for him?

“There’s something going on here, and I’m trying to figure it out,” she said slowly.

I raised my brows at her, growing more impatient. “What?”

I saw the guarded look, the way she wouldn’t quite meet my eyes, the way she spoke in vagaries. This was how she got when talking about all her other cases. This is how she’d been in the months preceding this one. This was why we found ourselves in the unhealthy place we currently occupied. Before I could press, though, she opened up first.

She linked her hands around my arms and pulled me close. “I think there’s more going on here than just a criminal investigation. Something just seems… off.”

“With what?”

“I’m still working through that part. I want to find out. I… I need to find out…”

It was almost like the old Amanda—determined, ready to take on the world. Given my new understanding of what Amanda was capable of, it scared me. Only there was a hesitancy now. Her blue eyes wavered as she gazed up at me.

She stepped closer, pressed up against me, reaching up a hand and touching my face. “But only if you’ll do this with me,” she said quietly. “If you want to walk away, I’ll call this in. I’ll tell them about Kozlov. I’m sure Hirsch would love to bring him in and add another scalp to his belt. We can be David and Amanda again.”

“You’d do that? After everything?”

“For you? For us? Yes.” I knew she wasn’t lying.

I nodded, processing it all.

I might have been a bit thick sometimes, and maybe too trusting for my own good too much of the time, but if I knew anything about my wife and about myself and about our marriage, I knew that in the long run, letting this go wouldn’t work for us because it didn’t work for her.

And I wanted us to work out.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find out what’s going on with your investigation.”

Her eyes widened, and her smile followed shortly after.

“Together,” we said it in unison

“But first,” I said, running my thumb up her cheekbone. She turned into the touch and kissed the palm of my hand. “You’ve still got some of my jazz on your cheek.”

I felt her hand clamp on my balls—not painfully, more like she was showing ownership. “It’s ‘jizz.’ Not ‘jazz.’” She sighed theatrically as she leaned in for another kiss, all while giving my balls a firm tug. “I can already see that I’m going to have my hands full breaking you in."

End of Book 2

Book 3 will be a little longer in coming than expected. I'm on vacation next week, and while I'd hoped to have Book 3 written before this point, I've actually scrapped quite a bit of what I wrote as I didn't love it. Fear not, though, hopefully the vacation will give me plenty of time to recharge.

In the meantime, I'll post another, shorter story next week (if I can get it together before then) or the week after if not.