Page 24 of Punishing Penelope
I ache for her, to my very core, and make a promise to myself—I’ll see that Giordanna gets everything she needs.
“Can I meet her?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. Please.”
We exchange the necessary information and hang up. My heart thuds hard, and I don’t see the office or my coworkers. I don’t see the many manila folders piled up before me.
I’m nine years back, only seventeen, losing everything.
Peter
Every, fucking, time I attend a press conference, it’s the same. She sits with her legs properly crossed, her dark gray pencil skirt ending above her knees. She wears black, shiny high heels and tan nylon stockings—I swear they’re stockings and that she’s wearing a lacy garter belt—and lacy silk cream panties with a matching bra, probably a push-up. Her breasts are still barely a handful, but she shows off a distracting amount of cleavage where she has left the white silk blouse unbuttoned enough to leave an indecently plunging neckline.
How can a man not take notice?
Every day, I see her somewhere, her picture in the newspaper next to her feature, always present at our press conferences. She’s spectacularly photogenic and is as popular a guest speaker in the news as a bag of donuts at the police station of every TV show ever.
Everyone wants a piece of her.
She’s everywhere. I’ll have to move across the country to get away.
But how could I?
She’s a sliver of a memory of better days.
Penelope fucking Wilder is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty.
L.A. is full of them—Botoxed, filled, nipped, tucked, lifted, stretched, with tits of grotesque proportions, unnaturally round asses, and liposucked until they barely look human. The town is crammed with them, and I’ve fucked plenty.
A tall, buff cop who never smiles, with steely eyes, who rides a motorcycle and plays guitar, whose home is pedantically in order, with a giant four-poster bed, art on the walls, and with depraved kinks to last through days of torturing willing chicks. Yeah, I’ve had no problem getting laid.
My issues begin when I compare every fucking one to her.
Beauty is a superficial, ever-changing standard I don’t much care for. I’ve closed my heart and locked it up in a chest of stone, made myself impenetrable, but she… she’s the most alive person I’ve ever met.
How did she manage that?
Despite her demons. Despite everything we went through.
That she went through.
How did she do it? How did she move on? Through the rage?
She still has the same sass and devil-may-care attitude. I wonder if she still jumps off cliffs or if she’s moved onto something more spectacular. Parachuting, maybe? Skydiving? Nothing surprises me when it comes to Penelope Wilder.
Although, her pen so full of vitriol surprises me a little. It’s not who she used to be, and I’m still shocked and morbidly curious to see what new stuff she’s written. She shits on everything we do, scrutinizes every arrest, finds flaws in every investigation, and complains we do too much or not enough. She looks for every reason to rile us up. When she doesn’t call or pepper the department with emails, she shows up unannounced and makes demands high and low in the name of her holy journalism.
She’s manifested all her energy into one sole focus—anger every cop in the LAPD. I fully expect her to turn to politics one day and annoy the hell out of every cop in the U.S.
I stare at the back wall, listening to the same inane questions and the impatient answers from my boss, imagining plowing my way through the crowd, dragging the tantalizing Penelope Wilder from her chair into the next room, and having my way with her while she screams for mercy that never comes. I’ll fuck her cunt, her throat, and her ass until she’s a weeping, babbling mess. Until she promises she will never write a word about law enforcement for the rest of her life.
Until she begs me to do her again.
I send a thankful thought that my leather jacket is long enough to cover my erection. The thought of sampling that tight pussy again makes my balls ache.
No one, no one, has ever compared to her.
She tries to catch my gaze, but I refuse to acknowledge her. No matter what we had, no matter how hard life has been to her, she can go fuck herself. I can only imagine what my partners would say if they knew of our connection. I’d never hear the end of it.