Better When He's Bad

by Jay Crownover

  I made the trip to the little house at the base of the Hill in record time, even though speeding after two weeks of steady drinking was probably an awful idea, and a DUI was the last thing I needed. I wasn’t surprised to see the lights on when I pulled the Runner into the driveway. I had tried to give this house to my mom to let her make it a home, to try and make up for the shitty hand she had been dealt in life, but she had never appreciated it, never been able to get out from under the demons and addictions that held her captive. Leave it to Dovie, to sweet, strong, unbreakable Dovie, to take this place and turn it into what it was always meant to be . . . a home.

  I opened the front door and just stood there for a second. She had been busy in the months I had been locked up. Instead of just the bare-bones furniture I had left, the place was now decorated. There were pillows on the couch, a rug on the floor under the coffee table, and the walls were no longer boring beige. It looked lived in and comfortable; it looked like her.

  I did a double take at the sight of the candles she had burning on one of the end tables and made my way into the kitchen to see if I could find her there. I don’t think I had ever been in a house that had candles in it. That just seemed so out of the realm of the life I lived, I was having a hard time getting my head around it.

  The kitchen was empty, but stocked full. The cabinets had food, the fridge was full, and she had put place mats on the little dining room table. I let my gaze rake fondly over the kitchen counter, dirty thoughts of having her splayed out and begging dancing behind my eyes. Five years without sex was no joke; three months without sex, when you had just figured out who the person you wanted to have sex with for the rest of your life was, was flat-out torture.

  I called out her name as lightly as I could. I didn’t want to scare her, and if she really didn’t want to see me, I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to run away from me. But if she did, I would chase her down and make her listen to me, make her realize I couldn’t do this anymore without her. This life was always going to be brutal and dark, and she needed to be the one bright spot in it.

  I walked through the kitchen to the back of the house where the master bedroom was. When I got closer, I could hear soft music coming from the under the closed door. I knocked lightly before twisting the knob and walking in. The big king bed that had been covered in plain sheets now had a charcoal-and-black comforter on in, and pillows that looked like they had been professionally fluffed up. There were lamps on the end table that looked like they were made from chrome and metal, and she had hung dark drapes over the window. There was a bloodred rug that covered a huge section of the hardwood floor that should look gaudy and harsh, but just added an edge to the dark furnishings. It looked like a sexy and dark retreat. The rest of the house looked like her, but this space she had decorated with me in mind. It was heavier, it looked a little mean, and I loved everything about it.

  Once the initial shock wore off, I heard the water running in the attached bathroom. I took a deep breath and walked over to the open doorway. I was going to freak her out just showing up out of the blue like this, especially if she was naked and vulnerable in the shower. I debated waiting for her to finish, thought about calling out to her to let her know I was there, but in the end I just walked into the bathroom, already pleading my case.

  “Copper-Top? I’m so sorry I wouldn’t see you when I got locked up. It was a dick move and I was being a coward, but please hear me out.”

  It was steamy and she had a radio on playing some kind of rock. The mirror was fogged over and my chest got tight when I noticed that in the steam she had written:

  I BAX

  The glass door to the walk-in shower whipped open and I was faced with a naked and wet Dovie who didn’t look at all surprised to see me. Her bright hair was a red curtain down her back and draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were big in her face as she blinked the still-running water out of them, but all I could see was the scar arching over the top of each of her perfect breasts. Instead of a V, it almost looked like a crudely etched bird in flight. It was still pink and looked freshly healed. It was big and not all together ugly, but there shouldn’t have ever been any situation where her perfect skin was marred with such violence and ugliness.

  “It’s about time you showed up. If you were a no-show by Monday, I was coming to find you. Welcome home, Bax.”

  I jerked my head up from her chest to meet her eyes. I think she had tears in them, but it was hard to tell with the water and the steam separating us.

  “What? Titus and Race both told me you were over it.”

  She lifted her hands over her head and ran them along her long fall of hair. Some of the blood thundering in my head raced below my belt.

  “They were just trying to get you to pull your head out of your ass. I was mad you wouldn’t see me, and I felt awful you were sitting in jail for something you didn’t do, but I understood it. I understand you, Bax. Eventually you’re going to have to accept that.”

  I took a few steps closer to the shower. There was water leaking out onto the floor and my boots squeaked across the tile as I got close enough to touch her. I didn’t, not yet, but I made sure she could see what I was feeling in my eyes.

  “I would never want this for you. Me, this life, the messed-up shit that comes with it, but I missed you. I care about you and can never repay you for what you did for me. You set me free. I would die for you . . .”

  My voice trailed off and I got a little choked up. I reached out a finger, I should’ve been embarrassed it was shaking, that I was shaking, and I touched the very center of her scar where it dipped in the crevice of her naked breasts. Her chest rose and fell in a heavy breath, but her eyes were steady on mine. In fact, she seemed a hundred times steadier than me.

  “I know you would die for me, Bax.” Her voice was just above a whisper and all I wanted to do was pull her to me and never let her go again. “What I need to know is if you are willing to live for me? I know you’re always going to be this guy who lives a dangerous life, who takes risks and pushes limits left and right. I can deal with all of that—hell, it’s part of what makes you so irresistible. What I can’t handle, what breaks my heart, is that you live every day like it’s your last, like it doesn’t matter if you don’t make it to the next one. It does matter. It matters to me, it matters to your brother, it matters to Race—but it has to matter to you, Bax. You have to understand that you matter.”

  I let out the breath I was holding and took another step closer to her. The water was splashing on the sleeve of my shirt as I reached up to grab both of her cheeks in my palms.

  “Are you scared of me?” It was the start of the questions I had asked her what felt like a lifetime ago. Her answer didn’t change, but this time when she answered, she was holding back a smile that made my heart hurt.

  “Terrified, but I kind of like it now.”

  “Do you trust me?” My voice broke. I had never really trusted anyone but Race and now there was her and my brother and just all kinds of new things making my life so much more complicated and undeniably fuller.

  “With my life. I trust all the parts of you, Bax. You need to know that.”

  “You going to go to bed with me?”

  That made her outright laugh and she reached up to curl her hands around my wrists.

  “As often as I can and anyplace in between when the mood strikes.” The rest of the blood racing around my system went solidly south.

  I dropped my forehead so it was resting on hers and the water from the showerhead was cascading down around us. I was making a mess, but I didn’t care because I had her, and she was my home.

  “Do you love me?”

  The words sounded so foreign, but so right, when I was saying them to her. She brushed her full lips across mine and the last three months without her faded away.

  “Do you want me to lie to you or tell you the truth?”

  I smiled against her mouth and kissed her back twice as hard as she had kissed me
.

  “Lie to me.”

  She reached up and put her arms around my neck and took a step back, dragging me all the way into the shower stall with her. The water was lukewarm at best, and it made me shiver. So did the fact that she started to impatiently pull the tail of my shirt up over my head. A task made increasingly difficult considering I was now soaked head to toe and the material was clinging to me.

  “Of course not. You’re the last person in the world I could love.”

  Even though she was just playing my own game, it still stung and made me scowl down at her. She lifted an eyebrow at me and put her hands on the sodden leather of my belt.

  “Want the truth?”

  I nodded and grunted a little when she finally managed to get the front of my heavy pants open. The water was going to ruin my boots but I didn’t care because she gave a little hop and I had her in my arms and was pressing against her and the back of the shower wall. She was slippery and warm. I didn’t even need her to tell me the truth; I could see it shining out of the forest that colored her eyes.

  “I didn’t want to love you. You’re not the kind of guy who is ever going to be easy on my heart. You take things to the extreme and I don’t love how easily you slip between Bax and Shane.”

  I ran a hand down her side and curled it around her hip. She locked her ankles around my back and arched into the light touch. All I had to do was lean forward just a little and I would slide inside her, but then there would be no more talking and I needed her to finish what she was saying. Needed it more than I needed to push my way home.

  “But you also make me feel safe and cherished and you make me feel like the entire world has to get through you to get to me. There is just something about that that makes all the other stuff incidental. I believe from the bottom of my heart that we can make each other happy. I’m never going to ask you to be a good guy, Bax, because I fell in love with you just the way you are. Bad.”

  I blinked at her and bent down to seal my mouth over hers. She tasted like toothpaste and redemption. She tasted like mine. I rubbed my tongue across hers, sank my teeth into her bottom lip, and pulled her hips just close enough that I could use the angle I was holding her at to sink all the way inside of her. She gasped into my mouth and I groaned into hers. I felt my fingers tighten on to her skin and she burned all along the exposed length of my cock.

  The fact that I was inside her, that we were together with nothing—both literally and figuratively—between us anymore seemed to hit both of us at the same time. Her eyes got huge in her face and I felt everything under my skin start to buzz. I pulled back and dropped a kiss on the end of her nose. Her fingernails dug into the back of my neck and her freckles stood out in stark relief across her milky-white skin.

  “You know where I’ve been this time.”

  “I just want you. I missed you. Missed this.”

  I throbbed inside of her, felt the way her body paid testament to her words, and I think it made me even harder. Her chest was pressed intimately into mine and I could feel the tiny points of her nipples stabbing into me, slipping along with water trailing between us.

  “I don’t know how love works, Dovie. I don’t know how to be anything other than this, but I know the only thing that gives me hope is the idea of you and me. I know I’m not the ideal, not the dream guy, but no one will ever fight for you the way I will. I promise you that you will always have the best parts of me I have to give.”

  “I know, Bax, and I know that’s how you love me. Now, can you please get your ass in gear and MOVE? Three months was way too long.” She leaned forward and ran her tongue along the shell of my ear, which made me shiver, and not just because the water was now cold as hell. She whispered in a husky voice that just turned me inside out. “I need you to make me come.”

  “Shit.” Of course I was in love with her. Who didn’t love a good girl who could get bad when the mood struck her?

  I slid my hand around her hips and grabbed her under her ass so I could heft her up and sink more fully inside her damp heat. I braced a hand on the slippery tile next to her head and buried my face in the curve of her neck. She tightened her arms around my neck and I felt her drop kisses all along my shoulder as I thrust inside her like I had no control. I didn’t. She felt so good, felt like where I should always be, that I just lost all sense of being and ground into her, moved along her until I heard her whimper, felt her inner walls start to spasm around my quivering dick. It wasn’t just sex, it wasn’t just making love, it was her imprinting on me, and me on her, with nothing between us ever again. It was a primitive claiming of another person in the most basic way possible.

  I lowered my hand from the wall and tangled it in her hair. I pulled her head back and tapped her lax mouth with mine. I breathed my life into her as I felt my body start to release into hers. She brought a shaking hand around to the front of my face and rubbed my cheek. She tapped her middle finger along my star and wordlessly mouthed my name as I pumped into her until I was empty and spent.

  It took the last of the strength I possessed to reach behind me and crank off the freezing water as we just stood there, replete and soggy.

  She put a kiss on my shoulder then walked around me to climb out of the shower. She made a face when she saw the mess on the floor, but just walked around it to fish some towels out of the linen closet. I just stared at her, trying to get my head around the fact this was all real. She was here, she had given me a place to call home, and she was going into it wide-eyed, with no illusions about who she was going to be crawling into bed with each night.

  I climbed out of the shower and sat on the toilet to struggle with my boots. I’d just got one off when she came back in, wrapped in a towel, and handed me one. I ran it over my head and looked up at her.

  “Gus left me the garage.”

  She leaned a shoulder on the doorframe and lifted a rust-colored eyebrow at me. “That’s sad, but kind of fitting. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Whatever you decide, I’m behind you.”

  I got the other boot off and tossed it with a thud onto the floor. I had to do a little wiggle and shake to get the damp denim down my legs, and by the time I was done, her eyes were glowing bright green at me again.

  “What if what I do isn’t exactly on the up-and-up?”

  She came back into the bathroom and took the towel from my hands. She wrapped it around my waist and used the tip of one of her fingernails to trace the top of one of my flags.

  “Three months apart was a really long time, Bax. I just want you to consider that when you make whatever choices you make. I love you and I’m not going to tell you what’s the right or wrong thing to do, but you need to remember now that what you do ultimately affects me too.”

  I closed my eyes briefly and pulled her against my chest. “All right, Copper-Top.”

  She smoothed her hands along my sides and grasped my hand. “What do you think of the house?”

  “It looks like home. It looks like you, and I love the bedroom.”

  She giggled a little and I followed her to the big bed. It just took a little nudge and she was sprawled on her back, the terry cloth between us long gone. I braced above her and grinned down at her.

  “I want to spend every night in here with you.”

  “That was the plan.”

  “I don’t know how this happened, Dovie, but I will always be grateful Race put you directly in my path.”

  Her mouth hooked up on one side and I bent down to trace the puckered skin of her scar with my tongue.

  “Things have a way of working out, Bax. You just need a little faith.”

  I lifted my head up and stared down at her. She was just so lovely, so optimistic and full of goodness, and kindness. She was the only way I was ever going to find some sense of rightness in this ultimately backward and wrong place we existed.

  “I don’t need faith, Dovie. I have you.”

  And I did have
her, over and over again, because I was making up for lost time, and because she was beautiful, and mostly because I felt like another person was truly mine, and that she was choosing to be here with me. No matter how bad it got, or what kind of road I might end up taking us down, she was in it with me for the long haul. I had never done anything right or righteous to deserve her, but now that I had her, I wasn’t letting her go and I was going to make a conscious effort to live a better life, knowing she was my reward and she deserved to have some good, even if she could handle all the bad.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dovie

  6 months later . . .

  I HAD A BUNCH of schoolwork spread out on the table in front of me, Brysen was sitting on the couch next to me, and we were gossiping about Ramon’s new boyfriend. I had cut back on my class schedule a little, so getting my associate’s degree was gonna take a little bit longer than I planned, but I had picked up an extra shift at the restaurant in order to squirrel money away for when I had to transfer to the actual university in order to finish my degree. Bax told me repeatedly he would fund the rest of my schooling, he had money left over from his real-life game of Grand Theft Auto and the garage was doing really well. But starting school and getting my degree was something that I had always planned for myself and wanted to achieve on my own, so eventually he quit offering. He paid all the house bills and gave me money on the regular anyway, so I figured it wouldn’t kill him to let me have this one thing for myself.

  I still worked at the group home. In fact, after Reeve’s quick exit, they had offered me a promotion. I was tempted to take it, but every other weekend away from Bax was already pushing it, so I had turned it down. It hurt a little to say no, but every time I came home after not seeing him for a few days in a row, he was sporting a new bruise or busted-up knuckles, meaning he was out getting into trouble while I was away. He didn’t come right out and say he was still letting Nassir set up fights for him, just like he didn’t openly admit all the cars he had coming in and out of the shop weren’t there by their owners’ request, but for the most part he was keeping his nose clean. Well, as clean as a guy like Bax could.