Under Locke

by Zapata, Mariana

  "MA!" someone yelled from the shore.

  Lisa, Dex's sister, stood on the beach, tossing towels at the kids around her.

  "Food's ready!" she yelled again, not bothering to look up.

  We both silently agreed to get out of the water. I dropped back in and swam slowly to shore alongside Dex's mom. I was only going to have this one chance to say something. “Debra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think Dex knows I was sick, and I haven’t exactly got around to telling him.” So please don’t say anything, I begged her with my eyes.

  There was no hesitation in her answer. She nodded immediately. “Got it. That’s your business, honey.”

  I smiled at her tightly, giving her a brief nod. “I’m going to tell him, I just haven’t yet.”

  “Okay.” She tipped her chin down a millimeter. “Make sure you tell him though, whenever you’re ready. He’s never been good with surprises, just to warn you.”

  Her warning felt ominous but her face was open and honest. I mumbled something to her that meant nothing and was easily forgotten.

  Lisa stood off to the side, herding the group of kids toward the picnic tables over the sloped terrain. Regardless of whether the oldest Locke knew about my cancer treatment or not, I was conscious to keep my arm straight against me as I walked toward my towel, reaching up only to wring out my wet hair.

  "Meet you over there," Debra said. She hadn't brought her towel down when she came up to me, so I figured she needed to grab one. Besides the remaining kids and Lisa, there was no one else on the beach. Not that I blamed anyone for avoiding the lake.

  Just as I reached down to grab my towel, I happened to look over in the direction of the picnic tables to see most of the group standing around the two tables in the center. Just off to the side of those standing was Dex.

  He faced me, hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans, facial expression blank.

  But he stared—at me.

  For what felt like the longest but was more than likely just a few seconds, I watched him back, and then I waved. He didn't wave in return but it didn't matter. He stood there, completely still, watching.

  Okay. I grabbed the towel on the sand and shook it out before drying off. I got as dry as I could, pulled the dress on again and shoved my legs into my shorts. When I glanced back up, Dex wasn't there anymore. Thank God.

  I rolled my wet towel under my arm and made my way slowly toward the group. There were so many people milling around, trying to get a little of everything from the buffet laid out that there was no rush to sit down. There were too many of us to all fit and since I was one of the youngest besides the kids, and not really family, I figured that I should be one of the people that got stuck standing up to eat, or sitting on the ground.

  "What the fu—I mean, hell is this?" I heard one of the Widows ask as he stood over the table, picking at something I couldn't see.

  Marie, Dex's other sister that looked like a female replica of her brother, nudged the man over. "Black bean burgers."

  "Black bean burgers?" His tone was part disgust, part outrage. "Who the fu—hell eats that?"

  Lord. I hadn't heard that in a while.

  "Iris doesn't eat meat," Marie answered him.

  The Widow scoffed, moving around the table with his plate held high. I was off to the side, behind a couple I recognized from Mayhem, so I knew he couldn't see me. Or maybe he was just one of those people who didn't give a crap. "Who doesn't eat meat?" A dumb question, obviously. "God gave us all these teeth so that we could eat hamburgers, chicken, meat. Not no damn black bean burgers."

  The urge to correct him of his ignorance buried itself in my throat, but I was used to it. I was used to people saying things that weren't correct at all. Like this guy. Whatever.

  But apparently, just because I kept my mouth shut didn't mean that everyone else did the same.

  "How about you just shut up and eat your hamburgers and watch your cholesterol go up, Pete? She can eat whatever she wants to eat without hearin' you babble off your stupid shit."

  Oh. Boy. It was Dex. Dex that I hadn't seen sitting at the fourth table.

  "Language!" Marie snapped, smiling right before she turned around.

  "I'm just saying." The guy I figured was named Pete had his face turn red.

  "Nobody cares," Dex cut him off. "Ritz, come eat."

  And then, awkwardness descended. The Pete guy finally realized that I was standing pretty much right by him but he had the decency to look a bit ashamed. Not much but something was better than nothing.

  I flashed him a jerky smile but made my way toward the table to start putting things on my plate. Sure enough, there were three black bean burger patties piled onto a dish and I took one to put between hamburger buns, adding more things from the multiple dishes on the table. Egg-less potato salad, leafy lettuce, and skewered pineapple.

  I started to walk around the three people still serving themselves, heading toward a patch of nearly dead grass to plop down on, but a hand reached out to grab the back of my bare knee.

  "Sit right here," the low smooth tone I'd heard so much of over the last few weeks said to me.

  Looking over my shoulder, Dex sat on the end of the picnic table bench, straddling it. His legs were wide, his food set on the table, and while he'd taken up more room than one man his size genuinely needed, it still wasn't enough space for two people.

  "I can just sit on the ground." I smiled at him.

  But he was watching me with those intense eyes. If watching could be considered that simple when there seemed to be a million different things going on in his head. Dex was staring and I didn't understand why. He'd looked at me in that way a few times before but this time was different. It's like he multiplied the look by a hundred. When he dropped his eyes down to my chest—which unfortunately had my dress sticking to my wet bathing suit—I had to gulp.

  "I made room." He looked back up at me. "Sit."

  Oh sweet mother.

  He wasn't going to let it go, and I guess I must have not really wanted to sit on the grass because I sighed. And then set my plate down right next to his. The only way to fit without having an entire butt cheek hanging off the edge was to straddle the bench, too.

  My butt pretty much snuggled safely between Dex's thighs, our quads lined up.

  We were sitting way too close. If I were to slouch, my back would hit his chest. I'm positive that if I took a deep breath, I'd touch him that way too. The denim of his jeans practically hugging my bare thighs almost made me make some kind of noise.

  It was too much.

  I breathed a little too deeply and my shoulder blades touched Dex's pecs. Crap.

  You can do this, Ris. You can sit with a man like this. It's just Dex.

  But that was the problem—it was Dex.

  I swear on my life that his hips move forward just an inch. But an inch was an inch that bumped the seam of his pants, the cradle of his groin, smoothly against my rear.

  I shivered.

  When I looked over my shoulder as I reached for my black bean burger, his face was right there. And it was tight—so damn tight.

  I smiled at him nervously, but Dex didn't smile back.

  He stared at my face, his food untouched, and I had no clue what the heck was going on with him.

  "Do you want me to move?" I whispered. I could see his mom looking at us from across the table. She wasn't even trying to play her gaze off.

  He still said nothing.

  Okay. "Charlie," I whispered again in a sing-song voice, trying to draw him out of whatever thought he was lost in.

  But still, nothing.

  All right. His mom kept watching us and I started to feel weird again.

  I tried to get up. My butt was maybe just an inch off the bench when his warm hand landed on my outer thigh, the thumb on the inside and all four of his long fingers curled over the outside of my leg, and he pushed me back down gently.

  "You're fine there." His voice
was way too low.

  I finally managed to nod my head and force a bite of black bean burger into my mouth to give me something else to do besides look at him, or focus on the heat of his body.

  Because honestly, my stomach was doing flip-flops at our proximity. At the feel of that long, sinewy body practically cocooning mine. Sweet baby lord.

  I mean, we’d been pretty close when he hugged me the other night but this was completely different.

  “So, Iris, what’s your little brother up to?” Dex’s mom asked abruptly.

  “He’s in the Army in Japan.”

  She lifted up her eyebrows. ”Japan? That’s fancy. You been up to visit him?”

  “Not yet.” Especially not when I couldn’t even reach him on the phone. “Hopefully one day soon.”

  “You should, life’s short.” Debra winked.

  I smiled at her and nodded. “I should start saving up for a plane ticket.”

  One of the women I recognized from Mayhem tisked. “Girl, just find yourself a sugar daddy to pay for that.”

  Did Dex just grunt?

  “Pretty girl like you, I bet you could find a man like that,” she snapped her fingers.

  Debra barked out a laugh that was eerily similar to her son’s. “Don’t listen to her. She’s always trying to talk everybody into finding sugar daddies.”

  “That’s true,” Dex’s sister threw in. “But if you listen to Ma, she’ll tell you to find a good man that likes you, has good credit and a steady job.”

  Debra nodded enthusiastically, pointing at two men standing up. “Yeah, and ya listened to me. See how well my advice worked out for you two?”

  The Mayhem woman snorted, cutting me a look. “I still think you should find a sugar daddy.”

  “Would you quit with that mess?” Debra huffed.

  Something traced the curve of my shoulder, breaking my attention away from the women.

  “Ignore ‘em.” It was Dex’s fingertip running over the strap of my bathing suit top. ”Like your bathing suit.” He drew a line down my shoulder blade.

  And then he shuffled forward another inch, bringing his lower body even closer to mine. The fingers on my leg tightened, his thighs closing in on mine. Was that a grumble?

  His finger made a line back up, slowly, and my stomach fluttered in recognition of his touch. “Eat, baby,” he muttered.

  Oh hell. I was still holding the burger in my hand, mid-air after the last bite. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and smiled.

  I'd maybe chewed three times before two thoughts hit me simultaneously. I was eating a black bean burger because his sisters had found out I was a vegetarian. And Dex's hand was still on my thigh.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “You’re kind of a nerd.”

  I shifted on the couch, deepening my cross-legged position on one end to look at Dex better. He was sitting with his ass in the opposite corner in loose basketball shorts, one leg extended straight out so that his bare foot was just a few inches from nudging my knee. His other foot was perpendicular to it, and he had a bottle of water squished between him and the couch.

  Had I mentioned how attractive Dex’s feet were?

  Maybe I’d been expecting athlete’s foot or a serious fungal infection and overgrown toenails to explain why I was so entranced by his long feet and neatly trimmed toenails. Even his freaking Morton’s toe was kind of endearing.

  What was wrong with me?

  Everything. That was the truth.

  After a long afternoon at the lake, in the sun, I didn’t have a doubt my hair was in a million different directions and I might have a slight sunburn on my nose. We'd left after Hannah opened her presents, both of us hugging his mom goodbye while I just waved at his sisters and the other MC members. Neither one of us had talked much after eating—and by eating I meant that I'd thoughtlessly chewed while staring at the ink-stained fingers on my thigh the entire time.

  “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult,” I told him.

  He tossed his head back. Yeah, he was definitely attractive. Smoking hot, level one million attractive. “Babe, you go to the library, you read romance books with a big ass smile on your face. You still say cool, and I just heard you recitin’ each line from the movie.”

  “It’s a good movie,” I tried to justify it. I’d seen all of the boy wizard’s movies at least three times each.

  Dex smiled, his smoky, intent gaze smug. “Babe, you’re the cutest fuckin’ nerd I’ve ever met.”

  My chest did this thing...I don’t even know how to describe it, it was like a seizure-type thing...for all of a split second before I squashed it down. The cute-ground was somewhere I didn't need to go. No, siree. No way. “You like Firefly. That’s pretty nerdy.” I learned this after going through his DVDs while he made tacos. Another major anomaly in his armor. I mean, seriously? He seemed like the type to try and beat up the nerdy kids that liked those types of shows.

  “It’s good,” he shrugged. “But you're still a little dork.”

  “You have a Captain America shield tattooed on your chest.” He didn’t need to know I actually found that incredibly hot. I gave him an obnoxious wink. "You win."

  Oh bloody hell. I was flirting, wasn’t I?

  “He’s the shit,” he answered simply, completely unfazed by my claims to his nerd-dom and the dreamy look I worried had funelled its way onto my heart—and face, unfortunately.

  I was full of crap but I wasn't going to do down without at least a fight. “Next thing I know you’re going to tell me you have a comic book collection."

  "I do." Without any hesitation, he hooked his thumb to his left. “In my spare bedroom.”

  Was he joking? “You’re lying.”

  Dex shook his head, returning my earlier smile. When this man was in a good mood...God. It was unfair. Totally, completely unfair to be around him. “Wanna see?”

  And it was that question, that had me in his underused spare bedroom minutes later.

  I'd read too many books where men had that secret bedroom that seconded as a play room for the kinky, or hell, an operations room for some secret society they belonged to. So when Dex opened the closed door to the room I'd yet to see, it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

  There were bright, pure white light bulbs in the ceiling fan, lamps in two corners of the room flooding the space with illumination. A drafting desk very similar to the one back at Pins was pushed up against the wall with the windows. There were large bookshelves filled with books and pristine plastic wrapped comic books. Vintage action figures were settled on shelves that dotted all of the walls where there wasn't posters or more framed artwork. Artwork that looked like Dex's heavy-handed style on kohl.

  The frame closest to me looked like an original dark superhero. A black cape billowed behind a massive, muscular man with eyes that looked haunted.

  "Did you do this one?" I asked him.

  "Mmhmm," he answered right before I felt the warm length of his body just behind me. "That's one of my earliest drawings."

  "It's so good," I told him honestly, taking in the sweep of heavy lines around the character. I wanted to turn around but he was too close, and it was easier to play opossum than to face Dex Locke. "You should start your own comic book."

  "Thanks, babe." He paused. "I used to want to back when I was a kid, but... shit doesn't always work out that way, you know?" There were no truer words that could have been said for me to understand completely.

  "Oh, I know." I blew out a breath. "Stuff happens."

  "Shit happens," he laughed darkly.

  I tried to look at him out of the corner of my eye but I couldn't. "And here you are, a successful business man."

  Dex snorted but it wasn't exactly in amusement. "If my juvie parole officer could see me now."

  "You got in trouble when you were young, too?" I don't know why I asked. Like so many other things, this was Dex. It made more sense than not.

  "’Course I did. Spent six mon
ths in boot camp when I was seventeen," he sounded a little too proud of it.

  I smiled even though he couldn't see it. "For what?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Jaywalking?" I laughed.

  "No."

  I turned my head to look at him over my shoulder. “Indecent exposure?”