by Lane Hart
“You don’t have to…” I sit up on my elbows to mildly protest.
“Shut up,” he says before his head disappears between my thighs. “I wanna taste of Abby’s homemade lemon meringue pie.”
“Oh God,” I moan, his naughty words reminding me of that night months ago and how freaking hot it was when he ate me out in the backseat of the taxi. My back arches off the mattress at the first swipe of his tongue along my pussy lips. Just a few words and one lick has me gushing all over his face. Senn doesn’t seem to mind. He laps up every drop, feasting on me like a starving man. I make loud, nonsensical sounds that probably wake the whole house. But right when I’m there, on the edge, ready to let go…he stops.
“Please, Senn,” I beg, sitting up to push his head back down shamelessly. I fucking begged him and I never beg for anything.
“Say you love my cock,” he orders, his hooded amber eyes looking up at me from between my thighs. One of his thick fingers keeps teasing my clit with slow, gentle circles.
“What? No, you big douche canoe!” I exclaim, flopping back down on the mattress.
“You sure about that?” he asks, continuing to tease me with his fingertip.
“Uh-huh.”
His tongue flutters over my clit, and I bounce clear off the bed. “Please,” I gasp, holding his long hair in a death grip. Since he won’t lower his mouth, my hips lift to try and seek out his tongue on their own. My empty pussy clenches, and I cry out in desperation.
“Say it,” Senn tells me, and then the asshole chuckles when the tip of his tongue sends my body into a convulsing frenzy again.
I shake my head back and forth on the mattress in defiance. There’s some dignity still left in me.
Two thick fingers are shoved inside me at the same time he swipes his tongue softly over my clit.
“I love your cock, you arrogant jackass!” I cry out, and he thankfully sucks on my clit, giving me a grand finale. “Oh God! Ohhh!” And what a show it is. I see stars, rainbows, pink hearts, yellow moons and green clovers. Mmm, yes.
“You good?” Senn asks sometime later with a chuckle. He apparently moved up beside me on the bed while I was pondering the fact that orgasm heaven is like a bowl of cereal without the nasty toasted oats. Just the delicious marshmallows. Yum. The baby must be hungry. My stomach growls as if on cue. I’m hungry, too. How long have I been fucking or asleep inside this damn room?
“You hungry?” Senn asks after he must’ve heard the rumble. “You want me to get you something from the kitchen?”
“Um, you don’t happen to have a box of Lucky Charms do you?” I ask, figuring the odds of a house full of adults eating the children’s cereal is slim to none.
“Yeah, sure, it’s my favorite cheat day food,” he says, bouncing out of bed with a grace that would rival a ballerina’s.
“Yes!” I shout with both arms pumped victoriously in the air. You’re in luck, baby girl. It’s like I need that shit right now or I might die of marshmallow deficiency. It’s also sweet of him to offer to go get it for me…
Wait a second.
Senn freezes in the process of pulling on his boxers, looking at my stomach and then up at me.
“When was the last time you had a bowl?” he asks.
“Probably around the time I started wearing training bras, so, like, thirteen years ago.”
He flashes me a smile, turning on the defrost around my cold, dead heart before he says, “You think she wants them?”
I nod, blinking away the stupid tears because he’s momentarily happy about sharing something with the daughter he doesn’t want.
“Have-have you had any other cravings?” he asks as he pulls a pair of shorts on over his boxers.
“Uh-huh. I wake up, wanting enchiladas for breakfast.” And cock. Lots of cock. “Then, almost every night, I have to have, um, cucumbers in vinegar before I can go to sleep.”
“That is…weird,” he says with a shiver. “My mom used to eat cucumbers in vinegar, smelling up the whole damn trailer.” With that snippet about his family, he walks out of the room and comes back a few minutes later with a big bowl of cereal.
Senn stays quiet until I finish eating, and then he places the empty bowl on the bedside table before turning off the lamp.
“Goodnight,” he says when we lie down, back to back instead of spooning. Not that I ever thought of him as a spooner. He’s clearly only a forker. He didn’t spoon with me the night he knocked me up. I had cuddled up to him, and he stayed put until the sun came up. But even so, he didn’t kick me out of his bed tonight, and I can still feel the warmth of his body heat, so that’s something, I guess. After a few yawns, I finally drift off to sleep.
…
The wonderful scent of sandalwood, along with the eye-stabbing sun reflecting off the ocean and into the window are the first things I notice when I wake up. I barely see the digital clock’s red readout of nine a.m. before I shoot out of bed like a toilet-seeking rocket. Only when the heaves let up do I realize I’m hugging the commode in Linc’s beach house with the door wide open. Senn staggers out of the room from across the hall in a pair of shorts before I can get to my feet. Then a red head appears in the doorway in front of him. Nate, one of the other fighters from Havoc.
“Whoa!” he says, eyes widening when he sees me. “Abby, are you – ”
That’s all he gets out of his mouth before he’s put in a headlock and yanked backwards out into the hallway. Senn steps in the bathroom and slams the door a second later, chest heaving as he paces in the small space, looking pissed off because I inconveniently interrupted his beauty sleep with my morning sickness.
When he looks down at me, his forehead wrinkles and transforms him into the confused Shar Pei again.
“What?” I huff. “Haven’t you ever seen a naked pregnant woman puking before?”
“Your nose is bleeding again,” is his quiet response.
“Shit,” I mutter. Grabbing some toilet paper from the roll, I hold it to my nose just as another wave of nausea comes barreling in.
Fuck.
I throw up so hard blood starts to splatter from my bleeding nose. It’s a god-awful mess. I wipe up with tissues as best I can and flush the grossness away. Senn offers me a wet washcloth, which I graciously accept to wash my face.
“Can I get you anything?” he asks softly, sounding slightly worried or highly disgusted.
“Crackers?” I ask. When he disappears without a word, I assume they have some of those in the big house. But he doesn’t come back.
Getting to my feet after it seems the worst of the nausea is over, I wrap a towel around myself and go back to Senn’s empty room to get dressed, trying to escape the embarrassment as quickly as possible.
Chapter Five
Senn
“Fucking ow!” I screech when another seashell or piece of gravel stabs the bottom of my foot. I should’ve gone back to get shoes. When Lynn, Linc’s mom, told me there weren’t any crackers of any kind in the house, I just started for the store around the corner from the beach house without thinking. I do have a fiver and some change in my cargo shorts pocket, which I assume will be enough to cover the cost of a box of saltines. Or Ritz. Does Abby have a preference? If I had thought to grab my phone, I could call the house. Oh well.
Walking into the beach shop, I finally find the right aisle and grab the first box I see. Of course, since I’m in a hurry to get back to the house and stop the horrendous morning sickness Abby’s enduring, the one check-out line is a mile long.
Huffing out a breath in frustration, I wait not so patiently for my turn. The unfortunate image of Abby naked and retching with blood pouring from her nose might be branded on my brain. I realize that today is probably not the first time she’s had morning sickness, and it’s my fucking fault she has to deal with all this shit. Yes, we were both participants in the conception; but if I had just abstained, listened to my head telling me not to fuck my best friend’s ex-girlfriend, she wouldn’t have to hug toilets
. And what’s with the nosebleeds, twice in a few hours? Is that another pregnancy symptom? I’ll have to Google it later. Fuck, I’ll have to add it to the long list of Googling I need to do, like, “How not to suck as a father” and “How do you change a baby’s diaper?” and even “How the fuck do you hold a baby without breaking them?”
I have to admit that hearing Abby say the baby craves one of my favorite foods in the world was pretty cool. That’s probably the moment when the last shred of doubt I had about the paternity went flying out the window. Of course I still want to do a DNA test because I’m not a complete idiot, but I already know how it will turn out.
Finally, I’m next in line. The punk rock cashier with purple hair shorter than mine and a nose ring gives me my total for one box of crackers. Six dollars and seventy-five cents. What the fuck? The markup along the coast, mooching off tourists, is unbelievable, but, hey, I guess it’s tough to make a living where you only have customers a few months out of the year.
I pull out my five dollar bill and start counting change. There’s only four quarters. Half a mil in my bank account and I don’t have enough cash on me for crackers. It’s enough to cause flashbacks of my childhood, ones where I was trying to buy bread or peanut butter from the smoke-filled convenience store near our trailer park with a handful of pennies because I couldn’t count. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to scrape together enough for any of the shit I usually tried to buy. Hell, it wasn’t even embarrassing when I was that young and hungry. By the time I got old enough to know shame, I was so smooth I could just steal food instead of have to beg for it. Guilt might be a stronger emotion, but at least you get to keep that shit to yourself.
While I stand here stuck in the past, the clerk eyes my bare chest all the way down to the waistband of my shorts. Then, she reaches in her pocket and puts three more quarters on my pile.
“Thank you,” I say in relief since I won’t have to make a trip back to the house for my wallet and waste more time. “They’re for my pregnant girlfriend, who’s at this very second puking her guts out across the street.”
Girlfriend? Did I seriously just say that word? I’ve never had a girlfriend in my entire life. Subconsciously I’m sure my brain just thought it sounded better than “baby mama.” That has to be it.
Taking my plastic bag from the counter with an offer of congrats from the punk rock clerk, I head out the door and wait for traffic to clear, so I can cross the street. When I see a red BMW come flying by from the direction of the beach house, I know I’m too late.
Abby just left.
Fuck.
I walk across the pavement and then through the sandy path scattered with seashells that feel more like glass to get back to my empty room at the house. The unmade bed and smell of sex in the air is all that’s left of the night of amazing sex. What a shame, because it was so incredible there should’ve been some sort of way to remember it like, I dunno, a photo, video or t-shirt with the date that says, “Best fucks of my life.”
Looking down on the floor filled with my dirty clothes, my eyes land on the light blue satin garter trimmed in white lace. I bend down and pick it up just as Nate comes up behind me and says, “Hey, man, sorry about earlier.”
I stuff the garter into the pocket of my shorts before I turn around to face him.
“If I had known she was –”
“Don’t fucking say it.” I hold a hand up to warn him. Knowing he saw her that way, naked and so vulnerable, nearly caused me to choke him out.
“I was just checking on her after I heard someone throwing up,” he says, shoving his hands into his jean pockets.
“Yeah, I know,” I reply on an exhale before I go over and sink down onto the edge of the mattress, tossing the plastic bag next to me. “And I went to get her crackers, but she’s gone.”
“She’s pregnant?” he asks.
“Yep.”
“And it’s yours?”
“Yep.” I stare up at the lighthouse painting on the wall and grind my teeth together, waiting for holier-than-thou Nate to lay into me about what a jackass I am.
“You actually care about her,” he says.
“What the hell?” I ask, looking back over him now standing against the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.
“You were ready to decapitate me for seeing her naked, and you obviously broke your one-night stand rule.”
“She was sick, and…and pregnant. I didn’t want anyone perving on her,” I argue.
“And you really think I was perving on her?” he asks.
“No,” I admit, because Nate’s not an asshole and wouldn’t screw over his friend, unlike me.
“You know, you don’t have to feel guilty about being with her. Linc’s married, so he’s not gonna mind. She was the one from that night back in what, March, right? When I had to come pick you up early the next morning?”
“How did you know?” I ask.
“Because when we were eating breakfast in the diner, you looked like you’d been run over by a big ass what the fuck did I just do truck, but you weren’t hungover. I’m guessing you were completely sober that night, and you knew full well what you were doing.”
“It was only supposed to be that one night,” I say in my defense.
“Right,” he says followed by a chuckle. “Is that why I was always able to pin your ass to the mat whenever Abby was in the gym?”
“I was worried she would tell Linc…”
“No,” he says. “I’m talking about when she came in to see him before that morning I picked you up.”
“Oh,” I mutter as I try to think back. Nate is a helluva a grappler, three time national champion in college. But with my thirty pound weight advantage, he usually can’t beat me. Usually. Except for the days I was distracted by a petite girl in tight jeans and tall boots, her full tits falling out her top.
“If you ask me, I think you’re happy you knocked her up,” he says offhandedly with a shrug.
“What the fuck?” I exclaim. “I never wanted to have kids. I used a condom –”
“That’s not what I mean,” he interrupts. “I didn’t say you meant to get her pregnant, just that now that she is, you’ve got an excuse to keep seeing her and the permission from Linc you thought you needed. She can be more than a one-night stand because you have an obligation to be with her, right?”
“I got her pregnant, so shouldn’t I be the one to take care of them?” I reply.
“Then why the fuck are you still here?” he asks with a grin.
Chapter Six
Abby
Exhausted beyond belief, I’ve just settled into my comfy sofa when there’s a knock on my apartment door. Since I haven’t ordered any food yet, I have a good idea who it is.
Having showered after the five-hour drive home from the beach, I’m not too much of a mess other than my eyes being a little redder than normal. Good thing I have lots of cucumbers in the fridge to put on them to try and reduce the puffiness later.
Pulling open the door, I come face-to-face with sparkling baby blue eyes and dirty blond hair sticking out from underneath a backward orange Clemson baseball cap.
“Hey, Luke,” I say, not having to force the smile on my face. I’m really happy to see him. It means I won’t be alone. He’s super sweet and is well aware that this is all temporary. I’ve been honest with him about everything, even the fact that he reminds me of Linc. In exchange, he’s been up front with me about that fact that he wants us to get naked. Also, and most importantly, unlike Senn, he’s safe. I don’t have to worry about him screwing around with other women or breaking my heart.
“Hey, beautiful,” Luke says with a stunning smile, opening his arms for me to step into them for a hug. “How you doing? How was the wedding? Linc didn’t come to his senses before the I dos?”
Snaking my arms around his trim waist, I laugh into his neck since he’s only half a foot taller than me. “I’m okay, and Linc’s now a happily married man.”
&n
bsp; “Sorry, not sorry,” he says with a kiss to the top of my head. “That means you’re still here and single.”
“Right,” I say with a shake of my head as I pull away to let him step inside the apartment. This is what I like about Luke. He’s so laid back and fun to be around. He always knows what to say or do to cheer me up.
“Did you see Senn?” he asks, following me to the sofa.
“Uh-huh.” I nod in the affirmative, sinking down onto the plush cushions with my legs curled up under me.
“And? Was he an asshole like usual?” he asks, flopping down next to me with an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his chest. I willingly go, grasping the front of his black, cotton Havoc tee and closing my eyes to drink in his clean scent. I’m such a bitch for wishing he smelled like the sandalwood I washed off earlier in the shower. Rubbing a palm down his stomach, I feel his abs through the soft material to try and stop those idiotic thoughts.
“Yes and no,” I answer in response to his question about Senn’s behavior. Senn, well, he sends more mixed signals than Helen Keller directing traffic.
“He was actually decent?” Luke asks, both eyebrows shooting up in amazement. Senn and Luke train at the same gym, so they know each other, not well, but it’s a small facility. “So did he go all Darth Vader and finally accept responsibility for being a father and shit?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Wow. Didn’t know he had it in him.”
“Me either,” I agree, but I’m ready to change the subject. “So what did you do this weekend?”
“Missed you,” he says, nuzzling my neck. “Trained. Ran a lot. Missed you.”
“You already said that one,” I point out. Why can’t all guys be like Luke, open and upfront without all the bullshit games?
“Oh, did I?” he asks before pulling me up onto his lap so that I’m straddling his waist. When he leans forward to capture my lips with his, I suddenly feel like a guilty whore. Luke was thinking about me while I was fucking someone else.
“I slept with Senn,” I tell him. He keeps kissing me.
