by Zoey Parker
“Good for which one of us?”
“Neither. Both. I’m still deciding.”
His face was so close to mine. Just a few inches away. I could just crane my neck a little bit and my lips would meet his. They looked so plump and soft. Kissable. Bitable. Delicious. His arms were the most solid thing I’d felt in a long time. Realer than real, almost. The ink was finely detailed where it was etched into his skin. He was soft and hard, dark and light, all at the same time. He was so close. He was so close.
“What’s the make or break factor?” His voice was barely a whisper, and yet it filled my eardrums, filled my senses.
I felt numb and tingly all over, alternately hot then cold. My whole system was going bonkers in Ben’s presence. “I’m not sure of that yet either.” I couldn’t read his eyes. Was he feeling what I was feeling? Did he want me the way I wanted him? The urge was so powerful and so immediate that I was having trouble forcing words around it. All I wanted in this world was to taste Ben’s lips, to feel his hands teasing my clothes off of me one more time. I felt so hollow and there was only one thing I could think of that would be suitable enough to fill me up. It was right in front of me.
He leaned in. There, it was coming, confirmation that the same thoughts running through my brain were going through his, too. His lips were a millimeter away, just a cell’s breadth apart from actually touching mine. My eyes were half-lidded. I felt like desire incarnate, like every single inch of me was on fire with desperate need for more of Ben, as much of him as he could possibly offer and then a little more.
Just a little more. Just a little more. I closed my eyes and waited for his kiss.
But it never came. I felt his hands loosen and slide off of me. He backed away as I opened my eyes. He looked confused, more lost than I had ever seen him before. The confidence that normally rolled off of him in waves was ebbing rapidly. I could almost see him retreat inside his head as he took two steps away from me.
“I, um…I need to, to, um, to not.”
It looked like his tongue refused to cooperate with him. Mine wouldn’t either. It was all I could manage to force out a barely audible, “Okay.”
He whirled away and disappeared into the bedroom, leaving me standing by myself in the kitchen as the stream from the faucet quietly splashed across the plates in the sink.
I cleaned up in numb silence. I couldn’t form proper thoughts or even begin to process what had just happened. It had felt like an electric moment, and I knew without thinking that Ben had felt what I had felt. But he’d backed away. Damn near run away, actually, looking back on it. What was he so afraid of? What was I so afraid of?
Every time I thought I’d reached a resolution about this incomprehensible turn of events that my life had taken, something new got thrown into the mix. I knew of course that I’d been attracted to Ben from the very beginning. That was the start of everything, obviously, that first night at the party. But I had been so certain that I would be able to ignore that attraction. He was just a man, after all, no different from any other. I didn’t need his affection.
At least, that’s what I’d told myself going into it, before the wedding, before the move to this apartment with him. But just now, when I was clasped in his arms and his mouth was right there, so close to taking me and making me his, I’d felt not the tiniest shred of ability to resist. He could have had me without a second thought. Hell, I’d thrown myself at him almost literally. But he hadn’t done anything. He’d backed away. Left me alone.
He emerged from the bedroom an hour later. Pacing up to the kitchen counter, he laid his hands to rest softly on the marble. He didn’t look at me as he spoke.
“I made up the bed for you. Clean sheets and everything. I’m going to sleep on the couch tonight. Bedroom’s all yours.”
“Okay,” I squeaked out quietly.
Without another word, he turned, walked over to the couch, and lay down with his back facing the kitchen.
I put the last of the dishes away before heading for the bedroom in timid, uncertain steps. Was this really what he wanted? To be so far away from me? Did I disgust him? All I had were questions and the man on the couch was quiet and still enough to be a corpse. He wasn’t offering me anything resembling an answer.
An hour later, I was in his bed, freshly showered and ready to sleep. But sleep wasn’t coming, not by a long shot. I felt as wide awake as if I’d just pounded back-to-back espressos. I didn’t understand the way the evening had gone. He was funny, then he was serious. He was charming, then he was distant. There was just not placing him, no comprehending what wild, pinwheeling thoughts were taking place behind that gorgeous face of his. I didn’t know whether to scream or cry or punch the pillows in frustration. Half of me wanted to march out to him right now and demand he explain himself.
But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I stayed under the covers, staring up at the ceiling while the same repetitive thoughts circled around and around, unsatisfied, like a flock of birds in search of food that just didn’t seem to be coming.
Chapter Twenty
Ben
I felt like hell the next morning. The couch may have looked comfortable when I bought it, but I found out quickly it was a real bitch to actually spend the night on. Still, I didn’t regret my decision. I didn’t trust myself to be anywhere near Carmen last night. I wanted to be far, far away from her, far enough that I’d be able to crush my desire to claim her into submission. There was no trusting that wily bastard. It had almost gotten me to succumb when I’d grabbed her during her dizzy spell. Being that close to those lips, that body, those beautifully pale eyes—it was torture of a cruel and unusual variety. A weaker man might have crumbled. Hell, I’d gotten pretty damn close. But I made it out with my promise intact. No touching. No staining. Just distance. Pure, blissful distance, as uncomplicated as a straight line.
We bumbled around the house awkwardly during the morning as the sun grew hotter and stronger through the windows. We both reached for the coffee pot at the same time, and when our hands brushed by accident, each of us leaped backwards like we’d been shocked by electricity. She giggled nervously, but I just turned and walked away. I needed to get the fuck outta there. I felt like a teenager again, all bristling libido and not the faintest clue of what to do with my eyes or my hands. Carmen looked as uncomfortable as I felt. By the time my phone rang and Slick’s caller ID popped up on the screen, I grabbed it like it was a float and I was a drowning man.
“What’s up, Slick?” I asked. I winced as the words came out of my mouth. I knew I sounded like an overeager little bitch.
“Damn, boss, what’s gotten into you? You never sound this peppy in the morning.”
I shifted my tone down an octave, noting as I did that Carmen’s eyes flicked up to me from where she sat on the couch filing her nails absent-mindedly. I winced again. This was a train wreck. I needed to get out. Fresh air. Clear the ole head. Too much shit floating around in this room for me to think straight. “Nothing,” I said brusquely. “What’ve you got for me? Any follow-up?”
“Unfortunately not,” he replied. “I’m having the boys pull old files from the storage room, just like you asked, but you know what it’s like down there.”
I did. It was a fucking shithole, to put it lightly. The previous presidents had never much bothered to keep things in order, preferring instead to just chuck boxes full of crap down the stairs of the basement without caring if they landed with any semblance of organization, the dumb bastards. I’d had the cleanup languishing on the very bottom of my to-do list for years, but I’d never quite gotten around to it. Looked like that was going to come bite me in the ass just when I needed a break desperately.
“How long?”
“Hard to say. Have you seen the rats down there? They’re fucking huge. I’m not letting Fang anywhere near that basement.” Fang was Slick’s Rottweiler. He was huge in his own right, and vicious when provoked.
“No, I haven’t seen the rats, and
I don’t think I want to either.”
“Probably a good call,” he mused. “I wonder if you can train them. Couldn’t be that hard…”
“Focus, Slick.”
“Sorry, got a little carried away there. Anyway, like I said, they’re sorting through the files, but between the rats and that little leak we sprung last year, it’s going to be a long time before they find what we’re looking for. And even if we do, the boxes could be too damaged to be of much use. I’d say it’s a few weeks at best before they’ve done a decent enough job to start analyzing what we’ve got on hand.”
A few weeks. Goddamn it. After my conversation with John Robinson, I’d tasked Slick with digging through the club’s old records to see if there was anything else we might have missed. Newspaper clippings, illicit photocopies of police documentation that our informant on the force had managed to slip us—anything like that that could provide an extra clue, some context, whatever it took to double down. But by the sound of it, we weren’t exactly going to be racing to an answer.
“All right, thanks, Slick. Stay on top of this shit. I want results as soon as possible.”
“You got it, Ben.”
“And Slick…”
“Yeah?”
“Keep those fucking rats downstairs.”
He chuckled. “Will do.”
I hung up and sighed, tossing my phone onto the kitchen counter before burying my face in my hands. I could feel Carmen’s eyes still locked on me.
“Trouble on the home front?” she asked. It was the first thing we’d said to each other all morning. Her tone was cautious and deceptively light. But it was a peace offering, or something close to it. I needed to stop being such a child and just accept that things were either going to be bearable or they weren’t, and it was up to me to decide which one. We were coexisting now, for better or worse, at least until a better option arose.
“Rats the size of dogs, a filing cabinet that makes burning junkyards look like the goddamn Dewey Decimal system, and nothing for me to do but sit around and twiddle my thumbs. Yeah, things are going swimmingly. Christ, I need a drink.”
“Little early for that, isn’t it?” she asked as I dug through the cabinet over the stove and found a half-empty bottle of Jack.
The first sip hit my throat with that hot, familiar fire, immediately taking the edge off my nerves, although I was still jangling and fidgety. “No such thing as too early,” I replied with a belch.
“Lovely manners there, dear,” she shot back sarcastically.
I whirled around to face her and narrowed my eyes. “Yeah, well, Mama wasn’t around often enough to correct me, so things kinda just are what they are. What you see is what you get, more or less.”
“Hmm. What’s the return policy on husbands?”
“Very funny,” I mumbled, but I screwed the cap back on the whiskey and tucked it away again. She was a sassy little spitfire when she wanted to be, but I had to admit it was growing on me. Nice to have someone around who didn’t fall all over themselves to do my bidding. A man got soft when he wasn’t challenged every once in a while. I never would’ve imagined that this girl—barely five feet tall, frail as a twig, with a snowball’s chance in hell of defending herself if she were ever to be suddenly tossed into the wild—would be the one to do it, but hey, life’s full of surprises.
I went into the bedroom and tugged on a fresh t-shirt, then swung my jacket around my shoulders before coming back out. “I’m gonna go to the clubhouse for a bit,” I said. “Check up on things.”
She looked up at me and smiled. I felt my chest surge with something that, once again, I couldn’t quite identify. It was like a big weight settling on my rib cage, but I felt lightheaded at the same time. Twenty-five years of life and my body was choosing now to start acting up on me? I didn’t like it any more than I had the first time I started feeling these weird little tingles when Carmen was around. Then there was the ever-present pang in my cock when she switched her crossed legs, revealing a sliver of tanned skin high up on her inner thigh. That particular reaction was expected, though, and I crushed it as brutally as I had every time before. No touching, I reminded myself. Don’t even think about it.
“I’ll see you later, Ben.”
# # #
A few weeks went by and we settled into somewhat of a rhythm. It took a while to come down off my constant edge, but eventually it became almost normal to have the low-level tension rumbling in my stomach whenever I was home with Carmen. She’d been hard at work buffing and rearranging the house. It seemed like she was really throwing herself into it judging by the amount of change I saw every time I came back from a day hauling half-eroded boxes out of the club’s decrepit basement.
I’d slink in through the door, my neck screaming with a million different aches and pains after being hunched over all day long, to see her beaming with pride at the newest blooming plant or tastefully chosen picture hanging on the wall. I didn’t know the first thing about decorating, and my idea of feng shui was having the liquor and my gun close enough that I could grab either one without getting up from my seat. But even I had to admit that the place had started to look pretty damn good.
“Where’d you learn how to do all this shit?” I asked one day, almost three weeks after the wedding had gone down.
“I dunno.” She shrugged, turning her sparkling smile on me. “I just see something and know what’s supposed to be there. Kinda weird.” She crinkled her nose. “You like it?”
“It looks great,” I said. I turned to face her squarely. “But—what are these called?” I asked as I rubbed the velvety white petal of a flower between my finger and thumb.
“Gardenias,” she said. She smacked my hand. “And don’t touch the petals; you’ll kill it.”
I dropped the flower, but went on to say, “If you tell any of my boys that I have goddamn gardenias in my house, I’ll dropkick you into the next county.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Killmore?” she asked coyly. She’d taken to calling me Mr. Killmore whenever she wanted to get under my skin. I hated it. For some reason, it made my hackles rise like no other.
“Watch it, little girl,” I growled. “You’re gonna get yourself into trouble that you won’t be able to get out of.”
She batted her eyelashes playfully. “That sounds just awful.”
I turned away to hide my grin. Behind me, I could sense her disappointment, but it was for the best. There’d been too many moments scattered throughout the last few weeks like this, when the tension between us was so damn obvious that I’d have to be an idiot not to notice. It was like a ticking time bomb, one that I was doing my best to keep batting down the road so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. The strategy was working so far, and I kept telling myself, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But the whole plan to find an exit out of this marriage was looking more distant and unlikely with each passing day. I’d assured myself then that it would be a cinch to find an easy way to nullify the thing and get the hell out of Dodge for a little while, but thus far, nothing presented itself. I didn’t have any other choice other than to batten down the hatches and keep myself to myself.
Another day, I was sitting in the bar, shooting the shit with Jay, Slick, Duncan, and Spark as we took a break from schlepping the crates of files up and down the basement staircase. All of us were filthy from head to toe, covered with spider webs, dirt, and an impressively colorful array of mold and fungi. But the beer had never tasted so good.
Duncan was telling a story about the night before. He and Spark had gone out to a local bar, on the prowl as usual. The kid was a walking, throbbing erection. He had a hankering for pussy like I’d never seen before.
“Damn, son, I used to think I was bad back in my younger and wilder days,” I said, shaking my head. “But you, kid, need to be stopped. Jesus.”
He laughed. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, prez,” he said. “You know how it goes. You walk into a bar and every townie girl there
is crawling on hands and knees just to get in the line that leads right to your dick.”
Spark nodded in agreement. “It really is something else,” he said in his baritone rumble.
We all chuckled and took another sip of our beer. “I’m sure the married life is a little different, eh?” Slick asked casually after a moment had passed.
The smile fell from my face instantly. I saw Slick pale out of the corner of my eye. I slowly wiped the foam off of my lips, then stood up, cold and grimacing. “Enough chit chat,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.” No one said a word. They all left their beers on the table, half-finished, as I turned and strode towards the basement.
I couldn’t explain why Slick’s comment had struck such a nerve with me. It was burning a hole in my brain as I lugged yet another box up the stairs, taking them one creaking step at a time. He’d meant it innocently enough; the guy didn’t have a mean bone in his body. And yet I’d turned on him like a junkyard dog. Part of me wanted to apologize, but it was too late for that. I couldn’t back down in front of my men. It was one thing to joke around with them—they were my brothers, after all—but it was important to show that some lines were not meant to be crossed.
