Broken Play

by Tracey Ward

  I lead Lonnie to the front of the line where the bouncer stands stony faced and thick in an all black suit. It looks expensive. It’s probably a loner from the club. No way he makes enough to buy threads like that on a bouncer’s salary.

  I nod to the clipboard in his hand. “Mila Greene, plus one.”

  He looks down at me for a measured beat before glancing at the paper. “You twenty-one, Mila Greene Plus One?”

  “I’m whatever you need me to be.”

  He chuckles. “This is my third night manning this door, kid. I’m not getting fired already for letting in underaged—”

  Lonnie drops a Benjamin on his clipboard. “We’re thirty.”

  The guy looks down at the money without touching it. “Your ages combined, maybe.”

  Lonnie sighs before dropping another hundred down.

  The guy swipes them both into his fist before stepping to the side for us. “Ladies.”

  I smile at him sweetly, patting his chest as I walk past.

  “Hey!”

  I glance over my shoulder. There’s a guy in line looking at me, smiling like he knows me. “I’ll see you inside, sweetheart!”

  I look him over. He’s older. Probably mid-thirties. Cute but not hot. He’s not what I need tonight.

  I shake my head with a grin. “No, you won’t. Sweetheart.”

  The crowd laughs at him as I disappear into the club behind Lonnie. She’s already striding through the entryway, headed for the bar. I’m right on her heels.

  I immediately spot Sloane and Hollis in a dark, roped off section of the club. They’ve got quite a crowd assembled. Thirty people at least. I make a point to drag Lonnie to the farthest end of the bar, away from the party. I used them to get into the club but I don’t want them to see me here because A) They’ll probably fire me and B) I don’t need a lecture right now. Not again. Not tonight.

  Lonnie signals the bartender and orders us both shots of Fireball. I don’t want it, that’s not my drink, but I take it anyway because she’s buying and I’m still cut off from Daddy’s billions. I’m down to eight hundred dollars in my checking account and I don’t get paid for another two weeks. Paying to get into the club tonight would have practically broken me and I think that’s all part of Daddy’s master plan. If I can’t afford my old lifestyle, I can’t live it. It’s simple math.

  Lonnie clinks her shot glass against mine. “To your first night out in too fucking long! Welcome back, queen!”

  I kick back the shot without a word. Lonnie slams hers down and immediately asks for another set, but I shake my head at the bartender.

  “What do you want instead?” he asks without raising his voice, making me lean in to hear him. He grins when he knows he’s got me. “I’m buying.”

  I smile slowly, looking him over. He’ll do.

  “Tequila,” I tell him. “No salt.”

  “Lime?”

  “A sliver.”

  “You got it.”

  When he goes to get the tequila, Lonnie looks at me impatiently. “Why is he buying your drink and not mine?”

  I shrug. “I look easier, I guess.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She adjusts the skirt on her dress, hiking it higher. Getting sluttier.

  She shouldn’t. What I said was sarcastic. She looks way trashier than I do, and that’s the problem. She’s trying too hard. You have to act and look like you don’t care. That’s how you get a guy hooked. They can’t matter. The second they matter, that’s when it all goes to hell. It gets too complicated and then there’s all these feelings, and you’re better off catching Hep C than catching feelings. At least there’s a cure for Hepatitis.

  When the bartender brings us our shots, he makes a point of touching my hand as he hands the glass to me. It’s bigger than Lonnie’s. He’s giving me a double and The Eyes, the ones that tell me he’ll find me later on the dance floor when his shift is over. I hope he does. He’s tall with black hair shaved on the sides and long on the top. Tattoos are popping out everywhere under his clothes, coursing over thick muscle, and I think he looks just right. A perfectly packaged throwaway.

  Lonnie and I kick back our drinks before heading out to dance. We stay close together, sometimes grinding up on each other, and eventually we rally a small circle around us. It’s all guys, all of them smiling at us as we touch each other suggestively. When Lonnie leans in to kiss me, though, I pull away abruptly.

  She frowns in annoyance. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re being weird.”

  “I’m not. I’m just thirsty. I’m going to get a drink.”

  She laughs. “You mean you’re going to get that bartender.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Fine. Make out with him, then. I don’t give a shit.”

  I believe her because before I’m five feet away, she’s happily swallowed up by the men who were circling us. One of them grabs at my hand, trying to pull me back, but I slip out of his hold easily.

  When I get to the bar, my mark is gone. I don’t see him anywhere so I sit in the only open spot I can find and make sure to keep my back to Nick Howard’s raging party.

  “Here! On me!” A guy hands me a drink. He’s a handsome guy. A friendly guy. His drink is bubbly and I like bubbly, so I take it without hesitating. “‘Cause you’re so damn beautiful I can’t help but spend money on you.”

  “Thank you,” I tell him blandly. “That’s very flattering.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome! I bet you get it a lot! You’re gorgeous!” He squeezes in next to me at the bar without asking, his hip leaning hard against my thigh. “What’s your name?!”

  I smile at him over the rim of the drink, but I don’t answer. I don’t want him to know my name. I don’t want to know his name. I just want to put his dick in my mouth as soon as I’m finished with this drink. Then I want to go home, vomit Fireball into my roommate’s garbage can, and fall asleep in my club clothes. I’ll wake up with a headache and bad hair, but it’ll feel familiar, and I need that right now.

  I need to feel like I know who the fuck I am, even if it’s the worst version of me.

  Friendly guy chats my ear off while I sip the drink he gave me. It’s stupid to do it. He could easily have slipped something into it, and by the time he gets to the end of his story about his co-worker who ‘totally crushed his collarbone skiing at his parents’ place in Vale’ and has assured me twice that he’ll take me there to spoil me sometime because I’m just so fucking hot, I’m almost hoping he drugged me. At least it will be an exit from this conversation.

  I put my empty glass on the bar, standing suddenly. “I’m going to the bathroom to take a shit,” I tell him matter-of-fact.

  He frowns. “What’d you say?!”

  “I said I’m going to the bathroom to get a spritz!” I shout in his face. I mime like I’m spraying something on my wrist. “Of perfume! I’ll be right back!”

  “Oh, yeah! Okay! But you don’t have to! You smell crazy hot already!”

  I hurry past him toward a dark hallway that I assume leads to the bathrooms. My eyes are blurry and I blink rapidly to clear them. I’m having trouble breathing, my throat closing up quickly, and I wonder if he actually did it. Did that motherfucker drug me?

  I run into a wall that I didn’t see coming. My vision is shot to shit. My heart is racing, my hands trembling. The wall takes hold of me, of my arms, and I start to panic. I open my mouth to scream.

  “Mila.”

  The voice rings in my ears. I blink again and again, finally clearing my eyes so I can see the man that’s holding me.

  “Tyus,” I whisper in relief.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TYUS

  Mila’s body relaxes in my hands when she breathes my name.

  Her eyes are flooded with tears, some of them spilling over her lashes down her pink cheeks. “Are you crying?”

  “I am?” She feels her face with shaking fingers. She looks surprised when she realizes
it’s wet. “Holy shit, I am, aren’t I?”

  “What happened?”

  “I thought a guy drugged me.”

  My hold on her tightens. “What?”

  “He didn’t. I don’t think.”

  “What guy? Where is he?”

  Mila shakes her head, regaining her strength. Her stubbornness. “He didn’t. I didn’t know I was crying. My eyes were blurry and my hands were shaking.” She holds them out in front of her to see. “Or they are shaking,” she mutters.

  “But this guy gave you a drink?”

  “A lot of guys give me drinks, Tyus. Get over it.”

  I let her go. She stumbles in surprise without my support. “You’re drunk.”

  “It was two shots. It’s nothing. I can have fun sometimes.”

  I look into her swimming, sad eyes. “Are you high?”

  She stares back defiantly. “Not yet.”

  “But you’re going to be.”

  “I’m going to be a lot of things tonight. High is likely to be one of them. Laid is most definitely another.”

  “I’m not sleeping with you tonight.”

  “I didn’t say it was going to be you.”

  I feel like punching the wall. Like ripping a door off its hinges. I feel like hitting somebody so hard their bones crack under my knuckles. The idea of her with another guy fucks me up that bad, and it’s a sobering, scary realization. I’ve been turned out by a girl so hard I feel like getting violent, but she pushes buttons I didn’t even know I had. She takes me to places I’ve never been before. Some of them good. Some of them very, very bad.

  “So it’s like that, huh?” I ask her quietly, my blood running like lava through my veins.

  She shakes her head slowly. “Just go back to the party, okay? Leave me alone.”

  “I’m not here for the party.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  I chuckle unhappily. “That’s a really good goddamn question.”

  I turn to leave out the back exit

  Mila chases after me. “Why are you here?!” she shouts.

  I ignore her. I hit the emergency door hard, banging it open against the side of the building. An alarm is probably going off somewhere inside, but I don’t give a shit. I just have to get out of here. I have to get away from her.

  “Tyus!” she shouts after me.

  I hear her heels clicking furiously over the cement behind me.

  “Why the fuck are you here?!” she screams at the top of her lungs.

  I round on her. She’s so close she runs into my chest when I turn to face her, and I grab her shoulders to keep her from stumbling on the spikes she’s walking on.

  “I came here for you,” I growl at her angrily. “Sloane called me. She said you were here with some wild ass friend of yours and she saw you taking shots and I thought, Mila doesn’t drink. Mila doesn’t party anymore. Mila fell off the radar after we had sex and this is my fault. I did this to her. I messed up. I need to make it right.”

  Her eyes narrow. “You can’t fix me.”

  “Trust me. I see that.”

  “You should go home.”

  “So should you.”

  “I want to stay.”

  “Why?”

  A cold breeze kicks up through the alley. It brushes by us, across her skin, making her body shiver like a leaf on a tree, threatening to fall. Refusing to relent. “I don’t know how to let you like me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you wanted to get to know me so I let you and now you like me! Like, actually like me, and I don’t get that!” she shouts, winding up. “I don’t get a guy liking me. Okay? I’m sure my therapist would love to hear that. I have shit self-esteem and all of my value to men is in sex, but whatever, that’s not it.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I like sex. No, I fucking love sex, Tyus. I crave it all the time. I’m addicted to it the way I used to be addicted to the pills and the booze, and yeah, I have a problem. I can’t control myself half the time. I want what I want and if I can’t get it immediately, I can’t handle it. I don’t know what to do. You tell me to be patient and slow down, but I don’t like slowing down. It makes me feel crazy.”

  I shake my head in frustration. My hand runs over my mouth roughly, my eyes rising to the sky. There’s nothing up there. No stars. No moon. Just the dusky gray ceiling of a Los Angeles night too full of artificial light to find Heaven. “We had sex,” I remind her mildly. “Good goddamn sex, and if you hadn’t disappeared on me, we would be in my crib doing it again. I’ll fuck you all night, every night if you want me to, Mila, but not if you’re going to be messing around with other guys and ignoring me when I reach for you, because you’re right. I do like you. The real you. The girl you’ve been letting me get to know, but I can’t chase you all over hell and back. You have to stand still sometimes. Eventually, you gotta go slow.”

  I expect her to yell at me. I’m ready for her to walk away or run or hit me – all that wild shit she’s notorious for, but she doesn’t. She looks up at me with wide, watery eyes, and she smiles. She looks insane and beautiful and so fragile I’m afraid to touch her.

  “Okay,” she breathes.

  I frown. “Okay?”

  “I can go slow with you.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She steps up on her toes to touch her tongue to my lips. To trace them slowly. “You sure you can give me what I need when I need it?”

  I take a deep breath. I tell myself to leave. I tell myself to run, because she has come straight up out the pocket tonight. This is next level crazy and you should never put your dick in crazy, but feeling her close to me like this, I can’t walk away, and I wonder if she’s the only addict here. She’s hooked on sex but I’m hooked on her. Her mouth, her ass, and her bones that feel like glass in my hands as I push her back up against the brick wall behind her.

  “You gonna go looking for it from anyone else?” I demand.

  She shakes her head fiercely. “Never.”

  “When you want it, where are you gonna get it?”

  “You. Only you.”

  “You gonna run from me again?”

  Her brow drops, her eyes getting anxious. “Probably. But you’re fast, Tyus.” She puts her hands on my hips. On the buckle of my belt. Slowly, she pulls it free from the loop. “You can catch, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, baby girl,” I mumble, dropping my lips down to hers. “I’ll catch you.”

  Mila whimpers as she kisses me. It’s messed up. It tastes like crazy. It’s every flavor of insanity I’ve ever known with some new ones she’s inventing on the fly, but I can’t help the way it makes me feel. The way she makes me feel. Her arms go around my neck. My hands take hold of her ass. I lift her up and she wraps her legs around me, clinging to me. Kissing me for all she’s worth with tears on her face that I don’t completely understand, but I don’t think she does either. She’s feeling too much to sort out any of it and I’m feeling her too much to try to figure it out.

  I pin her up against the wall. I’m leaning into her, feasting on her face, her neck, her breasts that are still covered by her dress, but that’s it. No bra. Nothing between us but the thin red material that gets wet and soft when my tongue drags across it. I can feel her nipple peak underneath as she sighs with relief, but then she’s moaning as I’m sucking and biting, pulling her into my mouth with all the force I can manage. She lifts her left leg to wrap it around my hip, pulling me into her.

  I’m worried I’ll crush her. Everything about her feels delicate. I can just barely feel her ribs under her skin as I drag my hand down her side onto her stomach. I tease one finger down past her belly button, making her shiver. Tickling her in a way that doesn’t make her laugh. It makes her pant. It makes her wild.

  I find the hem of her dress and I ball it in my fist, yanking upwards roughly. I expose her to the night and then I dive into the valley between her legs that’s marked by the smallest patch of curling, d
owny hair.

  “Hmm,” she moans as my fingers open her. “Slow.”

  “You want it slow?”

  “You know I—Ahh,” she groans, her hands gripping my shoulders for support. She shoves them inside the neck of my shirt to get to my skin. To me. Her eyes are already hooded and sleepy, her mouth hanging open. “You know how I am.”

  “Yeah, baby. I do.”

  Fast as lightning, I drag my finger through the warm wet of her cunt.

  “Fuck!” she screams, her body bucking against me.

  I chuckle darkly. “Try not to cum.”

  “Fuck you. I can’t. Not when you do shit like that to me.”

  “Try,” I growl before I cover her mouth with mine. Before I swirl my fingers inside her.

  She practically screams against my mouth but I don’t let up. I play at her entrance, teasing but never entering. Her lips quiver against mine, biting at both of us as she tries to keep herself together, but she’s slipping. When I finally slide my fingers inside her, she’s teetering on the edge.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she cries, high and pained. Her fingers are digging into my skin, her nails sharp as daggers.

  “Come on, Mila,” I scold her as I thrust inside her deeper. Harder. “You gonna go that easy?”

  “Fuck you. You’re two fingers deep,” she gasps. “It’s too much.”

  “Really? That all your little body can take?”

  She glares at me angrily. “No.”

  “You sure?” I slow my hand, testing the waters with the tip of a third finger.

  “Don’t, Tyus. I can’t.”

  I kiss her neck, nipping at the tender flesh that throbs with her wild pulse. “Goddamn, you’re wet. You’re gonna cum for me, aren’t you, baby girl? You can’t stop it.”

  “I can’t,” she whimpers. “I can’t.”

  “You don’t want to stop it, do you? You want to go again and again and again.”

  She rolls her hips against me, begging me with her body. “Yes! Please!”