Still Standing

by Kristen Ashley

  “Yes,” I lied.

  He again drew the cue back and then jabbed it forward in a controlled way, hitting the ball. The white ball cracked into the other ball at an angle and it shot straight into the side pocket.

  “Finesse,” he whispered into my ear.

  “Right,” I replied, pushing back against his body to straighten.

  He allowed this and I walked away from him and grabbed my beer.

  I sucked some back as I heard Buck call out, “Driver, another Lite and another Bud.”

  “Gotcha,” the young biker called back.

  I dropped my hand, looked at Buck and informed him honestly, “You should know, I’m already drunk, and if I have much more, I’ll be very drunk and unable to operate my vehicle legally. You should also know I have exactly twelve cents in my purse and one dollar and fifty-seven cents in my bank account, and therefore I will be unable not only to order a taxi, but also to buy a bus ticket. And lastly you should know that, even if I wasn’t wearing four-inch heels, I live too far away to walk home.”

  Buck studied me another long moment before he got close.

  So close I could feel his warmth and his hand came up and curled around the side of my neck, sliding to the back.

  I was shocked by this even after the pool lesson touching. He was so close I had to tip my head far back to catch his eyes and find he was actually so close that, if I lifted half an inch up on my toes, my mouth would be on his.

  Oh dear.

  “And you should know, Clara,” he murmured, using my real name for the first time in his gravelly, deep voice, making it sound like another name altogether. Another name that belonged to another woman, that woman not me, but that woman being a woman I wished I could be. “That I know exactly what’s in your account and I know you haven’t had lunch and I know you haven’t had breakfast, and I know it’s because you can’t afford either. I know you’ve got a master’s in library science and I know no one will hire you because his mud stuck to you. I know Tia Esposito is the only thing you got, which means that put you in the path of her husband. And I know Enrique Esposito is the kind of cockroach that’s able to sniff out vulnerability and manipulate it purely for shits and grins. And last, I know that you’re tryin’ to do your best with the hand you got dealt, but even so, babe, you are totally fuckin’ this shit up by makin’ all the wrong plays.”

  Something about that angered me, and with that, my heightened emotion and the tequila in my system, I didn’t guard my reply.

  “Okay, West,” I stated. “You may know all that, and I suspect you know more. What you do not know is what it means to be me. There are a fair few people, thank God, who know what it means to be me. So, what I know is you don’t know that first thing about how to play the hand I’ve been dealt. No one can know that unless they spend time in my shoes. So don’t you stand there and make judgments about me. You have no clue, no clue, what it is to be me. And I not only know that because you’re not me, but because, earlier, you said I entered this game. You were wrong. I didn’t enter it. I was shoved into it. So you don’t know everything, West Hardy. You know a lot, but you don’t know anything that’s important. So you cannot tell me I’m making the wrong plays because you don’t get what it means when every breath is an effort at survival. I’m breathing so my take on this is, I’m doing all right.”

  He stared down at me and I held his stare.

  Then, apropos of absolutely nothing, he asked, “Are you a vegetarian?”

  I felt my head jolt and my brows shoot together before I answered, “No, why?”

  Without taking his eyes or hand from me he shouted, “Driver! Order Toots and me the works!”

  And it was then when I realized I’d read the situation very wrong.

  I wasn’t on shaky ground.

  I was in the middle of an earthquake.

  2

  Clean

  “Toots, have you paid attention to anything I’ve taught you?”

  I looked up, leaned in, put a hand on the wall of a very muscled chest and grinned up at West “Buck” Hardy.

  “You asked me if I knew how to play pool,” I reminded him. “You didn’t ask me if I was capable of learning how to play pool.”

  I was drunk.

  Way drunk.

  Unbelievably drunk.

  In fact, I’d never been this drunk before in my life.

  We’d had huge burgers, cheesy curly fries, and we’d chased them with beers, and that was more food than I’d had to eat in a long time. So I kind of sobered up a little when the food hit my stomach.

  But then I shot more pool (sort of) while I shot more tequila and drank more beer, and I passed the drunk I was before like a rocket.

  Now, I was smashed.

  His hand hit my waist and slid around to the small of my back as he grinned down at me.

  “All right, darlin’, are you capable of learnin’ how to play pool?”

  I shook my head and gave him more of my weight.

  “Nope,” I replied. “I’m not very dexterous. Never have been. Always picked last for teams in gym, and when I dissected my frog in biology class…” I trailed off and scrunched my nose before I finished, “It was seriously icky.”

  His hand at the small of my back put on pressure and he fitted my body to his.

  “Then maybe we should give up,” he suggested.

  “This would be wise,” I told him, nodding, and suggested back, “We could go back to twenty questions.”

  His face changed, and I liked the change, whatever it was. I was just too drunk to figure out what it was.

  “Clara, honey, you didn’t find that fun,” he reminded me softly.

  “Well, if you don’t ask mean questions, West, maybe it’ll be fun,” I replied.

  His eyes moved over my face as he murmured, “Mean questions.”

  I pulled away, grabbed his hand and dragged him to a couch. I moved in front of him, put both my hands on his chest, put pressure on my hands, and he went down. I collapsed beside him, curled my feet up under me so my bent legs were resting against his thigh, but I twisted my neck toward the bar.

  “Driver!” I called. “Would you be a love and get us more beer?”

  I heard Buck chuckle, and I turned to see his eyes were aimed beyond me and he was tipping up his chin which meant Driver was going to bring us more beer.

  Excellent!

  His gaze came to me, upon which I declared, “I’m smashed.”

  Buck smiled and asked, “No shit?”

  “I’ve never been this drunk,” I added.

  His smile didn’t leave his face as his brows went up. “Really?”

  I shook my head and answered, “Nope.”

  “Babe, you gotta live more,” he advised.

  I smiled at him and noticed when I did, his attention dropped to my mouth, which made my belly feel warm, but I ignored this and drunkenly blathered.

  “No way.” I shook my head, then bragged outrageously, “I learned early to make all the right moves.”

  His gaze left my mouth, caught mine, and I realized in a vague way he looked kind of surprised.

  “Come again?”

  “Well,” I started, felt Driver’s presence, turned, gave him a huge smile as I took a beer from him and turned back as Buck took the other one and then Driver moved away. “You learn that in foster care.”

  Buck had started to lift the bottle to his mouth, but he stopped when his head jerked around, and his narrowed, lovely, rich, dark-brown eyes hit me.

  “What?” he asked so quietly, I barely heard him.

  But I heard him.

  I was sucking back beer, staring at him and nodding all at the same time. I dropped my chin and my beer hand and looked at him.

  “I mean, I messed up with Rogan, but I didn’t know that. He was handsome and he wore suits and he drove a nice car and he acted from the beginning like he really liked me. Not to mention he had a seriously cool name. I mean Rogan Kirk. Great name,” I stated.

>   I took another pull on my beer, swallowed it, and kept right on blathering.

  “My birth mother gave me up for adoption then my adoptive father took off on my new mom when I was five, and she handled it for a while then, when I was seven, she killed herself, so I went to her sister. But she had four kids already, her husband had left her too, and things were tough. I wasn’t blood anyway, so she called social services and they put me into foster care. That’s how I met Tia. We were in a home together. I met her when I was twelve. We were thick as thieves. She was great. Like having a sister. She liked Rogan too. Neither of us expected to get something like that. We both expected to get something like…something like…” I trailed off and then stated, “Well, obviously, something like Esposito.”

  When I shut up, I saw he was staring at me.

  He kept doing this for a bit, before he said, “Jesus, Clara.”

  “I know.” I threw out my hand with the bottle in it. “No one knows that, right? No one knows why I believed in Rogan. Or why I wanted to believe.” I sucked back more beer and went on, “In those articles, they didn’t talk about how I worked my ass off at school to get academic scholarships to go to college. Which didn’t cover it all, by the way. I had to get student loans and I paid those off. No one knows that.”

  I threw back more beer.

  And kept blabbing.

  “They also didn’t talk about the student loans I took out to get my masters which I also paid off with my money. Money I earned. Rogan offered, but I said no. I didn’t think it was fair. They didn’t ask me questions about that. They didn’t try to investigate why I was blind to what Rogan was doing. He treated me great. He traveled a lot, but when he was home, our marriage was awesome.”

  I leaned into Buck on the last word then leaned back and slugged more beer before continuing.

  “I’d worked hard to get what I had. I thought Rogan was my reward. I thought, finally, finally,” I leaned in again and stayed there, “it was my turn to have a taste of the good life.”

  “Baby,” he whispered.

  “But I was wrong,” I went on like he said not a word and sat back. “And that’s what I learned. You make all the right moves. You don’t get into trouble, and Buck,” I aimed a look at him, though not entirely successfully, “drinking until you’re smashed is the wrong move. That’ll piss off foster parents, get you kicked to a new place, or worse. So you be good. You do what you’re told. You study and get good grades and be where they tell you to be or where you say you’re going to be. You don’t make trouble. You don’t ask questions. You don’t have expectations. You just wake up and get through each day doing the best you can and putting every foot right.”

  I threw back another swallow of beer.

  And again kept talking.

  “So I did all that, and I have to tell you, I’ve thought about it, like, loads, how I put my foot wrong with Rogan. But I swear, I swear, he gave me no clue. We had a great marriage, great sex, shoo!” I threw my hand out again. “I mean, seriously, he’s a jerk of the jerkiest order, but you have to hand it to him, he has stamina if he was sleeping with all those women and still able to do the things he did to me.” I leaned in again. “And how often and with such energy.”

  “Are you saying you’re not pissed at him?” Buck asked, and I tried to focus more fully on him.

  “Oh no. If it wasn’t illegal and if prison didn’t scare the bejeezus out of me, I would have killed him,” I stated breezily. “I’m just saying he was great in bed.”

  “So he ruined you for other men,” Buck deduced, and if I wasn’t so drunk, I would have noticed his tone was teasing, but I was drunk.

  So drunk.

  “Totally, and not because of the bed business,” I answered in all seriousness. “Never going to go there again. No more men, ever.”

  I felt something funny and it was so funny my drunken focus became a far more focused focus and I saw Buck was again staring at me with a expression on his face I couldn’t decipher, but it made tingles slide across my skin.

  “No more men, ever?” he asked quietly.

  “Ever,” I answered firmly, then turned my head and sucked back more beer.

  “Baby, that’s a waste,” I heard Buck say.

  I dropped my beer hand and looked at him.

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “Because, Clara, you’re fuckin’ gorgeous,” he answered, and I felt my eyes get big at the same time I felt my mouth drop open. “Great ass, babe, fuckin’ unbelievable legs, fantastic tits, beautiful hair, gorgeous eyes, and shit, darlin’, when you smile, fuck, your smile goes right to a man’s dick.”

  I blinked again then I whispered, “I’m not gorgeous.”

  His hand slid around my thighs making his arm curl around both and he leaned into me to reply, “Don’t know what you see in the mirror and it also doesn’t matter. I feel your smile in my dick means I got a dick which means I’m a man and I’m tellin’ you, Toots, top-to-toe, you’re gorgeous. You weren’t, babe, your ass woulda been thrown outta this building two seconds after you entered it. Since you are, you’re drunk, and in about five minutes, you’re gonna be in my room and I’m gonna convince you to forget about your vow of no men, ever.”

  Oh wow.

  “You are?” I whispered.

  “Damn straight,” he answered.

  “Oh my.” I was still whispering.

  “You want, you can bring the bottle with you.” He tipped his head to the bottle of tequila still sitting on the pool table and kept talking. “But the only thing I’m gonna be tasting for the rest of the night is you.”

  Oh.

  Wow.

  “Oh my,” I repeated on a breath.

  “You want the bottle?” he asked.

  “Buck—”

  “Answer me, babe.”

  “No, but—”

  I didn’t finish.

  He stood, yanked my beer out of my hand and set it aside with his. He grabbed my hand, pulled me off the couch and dragged me through the room to a doorway on the side wall by the bar. Through that doorway, he turned us left, we went down a short hall, then left again, and we went down a long hall where he opened the door to the second to the last room.

  There, he pulled me in.

  He closed the door.

  I stared at the unmade, queen-sized bed.

  Oh dear.

  I turned to Buck.

  “Um…”

  I stopped speaking (not that I knew what to say) when he advanced.

  I was drunk but not drunk enough to retreat toward the bed.

  Instead, I shifted and moved away from it.

  Buck shifted too and kept advancing.

  “Um…Buck?” I called as I kept moving backward.

  “Yeah, babe,” he answered as he kept moving forward.

  I hit wall and was forced to stop.

  Buck’s body hit mine and simply stopped.

  I tipped my head back, feeling my scalp scrape the wall as I did so, and I stated, “I’m pretty…um, dedicated to that vow.”

  Buck spanned my hips with his hands and pulled them into his. He dropped his head so his lips were not even an inch away, but his eyes kept hold of mine.

  It was then, I smelled him.

  He did not smell of cologne.

  He smelled of Buck Hardy.

  Dark and decadent.

  Um.

  I was in trouble.

  “Like I said, baby, you gotta live more,” he whispered.

  “But—” I started.

  His head slanted, and he kissed me.

  His beard felt scratchy. It also felt sexy because it came with his lips and his tongue.

  And he tasted great, like beer, tequila and man.

  Oh God.

  My hands lifted, my fingers curled around his neck, and when his lips released mine and slid down my jaw to my ear, I felt it starting.

  I had a strong libido, according to Rogan.

  Rogan had loved that about me.

  I th
ought it was Rogan.

  Apparently, it was me.

  Or, in this case, perhaps tequila, beer and all things Buck.

  Specifically, the fact he smelled good, tasted good and was a really great kisser.

  “Buck,” I whispered, and he moved his hands from my hips to glide in and cup both cheeks of my behind.

  Oh God.

  “Buck,” I repeated on a breath.

  “Fuck, baby, you got a great ass,” he muttered against the skin under my ear.

  Oh…God.

  “Buck,” I said again, so low, even I could hardly hear it.

  He lifted his head, but he also pressed his hips against mine. There was something lovely and hard there, and I felt my knees buckle so my fingers dug into his neck.

  “I’m right here, Toots,” he replied, slanted his head again and kissed me.

  He was.

  He was right there.

  And I was right there.

  And he tasted great and he felt great and his hands at my bottom felt even better and his tongue in my mouth felt the best.

  Oh God, God, God.

  I couldn’t help it. I was too drunk, and he was too everything and all of it was good. I slid the fingers of one of my hands into his thick, overlong hair and the other hand moved around his shoulders to hold on. I tilted my head to the opposite side, pressed my body in and kissed him back.

  That was it and what would happen next would make Rogan and all the fabulous things he could do to me be forever erased from memory.

  I was all over Buck, and he was all over me.

  I couldn’t get enough of him, pulling his T-shirt from his jeans, my hands sliding in, over his hot, sleek, muscled skin, my movements fevered, hungry, my mouth more so.

  And Buck felt the same, I knew it because he didn’t hide it. He drank it from my mouth, he pulled it from my skin, he nipped it with his teeth.

  Unbelievable.

  I couldn’t even keep track of it all. I could only feel, his hands at my bottom, my sides, my breasts. His mouth on my nipple over my blouse. My fingers yanking up his tee. His arms going up, pulling the shirt off then immediately my mouth went to his chest, his nipples, my hand gliding over his hard crotch then his hand fisting in my hair and positioning my head for him to take my mouth again.