by Meg Jackson
He pressed his palm against her clit. She pulled away just slightly, taking his bottom lip between her teeth and sucking it in, her eyes meeting his, a challenge lurking behind the molten gold. It incited something inside him, sparked a feral desire to take her any way he wanted to, without asking her permission, without waiting for her to be ready. He stamped it down, but it was too late. She’d seen it in his eyes. And her body responded in kind.
Her skin, flushed and hot, felt like it would burn anyone who tried to touch her. Greedy, mindlessly, she ground against his hand, forcing his fingers deeper into her wet slit, her clit throbbing into the course flesh of his palm. Her own fingers stroked him from base to tip and back again, squeezing lightly, then gently, then lightly again, a torturous rhythm that only made him press harder with his fingers, to torture her the same way.
Tricia realized, suddenly, that they weren’t making love. They weren’t even fucking. They were fighting. There was struggle in their kiss. There was ownership in their hands. She tugged at his cock while she pulled away, her free hand yanking at his wrist until he was forced to release his hold on her sex. She growled, moving past him, still holding him tight.
She climbed onto the bed, on all fours, stretching out like a cat with her elbows on the mattress and her ass in the air. With her dress rucked up around her hips and her panties around her knees, she stared back at him, daring him to deny her, daring him to take her, daring him to please her.
“Why are we doing…” he started to say, even though his own jeans had hitched low enough that the evidence of his desire was undeniably.
“Don’t,” Tricia whispered, rolling her hips slightly so that he could see her glistening slit. “Just…just come here.”
He growled low in his throat, his body taking over. Grabbing her hips, he forced a gasp from her lips when he yanked back on her body. But he wasn’t going to just give her what she was demanding. He let one hand skirt upward, taunting her through the fabric of her dress, to her breast, clutching it from below and kneading hard until she moaned and arched her back, pressing against him. Her nipple was hard even through her bra and dress, the hint of her arousal just a nub against Damon’s thumb.
She heard the jingle of metal, the sound of denim against flesh, as Damon released himself fully, the head of his cock pressing against her slit. She bit her lip, her flesh anticipating the pleasure of his fullness, her pussy clenching prematurely, wanting him deep. He felt her and couldn’t suppress his own groan, the heat of her radiating, beckoning him in.
He took a deep breath, knowing that this wasn’t right, that this wasn’t how he wanted her. But then she pressed backwards, impaling herself on him, and he was lost in her wetness, her tender sex sucking him in – where he belonged. He reached around her supple waist, found her clit between the folds of her sex, and stroked it.
Tricia felt him submerged inside her, felt his fingers playing her like an instrument, and clutched the sheets in her hands, bit down to keep from screaming her ecstasy. He started to take her, slow and steady, drawing her body against his and pushing it away to match his strokes. The way he filled her, pressing the head of his cock into wells of maddening pleasure in her womb, was too much, his finger on her clit just toying with her limits.
“Fuck,” he growled from behind her, trying to hold back from fucking her too fast too soon – she was still tight, and it might hurt. But he felt her struggling to set her own pace. Faster, harder. “Slow down…”
“No,” she mumbled, her lips full of sheets. She raised her head, arching her back further so that he slipped into her from a harsher angle. “No, I want you to fuck me…just…just like this…Damon…fuck me ‘til I come…make me come, Damon…”
He liked to be in charge, but her words were urgent, and they only made him harder, needier. She looked back at him, her eyes fevered, her face flushed. Reaching forward, he grabbed her hair, pulling her head back on her neck until she cried out in pleasure.
“Is this what you want? Is this how you want me to fuck you?”
The words were hard, and they made Tricia’s gut clench. A knot in her stomach, a desperate and growing need in her muscles. She couldn’t see the edge, but she knew she was approaching it quickly. The harder he fucked her, the more he played with her throbbing clit, the more he tugged on her hair, owning her, the more she felt she couldn’t stop – and didn’t want to.
Her fingers grabbed and grabbed at the sheets, her toes curling up into the soles of her feet. Her clit sent screaming pleasure to the knot in her stomach, her pussy dripped around him, and she wanted only one thing to finish it all. She opened her mouth, crying out wordlessly. She wanted his cum in her. She wanted to feel him spasm and release inside her pussy.
“Fuck me, just like that,” she managed to whimper. “Please, Damon, fuck me…fuck me…fuck me…p-please…”
Her words were enough; she knew they would be. His finger pressed hard against her clit as he groaned, thrusting his hips against her so hard that she was pushed forward slightly. He yanked at her hair in his sudden release, and she felt the first burst of his cum inside her. All at once, it dissolved inside her; the need detonated into satisfaction, the knot detangled into ropes of ecstatic energy flowing through her veins, her world whited out as she bucked and came against him. Everything whittled down to a single, bright point, and she was dancing on it, with him…
And then it was over. And she wasn’t mad at him anymore. She was just sad. For him, and for the boy he’d been, and a little bit for herself, too. She accepted that he was stubborn in subtle ways. If this was a normal courtship, that would have taken months to figure out. But there was nothing normal about Damon. And there was nothing normal about her. She had signed up for this, whether she was aware of it at the time or not. She wasn’t going to talk herself out of it; she wouldn’t let him talk her out of it, either.
“This doesn’t change it,” Damon said when he held her after, speaking into the wisps of hair that covered his lips. “I’m sorry. I still have to fight him.”
“I know,” Tricia said, her own voice muffled against his hard chest. “I know it doesn’t change it.”
He felt her stiffen in his arms, and when she looked up, her eyes were trapped somewhere between anger and regret.
“This wasn’t for you,” she said, her voice quivering slightly. “This was for me.”
“Okay,” he said, pulling her in tight again and kissing the top of her head. “Okay, baby. Okay.”
“Can I come?” she asked a while later, when the sun outside had begun to cast long shadows through the wide windows.
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t need to. She closed her eyes and nestled in tighter.
30
A storm was descending on Miami. Everyone knew it. It wasn’t a metaphor. The storm was as real as anyone who could feel it in the air.
Damon watched the greying skies from the gym, where he was getting in his last bit of practice before the real thing. The skies were biblical in their roiling terror. More shades of grey than he ever thought existed. He clicked his jaw a few times, felt the old ache of a bad fight lingering there. It was one of his weak points. It was a bad weak point to have. A bad jaw practically begged to be broken. But if Curly found his way there, managed to land a hit on Damon’s jaw, he’d just fight through it. He’d done it before, fought through much more in fights where he cared far less.
Tricia watched the storm from her car, parked around the corner from the gym where she’d followed Damon. He’d taken a cab. She’d slipped out after him. She didn’t know why – there was nothing she could do. But she wasn’t going to go sightseeing, either. If this was the only way her man – her man – could see his way to happiness, she wanted to be there to see him get it. Or to soothe him when he didn’t. She still wasn’t angry. She was still just sad.
She was close to the ocean, and she saw how the storm churned up the sea into choppy, angry waves. The beach was abandoned. Even the sand looked wrong. S
he rolled down her window for a moment, let the electricity crackle over her cheeks. “For whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it’s always ourselves we find in the sea,” she thought, some remembered line, and wished she’d thought of it when Damon was at her side.
She thought about how gently Damon touched her sometimes, and how hard he pushed her other times. She chewed at the end of a strand of hair, an old habit revived from its grave. She rolled the window up and thought about a movie she’d seen once, about a party trapped on an island by a storm. Then she thought about how nice everything felt after a storm had passed.
Kennick watched the storm from the driver’s seat, where he kept a steady pace towards Miami. They broke through Pompano Beach and into Fort Lauderdale. If they were lucky, they’d be there in less than an hour. But the storm looked like it would make them unlucky.
In the back, Kim and Ricky stared out opposite windows, and Mina sat with her knees nearly touching the divider between the driver and passenger seats. She had a hand on each knee, her green eyes dead set ahead. Cristov ground his teeth in the passenger seat. He’d told Ricky not to come. Just like Kennick had told Kim not to come. But they’d known from the start it was a losing battle. They should never have told the girls at all.
No one talked about how ugly the storm looked. What would be the use of talking about it? It was coming, whether they wanted it to or not.
Jenner didn’t know about the storm. He was locked up tight in the back of an unmarked van, and had been for days – at least, it seemed like days. He knew that the few times he’d seen daylight, the sky had looked like morning and then afternoon and then morning again. They’d chosen to bring him along, after all, instead of trusting him with the few young recruits left behind at the clubhouse.
He was as much a prisoner as he’d ever been, but he was closer to freedom than he’d ever get. The variables, though – they were a nuisance. What if’s spiraled through his mind in a dizzying array. He had all the time in the world to consider each and every one of them, too.
The men driving the van stayed a safe distance behind the bikes up front. They wouldn’t crowd their brothers in the Miami traffic. They knew where they were going. They worried about the storm, though. Riding in the rain was a bad time. Their numbers were small enough without adding this kind of risk to it all.
Roper rode forward, towards the clouds, towards the storm, not caring about what conditions he’d have to ride through. He was going to get revenge for Rig. He was going to show that gypsy fuck and his inbred family what happened when you fucked with the Steel Dragons.
Curly Gottlieb glanced out the window. He saw the storm, grunted at it. Another day, another fucking thunderstorm. He hated Florida. But it was cheap, and there were enough scumbags that he didn’t feel like he stood out, walking down the street. He fingered the switchblade sewn into the waistband of his shorts; the threads would give easily when pulled. At the right moment. Always at the right moment. Curly needed to trust himself to find the right moment. He needed the money. That was all he cared about.
Slowly, all the parties began to converge. The location of the fight was not the center of the storm, as poetry would want it to be. It was actually quite a ways south of the center of the storm. But life and poetry rarely converge. And when they do, that’s when things are at their most dangerous.
31
Tricia watched the door to the gym until she saw Damon emerge, then started the engine. She kept her distance as she followed him through the strange streets; he kept checking his phone, presumably for directions, which meant he didn’t notice the car moving just a bit too slowly a block or so behind. She hoped that he wouldn’t make any sudden turns, and to her relief, he didn’t. She followed him until he turned down an alleyway beside a boarded-up building with no signage on it.
The other side of the building had a pull-through for cars. She turned down it, saw a parking lot stretching out behind the building. There were plenty of cars there, so Tricia felt confident speeding up and pulling into a space, hoping that Damon wouldn’t pay it any mind. He glanced in her direction as she parked, but nothing registered. He was focused on the fight.
Tricia, for that matter, was too focused on watching Damon enter through the back door to see the car pulling up beside hers. She was still looking in the opposite direction when she opened the door and began to slide out; one foot had just hit pavement when she finally noticed the five sets of eyes staring at her.
“What the…” she said.
“Where is he?” Cristov asked through the rolled-down passenger side window. “Where’s that dumb meathead fuck?”
Ricky, in the backseat, leaned forward and gently smacked the back of Cristov’s head.
“What are you doing here?” Tricia asked, one hand still on the door of her car. “How did you…”
“It took a lot of calls, and a lot of money, for us to find you guys,” Cristov said, opening his door and getting out of the car. “Where’s Damon?”
Tricia rose to meet him, watching as Kennick, Kim, Mina, and Ricky all piled out of the car, vaguely reminiscent of clowns – minus any semblance of jolliness. She didn’t get a chance to answer Cristov’s question before Ricky lunged at her, wrapping her in a skinny-armed hug.
“We were so worried,” Ricky said. “You can’t just go gallivanting off into…”
“Ricky,” Tricia said, returning the hug. “I’m sorry you were worried.”
She pulled away, though, and looked her friend dead in the eye.
“But I can just go gallivanting off,” she said. “I’m an adult, not a pound puppy.”
Kim joined the two girls in their embrace, pulling Tricia away from Ricky to hug her.
“You have to tell us where next time,” Kim said. “That’s what Ricky means.”
“Alright, alright,” Cristov said, growing more agitated by the moment. “She’s safe, she’s fine, great. Damon’s not, though. Where is he?”
“What do you mean Damon’s not?” Tricia said, her tone sharpening, looking at Cristov with her arms still around Kim.
“This is a set up,” Kennick said, stepping in front of Cristov. “Whoever Damon’s here to fight is on the Steel Dragons’ payroll, and he’s going to fight dirty. Damon doesn’t know, right?”
Tricia’s eyes widened, her jaw falling slack. She shook her head; she couldn’t imagine that Damon did know. Steel Dragons. Those men. Those men who’d…
She swallowed her fear. She wasn’t the one in danger this time. Damon was.
“So where is he? We need to get to him before he goes out there and gets himself killed,” Cristov said.
Tricia’s stomach felt like a cold, icy pit. She’d had a bad feeling about this fight, but for far different reasons.
“He went in the back,” she said, pointing to the metal door that Damon had knocked on and then disappeared into.
“Let’s go,” Cristov said, pushing past the small crowd and stalking across the parking lot, Kennick quick on his heels. Tricia made to follow them, but felt Kim’s hand on her arm, pulling her back. Mina was following Kennick, but looking back over her shoulder at the three women.
“We should let them deal with it,” Kim said softly. “They know how to deal with him best…”
Tricia shook herself free, smiled softly at Kim.
“I don’t know about that, Kim,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true anymore.”
She trotted off behind Mina, leaving Kim and Ricky to look at each other in surprise.
“Fucking gypsy magic,” Ricky said, shaking her head slowly. “How do they do it?”
“If you figure it out, let me know,” Kim said, leaning back against the hot metal of the car. “We can bottle it, make a fortune off love potions.”
Cristov banged on the metal door, relentlessly. Kennick watched Tricia approach, wondering what had happened between her and his brother on their long trip down the coast. If you gave him three guesses, he’d be right on the first try. Good
, he thought, if we can’t get through to him, maybe she can…
“I’m going around the front,” Mina said, backing away from the door. “If we can’t get in through the back…”
“Be careful,” Kennick warned, not entirely comfortable with the idea of his little sister walking, solo, into an underground fighting crowd. But she was already around the corner and gone. There was still no response from the other side of the metal door, despite Cristov’s unrelenting pounding. He shouted Damon’s name to punctuate each bang, his fist reddening at the same rate as his face. The storm was almost on top of them, a strong wind now blowing stray papers across the parking lot.
“Did he tell you what this was all about?” Kennick asked, turning to Tricia. She opened her mouth, feeling compelled to tell the truth. Kennick had that way about him that inspired honesty. But she knew the story wasn’t hers to tell. She shook her head.
“I was just along for the ride,” she said, looking away quickly. Kennick narrowed his eyes, sensing her dishonesty, but just at that moment, the door opened. Cristov nearly fell forward into the dank, sweat-scented room on the other side.
“Damon,” he said as he moved forward, Kennick and Tricia at his heels.
“No,” Mina said from the other side of the door. “I still don’t know where he is.”
They were in a locker room, a small one.
“I looked for him in the crowd, didn’t see him,” she said. “But I did see something else. Come here.”
