She still hasn’t said a word, but she continues holding onto me with all of her strength. “Come on.” I fight to press the car door up in the angle it’s situated in, pushing against the fighting winds. Quickly freeing up one hand, I help her up so she can climb inside. Sasha slides down the length of the back seat, and I follow her, careful not to crush her. I’m forced to switch spots with her since there’s no way to stay upright, but we’re settled now, and the car is nicely wedged, so we’re safe until this is over.
Sasha’s shaking and holding her arms tightly around her chest. I wrap my arms around her and force her to lean her weight on me. She gives in and relaxes her body against mine. I miss the fight. I miss this. Saving people, helping them, giving them a second chance at life. It made me who I am and it made me feel good. Now I’m floating from job to job, mostly working on cars and not helping a single soul, especially myself. I should be helping people. I should also stop focusing on the corpses and limbless men, women and children who scar every part of my memory.
Sasha twists around so she’s facing me, and her gaze focuses on my eyes. The makeup that I have yet to see her without is completely washed away. Her face is mostly clean and pure of anything I would ever recognize her with. She’s absolutely beautiful, more beautiful than with makeup on. Her hair is a sopping wet mess, but even that is perfect. “Why did you come after me?” she asks through trembling lips.
“Why wouldn’t I come after you?”
“I don’t understand you,” she says.
“Does attraction have to have a reason? Does desire need a definition? Yeah, I just met you. Yeah, I fucking like you, a lot. It’s probably not due to all of the nice things you’ve said to me, but I like you for who you are. There’s something about the pureness your embrace and the fight you put up to hold onto what you think is right. I don’t care if you’re different to me in every way possible, I’m still into you.”
“Even with the way I look right now?” she asks softly.
Is she serious? She’s worried about the way she looks after just rolling off a ledge into a ditch? That’s insane. I can’t even understand it.
Whatever the case, I got to say there’s not much that could make me smile in this situation right now, but the look on her face sure as hell does. “Especially with the way you look right now.”
Sasha scoots up, bringing her face closer to mine and I’m not sure if she’s thinking what I’ve been thinking every time I’ve been in her presence, but I’m not making that move unless she makes it incredibly clear that it’s what she wants. “I’ve been fighting against liking you,” she says shyly. “And. I think you have too much hair on your face, and way too many tattoos, but your smile is like no other smile I’ve seen, and it contagiously makes me feel happy when I see it. Even if I do my best to hide that.”
“Keep going,” I urge her, smiling coyly at each word she’s saying. No one’s ever spoken to me this way. I need to soak it all up.
She laughs a little and playfully slaps her hand against my chest. “Seriously, though, the way you look at people shows your sincerity for caring about things way more than most people care about anything,” she pauses, sounding a bit breathless. “Don’t get me wrong, though, I don’t like what comes out of your mouth, but sometimes you make me feel things I’m not sure I’ve felt before.”
“So, stop fighting your feelings,” I tell her, losing the smile, losing the cockiness, losing my last playing hand because if this doesn’t prove to her that she should consider giving in to what she’s avoiding, then it might not ever happen.
Her hair is dripping cold droplets of water over my chest, and her lips are hovering over mine. I’m not making this move. I’m not being held responsible for making her do something she doesn’t want to do. She’s making the call. It doesn’t mean I can’t inspect every one of her features, though. Like her freckles, she has them on her lips, perfect little imperfections that she likes to cover with lipstick. I’ve never seen someone with freckles on their lips and yet it’s probably the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. I’d do just about anything to hear the thoughts swimming through her head right now. For someone who’s made uncomfortable by words, she doesn’t seem the least bit fazed by the fact that we’re breathing on each other’s faces. Thank God, I had a mint on the way over here. Thank God she did too, I’m guessing. This moment is too perfect to ruin.
I don’t know the last time a woman has kissed me, or I’ve kissed a woman. I’m like that prostitute who refuses to include affection while having a one-night stand with some chick. There’s something way more intimate about kissing than sex, and Sasha isn’t sex. Sasha is a kiss that leads to more.
Her tongue lightly sweeps against her top lip, and I’m doing everything possible to stop myself from grabbing her face and forcing those lips against mine. “What’s it going to take?” she asks in merely a whisper that tickles my lips.
“You moving a little closer,” I tell her.
“Why do I have to move closer?” she argues.
“You’re the one who’s fighting against this. I’m not going to fight you for this.”
“You don’t want to kiss me?” she asks, her hands running up the sides of my arms. Sun rays are shining in through the car windows, telling me the storm is passing, and now I’m wondering how long it’s going to take her to realize her car is most likely totaled and that she should be thinking of that rather than my lips right now. But until that happens, I will lay here for as long as it takes.
“I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day I met you, but that would have been weird and a little inappropriate,” I whisper. Not like getting jerked off in a dark bathroom isn’t inappropriate but it’s not like I planned that. “So what’s the problem?” she whispers back. She gets uncomfortable when the word sex is mentioned, yet she’s playing this hard-to-get kissing game incredibly well right now.
“What’s your problem?” I argue.
“I want you to make the move, but now it’s not romantic.”
“Romance is in the eye of the beholder, doll-face.”
She shifts her body, bringing her legs to each side of mine. She’s straddling me. Goddamit, this is hot.
We’re in a car lodged in between boulders. I should be wondering what the hell I’m doing. Ha. I know exactly what I’m doing.
“What do you find romantic?” she asks me.
“When a girl says sex or cock,” I grin.
She presses her hands into my chest and pushes herself away from me. I realize I’ve already lost this battle so I couldn’t help myself.
“I bet I know what you find romantic,” I tell her, shifting her weight a little since she’s sitting on my cock right now, and not in the good way.
“I bet you don’t,” she says, narrowing her eyes at me and leaning her head against the back seat that’s acting like a wall.
I start with, “Romance to you is an unpredictable situation where either rain is pouring down on top of us, and we pretend like it’s the sun beaming over us instead, or when we’re standing in front of a moonlit ocean, and the waves are crashing around us. Of course then there’s the whole walking you to the door thing, you know when you go to say goodnight but you really want to say, ‘Oh, hello’.”
“You’re good, Jags. You know it all, huh?”
“Enough to get by,” I say, pinching at her cheek. “The storm is over.”
Sasha presses against me a little more and looks out the window I have my back against, probably realizing she can only see the ground below the car. She then turns and tries to maneuver her way up toward the only way out, but I throw my cards down onto the table and pull her hand out from beneath her, forcing her to fall into me. I grip my hands around her face tightly and steal the kiss I think she wants to be stolen. Her hands go weak against my chest, and her fingers tangle in the material of my shirt. She tastes like cherry and mint mixed together, and it’s like the most incredible fl
avor I haven’t tried before. I unravel my tongue into her mouth, needing to taste more of her, and her lips part and comply with eagerness. My hand becomes lost in her mess of hair, and I find myself holding her tighter than I intended, but the feeling I have for her has grown amazingly in the past thirty seconds. Attraction comes and goes, a pretty girl is a dime a dozen, but the real feelings I have deep in the blood-pumping chambers of my heart are something I haven’t felt for anyone. It’s something I haven’t allowed myself to feel for someone. My life has been death and destruction since eighteen years old, and I have refused to pull anyone into the nightmares I hide in my shadow, but maybe it would all go away if one woman could make me feel this way all of the time—something real that I don’t have to pretend to be real with.
She’s having trouble breathing and so am I, since neither of us have come up for a breath in what must be two minutes now. I might have had to be the first to make the move, despite what I planned, but I won’t be the first to back away. I’d rather give her every single one of my last breaths.
Another minute goes by before her lips slightly part from mine, only slightly, though, just enough to breathe our own air. Her lips are still parted, and she’s panting, looking at me as if I just did something to her that no one has done to her before. “I have never been kissed like that,” she says through her weak breaths.
“I told you I liked you.”
“I like you,” she says, without any side garbage of fighting against it.
“Enough to deal with my scruff and tattoos?”
She smiles, a Sasha smile, one that hasn’t been just for me, but one I’ve only seen a few times before—one where all of her incredibly white top teeth show. This smile makes my chest hurt in a way it hasn’t hurt before, and I’m realizing Sasha just makes me feel a whole lot of things I’ve never felt.
“My car is totaled,” she finally says. That took her way longer than I expected.
“It probably is, yeah, but that’s what insurance is for.”
“Right,” she says. “Thank you for saving me.”
I don’t want to tell her she’s welcome, that’s lame. Instead, I press up on my elbows and place another kiss on her swollen lips. “It was completely worth it,” I say into her mouth. “But before you get pregnant in here, we should probably get out. She giggles at this and places her head against my chest. She’s laughing at my jokes. I must be dreaming.
After a few more minutes of not so comfortably relaxing in this awkward angle that I seemed to not notice for the first ten minutes we were in here, I help her up to the door so she can climb out. As I make it out, I look around, finding us surrounded by a complete disaster. There’s shit everywhere except for the heap of metal Bambi lent me, which is sitting flush on the edge of the ditch. At least we have a ride. We’ll call a tow once we get back up there. I look around for a way up, and I see a narrowing in the ditch a little way down the road. I pull her with me, feeling her hand tighten around my hand. I don’t think I’ve ever held a girl’s hand. How the hell have I managed that one?
“We can’t tell them about this,” Sasha says.
“What? Who? I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of the storm we just had.”
“No, not that part. Cali and Tango. They’ll ruin it for us.” I think I can agree with that. They would. They’d want to know every detail, and I know what that would do to Sasha.
“It’s our secret,” I tell her as we reach the narrowed area that leads back up to the street level.
“Wait,” she says, tugging at my hand. “Before we go back up there…”
She’s standing in front of me, toe to toe, the top of her head leveled with my shoulders. Jesus, I knew I was a lot taller, but this is funny. I’m not sure I can angle my neck down far enough to reach her lips. Without thinking much about what she wanted to say, I sit down in a pile of wet mud and pull her down to my lap. She looks shocked as the mud splashes up against both of us. It’s cold. She doesn’t like it, but I think she kind of does. “You told me to wait,” I remind her.
“Yeah, but…” I place my hands down beside me, coating them in mud before I place them up against her face, causing her to shriek and gasp. “Jags!”
“A little mud isn’t gonna hurt you.” I place my thumb over her lips, putting a little mud there too. She looks really floored by this gesture but at the same time isn’t fighting it. “Sometimes beauty comes with a dirty mouth.”
I press my mouth up against hers, feeling the mud seep between us. As hot as I wanted this to be, a drop of it drips into my mouth, and I pull away, quickly spitting it out. “What?” she says, worriedly.
“That’s nasty. Why would you let me put mud on your lips?” She shoves me backward into more mud and stands up, wiping her hands off on her legs.
“What am I getting myself into?” she groans, walking up the shallow path.
“You haven’t gotten yourself into anything yet. Just wait…” I’m a little excited for what I might get into, though.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SASHA
I’D LIKE TO think the last hour of my life didn’t happen but it did, and it can’t be erased. My pretty little car is totaled, and the man sitting beside me just kissed me like I have never been kissed before. He made my heart do flips and all sorts of somersaults. Now he has this egotistical smirk etched across his face, and I still want to slap it off. This is the most confusing and yet, dare I say, enjoyable experience I’ve had in a good while.
Looking down at my crossed legs, I see I’m covered in a thin layer of dirt, and I have scrapes all over my legs. My white jacket is nearly black, and I can only imagine what my face looks like. I’m having a hard time thinking about the fact that anyone is seeing me like this, but Jags doesn’t look much better. Actually, I take that back, looking at him a little more with the mud on his face, his eyes look far bluer, his teeth are way more brilliantly white, and his dark blonde hair is accidentally spiked in this messy way that’s just…wow…he’s really something.
The roads are a disaster, and I don’t remember ever seeing this town look so rough. “This is pretty bad,” Jags says.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “It is.”
“Do you mind coming back to the shop with me for a few? I have to drop this car off and grab mine. I’ll take you back to Cali and Tango’s after,” he says.
I look down at myself again. I honestly look terrifying but after he just saved my life and I’m in no position to argue. “Of course. Whatever you need to do,” I say, combing my fingers through my dirt-riddled hair.
“We’ll call the insurance company this afternoon and start a claim on your car, okay?” I don’t even know what he’s talking about. I’ve never had to do a claim or anything like that. I guess I’ve been lucky. “Do you know who your insurance company is?”
“Yeah, it’s Towne Mutual.” I can’t focus on insurance right now. This storm is just the icing on the cake, the final layer of I can’t take much more. My life is officially upside down and inside out, and it’s making my chest ache almost every minute of the day. I’ve gotten this feeling many times over the course of my life, like a smothering pain. I’m always told I have to move away from what makes me comfortable and told what to do and when to do it. I’m constantly advised on what I should be doing rather than what I want to do. I feel like I’ve had a leash tied around my neck for way too long and I want to break away.
We pull into a run-down body shop downtown and Jags parks around the back side of the building. I pull down the mirror on the visor and look at exactly what I didn’t want to see. Makeup is streaked down my cheeks, and my hair is one giant knot. I wipe the makeup off my face and close the mirror back up before I have any more time to look at my scary reflection.
Jags manages to get out and around to my side of the car to open my door by the time I even remove my seatbelt. “You open doors too?” I joke.
“Only for pretty ladies, and sometimes Tango.” He offers
me his hand, and I don’t hesitate to take it. “Doesn’t look like this area got hit as hard as where you decided to break down.” Isn’t that just my luck.
My hand instinctively tightens around his as we walk into the car-oil-scented shop. This place isn’t very big and no one is inside. Jags looks in the various areas of the shop until he pulls me out into the front lot where we see a woman lying underneath one of the cars. At least I think it’s a woman. The legs are way too thin to be a man’s. “Bambi,” Jags shouts.
Oh, it’s her. Bambi. Who names their daughter Bambi? Clearly, her parents intended for her to be a pole dancer.
She slides out from under the car, and I see a perfect, slim body, and dark hair tousled up in a purposely messy knot on the top of her head. She’s gorgeous, and she’s under a car. Isn’t that every man’s fantasy?
“Everything okay with your friend’s…” she starts but then notices me.
“It’s totaled,” he tells her. “Any car casualties here?”
“Couple of cosmetic issues but nothing too serious. We got lucky here. Is there anything I can do to help with your car?” she asks me.
“It’s crushed at the bottom of a ditch,” I tell her, sounding meek in the presence of these two dominant personalities.
Cleaning her hands off on a rag, Bambi steps towards us and into the sun that has decided to grace us with its glorious appearance after hiding behind the storm. The sudden clarity brings a bit of shock, though. Wow. What could have happened to her? I try my hardest not to look at the scars, but it’s hard since it’s rude not to look at someone when they’re talking to you. It’s also rude to stare at someone’s flaws. She seems pretty confident, though, like she doesn’t care about the scars, which makes me a jerk for feeling bad for her. “Where is it?” she asks.
“On the side of 37, near the Candlewood exit.”
Spiked Lemonade: A Bad Boy Sailor and a Good Girl Romantic Comedy Standalone Page 16
