Take Me Harder

by Jackie Ashenden

  “Okay,” she said thickly, blinking hard and looking away from him, pushing her hands into the pocket of her dark blue pants. “I guess I asked for that.”

  There were a thousand things he wanted to say, cutting things that would make her bleed, make her hurt the way he was hurting, but all of them would give away far too much. Would make it sound like he cared, and he didn’t. He just fucking didn’t.

  So all he said was, “Well, are we done here?”

  She didn’t speak, only nodded. And even though her head was turned away, he didn’t miss the tear that rolled down her cheek.

  His lungs constricted, making him feel like he couldn’t breathe, and abruptly all he wanted to do was get out, get away. So he started forward, heading toward her, and she went still, brightness flaring in her eyes.

  But just as he ignored the tear, he ignored that too.

  He was done with her. Done with giving a fuck. If she wanted more from her life than him, then she was welcome to go after it. She’d started from the bottom of the barrel with him, after all. The only way was up.

  He went straight past her, moving toward the doors.

  “Rush…” Her voice sounded small and tight and hoarse.

  He turned, holding out his hands, walking backward and giving her his best fuck-you grin. “Sorry, sweetheart, haven’t got time for any more of this shit. Beers to drink, strippers to fuck.”

  The expression on her face closed up tight, but he turned back around and walked straight out.

  He didn’t care. There were plenty more bitches in the sea.

  Chapter 19

  “I thought you were supposed to know how to party.”

  Rush squinted. Someone was standing over him, blocking his view of Sugar Daddy’s stage. Which was really fucking annoying, since he was enjoying the show, especially the blonde doing something very rude with a champagne bottle.

  “I do know how to party.” Weird how his voice sounded all slurred. Had he really done that many shots? “Though it’s easier when some a-hole isn’t blocking my fucking view.” He shifted his head, but whichever douchebag it was standing in front of him shifted with him, continuing to block his view. It gave him a weird flashback to the night a week or so ago, when it had been Ava who’d…

  Ava.

  Reflexively he reached for the bottle of Jack on the table beside him, because clearly he hadn’t had enough to drink if he was still thinking about Ava, but his hands closed around empty air.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered. “Where’d my bottle go?”

  “Jesus,” Rhys said. And it was definitely Rhys. No one else sounded like a fucking robot. “He’s all yours.”

  Rush scowled, searching around for his bottle of bourbon. “Who’s all mine? I don’t do men, Rhys, you prick. I mean, I’m comfortable with all sexualities, don’t get me wrong. But it’s chicks that I dig, understand?” He scowled even harder. “Who the fuck stole my bourbon?”

  “I did.” There was someone else standing next to Rhys. Someone tall and uptight, with familiar blue eyes. “You’ve had enough,” his youngest brother said calmly. “Do you think you can stand up?”

  Rush sat back in his seat, glaring at him. “Why the fuck would I want to stand up?”

  “Because you’re drunk and the management wants you gone.” Zane gave him a critical once-over. “Seriously, can you stand up?”

  He didn’t want to stand up. He didn’t want to do anything. He just wanted to sit right here and drink himself into a coma. That was okay, wasn’t it? Wasn’t America supposed to be a free country?

  He folded his arms and glowered. “No.”

  Zane’s gaze narrowed. “What are you, two? Come on. You sit here and the management is going to get the cops to throw you out. And then you’ll be in the shit with your parole officer.”

  “I don’t care about my parole officer.”

  “You’ll go back to jail.”

  “I don’t care about jail.”

  “Quinn will be very unhappy with you.”

  “Quinn can go to hell.”

  Rhys murmured something Rush didn’t catch, but Zane shook his head. “Sure, it would be easier, but I sure as hell don’t want to carry him up those stairs. Do you?”

  The two of them talked some more, but Rush tuned them out.

  He wanted to sit here and watch the ladies onstage, that’s all. Shit, what did a guy have to do to get some peace around here?

  Zane cursed, and then Rush found himself hauled up and out of the chair and onto his feet. He blinked, the floor moving under him like the deck of a ship in a hurricane. The stage was moving too, and really, it was a wonder the strippers hadn’t fallen off it yet.

  Zane’s arm tightened around him.

  “Awww, man,” Rush murmured. “You know I like you, but you’re my brother and this is wrong.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Zane began to walk, leaving Rush with no choice but to walk with him. It was either that or fall down, because, surprisingly, he didn’t think he could actually stand up by himself.

  Okay, so he had done way more shots than he thought.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he mumbled, leaning comfortably against his brother, “but you smell really nice.”

  Zane didn’t reply, continuing to haul him along toward the exit.

  “Seriously, what’s your aftershave called?” Rush gave him an experimental sniff. “Essence of Pine Tree? Spirit of Christmas? Eau de Fucking Forest?”

  “If you don’t keep your mouth shut,” Zane said pleasantly, “I’m going to go with Rhys’s suggestion of knocking you over the back of the head and having the bouncers drag you out of here by your balls.”

  That actually didn’t sound…too bad. Not the balls part obviously, but he could handle being knocked over the back of the head. It would be better than having the floor move under him like it was doing now, and at least he’d be unconscious. “You could just leave me here,” he muttered. “That’s what I fucking want. Strippers and booze, man. That’s the fucking shit right there.”

  “It’s the shit all right.” Zane had reached the stairs and started dragging him up them. “It’s the bullshit.”

  Rush felt vaguely offended, though he couldn’t remember why. “Don’t diss my ladies, bro. They’re artists. They’re businesswomen. They’re fucking—”

  “Rush,” Zane interrupted, “it’s two in the morning. Don’t make me have to call Ava to come get you.”

  That shut him up. It shut him up all the way up the stairs to Zane’s brand-new, bright red truck, and it kept him shut up as Zane buckled him in and drove him back to Lone Star.

  Once they were there, he automatically made a beeline for the bar, but unfortunately for him Zane had other ideas. Grabbing Rush by the back of his T-shirt, Zane hauled him into the kitchen instead, sitting him down on a stool, then pouring him a vat of coffee and shoving it in his direction.

  “Drink it,” Zane ordered, giving him a hard stare.

  Rush wanted to say something funny, but somewhere on the ride back from Sugar Daddy’s to Lone Star, all his humor seemed to have vanished.

  “Rush…,” Ava had said in that small, tight voice.

  Ava. Christ. That’s why he’d been in Sugar Daddy’s. That’s what he’d been trying to forget.

  His chest ached and the floor wouldn’t stop moving, and he’d never felt shittier in his whole goddamned shitty life.

  Reaching for the coffee mug, he swallowed a mouthful, not even flinching at the temperature, since Zane liked his coffee hotter than the surface of the sun. That pain was better than the pain in his chest, right around the hollow space where his heart should have been.

  There was a silence, Zane not saying a word. So Rush didn’t say anything either, the pair of them just sitting there, letting the quiet deepen.

  And after a while, the floor stopped moving and he began to feel a little less drunk, though not any less shitty.

  “You’re welcome,” Zane said, after what felt
like forever.

  Rush scrubbed one hand through his hair, his head aching. “What?”

  “ ‘Thanks, Zane, for hauling my ass out of the shit.’ You’re welcome, Rush.”

  Oh. Right. He supposed he should be nice given that. Except nice was the last thing he felt like being. “Yeah,” he said, surly as hell. “That.”

  Zane’s blue gaze narrowed. “It’s kind of pathetic, you know that, right? To be called at one in the morning because your older brother, who should know fucking better, is making a nuisance of himself at a strip club and needed to be taken home.”

  He’s not wrong. It is fucking pathetic.

  Rush glared at the mug in his hand. He wasn’t making a damn nuisance of himself, not that he could remember everything that had happened. Only that he’d arrived there with the intent to get shit-faced and maybe grab a couple of girls for some fun times later. Rhys had been there, he did remember that, and then there’d been some shots…

  Nooooo, not pathetic at all.

  He gave a kind of noncommittal grunt, neither confirming nor denying.

  Zane frowned. “I saved your ass from getting thrown out and possibly from breaking the terms of your parole, and that’s all you can say?”

  Rush took another swallow of coffee. “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “I know you didn’t. Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  He thought about it, but not too hard, because thinking hurt. “Nope.”

  Zane made an irritated sound. “You’re a stupid bastard, Rush. You think I don’t know what’s going on?”

  “What’s going on where?”

  His brother’s gaze was just a hair short of exasperated. “What’s going on between you and Ava.”

  The pain in his chest shifted, but he ignored it, taking another swallow of the scalding drink. “There’s nothing going on with me and Ava.”

  “Of course there is,” Zane disagreed. “I heard the way you talked about her when you were asking Quinn and me to go get that asshole Collins. And I saw the way you looked at each other when she came in earlier tonight.”

  “She’s a friend.” And not even that, not anymore.

  “Do I look stupid to you?”

  “You really want me to answer that question?”

  Zane simply stared at him. “I saw the way you looked at her tonight, Rush. You can’t tell me nothing’s going on.”

  He didn’t want to meet his brother’s gaze, didn’t want to see what was in his eyes, so he looked down at his coffee instead. “Nothing going on,” he repeated.

  “But there was,” Zane said, and this time it wasn’t a question.

  Rush studied the brown liquid in his mug like it held the secrets of the universe. Seeing as how it was coffee, it probably did. Christ, he didn’t want to talk about this, not now, not with his brother. Not when he was in the middle of trying his hardest not to give a fuck.

  Trying and really not succeeding.

  “She doesn’t want me.” He heard his own voice as if from a long way off. “I thought we might…have something. But I guess she changed her mind.”

  “So you just let her walk away?”

  Anger burned like acid inside him, making him look up sharply. “What else was I supposed to do? Get on my knees and fucking beg? She didn’t want me, Zane. So fuck her.”

  But his brother’s gaze was unflinching. “Do you love her?”

  “Love?” The word was vaguely enraging. “What the fuck has that got to do with anything?”

  Zane kept staring at him. “Do you love her?”

  “No,” he said, because he didn’t. Because he didn’t care about anything, not anymore. And yet the word sounded wrong in his mouth. “No,” he repeated, trying to be more certain about it. “I don’t love her.”

  She wasn’t important. She didn’t matter. He didn’t care.

  But his younger brother’s blue eyes were far too sharp and way too knowledgeable. “If you don’t love her, then why are you drowning yourself in a bottle of Jack? Or are you competing with Dad for the Biggest Self-Pitying Asshole Award?”

  He’s right. You know he is. That’s exactly what you’re doing.

  His anger twisted. No, it fucking wasn’t. He’d gone to Sugar Daddy’s because he didn’t care. Because the best way he knew of to not give a shit about anything was to drink and fuck.

  Alternatively, it’s an excellent excuse to sit on your ass and do nothing.

  He tightened his grip on his mug, taking another deep swallow. “You don’t know shit,” he muttered, closing his free hand into a fist so he didn’t launch it into his brother’s smug face.

  “Yeah, I do,” Zane said, apparently unaware that he had a death wish. “I know what self-pity looks like, and you’re currently neck deep.”

  Rush’s fist clenched tighter. “It’s not fucking self-pity.”

  “Then what is it?”

  But he couldn’t answer. Because his brother was right. Of course it was.

  “You know what?” Zane’s voice was quiet and so much sharper because of it. “I haven’t wanted to say anything because you’ve been through some shit, but honestly? You’ve been doing this for years, Rush. Sitting on your ass, feeling sorry for yourself. Blaming Dad, blaming Quinn, and probably fucking blaming me too. It’s sad how desperately you’re trying not to give a shit.”

  His jaw ached and his chest hurt, and the need to smack his brother in the head was almost visceral. But a part of him, the part that knew Zane was right, no matter how painful it was, kept him from launching that punch. “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” he said thickly. “If you’re charging by the hour, you can suck it, ’cause I’m not paying.”

  Zane ignored him. “I know what you gave up, Rush. I know you gave up eight years of your life for Dad and Quinn, and they gave you nothing back. And yeah, it sucks, it just fucking sucks. Dad can’t say it, and Quinn…well, who knows what the fuck’s wrong with him. But you need to know that I’m sorry. I’m sorry you went to jail. I’m sorry I never visited you. I had shit to deal with, but that’s no excuse.”

  Rush looked away from him, his throat closing up tight, wishing there was booze in his coffee, anything so he didn’t have to listen to his brother tell him things that made his chest hurt so bad he could hardly breathe.

  “I can’t give you back the years you lost,” Zane went on, quiet and sure. “But what I can give you is some advice. Don’t waste this time getting angry about the past and pretending you don’t give a shit. Get the fuck up off your ass and go get what you want.”

  Rush went still, blinking at the mug in his hand, the ache of those unwanted feelings still hurting.

  Go get what you want.

  He’d spent years trying to make nice to the old man, years of working hard at school, then throwing himself into the army afterward, then into the business after that, trying to get his attention, make him notice. Nothing had worked.

  So after he’d gone to jail for his father, his final sacrifice, he’d decided he was going to stop trying. That it was his father’s turn to come get him.

  And you’re still waiting. He’s never going to come because that asshole is dead. Zane’s right. You’re wasting time. You still have a chance. There’s her.

  The coffee in his mug steamed, warming his hand, but all he could see was Ava’s copper eyes and the tear on her cheek. As if, despite everything she’d said, she was hurting as badly as he was.

  I should be special to you, she’d told him once, and he hadn’t replied. But she was. She was special to him. So very, very special.

  He’d never told her that. Never realized it till now. Never really even understood his own stupid feelings until she’d cut him open and left him bleeding.

  “Yeah,” he said after a long time, his voice not sounding like his at all, his chest suddenly aching so bad he thought he was having a heart attack. “I think…I think I do love her.”

  Because that was the only explanation for the pain he hadn’t managed to drown no matt
er how many shots he’d poured into himself, no matter how many times he’d told himself he didn’t give a fuck. The pain that was still stuck there deep inside him, mixed with a weird longing that felt as familiar to him as his own name. As if he’d finally found the one thing he’d been searching his whole life for.

  And then walked out on.

  Yeah, he had. He’d given her his usual Hey, see all the shits I do not give and stalked off to drown in a pool of self-pity at Sugar Daddy’s.

  Christ, he was a dumb fuck.

  Zane was nodding as if he’d expected this all along. “Well, women like her don’t grow on trees, asshole. If you want her, you’re going to have to sack up and beg for her.”

  He didn’t want to, so didn’t want to. Didn’t want to put himself out there again with no guarantees he’d get anything back, to be stuck with this pain that just wouldn’t go away. But then, what other choice did he have?

  It was either do that or spend the rest of his life watching strippers at Sugar Daddy’s and dreaming of what might have been with one little redhead he wanted more than he could remember wanting anything else in the entire universe.

  That answers your question then, doesn’t it, motherfucker? There is no choice.

  Something went out of him then, a tension he hadn’t known he’d been carrying around. A kind of acceptance. As if the worst had happened and now there was nothing else to be afraid of.

  Not that he was afraid. Only fucking terrified.

  He lifted his head, met his brother’s blue eyes. “Thanks, man. For the apology. For everything.” Then he paused. “But just tell me one thing. Is it worth it?”

  Zane’s mouth quirked. “What do you think?”

  —

  Ava woke the next morning feeling like death warmed over and served slightly tepid. Though given that she’d spent most of the night staring at her ceiling, could she even say she’d woken up when she hadn’t even really gone to sleep?

  She hauled herself out of bed, getting ready for work on autopilot.

  There was the option of calling in sick and staying in bed to hide under the comforter for the rest of the day, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck in her bedroom going over and over what had happened the night before, the things she’d said to Rush and the look on his face, the shock, the bewilderment and then…the anger.