by Paula Cox
We shake, and I can’t help but think about how soft and small her hand is. She tells me her name is Allison Lee.
“I was talking my way out of it,” she mutters, after a few seconds of just standing there.
“Oh yeah.” I smile sideways at her. “You look like you had a real handle on the situation. Maybe you were just waitin’ for the right time to use your ninja skills, huh? I suspect I owe you an apology for interrupting your routine.” I bow sarcastically. “Please, accept my sincere apologies, m’lady.”
She squints at me for a moment, and then giggles despite herself. She immediately smooths her expression. “I could’ve handled it,” she says proudly.
“Sure you could,” I say, but I don’t figure she could. She’s too small, too vulnerable-looking. And sexy as all hell. Just looking at her gets my blood stirring. She’s wearing tight jeans and a tight T-shirt, accentuating her figure, thin at the hips, small but pert breasts and legs which make a man think of what they’d be like wrapped around his waist.
I think she can tell this, too, ’cause her pale cheeks turn crimson and she glances down at her feet.
“Come for a drink with me,” I say.
“What?” She giggles, and then stops the giggling like she’s embarrassed. That just makes me want to provoke that giggling again, just to see her cheeks turn redder, as red as my name. “It’s the middle of a Wednesday, Mister …”
“Springfield. Rust Springfield.”
“Springfield…any relationship to Bruce?”
I grin. “Yeah, he’s my less-sadistic younger brother.”
Her green eyes glimmer at that. I know women, know them physically at least, and I know that Allison is thinking of all the sadistic, sexual things I could do to her.
“Come for a drink with me,” I repeat.
“I have work.”
“Take the afternoon off.” Why people work nine-to-five always confuses the hell out of me. What sort of person wants to work a job where you can’t go for a whisky or two in the afternoon? It’s stuff like that which reminds me of just how much I love the club.
She hesitates, takes a deep breath, and then lets it out and nods in a quick, small movement. “I can go for an hour,” she says shortly. “But—or maybe I shouldn’t.”
“If you think you shouldn’t do somethin’, chances are you should. Give me your keys. I’ll drive us.”
She swallows, looking like she has no clue what she’s doing, and then reaches into her pocket and hands me the car keys.
“Let me help you with these, sweetheart,” I say, kneeling down and collecting the pamphlets which have dropped all over the alleyway.
“I didn’t even realize I’d dropped them,” she mutters, kneeling down beside me.
I collect them, keeping one for myself: advertisement for social services work out of a community library.
“Do much business?” I ask, as we walk toward the car. I stuff the pamphlet in the pocket of my leather.
“I work with lots of people, yes.”
I open the car door and climb in. She drops into the passenger seat. “For a second there I thought you were going to be a gentleman and hold the door open for me.”
I laugh, and then turn and grin at her. “Nah, that ain’t me, sweetheart.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?” she asks, sounding like an exasperated teenager trying to be a calm grownup. It’s cute and funny and the same time.
“Because you look like a little deer caught in the headlights. It’s sweet. I presume you have a heart, since you’re working with troubled men like yours truly at the local community hot spot.” I turn up the sarcasm in my voice as high as it goes, and it irritates her, just like I knew it would.
“I do not,” she says, folding her arms, which has the incredible effect of pushing her breasts up, two peaches pressing together.
I stare at them for a few seconds before she realizes what I’m doing. “You’re disgusting,” she says, but she doesn’t unfold her arms, and there’s that same glint in her eye. “We just met.”
“I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, baby,” I say, turning the key.
She shakes her head. “Disgusting,” she repeats, and I chuckle.
I drive us to a bar called The Englishman where they know The Damned and we don’t have to pay for our drinks. A Union Jack hangs from a flagpole above the door, and inside various pictures of famous English men and women hang from the walls: Dickens, Austen, Darwin, dozens of others I don’t know the names of. The Beatles play on the jukebox, and the man behind the bar wears a red-and-white T-shirt, which apparently has something do with an English dragon slayer called Saint George.
“Drink?” I ask Allison, as we sit down.
“Just a Coke, please,” she responds, folding her hands on the table. She’s trying so damn hard to be respectable, as though this is entirely normal: just agreeing to come here with me. Really, what she would’ve done if she was being respectable is thank me for my assistance and refuse to come for an afternoon drink with me.
So I know that I can persuade her to have more than a Coke. “Don’t want wine?” I say.
She only hesitates for a moment, and then says, “Technically I’m not working today. I was going to go in after handing out the pamphlets to get ahead on some work.” She hesitates again, and then admits, “It’s my day off.”
“So you’re saying you want a drink, sweetheart?” I say.
She blushes, and then nods. “Sure,” she mutters.
I call over the barman for a whisky and a glass of red. He brings it over, and I sip from the whisky, enjoying the way it burns down my throat. I’ve always loved the way whisky burns down my throat, a proper jolt-awake drink, a proper sit-up-and-take-note drink. Allison sips daintily from her wine. Goddamn, she’s sexy, the fact that she’s trying to act like a lady when I can see how much she wants something to happen making her all the sexier.
“I take it you don’t normally do stuff like this,” I say.
“I shouldn’t be too scared,” she says. “But—well, um…a drink will definitely help calm my nerves.” She pauses, looks at me like she’s wonderin’ if I’m as tough as I look, and then adds, “That man—Trent—he knew you, didn’t he? They all did. They were like seven of them, and you show up, and…How does that happen?” There’s awe in her voice.
I wave a hand. “They’re unpatched, just a group of wanderers trying to make trouble. Nothing for The Damned to worry about. Anyway, I don’t wanna talk about Trent. I wanna talk about the way you’re lookin’ at me. Keep lookin’ at me like that, all deer in the headlights, and a man might get ideas.”
“I am not looking at you like anything,” she says, but her cheeks are glowing carmine now, bursting with life, and her eyes move to my arms, where my leather is tight around my biceps.
I shrug. “Course not.”
For the next few minutes, we sit and drink in silence: a silence around our table anyway, because British pop music plays throughout the bar, and a few tables back two old men play checkers, every so often letting out a cough of a low chuckle. After a while, Allison looks up—she’s been glancing around, nervously, deer-like—and says, “May I have a second wine, please?”
I grin, and then gesture to the barman, who brings over another wine and whisky.
“How do you drink that stuff?” she says. “It’s so harsh.”
“Maybe I’m a harsh man,” I say, and knock it back. It scorches my throat. “So, social work,” I go on. “That sounds …I don’t know, fun?”
Her face properly glows at this, as though she is very rarely asked about it. “I don’t know if fun’s the word,” she agrees. “But it is rewarding, one-hundred percent the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. What about you?”
“I’m an enforcer,” I say calmly.
I wait for her to react as she should react, with complete disgust, or fear. She should’ve reacted like that back in the side street with that unpatched gang. But ins
tead she just holds my gaze, and then takes a sip of her wine. I watch the hand holding the wine for any indication of nervousness, but she holds it steady.
“What?” she asks after a moment of staring.
“You’re not easily bothered, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re sittin’ here with a Damned enforcer and back there you were almost beaten into the ground by an unpatched sadist. Don’t you get scared?”
“Of course I do,” she says, with a note of dignity in her voice, head held high, “but I am used to fear now. I know how to handle it. Anyway, if you hadn’t arrived earlier, I would have started to scream in earnest.”
“In earnest,” I repeat, grinning. “You speak funny, sweetheart.”
She grins back, and I swear to God, that grin is sweeter than sugar. “Funny, or just with a slightly larger vocabulary than an eighth grader?”
“Oh, you’ve done it now,” I shoot back, enjoying myself. “If I’m an eighth-grader, you better watch yourself. Mud-pies are going to be coming your way, along with some titty-twisters and water balloons.”
She giggles, which seems to surprise her. The moment she giggles, she covers her mouth. “You’re rotten, Rust,” she says.
“True,” I say, nodding.
She finishes her wine, and I order us two more drinks. The alcohol isn’t having much effect on me, as alcohol always does. I don’t know if it’s thick blood, or a liver as stubborn as me, or just that I’m twice the size of most men, but alcohol never kicks me in the balls like it does to others. Allison, though, is getting tipsy if not drunk. She sways just a tiny bit in her chair, like a scarecrow rocking in a light wind, and her white neck is blotched with redness. I can’t help but think that looks attractive as hell; there’s so much life in this small woman. She makes me think of what it’d be like to have her sitting on top of me, bouncing. I bet she’s bouncier than an inflatable castle.
“Rust,” Allison says. “Why Rust? What’s your real name?”
“Rust is my real name,” I say. “And it’s my real name ’cause I’ve always liked the color red.”
“Hmm.” She leans forward, studying me. “I’m not sure about that.”
“Not sure? How’s that? You a mind reader now?”
“No, I just spend a lot of time around people who have more going on under the surface than they care to let on.”
I swallow: swallow back my past and my memories. Swallow away the image of my father clawing at his chest as the heart attack blew his life apart, swallow the phantom of my mother’s voice as she told me she’d found a new man, that she was pregnant, that she wanted to start afresh, as she told me point-blank that she would prefer if I found my own way. I was fifteen years old: old enough to go out into the world; old enough to leave her be. I saw her red eyes, saw the desperation in her face, and I also saw that she was doing this, in a warped way, out of love for my father. It hurt her too much, seeing me there, a constant reminder. But that didn’t change the fact she was moving on. And it did not change the fact that, after questioning her, I discovered that she’d been fucking this other man long before the heart attack took Dad, that in fact the reason he’d had the heart attack at all was that damned affair—
I lean back, take a breath, and then smile, smiling away the memories. “Not me,” I say. “I’m about as simple as they come.”
She watches me with those huge green eyes, eyes which look like two forests have been plucked from reality and pushed into her eye socket by some magic, eyes which remind me of nature and freshness. I think on that for a moment, think about how I never think shit like this about women, and then push it aside.
“If you say so.” She licks her lips, nods, finishes another wine, leans back, nods again, smiles at me whilst tilting her head. “But somehow I don’t believe it,” she says at length.
“You’re giving me that look again, Allison,” I say.
“What look?” She flutters her eyelashes. Does she know what she’s doing? Does she know how sexy she looks right now?
“The look like you’re imaginin’ all the things I could do for you.”
“No, it’s just…” She blushes, and shakes her head. “Nothing.”
“What is it?” I say. “Don’t be shy.”
“It’s nothing,” she says, looking down at the table.
“It’s clearly not nothing.” I laugh, holding my hands up. “Look, I promise you won’t offend my sensitive soul, alright?”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s embarrassing.”
“For me, or for you?”
“For me.”
I give an exaggerated shrug. “Then I don’t see how that’s my problem.”
She rolls her eyes again. There’s something about that gesture, flirty and shy and sexy all at once, that is really getting to me. She tips her wine glass back, and then places it back down when she realizes she’s already drank it all. Then she leans forward, laying her chin on her interlocked fingers, giving me a look I reckon no man could return without feeling something stir inside him.
“I read a lot of romance novels,” she says, “and you…well, you sort of remind me of some of the guys in them. Have you ever read any romance novels?”
“Can’t say I’ve read much of anything,” I admit. “What are the guys like? Men called Rust without a shade of red on ’em?”
She giggles. “No, they’re—you know, big, and strong, and assholes.”
“Assholes? Who says I’m an asshole?”
“You’ve barely taken your eyes off my chest since we came in here.”
“Hey,” I say, “I was staring at your rack before we came in here. You’re gorgeous. That makes me observant, not an asshole.”
She closes her eyes, and then opens them a few seconds later. “Can we get some fresh air?” she asks. “That wine is hitting me harder than I thought.”
“Sure.”
About a minute later, we’re walking in the afternoon sun down the street, past the bar, past an alleyway—It’s as we’re passing the alleyway that Allison turns to me, chest heaving, arms hanging at her sides and fingers tapping as though at an invisible keyboard. She looks at my face, and then over my body, and then throws herself at me, panting.
I open my arms, catching her, and we do a sort of dance-walk into the alleyway, our lips pressing together.
Chapter Four
Allison
The wine is burning in my chest, and the sun is burning into my skin, and the events of the past couple of hours are still burning into my mind, but all of this pales in comparison to Rust’s lips burning into my lips, his chest burning into my hands as I clutch at his leather. I blame it on the alcohol; I blame it on the romance novels; I blame it on the fear and adrenaline from having survived. We stumble backward, entangled, deep into the alleyway where he pushes my back up against the wall. I can feel his passion, hot, explosive, moving from him into me.
I push my lips into his, hardly thinking about what I’m doing, just feeling the pleasure of it. His lips are clean-shaven, and moist, and a perfect fit for mine. He opens his mouth slightly, a tempting opening, and I thrust my tongue into him; perhaps overeager, for my tongue brushes his teeth. But that adds to the pleasure somehow, as though we are too horny to even wait for both our mouths to be open. He opens his mouth all the way and the tips of our tongues clash. Nerves buzz, sending electric jolts of pleasure down my tongue and around my mouth, a cocktail of pleasure moving around my head.
I dig my fingernails into his leather jacket, wishing I could tear the jacket away and reveal the muscle beneath. I ride that thought, thinking what it would be like to rip the jacket off and show the bursting muscle beneath, the massive pectorals and the hard-packed abs. The kiss deepens as I think about it, and Rust reaches down and grabs my ass, one strong hand gripping me so hard I can envision my skin turning red. My whole body feels as though the skin is turning red: burning beneath the surface.
I move my hands down his jacket, smoothi
ng my hands over the leather, meaning to go down to the front of his jeans. My fingers have just moved to the coldness of his belt buckle when I realize what I’m doing.
I am aggressively making out with a man, about to go further with a man, in public. Not only that, but I do not know this man. I only met this man a few hours ago. Sure, he saved me from those bikers, but that doesn’t mean I owe him anything. That doesn’t mean I should just throw away my reason, my sensibilities. I would never normally do this, but that is why it’s exciting, isn’t it? But just because it’s exciting, it doesn’t mean I should do it. What about the consequences?
