“Fuck, I’m going to come,” I heard myself say.
His hand released from my wrist and drifted up to my throat, clamping down, pinning me still. A quiver ran through my body. I could see stars, though I’m not sure if it was to do with lack of air or me coming on his dick. His grunting loudened. I didn’t want it to end; I wanted more. More.
My legs reached up, wrapping around his warm, rigid body. I pulled myself in tight, getting as much of him inside of me as I could.
“Your pussy feels so fucking good,” Hunter muttered.
“Fuck me harder.”
He did. The bed rattled with every thrust, probably on the verge of falling into pieces.
“Harder,” I heard myself demand again.
His grunts became screams. I tried to squirm but his grip on my throat had become too tight. I came again. My vision became a haze and my pussy squeezed him tightly. A few more thrusts, and he came too.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned, his warm come filling up my body.
“Oh, Hunter,” I said, running my hand down the ridges of his muscular back.
Suddenly, he became still. “What?” he said.
I wasn’t dreaming. Hunter wasn’t on top of me. Liam was on top of me. I couldn’t see his face in the dark room, but I could feel his betrayed expression.
“W—What?” was the only thing I was able to say after a few moments of silence and stuttering.
He said nothing. He stood up, slipped his pants back up, and left the room. Then, I could hear the front door slam.
A dull, clenching pain throbbed in my chest, where my heart was supposed to be. I’d re-earned my title of the Witch of Nintipi. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I didn’t deserve to cry.
CHAPTER NINE
It wasn’t hard to find Kyla’s home address. All I had to do was go into her bar and ask the bartender that was working. He gave me a weird, hesitant sort of look, but he went into the back room and came out with the address written on a little piece of paper. “She lives here,” he said as he handed it to me, still with that slanted look—as if he recognized me but couldn’t place me.
As I was half out the door, he put it together. “Wait,” he said. I turned around. “Aren’t you that soldier—the one from the Congo?” he asked.
I thought for a moment, remembering what Anders told me, about keeping my mouth shut. I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah—I saw you on the news. Sergeant Sykes,” he said.
“Nah, man. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.” I turned and left.
I didn’t like my celebrity status, even though I knew it would only last a few days—a few weeks at most. I was never one for attention. Attention was Greg’s thing. The only attention I’d ever wanted was female attention, and even then, if it had nothing to do with sex, I wasn’t interested. It was too bad Greg wasn’t able to enjoy this. Hell, he could have been the one to do all these stupid press conferences. He would have loved them. The reporters would have loved him and believed every word he said.
It wasn’t like that for me. Everything I said raised eyebrows. Everybody looked at me as if I’d let them down, as if I was just another half-brained soldier, trying to make the world feel bad about me. I made the mistake of perusing the internet, where there were thousands of comments calling me a liar, a fraud, and a criminal. They said I should be ashamed of myself. One article I read went so far as to suggest that I was responsible for the death of Sammy Boy, “Just listen to the way he talks in his interviews. He probably got those boys killed. They should lock the bastard up,” the reporter said. If I could’ve had five minutes with that reporter, I would have been locked up.
When I showed up at the address, I thought I’d been duped. The Kyla Rose I knew growing up lived with her wealthy family in the ritzy end of town. I remember her house had vaulted ceilings and a white picket fence and all that shit. She could never hang out because she always had piano lessons to go to, or cocktail parties her parents were dragging her to. The address I’d been given made my little shit-shack look like the goddamned Taj Mahal.
The closer I got to the house, the worse the smell became. At first, I thought I’d stepped in dog shit, but the bottoms of my boots were clean, and it didn’t smell like the product of a dog. It smelled human. The smell was coming from somewhere else. Why was Kyla living in this smelly dump?
I nearly fell through the rotten deck stepping up to the door. I rang the doorbell three times before I realized the thing didn’t even work, but I was afraid to knock and have the whole house collapse. I knocked lightly.
“Just a second!” a voice called out. It was a female voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Kyla’s voice. But I still didn’t believe it was her. The Kyla I knew wouldn’t dare live in a trailer park. Standing there, I could distinctly remember her refusing to go to a party in that very trailer park, back when we were teenagers.
I scrunched the address up and tossed it next to the home, in the mud where grass was supposed to be. Then, the door opened and holy shit, it was Kyla Rose.
Her eyes widened at the sight of me and her lips parted. It looked like she had something to say, but couldn’t. She probably had a lot to say, based on the range of expressions she made. Within seconds, I thought she was going to cry, I thought she was about to slap me, I thought she was going to slam the door in my face, and at one point I even thought she was going to jump into my arms.
“Hey,” I said, killing the silence.
“What are you doing here?” I don’t think she’d blinked yet. She kept looking around, down the streets like some paranoid skid. There was no one there but us.
Her voice brought me back. It was the first familiar voice I’d heard since returning, save for Greg’s—and even his voice didn’t sound familiar since we’d been back. Kyla’s voice sounded exactly the same as five years ago—exactly the same as fifteen years ago, when I was a little, horny thirteen year old kid, trying to convince Kyla to be my first.
“I was in the area. Thought I’d stop by and say hi,” I said.
Her eyes were still darting up and down the street, hardly stopping on me for more than a few seconds at a time. “Now’s not a good time,” she said. She started to close the door on me, but I stopped it with my foot.
We’d known each other for fifteen years but she was treating me like I was some door-to-door appliance salesman. Not even a little ‘Hey Hunter, long time no see.’
“Is everything alright?” I asked, peering into the house through the narrow gap between the door and its frame.
“Everything’s fine. Just busy is all.”
“I won’t be long. Five minutes. Just want to say hello, find out what you’ve been up to.”
She sighed. “Okay, but come on inside.” She opened the door and let me into her home.
Her entire home was no larger than her childhood bedroom—a bedroom I’d only ever been in once, when I was dropping her off after a party where she’d had too much to drink.
It didn’t stink inside, which was a relief. But that didn’t answer the question, what the hell was that smell outside?
She told me to have a seat at her kitchen table, and I did. She didn’t, though. She couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds, constantly buzzing through the room, washing dishes that had already been washed, topping up my coffee after just a few sips, and so on.
“What’s that smell outside?” I asked. I had to ask.
Her face became red. “It’s not always there. There’s a sewer cover in the yard that came loose. The landlord was supposed to fix it weeks ago, but he’s taking his sweet time.”
“A sewer cover in the yard, huh? Well, that explains why it smells like shit out there.”
She scowled at me and then her eyes darted away. “I know. It’s not ideal. We’re saving up to move.” Her face became redder and she continued to buzz around the room, avoiding eye-contact.
She didn’t ask about t
he Congo or Sammy. I was hoping she would have, because that was why I came, and it wasn’t the easiest topic to segue into. Delaying the topic was easy, seeing as I had a thousand other things on my mind, starting with, “I saw you down at the airstrip the other day.” I didn’t ask her outright why she gave me the stink-eye then left, but I figured I didn’t need to—that much was assumed.
She bit her lip and looked down at her toes. “Yeah, I stopped by for a bit,” she said, though I could tell she knew that wasn’t the answer I was looking for. She went silent.
“You sure everything’s okay?” I asked.
“Things have just been real tough since you left,” she said, keeping her lips parted. There was more to add, but it wasn’t coming out.
That’s when I decided to tell her I knew everyone found out about me and her. Her eyes started to water and she turned back to the kitchen. She continued buzzing around. Apparently, it was a sensitive topic.
“We were drunk, shit happened,” I said. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
She swung her head back to me, her face suddenly dark red. “Thanks, Hunter. I haven’t beaten myself up over it too much. Everyone else has, though.” She turned back to the sink but there was nothing left for her to clean. She just stood there, staring down at the counter.
I figured that was my best chance to tell her what I came to tell her. “Sammy cheated on you, you know. A few days before we fucked, he told me he was sleeping with another girl.”
Kyla slowly looked back at me, her eyes red. Her brow lowered and her head tilted to one side. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. He told me a few days before we fucked.”
“What’s wrong with you? Is that why you came here? To rub it in my face that not only was my life ruined sleeping with you, but that my boyfriend didn’t even love me?” I thought she would be relieved. I thought it would ease any grief she’d been suffering. I guess some people just feel better killing the messenger.
“I kept telling him to tell you, but he thought he was protecting your feelings, not saying anything.”
“And you wanted him to tell me so—so what? So you wouldn’t feel so guilty when you swept in and slept with me? That didn’t stop you though, did it?”
Maybe Anders was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have tracked down Kyla Rose. It wasn’t turning into the happy reunion I’d hoped it would.
“Hunter.”
“Huh?”
She was staring at me with eyes peeled wide, waiting for an answer to the question I figured was a hypothetical one. “Well?” she said. “Is that why you came here?”
Not exactly. I wanted to see her. For the first time in five years, I wanted to see her. And I didn’t want her to hate me. We’d been friends our whole lives and I thought a lot about her in that P.O.W. camp. I thought a lot about Sammy in that camp. Unlike me, Sammy was never given the chance to finish things he’d started, to right his wrongs. Sammy would’ve wanted Kyla to have the piece of mind. The least I could do was give it to her. “Yeah,” I said.
“You’re a prick, Hunter,” she said.
“Sammy Boy wanted me to tell you.”
“Did he tell you that?” She wiped the tears from her eyes.
“Well, no. He didn’t have the chance to, but I knew Sammy since we were just kids. Longer than anyone.”
“You think I don’t know he was cheating on me? Of course I knew. You think reminding me that Sammy was a bad guy will make me feel good about everything?”
“Yeah,” I said. Hell, it helped make me feel a bit better about things.
She shook her head. “You should go.” She started towards the door. That’s when I noticed the big, dark bruise on the back of her arm—the arm that wasn’t bandaged from Greg’s attack.
“Where’d you get that bruise?” I asked, pointing to the bruise.
She turned her arm away from me. “I hit it against the counter.”
“Did Greg give that to you?”
“No. Greg just did this,” she looked down at her bandaged wrist, “and he didn’t mean to. That was an accident.”
“So where’d you get that bruise?”
“I hit it against the counter earlier, Hunter. Look, I have a lot to get done here. You should go.”
I walked up and turned her arm around, taking a closer look at the bruise. It had long, finger-like patches. “Your counter have hands?”
Kyla pulled her arm away and looked down at her feet.
“Who did this, Kyla?”
She remained silent. It was obvious she wasn’t going to say. She was protecting someone. Given her dating track record, I had my money on it being whoever she was seeing. Sammy, as much as I loved the little prick, had left Kyla with a bruise or two on more than one occasion, early in their relationship. That stopped after I made sure he knew better. Nearly broke his arm.
“You should go,” she said, finally breaking her silence.
I wrote my number down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Let’s catch up sometime,” I said, handing her the number and stepping out onto her porch.
“Bye, Hunter.” She closed the door and I could hear her footsteps through her thin walls as they moved across the trailer home.
I peeked in her mailbox before leaving. There were a number of letters addressed to a Liam Silverstone.
Liam Silverstone. The name rung a bell.
CHAPTER TEN
Greg had come back from the Congo a completely changed person. Hunter, on the other hand, hadn’t changed one bit. He was still just a selfish ass. And the whole bad boy thing was just plain pathetic. It was cute and innocent enough when we were kids, but we weren’t kids anymore. Everyone laughed when my dad caught Hunter trying to climb the wall up to my bedroom, when we were fourteen. When Hunter took Ms Lyle’s car for a joyride, when we were in the eleventh grade, we all got a kick out of it. No one got hurt.
Now, there were consequences for being a bad boy. It wasn’t cute anymore.
If Liam knew Hunter came over, I couldn’t even imagine what he might do. Before Hunter came home, I didn’t think Liam would ever so much as yell at me. Apparently, I was wrong. A few hours before Hunter showed up at my door, Liam came home, screamed at me, and gave me a mean shove into the counter. Who knows what he was capable of if he was pushed any further? I wasn’t exactly hoping to find out.
I quickly cleaned up Hunter’s coffee cup, leaving mine dirty so that Liam wouldn’t catch on. I even cleaned Hunter’s shoeprints off the floor. One thing I couldn’t seem to get out was the smell of Hunter’s musk—that smell of wood, fire, and gunpowder, as if the Congo was still in his blood and his sweat.
I held Hunter’s phone number over the garbage but hesitated. I put the number into my purse.
And that was all there was left to do, but wait for Liam to come home from work. I couldn’t even watch TV. Liam had cancelled our cable. He said it was too expensive. I was left alone with nothing but my thoughts and that lingering scent.
I took a seat at the kitchen table, still two hours before Liam was supposed to be home. I didn’t want him to come home. I knew he would find something to set him off. He would manage to read into something I’d say and accuse me of doing something I never did. And how long could I put up with that for?
I could still smell Hunter. I could practically see him sitting with me at that table, too—smirking, probably thinking about how much he loves himself. He’d gotten another tattoo since the night before he left for the Congo. It was a date, in roman numerals, written across his forearm. It was too muddy to read, as if he’d done it himself with an old needle. He probably did.
He used to always make me go with him to the tattoo parlours when we were kids. His excuse was that I made him look older when I stood next to him, and the rules said you needed to be eighteen. I think he was just trying to impress me, show me how tough he was, getting inked up without ever flinching.
I wondered if he’d gotten any other tattoos in the Congo. He’d always
talked about getting a quote tattooed on his side, but never got around to it. I couldn’t remember what the quote was—some song lyric. He would say that he wanted to wait until he was “the right weight,” afraid the tattoo would look funny if he kept putting on muscle after he got it. By the looks of it, he’d put on a good forty pounds of muscle since he shipped out. He barely fit his t-shirt. When he was sitting at the table, I could see every bulge and dip in his chest and arms.
What does a man need with all that muscle? He was strong before he left. I could still remember him pinning me down to that bed, driving his cock into me. If he’d pounded me any harder, he probably would’ve killed me.
GAGE: A Bad Boy Military Romance Page 21
