They were my most arresting trait; both boys and men wanting a better look at my gorgeous face, and more than adequate body had chased me down on more occasions than I could count.
Despite everything I had going for me—gorgeous looks, a great IQ, Boston University—I felt terribly inadequate here with these people. They all looked at me and I knew what they were thinking.
What was I doing here with no back up or protection? Where was Shaw and Ness because if they weren’t around, it was open season?
The most popular blonde and brunette at St. Joseph’s High stepped to me. They both were going to good schools—Vassar, since their parents couldn’t buy them into Harvard, Princeton or Yale.
“Well, well, well—look who it is, Ashley,” the brunette remarked with sky blue eyes as she donned the latest couture fashion courtesy of Versace and a sky-high pair of Yves Saint Laurent heels.
“Brittany, don’t tell me you’re jealous of Dorchester trash,” the blonde responded as she walked around me in a slow circle. Her outfit was the latest Vivienne Westwood with Chanel Mary Jane heels. Very avant-garde meets virgin.
Ashley slipped an arm around me. “Listen, Shevonne,” she began, pronouncing my Irish name correctly. “High school is over. You don’t have to feel like you’re not good enough to hang with us now.”
Brittany shoved a drink in my hand. “Half the guys in here want the first crack at you but we’ll take care of you. Only because I want a crack at both Shaw and his goodies—”
“What?” I looked between them both before I stared down at the drink. “Did he send you two over here?”
“Course,” Ashley said in a clipped tone. “Relax, it’s just an Adios Motherfucker for God’s sake. Why would I put anything in your drink when he’s promised us a threesome later? I’m not stupid. Down it, you’ll loosen up.”
I knew they were right. If Shaw had promised them goodies later on, they wouldn’t fuck it up, not even to have a go at me.
I sipped from the blue drink and surprisingly, it was very good. Before I knew it, the drink was gone and I held an empty cup while Brittany and Ashley walked me around the party.
Ashley grabbed my glass, put it on the tray of a waiter walking through and grabbed another. “They’re good, aren’t they? Drink up. You need at least three to let loose and have a good time.”
“Just think, you have the whole summer to be a good girl but you only have tonight to break out of that mold and have a good time.”
Brittany’s words made sense and I downed another and another.
By this time, I was definitely in a state of feel-good drunkenness. Nothing bothered me as we entered another room with pyrotechnic lights and dance music playing loudly.
“Live it up!” They both yelled before disappearing into the crowd but I didn’t care. I felt too good, too alive to feel embarrassed about dancing by myself to all the great DJs.
David Guetta’s “Where Them Girls At?” played and I gyrated to the music all by myself, feeling the rhythm as it seeped into my skin, through my veins and I actually felt myself become one with the music. It was a beautiful thing and even better when the music changed and Kaskade’s “Dynasty” replaced the previous song. I’d never felt this alive or free and realized what a gilded cage both Shaw and Ness has kept me in over the years.
I didn’t mind when a pair of hands snaked around my waist. I turned around and faced Vladimir Povikov. I recognized him as one of the guys Shaw did business with and he would have been more than pissed if he knew we were dancing together. Not that I cared at the moment. He was a great dancer and pulled me closer to him.
I could feel his hard-on as he whispered something to me in Russian.
“What did you say?” I yelled over the music.
“I said,” he began in perfect English with a strong Boston accent, “tonight will be the last night your cherry will remain intact, Irish maiden.”
I laughed and threw my arms around his neck. “Then what are you waiting for? Scared of something or shall I say someone?”
“Fuck Shaw.”
I threw my head back as he kissed my neck and his hands roamed my body. “That’s right! Fuck Shaw!”
Although I had just finished banging Nathalia after she snorted her father’s product, I was anxious to get back to the party. Liv was down there downstairs and I didn’t trust any of these rich fucks, not with my girl.
Ha! My girl. That was a laugh especially since our parents had her ending up with my younger brother, Ness. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they’d make a great couple but I’d loved the girl for so long, I didn’t know when she hadn’t meant anything to me.
I might have fucked everything that looked my way—if they were attractive and offering free pussy, who was I to refuse them?—but I was the same classic misogynist as my Pops. There were virgins and there were whores. Liv was better than me and our whole fucked up world. She deserved the best and with me, I would give it to her too. But I wouldn’t dare pursue her until I had the goods. She shouldn’t have to work anything, and with me, she wouldn’t. It was the reason why I got into drugs in the first place; it was easy money and when the time came, I’d sweep her off her feet.
I saw the looks she gave me. They were shy and sometimes guilty but I knew she felt the same about me.
I’d sold out of blow an hour into the party, and after fucking Nathalia, I was ready to take my girl home. She didn’t need to be around this crowd of rich fucking degenerates that would try to corrupt her pure spirit and good heart. I couldn’t have that. Liv belonged to me and she always would be.
My eyes looked around. I spotted my brother but he was with one of his classmates. It was so obvious that he was gay, I didn’t understand why my mom couldn’t see he was queer. With us being Catholic, she was probably in denial but I didn’t give a crap about his sexuality. It was kind of hard to act self-righteous when I did everything underneath the sun that was a “sin” in God’s eyes. It helped my cause he swung the other way. Ness was a lot of things but he would never condemn Liv to a life of misery and deceit. He was an ultimately better person than I was because I would drag her through my own personal hell just to make sure she was by my side.
I spotted Ashley and Brittany, two of the biggest whores at St. Joseph High. I’d had them both—separately and in a threesome multiple times. They spotted me and waved but it was Ashley who wrapped an arm around my neck and kissed me passionately.
“Babe, that shit is so primo. You got anymore?”
Technically, I was out but I always kept a few baggies on me for special people. Both women gave their pussy up easy enough and until Liv and I got together, I needed my unlimited supply of pussy. My sex drive was fucking unreal—I wasn’t ashamed to admit I was a manwhore. No use denying something I’d inherited from my pops. His weaknesses were pussy and gambling; mine were pussy and money. There was never enough of either for me.
I slipped her a baggie as I whispered into her ear, “Where’s Liv?”
“Well, she was dancing after we gave her a few drinks but I saw that sleazy Russian with his hands all over her.”
“Who? Anton?” I wondered out loud.
“Nah, Vladimir.” Brittany interrupted us as she grabbed the baggie from Ashley. “He took her upstairs. We both know what that means.”
The two women looked at each other before they French kissed each other. “Wanna join us, Shaw?”
“Not tonight.” My jaw ticked and I saw fucking red.
That slimy bastard was not going to fuck what I had been waiting all these years for and continued to put on the back burner. I’d kill him first.
The rage had taken over and I wasn’t thinking clearly.
It was the main reason why I didn’t drink or do drugs. Adrenaline and violence were my preferred drugs, unfortunately. When the rage took over, I wasn’t myself, hell, half the time I didn’t even know what happened.
I guess Pops had beaten me too many times as a kid and teen when he wasn’
t in jail. I couldn’t control it—it had a hold of me as my heart beat in my chest as if I was completely calm but the blood in my veins boiled, and all I could feel was that urge to rip someone’s head off.
It didn’t take me long to find them after interrupting several couples fucking. I opened the room and saw him on top of my angel. She tried to fight him off and had earned a split lip and bruises on her arms.
“No! I said no! Get off me.”
Vladimir’s hand was between her legs as he laughed. “You can’t be a virgin forever.”
“I don’t want to do this with you—”
I never allowed Liv to finish that statement as I grabbed him off of her and threw him against an antique drawer. He hit his head at a funny angle and slumped down to the floor while I walked over to Liv.
“Honey, you okay?”
Liv clung to me as she cried on my shoulder. “It’s my fault, Shaw. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. I . . . I don’t know what’s going on with me.”
I held her like a brother, not like a lover. “It’s okay, sweetie. I wouldn’t allow anything to happen to you. Nothing is ever your fault. You understand that?”
We looked at each other and she nodded. Those gorgeous fucking eyes of hers spoke to me in ways that words never be able to and I understood what she wanted to say but couldn’t.
“Listen, we have to get out of here, okay? Ness can find his own way home. I need to get you somewhere safe.”
Liv looked around the suite before her eyes settled on Vladimir. She jumped off the bed and strode over to him. She checked his pulse but by the strange angle of his neck, I knew my temper had gotten the best of me and the idiot was dead.
A major Russian boss’s son in Boston had been murdered and it was by my hands. Talk about a seal of fate.
She looked at me and shook her head. I didn’t understand what her gorgeous eyes were saying until I joined her on the hard wood floor.
“What’s going on in that head of yours, Liv?” I whispered to her.
“I can’t let you take the fall for this—they’ll lock you up in Walpole forever. We have to make this look like self-defense and you were only helping me but I helped you pushed him off me.”
I wasn’t catching her drift. What was she asking me to do?
Her gentle, soft hands grabbed my face and made me face her. “Tear my clothes. Put on a condom, break my hymen—”
“Fuck no!” I backed away from her.
I would do anything for Liv but force myself on her, no way. That was sacrilegious. Was she crazy?
She began to tear her clothes before she opened up Vladimir’s zipper and pulled out his flaccid dick. “Put on a condom—just be rough with me for a few moments and then I’ll slip the condom off you and put it on him.”
My heart beat like a fucking piston in my chest. “Listen, I can’t rape you.”
“You won’t—Vladimir did.”
“You know what I mean?”
Liv grabbed me by my shirt with strong fingers. “You think I’m going to allow you to spend your life in prison for this piece of shit? We have to make it look like rape, Shaw. You think I will hate you but I won’t. I will despise you if you spend the rest of your natural life in a place like Walpole for this piece of shit. Do it.”
Her strong grip let go and she handed me a condom she had found in Vladimir’s pants pocket.
I looked at the Durex condom and knew it wouldn’t fit me but worked with what I had to. I wasn’t even turned on but that never stopped my dick from getting hard.
“Listen, your plan isn’t going to work. First of all, I can’t use this condom, and second of all, DNA—”
Liv grabbed the condom from me, opened it and slipped it on Vladimir’s flaccid cock.
“I still need you to penetrate me though. Then I’ll wipe my DNA evidence on his condom.”
This whole situation felt like a fucking nightmare. I refused to pull out my cock and put it anywhere near Liv. I knew what she wanted but it wasn’t going to happen. There were other ways I could break her hymen but it wouldn’t be with my cock. I couldn’t do some twisted shit like that to her. Not when I wanted our first time to be special and her wanting, feral, ready and primal.
“Lay back,” I commanded.
She got back on the bed and spread her legs like a wanton goddess. I ripped her underwear and threw them on the floor before my fingers found her clit. It was aroused and hard despite the situation we found ourselves in.
I rubbed it with my thumb and she moaned out loud before she grabbed my hand with one of her own. “You have to break my hymen—”
“Babe, it’s me, Shaw. I know what to do but I don’t want this whole . . . night to poison you from sex forever. Let me make you feel good.”
Liv’s legs relaxed and I continued to coax her hard clit with my thumb while she began to gyrate to my ministrations. Once she was really into it, I inserted my index and middle finger inside her until I breached a thin piece of tissue. She was so turned on she came all over my fingers before I stopped caressing her clit.
Her eyes snapped open, and refused to look at me as she scooted off the bed, and took Vladimir’s cock and got on top of him. I couldn’t see what she was doing but what ever she did disgusted her beyond belief because she ended up vomiting next to him.
“Shaw, get out of here. Use the window. If you’re implicated, it’ll be later, not now. I’ll take the heat for this and I know how to play the victim.”
“Liv—”
“No!” she whisper-shouted. “Goddamn it—you won’t end up like your dad. They can’t do shit to me. But they can lock you up for life. Get. The. Fuck. Outta. Here. Use the goddamn window and run. I’m giving you a minute.”
I stared into her determined eyes and knew she was serious as a heart attack. She planned to play the “rape” card and I didn’t blame her—he would have raped her and done a whole lot worse had I not intervened. I opened the window and made my way down although there was absolutely no reason to be quiet. Music blasted, all the teens in attendance were drunk and high; not one would remember what happened that night. It was a cop’s nightmare.
I’d barely gotten to the ground when I heard Liv yell out that Vladimir had raped her but I knew I couldn’t stick around. Not while I worked for the Povikov family, and certainly not because one of their own had bit the dust tonight. I needed plausible deniability.
It didn’t take me long to find my ride, hop in and get the fuck out of dodge. I wasn’t stupid. Nothing would happen to Liv or Ness. They were the good kids from our fucked up neighborhood. No one would try to pin shit on them and whatever they said, they spoke the gospel. They’d both be okay.
The only ass I had to worry about that night was my own, and whether Abraham Povikov would buy the bullshit story Liv was selling.
Boston – The Present
“Congratulations, you two!”
I continued to plaster a smile on my face though this party wasn’t even supposed to be about us.
Mrs. Shaughnessy was on the verge of being drunk and had forgotten her oldest son had been released from prison after a four-year stint for possession to distribute cocaine and methamphetamines. Somehow, this whole party had turned toward Ness and my attention because we’d recently graduated from college. He, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and me, from the prestigious Boston University.
This was his next to last night in Boston. He’d accepted a position as a software engineer at Google in Silicon Valley, California. I had a pharmaceutical degree, and decided to shop my resume before I graduated. So far, both Pfizer in Manhattan and Roche were interested in me. For the moment, I was more interested in Roche because their position was in Basel, at their headquarters, and I’d studied German as a minor since most of the pharmaceutical companies had opportunities in German-speaking countries.
I never missed the moment Shaw entered. In some way, I was waiting for him to get out, and although our mothers had been working overtime to
get Ness and me together, it wasn’t working. I was over the moon he’d accepted his position in California because I knew it was a state I could never live in. I didn’t begrudge Ness’s good fortune but I hoped it sealed that hope our mothers’ both had of us ending up together.
Shaw entered the party stealthily and sneaked up on me pouring vodka in my fruit punch.
“Don’t think I forget a favor,” he whispered in my ear.
I smiled as I sipped from my spiked punch. “What? Do you mean Vlad, the so-called limp dick impaler? Don’t worry—nothing happened except I pissed off the Povikov family, and they blackmailed me harshly by forcing me into working at one of their top strip clubs.”
My eyes met Shaw’s crystal blue irises that had the look of murder in them. I covered his mouth with my hand. “Ness couldn’t do anything, and you were in the slammer. Just because I show the goods doesn’t mean I give them away, Shaw. You know me better than anyone. I haven’t changed except I have a degree, some offers to leave this shithole, and that’s it.”
Shaw snatched my arm so fast it surprised me but he held on to my wrist as if it were fragile and might break at the slightest wrench of his hand. “Why don’t you take them?”
I looked away, not being able to admit the obvious.
The offers didn’t mean shit if I couldn’t convince him to go with me. He was a felon, and couldn’t leave the state but we knew enough shady people to get him false documents, including a genuine Passport. That was the number one reason Basel was looking better and better to me. It meant not only a new start for me but also one for him. Away from all this crime and shit we’d grown up around. Shaw was versatile enough he could adapt and that was what I was hoping for desperately.
I stared into those crystal blue eyes that had seen more than they should have in his young life. They were so bright but the longer Shaw lived, the deadlier and much more serious they seemed to become. He’d seen too much, done too much. He would kill his own potential before he knew it.
“Why don’t you think I’ve left?” I questioned him and stared deeply into those endless pools of blue.
Run (Run Duet #1) Page 2
