“Hey, Gran.”
“Come on, he cheated on your sister-cousin! He deserves it!”
“Gran!”
“Well, hey there, baby girl.” Gran finally noticed me. Her light blue gaze met mine. She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth with a shaking hand and flicked her ash in a tray next to the bed. “I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“Yes, you did, Gran. I called you earlier in the week, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right.”
I leaned in and hugged her, pressing my nose against her short white hair. Her flowery fragrance mixed with cigarette smoke enveloped me, comforting me like it always did.
“Well, hot damn, who’s this?”
I had momentarily forgotten about Cole. A streak of embarrassment enveloped me.
What does he think about Gran? About where I’m from? I wanted to slap myself again. Who cares what he thinks? He’s a fuckin’ stripper just like you.
“I’m Cole, ma’am.”
I turned to see him holding out his hand. Gran stared at it for a moment before shaking it.
“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend, Julia,” she said once I had sat down in a lounge chair on the other side of her bed. Cole followed suit and sat on a couch by the door.
“Oh, Gran, I don’t. Cole is just a friend. We work together.”
“Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” the TV shouted before going to commercial.
Gran stuck her cigarette between her lips.
“But you’ve slept together,” she said through the side of her mouth.
“Gran!” I admonished. Heat crept into my cheeks. I risked a glance at Cole. Okay, so this was a horrible idea.
A smile tugged at his lips, as if he was holding back laughter.
Is he enjoying this?
“We haven’t,” I said.
“You’re a bad liar, Julia. You always have been.” She rearranged the front of her nightgown with shaking hands.
“Oh, Gran stop it.”
“I’m right, ain’t I?” She directed her question to Cole.
I expected him to be mad or to lash out. After all, I had seen him beat the shit out of three different men at once just for saying something he didn’t like. He didn’t though. Instead, he burst into laughter.
I took the opportunity to change the subject. “Anyway, Gran, how are you feeling?”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Julia.”
I crossed my arms. “That’s none of your business, Gran. You know how I feel about you pry—”
“Oh, shut it, Julia. I thought you didn’t date other strippers? Breaking your own rules now, huh?” Gran’s cigarette dangled from her lips, the ash over half an inch long.
“Your Gran knows you’re a stripper?”
I met Cole’s shocked expression.
“Do I know that she’s a stripper?” Gran guffawed and grabbed her glasses off the table. Once placing them on her nose, she turned back to Cole. “You think this girl could keep anything from her ol’ Gran?” She grinned.
“Well, I—”
“She tried to keep it from me.” Gran cut Cole off. “She tried to keep from tellin’ me that piece of shit father of hers had kicked her out too, but I took one look at her and knew what had happened. I could see it in her eyes. The pain. I know that look well. The look of losing everything.”
“Gran, seriously?” I stood up. Gran was a little kooky sometimes, but I hadn’t expected her to give an outline of the shitty things that had happened in my life.
“What?” She turned back toward me. “You mean, you haven’t told your boyfriend about your dear ol’ dad? What about Kevin? Did you tell him about him?”
“Stop.” A wave of panic traced through me. Kevin was the last person I wanted to talk about. I took a deep breath. “And Cole’s not my boyfriend, Gran.” I walked over and pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “You know they say you shouldn’t smoke with your oxygen tank.”
“He wants to be.” Gran stared at Cole. I glanced at him. He wore a slightly confused expression.
“Gran, stop it. Seriously? What’s with you today?” I tried to keep the aggravation out of my voice.
“You’ve had it rough, though, haven’t you?” Gran said to Cole.
His expression hardened.
“Please welcome Katrina to the stage. Her boyfriend has a spicy secret he wants to tell her today!” The TV show was back from commercial.
Gran spoke louder. “You just want someone to love you without destroying themselves in the process. A real love that isn’t splattered with memory of her blood.”
Cole stood and pushed his way out of the room, but not before I saw it. Pain etched into his features, twisting his handsome face. The door slammed behind him.
“Gran—”
“You can give him that, honey.” Her clear blue eyes, made larger with her thick glasses, stared up at me, beseeching me to understand. Gran said weird things all the time, she always seemed to know things without being told, but she’d never done anything like this before.
“What the fuck?” I stared at the door in disbelief that the last few minutes had happened.
“Huh?” Her gaze was already fixated on her show, forgetting I was even there.
“Why did you say that stuff?”
“What stuff?” She adjusted the clear plastic tubes running into her nose and lit another cigarette.
“Those things about Cole.”
“Cole? Who’s Cole, baby girl?”
Eight.
“Are you all right?” I climbed back into the truck about forty-five minutes later. Cole didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at me. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over Gran. Her dementia has gotten increasingly worse over the years, and sometimes she spouts off like she knows everything, when she doesn’t really know shit.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“What?”
He put the truck in reverse and backed out of the driveway. “You don’t believe it’s all shit.”
“What makes you say that?” I frowned, though he was absolutely right. Gran was a woman who went with her gut feeling. She called things how she saw them. She never lied, or said things just because she felt like it. Even the dementia hadn’t taken that away from her. If anything it only made her more perceptive. I didn’t want him to know that though.
“Because she was right about everything else.” He ran a hand down his jaw.
“Oh, come on, Cole. You’re a good looking guy. She just guessed about the sex. I don’t bring guys with me when I visit her.”
“So, why did you take me?”
“I didn’t really have a choice, did I?” I folded my legs up into the seat.
“You could have asked me to wait in the car, but you didn’t. You gave me the option of coming in to meet her.”
“Would you have listened and waited if I asked you to?”
“Obviously.” His hands had the wheel in a death grip again.
“Do you always do that?” I asked, annoyed.
“What?”
“Grip the wheel like it’s a lifeline.”
He relaxed his hands. A phone started ringing and Cole dug in his coat, extracting a white phone. The name Patricia lit up the screen.
“Hello?” He paused and I could barely hear Patricia’s nasally voice on the other side.
Why the hell is she calling him?
“All right, I’ll come by and sign them later. Thanks.” He hung up.
“Why was Patricia calling you?” Jealously ate away at my skin as I spoke. I hated the way it felt, like a sickness ravaging me.
He gave me a half-smile. “I have to go in and sign the resignation contract.”
“Resignation contract?”
“It’s something I had drawn up since I broke the contract I signed with them. Just legal stuff. Nothing big.”
I had completely forgotten that he had quit working at Rapture. “Why did you quit?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “This life just isn’t for me.”
“Life as a stripper?” I couldn’t help but feel like his words were a direct shot at me. As far as I knew, everything he had done at the club had directly involved me.
“Yes.”
“Huh.” I turned away from him and stared out the window. The sky had darkened significantly while I was in Gran’s. Blue-black clouds covered the sun and looked on the verge of rain.
“You ever thought about doing something else?” His question surprised me, but I didn’t turn around.
“Nope.” I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting that I didn’t want to shake my ass for money. He’d given off hints that he hated the profession and looked down on me for it. It made no sense before, but now it did. This wasn’t what he wanted to do. He’d had to dance with me once, the other time he got to fuck me and yet the money still wasn’t enough. There was no other job in the world he could get that would pay the kind of money we were making without having some sort of diploma and even then it was pushing it.
“You’ve never wanted to be anything more than just a piece of ass?”
“Excuse me?” I whirled around.
“Hey, now. Don’t get mad. I’m just asking.”
“Just because you don’t think stripping is honorable, it didn’t stop you from doing it, did it? It didn’t stop you from fucking me on that table in front of hundreds of people, did it?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw and he cut his eyes at me. “No, it didn’t.” He sounded almost ashamed.
“But you wish you hadn’t done those things, don’t you?” My voice cracked on the last word, even though I tried not to let my emotions show.
What is with me? Why do I even care?
“I didn’t say that.” The words came out rough.
“You didn’t have to.” I turned away and pulled my knees to my chest.
Am I that bad? Even the people paid to fuck me can’t wait to get away from me. Story of my life.
We passed most of the ride in tense silence until finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I wanted to be an English teacher, I’d started going to college to be one.” I’d had so many dreams before my dad and Kevin had squashed them all.
“Why didn’t you?”
I thought about his question for several minutes while staring at the ever-darkening sky. The dark blue faded into an almost black hue. I considered lying to him, telling him that I still planned to go, or that I had just turned to stripping because I thought it was easier.
He’s leaving, what difference does it make if he knows the truth?
“I figured out that I’m only good at one thing.”
“What do you—”
“I take that back, two things. I’m good at two things.” I paused. “Stripping and fucking.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t like when he laughed in Gran’s house. This was a sad laugh. “That’s sad, Julia. What made you ever buy into that bullshit?”
I shrugged. “It isn’t bullshit. It’s reality.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said angrily.
I snapped my head around. “What’s it to you anyway? It’s not like you can say much. You’re more than ten years older than me and you’re still a stripper.”
He was silent again, back to gripping the wheel.
“What? You have nothing to say? It’s okay for you to put me down, but that’s it. When it comes to you, discussion is off the table? Or is it just that I am woman?” The thought slammed into me. “That’s it, isn’t it? It’s okay for a man to shake his dick in unknown chicks’ faces, but when it comes to a woman she’s just shit on the street for doing it?” Anger clotted in my veins.
Why am I here? Why do I even care what he thinks?
I couldn’t answer that question. He took a deep breath and put on his blinker to exit.
“Where are we going?”
“To eat.”
I didn’t say anything as he pulled up to the old diner right off the highway. I was hungry and mad, which made me ravenous for food. I didn’t want to eat with him, but I didn’t want to wait the thirty more minutes it would take to get back to my loft either.
“An animal trainer for a circus,” Cole said as we slid into the worn booth inside.
“Huh?”
“That’s what I wanted to be.”
A burst of unflattering laugher escaped my lips, but his face remained serious. “You’re not kidding?”
“No.” He opened his menu.
I studied him. The anger that had been burning like a hot flame dimmed slightly as I watched him. “You like animals then?”
He nodded.
“Do you have any pets?” After I asked him, the ridiculousness of it caught up to me. Here I was sitting in a diner with a man I’d fucked. A man who had fucked my face with his long hard cock and yet I didn’t know the simplest things about him.
“No. Just a fish tank. That’s all.”
“You wanted to be an animal trainer, but you don’t own any trainable pets?”
“I like wild animals. Not domesticated ones.” His eyes bore into mine as he spoke, sending a shiver down my spine. He leaned in, laying down his menu. “I like exotic, willful creatures.”
His gaze roamed over my face. My lips parted feeling it like a physical caress.
“You like to break them?” The words were a whisper, slithering between my lips on their own accord.
“No.”
“No?” That wasn’t what I expected.
“I don’t have to break something to make it mine.”
A spasm of pleasure twisted my insides, flooding my panties with liquid heat. I leaned in, desperate to be closer to him. “What do you have to do then?”
“Y’all ready to order?” The loud southern accented voice broke the spell that had me clinging to the table, desperate to hear what Cole would say next. I jerked, slamming into the back of the worn leather booth.
A tight smile covered Cole’s lips. “I know what I want, but I’m not sure about the lady.”
I glanced down at my untouched menu.
“A burger. A cheeseburger and a water,” I muttered and pushed my menu to the edge of the table.
I watched Cole order. He smiled at the young waitress and handed her our menus. His hand briefly brushed against hers. A spike of jealousy stabbed me in the back. What the fuck? I hated this. I hated feeling this way.
I looked away quickly, not liking where my thoughts were going. Droplets of rain had started to splatter against the window. The sky was even darker now, the storm finally here. The speed of them picked up before my eyes, rushing down from the sky and pouring onto the little diner with a soft thrumming sound. The truck and highway blurred from the obscurity of water. Everything was distorted.
“You okay?” Cole’s deep voice was like a balm to my ears. One I wanted to snatch up and rub all over my body. The image of his cock squirting cum onto my chest flashed into my mind.
I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t you become an animal trainer?”
“Well, you see, Julia. I found out that I’m only good at two things in life.” He smiled and this time it reached his eyes.
Is he teasing me?
Full-on laughter shook my insides. I couldn’t help it. The conflicting emotions inside me seemed to overflow until I was nothing but a wet mess.
“Things don’t always work out like you plan for them to,” he said after my laughter died down. I recognized this too was a repeat of what I’d said to him the day before.
“You can say that again.”
Cole glanced out the window and ran a hand over his head. The tattoo of his sister stared back at me, with dark alluring eyes. Memory of what Gran said jumped into my mind for the first time since I got back in the truck.
“What did Gran mean when she talked about the blood?” I shouldn’t have brought it up. I shouldn’t have said a damn thing about it. Everything with me and Cole was s
o tense as it was, and for reasons I wasn’t even sure of.
On cue his face darkened. “I thought you didn’t buy into the things your gran said.”
“You’re avoiding the question.” I noticed he did this more often than not. I would ask him something and he would redirect with something else. Not this time. I didn’t feel afraid of him, or this image of splattered blood that Gran brought up. I should be afraid. But I wasn’t in the least. Something inside of me knew he wouldn’t hurt me.
“Who’s Kevin?” The mention of my ex’s name sent a rush of cold over my body and the memory of the white paper envelope. I’d forgotten about it too. My gran had given it to me as an afterthought just before I left.
“That piece of shit you used to date stopped by last week and wanted me to give this to you,” she’d said when she handed it to me.
My name was scratched on the outside of the envelope in the uneven scrawl I knew so well. I hated Kevin. I hated him more than anything in this world, but I couldn’t deny the thrill of excitement as my hands fluttered against the white envelope when she handed it to me. Kevin was bad for me. The worst anyone could be. He’d hurt me repeatedly, endlessly. I’d hurt him back, and he was still hurting me years after the fact. And sometimes I missed him for a moment, before all of the horrible truths of the past came rushing back to remind me why I finally left.
“That’s none of your business,” I said.
The waitress came and brought our food, though I was no longer hungry.
“Did he hurt you?” The absurdity of the question had me glancing up, meeting Cole’s angry blue eyes.
“Again, none of your business.”
“What did he do to you?” Images of the past jumped into my mind. Horrific stills of the times that ruined me.
The urge to vomit climbed up my throat. I jumped up from the table and rushed out the front door. The tinkling of the bell did nothing to calm the turmoil raging inside my body. The rain was pouring down and instantly I was soaked from head to toe. It was surprisingly warm for the time of year and I welcomed it, hoping it would wash it all away. I’d pushed the memories out of my mind a long time ago. I hadn’t spoken Kevin’s name out loud in more than a year, yet all at once he was trying to reappear in my life. Not to mention whatever I was starting to feel for Cole.
Drowning in Rapture: Rapture, Book One Page 8
