"Never had a guy take care of you before?"
"I," she started, then stopped to think. "I guess not. It's always kind of been more like... I handle my stuff and they handle their stuff and we share meals and things like that."
"Penny, I ain't exactly the kind of man who operates as a seat-filler. You're with me, we share shit. And not just food and a bed."
She moved slowly off the side of the bed, yawning hard once then looking up at me. "I think I like that," she said, moving past me toward her boxes and searching inside for clothes.
I watched as she grabbed dark skinny jeans and a simple black t-shirt with the name of some store or something across the chest. It didn't exactly escape me that she grabbed a matching purple bra and panty set.
I snagged the bra as she moved past me to go toward the bathroom, making her stop short. "Still can't wear a bra, Pen."
She snatched it out of my hands, cheeks a little red. "I have to wear a bra. I always wear a bra when I leave the house."
"Not for the next couple of weeks you don't. Besides, your tits are perfect. They don't need the support."
She shot me a look and moved into the bathroom, piling her clothes on the sink counter and going to grab a towel out of the closet.
"Alright, so um..." she started, shuffling her feet uncomfortably.
"Take your shirt off, babe," I said, going into the drawer beneath the sink for scissors.
"Duke I..."
"Purely medical motives here," I said, giving her what I hoped was a convincing smile.
"Yeah, sure," she said, knowing better. But she turned her back on me and pulled the shirt over her head, but didn't drop it. I moved in behind her, first unwrapping the elastic bandages. She let out a slow breath as soon as they fell. "Feels like the first time I could really breathe in days," she admitted as I grabbed the edge of the gauze and pulled it up so I could slide the scissors under and slice upward.
I took my own deep breath as I made the last snip, putting the scissors back down and reaching to slowly pull the gauze away. I knew Ashley and Lo had checked it out, but a part of me was worried it would be infected. When I removed the gauze, however, it was much better than the last time I had seen it, bleeding and jagged. The skin was pulled tight with the little black stitches. But there was no redness or irritation. For as crude an injury it had been, it would heal cleanly. There would be a scar but it wouldn't be particularly raised.
"Silence can't be good," she said and I looked up to see her holding the tee to her chest, turning her head over her shoulder at me.
"No, actually, it's a lot better than I was expecting. Another week and these will come out. Turn to your side. Let me see your ribs," I said, hand moving low on her back so it slid along her skin as she moved.
Softest fuckin' skin I had ever felt.
"Wow, that's really red," she said as she looked down at her side. And it was. The area from under where her bra would be to the waistband of her pants had a smattering of red smeared across, almost as if someone kept swiping a paintbrush over her skin.
"Red is good though," I said, putting my hand flush against her ribs with a little pressure to test my theory. When she didn't immediately flinch or hiss, I was fairly comfortable with my deduction. "If it was purple or blue still, I'd think they were broken. But this light red seems more like it's bruised, not busted."
"Small miracles," she said, looking up at me. "So can I take a shower?"
"Depends," I said, feeling the corner of my lips turn up.
"I don't trust that look. Depends on what?"
"If I can come in with you."
Her mouth went slack even as she was shaking her head. "No way!" she said with a smile.
"Why not?"
"You can't be serious."
"I can't? I feel pretty serious." I paused, reaching out for the shirt she had clutched to her chest and pulling. She didn't even fight. "Nothing's gonna happen. Just sharing a shower. You know, being green and all that," I added with a smirk, making her lips curve upward.
"That's how you want to play this?"
"Yep," I said, rolling back on my heels with a smile.
"On the stubbornness scale..."
"Babe, I'm off the charts." I moved toward her, letting my hands run down her sides, feeling her shiver, trying to ignore the way it made my cock twitch. There would be no denying my body's response to her, but I meant to be true to my word. Beside the fact that we didn't have the time and the fact that she was still too hurt to really enjoy herself, it was important for her to know she could trust my word.
My hands slipped beneath the waistband of her pants and panties and tugged them downward. She let them fall to her feet and stepped out of them carefully. Then, as if suddenly remembering that she thought she was supposed to be embarrassed, her arm went over her breasts and she quickly turned and walked away from me. I watched her ass as she moved the shower curtain aside and climbed in, turning the water on and letting out a curse I didn't know she was capable of when the water pelted down on her.
"Yeah, shoulda warned you about the pipes needing some time to warm up."
"Jesus," she hissed and I could hear the water pelting onto the shower liner like she had turned the shower head away from her. "That's one way to make sure I'm awake," she grumbled as I stripped out of my clothes and moved toward the shower. I pulled back the curtain and stepped inside to find her with her ass pressed against the back wall, her arm still over her breasts, the ends of her hair dripping with what had to be frigid water.
I stifled a chuckle as I reached for her, noticing she was way better than me at keeping her eyes averted. "You can look, babe. I'm not shy."
"Well, no. You wouldn't be with all those perfectly manly muscles of yours," she grumbled. "Your hair is even better than mine," she added before I pulled her against my chest. Then she wasn't speaking as our bare skin touched from knee to her shoulders. Her arm dropped and her breasts pressed into my chest, making me close my eyes and take a deep breath. My cock was hard and heavy and pressing against her stomach. But she didn't flinch away.
"Your hair is softer," I offered, raising my hand to push some behind her ear.
"Liar," she said, reaching up and pulling mine carefully out of the bun I had it in. "But thanks for trying."
I reached behind her, grabbing the shower head and angling it to the center of the shower. "It's better," I told her, letting it splash onto her ass. "Back into it slowly to see how it feels on your back," I said and she did slowly back up. The distance was both a relief and a disappointment at the same time. "You alright?" I asked when she winced.
"Just kinda burns a little. It's not bad. It's probably good to get it all cleaned out. Do you think I have to wrap back up again?"
I shrugged as I moved closer, getting under the water too. "We can probably leave it off for the day. Maybe just wrap up at night in case you roll onto your back when you sleep. Though you seem more like you like to sleep-molest that body pillow of yours."
"Shut up," she laughed, tilting her head up to look at me, making the water slick back her hair. I reached for the shampoo and scrubbed it into her hair, trying to ignore the way her eyes got heavy and her nipples hardened against my chest.
She rinsed. I conditioned. I soaped her up as much as she would allow before self-consciously swatting me away.
"Alright. My turn, water hog," I said, moving her out of the way so I could move under the spray.
She stepped back and squeezed the excess water out of her hair, reaching out for a towel. "Yeah, I need to go try out that makeup stuff anyway," she said as I turned to face the water.
ELEVEN
Penny
I thought I was seeing things at first.
I thought the startled wake-up, the makeshift exam, and the almost overpowering sexual tension I felt all through the shower was somehow messing with my head.
But I blinked hard and opened my eyes to look at the back of his shoulder and, sure enough, I wasn't mistaken.
Maybe another person wouldn't have really noticed if they hadn't been really looking.
But it was Duke's naked body; I was looking.
It was a tattoo.
Or, it had been a tattoo at some point.
It was warped, light, parts of it completely gone.
It was in the process of removal.
But I could make it out.
Anyone would know it when they saw it.
And every thing in me recoiled at the sight.
What Duke had, at one point, permanently etched into his skin?
Yeah, it was a swastika.
TWELVE
Duke
There are some interesting facts about Arkansas.
It was the birth place of Johnny Cash.
The state bird is the mockingbird.
The pine tree is the official state tree.
It has over six-hundred thousand acres of lakes.
And it is home to more hate groups than any other state in the nation.
It was where I was born, in a town right outside Harrison. Why do I mention Harrison, you might ask? Yeah, it's because Harrison is where the director of the Ku Klux Klan, to this day, keeps his main office. It is a quaint, typical small time America place where you also just so happen to find blatantly racist billboards and people waving Confederate flags like they're still in the God damn Civil War.
I was born, the first of six children. Every last one of us were blonde-haired and blue-eyed. This was mainly because it was planned that way. My mother was blonde and blue-eyed; my father was blond and blue-eyed. So were their parents, their siblings, all my cousins.
Selective breeding, in a way.
I think it went without saying that my family was still under the misguided idea that other races were trying to overtake the country and that, in turn, the whites needed to maintain racial purity to preserve the Aryan race.
And had it maybe been as ignorant and idiotic as that, I might have been able to live with that being my family, my heritage.
But it very rarely is just innocent ignorance.
Ignorant people, well, tended to be stupid as well.
And stupid people responded to things like their fears with violence.
We were put to bed at night in a crib underneath a Confederate flag with an Aryan circle in the center.
I never knew about Sam and his Green Eggs and Ham.
I never heard a peep about Charlotte and her web.
But by age six, I could spout direct quotes from Mein Kampf.
At age ten, I protested the funeral of a gay man who had done nothing other than live his peaceful life and share his body with men.
At age eleven, I marched down the street in full Nazi uniform, spouting some shit I can't even let myself think it was so foul, using words I had no business using at all, let alone at that age.
See, the thing was, I didn't just belong to the average type of corn-fed, Bible-banging, gun-toting, Confederate flag waving, racist family. Oh, no. I belonged to a family three generations deep in hate mongering leadership. And being the oldest son, yeah, dear old Dad and Grandpa had some grand plans for my eventual leadership.
"World is going to fucking hell in a hand basket," my father told me, standing on a back porch to a farm that had at one time just been a farm.
But over the course of the prior year and a half, things had been changing. Guns and ammo piled up. A fence was erected, barbed, and electrified. Then the building started. The first one I didn't question. I figured it was another barn for the tools or the animals or prepping shit or what-the-fuck-ever else my pops and grandpop got it in their heads to do. They were forever working on shit.
But when one turned to two and two somehow turned to eight, yeah, I started asking.
"Duke, we need to protect ourselves," he had went on, nodding at one of the men who walked past carrying wood. "And there ain't no way to do that all spread out in twenty different locations when shit hits the fan."
"You're moving our people to the farm?" I asked, looking out at the small buildings, not understanding how any single person could live in one, let alone families. And our people, yeah, they had families. The men knocked up the women until they couldn't squeeze any more babies out.
"Things going the way they are going, our people will be looking to us for guidance, for answers, for help. Besides, this way, the next generation can grow up around their own kind. They won't be subjected to all that racial intermingling and bastardization of our history."
That 'bastardization of our history' meant things such as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the negativity toward the south in the Civil War, the fact that we all but annihilated an entire indigenous race, and that Hitler was, well, anything other than a bright and shining star.
"We're going to get homeschooled?" I asked, fifteen and not overly adverse to the idea of not having to sit my ass in a class room six hours a day learning shit that I would literally never need to know in my adult life.
"You? No, son," he said, shaking his head with a smile. "No. You're a man now. You will be put to work around here."
And I was.
One day, I was just a normal fifteen year-old going to school and hating it.
The next, I was pulled out under the pretense of religious reasons, and I was suddenly in charge of overseeing the construction of the stock pile barn. Never mind that I didn't know shit about building and that all the men working under me knew that as well. I was the son of their leader. It was a position owed respect even if I didn't do shit to earn it.
Leader.
My father was the leader.
My grandfather was a past leader before his heart went bad.
There was none of that Grand Wizard shit that my family scoffed at.
"All for show, the lot of them," my grandfather said as we watched a row of white sheets picket outside the courthouse the day a young black man was being charged with the rape of a young white woman.
See, the charge was bullshit.
I knew this because I had listened to my father coach her on how to sell the story to the cops. I had watched my mother tear her clothes and press bruises into her thighs.
I also knew that the kid was going down for it.
They always did.
The system was rigged against them, something my family delighted in.
"Did nothing to take the bastard down, but show up here like they were there from the beginning. Fucking pussies," he said, spitting a wad of chewing tobacco on the ground and walking away.
I had been the only one to stay and watch the confusion, the hurt, the betrayal, and the fear cross that eighteen year old's face as he was handed his sentence and hauled off to jail.
But even if they had been there, I doubted the image would have bothered any of them. Why it bothered me, to this day, was a mystery. Maybe it was because I had gone to public school for so long in an age where diversity was celebrated. Maybe I lucked out that I had a decent head on my shoulders, not a brain full of fear and ignorance like the rest of them.
Regardless, something inside me changed that day.
The following birthday, I was pulled into the barn and had a swastika tattooed on my shoulder. Because that was just what was done. I was the only one out of the lot of them who didn't have more than that. Half the guys were sporting hand and neck tattoos showing off their hatred. By that point, all our little houses were occupied. Men, women, and especially children, were every-fucking-where. You couldn't walk two feet out the door without bumping into one of them.
"Nothing better than a community of like-minded men and women," my grandfather had said after informing me that there were plans to build on, to have more families come live on the farm.
I'd love to say I hated every minute of my life; I really would.
But fact of the matter was, life wasn't always about hate and fear and preparing for some inevitable (they thought) race war. Life was just life. And for people with such a strong capac
ity for hate, it was surprising how much love they could give people they considered of the same mind. If you were sick, there was soup for you. If you were hurt, your chores were handled without you even having to ask. If you were struggling learning how to shoot, fish, fight, tie knots... anything, someone was happy to lend a patient hand. Mothers helped the other mothers so everyone got time off. The men provided for their families.
It was, if you looked past the Aryan tattoos and ever-present Nazi memorabilia, a quaint type of community.
Except as the years went on, the agenda got more and more hostile. All a sudden, one summer, the stockpiling of weapons increased enough for me to start paying attention. And then I walked into the barn one night to see a circle of the men sitting around someone who was, quite obviously even for someone who had never seen it done before, compiling pipe bombs.
No one had heard me come in so I stood there and listened, either too curious or too stunned to move.
"... Fucks will never see it coming," one of them said. "Martina can put them right under their God damn cribs," he added and I felt myself stiffen.
Martina had recently, for reasons that weren't clear until that very moment, gotten a job at a local day care center three towns over. It had raised brows among all the families; especially seeing as the population was largely black. Everyone figured her husband, Bobby, had gotten them into some heavy debt and she was doing what she had to to keep food on the table without asking for handouts. Handouts, it went without saying, were a big no-no in our community. Being that there weren't a whole helluva lot of jobs in our town, it made sense that she had needed to venture out.
But it was all planned.
They were going to blow up the fucking day care center.
"Well, fuck. Cat's out of the bag now," another of them said and his eyes were on me.
My father's head turned and he gave me a smile that showed just how evil he truly was. I wasn't sure I ever saw it until then. A stupid, hateful man at times? Sure. But I never saw evil until that moment. But he was, right down to his dark soul.
Duke (The Henchmen MC Book 5) Page 12
