by Mignon Mykel
“Just don’t be stupid and tattoo her name on your body,” Myke broke through the stare-off from her own tattoo chair. “Anything can happen in the next few years, Ports. I know she’s been a part of your life for a long time, but you just started dating. Don’t be a stupid kid.”
The elevens were all completed and I was the lone Prescott kid still in a tattoo chair while my five older siblings stood around.
Yeah, that didn’t make a guy nervous.
Not about the tattooing. The first one didn’t hurt at all, really. There had been a few tender spots, sure, but it wasn’t bad at all.
It was having five sets of eyes on you while you got tattooed that didn’t sit very well with me.
“Can you guys not be in here staring me down while I get another tat?” I asked the room of waiting siblings.
“Well, where are we going to go? It’s snowing,” Avery asked, frowning.
“I don’t know, but somewhere.”
The tattoo artist working on me chuckled to himself as he cleaned his gear, getting ready for my next one. While he was doing my eleven, I told him what I wanted so he was in on the plan, even if my siblings weren’t.
After a moment of discussing, the five of them decided to go to the coffee shop across the street, finally leaving me with the artist and the buzz of the needle.
I dropped my chin to watch as the needle decorated my skin over my rib cage. This wasn’t going to be big, no bigger than the one on my arm, but it made me smile as much as the family one did.
The person who inspired this one made me smile.
“What’d you get?” McKenna asked as I entered the coffee shop a little while later.
I shook my head, grinning. “Never mind.”
“It’s probably a daisy or something,” Jonny taunted.
“Oh! One of those watercolor lions.” Caleb nodded a few times.
My brothers were assholes.
I let them know by flipping them the bird.
“Well?” Avery asked.
“Don’t worry about it.” I was good at being secretive if I really wanted to.
“Damn, it really is a watercolor girly tattoo, or else he’d show us.”
Myke simply stared at me, her eyes narrowed as she tried to figure me out.
She was too much like Dad in that regard.
Unless these five were in my room while I was changing though, they weren’t going to know what it was until next summer at the earliest. Which worked for me.
Only one person needed to see it, and she wasn’t in this room.
It was the night before I started at University.
I was a little nervous, sure. I didn’t know these kids. I didn’t know the school.
Having so many older siblings, I knew the layout of East well before I was a student there. I grew up with the kids I went to school with. And while University wasn’t cities away, it was still a different school with different kids.
I knew Coach Max, but knowing my hockey coach wasn’t exactly the biggest selling point.
The biggest change, though, would be not seeing Mo day in and day out.
My brothers hadn’t been kidding the other day.
Mo and I had been good friends for many years, more than the ‘friends with benefits’ thing we had going on through high school. And now that I called her my girlfriend, I wanted to see her more.
Go figure. I finally finish the pay-back for Dad, opening up a little more free time, and I end up going to a different school.
We were sitting in the heated enclosed gazebo in her backyard, our backs to one of the benches that lined the walls. We were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, and her hand was in mine. With her head on my shoulder, we simply sat there, the only lights coming from high strung round bulbs decorating the ceiling.
I had a feeling my being in a different school was going to be just as hard on her as it was on me.
“Do you have your hockey schedule yet?” she finally asked, breaking the silence.
“University practices for two hours after school every day there’s not a game. And they have mandatory meetings and gym time on Saturdays.”
“Am I going to see you ever?”
I looked down at her and while she didn’t look up at me, I could see that she pulled her brows down in a frown. I lowered my head so I could press my lips to the top of her head.
“We’ll find time.”
“It’s like long-distance even though you’ll still live right here.”
“Hey, we can consider it practice for when you go to college.”
She laughed lightly, but I could tell the laugh was forced. “Sure, Porter.”
“C’mon, cheer up,” I said, moving away from her only to tug on her leg, pulling her to lay down. This elicited a real laugh from her.
Smiling, I crawled up beside her and put an arm on either side of her shoulders.
“I love your smile,” I told her. The yellow bulbs reflected in her eyes.
“I bet I love yours more,” she whispered before reaching up to trace her finger down the dimple all Prescott guys had.
I leaned down to press my lips to hers but Mo wasted no time in moving this along. Her hands were on my shirt, tugging upward until I helped pull it off. When my shirt cleared my head, Mo pushed on my shoulder so I would lie on my back, reversing our positions. I chuckled, allowing her to do her thing.
For now.
She touched her lips to mine once before moving down to press them against my sternum. Her hands were between us, her fingers unbuttoning my jeans, as she kept pressing kisses lower. She stopped though, right above my belly button.
I groaned.
So close.
“Porter…” Her voice was low and confused. I lifted my head to look at her.
“Seriously, Porter?”
It wasn’t an ohmigod yay ‘seriously,’ but it wasn’t a pissed ‘seriously’ either. It was a ‘seriously’ said with awed confusion, and I knew what she found.
“Yeah, seriously, Mo.”
She lifted a finger to trace the scripted ‘Mo’ on my ribs, on the side of my body where biology class taught us was where your heart sat closest to your chest wall.
Now that she was distracted, I pushed her onto her back again, leaning over her once more.
“You like it?”
“Yeah, I like it,” she whispered, a small smile on her face.
“Wherever life brings us, you’ve been a part of mine for a long time. You mean a lot to me.”
“I love you, Porter Prescott.” Her voice was quiet, the sound of her voice hardly cracking
through the whispered tones in the dark. I leaned down and pressed my lips against hers, resting my hand on her stomach over her shirt.
When her hands threaded into my hair, holding my face to hers, her tongue pushing and pressing against mine, I let my hand slip down under the top of her jeans, under her panties, and into her wet folds.
She separated her legs to give my fingers more access, but the movement tightened her jeans against my hand.
No big. I didn’t need my wrist.
I let my fingers play over her sensitive nub, rubbing circles over her as her mouth frantically fought against mine.
We may not get as much time together during the day starting tomorrow, but I knew Mo would take what time I could give her.
This was how our relationship had always worked.
It would continue to work this way, I was sure of it.
My first day at University wasn’t all that bad. My locker was next to a kid named Logan. I learned pretty quickly that Logan Kristoferssen was also on the hockey team and that he was in the majority of my classes.
He was good people.
Most of the kids here were pretty open to the new kid, the guy who was expected to be the star athlete on the hockey team because of the numbers he was bringing with him, but also his upbringing. But what else made this move not terribly bad was most of these kids had money of their own.
Not that rich kids among rich kids didn’t have its share of problems, but I wasn’t getting side-eyes simply because of who I was or what family I was born into.
For the first time in my life, I entered through a set of doors and was simply Porter Prescott. It made my desires earlier this year to prove who I was seem almost silly.
I was finally that ‘Porter Prescott. Period’ I strived to be.
I didn’t have to pull down my siblings’ accomplishments to define myself. I didn’t have to defend who my family was.
I didn’t have to prove my worth in the same sense that I did at East.
Now I just had to prove I was as good as Coach Max told the team I was.
That I was worth all the talk.
And surprisingly, in the meantime I found myself fully enjoying myself.
The rest of junior year wasn’t too bad.
It was actually pretty freaking great.
I strived to get good grades because I didn’t want the consequences to fold over into hockey. My time was filled with hockey and school, but I saw Mo surprisingly more than I had before. When she wasn’t competing or I wasn’t playing, we were able to spend a lot of time together.
I heard from Matt that Alex was sent to juvie. Turned out that the weed he stuffed in my locker was only a small amount of what he had, and that he was actively selling it in addition to using it. Alex kissed his future with hockey goodbye and I found myself not really giving a shit.
As for Matt, Ty, and I? Our friendship slowly fell apart. We had East and hockey in common, and when you took away part of that equation…
Well, it didn’t really hurt my feelings.
I also learned pretty quickly that their loyalty was to Alex, but no skin off my nose.
With University school and the guys I met on that team, I learned what true friendships could be. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the friendship I forged with Logan was one of those life-long ones.
It also helped keep Dad happy.
He liked Logan, so I didn’t have to worry about the strife that came with having a friend your parents didn’t care for.
I’m proud to say I have been off Dad’s shit list for a while now.
He found himself a new superstitious parking spot, too. The first game I played and we won, Dad laughed the entire drive home about how it was all about where he parked the truck.
Speaking of hockey and Logan, Logan and I played well together, something that Coach Max was excited about. Having two excellent forwards in high school hockey wasn’t rare, but the way Logan and I played off of one another was something that the scouts talked about more often than not.
Senior year was much the same, and the scouts who came to watch me were not only for colleges, but for NHL teams that weren’t the Enforcer organization.
Did I want to play outside of my dad’s shadow? Out of my brothers’ shadows?
Absolutely.
I’d never been shy about that, and the fact that it was a true possibility was exciting. Many of the scouts loved watching Logan and I play together, but in the end, Logan was deciding to go to college first.
School worked for Logan.
It didn’t work for me.
Last February, Sydney had her and Cael’s second baby, another boy. They named him Brody and the poor kid looked just like Brandon. I did not envy the years in school where all he would here would be how much he looked like his brother. A year later, just a few months ago, Sydney was pregnant again. Caleb wouldn’t shut up about the fact they were expecting a girl next.
Ken met a guy who had a kid, and Jonny and Jenna? Unfortunately they never divorced, as much as we all hoped was the direction they were taking when Jonny showed up to Christmas junior year.
Life stayed the same throughout the end of my high school career until the summer right after graduation.
I broke up with Mo. She wanted to go to college and I honestly wanted that for her. But with her going to school here in Wisconsin and me being drafted to the NHL’s Charleston Rockets in South Carolina, I didn’t want to hold her back. She left for school with a hug and tears in her eyes, a smile on her face. We would always be friends. You couldn’t break the years she and I had together as friends first, lovers second. Maybe in four years when she graduated we’d hook back up.
But before I left for Charleston, my plans changed.
That was when I met her…
* * *
Porter’s HEA story is on its way!
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the Playmaker Duet, his and Asher’s story, releases!
Altercation (March 1)
Holding (March 28)
Also, if you want to meet Asher, much as you met Porter in Troublemaker, her prequel, Breakaway, will be releasing in late February.
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instagram.com/porter.asher
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Please keep reading for a sneak peek into Asher’s prequel, Breakaway, releasing in February!
PRESENT DAY
I had no end goal.
No end destination.
There was nowhere for me to go, nobody waiting to greet me with open arms.
For the first time in my life, I was truly and completely alone—and I was one-hundred percent okay with it.
Alone, you couldn’t hurt—not in the physical sense.
Alone, you didn’t have to worry about watching your back and sleeping with your eyes open.
Alone, and the only person you had to please—to impress—was yourself. So far though, I couldn’t exactly say ‘impressed’ was the word for what I thought of myself.
It wasn’t like I could just…
Drop off the earth. Hell, I was driving a car that didn’t belong to me. My friend—the only friend I had in my life and I only met her two months ago—had her brother hook me up with a means of transportation. Eventually I was going to have to get into contact with her, or her brother again at the very least, and return the car.
So I had one, maybe two people in my corner. Come to think of it, Carter was one of seven and between her and her brother, swore I was one of them, so maybe I actually had seven people in that dark, dusty corner.
I scoffed at the idea. That would mean Carter and I would remain friends when the month was up and she rejoined the world, but she was going on to bigger and better—more exciting—things, while me?
Well, I was driving to Who-the-fuck-cares, and was staying for who-the-hell-knew-how-long.
All I knew was that I was no longer Genevieve Asher Spencer.
I still had a little over a month before I turned eighteen but I was emancipated from the state of Tennessee and with help, I legally changed my name to Asher Spence.
Genevieve was a foster kid who failed, and who was failed.
Asher was strong as steel, and there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that was going to stop her—at least, that was my goal.
I literally only had myself to answer to. I didn’t have any long lost siblings to find. I had no desire to find my birth parents.
There was just me, driving along the spider web of freeways until I found a place that simply “felt” right. Then maybe I’d find something worth living for. I refused to believe I was put on this earth for nothing more than being a foster care kid who the system failed.
I continued driving up I-94, passing through Chicago and going north into Wisconsin. Each time I saw an exit sign, I made a split decision: keep going, or turn. This journey was completely random and it felt good.
Good to be driving, to be moving. I needed to be moving.
The standstill traffic of Chicago nearly sent me into a panic attack. Too much downtime was not so great for
the memories. Those visions, reliving my nightmares? They needed to stay the fuck in the past. I didn’t need them in my future.
Nor in my present.
I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel as the radio DJ faded into one of the newer radio hits. I hadn’t been too privy with music the last two months; didn’t have radio or television where I just left. Most of the music that continued to play, I’d never heard before but after fourteen hours of the stuff I found myself humming along to the notes and melodies.
Fighting off a yawn, I popped the top of a new Monster, sitting in the cup holder next to me. With my eyes on the road, I chugged down the large can, taking deep breaths through my nose as I did.
When the can was empty, I squeezed it with my hand and let it join the liter of other cans at the floor of the passenger seat.
I was going to have to find a place to stop soon. It wasn’t like I could just drive and drive and drive until I found a place to call home for however the hell knew how long. I’d left the east coast, South Carolina to be precise, at six last night and drove through the night hours, over and through the mountains which didn’t prove to be my brightest idea but hey, I did it, I made it, and now I was somewhere north of Chicago.
I wasn’t sure when I started heading north rather than west, but like I said—I didn’t have an end goal.
The last week had been a whirlwind but shit, my entire life had been one catastrophe after another.
I left one hell, only to be kicked out of another. I pinched my mouth together, pissed at myself for the reminder of my fuck ups.
I looked down to my right arm, at the still healing mass of colors swirling there. That was one good thing about being on my own—I could do whatever the fuck I wanted, and if those prestigious assholes who could do nothing other than yell at you, didn’t want me? Well then dammit, I was doing something for me.
Not even four hours after being kicked out, I found myself in a tattoo parlor that was recommended by some of the tattooed men in the area—there were a number of them where I came from—and was handing over a sketch I’d been working on. I had a day or two to kill, so I spent my hours in a tattoo chair. Now, aside from the red healing, my arm was a mass of watercolor swashes and blots. When I was told there may be discomfort, that I should consider a multi-day session, I simply shrugged it off.
