“Stunned. Angry. I’ll be glad when we figure out how to help.” Delaney had called church for early the next morning specifically for that purpose.
“What can be done from Oklahoma?”
“Some of the guys were talking about the Oklahoma City bombing. The club did a run to volunteer at that site for search and rescue. There’s already stuff going around about putting together a cross-country volunteer run like that to help in New York.” But they were a couple days’ ride from New York. Were they too far to be of use? “Delaney mentioned a blood run, too, where we pick up donations from a blood drive and ride a relay to get it to New York. I don’t know. We have to do something, though, don’t we?”
“Leah said Gunner’s talking about reenlisting, if we go to war over this. She’s terrified he’ll do it.” Early reports were that Muslim extremists had hijacked the planes, and there were already rumblings of war. Cecily locked her blue eyes on him. “Would you do that? Enlist?”
He wasn’t sure what answer she hoped for, but he knew the answer he had. He didn’t share his brother’s and grandfather’s suspicious hatred of the white world, but he’d grown up in his grandfather’s house, and he lived in the world as an Osage man. He had his share of angry distrust. He’d never work, in any capacity, for a government that had so abused his people and done so as a matter of policy. He’d certainly never take up arms for it.
“No. I’ll do what I can, if there’s anything I can do. But not that.”
“I’m glad.” She shifted to her side and curled forward, setting her head on his towel-covered thigh. “It feels like today broke the world.”
He brushed his hand over her hair, down her bare back, letting his fingertips trace the knobs of her spine. “I don’t know. Maybe. But it’ll heal.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
They sat like that, quietly, Cecily’s head in his lap, Caleb stroking her hair, her back, his fingers grazing the sweet slope of her ass on each downward sweep. With her head so close, and nothing but his towel and the covers between their bodies, it was no wonder that he was obnoxiously, obviously hard within a minute or so. But it didn’t seem the right time to start something. Not today.
But then Cecily pulled the towel loose from his waist and took hold of his shaft, and it was the perfect time. Something good to heal the break. She pulled him to her mouth and sucked his tip, and he clutched his fingers into one soft globe of her ass.
“Fuck, baby.”
She moaned in response and sucked him deeper. Before he lost himself completely to her mouth and hand, Caleb pushed on her hip, urging her to give him access. She did so, twisting back at the waist without losing her rhythm at his cock, and he slid his hand between her legs, over that sweet, soft, pale, bare flesh. Ah, she was wet. She had a really beautiful pussy, a confection conjured in a dream: sleek lips meeting like a kiss over a tight, pink, sweet center. In this position, in the dim light of a single lamp, he couldn’t see it, but he could feel it, the smooth slick of that tender skin, the firm, round bead of her clit, the snug grip around even a single finger.
He slid his middle finger into her and teased at her clit with his thumb, and she moaned around his cock. The shock of it yanked his head back.
When he pushed another finger into her and delved deep, finding the place that drove her wild and settling in there to make it happen, Cecily’s rhythm on his cock faltered and finally stopped as her hips picked up a rhythm of their own, a counterpoint to his thrusting fingers. She clamped her hands around him, tight to the point of pain, and rested her head on his thigh, fully diverted by what he was doing to her. He liked it this way, prolonging his own pleasure, extending it and enhancing it by seeing and feeling what he did to her.
Cecily was loud, almost always, and he loved it.
“Oh, fuck,” she moaned. “Oh fuck. Fuck me, fuck me.”
He picked up his pace, spread his fingers inside her, drew his thumb with light flicks over her clit each time he thrust his fingers deep.
“Oh God, I need it. Oh fuck, Caleb!”
“I’m bringing it, baby. Open wide.”
She flung her legs wide open, and he trebled his pace, fucking her hard with his hand, ravishing her, so much that he moved her whole body. She came wetly, splashing on his hand, screaming his name. Wanting to taste her, needing it, he shifted and climbed onto the bed, straddling her head, and buried his face in her soaked pussy, lapping up all her juices, sucking them from her. She screamed and rocked beneath him, clamping her legs around his head and her arms around his hips, and then she found him again and sucked him deep. He was so into her that he’d half forgotten his own aching cock, and his surprise at the intense pleasure of filling her mouth tore a shout from him.
She pulled back. “Fuck my mouth, fuck my mouth!”
“What?” he gasped, trying to see her upside down, between their bodies.
“I want to feel you fucking me everywhere! Fuck my mouth! Fuck all of me!”
Jesus! So that she’d have a way out if she needed it, he rolled them to their sides, and she took him back into her mouth. He gave an experimental thrust, then another, and she clamped her arms around his hips and took him deep. Fuck, oh fuck, that was good. Knowing she could back off, he let his cock find what it needed, and he set back to work feasting on her amazing pussy, so wet and sweet. Her hips rocked and trembled in his grasp, and he could feel another orgasm winding up through her quivering muscles.
And oh God, her moans and cries around his cock.
She was hot and slick everywhere, and she wanted him to fuck all of her, so just at the moment that he felt her body coiling up for its release, his slid a finger into her tight, smooth asshole. He’d never done that to her before, and he pulled enough rational thought out of the tempest of visceral sensation that he could judge her reaction and back off if she freaked.
She did not freak. Instead, she came instantly, explosively, screaming around his cock, the sound gargled around his thrusts. She drove her hips down, taking his finger deeper, and clamped her body more tightly around him at every possible point. Her climax washed over his face. And his finish landed right on hers, so fierce it was painful, and as he came down her throat, some kind of noise tore itself through his body out of his mouth.
He stayed right where he was, buried in her everywhere, until he could not put off the demand for breath. He leaned back and pulled out of her and then simply sagged, sucking in air.
“Jeepers,” she gasped at his thigh. The silly word struck him as particularly funny just now, and he laughed hard. She joined him.
“That was good?” he asked when he was able to assemble words into comprehensible order.
“That was the best ever.” She kissed his thigh. “But it feels weird to do it tonight.”
Caleb moved around on the bed so he could lie beside her, face to face. “No, baby. This is why the world’s not broken.”
“Because we just made each other come like crazy?”
“Because there’s still love and good feeling, and that will help people heal.”
Her expression faded to solemnity. “Caleb, I don’t think I’d heal if I lost you.”
He pulled her close and set his lips on her forehead. “I’m not going anywhere, Ciss. I’m home.”
~oOo~
Early the next morning, before they opened the station, the Bulls sat in their chapel. Twelve men, still stunned by the events of the day before, but their shock turning to anger and impatience. They were men of action; a day spent sitting impotently, ineffectually, watching the world they knew shake at its foundation had them all thrumming with the need to do something.
Apollo had been last in, taking his seat after Delaney stuck the gavel. Normally that meant a fine, but Apollo had a good excuse for his tardiness.
“You could’ve missed this, son,” Delaney said now, as Apollo settled in. “You should be with your woman.”
Last night, Jacinda had been admitted to the
hospital, probably for the rest of her pregnancy. Delaney had shared that much before Apollo had come through the doors himself.
“They’ve got her sedated, and I’m losing my head in the hospital. Her mom is there for her right now, and Barbara and I aren’t exactly best friends. It’s good I’m here. I don’t know how much use I’ll be, though.”
“What’s going on, brother? She going to be okay?”
Apollo took a long, deep breath. “You know her doctors have been doing shit all along to keep this baby inside her—she’s a girl, by the way. Now that she’s in the third trimester I’m allowed to tell you that. Her name is Luna.” A burst of congratulations went around the table, and Apollo received them with a weary smile. “Anyway, her best friend is in New York, at some conference at the WTC, and she can’t reach him. I guess the stress of it kicked something off inside her, and she went into labor. It’s way too early, so they gave her a bunch of shit to stop it, and it worked. But now she’s flat on her back, in the hospital, for the rest of the pregnancy, which hopefully won’t be for three more months. They’re giving her meds to help the baby develop faster, too. Honestly, I was too freaked out to understand most of what they told us, but she’s got like five different IV bags going, and they won’t even let her sit up in bed.” He laughed without humor. “We want this little girl so fucking bad, but if I’d known what she’d go through to have her, I’d have thrown myself in the way every way I could. Fuck, this is hard.”
Simon reached over and set his hand on Apollo’s shoulder. “She’s strong, bro. Your woman is tough as nails. It’ll be okay.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Apollo turned to the president. “So, what’s goin’ on? Is there news?”
With the attention of the table back on him, Delaney nodded. “We got two things to talk about, maybe three. First is easy—I’ve been on the horn last night and first thing this morning, putting together a blood relay run, from California through to New York City.”
Rad cut in. “Willa’s working with her hospital to set up a blood drive. I talked to the Reverend down the block, and we can set it up in their fellowship room. We can do it as early as Friday.”
“Good. The run starts in Cali this afternoon, so Friday is good. Everybody picking up the run is adding to it. We’ll ride it from Oklahoma City to Springfield, and hand it off to the Horde there. They’ll take it through Illinois and hand it off at the Indiana border. That sound good to everybody?”
All the heads around the table nodded.
“Good. Apollo, I don’t want you on this run. You work with Becker and get the details worked out, but as much as we can spare you, I’m sitting you out of anything that takes us out of Tulsa, until this baby gets born safe.”
“Okay, Prez. Thanks.”
“That’s alright. There’s gonna be plenty for you to do in town. Because we have to talk business, too. I heard from Irina. She wants to find a way to keep the runs going.”
Maverick barked an angry laugh. “That broad is fucking nuts. There’s no way, D. Heat is going to be a hundred times hotter at the borders. We can’t be moving truckloads of black market guns while every goddamn LEO in the country is hunting terrorists.”
“Mav’s right,” said Gunner, whose leg was thumping the whole table like an earthquake. “We’ll end up in some black site prison in the middle of Saudi Arabia.”
Leaning back in his chair, Becker nodded. “You know I agree with them. The work is dangerous enough as it is.”
“I agree, too,” Delaney said. “But she’s close to whatever it is she’s got going down south, and she doesn’t want to lose momentum. So we need to bring her a strong case to lay low, or a new plan for the runs if they continue. That’s where you come in, Apollo. Any time you can give us to dig for intel and see what you can see about how things work now, what kind of new threat we face at the borders, if there’s a way around it, if we need to change our routes or our partners, anything. Put something together I can share with her. We all need to back off and regroup.”
“That’ll hit our bottom line, won’t it?” Fitz asked. “If the Russian work slows down?”
Like Caleb, Fitz was a new patch, and their take was much smaller than the older members’. While the senior officers could wipe their asses with Benjamins, and most of the other patches were doing just fine, the youngest members were doing only okay. Better than okay, really, but still. The difference was pretty stark. They hadn’t had a lot of time to build up their nest egg. Caleb was okay, because he didn’t spend much money. He could easily live on his station earnings, so most of his club take was saved. But Fitz supported his mom and grandma on his earnings, too.
“It will,” Simon, the club secretary, answered. “But we’ve got a thick, soft cushion, so we can take a hit for awhile.”
“Speak for yourself,” Wally grumbled. He spent money as fast as it came in.
“That you can’t manage money is not the club’s problem, boy,” Rad growled. “Unless you make it our problem.”
Rad’s threat hit home and, chastened, Wally settled back into his seat and made himself as small as he could. Which wasn’t small at all.
~oOo~
Caleb reclined on what amounted to a padded lawn chair and squeezed the little sand-filled balloon the nurse had given him. He watched his blood ooze through the clear plastic tube, down into a clear plastic bag.
It wasn’t his first time donating blood. His RzRz type was rare and specific to his ethnic group, so he donated fairly regularly, a couple times a year, at the Osage Nation Health Center in Hominy. Donating blood was just about literally the least a person could do and still be doing anything. It was a half-hour rest and a cookie.
Here in the basement of the Glory to the Savior Fellowship Church, down the block from Delaney’s Sinclair, their fellowship room was set up as a blood donation center, with a couple dozen identical collapsible chaise lounges arranged in rows, and a small army of nurses deployed to collect the blood and tend to the donors. All the Bulls had donated. A couple had been a bit green around the gills at the idea, and Caleb meant to get some mileage out of that. Wally had been one of them, and he was a big, burly dude. Seeing him go faint at the sight of his own blood filling up a pint packet—well, that was worth a pint of his own to see.
More than the Bulls had offered up an arm to do some little part in the aftermath of what everyone had started calling the 9/11 attacks—the date on which the attacks had happened, and the number for emergency help, too. That was too poetic to be coincidence. The shithead terrorist bastards had probably thought themselves clever for picking that date. They probably hadn’t expected Americans to stand right up, while the dust of destroyed buildings and lives still floated in the air, and get to work. People had been going nonstop all across the country—fire departments from as far as the West Coast sending teams for search and rescue, hospitals sending teams for medical intervention, regular folks sending monetary donations and lining up around blocks, waiting to give their blood.
There were some assholes, too, defacing mosques and attacking Muslims or just darker people the idiots thought might be Muslim—Caleb himself had gotten a face full of somebody’s drive-thru soda, heaved from a car driving past him on the road—but the strongest sentiment pulsing from Tulsa and everywhere else was a grieving solidarity. Thousands of people, from all walks of life, had been murdered in the attacks. For the most part, it had brought people together.
Caleb hoped it would stay that way.
On this day, the Bulls-sponsored blood drive, the fellowship room was Standing Room Only, and every time a chair became available, it was immediately occupied again. All the neighborhood, and all the Bulls’ family and satellites, had stood up and shown up.
“Hey.” Willa sat beside him. “You’re done. Let’s get you unstuck.”
Feeling mellow and a little sleepy, as he always did when he gave blood, Caleb simply smiled and watched Rad’s old lady remove the needle and press a big wad of gauze on the site
.
“Hold this for a sec, please.”
He reached across his body and pressed down on the gauze while she dealt with the needle and bag. No part of the process made him feel the least bit queasy. It was just blood; he was full of it.
She taped the gauze down firmly, and he moved his hand out of the way. “You seem a little lethargic,” she said, frowning at him as she folded his arm at the elbow. “You okay?”
“I’m good. I always get quiet when I donate. Don’t know why. But I’m good.”
“I’m glad you donate regularly. People with rare blood types, especially ethnic-specific types, really help.”
“Yeah, the Health Center up home does a lot of campaigning, in the schools and all over. Most people I know who can, do.”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 21
