"Just conjugals then," he shot back, smile wicked.
"Well, duh," I agreed. "I can't go twenty years without a good fuck."
His head ducked at that. "Can't get enough, huh?" he asked, hand moving out to slide down my thigh, snagging my knee, dragging me until I moved to straddle him.
"Of you?" I asked, feeling his hands slide up my thighs to slip under the tee, cupping my bare ass, dragging my pussy against his hard cock through his thin pajama pants. "Never."
There was the rumbling approval in his chest as he reached between us to free his cock, letting my pussy slide against him with no barrier.
"Soaked," he growled as he reached toward the nightstand, snagging a condom that he ripped open with a tooth. "Take me in," he commanded a moment later after protecting us.
I didn't need any more encouragement than that.
My hips shifted up, and I took him in, doing so slowly, enjoying every thick inch, wanting to savor the way he filled me.
But as soon as he was settled deep, the night full of adrenaline and uncertainty making my body needy for release, I rode him hard and fast, feeling the sweat start to slick both our skin.
Edison's hands slid down my arms, snagging my wrists, twining them around his neck. "Hold on," he demanded, stopping my motion as his hands moved again down my sides to my hips, then thighs, then curling under my knees.
"What are..." I started, only to lose my sentence on a gasp as his hands yanked my legs up to my chest, coaxing my knees up and over his shoulders.
Once settled, his hands slid around my lower back, anchoring me to him, allowing him to control the pace, meaning there was no more hard or fast or wild.
His eyes held mine as he eased me back, then pulled me close again, rocking his cock gently inside me.
And as much as my body needed release, there was an understanding of the importance of this moment.
Over the past few days, I had let down my guards, I had given him my truth.
Tonight, he had given me his.
And that was big.
I wasn't so jaded that I couldn't understand how rare that was for people like us, how significant.
It wasn't time for a fuck.
It was time for something more, something deeper, something that acknowledged the connection between us.
It was time for something that it was clear we both felt.
Love.
And therefore something I had never experienced before.
Lovemaking.
Sensing the shift in understanding in me, Edison leaned forward, taking my lips to his, softer, but somehow deeper than ever before.
I felt it as we moved together - a heavy, weighted, pulling sensation inside.
It didn't surprise me in the least that as slowly as it built, when it crashed, my orgasm was almost overpowering, was strong enough to bring the tears to my eyes again.
But this time, I didn't fight them. I didn't try to hide them.
There was no reason.
Edison had seen every part of me.
And embraced it all with open arms.
I didn't need to hide anymore.
EPILOGUE
Edison - 1 day
"Busy night," Reign greeted me as I walked into the kitchen to make coffee, knowing that Lenny had all the morning cheer of a raccoon with rabies before her fix, and wanting to head that off.
Reign wasn't usually in the compound first thing in the morning, meaning that he was likely there just to confront me.
Someone had filled him in.
And that should have been my place.
"I know I am supposed to clear shit with you..."
"What?" he cut me off, smirking. "Like Laz and Pagan came to me first? I get shit comes up in life sometimes that needs to be handled in the moment. Can't expect you to call me in the middle of a crime scene clean-up. I just want to make sure it is all handled. And that Lenny isn't a loose end."
"Lenny's plan was to kill him herself. She won't be ratting us out if that is what you're worrying about. She just froze."
Reign nodded at that. "Satisfy your bloodlust for a while?"
"His abuse drove Lenny's sister to suicide to get away from him."
"So yes," he concluded, nodding. "And the scene? I heard he was a cop. Not one in our pockets, but a member of NBPD regardless."
"If I heard right, he was in Third Street's and Abruzzo's pockets. But they won't know to be pissed at us. It just looks like the good officer disappeared."
"Alright," Reign agreed, shrugging.
I wondered often what the man must have been through in his life to make him so accepting of all the crazy shit that surrounded his club and the men and women inside it. But when it came to sharing, Reign was about as tight-lipped as Roan and Reeve.
I guessed when you had seen more than two-thirds of your men lying dead in the place that was supposed to be the safest spot in the world for them, it was easy to think of everything else as no big deal.
"Church tomorrow. We all gotta talk about Adler."
Adler who was no longer cuffed around the compound.
But before I could ask anything, Reign was gone.
"Ugh! Who the fuck left boots in the middle of the fucking floor!"
I felt my lips curling upward, not giving a fuck how whipped that made me seem.
My rabies-riddled raccoon was up.
It was time to get some caffeine in her.
Lenny - 4 months
"Ya just don't want to do it 'cause you're worried yer mad skills won't match up."
Adler liked Meryl's.
The other newer bloods had happened in once, noted the complete lack of pussy frequenting the establishment, and headed off to more women-laden pastures.
Not Adler though.
He said it reminded him of some rundown watering hole he had frequented in Ireland, full of drunk old men talking bullshit for hours.
Meryl might have been disappointed that the entire Henchmen clan didn't come bursting down the doors every night, but when he found out that Adler had a strange penchant for buying the house rounds at least once a night, he warmed up to Adler who was more receptive of his ass-kissing than Edison had ever been.
"No. I'm saying you are going to be a bitch about losing, and blame it on how drunk you are tonight, instead of taking your defeat like a man."
"Big words from a woman who won't even pick up a dart... oh," his sentence cut off when I whipped the blade out of my boot, flicked it open, and tossed it across the room at the board, hitting just outside the bullseye as it always did, beating all his other throws from the night, even before he got drunk. "Well," he said, lips twitching as he turned back to me, "the sun was in my eyes," he told me, deadpan, looking right at the window behind me, pitch black as it always was at one AM.
"Yeah yeah yeah," I said, shaking my head at him. "So how are things going with your girl?"
A guardedness came up over his eyes, but not quite before my trained gaze could find a bit of sadness first. "She's not my girl. And her story ain't mine to tell either."
With that, he moved away, going back toward the bar, buying a round, and drowning it in cheap whiskey.
Maybe she wasn't his girl. Yet.
And maybe she was going through some serious shit.
But I had a feeling there would be a new girl around the compound soon.
After both Reeve and Sugar got their chicks, we had been placing bets on who was next to fall. Reeve's girl had her money on Roan, who she had a soft spot for. Sugar's girl went with Virgin because he was 'too damn fine not to have some chick blindside his ass.'
Me, I was sure my money was on the right brother.
Try as he might to hide what was going on, there was no denying Adler was finding out that his own damage could be lovable... by finding himself falling for a woman just as scarred.
Edison - 6 months
"You're letting me win," Lenny hissed down at me, where she had knocked me on my ass just a second before.
>
She had eased up slightly on her training now that she didn't have a time and a date to take down a man who had sixty pounds of muscle on her. But she still went to the gym a few times a week, working out with some of the girls when they insisted, or just as often alone like she preferred.
She might have softened up to a few of the girls club members, but Lenny would always be Lenny - a bit of a loner, not someone anyone could ever call a joiner. She had no problem turning down offers to spa days and shopping trips, out and out claiming she was pretty sure that bamboo shoots under her nails would be a lot more enjoyable way to spend her day.
All in all, she got on a bit better with the guys than most of the girls, not able to relate to the wife and mom situations that most of the others had going on.
"I would never let you win," I objected, reaching up to snag her wrist, dragging her down to the floor with me, sitting next to my hip, her arm planted on my stomach. "I respect you too much for that."
"Yeah yeah yeah," she said, pretending to small-eye me. "You're just saying that to get in my pants."
I whipped upward, wrapping an arm around her back, turning, and dropping her onto the ground, my body covering hers. Too fast for her even to try to fight back.
"Well, I do love being in there."
She shocked back slightly.
She always did.
That word was still complicated for her.
I felt it.
She felt it.
She knew I knew she felt it.
And she damn sure knew I felt it because I had been telling her for two months.
But every time, a little part of her was surprised by it, alarmed by it, maybe just unsure of it as a whole.
It was like that by admitting it aloud, she would risk the chance of losing it.
It didn't matter how long it had been and how comfortable she had become with me, I was up against a lifetime of programming.
She had loved only one other person in her life.
And losing that person had nearly crippled her.
She was afraid of losing that again.
I couldn't blame her for that.
Especially when not a single man in her life had allowed her to believe that it was safe to love someone.
We would get there.
Lenny - 1 year
Grief was a strange thing.
It had hit me hard and overwhelming at first. And even in the months after, was a constant dull ache inside. Then it slowly shifted to something different, just a quiet sadness that came upon me in silent moments, or when something reminded me of her.
But on the one-year anniversary of her death, it felt like something vital had been ripped out of me all over again. It felt like I was bleeding internally. It felt like it would never stop.
Edison's hand moved off the wheel, reaching over the console to squeeze my knee.
The tulips in my lap were cheesy and sentimental.
So you know I didn't buy them.
Summer had come by the compound to drop them off to me, encouraging me to put them on the grave, insisting that it was important to acknowledge the day.
And Edison had jumped on that bandwagon, ruining my plans to lay in bed with a bottle of Jack, trying to avoid the entire anniversary in general.
So we were on the way to the cemetery, a place I hadn't visited since we had had the funeral. It seemed useless to me, to visit a grave.
Letha wasn't there.
It was just what was left of her body in the ground.
If there was an afterlife, I really doubted she would spend it sitting on her grave waiting for people to come and sob at her.
First, that was a ridiculous thought.
Second, that wasn't the kind of person Letha was.
But to appease everyone else, I would go to the grave; I would put down flowers; I would put on a show of being a normal human being.
Hell, I hadn't even seen the gravestone that had been put down a few months after the service. When Summer had brought it up, I maybe had lost my shit a little bit, leaving Edison to assure me that he would handle it.
So I didn't know what to expect as we walked up to the site that was rife with bad memories, Edison's hand an anchor at my lower back, the flowers unusually weighted in my hands.
And when I saw the granite sitting there, her name and birth and death dates, it had knocked the wind right out of me. There was something so final about a gravestone, even more so than the casket.
Beloved sister.
That was the phrase Edison had chosen.
And it couldn't have been more fitting.
That was what she had been.
The most beloved of sisters.
Loved even by someone as hard-hearted as me.
And on the sides of those words?
Yeah, that was what finally broke through the dam I had tried to put up in my eyes leading up to this day, knowing how hard it was going to be, and how much I didn't want to lose it in front of everyone again.
A teapot on one side.
And a teacup on the other.
And not just any teapot and cup.
The exact ones that had been tattooed on us.
The exact ones we used to have tea parties with as kids.
The flowers dropped onto the soft grass of her grave as Edison turned and pulled me to his chest at the sound of my sob.
Then, well, he did what he had done a year before. He held me. He let me purge it all. Then he took me home to an apartment he had insisted on eight months before, not wanting to live on Third Street turf. I had no arguments aside from I would continue to pay toward that rent what I paid to my old rent. There was an argument because Edison was the kind of man who liked to take care of you, and I was not the kind of woman who needed to be taken care of. In the end, he made me take a hundred off the top, and we called it a deal.
He pulled off my clothes, dragged me into bed, and just let me grieve.
I turned to him later that night, eyes cried dry, soul wrung of most of the pain.
And it finally happened.
The last guard fell.
The words that scared me more than anything came out of my lips when he turned to me. "You okay?" he asked, fingers stroking down my jaw.
"I love you." They rushed out, practically tripping over one another to finally be expressed. They felt weird, clumsy, foreign as the Russian Edison had been teaching me, on my tongue.
But right.
They were so right.
And so incredibly overdue.
The look of wonder on his face at hearing them was all the proof I needed that I had finally found something I had never been sure existed before - a man I could trust with that last bit of me.
But he had it.
And I knew he would take care of it.
Always.
Lenny - 9 years
It was never planned.
Actually, it was never a discussion we had had.
Children.
I guessed when your lives had been as fucked up as ours had, you didn't give much thought to them, even as they popped out all around you. The goddamn Henchmen bred like rabbits, it seemed.
But not us.
Me and Edison, we were happy. Just the two of us.
It wasn't planned.
What was planned was the procedure to remove my IUD when, out of nowhere, I was getting piercing, excruciating pains in my lower belly with no clear reason why it was happening. Until, lo and behold, the gyno told me that it was common, that women got copper toxicity, or their bodies simply couldn't take the foreign invasion anymore.
So they ripped that bitch out.
And it hurt every bit as much as I thought it would.
I was thrown on the Pill instead, on which I stayed for four months.
Before I missed my period.
And then I got sick.
So incredibly freaking sick.
As the reality dawned on me, I can't claim I was elated, over-the-moon, or excited.
I had changed a bit in my time with Edison.
I had opened up, become somewhat less guarded.
But I was still me.
Crass, blunt, sarcastic, jaded.
Those weren't exactly words people would use to describe the ideal mother.
Speaking of mothers, mine was pretty shitty.
I didn't have a good role model.
I didn't feel secure in my ability to raise a human, and have it come out even remotely well-adjusted.
So I hadn't been one of the glowing, 'I am carrying a miracle inside me' pregnant women.
I had been sick, literally.
Then I had been sick figuratively.
Every single waking moment of my day.
And then at night when I was plagued by dreams of screaming babies that I couldn't get over a wall in my way to find. Like my mental wall I had up against the idea of having children.
Edison, well, he did have a mother who had loved him dearly. He had been around the Henchmen kids longer than I had, had taken to their games easily, had allowed the girls to put flowers in his hair and beard after braiding it with clumsy fingers, had fallen to the ground, groaning as he held the invisible sword wounds on his chest that one of the boys had inflicted on him.
He was happy.
And he was patient with my uncharacteristically insecure ramblings.
He didn't try to tell me everything would be fine, to belittle my worries. He just let me speak. Then held me, telling me all the reasons he thought I was going to make a good mother, often coming back to the fact that, even a child myself, I had been a mother to Letha.
Her name still brought a pang, but one more surrounded with nostalgia and warmth than the bitter cold current of grief.
"Mama," Layna called from the room that would soon be her playroom. If we could ever get any of the boxes unpacked, that is.
She was five, just having her birthday the week before our move out of an apartment and into a townhouse a few doors down from Cash.
And she was, well, nothing like me.
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