by Hazel Kelly
I dragged a finger through his cum and brought it to my lips, sucking it clean as I held his gaze.
And when an irresistible smile broke through his exasperated expression, I realized I was way beyond fucked.
N I N E T E E N
- Alex -
“You know what we have to do now,” I said, draping my hands over Gemma’s slippery legs, which lay lifeless across my lap.
“There’s no more doing,” she whispered, her flushed body strewn across the hot tiles. “I’m done. Done.”
“We’ve been in here long enough. We’re liable to melt.”
“Go,” she said, lifting her head and shooing me away. “Save yourself.”
“Not a chance. I’m more determined than ever to keep you alive after that.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “Is that so?”
“It is.”
She cocked her head and smiled lazily, closed her eyes, and lay back down.
“I’m so sorry about this,” I said, ducking under her legs so I could stand up. “But you’ve left me no choice.”
“Shhh,” she said, carrying on like she was perfectly happy to pass out in the steam room.
I scooped her limp body up and paused, giving her a chance to hook her arms around my neck.
“Where are we going?”
I didn’t want to answer her. I was afraid if I did, she might jerk and cause me to slip on the wet floor. Fortunately, she was too exhausted to press me further as I pulled the steam room door open, blasting us with surprisingly chilly chlorine-scented air.
“Brrrr,” Gemma said, tightening her grip on me.
I walked to the edge of the pool and jumped.
She started screaming before she even hit the water and popped back to the surface like a buoy. “Oh my God,” she panted, swimming towards the closest ladder. “It’s so fucking cold! What were you thinking?!”
“Desperate times,” I said, grabbing my Speedo while she scrambled for her clothes.
“Join me for a shower?” I asked, enjoying the view as I followed her towards the locker rooms.
“Not a chance,” she said. “We need to be gone before maintenance arrives or I’m going to be in big trouble with Mary.”
I glanced at the clock. “When’s that?”
“Fifteen minutes,” she said, her expression stern. “So don’t dilly-dally.”
I laughed. “You seemed to think we had all the time in the world when I was dillying your dally five minutes ago.”
“That was before you dunked me in an ice bath and brought me to my senses.”
“I’ll race you,” I said, flashing my eyebrows before disappearing into the men’s locker room.
“Real mature!” she called after me.
She arrived at the front desk eight minutes later to find me leaning against it, checking my watch.
“What held you up?” I asked. “I was starting to worry.”
“Very funny,” she said, her wet hair dripping all over the shoulders of a fresh uniform shirt. “I was like lightning.”
“Where’d you get the dry clothes?” I asked, eager for any excuse to check her out, especially now that I knew the wonders she was hiding beneath all that cotton.
“I keep a spare outfit at work.”
“For occasions like this?”
“No,” she said, scolding me with her eyes. “Ever since… Never mind. It’s a gross story.”
“I’m not squeamish,” I said, watching her gather her things from behind the front desk.
She slung her leather purse across her body and spun her keychain around her finger. “Let’s just say there’s a reason we don’t let kids under twelve use the treadmills anymore.”
I started for the door.
“Especially the week after Halloween,” she said, flicking the last overhead light off.
I stepped into the cool night air and waited for her to set the alarm and lock the front doors, wishing I had the same confidence in everyone who had the keys to my gyms. Perhaps if that were the case, selling never would’ve crossed my mind.
“What are you doing?” she asked when I fell in step beside her.
“Walking you to your car.”
“Because it’s dark or because you’re one of those guys that gets really clingy after a girl gives it up?”
“I’ve never been accused of being clingy before.”
“For some reason, I believe that,” she said, pulling a red beanie on over her wet hair.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She stopped in her tracks so abruptly I figured we were about to get skunked. But when I followed her line of sight, my eyes came to rest on a two-door Pontiac in the far corner of the lot beneath the farthest parking light.
Hateful slurs were written in shaving cream across the windshield and hood, many of which had been smeared by the trash dumped over every surface. I didn’t need to ask if it was her car. I could tell by the defeated look on her face as she approached it.
I looked around to see if anyone was in the area, but the lot was still and silent apart from the half-crushed Coke cans rolling back and forth in the breeze near her car.
“I’m calling the police,” I said, confident that my buddy on the force would send someone right away.
She looked like she was trying to decide if she should start cleaning or fall to her knees. “Don’t bother.”
“But—”
“I know who did this.” She stared at an overturned Chinese takeout box snagged on one of her windshield wipers. “The cops never do anything about it.”
“This has happened before?” I asked, pulling a towel out of my bag. There was no chance in hell I was going to let her look at those nasty words for one more second.
“Variations of it.”
I hoped she would continue the explanation, but she didn’t.
“None of this is true,” I said, tossing the towel over the windshield and dragging it towards me to smear the offensive profanities. “You aren’t any of these things.”
“Just don’t, okay?” she said, unable to meet my eyes.
I crumpled the towel, and when I didn’t see a garbage can, I wedged it under her front wheel for the time being.
“Alex?”
I stood up and looked across the hood at her.
“Can I have a ride home?”
She barely said a word in the car, and all the ideas I had for how to comfort her seemed grossly inadequate.
“The police need to know this happened,” I said.
“The police are sick of hearing about it. I’ve been reporting this kind of garbage—pardon the pun—for the last six months.”
“Your ex?”
She nodded.
“What the hell is wrong with this guy?” I asked. “When a woman rejects me, I just sulk like a normal person.”
“Women reject you, do they?” she asked, smiling for the first time since we left the gym.
“They used to,” I said, checking the rearview mirror. “Before I got so handsome.”
She groaned. “I walked into that one.”
“Seriously, Gemma.” I squeezed my fists around the wheel and tried not to let the tension I felt seep into my voice. “I can’t have this guy harassing you like this.”
“With all due respect, I’m not your problem.”
“I’m not suggesting you are.”
“Besides, he’s harmless,” she said. “Sticks and stones, as they say.”
“There was nothing harmless about the condition of your car just now. Or the way it stole the smile from your face.”
“He’s a bully, nothing more,” she said, staring out the passenger window. “Reacting only gets a rise out of him.”
“Not the kind of reaction he’s going to get from me if I ever catch him hassling you.”
“He’ll find someone else to bully soon enough, and he’ll forget all about me.”
“I find it hard to believe that anyone could forget about you.”
“No offense, Alex, but I’m not really in the mood for niceties right now,” she said. “If you really want to make me feel better, forget you ever saw that.”
T W E N T Y
- Gemma -
I could tell Alex was fuming. Even in the dark, his knuckles looked white against the steering wheel, and he seemed to be thinking so hard I could practically hear the gears turning in his head.
“Just don’t let that asshole bring you down,” he said. “That’s what he wants. Don’t let him win.”
“He hasn’t won, Alex. Don’t you get it? That’s why he did this. He lost his favorite punching bag, and he’s beside himself.”
Alex’s jaw clenched so hard it reminded me that he wasn’t merely some scrawny teen pissed on my behalf anymore. He was a man—a big man—and he was probably capable of just as much anger as my ex.
I glanced at the digital clock and then out the windshield at the red and white brake lights ahead of us, wishing I were already home under Jeanie’s Snuggie with Tink licking my cheeks like nothing happened.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, his voice suddenly softer, as if he’d realized his anger wasn’t improving the atmosphere in the small car.
“Can I stop you?”
His lips twisted with tangible frustration.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just…embarrassed you even saw that. And right after what we just did.” I dropped my head back against the seat rest. “It was just bad timing.”
“There’s never a good time to have your car trashed and your reputation called into question.”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“How did you end up with a guy like that?”
I picked at my thumbnail.
“I don’t get it. When I look at you, I see a beautiful, smart woman who would never bend to the will of someone so…unstable.”
“Well, thanks for the compliment,” I said. “But I wasn’t always the person I am now.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve always been those things,” he said. “You forget that I’ve known you since you were a teenager, and even then you were the most—”
“That’s enough, Alex. More than enough.”
He came to a stop behind the car ahead of us and looked at me, his dark eyes sad in the dim light.
I exhaled. “Even if those nice things are true, I didn’t believe them for a long time. That’s how I ended up with a guy like that.”
His eyes turned down at the corners.
“I saw myself the way he saw me: as a pathetic, lonely, desperate fat ass. So when he treated me like that’s what I was, I didn’t see a problem with it.”
“Gemma—”
“You asked.”
“So what changed?”
“I don’t know,” I said, nodding towards the windshield when traffic started to move.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Leaving a situation like that takes courage,” he said. “Something gave you that.”
I didn’t want to relieve any of this. Not even for one second. All this pain was buried so deep inside me, and it took so much energy to keep it there. But I respected Alex. And I trusted him. He’d never given me any reason not to, and he’d never made me question my worth. So perhaps he deserved the truth. After all, if he couldn’t handle it, maybe he would distance himself from me before my feelings for him went any further…
“He broke my wrist,” I said finally.
“What?”
“Well, technically, I broke it,” I said. “From falling when he was knocking me around.”
He kept his eyes on the road.
“And he made a joke after he picked me up at the hospital.” My chest burned at the memory.
Alex stayed silent.
“He said maybe I’d finally lose some weight now that it would be harder for me to pick up a fork.”
Alex squeezed his jaw in one hand.
“It hit me like a truck then that he didn’t love me, that all he really loved was tearing me down. That he was the unworthy piece of shit, not me.”
Alex turned into the lot outside Jeanie’s apartment building.
“That’s when I decided I’d rather die trying to leave the relationship than die in it.”
He pulled up to the curb and put the car in park.
“Does that answer your question?”
He nodded.
I unbuckled my seatbelt. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Gemma?”
I looked at him and raised my brows.
His eyes pleaded with me. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say it doesn’t bother you. Say none of it bothers you.”
“I can’t say that,” he said. “It wouldn’t be true.”
My lips twitched towards a frown. “Then at least say it doesn’t spoil the nice time we had earlier.”
“Hey—” He reached over and cradled my cheek in his hand. “Nothing could spoil that.”
My heart cracked at the warmth of his touch, at the kindness in his eyes. I lifted a hand and pressed his against my cheek.
“You were…” His voice trailed off in a way that was so romantic I forgot everything we’d been discussing for a moment.
I leaned forward and kissed him, holding myself there for a second before parting my lips and letting him inhale my pain. When my eyes started to water, I sat back and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Thank you.”
“Do you need me to kiss you anywhere else?” he asked. “Because it would be an absolute pleasure to drag you in the backseat and—”
“Another time?” I asked.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
I pressed my lips together and let myself out, but as soon as I turned my back on his car, I heard the window rolling down and glanced over my shoulder. “Miss me already?” I asked.
“Naw. The view’s nice when you walk away, too.”
My cheeks blushed against the crisp evening air.
“Just wanted to say I’ll drive you to work in the morning. Save you having to find another way.”
“But you’re not on until ten.”
“You’re supposed to say ‘thanks, I look forward to seeing you then.’”
I smiled. “Thanks. I look forward to seeing you then.”
“I like it when you do what I tell you,” he said. “Gives me an idea for our next trip to the steam room.”
“Goodnight, Alex.”
“Great night, actually.”
I bit the inside of my cheek and disappeared into the building, relieved to be out of the chilly air with my wet hair.
“Is it raining?” Jeanie asked as I let myself in, the steam from a Cup Noodle rising around her face.
I slumped against the inside of the door and shook my head.
“Why are you smiling like an idiot?”
I sighed as Tinkerbell ran up and pressed her front paws against my knee. “Not because Ray dumped trash all over my car and wrote ‘fat whore’ across the windshield with whipped cream.”
Her face fell with her next bite, which splashed back in the steaming broth. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I wish.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yet you look like Santa just confirmed your place on the nice list… So what gives?”
I scooped Tink into my arms and let her skinny tongue lap at my cheeks.
“I’m waiting,” she said, still clutching her dinner to her chest.
“Alex drove me home.”
A surprised smile lifted her cheeks. “And?”
“That’s not all he did.”
T W E N T Y O N E
- Alex -
“I’m going to be a little late,” I said, pulling up along the curb where I’d dropped Gemma off the night before.
“How late?” Jimmy asked. “I’m meeting Cliff at 10:30.”
“What do you mean you’re meeting Cliff?”
>
“He wants to change the terms of the negotiation.”
“There is no negotiation,” I shouted into the phone. “He made an offer, and I’m thinking about it. Why the hell did he even get in touch with you?”
“Do you want me to tell you my best guess or what he said?”
“Both.”
“They’re sort of the same.”
“Talk fast,” I said as Gemma walked out of the building with a pretty Asian girl.
“He said you’ve been belligerent every time he’s tried to talk to you.”
“I have not been bellige—”
The women smiled in my direction.
“We’ll discuss this over breakfast,” I said, pushing the red circle on the screen too hard, which offered little comfort and left me missing the days when phone calls could be more dramatically ended. Then I chucked the phone in the center cup holder and got out.
“Morning,” I said over the car.
“You must be Alex,” Gemma’s friend said, stepping off the curb. “Jeanie.” She held her hand out. “Nice to finely meet you.”
“I understand you’re a bit of a hero,” I said, shaking her delicate hand. “Giving my fair lady here a safe place to stay.”
“Is it that obvious?” she asked, glancing at Gemma where she was blushing beside the passenger door. “Usually people can’t tell when my cape’s at the cleaners.”
I smiled.
“Perhaps it takes one to know one.” Her dark eyes scoured every inch of my face like she was on her way to inform a police sketch.
“So glad you guys are hitting it off,” Gemma said. “But I have to get to work.” She opened the door, slid into the car, and shut herself in. “Ready when you are!”
Jeanie stepped into my personal space with the curious intensity of a detective. “You seem like a good guy, Alex,” she said, lowering her voice. “But if I find out you’re not, I will find you, and I will—”
“What?” I asked. “Let me get away with everything but murder like you’ve done with Gemma’s ex?”
