He closed the door and let his thoughts become buried in her. God, he would have loved to tell his friend how much she meant to him. She was a beautiful soul in and out, and he was lucky to have her in his life.
He’d barely seen her earlier when Mary was there, but now he could go take her in his arms and maybe talk her into spending some time with him. If he knew her, though, she’d tell him he had to wait until five o’clock. He’d never told her she had to work until five every day, and yet she did most of the time. Sometimes she even worked later. He knew she did things for him on the weekends too.
So he was going to the office where she was sure to be. He practically sprinted down the hall. When he got close to the door, though, he slowed down to his Jet gait and swagger. Couldn’t look too eager. When he walked in, though, she was nowhere to be seen. There were two big file boxes on the desk next to the computer but no sign of Emily.
He walked back to the kitchen and peeked in there but struck out. He walked back down the hall and the bathroom door was open, so he concluded the only other place she might be would be her bedroom—unless, of course, she’d left the house for some reason. When he got to her door, he tapped on it. “Emily? You in there?” He thought he heard her say something. “Emily?”
“I don’t want to talk right now.”
Oh, Christ. More boyfriend problems. What did that asshole do this time? “Come on, Emily. Come out. I’ll listen.”
Sounding more angry: “I’m not ready.”
That was weird. He’d never heard that tone from her before. “Okay. Well…I’ll be out here when you are.” If he didn’t know better, she almost sounded angry at him. Strange. He decided to go work more on the new music he and Brian were creating. Several of the songs were ready for drums and vocals, but a couple were still a little rough. And he felt like he had one more song in him for now, but it wasn’t quite ready to come out—not yet, anyway.
So he grabbed a can of Coke and headed into the music room. He lost track of time when he worked on his music, so he wasn’t sure how long he’d been in there when Emily came in the room. She was not happy, and he couldn’t tell if she was upset, angry, sad, or all of the above. “Hey. Ready to talk?” He hoped his voice sounded sympathetic and supportive.
She nodded. “Yeah. Can we talk in the kitchen? I just made some coffee.”
At night? Well, he wasn’t going to question it. “Yeah, okay.” He set the guitar in its stand and then stretched. That was how he could tell he’d been sitting for well over an hour, maybe two.
When they got to the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of fresh java. “Want some?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m good.” She finished doctoring her coffee and then sat down at the table next to him. “So what’s going on?”
She blinked and he noticed that her jaw looked tense. “You…have an awful lot of porn.”
“What?”
“Downstairs…boxes and boxes. And not just plain old porn. You have some whacked-out shit. Lesbian porn, some hardcore kinky stuff, some weird blowjob ones, a bunch dealing strictly with anal. I mean…what the fuck, Clay? Why the hell do you have so much porn?”
Fuck. He wanted to ask her why the hell she’d been downstairs snooping in the first place, but that didn’t matter. Maybe he could just make light of it, and they could have a good laugh. “God, Emily, how much dust did you have to blow off those DVDs? I haven’t watched those in years.”
“Why do you still have them? No, actually, I really want to know why you have them at all. What the hell, Clay? You know that’s not healthy, right? That’s not normal.”
“How do you know that, Emily?” He was starting to feel a little defensive. “Guys like porn, all right?”
“That much? You could open your own adult store. There were at least three boxes of that crap. I nearly lost my lunch.” Her eyes glowered. “Is that what your little movie theater is for? So you can jack off in private?” He’d been tense up till that point, but when she suggested he used the theater to masturbate to porn, he started laughing. “I’m serious, Clay. I need to know.”
He took a deep breath. He was starting to sense that it really bothered her. “All I’m gonna say is that’s a part of my old life.”
Her hands were folded just in front of her coffee cup, her knuckles white. “Not good enough.”
Okay, so he was starting to care for this woman—a lot—but he wasn’t going to start baring his entire soul to her. “Sorry, but that’s all you’re getting.”
She sat still for a few moments, staring inside her coffee cup. “All right. Then I’m giving you my two weeks’ notice.”
“What? You kidding me?”
“No. I’m dead serious.”
“You’re leaving if I don’t tell you about something that means nothing to me now.”
“Yeah…because right now you seem like some weird creepy pervert. I need to understand.”
Part of him wanted to tell her. He did. But the other part of him—the part that believed she was just playing around with him before she decided to marry douche boy after all—didn’t want to say a word. So maybe she’d take a compromise. “Look—I’m not ready to tell you. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll tell you two months from now.”
“No dice. You’re just hoping I forget it.”
He let out a breath. “No. I’m hoping I feel like I can trust you more then.”
She looked hurt. “You don’t think you can trust me?”
He forced his jaw to relax. “It’s my guts—everything inside—you’re talking about here, Emily. You have no idea.”
Her voice was quiet. “What do you need from me to know it’s okay?”
He wasn’t worried about her saying anything. She’d signed the non-disclosure statement day one of her employment. No, he was worried what Emily—the girl he was starting to fall for in a huge way—might do to him once she heard his story. He shook his head. “There’s nothing you can give me that will make me feel better about it.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” She finished her coffee and stood. “You have my two-week notice. Do you need that in writing?”
He sighed. “Wait.” He couldn’t believe he was going to fucking do it. “I’ll tell you. Sit down.” He walked over to the liquor cabinet. He would do this…but he was going to need a stiff drink first—or maybe several.
Chapter Twenty-three
THE WHISKEY WAS hot going down, and Clay knew it was going to hit him in a few minutes. “Okay…the porn collection. Sorry, but I’m gonna have to backtrack a little for you to understand it.”
“That’s fine. I’m willing to listen.” She refilled her coffee too, and that was good, because Clay was able to feel his muscles relax just a little bit—and that was all he needed.
“So…the story starts a long time ago. I graduated high school, right? Barely, but I did. The only thing that kept me there was band. Oh, and my friends. But graduation came, and me and my friends were excited to pursue our band dream full time. It was one of the most fun times of my life. We just wrote music—not much at first and definitely nothing worth recording—and played gigs. Fucking incredible. We lived like there was no tomorrow.” He ran his hands through his hair. So far, not bad.
Still, he poured another drink and took a swallow before continuing. “I dated some, but Jet? He was pretty new. He was the reason I could get up onstage and do what I did. He was fearless. And I met this beautiful woman. Christ. Her name was Abigail, and she turned my whole world upside down. She was incredible. She made me laugh. She made me happy. And I didn’t give a shit that I had nothing. I and my friends worked shitty little part-time jobs and played gigs. That was it. It was my world, and I wouldn’t have traded anything for it.
“Anyway, Abby…she rocked my world. I’d never felt anything like that before. It was hardcore and intense, and I would have done anything for her. But her dad hated my guts. Abby—she’s African American, and her dad hated me just because I was a
white boy. He didn’t think I was good enough for her. But we didn’t care. We kept seeing each other. We loved each other.
“And then she got pregnant. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Well, after giving it some thought, I knew I didn’t want her to get an abortion. My kid was growing inside the woman I loved. I wanted to do the right thing. So we got married. Yeah, her dad was really pissed then. My piss-ant job, though—no way it would pay for her medical expenses. She got on Medicaid, but still. I knew she couldn’t move in with me and my loser friends. That was no kind of life for my new wife and baby. I quit the band and got two almost full-time jobs, both shitty. I wanted to be a good man. I wanted to take care of my family.
“We were so happy at first. We lived in a shitty trailer in a shitty neighborhood, but it was ours, and we had a baby on the way.
“The jobs started to take their toll, though. I hardly saw Abby. I mostly slept when I was home. I did get to talk to the baby through her tummy, though, you know? And I was able to pay all our bills, but I was tired. Beyond tired. Before I knew it, the baby arrived. Little Jasmine Yerica Smith. She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Had her mama’s eyes and lips. I was the proudest daddy you’ve ever seen. I cried. There’s nothing like watching a child come into this world, but you can’t believe what it’s like when it’s your own. It’s a miracle.”
Okay, so now he was veering into the sappy. He needed another swig of whiskey. “I had a few days off from work, but I had to go back to both jobs at one point. Nothing had changed, really—I was working a lot, sleeping when I could, and spending as much time as I could with my wife and daughter. Our time together was quality, but there wasn’t much of it.
“Anyway, Jas was about seven or eight months old when I noticed Abby getting distant. And, uh, it took a while, but…” He swallowed. Now they were getting to the hard part. Could he keep himself from getting emotional? He had to. “I found out she was having an affair. It—ripped my heart in two. This woman I loved so much, more than life, and she was sleeping with someone else. That just killed me.
“We talked. And it was fucking stupid—I know. But we decided to work it out. She said she was sorry, that she felt so lonely without me, and she said she’d never do it again. I believed her. She was my baby, you know?”
Okay, now he was being a pussy. He was only able to keep going because Emily’s features had softened. She’d stopped looking so angry and started looking like she cared again. “So we made another go at it. I had to keep working, though. Even with my two jobs, we could barely make ends meet. Abby asked if I wanted her to work, but her job would have just barely paid for daycare. It would have been stupid to have Abs work so someone else could raise our kid. It bothered me, though, because I missed a lot of important things with Jas…but at least I knew her mom was taking good care of her.
“And then she did it again. She should have just fucking stabbed me in the heart. I was lost then. I stayed with some friends for a few days and then we talked. She wanted to try again, she said, but I couldn’t trust her anymore. She was going to keep stomping on my heart, and I was a dumb ass if I let her. Turned out she’d been screwing around with the same guy she had been the first time. Maybe she’d never stopped. I didn’t want her to hurt me again.
“It wasn’t long before I had the child support people crawling up my ass. I really wanted to take Jas, but I couldn’t. She knew her mom better, spent more time with her. She hardly knew me and, besides, I’d have to pay a babysitter all the time. So I lost the woman I loved and my daughter at the same time. It was like my heart was pulled out of my chest and thrown into a shredder. So I decided fuck it. I wasn’t gonna keep working my ass off doing shit I fucking hated for nothing. No one appreciated my hard work. Oh, I kept the better-paying shitty job. I was a cook at a down-home restaurant. Nothing fancy, but steady work. They would keep me working days. And then I called Brian. He and I had been in our first band together, and I knew he was still playing in a band. But I asked if he wanted to do something with me again, and he said hell, yeah, and Last Five Seconds was born. Not the one you know now—we’ve had a few changes in line up. Still, that was the beginning.
“That’s when I really became Jet. Before, Jet was just kind of a way to be a bad ass onstage, you know, to kind of get over my nerves of being in front of an audience. He still was. I didn’t want to get hurt again. But you gotta realize…I was, like, twenty-four or something. I was horny. Goddamn. I could have had sex twenty times a day. Porn helped. I’d put in something—and it varied. What worked one day sucked the next.” Emily grimaced. “Sorry. You get the idea—the porn made it to where I didn’t need a girlfriend. I didn’t have to worry about a fucking messy relationship, right?
“It was pretty lonely, though, and pretty boring. Jet was full blown by then. I discovered when I was Jet, I could fuck a woman and not give a shit. It kept me from getting hurt.
“A few years later, though, I let my guard down. There was this woman I let in. We were friends at first, but she was something else. She was safe-ish…she had a boyfriend and didn’t seem interested in me—until she was. Jet had that effect on women. We were actually together for a while. It was great while it lasted, but…well, she saw the porn too. I used to keep it on these bookshelves. Part of it was to scare women away—and it worked. I hadn’t wanted to scare her away, but I thought she loved me for who I was. Aw, she did. It just didn’t work. She loved somebody else, and I was kinda just rebound guy.” Fuck. He did it again. He told her something he shouldn’t have.
Still…she was listening and she wasn’t saying anything. Should he keep going? “So…the porn now? Just a reminder. You need to know? I wanna watch porn, I got my computer, and I got Pay Per View. I don’t need DVDs anymore. And if you had really checked out my movie theater, you would have booted up the computer and found movies on there. And under the skirt of the table are DVDs me and my buddies watch. No porn.”
Emily seemed hesitant, but she said, “Still, why do you have to keep it?”
Clay smiled. “You think Goodwill would like seeing that as a donation?”
She laughed. “Okay. You got me. You could throw it away.”
“Yeah, I guess I could. It’s not hurting anything, though.”
Emily didn’t say another word at first. “So why don’t you have visitation with your daughter?”
“I do.”
“I’ve been here close to two months and have never seen her.”
“She’s in some kind of summer camp. She’s gonna be here in two weeks. I can’t wait for you to meet her.” He searched her eyes. “That is, if you plan to still be here.”
“I just have a question. Who slept with me?”
“What do you mean?”
Emily took a deep breath. “You talked about Jet and Clay. Has Clay ever had sex with anyone other than Abby?”
“Oh, yeah. He loved Val too.” He finished the whiskey in the glass. “Sorry. You probably didn’t need to hear that.”
“So…who slept with me?”
He swallowed. Oh, God. This was either gonna make or break him, and he didn’t know that he had the balls to do it. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Didn’t matter—he was already splayed out on the table, and all she had to do was chop his head off. “Clay.”
She searched his eyes, and he saw her eyes soften. “Then I’ll stay.”
Chapter Twenty-four
EMILY FELT BAD about making Clay bare his soul, but she felt better too. She’d been thinking he was a complete perv. She knew guys liked porn but the amount he owned was completely crazy, what appeared to be an obsession. Hearing his story, though, made it better. It was more in the past, and she thought she could deal with that.
She probably wouldn’t have felt quite so bad if she had been more serious about their—whatever it was. Relationship felt like too strong a word, but friendship didn’t quite cut it. Still, she wasn’t serious at all. He was her guy for now. She st
ill wasn’t sure about her future, with or without Bryce. She didn’t think Clay was the right guy for her in any capacity—but he was a hell of a lot of fun, and there was no denying how great he made her feel.
In fact, she didn’t know that she’d had that much fun having sex ever. The guy was a master in the bedroom. Well, more out of the bedroom. They didn’t do it much there. They’d done it on the washing machine, out back in his pool one night, in the shower, in the office, the living room, the stairs leading to the basement, the kitchen (twice), the hood of his car, the music room multiple times, once hanging on his big amp, and then another time in his room with her sitting on his dresser. Even in bed, she didn’t think they’d done it the same way twice. He made her feel so good. Some days she could hardly wait for Mary to get the fuck out of there, and Clay had gotten good at shooing Brian and other occasional visitors out the door mid-afternoon so they had the house all to themselves.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to try the theater downstairs. No matter what he said, she just couldn’t bring herself to go there yet.
One afternoon at four o’clock, the house was quiet. She’d finished the work she’d planned for the day, but she’d been thinking about Clay all afternoon. If he’d walked in the office door, she might have jumped on him even if Mary had still been in the house. She was feeling a little hot, a lot out of control, and she was wanting him again—wanting his mouth on her, his hands getting a little rough, finding new ways to bring her pleasure. He was like a drug, and she needed a fix.
She went to her room to change clothes into something a little more comfortable. If the house hadn’t been so eerily quiet, she might have considered putting on a little lingerie to surprise him. She walked over to her dresser, and as she opened a drawer, she saw a card with her name on it. It looked like Clay’s handwriting, but she hadn’t seen it that much. She was curious as hell.
Bullet Series Box Set Books 1-8 Page 85
