Mercy affected a bored expression and said, “Sure thing, boss. Will do.”
Mercy’s bike was a 1995 Dyna Super Glide, with padded leather backrest on the bitch seat, matte black finish on the tank, and aftermarket black wheel spokes. He’d bought it from an old man who’d babied it, and then replaced the handlebars and wrapped the pipes himself. Like the rest of the boys, he was a decent mechanic, and did all the work on his personal ride. It was the single most valuable thing he’d ever owned; he paid to rent a garage in back of his apartment and covered it with a drop cloth every night.
It was fast – Jesus, was it fast – and it was beautiful in a dull, nondescript sort of way. The goal was not to get noticed by the law: no flashy colors, no logos, no speeding, no traffic violations. No one in Knoxville was ever going to catch a Dog disturbing the peace – they had too much at stake to get caught up in petty, punk kid bullshit.
Mercy spent the short ride to the Teague home enjoying the hell out of the wind in his face. Loving the sound of the engine. He’d ridden the bike all up and down the east coast, more times than he could count, and it was an extension of his body, a part of him in every sense. He rode without thought, giving his anxiety over to the pavement, letting the Dyna replace every worry with sensation.
Too soon, he was swooping into the driveway and killing the engine.
Ava’s truck was parked in front of the garage, the repainted Ford four-door that Maggie had wrecked some eight years before, black and shiny and still relevant, a nice chunk of safe vehicle that was appropriate for a kid like Ava to be driving.
Maggie’s garden was, as always, a profusion of seasonal colors as he made his way around the back and to the door off the patio. The sidewalk was flanked with yellow and orange and purple and deep blue flowers he didn’t know the names of. The Harley-Davidson welcome mat awaited the soles of his dirty boots. He would just wipe them, he reasoned; no sense taking them off since he didn’t plan to stay long. The entire walk around to the back door had built an acidic cramp in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t want to see Ava yet, not after last night. There were only so many more meetings in which he’d be able to spurn her open adoration.
He knocked and saw the sheer curtain flicker at the window: Ava checking to see who it was. When the door opened, he was greeted by the sight of her in one of Aidan’s old outgrown flannel shirts and a pair of black leggings. Her hair was a loose tumble of brown around her shoulders; her feet were bare; in her right hand, a .22 Colt revolver hung limp alongside her thigh.
She set the gun on the kitchen counter as she stepped back and let him come in.
Mercy blinked before he entered and heeled the door shut. He put on what felt like a normal grin. “When did you start answering the door with a gun in your hand?”
“When I was old enough to be left at home alone,” she replied without returning his smile.
There was a pale blankness to her face; she looked tired, yeah, and…something dark and suspicious in her eyes. Wary. She looked wary. And never before in her life had she shown him anything but bald acceptance and love. But now she had doubts; she didn’t know what to make of him, and that hurt – worse than he expected. Couple that with her blonde footballer, with Ghost’s trust, with Fisher’s killer drugs, with Jasmine’s taunt, with his overwhelming guilt…
Anger cycled through him in hot currents.
“You studying?” He gestured to the open textbooks at the table.
Ava moved to close and stack them, making a place for him to sit, if he wanted.
He sat.
“I can’t afford to fall behind my senior year,” she explained in a flat, uncharacteristic voice.
“Right.” He shrugged out of his cut and jacket and draped them over the back of the chair where he sat. “Bet it’s nice not to have to go into class, though.”
She made a noncommittal sound. “Dad sent you to check on me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “He thinks I’m going through some sort of late-onset teenage rebellion, and he thinks I’ll tell you all about it.”
He snorted. “Are you?”
“No.” She stepped toward the fridge. “Beer?”
He didn’t like this distant side of her, not even a little bit. She wasn’t supposed to act like a spurned lover, damn it. She was a little girl – his little girl. She wasn’t supposed to have hurt feelings, wasn’t supposed to harbor resentment or give him this newly realized cold shoulder.
She brought a six-pack of Michelob in brown bottles to the table and set it before him, taking the seat opposite, folding her hands on the tabletop in front of her.
Mercy uncapped the first beer and took a long pull.
The silence stretched in a nerve-racking way.
Ava stared at him, watchful and judgmental as a cat.
“Rough day?”
Mercy paused with the bottle halfway to his lips. It was his third bottle. Without much thought, he’d slugged down two beers and then opened another. He hadn’t been angry, that’s what he’d told himself. Not even a little bit. He was in good control of that shit these days. He wasn’t some character in a story Ava would write; he didn’t have blazing passions that got the best of his temper.
So why was he slugging Michelob like it was lifeblood?
“Nah.” He forced a smile that felt stiff and set the bottle back on the table, staring at the beaded condensation sliding down the sides so he didn’t have to stare at the way the old worn flannel shirt pulled tight over Ava’s breasts. Not only was he not himself, but he didn’t trust himself, and that was a dangerous state of being. “Just thirsty is all.”
He heard her take a deep breath, and then she said something that absolutely cut him to the bone. “I think you should leave.”
His head lifted at that, eyes finding her delicate porcelain face. She had dark circles smudged beneath her eyes. She looked pale and rattled. And it was his fault.
“Why?” he asked, swallowing.
“Because…” She bit her lip and took a deep breath, the shirt stretching tighter as her chest lifted. “Because I don’t know you anymore, Mercy. And it scares me.”
“I scare you? Me?” He scared every damn body, but not her, not his fillette. She’d never been scared of him for a second, and that was a safe harbor, he realized now, one that he needed badly.
“No. It’s just–” She shook her head, but she didn’t break eye contact. Her irises were a rich chocolate in the sunlight, same as her glinting hair. Tears welled up in their depths. “You treat me like a child, and you never did that before.”
Fuck her. Fuck her perception and her round tits and the way her mouth trembled and the way she’d turned into a woman before he could detach himself properly. Fuck her for that – for becoming someone he wanted when he still loved her for the little girl she’d always been.
He felt his muscles leap, felt the dangerous tension wind through them. “You are a child,” he said, coldly on purpose. “You’re seventeen goddamn years old, Ava, and you don’t even have sense not to get tossed outta school.”
His insult struck home, as hoped. But when she surged to her feet, she came around the table toward him, a move he hadn’t counted on.
“Stop!” she said as the tears started to pour down her cheeks. “It’s not fair! You know what you’re doing. You know how I feel…” She closed her eyes tight, the anguish in her doing devastating things to his self-control. When she opened her eyes again, they were bright and wet. “And you…you tease me. It’s fun for you! It’s not fair – you know I love you and you throw it in my face–”
She sucked in a gasp as he rose to his feet. Mercy was moving faster than he could think. He stood and he gathered her arms up in his hands and pulled her in close to him. He hated the crying so much. He hated being the cause of it.
“Stop,” he said, giving her a little shake even as he tucked her into his chest. “Hush, stop doing that.”
“You’re doing it again!” She struggled a moment, her efforts c
omical, and Mercy was this frustrated knot of protector and soother and suitor as he bent to kiss her cheek.
She was five-five, but that still left her a foot below him, and he did indeed have to bend. Her face was hot and damp with tears, her skin like satin against his. She went utterly still as his lips touched the tearstains. And without even breathing, she invaded him.
The clean smell of her shampoo. The taste of her tears. The feel of her body pressed to his. The faint thunder of her pulse against his own where they were skin-to-skin.
She loved him, and he’d known it for a long time now. Just like he knew that there was a deep place carved in her heart that she would leave open for him, waiting, hoping. She hadn’t chosen to feel the way she did. All those years, all those talks, all those moments her father had abandoned her into his care. This, her against him like this, was nothing like the coy invitation of the groupies, the dare of the thrill-seekers who wanted to snag a piece of a bad boy. This was the little girl he’d helped to raise growing up and flowering into a woman with a sex drive who didn’t want anyone to touch her but him. She was beautiful and fragile and ferocious. And she was honest – Ava was maybe the only honest thing in his life. And he’d watched her for too long, and he’d wondered too much, and she was this precious creature whose safety had become the point around which his existence pivoted.
“Mercy,” she whispered, and it was his final undoing.
He turned his head and captured her startled mouth with his own, his hands coming up to cup the delicate back of her skull, crushing her silken hair as he latched onto her and felt the most acute lust of his life burst with molten fervor in his veins.
She gasped; he felt her breath against his lips as he pushed hers wide and dove between with his tongue. Her mouth was so hot, so slick and wet. It was too sudden and uncertain and he’d let things build for too long – he couldn’t be slow and delicate and patient. He clutched her close to him and invaded her mouth, pulling her up higher, bending lower. God, he attacked her, without a shred of rational thought.
But then he felt her hands, clumsy with nerves and excitement, tangle in the front of his shirt. She stretched up on her toes. She was the one who tilted her head and changed the angle, giving him deeper access, opening her jaw wide to accept him.
He had to have her. He was volcanic with painful, frantic need. And she was giving herself to him, without a shred of reservation. He could read it in the way her body pressed to him: Please. Please, I need it too.
Please.
Please…
An image of her at age ten flooded his mind, with her hair braided and her smile pleading as she asked to ride on the back of his bike, just to the end of the street and back, not very far at all, pretty please.
Mercy shoved her away, violently. She gasped again, this time as their lips broke apart, and he watched her clutch her mouth, her eyes liquid with desire and huge with panic. He was so aroused that the sight of her like that almost propelled him back to her.
But he backed away, one step and then another. “No. No, no, no. Jesus. No.”
Ava reached for him. “Mercy–”
“No!” Distance, he needed more distance. Snatching his jacket and cut off the back of his chair, he shrugged back into them both at once, his back to her. “This is fucked up,” he said without looking at her. “Beyond fucked up.”
She took a shattered breath that pulled at him hard.
But he walked to the back door. And then opened it, stepped halfway through it. “Lock this behind me.” He finally risked a glance toward her, saw her standing with one arm banded around her middle and a hand still pressed over her mouth. She looked shell-shocked. “You hear me? Lock this door behind me.”
He stepped out and slammed the door. Took a pained, pitiful moment to brace a hand against it and collect himself. He didn’t move until he heard the deadbolt slide into place.
Ava closed her eyes tight and pressed her forehead to the cool painted wood of the door. Her pulse was beating at a pace that robbed her of oxygen, throbbing hardest in her breasts and between her legs, stirring urges in her that were elemental and hormonal, and didn’t need experience to fuel them. She felt weak, like her neck wouldn’t support her head, or her legs her weight. She braced her palms on the door and concentrated on breathing.
His mouth against hers. The way he’d all but attacked her.
Oh, she wanted to dissolve right here and now. She didn’t want to take one step away from this door and know that he’d kissed her like that, and then walked away from her.
She waited for the sound of his bike starting.
Instead, she heard his voice, just on the other side of the door. “Ava.”
Her throat was too tight to respond.
“Ava. Fillette.” His voice was calmer, more composed. “Open the door again,” he said, almost pleading. “Come on, sweetheart, unlock it.”
She forced her tongue to move. “Why?”
“Because…I didn’t do it right.”
Ava threw the locks, fumbling with the deadbolt, and then pulled the door wide.
Mercy’s tall, broad shape blotted out the sunlight. He crossed the threshold with slow, purposeful steps, backing her up, easing the door shut behind him. His eyes looked black here in the kitchen. It was with slow reverence that his hands lifted, and then settled at the sides of her head, his palms cradling her cheeks.
For the longest moment, he studied her face, and she held still, afraid he’d change his mind if she so much as breathed. Finally, one corner of his mouth twitched.
“I’m going to hell anyway, right?” he murmured.
And she closed her eyes as he leaned in and kissed her again.
She’d never kissed anyone before. It was so much messier than she’d always thought it would be. It was so undignified and basic and unrefined.
It was glorious.
Mercy kissed her and held her face and backed her up a step at a time until she hit the counter.
Heat poured through her. Her clothes chafed her skin. She wanted so many things, to touch and be touched, and her lack of experience was painfully embarrassing as she dug her fingers into his leather jacket and opened her lips for him.
“Easy, baby,” he whispered against her mouth. “Easy.”
She broke away from him, far enough to catch a breath, close enough for his face to be an indistinct blur.
His lips touched her cheek, cruised along the edge of her jaw. She felt his tongue at the artery along her throat and she shivered, fingers tightening in his jacket.
Was this happening? Had she fallen asleep and this was a dream? Or was Mercy truly kissing her neck? His hands migrating down her shoulders, her arms.
She closed her eyes and felt tears catching in her lashes.
Maybe this was just pity. Maybe this was just the next step in his game of keep-away, a natural progression.
She reached up, until her fingers knotted in his hair. “Don’t tease me,” she whispered, holding him to her. “Don’t, Mercy.”
He stilled, his body curled over hers, his hands at her waist, his mouth at her collarbone. She felt the slow, deliberate sweep of his tongue against her clavicle and fine tremors passed beneath her skin. “You don’t like it?” he asked, his voice cold and dark.
She pressed her fingertips against his scalp. “I’ve had dreams about this.” She blinked hard at the tears, drawing in a deep, shuddering breath. “But I’m so afraid you’ll push me away.”
Mercy straightened, and then his hands were at her hips, and he was lifting her up to sit on the counter. He lifted her like she was weightless. He stepped in closer, in between her knees, and he towered over her, one forearm braced on the cabinet face behind her head.
“Look at me.”
She did, head tipping back against the cabinet.
Never had she seen his face illuminated like this, with the harshness of the kill, but with his eyes wide and black and dilated. His voice was almost mocking, but in a gentle w
ay, his words tight and full of humor all at once.
“Ava, how much have you done with your football boy?”
“What do you – oh! Done? No. Nothing.” Her chest was too tight and when she sucked in a deep breath, Mercy’s eyes shifted to her breasts.
“Not anything?” One of his big hands came up to the V of skin exposed by her shirt. His thumb toyed with the top button and his fingertips played against her leaping pulse. “You didn’t make out with him? Let him touch you?”
She wanted to shut her eyes, but she didn’t want to look away from his hand as it pressed between her breasts. “No. What do you think ‘nothing’ means?”
His smile was more of a grimace. “Has there been anyone else?”
“No. No one.”
She couldn’t tell if that pleased him. It was mortifying for her; she wanted nothing more than to be like Jasmine, to have some skill and wit to offer him in this moment. All she had was herself, and she hoped that was enough.
“Then take a good look, fillette.” Mercy’s eyes lifted to hers, and their intensity was unfathomable. “Because this is what it looks like when a man wants to be inside you.”
She took her look, and then another, her heart hammering hard, trying to work itself through bone and blood to reach the palm of his hand.
“Have you got any idea how bad I want to have you?” he whispered as he held her pinned on the kitchen counter. The same kitchen in which they’d had breakfast that first day, nine years ago.
Her throat ached as she swallowed. “So have me.” And she wound her hands in his hair and pulled him down to her.
He kissed her and kissed her, until she felt drunk. She leaned into his hands, dominated by the urge to press the whole of her body against the whole of his.
Then she felt his fingers at her buttons, and with a few deft moves, he had them undone and her shirt was parting, the air cool against her skin. He smoothed the halves back and passed his rough-skinned hands across her belly, up her ribs. They closed over the black cotton cups of her bra and Ava’s spine bowed as she arched into the contact.
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