by A. J. Downey
Reaver nodded, laughing, and said, “All right, I like your style.”
We went around to the back of the building and Tiffany kept me in her sight. I went to her and pulled her aside. She looked up at me quizzically through the long fall of her hair and I turned her away from my brothers and smoothed it out of her eyes.
“You can trust them,” I told her. “Just like you trust me, eh.”
“Not like I trust you,” she whispered. She chewed her bottom lip lightly in indecision and finally sighed, her breath pluming the frozen air. “I’m trying,” she said finally, after a moment of silence and I smiled.
“I know. I know this is hard for you but listen to what Trigger has to say and I promise, she’ll be right, okay?”
“Okay.” She fixed her hair and went back over to Trigger, who smiled at her patiently.
“You’re gonna be holding a gun, Sweetheart. You’re gonna be shooting at something.” He let out a breath and said, “You’re gonna have to get your hair outta your face.”
She licked her lips, the way she held herself stiff but finally, she said, “Don’t judge, and try not to stare?”
“Not me,” he said and held up fingers in what he’d once told me was a boy scout’s salute. Meant he couldn’t lie.
Tiffany chuckled and moved her hair out of her eyes, hanging it behind her ears saying, “An outlaw biker who’s a boy scout. Isn’t that some kind of an oxymoron?”
“We didn’t all start as outlaws,” Reaver said with a reckless grin. Tiffany’s eyes dimmed and her expression lost its hard-won smile of the moment before.
“That’s a fair point,” she said.
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Trigger said, and held out a handgun to show her. “Which is all right. A lot of us didn’t like it up there anyway.”
“Which is why we’re slumming it down here,” Reaver agreed.
“This here,” Trigger indicated a point on the gun, “pops the magazine.” He dropped it and caught it with his other hand, handing it to Tiff. She took it and he said, “Now that doesn’t mean it’s not loaded. You always gotta assume there’s one in the chamber.” He pulled back the slide to show her. “See there?”
When he said he was going to run her through the basics, he meant it. He educated her from the ground up, and she listened with rapt attention. I’d asked them to meet us out here rather than at the club because the club was always full of people anymore. Brothers, ol’ ladies, and a lot of the time their kids were around. I figured out here would be nice and quiet. Much more Tiffany’s speed.
She didn’t like being around people much, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. A lot of the people around here could be right cunts. Staring at her openly like some bug under glass. Some of them would just walk right up to her and ask. Others took one look at me and assumed the worst. I found those citizens to be the most amusing. And they called us the fuckin’ animals.
“It’s gonna be loud, you’re gonna jump, and that’s okay. The goal of coming out here on the regular is to get you to where you don’t jump so much, as much as it is to improve your shot. You ready?”
“No.”
“Shoot it anyways,” Trig said, and hand trembling, she held the gun out, sighted down the barrel, let out a breath, and fired. She jumped and nearly dropped the gun. Reaver laughed and I smacked him on the shoulder. She was a nervous thing, and this was way outside her comfort zone.
“Sorry!” she said immediately and Trig shook his head.
“Don’t be, just try to hit the target and this time, don’t stop until the gun is empty.”
She did as she was told and lowered it when it was empty. She let out a shuddering breath and asked, “Okay, how’d I do?”
Reaver squinted across the snow at the paper target tacked to a piece of plywood nailed to a board out there and said, “Ehhhh, we’ll get you a shotgun.”
Trig sighed and closed his eyes, shaking his head.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said blankly.
“Means you’re kind of a terrible shot and you’re gonna need practice,” Trig said gently and I could see her shoulders drop slightly. The look on her face was stone, but the flinching in her eyes spelled defeat.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, eh,” I said gently.
She looked at me and nodded, standing up a little straighter.
“Again?” she asked. Trigger nodded.
“One more magazine for today. Let’s teach you how to properly load it.”
“Okay,” she agreed but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled at emptying another into the paper target across the snow.
Shooting was not my girl’s thing.
17
Tiff...
“I really hate guns,” I said, and looked at him from across my kitchen counter. He was standing in my small studio, hanging his jacket on the back of one of my two chairs at my little table and he nodded.
“I know,” he said.
“There’s a reason for it, but I don’t know if I want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will just make you mad, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
He nodded and pulled the chair out and sat down in it, leaning back and watching me carefully, waiting me out. I moved around my kitchen, setting water on to boil and bringing down two large mugs.
“Try me, eh?” he said finally and I nodded, pulling down two packs of cocoa from another cupboard. I needed the chocolate fix.
I told him the reason why. That one of my foster dads had used to threaten us with one. Put it in our mouth, threatened to pull the trigger. Sometimes he had pulled the trigger, but it was always empty. Still, the mind games… there were more than a few times that I wished it weren’t, just so I didn’t have to deal with the fear and the terror anymore when he got to drinking.
Nik sat real still, knee bouncing with agitation. It felt good to tell someone else other than Delia about these things. Felt even better that he was mad about them on my behalf, but at the same time? I didn’t like talking about it because I didn’t like how upset he got. How angry he looked… dark eyes stormy as his expression drew down in a tempestuous scowl. He very nearly hummed with a barely-contained violence but then he would look at me and if I displayed any sort of apprehension, it would melt away, all that anger would drain as if through the floor and would simply be gone as fast as it’d come on.
“You’re right, it makes me angry. You’re also right that it’s not worth going back and shoving that gun up his ass. But I’d very much like to.”
I moved around the kitchen counter and he straightened in his seat, putting his hands on top of his denim-clad thighs and looking up at me as I drew near. I straddled his lap and sank down onto it, my arms twining around his neck on the shoulders of his open red and black flannel, the white waffle pattern thermal stretching tantalizingly over his chest.
“I know,” I said, voice huskier than a moment before with a deep emotion. “That’s one of the things I love about you. You listen, you want to do something, but you’re practical. You don’t do anything without a deliberateness… it’s kind of hot actually.”
He smiled up at me, his hands which had found my hips, drifting up to cup my face and finish bringing me down to him for a kiss. “Yeah?” he asked, right before our lips touched and then it was just the warmth of his mouth against mine.
I felt my muscles lose some of the tension they’d been holding and it felt good to relax. I had such a hard time doing it lately, but with Nik, it was easier somehow. I dipped my head and kissed him, fingertips ghosting along his jaw even as his hands gripped me tighter around my back. I scooted closer, even though it really involved being plastered up against him for all I was worth and his tongue teased at the seam of my lips, requesting I deepen it.
I love how he asked, not always with words, but asked none the less. I parted my lips and met his tongue with mine, sighing out in satisfaction.
He pulled back slightly and rested his forehead against mine, eyes closed, but I watched him and I could see there was something he wanted to ask but it had that weight, that feel to it inside my head that it wasn’t necessarily something I was going to like.
“What is it?” I whispered and he looked up at me.
He swallowed hard and he said, “I want to ask you…”
Apprehension filled me and I felt myself go really still on his lap. I didn’t like the insecurity I heard in his voice but at the same time, whatever he wanted to ask, it sounded like it had the potential to hurt. I steeled myself and said, “Go on. Ask.”
“Is there something that you could give me?” he asked. “Something that you don’t give the men at the club. Something that you hold back from them but not me?”
He swallowed hard and I felt the tension that had suddenly overwhelmed me loosen to the point that I nearly went liquid with relief.
“I already do,” I said shyly and I kissed him. His breath caught and he kissed me back, arms tightening around me like he was afraid I was going to go, like he was going to lose me for asking, but this? This, surprisingly, is something I understood. He needed to know he was special to me, but I didn’t know if there was any way possible I could tell him or even show him just how special he was.
“I kiss you,” I whispered against his mouth. “I don’t kiss anyone else.”
“Yeah?” he asked, voice strained.
“Yeah,” I murmured softly. “Pretty Woman Art of Hooking Handbook, kissing someone is special. Kissing is intimate. You hold that back for yourself and your partner.”
He leaned back and looked at me, a frown on his face and blurted out, “There’s an actual handbook for prostitutes?”
I threw back my head and laughed, high and clear; it was so absurd and took me totally off guard. I looked back down and captured his face in my hands, kissing him fiercely. Happy. I was happy and this was too much.
“No!” I declared. “Pretty Woman! You know, Julia Roberts? Richard Gere? The movie?”
“Oh, nah, I’ve never seen it,” he declared.
I blinked in surprise and said, “Oh, no, this is so happening,” just as the kettle on the stove began to whistle.
“What is?” he asked as I slipped off his lap.
“Just a minute. I’m gonna call Lia,” I declared. “She needs in on this.”
I picked up my phone and called her, thinking this might be a good way for her to get to know Nik and a decent peace offering between us, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. I just didn’t want to lose my only friend. I moved the kettle off the heat and tore open the packets of cocoa, dumping them each into their respective mugs.
“Hi, you’ve reached Delia, don’t forget to leave a message!”
I didn’t. I just hung up, disappointed. I poured the water and stirred the contents of first one mug and then the other, setting the phone on the counter.
“Oh, well, her loss. We’re so doing this, though.”
“Doing what?” he asked, an eyebrow raised in intrigue.
“Watching this movie.”
He looked me up and down, curious, and said, “All right, then,” sealing his fate. Then again, with a man as well-read as he seemed to be, and the fact he didn’t really seem to give a shit about what other people thought, I didn’t think he would find watching a total chick flick with me to be that big of a deal. I could be wrong, though; you never did know what it would be that could hurt a man’s fragile masculinity. I’d learned that lesson time and time again.
“I’ll go get it, make yourself comfortable?”
“Anything for you,” he said and I paused slightly before moving into the main area of my apartment. I handed him his mug while passing and set mine on the side table by my day-bed. I rooted around underneath the bed for my CD binder that I had filled with DVD’s and brought it out onto my lap. He got up and wandered over, sitting next to me as I flipped through the pages looking for Pretty Woman.
“You know this is a cross between Pygmalion and the Cinderella story?” I asked casually and Nik turned his head.
“Wasn’t Pygmalion the bloke that fell in love with his own statue he carved?”
I smiled and looked up, “Yes, that’s right. Not a lot of people know the story.”
He gave a shrug with one shoulder, “I read a lot and one of my favorite subjects was the whole Greek myths. I actually did decent in those classes.”
“You strike me as someone who did poorly in school not because you’re stupid but because you were bored,” I said, and continued flipping pages. I really needed to put this damn thing in some kind of order. Like alphabetical by title or by the director or something. Hell, even by color would work better than this mess.
“I think you may be right about that,” he said. “My dad always thought I was lazy and stupid, my mum knew different. So did my granddad.”
“A mother always knows,” I said quietly and slid the disc out of its sleeve. “I never knew mine. I was found in a dumpster on prom night. Classy, right?”
“Tragic, is more like it,” he said softly.
“Yeah, well, they never found her and I always wondered growing up if I passed her, or if she would see me and just know, you know?”
He nodded and then shook his head, but I caught his meaning. He understood what I was saying but no, he didn’t know. Couldn’t imagine growing up like that. It was no picnic that was for sure. I grew up in the system. No one ever adopted me so it was one foster home after another, after another. No roots, no sense of permanence. Which was why, when I hit sixteen, it wasn’t hard to bounce. I had no real attachments to the last family and Mike was a douche. I had to get the fuck out of there before he got braver than just fondling me. I had no intentions of losing my virginity to his nasty ass. Nope, that honor, or lack thereof, went to a rodeo clown, of all things. Don’t ask me what I’d been thinking.
I slid off the bed and opened up my little DVD player, slipping the disc into the tray. It slid closed and I pushed myself back up onto the bed where Nik was shoving pillows behind his back against the spindly metal of the bed’s… sideboard? I don’t know what you called it for a daybed. It was less head- and foot-board than it was making it into a couch, kind of.
I settled against him and reached for my cocoa, using the little remote to start the movie. He kept an arm around me and idly smoothed a hand up and down my arm through the long sleeve of my shirt and the simple action set me aglow. I liked it, very much.
“Ha! You weren’t joking, she’s a streetwalker.”
“I told you,” I said softly and he kissed the top of my head taking any of the sting out of his words.
It was cozy, watching the movie with him and I enjoyed it. At one point I said, “A lot of the girls at Sugars wish they were her, I think.”
“Ah yeah? And what about you?”
I shook my head, “I don’t want to be taken care of as much as I want to be able to take care of myself,” I said. “But this is nice.”
“What is?”
“Having someone to have my back, I mean, it’s not like Lia doesn’t but someone stronger than that, physically, I mean.”
“No, I get you,” he said and hugged me to him a little tighter.
I cuddled into his side, head on his chest and laughed a short time later when he muttered, “You’re going to regret that, yah fuckin’ nob gobbler.”
“What!?” I cried. “Nob gobbler?”
“What?” he demanded. “She’s an asshole for not letting her shop!”
I laughed, I couldn’t help myself. It was the funniest thing I think I had ever heard and once I started I couldn’t stop. It was an infectious sort of laugh, I think because pretty soon he was chuckling, too. I pushed myself up and kissed him and he kissed me back but it didn’t get far, he genuinely wanted to finish the movie and so he backed me off and held me tight and actually rewound what he’d missed.
“Ha! She told them,” he declared and I
laughed all over again as Viv walked out of the shop with all of her bags on the screen. I wondered idly if watching movies with Nik would be like this all of the time and had to sigh inwardly. I was sure that the novelty of me would wear off before I would have the chance to find out, but this was certainly nice, and I would enjoy it while it lasted.
“Hey.” He paused the movie and I looked up.
“Hmm?”
“Why so sad all of a sudden, eh?”
“I’m not sad,” I said.
“You know the more a bloke gets to know you, the more he realizes you’re a terrible liar.”
I choked on a laugh and swatted him lightly on the chest. When the fit had passed, I sighed deeply. “I like this,” I said. “Being here, with you. I was thinking it will be sad when it ends… when the novelty of me wears off, you know?” I couldn’t look him in the eye when I said the last and I shifted a bit, uncomfortable, when I could feel his scowl like heat from a fire against my face.
“There’s no novelty here, eh. I like you, Tiff. You’ve got a fire inside. You’re not like any other girl I’ve ever met and I won’t hear you talk about yourself like that.” He shook his head and tipped my chin up with a light touch, I met his eyes reluctantly with mine. He said, “That’s the kind of thing I suspect would come out of that Nob’s mouth. I don’t ever want to hear it come out of yours again.”
I swallowed hard and nodded slightly, and he shook his head, pulling my mouth to his as if the force of his kiss would burn any more thoughts like it clean out of my head, and to be honest, it did. He hauled me up tight against his body and I swear, I climbed him like a tree, straddling his hips and thinking wistfully that there were far too many clothes between us.
“Off,” I breathed against his mouth and pushed at his flannel shirt. He shrugged out of it, peeling it off and my hands gathered his thermal at the hem. He lifted his arms and let me take it from him, and once it was off, let his fingers slide into the waistband of my jeans and lift my own shirt from it.
I sucked in a breath when his fingers made contact with my skin, a wash of tingles spilling up my back and across my ribs. “Please,” I begged breathlessly and it was a frenzy of both of us to see who could get who undressed the fastest.
