It wasn’t, because nothing was going to win me back, but he didn’t need to know that.
It was late. Almost midnight. I wasn’t even going to attempt to sleep after the day we’d had. Instead, I was sitting on a stool, tucked into the kitchen counter as I smoked cigarette after cigarette, lighting one off another. Beside my hand was a tumbler of vodka and melted ice, a half-empty bottle reminding me it was time to replenish my stocks. It had been full when I’d started a couple of hours earlier. I preferred wine, but wine led to a messy kind of drunk. Vodka was the perfect thing to dull the ache in my skull, while letting me stay in control of myself. The last thing I needed was to start mouthing off to Emilio, or worse. Guillermo and John had both been right. I should have listened to them.
I was going to be severely punished for my reckless show of defiance in Emilio’s office. And although I didn’t regret doing it, I was so annoyed at myself for having acted so impulsively after almost a decade of careful, measured steps. Things were starting to unravel, fast, and I needed more time. Before we made a run for it. Before I got my boy back. Luis. Baby. Mama’s coming for you.
With much reluctance, I called Dornan’s number. He picked up after the first ring.
‘Thought you might be dead,’ he said, his annoyance coming loud and clear over the line. It was noisy in the background, music and voices clamouring to be heard.
‘The night’s still young,’ I said, not liking the way my words slurred ever so slightly at the ends. I stared into the bottom of my glass of vodka and had the unbearable urge to scream.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Dornan said sharply. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, taking a gulp of vodka and enjoying the way it burned on the way down. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to slit my wrists just yet.’
‘Don’t joke,’ Dornan said. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you call me this morning? I had to find out in a meeting with my father?’
I heard the hurt in his voice and chose to push it aside. He didn’t get my sympathy anymore. ‘I’m sorry,’ I snapped back, pouring more vodka into my glass. ‘I wasn’t really thinking about your feelings when I was trying to deal with a dead kid delivery in my fucking kitchen.’
I heard a female voice, the titter of laughter, a squeal. ‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘Are you at the clubhouse?’
‘Where else would I be?’
His voice sounded . . . strange. ‘Are you high?’
‘Are you drunk?’ he shot back, the cruelty clear in his deep voice.
‘Absolutely,’ I answered, unashamed. ‘If you can’t get drunk on your own birthday, when can you?’
That floated in the air between us for a moment. I heard Dornan make a sound in the back of his throat. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ I replied, watching the untouched cigarette in my hand as it burned down to the filter. ‘I’m not in the mood for company right now.’
‘Right,’ Dornan said. ‘Well, I’ll see you later.’
He ended the call before I could make a bitchy remark. I knew exactly where he was, and it wasn’t the clubhouse. They didn’t play stripper music at the Gypsy Brothers HQ. They played death metal and old eighties classics that made me cringe. I’d distinctly heard sexy music in the background, and I knew exactly what it was from. My office was in the back of the club, for Christ’s sake. I knew the music playlist by heart.
I wondered if he was cheating on me. If he had his dick in somebody else right this minute.
I decided I didn’t care. I was cheating on him, after all. And if some stripper could buy me a few days without having to fuck the man who’d decided raping me and beating our unborn baby to death was the right way to love me? I’d pay her myself.
It was only when I’d set the phone down that I realised it was technically still my birthday. At least for another seven minutes. I texted Guillermo. Where are you? Bring birthday cake / vodka. He replied almost immediately. Sorry, got a situation. Be back in the morning.
I slumped over the counter, burying my face in my arms. I closed my eyes for a second, my fingers still around the bottom of the vodka bottle. I just needed to rest, just for a few minutes, and then I’d resume my pity party for one.
***
‘Ana,’ a voice murmured in my ear. I sat bolt upright, one side of my face cold and squished from where it had lain on the countertop.
‘Huh?’ I said, my voice still thick from sleep and all the vodka I’d just downed. My eyes felt gritty, like I’d just taken a face full of sand.
‘John? What are you doing here?’
I looked at him again. In the bright light of the kitchen, he was an apparition. He had a swollen lip, and had he split his forehead open? ‘What happened to you?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘More like who.’
My heart sank. ‘What happened?’
John shrugged. ‘I don’t even know,’ he said, running his hand through his dirty blond hair. ‘Dornan and I . . . Ana, we can’t save him. He’s too far gone.’
‘I know that.’
‘So what the fuck are we waiting for? Waiting around to die?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me.’
He looked at the floor. ‘When I got home, Juliette was gone. He’d picked her up and taken her back to his place to fix him up. But really, to get at me.’
My stomach roiled at that knowledge. Dornan had taken John’s teenage daughter, at night, without asking him, as a warning?
‘Is she okay?’
John waved his hand dismissively, but there was hurt in his eyes. Anger. ‘I picked her up, took her for a drive. She’s at home now, hopefully asleep.’
I exhaled a sigh of relief.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Hawaii. Miami . . . Fuck, Australia. I know people. Good people who’ll help us.’
I looked around my empty apartment. ‘Where were you when you were fighting?’
John looked at the floor again.
‘I called him,’ I said, eyeing off the vodka again. My head felt like it was going to split in half, and my mouth was unbearably dry. ‘Dornan told me he was at the clubhouse, but last time I checked, you don’t play stripping music there.’
‘He was at the strip club,’ John confirmed. ‘We were supposed to be having a meeting.’ He gestured to his face. ‘I don’t think he liked what I had to say.’
‘Was he high? He sounded high.’
John nodded. ‘He’s developing quite the taste for his daddy’s product.’
I scrunched my face up. ‘That sounds disgusting.’
John laughed. ‘You should have seen him snorting it. It was disgusting. That stuff’ll make your nose bleed like a goddamn faucet.’
‘Like your head?’ As if on cue, the split on his forehead was open again, blood streaming down his face. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, and before I could think to get up and get a towel, he’d taken his T-shirt off and had balled it up, pressing it to his bleeding forehead. I swallowed, my eyes drifting down his chest, past chiselled abs and a smooth, tattooed chest. His jeans were slung low around his narrow waist, and I found myself staring at the top button of his fly, almost like I could use the force to unbutton it from three feet away.
He gave me an odd look, and I tore my gaze away from the clothing I would have liked him to remove, motioning for him to move the T-shirt from his forehead. The cut continued to bleed heavily.
‘Let me help you,’ I said, hearing my words as they came out a little thicker than normal, muffled by exhaustion and too much alcohol. I was dying for a drink of water, but I needed some steri-strips first. ‘Wait there,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a first aid kit somewhere around here.’
I rummaged in a few kitchen cabinets, finally finding the kit under the sink. I grabbed it and turned back to John, noticing where his eyes had been – squarely on my ass. It was nice to feel wanted without any strings attached. Nice to feel desired. I tried to push that away, my nipples hard enough to cut glass as I thought of the
last time John and I had been together. The way he’d made me cry out beneath him.
Jesus, woman. Get a grip. He’ll have bled to death from this cut by the time you get your shit together.
‘Sit down,’ I said, patting the stool. ‘So I can reach better.’
He did, and I got to work, washing my hands with alcohol sanitiser, before setting up my tools – gauze, steri-strips, cotton balls and alcohol solution. The strip club was dirty. If you shone one of those luma-lights down there, it’d light up like a fucking Christmas tree in Times Square, all body fluids and blood from old fights.
‘I’m not used to people helping me,’ John said, keeping perfectly still as I dabbed the alcohol solution around his cut.
‘This is deep, John,’ I said, trying to focus but suddenly aware that if I was just a tiny bit closer, I could rub one of my nipples against his lips. Stop. Fix him first, and then figure out a way to screw him without getting killed.
‘That’s what she said.’ That glint in his eye, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
‘I’m serious. You need stitches.’ I’m serious. Deep sounds exactly like what I’ll say when you ask me how I want it.
‘No time for stitches,’ he said, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Unless you’ve got a needle and thread?’
‘A needle and thread,’ I repeated, taking a steri-strip and closing his wound as best I could. ‘You’ll have a scar on your head the size of Tennessee. I mean, I’ll love you anyway, even if you’re horribly disfigured.’
‘What?’ He sucked in a breath, and my chest tightened.
‘I was kidding,’ I said, pressing another steri-strip to his cut. ‘You won’t be disfigured. It’ll be a little line.’
His hand shot out, fingers wrapping around my wrist and squeezing. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
Oh.
‘You . . . love me?’ He said the words like they were in another language and he wasn’t quite sure how they fit together in a sentence.
I stopped what I was doing, meeting his gaze. ‘Of course I love you, you idiot,’ I replied. ‘You think I’d risk my head for somebody I just kind of thought was okay?’
He smiled, teeth and all, and it was like the sun was beaming directly onto my face. I felt blood rise in my cheeks as we digested that reality together. Had I really never told him that I loved him? Had he never told me? It was just something that I knew, at a cellular level, something that I didn’t ever have to question, not after that first night we’d spent together. I loved him as ferociously as I had ever loved anyone.
‘You hungry?’
I nodded. I wasn’t offended that he hadn’t said it back. I wasn’t a teenage girl with stars in her eyes. John loved me, whether he said it or not. He’d risked everything for me, more than once. The way he stared at me when he thought I wasn’t looking was not the stare of casual affection. He loved me so much, I was afraid when we had to associate with each other in front of other human beings, because couldn’t they see how bright we burned for each other?
‘Come on. I’m taking you out. He can hardly be suspicious if I take you out for the birthday he forgot.’
I glanced at the clock. It was almost 2 a.m. ‘It isn’t my birthday anymore.’
John shrugged. ‘And?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Give me a minute.’
I changed into a tank top and a skirt that hung loose over my hips. You know, just in case we stopped off on the way. It’s not like we were going to fuck in a restaurant.
We went to Denny’s, over in Burbank, where nobody would spot us. I was already experiencing the hangover from hell, and I ordered the biggest cup of coffee they had. Strong. Black. When it arrived I dumped my body weight in sugar into it, gave it a stir and mainlined it as quickly as I could.
I had waffles and bacon. John had eggs. ‘Next time I’ll take you somewhere a little more upmarket,’ he said, drinking his coffee.
I shrugged. ‘I love diners,’ I said, stabbing a piece of waffle with my fork and drizzling maple syrup all over it.
John laughed, his eyebrows raised in that adorable way. ‘You love diners,’ he repeated dubiously.
I winced as I saw the gauze on his forehead redden. ‘Don’t smile,’ I said, gesturing to his wound with my fork. ‘In fact, no facial expressions from now on, okay? Or I will take you to the hospital and make you get stitches.’
He arranged his face into a perfect blank stare. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, dissolving into laughter. I made a disapproving sound in my throat. ‘You’re opening your wound again, silly. You’re gonna bleed all over the place.’
The gauze was steadily getting redder. ‘Jesus, he really got you good,’ I said. After the words had left my mouth, I winced, realising how stupid they sounded. He’d just brawled with his best friend, my lover, and from the sounds of it, he’d been lucky to walk away.
He didn’t take offence, though. He smirked, and that fucking dimple in his cheek was enough to make a woman orgasm just by looking at it. He had that playful twinkle back in his bright blue eyes, almost like the fight with Dornan had woken him up or something. Given him some motivation to make a move.
‘You think this is bad?’ he said, spinning his coffee cup around and around. ‘You should see the other guy.’
I sat back in my side of the booth, raised one eyebrow. ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘I’m pretty sure his nose is broken,’ he said.
I smiled wryly, thinking about how it was about time somebody knocked some sense into Dornan, even as my chest tightened at the thought of him being hurt. Old habits died hard. He’d hurt me so much, I should’ve been numb to his suffering. And yet I found myself hoping that he was all right. Did he need me?
On a practical level, I was also thinking about whether he was at my apartment right now, wondering where I was, waiting for me to patch him up. Then again, he was impatient. If he arrived and I wasn’t there, he’d call me. My phone had lain on the table beside my breakfast the entire time, silent.
‘You must have been mad,’ I said, ‘to break his nose.’
John’s playful expression dropped away.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘He pulled a gun on me,’ he said, making his hand into the shape of a gun and wedging it beneath his chin, his fingertips – the make-believe barrel – pressed into his throat.
‘He pulled a gun on you?’ I echoed. Suddenly, I wasn’t envisioning a testosterone-fuelled fracas, but a full-on vicious cage fight to the death.
‘He didn’t like some of the things I called him out on,’ John said, pressing his fingers to his forehead. They came away red, the gauze pad taped to his skin completely soaked through. A waitress came over, barely glancing at John’s wound. For all she knew, he was an extra from one of the nearby studio lots. We were in television city, make-believe land, and our oddness made us blend in, in a way.
John paid the waitress and she took my waffles to box up. I’d barely touched them, too busy talking, but I might want them after a couple of hours’ sleep.
‘You got a bathroom?’ John asked her. The woman looked at him like he was an idiot. She didn’t even respond with words, just pointed to a door in the back.
‘I’m gonna go get this cleaned up,’ he said.
I held up my purse. ‘I’ll come with you. I brought extra gauze. Since you insist on not getting stitches.’
Luckily there was a staff bathroom and changeroom that nobody seemed to be using. John held the door open for me and then locked it, testing it to make sure it couldn’t open. We were good. He leaned down while I took off the old gauze and tried my best to clean the wound again. It was deep, and looked nasty.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve had things hurt a lot more.’
‘Like what?’
He licked his lips, put his hands on my waist. ‘Like my cock right now.’
Lust dragged through my belly like wildfire and I swear, I felt my pupils dilate.
‘Oh, ye
ah? Your cock needs medical attention, too?’
He smirked, pulling me close with a forceful jerk. I could feel his hardness against my belly, and I wanted it all to myself. An empty ache throbbed between my thighs, demanding to be filled.
He brought a finger to my chin, tilting my face up to his. One kiss. That was all it took for my lamb to become a lion.
‘Take your fucking panties off before I rip them off.’ His eyes burned with desire and I felt my heart skip a beat.
Shit. I was about ready to come just from his words.
I hitched my skirt up, making it a show for him as I hooked my thumbs into the edges of my panties and slid them down my thighs. I was wearing white panties, and there was a clear wet patch on the inside. John saw it as I stepped out of the panties and he made a growling noise in the back of his throat, snatching them from me.
He fell to his knees before me, prising my thighs apart. I had to shuffle my feet wider apart to accommodate him. His tongue touched me, ever so gently, and it took everything inside me not to scream.
‘John,’ I begged. I wasn’t even sure what I was begging for. I just knew that I needed him, desperately. He slid a finger inside me and I tightened around it, involuntary, pulsing with need. A finger wasn’t going to be enough. I needed him. Inside me. Now. I squeezed his head, my hands fisted in his hair. Every time his tongue touched me, it was like a fucking inferno lit up inside me. Every time he pulled away, I pressed my hips forward, seeking that wet caress that was threatening to bring me undone in a Denny’s bathroom stall. Of all places.
Guess I’d been wrong. Seemed we really were going to fuck in a restaurant bathroom.
When he pulled his face away, I just about crumpled over on myself. I caught a look at myself in the mirror – clumped mascara from the nap I’d taken on the kitchen counter earlier; my cheeks flushed.
‘Somebody might catch us,’ John said, that teasing glint in his eye.
I held onto his arms, my legs still shaking from the way he’d cruelly taunted me until I was almost coming. ‘Let’s shoot everyone on that bridge when we come to it,’ I said, pulling my tank top down to expose a nipple. I pulled his hair, and he went with it, bringing his mouth to my pebbled nipple and sucking hard enough that pleasure hummed dangerously close to pain.
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