Bad Boy Boxset

by JD Hawkins

  He returns, the mother and daughter smiling in his wake.

  “Problem solved,” he says.

  I look away, trying to hide how much I’m blushing.

  We grab some hot dogs and walk slow as we eat. Teo wipes a smudge of ketchup from my lip with a paper napkin, and the fact that it doesn’t make me feel awkward makes me realize that I haven’t been protecting my heart today, not at all. But I can’t bring myself to shut down, not yet anyway. Moving toward the sunset on slow, light steps, it’s like we don’t want to run out of pier. The sky dims to an ethereal shimmer, the Pacific breeze making me light-headed.

  “You know, it’s funny,” I say, feeling the space between what I want to say and what I allow myself to say fade, “I keep thinking of what I wanted to say to you the last time we met, and now that I’m actually here, I can’t think of anything.”

  Teo smiles as we near the pier’s end, and he leans over it, dangling the dragon over the water.

  “Treppenwitz.”

  “What?” I say, leaning back against the rail beside him.

  “It’s a German word, for the things you only think about saying after you’ve left someone. The Germans have a lot of words for little things like that.”

  “Huh,” I say, looking at his face, half-lit by the sun. “When did you learn German?”

  He shrugs, almost seeming embarrassed. “I lived there for a year.”

  “Seriously?”

  Teo looks at me and laughs.

  “Yeah… After I left…I spent a couple years skipping around the states, grabbing work wherever I could. Construction, fixing up cars and bikes, even a little ranch work. Wasn’t any kind of life, just enough to get something to eat, and just enough beer to keep me from thinking too much about what a waste it was. Anyway, I was working security down in Miami for an illegal backroom card game—pretty dangerous, but the money was the best I ever had. Shit happened, though, and I had to leave fast. Figured the best thing to do was get out of the country and lay low for a while. A lot of the people involved went south, to Mexico and Brazil, but I decided to go to Europe. I don’t know why…or maybe I did.”

  “Wow,” I say, taken aback by the thought of Teo being in that kind of danger. The wind picks up and I pull my light jacket around me, Teo reaching out to tuck my hair gently behind my ear. His finger traces my jaw, leaving a tingling trail on my skin. When his thumb brushes my lips, I let out a gasp. I want him so bad I can taste it. I feel my cheeks flush under his intense gaze. But then he pulls away.

  “Berlin,” he continues, his voice a little wistful, his expression a little more contented as he says it, “I’d heard it was the place to be. Full of artists, musicians—a good scene. Good place to be forgotten, to make a new identity.” He shifts to show me his left arm, pulling his shirt sleeve over his huge bicep to reveal a tattoo of a falcon, the wings tensed in mid-flight, feet extended. Poised and dynamic, as if it’s just taking off. “Few days after I got there I decided to get a tattoo—mark the occasion. Managed to get some time with Esther—the best artist in the city. I drew the flash myself, and she was impressed. Asked me if I’d ever handled a needle before. Next thing you know I’m apprenticing under her. She was incredible, taught me everything I know.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I say, feeling a sudden sinking feeling even as I enjoy the obvious happiness he has in remembering all this.

  If I wasn’t sure how I felt about Teo before, hearing him talk in such glowing tones about another woman puts it into sharp focus. Even as he confides in me, I feel a distance between us. A realization that this isn’t the Teo who left me, but another Teo. One who’s lived a lot of life in between, met a lot of other people, done a lot of things I know nothing about. Suddenly I feel a little silly about being indignant, about feeling that sense of ownership, and I start to get the same danger signals that made me abandon him in the alley outside the gig—the feeling that even though I want him so bad, I need to keep my guard up.

  “Yeah. She even let me crash with her for a while since I didn’t have a place—until she moved in with her girlfriend, anyway.”

  “Girlfriend?” I say, too quickly to stop myself sounding overly interested.

  “Yeah. They’d been together for four years, so I knew she’d be moving out soon. But it gave me the time I needed to get my shit together. Man,” Teo says, laughing a little as he looks out to sea. “It was a hell of a culture shock—but a good one. One minute I’m working the crane at a junkyard making just enough for some canned beans and cheap whiskey, surrounded by country music and bitter old men; the next I’m being invited to punk rock roller derbies and fancy club nights. Bars full of craft beers and seventeen languages. Even had some of my art up in a gallery at one point.” Teo turns back to me, eyes narrowed, turning me to stone under his gaze. “I never got the chance to say thanks. You were right. You had me figured out before I did. Who I was.”

  I look at him, struggling to understand.

  “What do you mean?”

  Teo laughs a little.

  “You probably don’t even remember…” he says, shaking his head.

  “Remind me?”

  After a pause, Teo says, “You remember that spot under the highway overpass, with all the trees? We went there a few times. I used to go there a lot to clear my head.”

  “Sure. Where you painted those animals?”

  Teo smiles broadly now, looking at me tenderly when he sees I remember.

  “Right. Just some graffiti, something to pass the time, take my mind off things.”

  “It wasn’t just graffiti—it was beautiful.”

  Teo pauses again, as if to savor what I said.

  “I didn’t think much of it. Nothing important. Until one day I go there,” Teo says, his face darkening, a flash of frustration, “and saw they’d cleaned the place up. Steam cleaned the whole damned thing. Columns, walls—not a dot of color left. Then that night I came to see you. Climbed in your window and sat on the edge of your bed. Told you about it, trying to figure out why it got me so cut up. It wasn’t like anybody went there, or actually saw what I did. Half of it was fading anyway. I just couldn’t understand why it made me so angry…”

  He turns away from the ocean, directing his body at me now. He turns me to face him, his hands on my shoulders.

  “And you put your hands on my shoulders, like this, and looked me right in the eye, and said: ‘Teo, you’re an artist. Of course you’re angry. You’ve every right to be.’”

  He holds me there for a second, our eyes locked, heat flickering in the small space between us.

  “I remember,” I whisper, my heart pounding.

  I part my lips, but Teo pulls his hands away and continues.

  “You don’t know what that did to me,” he says, looking out at the waves again now. “I thought you were just being nice, saying whatever to calm me down—maybe you meant it like that. But it stuck with me. I’d be halfway through a bottle of whiskey, or dragging feet across Michigan snow for a half chance at a job, thinking about what a fuck-up I was, remembering all the times my dad said I belonged in jail with him…then I’d feel your hands on my shoulders…see your face right there…and hear you say that to me again… It was the only thing that kept me going sometimes, knowing you believed in me. God knows where I’d’ve ended up without it.”

  As he says it, a flood of emotion holds me still, unsure of what to say, but certain of the need to say something meaningful. In an instant I feel like I understand, the way I understood before. The beautiful soul born to a deadbeat dad, who painted highway columns nobody would see, for whom a few words were enough to keep going.

  Right now I feel closer to Teo than anyone else in the seven years since he left, more intimate and understanding. I try to think of how to tell him this, of how to express that he meant as much to me as I did to him, but there aren’t words for it.

  I put my hand on his arm, and he turns those eyes to me, a little soft, but never unfocused, never una
ware. I move my hand up to his shoulder, turn his body to face me, move my hands to his neck, and pull him close to kiss with parted lips. Softly, tenderly, as if to slow down time. A kiss that makes my skin shiver in the breeze, my knees weaken until Teo holds me to him tightly and it feels like I’m weightless.

  Then something shifts, our kiss gaining urgency, my insides going taut and white-hot. His hands pull at my ass, his cock hardening against me. As his tongue presses into my mouth I can feel his hunger for me too. A growl in his chest reverberates through my breasts, and I know he’s on the verge of losing control, desire roused fully now.

  I pull my lips away, our foreheads together, my hand on his cheek.

  “Do you have your bike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come home with me.”

  10

  Teo

  She grips me hard as I drive her home. Harder than she needs to. Fingers claw-like against my abdominals, as if she wants to tear me apart. Her nipples stiff enough that I feel them against my back, through her tank top, through my t-shirt, so all I can think about are those swelling breasts, so close and yet still out of reach. It sends me half crazy, so that I jump reds and push the bike hard, making it rev and roar, a voice for the almost angry lust that she’s stirring inside of me.

  By the time we get to her apartment I’m seven different kinds of twisted, cock pressing against my jeans like a wound-up spring, feeling like a loaded gun.

  “This you?” I say, once we’re off the bike and standing in front of the apartment complex. I want to fuck her so bad I can barely keep from picking her up in my arms and kicking down the door, but I force myself to stay in control.

  “Yep. Just moved in about a month ago.”

  I follow her up a flight of stairs, the view of her ass torturing me all the way, even in those boyfriend jeans, still testing the limits of my self-control. She opens her door and I follow her inside.

  “It’s still a work-in-progress,” she says, as she tosses her jean jacket and keys aside. “I need to get some more furniture. It’s a lot bigger than my last place.”

  It’s dark outside now, only the dim streetlights casting a yellowish glow through the night beyond the window. Ash turns on a lamp shaded in red, and it’s like she’s unveiling a masterpiece. I move through the hallway, soaking it all up. The art books stacked on the reclaimed wood coffee table and thick, knitted throws covering the low couch. The line of succulents on the window sill and the wood-framed paintings in small groupings across the walls. The antique cabinets painted in reds and yellows, topped with fading white flowers in mason jars, and the old, faded, country guitar in the corner by the French window.

  It feels like her. Colorful, warm, interesting. Even smells like her, like wood and honey. It feels like a home. Somewhere a person can breathe and be themselves. I think about her room, back then, the one I would sneak into at night, and how that also felt like some expression of her.

  I think of all the places I’ve called home. Weather-beaten trailers and old cabins not much more than barns. Even now, my place in L.A. Big and expensive, filled with slick electronics and black leather furniture and shit I don’t actually need—a home only in name. I might be able to draw nice, but Ash always knew how to live beautifully.

  “You want something to drink?” she calls from some other room.

  “Sure. Something strong.”

  “Vodka ok?”

  “Always.”

  I pace around the room a little, lust still pumping me full of adrenaline, taking in the details, stopping to study a Basquiat print above a bookcase. Flashbacks of conversations we had in her bed rushing through my mind, until she clinks some glasses behind me and I turn around.

  “Here you go,” she says, handing me the glass.

  I take it from her, sip slowly, but my eyes stay on hers—a living work of art even more captivating than what’s on the walls. The alcohol burns, hitting the spot, but I’m intoxicated enough by the room, by the smell, by her. She must sense it, because she breaks my gaze, eyelashes flickering away as she smiles down, but her coyness only ignites the fire building within me.

  I put my drink down and throw her on the couch so I can gaze at those lush curves, trace my eyes down the length of that magnificent body.

  I trace a finger around her ear, down her neck. She trembles like a leaf under my touch, skin cool with goosebumps. Her breath quickening, hot and heavy.

  I climb on top of her and we devour each other’s mouths as I tug her pants off and she pulls her shirt over her head. We roll around on the couch, her hands squeezing my cock, my mouth sucking each nipple until her breath shudders, her fingers clawing down my back. I need to taste her.

  I pull away, enjoying how she hisses with unresolved desire.

  “Why are you stopping?” she asks, her voice tinged with desperation.

  I growl, low and firm, “I’m not. I’m going to eat you.”

  I pull her ass closer and rip her panties off, spreading her open and giving her one long, slow lick. She tastes delicious. I kiss and suck and tongue her pussy like I’ve been starving for her, for this, until she’s panting and moaning, a dreamy smile on her face.

  “You like that?” I say, and before she can answer I suck her clit between my lips, slipping a finger inside her to curl back and hit the spot I know drives her crazy.

  She cries out, “Fuck me, Teo.”

  The lust in her voice drives me wild—it always did—and sets a fire through my body. I lick her again and again, lapping up her juices, pumping my finger inside her until I hear her moans grow in strength and her body begins to writhe and shake. I nip at her clit until she comes with an intensity I don’t remember.

  I pull back, looking down at her, oceans of desire swirling inside me. She bites her lip, puts her hands on her breasts and squeezes them.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing to me,” she says, the words coming out like a low, thudding drum.

  “No. I do,” I say. “But I’m not done with you yet.”

  My words make her smile. There’s a twinkle in her eye. She brings a finger to her mouth, and something inside me triggers. I pounce on her like a predator. I bite at that divine flesh, run a rough tongue from nipple to neck and back again, take those perfect tits in my hands and mouth, pulling and grabbing. Ash tugs at my pants, undoing my button fly and wrapping her hands tight around my throbbing cock. We push and pull against each other until we fall to the floor, knocking the stack of books on the coffee table over, glasses clattering against the wood, a chaos of sounds that only sends us further into frenzy

  I pull back from her to sit on the floor, so that I can pull and yank at my bootlaces, kicking them off. Ash tugs off my jeans just as quickly and then I stand up and let her peel my shirt off.

  I smack her ass, making her moan deliciously, and then pick her up and carry her to the bedroom.

  I toss her onto the bed but she laughs and climbs off, kneeling on the floor in front of me to pull down my boxer briefs. “I have a little favor to return,” she grins.

  “Do you?” I grab a handful of her hair and bring her mouth to my stiff cock. “You still love giving head, you dirty girl?”

  She moans hungrily in response as her lips stretch across the head, soft and warm. Satisfying sensations making me slam back into her dresser, knocking into a lamp and upsetting a pile of folded laundry. But Ash doesn’t miss a beat. Her tongue wraps and tosses my cock inside her mouth, soaking me in the hot cavern of her mouth, conjuring all sensation from my body to centralize there on the touch of her sensitive lips against my sensitive shaft.

  “Fuck…Ash…” I snarl through gritted teeth. “Ash…that’s good.”

  I can almost feel her satisfied smile, a shuddering laugh that shakes through my entire body. Her head twists around my cock, her hand working my balls with the tender care of somebody who knows they’re in control, someone who remembers all the things that worked on me all those years ago.

  I pull he
r away, her mouth open and gasping for more, my cock feeling powerful enough to smash a wall. Too close to wait now, burning too much to stay like this.

  “Get a condom,” I command.

  She runs to the bathroom, already tearing the packet open as she walks back into the room. Without taking her eyes from mine, she puts it on me, enjoying how I wince a little as she makes sure it’s on tight and good. Then she takes my hand and moves past me, leading me over to the bed.

  I press up behind and bend her over the mattress, feeling the curve of her front, grabbing fistfuls of those tits to squeeze and pinch, leaning over her arched back to sink my teeth into her shoulder as I tease my cock against her ass.

  “Getting impatient?” she teases.

  “I’ve waited long enough,” I whisper into her ear, taking her lobe between my teeth as she winds her ass up, the tip of my cock playing around her pussy.

  I guide those swaying, dizzying hips with my hands, cock rolling against her wetness. I want to hold back but we fit too perfectly together, it feels too right, too good to press inside her again, to have her engulf my hard center. She moans, long and low, pushing herself against me, fisting the blankets and using the edge of the mattress for leverage. My hands on her tits, my teeth on the back of her neck, I pound hard into her, giving her a little more inside, her trembling gasps escalating a little more each time.

  “Fuck me, Teo,” she moans, her voice thick with sensation. So I do.

  Both of us yearning for each other, but both of us holding back, teetering on the edge, trying to stop time to linger in this perfect moment a little longer, until the weight of our lust gets too heavy, too unbearable, and something snaps. No more foreplay. No more teasing anticipation. No more dancing along the edge. Just pure fucking, beasts unleashed, urges rampant.

  “Get up on the bed,” I tell her. “On all fours.”

  I climb up behind her and slam into her again, finding the rhythm again, stroking harder and deeper until she’s panting my name.