Who the hell could I ask for help? This felt like such a steep request. It felt like something people would be a little offended by if you asked them to do it. Maybe I’d offer to pay them. There had to be a kid in my building who would take my money to do this for me. I’d have to ring some doorbells.
Another one of my worries was his sister. Celeste and I had been talking, and she had decided that in addition to the wedding invitations, I would pen the messages that they gave to the guests as part of their wedding favors. She didn’t have a completed guest list yet, but I didn’t need that to give her a sample, letting her know what they’d eventually look like.
I had offered to scan the samples and send her the images over email, but she was flying out to London from Oakland International anyway, so she said she would come by Wednesday evening and see it in person.
She wanted the invitations to sort of match the vibe of the wedding. Casual, intimate, beachy. I had gone with colored ink on eggshell colored paper. Straight-edged. She came over just after six on Wednesday. I gave her the samples and let her look at the other papers and ink options she could have.
“This is gorgeous, Audra,” she said looking at the invitation sample. “But I can’t really make a decision without Katherine.”
“That’s fine. You can take the sample and the different paper and just email me with your final decision, along with the guest list.”
“Thanks. I think she’ll love this. You’re coming by the way, to the wedding? This is your official invitation,” she grinned.
“Really? I’d love to come, but what about your fiancée?”
“She won’t mind. Besides, Levi would just bring you along as his date whether I invited you or not,” she said, laughing when I didn’t say anything. “I take your silence as a yes. So, you and Levi, huh?” she asked slyly.
“Well, I don’t know what he’s told you, but we’re trying this long-distance thing,” I said shrugging, looking away from her because I was blushing.
“He doesn’t need my blessing with the women he dates, but you are definitely my favorite. Let’s hope he doesn’t fuck this up,” she said. Oh, if only she knew I was the one about to fuck up and not her brother. I kept my mouth shut about that and asked about the wedding instead, her plans, the dress, or dresses in her and Katherine’s case. Hecate had jumped up into her lap, and we bonded over our shared love of hairless cats, one cat lady to another.
I saw my in. If she had hairless cats, then she knew the struggle.
“Celeste… can I ask you to do something for me?”
“Sure. What is it?” I took a deep breath. Worst-case scenario she said no, and I would pass it off like I was kidding.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. I’m only asking this of you because I feel like we’re friends.”
“Oh my God, Audra, what is it? Spit it out.”
“I just need a little help with my cats’ litter boxes. I would never ask you to do this unless there was a reason I couldn’t do it myself,” I blurted out in one breath.
“What? Slow down; I can’t understand you,” Celeste said.
“I just need a little help. I have a neighbor who helps me out, but they aren’t in tonight. I just need a little help replacing the litter.”
“Your cat litter? Audra. It’s fine. Of course, I’ll help you. It’s not a big deal. I know how Sphynxes are.” She stood and asked me where I kept my litter and where the boxes were. Fuck, if she was going to take it so well, why had I been shitting bricks?
“Thank you so much. It’s just that I can’t really-” I cut myself off before I finished that statement.
“You can’t what? I have a couple of these little monsters too. I got off litter duty a little while when I came here. Katherine’s pregnant, so she can’t do it herself anymore…”
I held my breath because it was literally a matter of time. She would catch on in five, four, three…
“Audra?” Celeste said turning and facing me.
“Hm?”
“Why do you need help changing your cat litter?” she asked, taking a few steps towards me. She looked pointedly at my stomach then at my face.
“I can explain,” I said.
“Is it Lee’s?”
I swallowed, nodding. Celeste closed the distance between us and I felt her arms around me. Tears—instantly. Like turning a faucet on.
“He doesn’t know?” I heard her ask. I didn’t answer, but she must have construed the tears as a yes. She released me so she could look at me. “I have to tell him. You know that, right?”
“You can’t. Please don’t,” I said.
“I consider you a friend, but Levi is my brother. I’m not going to keep this from him. I can’t.”
“I’m going to tell him. I just… I’m so scared, Celeste. I don’t know how he’ll react. We just started dating. There’s no way he wants this.”
“You won’t know until you tell him. He has a right to know.”
“I know, I know. Just give me a little time to find out how to tell him.”
“How much time? The longer you wait, the longer the lie goes on.” I was going to try to say something but stopped because she wasn’t wrong. I was lying to him. It was a lie by omission, and it was about something that needed to be discussed urgently by both of us.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I just found out a couple of days ago. He said he’d be here this weekend.”
“You mean in a couple of days?” she asked, looking at me like she knew I’d chicken out. She was totally right. I had thought about what I’d say, but the actual words were eluding me. The fear was paralyzing me. The uncertainty at his reaction was making me nervous to just say it.
“I feel like, if I tell him, he’ll hate me or something. I don’t know what to do. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and I feel like…”
“You feel like what?” she urged.
“I feel like he might make me get rid of it,” I admitted.
“Audra… Levi… he’s not traditional, and he’s not a lot of things, but he would never ask you to do something like that.”
“How can you be so sure? Our relationship didn’t start the way most relationships start. He lives in New York. He doesn’t want this, and I think once he finds out he won’t want me anymore either.”
“He won’t do that,” she said resolutely.
“If he does… I’d really like to keep being your friend.”
“He’s not going to do anything like that. Audra, since he met you, he’s been like a different person. He cares about you, so much. He called me before your date last weekend because he was nervous. You need to give him a chance to show you how he feels.”
“What if he asks me to get rid of it?”
“Then I’ll kick his ass.”
I smiled. Celeste squeezed me in a tight hug again.
“Still early days? How far along?”
“Just a few weeks. I haven’t been to the hospital or anything. I started feeling a few symptoms, but I just thought it was my period coming.”
“Oh my god, how could I be so rude? Congratulations,” she said, smiling. “I’m gonna be an aunt!”
“Let’s hope Levi is half as excited as you are,” I said.
“I didn’t even ask. Are you excited?”
“I am. I didn’t think I’d end up having children, but we’re here now. And with Levi.”
“You’re really into him, huh?”
“He’s okay, I guess,” I said. She laughed. She didn’t stay long after she had helped clean the litter boxes out; she had a flight to catch.
That was acceptance and approval from one member of his family. I’d take it for what it was worth. I liked Celeste, but I still had my reservations about what would happen with Levi. Maybe by the time the weekend came, I’d have nutted up enough to just do it.
Thursday night I was so tired—but I couldn’t sleep. I was worn out, but I was anxious. The two warred against each other in my body, leavi
ng me restless and unable to settle. I tried to go to bed early, having a bath before to try to relax. I hit the sheets before ten but hadn’t managed to get to sleep an hour later, close to eleven.
Times like this were dangerous. The darker the night got, the further your thoughts could wander, the worse your decision making got. The more texting Levi that I was pregnant became an idea that wasn’t totally horrible.
I could text him and turn my phone off until morning or whenever I was ready to talk to him again. No, this wasn’t something you said over the phone. I took it out anyway, though. I sat up and typed a text message out.
I took a test on Monday. I’m pregnant.
I deleted it immediately.
Are you asleep? I want to talk I typed instead.
That was a little better. I miss you I tacked onto the end because it was true. I hit send, and ten minutes later my phone vibrated with a phone call. It was him.
“Hello?”
“Sweetheart, what time is it over there?”
“About eleven.”
“What’s wrong? I wanted to call you when it was morning.”
“Sorry, did I wake you? I just wanted… I just wanted to hear your voice. I miss you. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow,” I said, telling a lie, but not really lying at the same time. I was going to say it, I was, but when I heard his voice, and how happy he seemed to be talking to me, I didn’t want to lose that by dropping a bomb on him.
“You didn’t wake me. I miss you. I wanted to talk to you tomorrow about something that came up this weekend.”
“What something? Something bad?”
“Awful. I can’t come to the Bay this weekend. I have to travel for work.”
Relief. I felt relief and then disappointment, right on its heels.
“Oh… where are you going?”
“Hong Kong.” I frowned.
“So I have to wait another week to see you?”
“Just one. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“No, it isn’t. I want this to work. Next week I’m seeing you, no excuses.”
“That’ll be two weeks of no sex. I hope you know I won’t get off your dick the entire two days,” I taunted.
“Mm. I can’t wait. Make that three days. Take off work and fly over here.”
“Take off work? I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. You’re in that place every day. I’ll arrange everything. Spend the weekend with me in New York. We can go look at art, go to Brooklyn, spend the entire time fucking, whatever you want.”
“Sounds tempting,” I said.
“Then say yes.”
“Can I tell you tomorrow?”
“Tell your boss you have to go see your mother or something. Tell him your grandmother died.”
“I’m not going to kill my grandmother,” I laughed. “I’ll tell him something and tell you tomorrow whether I can come.”
We stayed on the phone a while longer before I started dozing off. I wasn’t seeing him until next week. That was time. I had time now to figure out how I was going to tell him. One and a half weeks.
That was as long as I’d keep up this lie.
20
Levi
There was no nice way to let someone know that they were fired. Nobody liked to lose their job. Audra wouldn’t like losing her position at Strickland’s, but maybe the blow would be softened when I told her the position of head cataloguer was waiting for her at our New York office?
Our forthcoming New York office. We didn’t have one yet. But we were going to, and she was going to be our head cataloguer if she wanted to be.
I would offer her the position myself; how could she say no? She’d be able to move back to New York. She’d be near her mother. She’d be near me. We wouldn’t have to fuck over the phone like I was deployed or something. It would be great. She hated California.
Yeah, she hated California, but she loved me, right? Yeah, she loved me so much she’d have no problem leaving behind the life and career she had been building for the last couple of years to come live with me in Manhattan.
She’d move back to New York and want to live with me at all. She lived across the bridge; who said she’d want to live with me at all? She was so in love with me she’d jump on the idea without so much as a second thought.
It wasn’t like I was going to try to talk her out of a life of destitution and lack. She lived alone and in Noe Valley; it wasn’t like I was trying to pick her up out of Skid Row. She supported herself, and she enjoyed her work. I’d be asking her to give her life up for me. For us… no, for me.
We hadn’t talked about any of this. I didn’t know whether she wanted to move, leave her job, whether she wanted to live with me. It was for me. I hadn’t asked her to find out whether she wanted the same thing.
It was a lot. I guess I’d know how much when I saw her again. It hadn’t been that long, but this long-distance thing sucked. We talked every single day, but that didn’t matter; her voice from thousands of miles away wasn’t a good enough replacement for her hair in my hands and her skin touching mine. Waking up with her, touching her, fucking her. I couldn’t wait to see her.
The one woman I had brought to my home besides my mother, Katherine and Sissy was Debbie, but she didn’t count. I wanted Audra to live here with me. To put her favorite paintings up. Have her hairbrush in the bathroom, even bring her cats so they could rip the leather couches up with their claws.
I guess that meant I loved her. More than love, was there a level up from that? There must be because that was where I was. Ready to move Audra across the country to be with her. Moving back to California to be with her didn’t sound like something that either of us would want to do. The being together part definitely, but not the California part. I hadn’t asked her, but she didn’t want to be there. Or rather there was a place she would rather be, I knew that much, and that was New York.
It was fine. We would talk about it. We would talk about it when she got here. She was coming. She’d gotten out of work Friday, so we were spending the whole weekend together. She’d be at the house when I got home. Lindsay was going to be waiting for her in the building when she got dropped off and let her in. I’d have to give her her own key. It was her house too. Fighting the urge to ditch work completely to go home and ravish her was killing me. It was like its own twisted foreplay. The worst kind of edging, but the payoff would be worth every minute.
I had left all the spare bedrooms locked because there was nowhere she was sleeping but with me. I got to the house and looked for signs of her. I found her in the bedroom. She was asleep. She lay on her side with one of her hands tucked under the pillow. Her hair was tied up in a bun. Her bag wasn’t unpacked, it sat open on the floor by the bed.
Watching people sleep was one of the creepiest things you could do. I didn’t want to wake her, but I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to kiss her, and I wanted to finally, finally fuck her. I walked up to her on the bed and kissed her cheek. There it was. I needed to feel her near me again. Breathing in the smell of her hair, her skin, I felt like a junkie getting my fix.
“Sweetheart, wake up,” I whispered, sitting next to her. She sighed and rolled onto her back. She opened her eyes looking at me.
“Hi,” she said, smiling. She sat up and hugged me. I pulled her into my lap and hugged her back. It could be like this every day, I thought. I loved the way she felt. I loved that she was so happy to see me. I tried to ignore the instant arousal I had felt seeing her on my bed, so my hard dick didn’t ruin the moment.
“How long have you been waiting?”
“Not that long. I was just a little tired,” she said. She had told me she had been sort of drowsy a lot lately. She was always going to bed when we talked, even when it was just around nine o’clock her time. I could see it in her face a little bit, around her eyes; she looked sleepy.
“Are you hungry? Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry, not for food, anyway,”
she said, kissing me. Her hands pulled my shirt out of my pants, untucking it. They were already at the buckle of my belt, quickly getting past the barrier between her and my cock. She took it out and stroked it slowly as we kissed. It had been two weeks, but my body felt like it had been two years.
She kissed my neck and chest, pushing me towards the bed, so I was on my back. Her lips closed around the head, sucking as she slowly worked her way down my length, running her tongue along the underside. I put my hands in her hair encouraging her to take it deeper. She used her hand, jerking my tip as she sucked my balls into her mouth, one at a time before sucking my cock again, all the way to the back of her throat. I sighed hearing her moan. I could feel the vibration in my cock.
“Slow down,” I told her. I wanted to feel her swallow around my cock, but first I needed to be inside her. “I want you to ride me.” She let my cock pop out of her mouth, sitting up on her knees. She took her t-shirt off and stood, turning her back to me as she shimmied out of her jeans. She bent down, and I could see her glistening pussy lips between her thighs.
Goddamn, she was so sexy. Her ass was round and firm.
She climbed into my lap, straddling me. I unhooked her bra and sucked on one of her nipples as she lowered herself down on my cock. She was so wet she slid right down. I held her waist feeling her tight pussy choke my cock.
She might have been on top, but that didn’t mean she was in control. I held her waist as she began to grind her hips. It hadn’t been that long since we’d fucked, but she felt different in my hands. Her build was petite, but she felt smaller. She made me forget about wanting to ask her by moaning and closing her eyes like my cock was the best thing that had ever been between her legs.
“Hold still,” I instructed, holding her round the waist with one arm. Leaning back on the other I thrust up into her pussy. The angle must have made sure I hit her clit on the way up; it drove her crazy. Her eyes shut as she moaned. She couldn’t stop herself from grinding into me. Her nails left light marks on my arms and back.
Levi (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 4) Page 15