He picked up a lime and bit into it. His mouth puckered and he shook his head. “Jesus. You’re a mouthy little bitch. Are you the same girl I met the other day?”
I watched him threaten a man’s life over an unpaid debt. He had a gun, a laser sharp glare, an attitude, and a really big dick. In the alley, he was intimidating. Now, sitting across from me, he wasn’t. His eyes met mine. I felt weak.
In a good way.
“I was tired. I’d been up late and hadn’t eaten. I was off my game,” I lied. “So, you just stopped in to ask me to dinner?”
He sniffed the lime. “I couldn’t get you or your cute little ass off my mind. So, I made the reservation for us. You and me.”
I lifted my eyes from the tequila. My mouth was salivating. I met his gaze. “Before you asked me?”
He nodded. “I didn’t need to ask. I could see it in your eyes.”
“Arrogant much?”
He raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement of my sarcastic remark, then studied me as he sucked on the lime. “You’re sure a mouthy little bitch. And I’m not arrogant. I’m astute.”
I already decided. I was going. I wanted to know more about him. How, at less than 30 years old he was driving a new Mercedes-Benz.
And why he carried a gun.
Somewhere between conversations about guns, money, and Wednesday night dinner dates, maybe we could discuss the bulge in his jeans.
“Where?” I asked.
I really didn’t care. He could have said Burger King, and I would have agreed.
He slumped in his seat slightly, studied me, and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I liked it.
A lot.
“The Brisco,” he said.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The Brisco was an upscale restaurant that charged $200 a plate for dinner, and $20 for a drink. I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. Hell, I couldn’t dress for the occasion.
“I can’t go wearing this, and my roommate is banging her college quarterback boyfriend and I can’t go home until midnight.” I shrugged. “So changing is out of question.”
I didn’t have a roommate, but it sounded good. It was my way out of his dinner offer without telling him I didn’t own anything that The Brisco would allow me to wear.
He lifted one of the shot glasses and sniffed it. “No shit? Who’s he play for?”
“Former. He’s out now. Works as a bouncer.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I’m not dating him, she is.” I stood up and pointed to my shorts. “But I can’t wear this. Thanks, though.”
“Forget your lame assed excuses, you’re going. The mall closes at 10:00. I’ll buy a dress.”
You’re gonna buy me a dress?
“You’re gonna buy me a dress?”
“I’m going to take you to dinner. The dress is part of it.”
“Are you serious?”
“About which part? That I can’t get you and your cute little ass off my mind, or the part about buying the dress?”
“Uhhm.” I shrugged. “Both.”
“Turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around. You know what that means, right? Like spin in a circle real slow. Turn around.”
“I’m not turning around.”
He cocked an eyebrow and stared. It was the same stare he gave me when I honked the horn. My face felt hot and tingly. My pussy soon followed. I lasted all of three seconds.
Slowly, I turned around.
He scratched the side of his head. “Yeah.”
“Yeah what?”
“Jesus. You asked me if I was serious. I said ‘about what, the ass or the dress?’ You said ‘both.’ I said ‘turn around.’ You did. I said ‘Yeah.’ Yeah, Jess. I’m serious. About your ass. And about the dress.” He pushed the tequila a little closer to me. “Now, drink your fucking shot.”
He was wearing a black button-down shirt, dark wash jeans, and rocking a slight growth of beard. He looked good. Really good. The thought of it all excited me. I loved spur of the moment shopping, hot guys, fancy restaurants, and Mercedes Benz’s. I just couldn’t afford any of them.
I nodded. “If you’ll buy me a dress, I’ll go get someone to cover my shift.”
He rolled his eyes and tilted his head toward the tequila. I picked up the shot on my side of the table, downed it, and reached for his.
His eyes filled with wonder, and his face with disbelief. I lifted the other shot and downed it. The corner of his mouth curled up slightly. I grabbed one of the limes and bit into it.
I turned toward him and winked. “Pull your car around to the back door.”
He sat up in his seat and grinned. As he slid out of the booth, his biceps flared through his shirt. “Bring me my tab.”
God damn, you’re sexy.
“Dinner’s on you. Patron’s on me.”
He slid out of the booth and stood. “I’ll pull around.”
There were a few things I didn’t have any business doing.
One of them was drinking tequila.
The other was being in the presence of a criminal.
But only one was a stipulation of my probation.
FOUR
Dick
WE sat at a table in the rear of the restaurant. Wearing her new sleeveless black dress, Jess looked like she stepped right out of an ad in a women’s magazine. I couldn’t decide if her brown hair had blonde highlights or if her blonde hair had brown highlights. It seemed like a perfect 50/50 mixture of both. Her brown eyes weren’t dark like most that I’d seen, they were more of a translucent color.
Almost a burnt orange.
She talked fast and used her hands to gesture a lot, which made her a very entertaining person to listen to – and to watch. It was easy to get lost in just watching her be herself. The day we met in the alley I planned to fuck her and forget her, but now that I had spent the majority of the night with her, I was enjoying her company more than anyone else I had spent time with since I got out of prison. I still wanted to fuck her, but forgetting her was something I was afraid might not happen.
Ever.
As much as I knew I may never forget her, allowing her to be in my life on a regular basis wasn’t an option. For me, a woman was a risk, a huge risk. And I wasn’t in the risk taking business.
I was a criminal and an asshole.
And I was good at being both.
She lowered her wine glass and cocked her head slightly. “So what is it that do you do exactly?”
We had finished eating, and I wanted to talk about sex, outsmarting the law, or the arrival of my new leopard, but not what I did for money. I decided to play along. Sort of. “The truth or a lie?”
She took another sip of wine. “Truth.”
I didn’t tell anyone the truth. “Entrepreneur,” I said, stretching the truth to its outer limits.
In my thirty years on earth, I’d fucked more women than Wilt Chamberlain, been to juvenile detention twice, prison once, and arrested more times than I could count. My current occupation – by definition – was a combination of a criminal and a vigilante of sorts, but I liked to call myself an entrepreneur.
It just sounded better.
She slid her glass of wine to the side. “Bullshit.”
It was bullshit, but I couldn’t really tell her the truth. Admitting the truth to anyone about what I did would be a foolish move on my part.
Very foolish.
“Why do you say it’s bullshit? I’m an entrepreneur.”
“You threatened to kill that guy in the alley. You said you were going to burn down his house and sell his wife to the drug cartel. Normal people don’t say stuff like that.”
I couldn’t believe she caught all of that while she was sitting behind me in her car. Either she had hypersensitive hearing, or I talked too damned loud.
“I’m not normal people. I’m uhhm. I’m what you’d call…”
I struggled with what to say.
I wasn’t a normal person, I didn’t act like a normal person, and I couldn’t claim to be a normal person. While I attempted to formulate a variation of the truth – or a really well thought out lie – she leaned forward and pried her way into my line of sight.
“A criminal,” she said.
“Whoa. What the fuck? Why would you say that?”
“In the alley. You had a gun.”
Perceptive little bitch.
“So.”
“It’s simple mathematics,” she said. “One, you carried a gun. And it was shoved in your pants. Two, you threatened that guy’s life. And three, you told him if he didn’t pay you, you’d sell his wife to the cartel.”
She relaxed into her seat as if she’d made her point. As she reached for her wine, she raised her index finger and blurted out yet another reason. “And four, you drive a Mercedes.”
I chuckled. “Driving a Benz isn’t a crime.”
“You’re not old enough to drive a car like that.”
I found the last statement funny. The rest of it, not so much. I responded to the latter. “I sure as fuck am.”
“No you’re not.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. That car’s paid for, and I’m the one who bought it. So, obviously I’m old enough.”
She cocked and eyebrow. “What’d it cost?”
“I don’t remember. Hundred and something.”
Her eyes went wide. “A hundred and something grand? And you paid for it? Like paid for it?”
“Yeah. I bought the fucker. I think it was $128,000.”
“I want to do whatever it is you do. It’d take…” She took a drink of wine and gazed beyond me for a moment. After a long minute of thinking, she looked at me again. “A little more than fifty years to buy one.”
I choked on my scotch. “Fifty years?”
“Yeah. I make about forty or fifty bucks a week I could call extra. You know, what I spend on clothes and stuff. So, fifty bucks a week, fifty-two weeks a year, that’s $2,600 a year extra. Fifty years of that would be $130,000.”
I was impressed. And shocked. “Jesus. You’re good at math. But what the fuck? Fifty bucks extra a week? That’s fucking ridiculous.”
She wagged her eyebrows. “Welcome to my life.”
I tried to get a grasp on living with fifty extra bucks a week. It didn’t make sense to me. Since I was sixteen, I’d hustled for everything I made. My hustling got me in some serious trouble, but it was also very rewarding.
And fun.
To think I knew someone who worked for a living and made fifty extra bucks a week was incomprehensible to me. I wanted to save her from her ridiculous job and the agony I was sure she was forced to live with, but knew better than to make an attempt.
Stuffing her full of cock and then sending her mouthy little ass home to her roommate and the football player was more like it. I decided to start a new line of questioning. Sort of. “What are you good at?”
“I’m good at a lot of things, but I thought we were talking about you?”
I cleared my throat. “We were. You bitched about my car, and then you said you made fifty bucks a week extra. Now we’re talking about you and how you’re not making any money at Patel’s bar. Maybe you need to slow down on the wine so you can keep up with the convo.”
“I’m not drunk, I’m just feeling good.”
I liked watching her lips move. She had an amazing mouth. “Open your mouth.”
“What?”
“Your mouth, open it.”
She scrunched her nose. “Why?”
I glared at her. After a few seconds of nervously squirming around in her seat, she turned to face me and opened her mouth. I didn’t want to look in her mouth, I just wanted her to do what I told her to. I folded my arms in front of my chest and imagined feeding her my dick, one thick inch at a time.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”
She closed her mouth and licked her lips. “What was that about?”
I shrugged and took a sip of scotch.
She extended her index finger. “I’m not so drunk that I can’t see what it is you’re doing. You’re changing the subject, criminal.”
It seemed strange to be on the receiving end of harassment, especially at the hands of a woman. I tossed my hands in the air in an exaggerated – but playful – fashion. “We don’t have a subject. You were just showing me how wide you could open your pretty little mouth. Now I’ve got your mouth and that cute little ass of yours to think about.”
She huffed out a heavy sigh. One would have thought I spent the entire evening discussing sex. Truth be told, I hadn’t even started.
She raised her glass of wine and immediately realized it was empty. “Yeah. Okay, so you gave me your little business card in the alley. And then you hunted me down, just like you said. Now you’re making me open my mouth. What do you want from me?”
“Spend some time with you. Get to know you.” I took a short sip of my scotch and shrugged. “See what happens.”
“See what happens?” She leaned forward and stared straight into my eyes. “That’s code for see if I can fuck this bitch.”
I choked on my scotch. Again. I normally didn’t keep track of such things, but it was the third time. And it was scotch. It burned. Bad.
“Son-of-a-bitch.” I was pissed, but couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve got to stop making me do that.”
She raised her empty wine glass. “I wish I had something to choke on.”
I fought against the urge to smile, but didn’t totally succeed.
“What?” she snapped.
“You want something to choke on? I can resolve that problem. Quick.”
“Here we go again. I was talking about my empty wine glass, and you’re thinking about sticking your big fat dick in my mouth. I don’t know about you, Dick.”
“Big fat dick? What do you know about my dick?”
She studied me for a few long seconds, and then reached into her purse. “Nothing. Forget I said anything. I’m drunk. Well, not drunk. Just drunk-ish.”
She spread lip gloss on her lips, smacked them together a few times, and dropped the tube into her purse. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m a criminal too.”
“Excuse me?”
She pointed to herself and nodded. “A criminal. I’ve been arrested.”
“I can’t wait to hear this. For what? Being a mouthy bitch?”
“Kicking a cop in the nuts.”
It didn’t surprise me. “Seriously? A real cop or a Wal-Mart cop?”
“Real cop. Real cop car. Real jail cell. Real judge. Real jury. Real everything. The fucker pulled me over for speeding, and was going to write me a ticket for not having proof of insurance. I had proof of insurance, but he wouldn’t accept it.”
“So you kicked him in the nuts?”
“No. I kicked him in the nuts because he grabbed me.”
“Why’d he grab you?”
“Because he told me to stop and I didn’t.”
“Stop what?”
“Walking away while he was talking to me.”
“So you kicked him in the nuts?”
“Yep. Twice. I just paid my insurance premium, and had the proof on my phone. I opened the proof of insurance, you know, the .pdf document the insurance company sent me. So I got it and showed him my phone and said ‘here’s the proof.’ And he said ‘that’s not proof, I need a printed copy.’ And I said ‘no you don’t, you want a printed copy. You need proof. You have proof.’
And I turned around and started walking back to my car. So, he grabbed my arm and spun me around. Fucker starts screaming about how I need to do what he says and all kinds of crazy shit. I would have been fine with all that, but he wouldn’t let go of my arm. I told him to let go. He didn’t. So, I kicked him in the nuts.
Twice.
Fucker arrested me, and charged me with assault on a law enforcement officer. Now I’m on probation. So, you’re not the only criminal at the
table.”
I wasn’t going to let her goad me into admitting I was a criminal. I shot her a grin to acknowledge her accomplishment.
She grinned in return. “So, back to what we were talking about. What do you want from me, Dick?”
I glared at her. “Will you stop saying my name like that?”
“I will if you tell me what you want.”
“I haven’t decided yet. I’ve got a few ideas, though.”
She made eye contact, leaned over the center of the table, and grabbed my glass of scotch. After two sips, she winced, coughed, and wiped her mouth. “Bullshit. I wish once, just once, that a guy would be truthful. I ask you what you do, and you say you’re an entrepreneur. I ask you what you want, and you say you haven’t decided. Every guy I ever dated ended up being a liar. Be different, Dick. Tell the truth.”
I grabbed my scotch out of her hand and drank what was left in the glass. I had nothing to lose in telling her the truth. Not really. I inhaled a deep breath, studied her for a moment and decided what the fuck. “When I met you in the alley, I thought you were a cute little bitch, just like I told you. In fact, the more I looked at you, the cuter you got. You made my dick stiff, Jess. All ten inches of it.”
Her eyes went wide. Real wide.
My mouth twisted into a smirk. “Yeah. I said ten. And it’s about as fat as your skinny little wrist. I made you open your mouth just because, but when you did, I imagined watching every fucking inch of it sliding past those pouty little lips of yours. You know the lips I’m talking about right? The ones you just spread that lip butter on a minute ago?”
She stared back at me with her mouth agape.
I stood up, opened my wallet, and tossed $500 on the table. “Get up.”
Her brown eyes met mine. “Huh?”
I tossed my head toward her purse. “Get up. Grab your purse. We’re leaving.”
She stood up. “Where are we going?”
“Back to my place. I’m tired of arguing with you. I’ll just show you what I want.”
“What if I don’t want to do what you want to do?”
“You do. You’re just too busy running your fucking mouth to realize it.” I coughed out a laugh. “But here pretty soon it’ll be too full for you to talk.”
DIRTY READS Page 3