by Jessie Evans
“How?” I ask, pressing my lips together as I shake my head. “I can’t let this shit drag anyone else down but…I can’t see a way out. We’re drowning, and I can’t find a life boat, no matter where I look.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Isaac says, cupping my face in his big hand, a gesture I know is meant to be comforting, but only makes me more aware of how small I am. I’m five feet three inches, in heels, and Dad always says I look like I’d blow away in a strong wind. I’m small, scrawny, and I’ve been fooling myself thinking I can hold everything together. The only thing to do now is to start preparing for the worst…or get so drunk I forget about all the problems for a night.
Getting wasted isn’t usually my style—between my alcoholic mom and dad and druggie sister, I’ve seen enough substance abuse to know better—but right now a shot of whiskey is sounding pretty damned good. And hell, it is my twentieth birthday, and I’ve got a fake ID burning a hole in my purse. I’m practically obligated to get wasted.
I sniff and pull away from Isaac with a hard grin. “Grab me a couple of antacids from the top shelf, will ya? I need to get some food in my stomach before I get to the club.”
“Good plan,” Isaac says, letting the heavy stuff drop the way he always does.
It’s one of the reasons he’s still my friend when so many others have come and gone. Isaac knows when to leave things alone, when to turn a blind eye to my father passed out on the floor by the back door or ignore the fact that Emmie’s running around the house with a bare bottom because we ran out of diapers. He knows when to offer advice, and when to just be there, making me feel less alone.
“Thanks for watching the kids so Sherry and I can go out,” I say, chomping the antacids he drops into my palm and washing away the chalk taste with a gulp of Coke that sets my teeth fizzing.
“My pleasure.” Isaac hands me the plate of pizza and watches with a smile as I inhale half a slice in three bites.
“And have fun tonight, okay?” he says. “All the shit will still be here in the morning.”
“Don’t I know it,” I say wryly, shifting to check on the kids as I finish my first slice of pepperoni. Miraculously, no fights have broken out in the ten minutes I’ve dropped my guard. Thank God for pizza and plenty of it.
“I meant you should have a good time,” Isaac says, chucking me on the shoulder. “You deserve a break. Have a few too many; stay out until the sun comes up. I’ll make sure the kids are in bed by ten and don’t burn the house down.”
“And teeth need to be brushed,” I say around a mouthful of pizza. “Especially Sean. He’s been pulling that ‘wet the toothbrush and stick it back in the cup without brushing’ thing lately.”
Isaac gives me a thumbs up.
“And make sure Emmie goes potty last thing before bed,” I continue. “She’s less likely to have an accident that way.”
“Got it.” Isaac nods.
“And don’t let Danny play anything violent while the little ones are downstairs,” I say, finishing my second slice and wiping my hands on the ratty dishtowel hanging by the oven. “Those zombie games give Sean and Emmie both nightmares. Sean says they don’t, but he’s lying. And don’t let Ray take another bath. He’s used up enough hot water for one day, but make sure Danny and Sean—”
I’m interrupted by a hard knock on the front door. Seconds later Sherry slams into the house with a whoop.
“What’s up, people!” she calls out as she breezes through the living room.
She’s wearing as few clothes as possible—black hot pants and a red halter top, paired with heels that look sharp enough to be used as a murder weapon—and her curly red hair is teased into a sexy mess that makes it clear she’s prepared to party.
“Ready to jet, Cait?” she asks, wiggling her fingers at Isaac.
“Yes, she is.” Isaac turns me around by the shoulders and walks me into the living room. “Get her out of here before she starts making lists.”
I turn back to him, hands on my hips. “Do I need to make a list?”
“No!” Isaac and Sherry say at the same time.
“Isaac’s got this. Let’s go.” Sherry grabs my hand and tows me toward the door. “We can get in free to Elevation if we get there before nine o’clock.”
“In bed by ten, y’all,” I call out to the kids as I grab my purse from the hook near the door. “And don’t give Isaac any crap.”
“Have fun!” Ray calls out.
“Happy Birthday, sissy, I love you,” Sean says, earning my forgiveness for being a toothbrush-avoiding turd.
“Don’t get pregnant,” Danny adds, followed by a sharp, “Hey!” when Isaac thunks him on the back of the head.
“Have fun, ladies!” Isaac calls out, grinning as Danny tackles him and they both go rolling onto the carpet. By the time Sherry and I escape out the front door, Sean has launched himself onto the pig pile and all three of them are laughing like idiots.
I know the roughhousing will end in tears—it always does—but I resist the urge to head back into the house and put an end to the madness.
As of now, I’m officially off duty. For the next few hours, I’m not Caitlin the loyal daughter, Caitlin the responsible sister, or Caitlin the dutiful aunt. Tonight I’m going to be the Caitlin who knows how to let her hair down, who can dance all night and still have enough energy to hit the diner before sunrise. I’m ready to cut loose and have some fun before focusing my entire being on finding a way to keep things from going to rot and ruin.
I have no clue that this will be the night that changes everything, the night he sweeps into my life like a summer storm, washing away all those years of hard work and good intentions, making me someone different than I was before.
CHAPTER TWO
Gabe
“If music be the food of love, play on.” –Shakespeare
The brunette next to me in the black leather booth overlooking the dance floor is going on and on about how much she enjoys volunteering at the battered women’s shelter my mother and her DAR cronies fund as their pet project.
Shannon Griffon sits with her shapely, tanned legs demurely crossed, her curve-hugging—yet tasteful—beige dress tugged down to her knees. She extols the virtues of the brave women and adorable children who take refuge at the shelter in words as eloquent as her clothing, each sentence out of her mouth more heartwarming than the last, but all I keep thinking is that this is an hour of my life I’ll never get back again.
An entire, precious hour wasted making small talk with a sweet, doe-eyed girl my mother insisted I take out for drinks, when I could be down on the dance floor with a woman who might actually be up for having a good time later tonight.
“Don’t you think that’s so important?” Shannon asks, raising her voice to be heard over the pulsing club beat. “I mean, I don’t know what I’d do without a space of my own. I think every human being deserves that.”
I nod lazily—hoping she’ll wind down and I’ll be able to make my excuses and head for the exit—but apparently even that small sign of interest is enough to convince Shannon I’m engaged. She launches into another monologue that I’m certain is sincere, not simply an attempt to impress her boss’s son, but I don’t care. I don’t care that Shannon and I share a passion for righting societal wrongs. I don’t care that Shannon is a perfectly nice person. I don’t care that she has a good heart and a hot body and would probably make someone a great girlfriend.
That someone isn’t me, and the sooner we both understand that, the better.
“I’m sorry,” I say, interrupting her lecture on the importance of treating the poor with dignity. “I have to get going.”
Shannon blinks. “Oh. Okay.” She lets out a noise that is half sigh, half nervous laugh. “But we’re having such a good time.”
“No, we’re not,” I say, knowing honesty is the best way to make sure she gets the message, and my mother never tries to set me up with anyone, ever again. “You seem nice, Shannon, but I’m not interested.
Not even a little.”
Her jaw drops. “I… I can’t believe you just said that.”
I lift one shoulder. “I know. I’m rude. You’re better off without a guy like me.” I pat her bare knee, not surprised to feel nothing when I touch her, not even the slightest spark of attraction. “I’m sure you’ll make some frat boy very happy when you go back to the university next fall.”
Shannon surges to her feet, hair flying as she turns to go only to spin back when she realizes she’s forgotten her purse. “You’re a jerk, Gabe Alexander, and you can rot in heck for all I care,” she says, the anger flashing in her brown eyes making her marginally more attractive.
But only marginally.
“Drive safe.” I lift one hand and watch Shannon storm away, weaving in and out between the dark black booths lining the balcony, with the swiftness of a girl who drank virgin margaritas all night.
Virgin drinks with Mother Theresa. So far, this evening has been so G-rated it’s left a saccharine taste in my mouth.
“Whiskey,” I say to the cocktail waitress when she tries to drop off the check—mistakenly assuming I’ll be leaving with my date. “Double. On the rocks. The best you’ve got.”
She nods, setting the feathers on the ridiculous hat Elevation makes its female staff wear bobbing before she walks away.
I settle back into the booth, the tension easing from my shoulders. I suppose some people might be more tense after pissing off their date, but I’m happy to have reclaimed my night. Shannon will be fine. I’ve done her a favor, really. Some girls have to be burned a few times before they wise up, get over their “saving the bad boy” fantasies, and go looking for a nice guy.
Bad boys are a waste of a woman’s time. Most of us are past saving, and the rest have zero interest in Happily Ever After. Hell, I have zero interest in Happy For Now. I just want to feel alive, to look into a girl’s eyes and see something that’s going to keep my mind off all the things I refuse to think about for an hour or two.
The thought is barely through my head when I see her, the blonde in the gold tank top and the painted on jeans thrashing in the center of the dance floor below. She dances like a woman possessed—arms up, head tossing from side to side, hair flying, hips swiveling with a sensual abandon that has the men surrounding her twisting their necks to get a better look at her ass, but she doesn’t seem to realize she’s causing a commotion.
Or if she does, she doesn’t care. She isn’t dancing for the people watching. This dance is about her and the music. She’s feeding off every pulse of the bass, every eerie note the female singer croons about castles in the sky. The girl dances like this moment is all there is, all she needs, all she’ll ever have, and I know right then—I have to have her.
A second later I’ve dumped forty dollars on the table and I’m out of my booth, moving smoothly down the circular staircase to the dance floor, my double shot of whiskey forgotten. I ease off the last step and head straight for my girl, not surprised when the men and women in my way sense me coming and instinctively shift out of my path.
Over the past few months, I’ve stopped giving a shit about almost everything and I’ve started fearing nothing. One thing I’ve learned in that time is that average folks are scared of people like me. Humans are hard-wired to possess a certain degree of fear. Fear keeps us safe from predators. Fear keeps us out of the path of oncoming traffic and our fingers out of the flames. People who aren’t afraid are dangerous, unpredictable, like a field full of landmines you’re better off not trying to cross.
But I have a feeling my tiny dancer is the kind who enjoys danger.
I reach her as the bass line is escalating, thumping faster and faster, becoming a desperate, hungry pulse that fills the club and reverberates off the walls. Her hips keep time, wiggling in tight circles that make it impossible not to imagine her blond curls tumbling around her bare shoulders while she rides me, faster and faster until we both explode.
Judging by the expressions on the faces of the two meatheads in matching polos hovering behind her, the jocks were having similar thoughts, but when I move between them and the object of their desire, they step back. Their lizard brains can probably tell picking a fight with me wouldn’t end well, even if my biceps aren’t the size of watermelons.
Not sparing my competition another thought, I shift my focus to the girl’s flying hair and undulating hips and let go. I let go of everything—the residual irritation from the time I wasted with Shannon, the burning in my gut from my latest fight with my parents, the heavy gray weight of the undeniable things I drag around behind me every minute of every day, and the frustrated ambitions that hover around me like a poisonous fog. It all vanishes, leaving nothing but the girl and me and the music.
I’ve been dancing less than a minute when she turns—pivoting toward me and moving in close—and I know she’s felt it, the draw of two like-minded creatures, a pull a hundred times more powerful than the opposing poles of a magnet. Some may say opposites attract, but when it comes to human nature, like craves like.
My girl shifts closer, so close the hair flying around her face lashes the bare skin below the sleeves of my tee shirt, leaving a pleasant stinging sensation behind. The smell of her—cedar and soap and darker, smokier things—fills my head, ratcheting up my awareness. It’s an unexpectedly masculine smell, but I like it. It suits her, somehow. She might be smaller than almost every other girl on the dance floor, but her ferocity is evident in every hip swivel, in every confident thrust of her thin arms into the air.
By the time she fists her hand in my shirt, pulling me to her, I’m already halfway to being hard. Her curves pressing against me finishes the job, but she doesn’t pull away when my erection brushes against her belly. In fact—from what I can see of her pink lips between the flashing lights and the hair swirling around her face—I think she smiles.
A suspicion of a smile is enough for me to wrap my arm around her waist and lift her slim frame, shifting my jean-clad thigh between her legs.
She stiffens slightly as I urge her closer, until every roll of our hips sends my thigh into intimate connection with her heat. Her fingers claw into my shoulders and I catch a glimpse of her full bottom lip trapped between adorably jagged teeth. She sighs and throws her head back, giving me a glimpse of her pale throat and a jaw so delicate I could fit it in one hand.
Her head snaps back up a moment later, her hair flying around both our faces, and I feel the last of her resistance vanish. She gives in to the moment, to the music, to the way our bodies fit so perfectly together it’s as if God made us to dry hump on the dance floor of the only semi-cool club in northern South Carolina.
I pull her closer, driving my fingers through her hair as our foreheads touch. Her nails dig into my skin so hard I can feel it through my tee shirt, her breath is warm and sweet against my lips, and the soft sound she makes as I tighten my fist in her hair is enough to make my skin go fever hot all over.
I suddenly can’t wait another minute to be alone with her. The music that was fuel for the fire is now a giant gnat buzzing around my head, keeping me from being able to hear the sexy little breaths my girl is making as our dance gets progressively more erotic.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I say in her ear—perfect seashell ear so sweet looking I can’t wait to trace each curve with my tongue. “Get out of here.”
She shakes her head as she pulls away, giving me my first good look at her face. “I can’t, I…” Her words cut off, replaced by a shocked expression I’m sure mirrors my own.
And I don’t shock easily. Not any more.
But finding out the wild, uninhibited stranger, who’s been grinding on my leg in public, is the most uptight good girl I’ve ever met—a girl so good she nuclear bombed her entire life to enable her ghetto family’s bullshit—is shocking stuff.
Still, I recover before she does, and smile.
“Caitlin.” I shout to be heard over the new song, a hip-hop number less pulsing than the techno nu
mber before it. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“You still haven’t seen me,” she says, swallowing hard. “This never happened.”
I smile wider. “Oh, come on. You seemed to be enjoying yourself. I was. Sure you don’t want to come back to my place?”
“No way in hell,” she says, her mouth going tight around the edges, the way it did when she’d turn in her seat during study hall and demand that my friends and I shut up, because “some people need to get their homework done before work, assholes.”
Back then, she was so uptight it was easy to ignore how pretty she was, but now that I’ve seen her dance, smelled her intoxicating scent, and had her breasts flattened against my chest as she writhed against me, I don’t want to ignore it. I don’t want to let Caitlin walk away without finding out if there’s more wild child hiding beneath her chilly exterior.
When she spins and hurries away without so much as a “fuck you,” I follow, stalking her across the dance floor.
I’d never pursue a girl who legitimately had no interest, but I know Caitlin wants me, and I want to feel her fingernails digging into my shoulders again, this time with no clothes between us. I want to feel her breath hot on my lips as she calls my name when I make her come, and come, and come again, until neither of us can hold a thought in our heads and there is nothing in the world but how good it feels to fuck.
Hot, sticky, sweaty, no-holds-barred fucking until the sun rises tomorrow morning.
I have my share of addictions, but this is my drug of choice—the hunt, the rush as I see how fast I can get the woman of the night naked and willing. It usually doesn’t take long. Ten minutes, fifteen—maybe an hour if she’s one of those sweet, Southern types who still gives a shit if a guy thinks she’s a “bad girl.”
As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as a “bad girl,” simply girls who’ve embraced their sexuality and refuse to feel shame about it, and those who haven’t. But, if we must call women who like to come with a variety of consenting partners “bad girls,” then I’m a fan.