Struggling to maintain her “mother said no cookies”-demeanor, she said, “I don’t think it works that way.”
“Probably not,” I admitted, ripping the last batch of wires free from my body—suddenly feeling a lot like Pinocchio ridding himself of all those pesky puppet strings—“but I don’t exactly like playing by the rules.” Still holding my mischievous child grin (it seemed to go well with “mother said no cookies”), I quipped, “Thought you would’ve figured that out by now,” before returning to the matter at hand: “So what’s in the bag?”
Mia rolled her eyes once more, groaned in defeat, and finally succumbed to a smile, which just as quickly turned into a giggle. Shaking her head, she closed the distance between us, planted a kiss on my lips—heaven; pure heaven—and set the bag gently on my lap.
It was an unmarked paper bag. Fancy, but not emblazoned with any brand name or logo. A pair of woven, cream-colored drawstrings looped up from either end of the widest lengths of the opening, and, peeking out just over the edges—the contents just slightly longer than the bag was tall—was a ruler-straight length of black plastic. It took me a moment to realize that what I was looking at was the outer edge of a frame. Squinting at this, confused, I took this by either corner and began to pull out whatever it was.
“The frame is a cheap piece of shit,” Mia injected before I had it all the way out, “but I figured we could find something nicer to put it in after you got out of here.”
I smiled at that, deciding to add that mission to the day’s plans.
Admittedly, that was not a long list.
I hadn’t decided that I was leaving until the moment I’d seen Mia walk through the door. I mused on that, finding it funny how such a bold and brash decision could be made in such a split-second, spur-of-the-moment instant. In my defense, though, having that woman step into your life was a surefire way to motivate such brashness. It certainly made sense how a face like that—and, yes, a body like that, too—could do well to separate men from their money. I had never been confused about why the Carrion Crew wanted her on the streets as one of their whores, and I couldn’t even be mad about it in the long run. If prostitution was the oldest human occupation, then women like Mia represented the best the business had to offer. A batting of those eyes, a pursing of those lips, and—sweet fucking hell, I’m horny!—a swagger of those hips and, yeah, the male mind was putty. Rendered stupid and desperate, she could get a guy to make a brash, split-second, and spur-of-the-moment decision. Even when she didn’t mean to. On the streets, as an “employee” of the Carrion Crew, that might have translated into getting into a guy’s wallet in exchange for letting him into her pants. Here, in a hospital room, however, it translated to “I’m getting the fuck out of here!”
And, again, in my defense: I was horny.
Then, finishing with the extraction process of the “cheap piece of shit” frame, I felt a great deal of that horniness leave me. Awe sauntered in side-by-side with pure love for this woman to replace it.
“I remembered your story about visiting there,” she said, smiling at what I could only imagine was a look of shock plastered across my face as I took in the familiar sight of a photograph of a scenic, sea-front view of a Roman town I’d gone to during a family vacation as a boy. We’d stumbled across that print during one of our dates, and it suddenly occurred to me that something I’d thought to be so passive and forgettable at the time had motivated her to track it down for me.
If there were any guilty feelings about ditching the hospital to spend the day with her, they were gone in that instant.
“You… you went back to the canal to get this?” I asked, hoping my voice wasn’t breaking as badly as it felt like it was.
Mia shrugged and tried to look casual as she said, “I was in the area.”
I tore my eyes from the photograph—no easy task, I might add—to give her a face. I remembered the ride we’d taken to get there, remembered how great it felt to have her sitting behind me on my chopper as we sped through the winding streets that left the city and wound dizzily towards the small town during its annual Canal Days festival. I hadn’t resented a moment of that ride—hadn’t resented a moment of that entire night, to be fair—but it was no quick trip. And it was most certainly not the sort of place that Mia had just accidently found herself in, no matter how beautiful and fun it might be.
“Oh? And what were you doing in the area?” I challenged.
Smirking, realizing she’d been caught, she said, “Tracking down that photograph.”
I stared at her, feeling myself fall in love with her all over again, and finally reached out to her, pulling her down to kiss her again. This time, I kissed her properly. None of that “glad you didn’t die”-pecking or “hey! Look at you awake and not comatose”-smooching. No, sir. Our lips needed to be properly reacquainted, and you can bet your ass that’s just what I did.
Because Jason Presley handles his business.
And, speaking of which…
Parting from the kiss, I carefully worked Mia’s gift back into its bag and hoisted myself from the hospital bed. I’d caught sight of some fresh clothes earlier, a pair of faded jeans with a tri-folded sheet of paper that read “SO WE DON’T HAVE TO STARE AT THAT BARE ASS OF YOURS, BOSS!” and my leather jacket, still encased in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag with a small gift tag looped around the top. Though it was pink and frilly, this tag’s message—“only a faggot knows how to get death and meth out of leather!”—was anything but fluffy and cute. It was also all the evidence I needed to know that Danny, that tough-as-nails and fruitier-than-a-bag-of-Skittles godsend of a man had managed to pull through. Being one of my best friends and the closest thing I had to a father, it had been enough to make me laugh and cry at the same time upon seeing it.
Meth lab explosion? Multiple gunshot wounds? Burns? Lacerations? Smoke inhalation? Bah! Why should any of that go and spoil his fun, right? I’d thought, practically hearing him say “I ain’t dyin’ on Pride Month, ya dumb motherfucker!” in my mind.
Now, working my way across the room on still-shaky legs, I found myself glad for the generous offers for a whole new set of reasons. Knowing Danny was alive and well—and still catty as hell—was nice and all, but I was pretty sure that the clothes I’d been brought in wearing, all scorched and likely reeking of smoke and poisonous fumes, were long-gone. While nothing—goddam NOTHING!—was about to keep me from leaving that place with Mia, I was equally sure that a man escorting a pretty woman down the street with his butt crack hanging out from behind a hospital johnny was a good way to get dragged to a different sort of hospital, one with a snugly-fitted “hug myself” jacket, a drool bib, and a private room with walls made out of pillows.
Not that I probably wasn’t overdue for a psych eval…
But I’d definitely have to be crazy to stick around there any longer when I could be out and about with—
“You’re really doing this?” Mia said with a startled giggle.
“Damn right!” I told her, tearing off the johnny and beginning to reach for the pants gifted to me by some random (and soon to be handsomely rewarded) member of the Crows. “And nothing in the world’s gonna stop—”
“Mister Presley!”
I spun at the stunned and outraged call of my name and spotted the nurse from before glaring back at me from the doorway. The room fell into an awkward silence—enough to let the lazy THWAP of my whipped-about penis slapping against my inner thigh resound in three sets of ears—and I became aggressively aware of a number of incriminating facts:
I was out of bed.
I was naked.
And, likely most damning in this medical professional’s eyes, I had tampered with a great many pieces of equipment in order to accomplish those first two feats.
With no small amount of bitter resentment, it occurred to me that any one of those machines I’d just unplugged myself from could have alerted her to what was either my attempted escape or my untimely demise.
Standing there—red-handed as a boy with his hand in the cookie jar and naked as the day I was born—I decided that dying wouldn’t be such an awful thing at that moment.
“I… uh,” I stammered, glancing longingly towards my increasingly glorious-looking pair of gifted pants. “I don’t suppose a ‘sweet titty-fucking Christ’ would fix this, would it?”
****
“‘Sweet titty-fucking Christ’?” Mia repeated to me for likely the hundredth time in just as many minutes. She’d gotten as much of a laugh out of it as the nurse had the first time around—or maybe she’d been laughing at me being caught stark-naked in my escape attempt, my “guilty cock-slap,” as she’d put it, or just the overall impact of the absolutely mortifying scene—and had yet to let me live it down.
“You’re going to owe me a titjob every time you throw that back at me, you brat!” I scolded, but an ear-splitting grin abandoned my effort to come off stern.
“Like I’d have a problem with that,” she taunted, slipping fluidly into a playful, skipping side-step to shake her chest at me for a moment before saying, “And I wouldn’t even charge you the twenty bucks for it, either!”
“Twenty bucks?” I asked, raising an eyebrow as she fell back into a casual stroll beside me. We both ignored the stunned glances of a few passersby who’d happened to overhear the exchange. “Isn’t that sort of underselling it? I mean, a chance to slap one’s prick between those perfect, creamy orbs has got to be worth, I don’t know, a hundred dollars! Fifty, at least!”
Mia shrugged a shoulder and looked away, her face twisted like she’d bitten into something sour. “Don’t blame me,” she defended, suddenly sounding upset despite her obvious efforts to keep the joke alive, “it wasn’t like I ever set the prices.”
I curled my lip in an understanding smirk and put my arm around her shoulders. “Well, your previous employers clearly didn’t know what a quality product they had. Rest assured, a titjob from you should earn no less than a crisp Franklin.”
She rolled her eyes at that but still offered me a reassured smirk. “You’re such a charmer. So you telling me I should put myself back on the market, this time as a high-class whore? Maybe advertise as an escort to athletes and politicians.”
“Ew!” I gave a shutter and shook my head, mock-retching. “Politicians? Not sure I could share a bed with somebody who’s slept with that sort of scum.”
Mia folded her arms across her chest and gave me a look. “But I’m free to whore myself out to athletes, huh?” she said in a dangerously challenging voice.
I shrugged, feeling up to a dangerous challenge. “I guess there’s a few sports stars I wouldn’t mind taking sloppy seconds to,” I admitted. “Provided you got me an autograph, too. Ooh!” I clapped victoriously, “You could get them to sign your tits before giving me one of those hundred-dollar titjobs! Then I’d have an autograph on my—”
“Jerk!” Mia snarled, driving a surprise punch into my shoulder and effectively numbing my arm in the process.
“H-hey! Ow!” I whined, rubbing my sore shoulder and pouting. “That actually hurt!”
“Good!” she chastised, making another fist and moving like she was going to hit me again.
“NO, MOMMY! DON’T BEAT ME AGAIN!” I play-wailed, earning the startled glances of a few other pedestrians. “I’LL BE GOOD! I PROMISE!”
“Oh my…” Mia gasped, looked around at the fresh attention we were getting, and broke out into nervous cackles. “Will you shut up! Jeez, you’re gonna get us arrested or something!”
“Nah,” I said, waving off the suggestion. “That would never happen.”
“Why?” Mia asked, “Because you can just pay them off like you did that woman back at the hospital?”
I smirked at that, remembering cutting a check for the nurse with enough zeroes on it to convince her that she hadn’t been fast enough to catch me before my escape. Though I knew the hospital would track me down soon enough for ducking out, I also knew that my bank account and my connections would smooth over the process when that time came.
“Technically I’ve been paying off the cops for a few years now. Before that it was my brother, and before that it was my dad. Though I won’t go so far as to claim that I’m untouchable in the eyes of the law, if a cop shows up in response to a call from any of these folks”—I nodded out towards the other pedestrians, who’d already lost interest and had gone back to their business—“they’ll probably just roll their eyes, say ‘hi,’ and then be on their way.”
“Probably?” Mia asked, honing in on that one conditional word.
I shrugged again. “A new guy might not recognize me, bring us in, and then get a bunch of guff at the station for wasting everyone’s time for not knowing who I was.”
“Oh…” Mia said after a moment of consideration. “So they really don’t mind you being, you know, a crime lord and all.”
I feigned injury at that, grasping at my chest and feeling the leather of my jacket rub against my bare skin underneath. “Crime lord? You injure me, madam! I’m more like… hmm, like Robin Hood, I suppose.”
Mia giggled and said, “Oh? So you rob from the rich to give to the poor, huh?”
“You know that’s not the—” I groaned and shook my head. “Look, the cops know that what we do keeps the real bad shit—the sort of shit that the Carrion Crew is trying to stir up—from running rampant. Hell, you know what we’re working on with Candy and our organized prostitution ring,” I pointed out. “No more dangerous sex trafficking, no more abusive pimps, no more risky nights on the streets. Sure, it’s still illegal, but it’s not like—”
“Jace,” Mia cut me off, giving me one her patented smirks.
“Yeah?” I asked, breathing hard in my interrupted, post-self-defense rant.
She hooked her arm around mine and leaned against me as we continued to walk. “I was teasing you,” she said with a purr as she nuzzled my still-aching shoulder. “I know you’re the good-bad guys.”
“Oh… right,” I said, more than a little embarrassed.
A short silence stretched on then. Our walk continued, and though I appreciated it for what it was I found myself wishing I had my chopper. There was no denying that the liberating sensation of sailing through traffic on a roaring motorcycle was leagues and legends beyond that of meandering about on a sidewalk among countless others. Truth be told, it made me feel a bit like a bit of livestock; made me feel like I was being watched, herded. This, however, I knew to be a product of paranoia.
I was, after all, a bit crazy…
Wasn’t I?
“So what would you do if I decided to be a high-class whore?” Mia suddenly asked.
An older woman with a small, knockoff handbag—one that I personally recognized as something the Crows had put into circulation to challenge a price hike in the name brand it was counterfeiting—gasped as she overheard the question, nearly dropping the bag, and scuttled away as though the whore-bug were contagious.
Not that I could exactly blame her. The question had caught me off guard, as well.
“I… uh, what?” I stammered, trying to wrap my mind around what she was asking. “I don’t think… I mean, I guess I can’t really stop you if that’s what you want, but… but… wait, no! You don’t want to be a whore again… do you?”
Mia purred again, giving my shoulder another nuzzle, and then shook her head. “No, not really. Not unless I’d be your whore; your private whore.”
“So… like, I take you to nice places, buy you nice things, and basically just show you a nice life, and in exchange I get to have nasty sex with you?”
“Pretty much,” she said with a nod. “Yeah.”
I considered this for a moment and then laughed. “And how would that be different from being a girlfriend?” I asked.
“Jerk!” she repeated, and, with this repetition, she served up another dose of shoulder-numbing fury.
I yelped, laughed, and scooped her back into me with my now-throbbing arm.
/>
God, but I loved this woman!
“But you really wouldn’t care, would you?” she asked then, glancing up at me. “You didn’t mind before—back when I was still working for the Carrion Crew—and… and I don’t feel like you’d mind now.”
I shrugged my opposite shoulder, taking more care to not nudge her away than to nurse the ache in my other arm. “Why should I care? It’s like I said before: prostitution is a job—a service—not a relationship. You selling a blowjob or some casual sex isn’t really much different in my eyes than a baker selling a loaf of bread or a fancy cake.”
“You know that not everyone would agree with that perspective,” she countered.
I gave another one-armed shrug. “And they’re welcome to feel what they want. I won’t even say that they’re wrong. There’s obviously some differences, but the bulk of those differences are superficial.”
Mia cocked her head and asked, “How do you mean?”
“They put emphasis on sex as being strictly this or strictly that. It’s either an emotional act for them, and so it must always be an emotional act, or it’s a matter of ownership—‘I fucked this, so it is therefore mine!’” I paused, shook my head, and sighed. “I didn’t have a problem with you—or, more specifically, with your job—because I didn’t get the impression that you loved any of the guys who were buying from you. If I thought that any one of those guys was getting a bit of this”—I reached out with my opposite hand to tap lightly at her temple—“or any of this”—I moved down to repeat the action over her chest, just above her heart—“then, yeah, I’d feel pretty jealous, but… well, did you feel anything for any of those guys?”
“Hell no!” Mia spat with absolute disgust. “I can’t even remember what a single one of them looked like!” She paused, thought, and then sighed, “Well, actually, there was this one… but he was a kid—I don’t even think he was… oh god, Jace, he was just a kid!—and his dad used me as some sort of… like some rite of passage or a damn birthday present or something. Except he insisted on watching and telling this poor boy everything he was doing wrong and… and…” she scoffed and shook her head, “Funny thing was, Jace, that kid—still too young to even buy his own cigarettes—was better than any other John I’d worked on.”
Riding On Fumes: Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (The Crow's MC Book 2) Page 8