She aims her gaze at me, a rifle to a buck, and says, “Just like you started this?” She gestures between me and her.
I look out the windshield, see someone’s spray-paint tag on the brick wall. “Blaze, I’m tryin to be a gentleman about this. I’m trying to...not scare you off...because...” I turn to her. If I tell her what I’m really thinking she’ll run. I shake my head of the rest of it. “Never mind.”
“Now you’re the one hiding your thoughts from me!”
I feel myself blush. I look at the gearshift, anything to not confront her beauty. “I’m scared that if I tell you, that I’ll come across as too intense. And it’ll make you think you need to get a restraining order against me or something.”
She says nothing. So I look up at her. I can’t tell if it’s shock in her eyes, or desire. “May—maybe...” She clears her throat. “Maybe that’s what I...like...about you. How intense you are.” When she says Like, her bottom lip trembles like a flag in a storm.
Our eyes burn into each other. Eons pass. For the first time in my life, in front of a girl, I’m speechless—oh, no, wait, that was on Saturday night, when I first met her, so this is the second time. But it’s because none of the bullshit lines I’ve ever fed a girl would fit in here. She ain’t just some girl, Deck.
I’m watching my step, trying not to step on that thin layer of ice that might send me crashing down into the frozen lake—the grand piano falling. Because this one—Blaze—I don’t want to throw away.
I reach over to touch her hand, and as I get there, she moves toward me.
Her tongue touches mine.
-5-
It’s slow. Passionate. Deeply moving.
My body starts trembling, much like the tremble she had in her chin a second ago. My skin breaks out in chills. My manhood...grows.
I close my eyes, run my hand over the shaved side of her head. The side I love the most, because it’s the bad side.
Blaze is far from bad. But she tries to be bad. It’s the look of someone who’s been kicked so hard, stomped on, and yet gets up again, with a look of defiance.
I imagine her standing in a road with the bulls in Spain and, tatted up and hair whipping in the wind, giving them the finger while they charge toward her. That’s the type of babe Blaze is.
I also imagine her getting trampled.
And getting up again, and saying, I’ll do it better next time.
But getting run over by bulls leaves you a little shaken the next time you see one. Who was the bull that makes you shake like this when I kiss you? I think.
I feel her hesitation now—physically. And I also feel her desire to push through it.
Her gentleness on my lips, the unsteady caress of my hair (which drives me crazy, I must mention), tells me this about her: I’m afraid. But I won’t let this fear get in the way of us.
The smacks of her lips on mine is the only sound in this car. That, and the ever-loudening breathing.
A second ago I was getting cold—forty or so degrees outside, the car off. But now, I’m sweating. Sweating everywhere.
She pulls away, her hand behind my neck. Her eyes flying furiously left and right. She wavers a second before kissing me again. No need to rush this. And I like the slowness. I’ve never liked slowness with a girl.
Gina Moretti is a testament to that.
But hormones will be hormones, and the more Blaze’s sounds change from breathy whispers to moans of Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, MMMMMMMMMMM, the more my male hormones take over me.
I hold back. I force myself to. Ice on a lake, I think. And what a beautiful lake you are...
She pulls away again. I expected her to. Because she has her pace, the pace that she’s comfortable with. The pace that makes her face that bull successfully.
Her face is red. She leans back. She laughs at the fogged up car windows. “I always thought that only happened in movies.” It’s clear she hasn’t been with a dude in a car before. “Deck...I...” She puts a hand to her forehead. “Oh, god. Uhm.” Then, steeling herself: “Would you like to come upstairs for a bit?”
I smile. “Sure. I’d love to.”
-6-
I get a closer look at her apartment now. Especially at the two mixing setups she has—one in each corner. And, if I’m not mistaken, one of them is vinyl. The kit sits on a wooden stand that looks homemade, and I guess the vinyl records are below that, on a built-in shelf behind it or something.
“You scratch?” I ask her.
She nods. “I do it all.” She eases over to the decks, walks behind the wooden stand. Puts on a hip hop LP that I don’t recognize, only that it’s from back in the day, and starts grooving some scratches that make me wanna get my groove on.
“How much time do you actually spend on mixing a day? Or...” I gesture to the vinyl decks, “...scratching.”
“My life consists of buying groceries, reading books while listening to music, and mixing. Well, that’s how it’s been the last year or so...” She turns her back to me, and I see her hand go up to her face.
I don’t ask about the friend, although only an idiot wouldn’t figure out that “Friend of mine ODed” happened about a year ago.
“Wanna drink?”
Actually, all I wanna do is put you against that counter there. “Sure, something...cold.”
“Alcoholic?”
“No, uhm, I gotta drive home still.”
She pauses in her stride to the fridge. “Uhm, oh, yeah, of course.” When she opens the door, I see the mountain of Amp and Rockstar energy drinks, as well as a few Dale’s Pale Ale cans. “Amp?”
“You have soda?”
“Pepsi.”
“Sure.”
She pulls out a can, pops it open with a squish, and places it on the scratched and grooved-up counter. Must be an art thing, because it doesn’t look ugly or cheap. I pull up a stool, sit. She’s tracing purposeless fingertips over those same grooves on the countertop.
I sip. Wait.
Her eyes are down, then up, then down again. “In the car, I wanted to say...uhm...that the line ‘Declan started it’ was funny because”—she bites her lower lip, looks up at the back left corner—“because I can see that in you, you know. That you start things. I mean, because you kinda started this as well. With me. Like I said in the car.” She stops.
My drink is paused to my lips. “So did you.”
“After you checked me out all night.”
“Because you played a crazy hot set.”
“So you’re denying you actually started this?”
“Nope, I can live with starting this. But that fight Trev and Skate told you about, that was all them!”
“Well, you seem like that kind of person, you know? The one that will go out and get the things he wants. So, well, I just thought it was funny. You know, ‘Declan started it!’ And, when Skate was saying it, I couldn’t help thinking, Yeah, tell me about it! ’Cause he damn-well started this shit, too! Anyway, I didn’t wanna say anything because, well, it was embarrassing. I mean, this is not even necessarily anything, you know.”
“Hmmm?”
“Us. I mean, it’s been”—she counts with her fingers—“not even two days and—”
“And nothing. Last night, Blaze...it wasn’t just...nothing. You understand? Look, I’d tell you ‘I’m not that kind of guy’ but, well, maybe I am. Sort of. But with you it was different. And I don’t know what it means, I just want you to know that I was sincere there with you on that bed.”
Thinking of it makes my bad-boy cringe for some more.
She trails her finger on the wood, looks down. Always thinking. About what?
“Well, I haven’t been with...a lot of guys. God, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. Anyway, I haven’t been with a lot of guys. But there was a time when, doing what we did yesterday, was just physical. You know, get high, get it on with someone. Say sayonara the next day. That’s not me anymore. So...yeah, for me too—it was more than just... How do I put this? Rubbing. It was more than th
at.”
“Glad we’re on the same page.”
“Your turn. To tell me what you wanted to say to me in the car. After you said ‘Never mind.’”
“Nah, let’s skip that.”
“Spit it out.”
I swallow a big gulp of Pepsi, because my throat’s feeling suddenly a little swollen. “Well, when you looked at me in the car and said I started this”—I gesture back and forth between us like she did earlier—“I flashed back...to last night. And, your eyes, well, they made me hot, Blaze. And I wanted to jump you. Right there in the car. All the way. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
She says nothing for a second. I see the sweat glistening from her brow. From the talk? The workout? “Do you wanna jump me now?”
The Pepsi’s empty when I try take a cooling sip. “I wanna jump you all the time.”
-7-
Looking down at the can, I pretty much miss the fact that she moves out from behind the counter. I look up to see only a budget Frigidaire where she was a moment ago. Then I feel an unsteady hand on my sleeved arm—the tat sleeve.
She grabs it, looks at the inside. LIVE IN THE NOW. She traces it with her finger and it tickles like a mofo. It also makes me horny as a mofo. I put the empty can down and crush it a little, unwittingly. My mind’s not oblivious to the sex-talk we just had, before she so delicately started lighting fires on my pores with her bright purple nails, and now—
Oh. Holy. Christ.
Her tongue’s on my upper arm—the inside of it, on the W of NOW—and I almost hear the shudder as it courses down my head and back. I wanna grab her and rip her top off and take her pants off and wrap her in my arms and legs. I feel the Pepsi can crush even further under my grip and decide to let it go; at least it’s empty, lest we suddenly needed to get involved in some serious cleaning of her pine floors because of my agitated physical state!
Her tongue keeps dancing down my tat, down every letter, tracing lines on one of the most sensitive parts of the body. I hold myself back, because as much as I’d like to let my testosterone take her and push her up against this counter, what she’s doing is so unbelievably sincere and romantic that I realize I’d be a fool to do it. I realize it like an anchor to the head.
I grab the edge of the counter. When she gets to my wrist, I decide to get off the stool because I need to move! My legs thrum, my heart puts on boxing gloves and starts punching. I’m so fired up that the stool falls with a clang as I get off it.
It doesn’t faze her. She twirls and swirls with the most exquisite tongue I’ve ever come across in the entire universe. And I know that’s a hyperbole, but I’m in that ninth cloud you only read about, baby. Motherfuck!—I’m on number nine-thousand right now!
She eases herself back. Her back touches the counter. She tugs my arm so that my body presses against her.
And this is when she slides her hands against the back of my shirt. And presses her forehead to my chest.
The intimacy of it is like a sharp axe through my head.
I actually feel my heart skip a beat. Like, really—one beat. For goddamn real.
-8-
I start kissing her head, the shaved part, on her right—my left. Because that’s the part that drives me wild. The prickling of the stubs of hair on my tongue makes me see hazy images of lust and desire in my watering eyes. I don’t know where this is going, how far I can push it. I don’t know how far I can push her.
Although I would not say her kisses and her tongue on my skin (My GOD!) was unconfident, I also wouldn’t call it Stripper at a Nightclub confident. The kisses were intimate, the kind of intimacy you get only after months of being together with someone.
Passionate. The fire-in-the-eyes kind.
And Fearful. A fear I can tell—by the gentle quivers of her fingertips, the slightest hesitations as her tongue sometimes fails to touch mine—that there’s a darkness there. A black hole that she feels she could fall into at any moment, pulling everything she knows with her.
In a snap.
I put my other hand behind her head, because I know that damned fear. I know it. I’ve felt it, walked in the sewers with it. I’ve tasted its foulness and swum in its filth. Although no words are spoken, I want her to know this. I want her to know that I, too, know.
She takes the cue on my kisses moving down to her neck and eases her hands up my back.
I groan, trying to release something. But it’s no good. I’ve passed the edge, and I need something else. I’m too scared to take it from her. So I let it ride, feeling each of her fingertips—her nails—like a blade to my skin. Each one calling to me, telling me to follow my instincts and do what men and women have been doing since the beginning of time.
And to do it with her. Now!
“I’m too scared to take this further with you,” I admit. “I...don’t know what you’re used to. And I don’t want to screw this up. I really don’t want to screw this up.”
Her body clenches up as I ask her. “Just...not sex,” she says. “I...I’m sorry...I’m just not ready for that. But...don’t hold back otherwise.” She moves in on my neck. And the way she does it tells me she wants me as badly as I want her.
Or more.
Our lips collide. A maelstrom of mutual urgency. Her cries are pleas. Pleas to be released from the blackened pits life throws us into sometimes.
I’m sure my groans betray this as well. And it soon muddles itself up in my mind: Who needs whom more?
The blood in my veins is a rushing river, my heartbeat is the pace of galloping horses—their asses branded and chilly thrown on the wounds. Impatiently, thirsty lips fighting and scrambling, I undo her belt. I fight with her jeans button, a battle which it’s unfortunately winning. Pulling on it brings her waist forward to me like she was made of feathers. Her hands go below and help me and the relief of it—the confirmation of her telling me, Yes, go there, touch me there—is enough to make this button’s stubbornness seem like Lucipher himself laughing at me. And then, after an age, it snaps open.
And so does her zip.
And my fingers slide up into her wonderfully sodden and slicked crevice.
-9-
The burst of moisture on my hand weakens every defense I have. Even I groan at its feel on my fingers. She groans as well, writhes, twists, impales her forehead into my chest as my hand plies her below. Her pelvis starts rocking under my hand. Down, she pushes.
Oh, god, this is SO hot.
Nails drive into my back, bringing my pelvis closer to hers so that my hand—the one inside her—is very literally being crushed between us.
And my boy down there starts screaming.
Her teeth bite into my tee, just catching some of my nipple underneath. It hurts like a bastard, but, for one microscopic second, it actually takes my mind off...that.
But the moment flies out the window with a moan so guttural, so earthy and primal, from her, that for one blissful instant, there is nothing.
Nothing but us.
And her exploding body on my hand.
-10-
Think of the first pink petals falling off a cherry tree after they bloom.
Think of that scene in your favorite movie, a setting sun gilding a skyscrapered city to a glorious backdrop of violins and groaning cellos. Two sets of eyes meeting across an impossible distance, blocked by a throng of frenzied work-goers. And the owners of those eyes just knowing.
Think of that first snowfall, of that first snowflake, falling, drifting, twirling in the sky and, then, landing precisely on the tip of your nose.
Yeah, I think you get how I’m feeling about Blaze right now...
-11-
My right arm clamps her tiny body to mine while her own body shatters against me. My left hand supports her below. In the end, she’s still. An inward breath of hers manifests itself as a quick wheeze.
And still, I hold her.
My need has fallen to the backseat. Lost somewhere. Gone. Disappeared into a world that probably transcends
the physical. I even feel my hard-on settle. As if that were possible!
But, yet, here it is.
My tee is drenched, especially where her head now rests.
And I am amazed.
We share a moment of united silence. I ease my hand out from inside her, and put it behind her back.
I feel the weight of her cheek on my heart as it beats. I swear to god I can even hear that beat’s thundering echoes in this empty room.
The world starts to swirl. And we’re in the center of it.
Don’t ask me to explain that. Because I sure as fuck don’t know what it means myself.
Just like I don’t know what the hell it is I’m feeling right now.
Except that I like it.
The middle’s always good...
SEVEN
THE WOLVES
-1-
Blaze Ryleigh
The rush is intense. It’s crazy. It’s the wildest roll in the history of Molly rolls. It’s inside me, bubbling in my blood, making my heart rush, my skin sweat. My breathing faster than a speedcore Dance Beat.
Standing here, as his hand moves out from me and to my back, then holds me—a staggering thirty-four or so hours since I met him—I’m starting to admit of the possibility of Love between us. But let me tell you, I don’t use that word lightly. I mean, this is the pure-grade stuff. Spike it once and never live to tell the tale, you understand? This is the hundred percent shit, “the good shit;” the wickedest, baddest, deadliest Aunt Hazel you ever thought of sticking on a spoon and chasing like the Bengal Tiger that it is.
His touches send chills over my skin the likes of which no Speed Pill ever came close to.
I’m mesmerized by his smile, his eyes, his strength. By him—the real man underneath all that veneer. A broken man, I believe.
Like me.
I’m hooked on him. Hooked on our Mutual Meth
And I’m loving it.
You always love the drug when you’re on it...
Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) Page 12