“But what about right now?” I asked.
“Now?” she asked, growing bolder, slipping her hand into the back waistband of my jeans and cupping my ass. “Now we practice.”
A growl tore from my throat as I lifted her up into my arms, her legs instantly wrapping around my waist. I felt the heat of her pussy against my cock as I walked with her into the shadows under the house and pushed her up against a pillar. “I’m particularly fond of this particular pillar,” she cooed, tightening her legs around me.
“You make me fucking crazy woman,” I said, grabbing her face in my hands and kissing her furiously. “You can bargain with me all you want, but you best remember who’s in charge here.” I squeezed her ass. “Of this.” She arched her back against the pillar. “Of this,” I said, pinching her nipple between my fingers. “Of this,” I growled, shoving my hand down the front of her shorts and cupping her pussy in my palm. Her head dropped back as she rotated her hips, her body begging for more.
“More,” she said, breathlessly.
I claimed her lips again, rocking rhythmically against the opening of her pussy, kissing her deeply and furiously, my tongue intertwining with hers in a way that made me ache to be balls deep inside of her.
It never mattered how many times I’d kissed Pup or even how many times I’d fucked her since we’d first met. None of that even mattered because it was as if time only made me want her more and more. I was sick with lust for her. A sickness I never wanted to be cured of. I pulled back for air and pushed a stray hair from her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. Her face flushed, her lips swollen and red. As soon as she spoke the last syllable of her question I entered her pussy in one long hard thrust that has me seeing stars as she squeezed around me like a fucking vice. She cried out and dug her fingernails into my shoulders.
Of course my phone rang right when I was about to remind her who owned that pussy by introducing it again and again to my cock until she lost her voice from screaming. When the phone stopped it was only for a second before it starting ringing again. Finally, Pup reached into my back pocket and handed it to me. I glared at her when I barked “What?” into the phon. “Shit, we’ll be right there,” I said, clicking END and immediately dialing Bear’s number. I withdrew from Pup and set my worried looking girl back on her feet. I righted my jeans while waiting for him to answer.
“Who was that?” Ray asked, jogging beside me to keep up as I made my way to the garage where Bear had been tinkering around earlier.
I pounded on the door and it lifted seconds later, Bear stood there with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a greasy wrench in his hand. I looked from Ray to Bear. “Billy called. He said Preppy came in screaming and knocking shit over at his crab shack. When Billy tried to settle him down he darted out the back. He can’t find him anywhere and he just hopes…” I trailed off.
“What? He hopes what?” Ray asked, pulling at my shirt.
“That he didn’t jump off the seawall.”
15
DRE
When there was a knock at the front door I assumed it was the realtor who was coming by to show a prospective buyer the house, but when I opened the door and saw Ray standing on my porch I was pleasantly surprised.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised until I realized what state she was in. Her eyes were red. She was twisting her hands together and bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet. King was standing outside of the truck in the driveway, an unreadable expression on his face. “Is he here?” Ray asked, glancing over my shoulder into the house.
“Who?” I asked.
“Preppy!” Ray shouted, pushing past me and ran through the empty house, darting from room to room. She ran out just as quickly as she’d run in and shook her head at King who clenched his fists and pounded them against the roof of the truck. His head dropped.
Ray ran to the truck and King got in the driver’s seat.
“Wait! What’s wrong?” I asked, running after them, feeling a sense of dread building inside of me.
They ignored me. King threw the truck in reverse. They’d gotten about three feet down the driveway when I jumped behind the truck and held up my hands. King slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting me. “What the fuck. Get out of the fucking way!” King said, sticking his head out the window.
To say that King was frightening was the understatement of the century. The man was downright terrifying, but there was no way in hell I was letting them leave. “I’ll move when you tell me what the fuck is going on and why you’re searching my house and asking me if he’s here.”
King threw the truck in park and got out. He slammed the door and stormed up to me in a few long strides. He glared down at me and I could feel the anger in his gaze. “You need to get out of the fucking way,” he seethed.
I shook my head and although my hands were shaking there was no way I was moving. “No. You’ll have to run me over first. Tell me what the fuck is going on,” I said, standing my ground.
King opened his mouth to speak but Ray appeared next to him, took his hand in hers and beat him to it. “Preppy freaked out and bolted. Can’t find him anywhere. Thought he might have come here.” Ray paused and looked to the floor. “He’s not in a great place right now, and we’re worried that he might have done something…stupid.”
King let go of her hand and they both got back in the truck. I stepped out of the way with a sinking heart, watching them roll away when suddenly it hit me. I bolted to the passenger side and threw open the door of the truck. Again, King was forced to slam on the brakes. “What the hell are you doing?” Ray squealed as I jumped inside, forcing her to slide to the middle.
I closed the door and turned to a very confused and worried looking King and Ray. “I know where he is.”
King called Bear on the way and told him where to meet us. After only a few minutes Bear appeared behind us on his bike, the roar of the engine rattling the rearview mirror as he followed us down the road.
It wasn’t until we’d cleared the fence and the tall pine trees that we realized the moon wasn’t the only thing lighting up the water tower.
Parked in the field below was an array of flashing red and blue courtesy of a fire truck, several police cars…and an ambulance.
16
DRE
The hospital was a damn madhouse. Doctors and nurses flew down the hallway at inhuman speeds like white-coated superheroes, shouting out complicated series of orders to one another that sounded nothing like words I’d ever heard in the English language before.
Everything in the place blinked and beeped and when the occasional alarm would sound more white coats would stampede toward the ER doors, their stethoscopes swinging from their necks like elephant trunks.
The waiting room was jam-packed, every seat was taken as the nurses at the desk called out numbers like the deli counter at the grocery store. The hallways were lined with people, all in varying states of worry, who all tried to become a part of the walls to make room for the medical teams when they rolled another patient through. The smell of the place was sickening, like open sores and antiseptic. My stomach rolled.
“We need to see Samuel Clearwater, he’s back there. What room is he in? How is he doing?” King demanded. The front desk nurse, looked as if she was about to argue until she glanced up from her computer between King and Bear. She looked back down to the screen. “He doesn’t have a room yet. He’s in an evaluation curtain.”
“Where is the evaluation area?” Bear asked.
She shook her head. “Nuh, uh, you can’t go back there unless you’re immediate family.”
“We’re the closest thing to family he’s got,” Ray argued.
“Unfortunately, in this hospital that’s not close enough. I’ll send a doctor out with an update as soon as we have one. I suggest you take a seat until then. If and when he gets a room you can go back one at a time, but for now you have to wait like everyone else.”
“Fuck this,” King roared, heading toward the double d
oors marked DO NOT ENTER in large determined strides.
“Sir!” the nurse exclaimed throwing her tiny body in front of King before he reached his destination. She flipped her braids over her shoulders again and that’s when I got a clear view of her nametag. IVY. And Nurse Ivy apparently had a huge set of balls on her to stand up against the likes of King. “Don’t you make me call security up in here and have you thrown out. Because then you’ll have to call for an update from your jail cell instead of sitting patiently in the waiting room like I so nicely asked you to do.”
“Listen, darlin’,” Bear said, smiling down at Ivy who looked even less impressed with his attempt at a softer approach, although the lines in her forehead did decrease just a fraction. She was a female after all and Bear’s slow southern drawl sounded like a deep purr. The kind that vibrated all the way through you to the ground. “Our friend is in there. He hates hospitals more than anything. All I’m asking is that you let one of us to go in there and check on him, really quick, just to make sure he’s all right, and then we’ll get out of your fucking hair.” Nurse Ivy folded her arms over her chest, her determination to keep them out unwavering.
Two uniformed guards approached King and Bear. “Ma’am, please,” Bear pled, as the guards stepped between them and Ivy. “He needs someone back there with him and he doesn’t have any immediate family here.”
“Yes, he does!” I shouted a bit too loudly. Not only did King, Bear, and Ray turn to face me, but so did the nurse, the guards, and most of the waiting room. “I can go back there with him. I’m his immediate family.”
“Sure you are, Miss,” the nurse said with a roll of her eyes. “And who exactly are you? His sister? No wait, his mama?”
I had about all I could take of the bitch. I stepped between King and Bear. “No, I’m his WIFE,” I growled.
She looked up to King and Bear. “No immediate family, huh?” she said with her lips pursed. “You unaware that your friend had a wife?” she asked skeptically.
“It’s complicated,” Ray clarified.
“Take me to my husband. Now,” I said to the nurse, pushing past the guards who stepped aside. Reluctantly, and with a lot more attitude than was necessary, Ivy pressed a button opening the double doors. The security guards stepped away.
I turned back before the doors closed again. “I’ll come out and let you know what’s going on as soon as I know something,” I said to Preppy’s friends. King shot me an appreciative nod before I followed the nurse down the wide hall on the way to find Preppy.
My husband.
The nurse walked me through another set of doors and pointed me toward a curtain before stalking back off toward the waiting area, grumbling to herself along the way. Cautiously, I pulled the curtain aside and my breath caught in my throat when I saw Preppy lying there on the gurney with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. He was unconscious.
A doctor wearing glasses and a long white lab coat was hovering over Preppy, a needle up to the IV in the back of Preppy’s hand. When the doctor realized I was there his eyes snapped up to mine and he pulled the needle from the IV and stood up straight, adjusting his coat.
“I’m his wife,” I said before he could protest my presence. “What’s going on with him?” I asked, standing by the gurney and taking Preppy’s hand in mine in a very wifely move. I scanned him over but there weren’t any obvious signs of injury. No bleeding or bruises. “What happened to him?”
The doctor tucked the full needle into the breast pocket of his shirt. “What is that?” I asked, pointing to where he’d just covered his pocket with his coat.
“Just a mild sedative,” he replied, pushing his glasses back on his nose. That’s when I noticed the cheesy smiley face tattoo on the back of his hand.
“He looks perfectly sedated to me,” I said, looking at Preppy whose mouth was open, a deep snore rumbled from his mouth.
“That’s why I decided not to give it to him,” the doctor replied, jotting something down on his clipboard.
“Why sedate him at all? What exactly is going on here? Why is he here at all?”
“Your husband was found on the water tower about to commit suicide. It was called in by a concerned passerby and the police called an ambulance who brought him here. Standard protocol for these types of things.”
Suicide? The water tower?
“Who was the passer-by?” I asked. “I’d like to check with them. Talk to them about what they saw.”
“You can’t. It was an anonymous call.” The doctor set the clipboard into a slot on the wall. “If you’ll excuse me, ma’am.”
“No, I won’t excuse you. There must be some mistake. The bystander is wrong. My husband wouldn’t do that,” I argued.
I knew Preppy’s take on suicide. I knew that even in the worst of worst times he would never take his own life. I was as sure of that as I was about the earth being round and the sky being blue.
I want to be an old man with old rabbit dick dangling between my legs…
“Ma’am it doesn’t matter if you think he would or wouldn’t try to kill himself. We are checking him into the psych ward for a full evaluation. We will know more in a few days and if everything checks out fine then he can go home in seventy-two hours.”
“A few days?” I asked, dropping Preppy’s hand and taking a step forward toward the doctor. “That’s not going to happen,” I argued. “No, he’s coming home with me.”
“Ma’am,” the doctor said, looking annoyed. “The law…”
“Sir,” I interrupted him. “The law states that he can only be put on a psych hold for up to seventy-two hours if he is a threat to himself or others or if he’s been arrested and the judge requests a determination of his mental state prior to arrangement.” I knew this because I’d looked it up once after my father threatened me with the very same thing after heroin and I became fast friends. I just hoped the laws in Florida were similar to the ones in New York. “Is he being charged with anything?”
The doctor rubbed his temple. “Not to my knowledge.”
“Okay, and I happen to know for a fact that my husband goes up to the water tower to relax from time to time and look down at the city he loves. If in fact someone called him in as a possible suicide attempt, then they were very mistaken.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there isn’t anything I can do. He has to stay for a hold…”
I stood my ground. “Without proof that he was trying to harm himself, which you don’t have since your witness was anonymous, then you have no grounds to hold him.”
“She’s right,” said a male police officer who’d just stepped inside the curtained area. “It’s the law. He’s free to go.”
“Fine,” the doctor huffed. He pulled aside the curtain. “But if he ends up dead because you didn’t think he was capable of killing himself, then it’s on you.” He pointed to the officer and shot him a disapproving sneer. “I assume you can take care of his cuffs.” The doctor then scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Discharge papers,” he mumbled as he left.
“Thank you,” I said, turning to the officer when the doctor was out of earshot. “I really appreciate…”
“You know that’s not really the law, right?” the officer asked. He uncuffed Preppy’s wrist from the gurney. When he was done he crossed his arms and took a wide stance. He was huge in both presence and stature. The name on his badge read Wiggum. “Close though.”
“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but it was worth a try,” I explained. “Preppy hates hospitals and I know for a fact he wouldn’t do what they said he was trying to do.” Suddenly something strange hit me. I looked up to the officer who didn’t look like any of the cops I’d ever seen. Tattoos on his neck and hands. A chiseled jaw, a five o’clock shadow and dark shiny hair peeking out from under his police hat. “But if it isn’t the law then why would you say it was? Why put your job at risk for someone you don’t know?”
“Who said I didn’t know him? Besides, I would be rea
lly fucking concerned about my job…” Officer Wiggum turned to me and whispered “If I were really a cop.”
“If you’re not a cop then who are you?” I asked as non police officer Wiggum took a syringe out of a pencil case.
“Wait, what are you giving him?” I placed my hand in front of the IV and the needle pricked my skin as he was about to push on the plunger. He growled in annoyance. “I’m just someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time,” he said, grabbing my wrist he tossed it out of his way. I licked the drop of blood from the back of my hand. “And calm your pretty face. I’m just giving him something that will wake him up a bit,” he said, pushing on the plunger. “Whatever fucking horse tranquilizer they gave him when they arrested him was meant to keep him comatose for quite a while.”
“Then how were they supposed to do an evaluation on him? That makes no sense.”
“Something tells me they never planned on any sort of evaluation. Keep your eyes out around here. Shit’s gone a little sideways. Don’t trust anyone. Especially not the cops or even the doctors.” He leaned over Preppy and gave each of his cheeks a couple of short slaps.
Preppy’s eyelids fluttered. He moaned softly and the sound shot straight to my heart. I was so focused on him waking up I didn’t realize that the man in the officer’s uniform had been staring at me. “What?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable under his dark glare.
“You must be Dre,” he said, with no sort of emotion attached to the words.
“How did you know who I am?”
Finally, he smiled although it was a small crooked smile. “I know everything,” he stated. He stood and tipped his hat to me on the way out. He glanced at Preppy one final time. “I’ll tell King and Bear he’s going home. Don’t leave his side and when he comes around tell Prep he owes me one. Again.”
I nodded. “I will. Thank you.” Before he could step away I realized something. “Wait! Who do I tell him he owes? Unless Wiggum is really your name?” I asked, pointing to his badge.
Preppy, The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater: A King Series Trilogy Page 33