by Mary Calmes
“Yeah, I saw you doin’ that at Jimmy Drake’s party,” I cut him off, fisting a hand in his heavy wool sweater so he couldn’t move. “You were on your knees all night, huh?”
His eyes were back, finally actually meeting mine instead of looking everywhere but. I lifted my hand to his cheek and dragged my thumb over his gorgeous mouth. He had full lips, plump and dark and made to be kissed.
“How ’bout I kiss you and after that you can put your dick in my mouth.”
The huge eyes—blue-green, a color I remembered from a cup I had glazed in a ceramics class in high school, peacock blue, an absolute sum of the two—absorbed my face. “You don’t have to work this hard,” he told me. “I give it away.”
I grunted as I leaned in and took possession of the lips that had haunted my dreams. And he tasted like beer and peanuts with a hint of cherry Life Savers. I pulled away fast, took his beer back, put my drink on the table beside his, turned, and rushed him. My hands were on his face as I kissed him the second time, pile driving him into the wall, taking it all, his breath, his saliva, his whimpers and sighs. My tongue pushed and shoved his, tangling and stroking, as I ravaged him and took what I wanted. My hands went under his sweater, burrowed down beneath the T-shirt and found skin that was sleek, warm, and silky. His smooth stomach trembled under my hand, and when I shoved my knee between his thighs, his hoarse groan made me hard. I kissed him until he had to shove me off to breathe.
“Come home with me and lemme talk to you, because you’re confused about stuff.”
“Not confused,” he panted, long, feathery lashes fluttering. “Whore.”
“Not anymore,” I told him, and kissed him breathless again. I sucked his tongue into my mouth, loosened his belt, worked his jeans open, and got my hand down into his briefs.
His gasp as I unsealed my mouth from his made me smile.
“You’re treating me like a whore.”
“I’m treating you like you’re mine,” I corrected him. “’Cause from now on… this only gets done with me.”
“No one keeps me,” he groaned, pushing up into my hand, eyes closed, mouth open, head back against the wall.
“Until now,” I said, reclaiming his mouth, chewing on his lip. I didn’t let him pull away until, between me jerking him off, putting hickeys on his neck, shoving my left hand down the back of his jeans, and sliding my fingers over his crease, he came in my fist with a shuddering, muffled yell.
“Jesus, you made me come with just your voice telling me to.”
That and a hand job with some frottage thrown in for good measure.
“Fuck.”
I chuckled and licked a line up the side of his neck to behind his ear, sucking the sensitive skin before returning to his sweet mouth. The man took direction well, and I liked that. I wiped my hand on the T-shirt I was wearing under my own sweater.
“What are you doing?” he snapped at me, shoving me away from him so he could take a gulp of air. “If you do that, you’ll have my cum on you.”
“It’ll just be the first of many times, right?”
He whimpered in the back of his throat. “Nobody wants me. I’m all used up and—”
“Nope.” I refused to hear it. “You’re a light, you’re my light, gonna be just mine.”
The tears came so fast. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m the guy you’ve been blowing off for the last three months,” I told him, watching him tuck himself in, now that his brain was working again, and zip up. It was a shame not to be looking at his beautiful, long cut cock anymore, but I didn’t want anyone else getting an eyeful. “I told you, I see you all the time, everywhere, and you never gimme the time of day. I just got sick of it, figured it was time to do something about it.”
He lunged at me, arms wrapped tight around my neck, face in the side of my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry… forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive, you didn’t see me. Now you do.”
“Now I do,” he agreed and shivered hard.
“Your name is Landry, right?”
He nodded, pulling back from me.
“My name’s Trevan. Buckle your belt, ’cause we’re out of here.”
And he kissed me, laid one on me that was full of trembling hope and happiness that maybe he could rest and stop running and stop being alone unless he was on his knees.
I had been watching him for a while, stalking him when we showed up at the same places, and had tried to talk to him on a number of occasions. But he was so busy giving himself to anyone who asked that I, a good guy, a patient guy, a gentleman, never blipped on his radar. Because I liked what I saw outwardly—he was really just beautiful—I had to see if there was anything else there at all. Normally, no one caught my eye or kept my interest, so the fact that he had, had to mean something. Upon investigation, I discovered things about him.
The man was not a drug addict, but he did them to fit in. He didn’t really like to drink, but he did that too. He had vices that he could give up in a heartbeat because they were never his, just convenient excuses for others to put aside their inhibitions and use him. I told him no one but me was ever putting their hands on him again. The smile as he cried was heartbreaking and dazzling all at the same time.
Since he was the only reason I had gone to the party, once I buckled his belt for him—he hadn’t followed the last of my directions, too busy launching himself at me—I took his hand and led him back through the crowd. When I felt him stop, I turned and saw some guy with his hand on Landry’s bicep. Landry squeezed my hand tight, and I saw it in his eyes, the pleading. This was the very first test: was he really leaving with me, or would I let him go? It was funny but I never once thought, why didn’t he just tell the guy no. I understood, he had to see what I would say, what I would do. He couldn’t stick up for something, for the idea of us together, if he didn’t know he could count on it.
“You know me?” I asked the guy there, the stranger holding onto my new boyfriend.
“No.”
I shrugged. “And you don’t wanna. Let go.” My voice was flat, my stare was level, and I stilled, waiting.
The stranger took my measure. “Whatever.” The guy balked and then turned to look at Landry. “I’ll catch you later. I’ll bring the lube and condoms.”
But he didn’t, because I took Landry Carter home with me, to my apartment, to my kitchen table where I fed him, and then to my bed to sleep.
“I thought you wanted to fuck me?” he asked worriedly, standing in my bedroom freshly showered and dressed in a pair of my pajamas.
“I wanna hold you,” I said with a smile, grabbing his hand, yanking him down on top of me. When I rolled him over on his side and spooned around him, brushing the hair away from the back of his neck before I kissed it, I thought he was going to fly apart with the trembling.
“Oh God.” He was back to crying.
I chuckled, and he took a heaving breath before snuggling back against me. When I woke up in the night, he was wrapped around me, head in the hollow of my neck, arm over me and leg over mine. He was very cute, and when I bent and kissed his forehead, Landry’s sigh was deep and long and content.
He needed me, and I needed him just as badly. No one ever let me just love them because I could. Men looked at me and saw a guy without a “real” job, a guy with only a high school education, a guy without a future or prospects. I looked scary, dangerous, and so they walked the other way. No one ever took the time to know me, to learn about my plans and what I wanted my life to be. They wanted a guarantee. No one wanted to build on me—no one but Landry.
I told him it was because he was hard up.
He told me he was definitely hard.
“Perv.”
“You would know.”
Most of our conversations degraded to name-calling, tickling, water fights, food fights, pillow fights, kissing, groping, rubbing, and then him held down and begging. It had been working seamlessly for two years.
The first
thing I did was remove him from his circle and put him into mine. It wasn’t that my friends were paragons of virtue. They were not perfect. But they were loyal and trustworthy and dependable and true. They were also, it turned out, really possessive, just like I was. So when some guy put his hands on Landry in a club, by the time I got back from the bathroom, the guy had already been run off, humiliated, jeered at, and one time, because the guy wasn’t hearing the no, hit. The message was clear: Landry Carter was no longer available, and he would not be passing himself around like a party favor anymore. He belonged to me and me alone.
In the two years we had been together, the changes in the man were stunning. After six months, I helped him live out his dream of opening his own jewelry store, and in midtown Detroit, in the middle of a recession, he still did well. There was an online catalog and a website, and you could visit the showroom and order custom pieces once you got there. When people wondered why I was so beautifully accessorized, I always told them. My triple-wrap leather bracelets were always complimented, and he said the best thing he ever did was make me wear them. I saw so many people, and they all saw my bracelets and asked me where to get one. As far as I knew, I was the only runner who carried his boyfriend’s business card.
He was doing well. Business was booming, his jewelry was in several upscale boutiques downtown, and he had just hired a public relations firm to help him launch a new line geared to the department store crowd. I was very proud of him, and between my savings and his being on the cusp of greatness, we were poised to move, buy a house, buy other property, and start to see a change in our lifestyle from living paycheck to paycheck to having some extra cash in the bank. I had done my days of peanut butter and ramen noodles before I met him, but when we first moved in together, before he knew what he wanted to do, it had been both of us on my single feast or famine money cycle. But things were looking way up for us, so the timing, with his family suddenly appearing, made me wary.
“SO TELL me,” Chris said, returning me to the present from my walk down memory lane. “How does it work?”
I was confused. Me and Landry? “What?”
“What you do for the bookie, how does that work?”
Bookie? Who even used that word anymore?
“I can tell you,” Landry offered, sitting up, leaning forward out of my hold but still pressed against me, his leg sliding over mine.
“Okay,” Chris agreed, and I could tell he was dying to get Landry to open up to him at all. And I understood; I was a slave to having the man’s attention myself. “Guys call Trev and ask, like, hey, what’s the line on whatever game, or gimme the line for half of the game or the over or the under, and then they place their bets. If they win, they get whatever they bet, but if they lose, they gotta pay what they bet plus the juice.”
“Juice?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s the money the house makes if you lose, it’s usually like 20 percent, but it could be more depending on the house. Trevan’s takes twenty.”
“Oh, okay.”
“But there’s all kinds of different bets,” Landry continued, fiddling with the black leather wrap bracelet on my left wrist, hematite and turquoise, before touching the hammered silver ring that made me look like I was married. “There’s teaser bets and parlay bets, but the more points you buy, the less your payout is.”
His eyes flicked to Chris to check if he was listening. He shouldn’t have worried.
“Let’s say,” he continued, “you have Green Bay and Indianapolis and the spread is ten points. Sometimes guys will say I want to teaser that bet by three points, so instead of the spread being ten points, it’s seven. But the more points you buy, the less your payout is.”
“Interesting,” Chris said, not caring in the least about my business but able to talk to his brother because of it. He looked over at me then. “So Trevan, where do you come in?”
“He’s the runner, like I said,” Landry answered for me. “Trev collects what’s owed and pays out winnings. On Monday and Tuesday he collects; on Wednesday he pays everybody.”
“So you’re popular on Wednesday.” Chris smiled at me.
“Pretty much, yeah.” I nodded.
“So what if guys don’t have the money to pay you? Do you break their legs?”
“No.” Landry grinned at him. “Trevan just cuts the guy off, and once the word’s out that you’re a welsher, you’re pretty much done, ya know?”
There was more to it than that, but my boyfriend did not need to know all the ins and outs of my business. I answered to the house, and if the guys that I went to collect from didn’t pay me, then the money had to come from somewhere. The house, or in this case, Adrian Eramo, didn’t care who paid me, he only cared that he got paid. Period.
“You’re not a cop now, are you?” Landry snapped suddenly, realizing everything he’d already said, his voice betraying him, the shiver in it. “You’re not here to hurt Trev.”
“No.” Chris’s voice nearly broke. “I’m here to get you to come home. That’s all I want. I’m just a college student, Lan, I’m completely nonthreatening, I assure you.”
Landry nodded, a quick shiver running through him as my phone rang. Normally I wouldn’t have even bothered with it, but the number was my boss, so I turned it to Landry so he could see it. He moved his leg from where it was between mine, and I stood up to answer it.
“Trev,” Landry said before I could walk away.
I looked at him but said nothing.
“Don’t be long.”
When I stroked my fingers through his hair, taking hold of a clump of it, he tipped his head back and closed his eyes. I bent and kissed his forehead, letting him go before I walked toward the living-room window that looked out on the park behind the apartment building. I answered by the eighth ring.
“What the fuck?”
“Gabe?”
Heavy sigh on the other end. “Yeah, sorry,” he grumbled. “Where the fuck are you?”
“Home. Why, what’s up?”
He cleared his throat. “Did Ellis Kady place any bets with you last week?”
“No, I cut him off.”
Several ticks of silence went by. “Trevan, the man owns three nightclubs, a restaurant, and a car dealership. Why would you cut him off?”
He didn’t sound mad; he sounded more like he was fishing. Sometimes when I refused to take bets from people, Gabriel Pike called to find out why. He never forced me to go against my gut feeling, but he liked an explanation. If he felt I was being unreasonable, he would take the bet from the player himself. Most of the time, Gabe took my advice and let the client walk, but every now and then, he overruled me and the little voice in my head.
“T?” he prompted.
“I cut him off because he didn’t pay me two weeks in a row.”
“But you weren’t short.”
“Have you ever known me to be?”
Heavy sigh. “No, Trev, you’re the best goddamn runner I’ve ever had.”
“Well, that’s nice to hear, but I carry my friends, not assholes like Ellis Kady who think they’re too fuckin’ good to pay me.”
“What does he owe you?”
“That’s between me and Ellis,” I told him. “I paid you, you paid Adrian—I’m square with the house, and that’s how I like it. Whatever else is my problem.”
“Normally I would agree, but a couple of his boys just did a number on Benji. The police found him in an alley, and he had to go to the hospital.”
“Oh shit,” I groaned. I liked Benji Matthews. He was a nice guy, sweet and even tempered. When our paths crossed, we always ended up eating together or having a cup of coffee before going our separate ways. “How bad was he hurt?”
“I dunno. Tony went to the hospital, and he says he’s a mess, so now me and Ira and Pete are going back to see Kady and figure out what the fuck is going on.”
“Just the three of you?”
“No.” His voice dropped low.
I understood. I needed to
stop asking questions about what they were going to do. “How do you know it was Kady?”
“He called Adrian and told him that any runners of his he found on the street were dead.”
“That’s pretty fuckin’ clear.”
He grunted.
“Okay.” I took a breath.
“I’m sending Francesco to pick up your drop.”
“If he’s coming right now, I’ll run down and give it to him, but if not, I’ll just bring it by in a few hours.”
“You sure? I know you, you hate carrying.”
“I’ll call Connie when I’m ready, and he can ride with me.”
Deep chuckle from him.
“What?”
“Only you, Trev, I swear to God.”
“I’m missing something.”
“Jesus, T, Conrad Harris is a cold-blooded killer, but you’re on a first-name basis with the sociopath—more than first name, nickname, which is even worse.”
“He’s a good guy,” I defended my friend.
“He’s a goddamn hitman is what he is,” Gabe assured me.
“Never proven,” I said, and I was right, even though I knew as well as anyone what the man did for a living.
“He’s a contract killer, swear to God.”
“Says you.” Deny, deny, deny. Where Conrad was concerned, it was what I did. No one would ever catch me agreeing about what he was or wasn’t, especially on the phone. I didn’t care who was on the other end.
“Okay, T,” he acceded, patronizing me. “We’ll just pretend he ain’t scary or nothin’.”
“He’s not.” I sighed, because to me, he wasn’t. I could not speak for others.
“Uh-huh,” he grunted.
“Just… can we drop it?”
“Oh fuck yeah, let’s drop it. Tell me about Kady. How many weeks did you carry him?”
“Just two, and then I stopped taking his calls.”
“That’s probably when he called Benji.”
“I think he called Luis before that.” I yawned again, rubbing my eyes; they felt like they had sand in them.
“Does he owe Luis too?”
“I dunno, but you know him. Luis doesn’t let anybody chase their money. He’ll beat the shit outta you if you don’t pay up.”