I would think she was a terrible dog if she didn’t do so well while she was on duty.
But the moment she was off, she was tearing stuff up or eating something that didn’t belong to her.
Just last week Mocha had eaten the birthday cake that Downy had picked up for his wife, and everyone in a three block radius had heard Downy’s bellow of outrage.
Of course, it’d helped that we were outside at the time.
“Okay,” Tai broke into my thoughts. “I think we should talk about this.”
“Talk about what?” I asked him.
“About the fact that you haven’t shared that you were with someone,” Tai continued. “Mia would love to meet her. Bring her to the fire station on Sunday.”
I thought about that for a moment, and then shrugged.
“I’ll ask her,” I mumbled.
It wasn’t likely that she’d want to go to a fundraiser at the fire station on her day off from house arrest, but I’d offer it to her anyway.
“Alright, boys,” Luke cut in, his voice saying that it was time for business to commence. “I have the plans. Let’s do this.”
I leaned into the side of the truck and watched as the rest of the SWAT team, including me and Tai, gathered around to go over the plan of action.
“Everyone good?” Luke asked a few minutes later.
We all nodded.
“Tai,” Luke said. “You’re here in case we need you. Drew, you’re with us.”
My stomach tensed as it always did right before I went in with the team, but this time was different.
I used to think of Attie right before I went inside, but this time, there was another person added to my worries.
If I didn’t come home, there’d be two ladies devastated, not just one.
And I found that I kind of liked that.
A lot.
Chapter 17
All my life I thought air was free. Then I saw The Lorax and it all finally makes sense. You pay for the air as well as the potato chips when you buy a bag of Lays.
-Aspen’s secret thoughts
Aspen
“What’s wrong?” Attie asked as I closed the door on the man who’d just served me papers.
“I’ve been served,” I muttered in the same voice that the man had just used on me.
Attie blinked, her eyes going wide.
“Like, you’ve been sued, papers?” She asked worriedly.
“I don’t know,” I tried to be calm, taking the papers from the manila envelope and taking a seat at the dining room table so I could spread them out.
My eyes scanned the words of the first page, and the more I read, the more anger that built until I was about ready to scream.
“What…” Attie muttered as she read over my shoulder. “Abandonment? Who did you abandon?”
I gritted my teeth.
“Apparently, my ex thinks that I’ve abandoned him, and he’s suing me for support. When he’s the one who left me,” I said dryly. “And the court date is in two weeks. On a Tuesday, no less.”
“How are you going to get there?” She asked. “You can’t leave.”
I looked down at where she was indicating: the ankle monitor that was sticking out of my sweat pants.
“I can’t,” I agreed. “I guess I’ll either have to see if they will let me get off for the day. That or I’ll have to request a different day from the judge.”
She bit her lip, her finger twirling around a lock of hair that’d fallen down from her high ponytail.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head, causing another piece of hair to fall from her ponytail.
“You look a mess,” I said. “Do you want to take a shower or something? Your mascara is dried to your cheeks.”
Her horrified gasp had her bringing her hands up to her cheeks in a manner only a vain teenager who cared about her appearance would.
“Does it look bad?” She asked, patting her cheeks.
I shook my head.
“No,” I lied.
She smiled, but excused herself to the bathroom to clean her face anyway.
Her horrified scream a few moments later had me chuckling, even though the words I was reading on the papers had me wanting to scream.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled, looking at Danny’s name. “You fucking suck.”
“Who sucks?” Attie asked as she came back long moments later, her hair back up in a tidy ponytail, and her face scrubbed clean of makeup. “What’s wrong?”
I pointed at the papers.
“It states that we’re common-law married,” I growled. “What the fuck?” I looked guiltily over at Attie. “I’m sorry, but my mouth seems to run away with me when I get all hot and bothered.”
She snorted and raised her hand in a clearing gesture. “It’s fine. I’ve heard worse from the boys at school.”
I smiled at her, then my gaze fell back onto the papers.
“What happened?” She asked. “I heard a little bit about what you did to earn the ankle monitor from my mother while she was talking on the phone to someone about you, but I never heard why you beat the crap out of the cop’s car.”
I looked over at her.
“You want to know?” I asked.
She nodded.
So I told her everything, going all the way back to the times when I first slept with Danny.
“I didn’t like sex very much either,” she whispered.
I smiled at her.
“I imagine that you didn’t like it because boys don’t really know how to use their dicks at your age,” I told her. “Likely, he didn’t have the skills or the stamina, nor the knowledge, to make it good for you.”
Her eyes widened. “So that comes with age?”
I nodded.
“Age, practice and more practice,” I amended.
She licked her lips.
“Would you….one day…can we talk about this one day that’s not today? One day in the very far future after the baby comes?” She requested.
I nodded.
“As long as you let me take you to get birth control before I do it,” I promised.
She grinned.
“If I’d known you were so cool, I’d have come here a long time ago and spoken about this with you,” she whispered.
“Spoken about what?” Drew asked as he walked into the room
My eyes immediately fell on the pronounced limp he had going on.
Not to mention he was covered nearly head to toe in ash and smelled like a supercharged bonfire.
“What happened?” I asked in alarm.
He held out his hand.
“I’ll tell you after you tell me what she wishes she would’ve talked to you about,” he said, his voice booking no room for argument.
I sighed and picked up the papers.
“My ex is suing me for abandonment,” I told him, showing him the papers.
He took them and his eyes scanned the pages.
They got wider and wider as he continued to read.
“They’re saying you’re married?” He asked incredulously.
I nodded, my stomach turning summersaults at the look of pure anger on his face.
“You’re shitting me,” he said.
I shook my head again.
“I’m just going to head over to dad’s house,” Attie murmured softly, standing up and making her way to the door. “Goodnight Daddy.”
She went up on her tiptoes to kiss Drew who’d yet to make it into the room any further, but stopped when she couldn’t find a clean place to kiss him.
“Uhh,” she hesitated.
Drew didn’t have the same problem.
He just grabbed her to him and wrapped his arms around her, ensuring that he got a good hug regardless of what it did to the poor kid’s clothes.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said to me, opening the door for Attie and walking down the front wal
k with her.
The rain that was still coming down, for three days straight now, made them disappear from my view moments later.
Closing the door, I threw the papers down on the coffee table, glaring at them for added effect.
I’d deal with that tomorrow.
Right then, though, I walked to the bathroom and started the shower, and warmed it up for my man.
Then, for added affect, I deposited my body in it and got all wet for him.
In two ways.
Leaning against the shower, letting the water spray me down, I let my hands move over my body.
I heard him come through the door, thankful that he had a key, otherwise I’d worry that maybe it wasn’t him coming in, but someone else that wasn’t supposed to be there.
I would hate for his surprise to be ruined by someone else.
Chapter 18
How do I like my eggs? In a cake.
-Text from Aspen to Drew
Drew
My eyes stayed down as the cold water helped wash the soot and ash from my skin, my legs carrying me fast across the distance from my house to Aspen’s.
I waved to Raphael who was sitting on his front porch, who waved back, and then pointed to the side where the boy who’d sprayed me with a fire extinguisher stared at me from the front seat of his truck. He had a friend with him, who was looking at the boy like he was insane.
The truck, incidentally, still had a huge crack in the windshield from the extinguisher his mom threw at it.
“You’re a fucking douche bag, you know that?” The boy yelled through his open window.
My brows rose, and I paused, turning fully to look at the boy.
“I’m the douchebag?” I asked him. “What about you? I never asked to be sprayed with a fire extinguisher.”
The boy lifted his lip in a snarl, then turned the light bar on his truck, trying to blind me.
“You know who I am, right?” I asked.
I was just being sure he knew before he got himself too far into the fire.
He flipped me off. “I don’t give a fuck who you are.”
I started laughing then.
“Yeah,” I said. “You will care when I decide to press charges against you.”
He snapped.
“Prove it, motherfucker. You don’t got nothin’ on me,” he said, tossing the door to his truck open, sliding out, and stalking around it to come to a stop in front of me.
My brows rose.
“How old are you?” I asked. “Sixteen? Seventeen? Eighteen?”
He bared his teeth.
“What does it matter to you?” He challenged, the rain drenching his body, revealing the bones of ribs and the lankiness of his body that only a teenager that hadn’t grown into his body still had.
“What matters to me is that I know your parents don’t give you the discipline that you need. I wouldn’t have gone about doing what your mother did the other day, but at least she did something. My kid ever did anything like what you did to me and I would’ve had her truck. Then she would’ve been grounded. Not to mention she’d be lucky if she ever saw the light of day again,” I growled, crossing my arms over my chest.
The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“Who are you to tell me what I do and don’t need?” He growled. “You don’t know me.”
My brows rose.
“You have a brand new truck. You dress in designer clothing. You live in a nice house. You have a light bar, a lift, and tires on your truck that cost a whack. Trust me, I would be the one to know what you were given,” I pointed to my own truck that was very similar to his, yet I’d bought it and not my mommy.
Not that my mom wouldn’t have bought it for me had I wanted her to. She was always trying to do stuff for me that I could do for myself. Yet, I never took her up on the offer.
This kid, though, struck me as the type of kid that would suck his mommy’s titty until he was pried off with a halligan.
The kid bowed up, and I waited for him to throw the first punch, but reason started to leach into his eyes before he took a hasty step back.
My guess was that he finally saw I wasn’t in the mood to play.
“You’re a fucking loser,” he said, turning on his heel and heading for his truck.
I snorted out a laugh when I made my way to Aspen’s front porch, turning slightly when I heard the slam of the door meaning that the boy had gone inside, too.
“Hey!” I heard.
I stopped when I reached the porch covering, then turned to find the friend that was in the passenger seat crawling out of the truck, his eyes wide and worried.
“What?” I asked shortly.
He turned his eyes to the door, gauging to make sure that the boy was actually inside, then turned back to me.
“I’m Mace Turner,” he said quickly.
“Okay,” I drawled, waiting for him to get on with it.
“I’m…I’m a friend of Attie’s,” he said.
My eyes instantly narrowed.
“How friendly?” I drawled, hands clenching into fists.
“I’ve been seeing her for a while…at school. We’re just friends.” He licked his lips. “Well, we were seeing each other. Then she abruptly stopped seeing me about six months ago. She changed.”
I blinked, not ready for that response.
“She changed?” I asked.
I nodded.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Well then, what was it you wanted to talk about?” I said in exasperation.
He pointed at the door where the boy had disappeared. “That’s Ellison. He’s not very nice.”
My eyes narrowed.
“Then why are you with him?” I asked gratingly.
He pointed at my house.
“Your daughter lives next door to him,” he said simply.
I wanted to laugh.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Get on with it.”
“Ellison’s not a good person. If you’re not careful, he’s going to do something stupid, and you could get hurt in the process,” Mace explained quickly, the words seeming to tumble from his lips in his haste to say them.
“I don’t think that really matters at this juncture. He’s a kid. I’m an adult. There won’t be any more contact between the two of us, if I have my say so about it. But thank you for informing me of your concerns,” I said simply, surprised by his worry over me.
He nodded quickly, then tossed one look back over his shoulder before he sighed.
“I have to go home. I have to be at work in an hour. He was taking me home when you came out of your house,” he explained quickly.
My head hurt.
“How are you getting home?” I asked.
He pointed.
“It’s not a far walk. Just down the street and a left. I’m on the corner there,” he explained.
I nodded.
“Be careful,” I instructed. “And hey,” he stopped. “Do me a favor?”
He waited for me to explain.
“What favor?”
“Stay away from that kid, alright?” I told him.
He winced.
“I plan to,” he said. “After that…there’s no way I’m going to keep hanging with him. He was only a means to an end, anyway.”
I laughed, then, and pointed down the road.
“Go home, boy.”
He went, taking off in a jog into the still raining night.
I turned to the door and checked the handle.
Locked.
“He’s right, you know,” Raphael called from his front porch.
“Why?” I asked. “The kid’s a nuisance, nothing else.”
Raphael shook his head.
“Boy’s got a hot temper,” he explained. “I’ve been watching him. The way he acts around his parents. The dad’s just like him. The
mom the same to some degree. Neither parent really gives a shit when it comes to the kid, but he gets what he wants, meaning he’s an entitled little fucker that thinks he should always get what he wants.”
I shrugged.
“So,” I said. “There’s a lot of that out there.”
And there was.
That kid was not an exception.
I also didn’t really want to think about it right now.
My head was not in the right headspace to deal with the kid’s shit.
My daughter was pregnant.
My ex-wife was blaming it on me.
My new girlfriend was married.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the fuck-tastic day I’d had, ending with fucking explosions.
This was a clusterfuck of mass proportions.
No, definitely not in the best of headspaces, that was for sure.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” when Raphael still didn’t say anything.
Raphael shrugged.
“Night,” I muttered.
Raphael gave me a chin lift, then got up and went inside, leaving me alone with my thoughts once again, and what I was thinking really wasn’t good.
In fact, I would consider myself not very good company at the moment.
Did that stop me from using my key and walking into Aspen’s house?
Fuck no.
The sound of the shower running was the first thing that caught my attention, followed shortly by the pizza boxes that were still half filled.
I contemplated grabbing a piece, but the air from the ceiling fan wafted the smell of smoke up to my nose, and I sighed.
Turning around to close the blinds, I stripped my clothes off in the entranceway, dropping them into Aspen’s laundry room on the way past.
I could hear the shower running, and my body itched to be clean, so faster than I would’ve normally gone, I walked into the bathroom, and froze solid at the sight before me.
It occurred to me that Aspen would be in the shower.
What didn’t occur to me was that she’d be using the dildo we’d made of my cock.
She had it in her mouth, and while I watched, she took it out, let it trail down her wet body, and found her sweet heat in the next breath.
My mouth dropped open as my dick instantly hardened.
“What…” my voice cracked. Clearing my throat, I tried again. “What are you doing?”
Oxygen Deprived (Kilgore Fire Book 3) Page 16