by JA Huss
I love it.
I take a peek and see him fisting his cock, the last bits of his sticky, hot come pulsing out of the thick tip of his dick and (I can’t fucking believe this) I come one more time. Three times in like ten minutes. Holy shit. Who is this man who has forced his way into my life? And he has. Forced himself. Because he is. A force.
I moan again as my legs shiver and shake, and he moans as he drains himself dry. Then, both of us empty and shaking, he lets out a breath and says, “Thanks.” Which I find kind of amazingly adorable and I’m not sure why.
So, “You’re welcome,” I say through a dumb smile I can’t stop from spreading.
He laughs and slaps me right on my ass. And then he says, “Shit.”
“What?” I ask. “What happened?”
“I got come all over my hand. Holy shit. Did I do all that?” I crane my head to see him staring at his handiwork and the look on his face is one of wonder and maybe pride.
Men.
“Yep. You sure must have,” I say as I turn around, take his come-covered hand in mine, and place his fingers in my mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” he says as I suck his salty semen from his strong fingers. “You’re going to fucking kill me.”
I just smile in return. Because who knows? Maybe I will. Maybe we’ll kill each other.
And just then… the back door opens. Raven sticks her head out. He pushes me back, up against the wall, into the corner, lost in the shadows. She looks left, looks right. Please, oh, dear Lord, do not come out here to look around. “Scarlett?” she calls out.
He puts his head against mine and tries not to laugh. I want to punch him because I am definitely not laughing. Raven sees the abandoned Defender sitting in the middle of the alley, its lights still on. She walks over to it to look inside and we recess ourselves as deep into the dark as we can. I can feel the come sliding down the backs of my thighs and a thought occurs to me:
THIS. IS. FUCKING. INSANE.
“Scarlett?” Raven calls out into the night. Just go back inside, Raven. Please. Just go back in.
I close my eyes and pray to whoever might be listening to just have her turn around and head back in. Just please let me get away from this with my job intact.
That’s what I’m praying for. Not to preserve my dignity or my modesty or my integrity or decency or anything that ends in ‘y.’ I just don’t want to lose my J-O-B. That’s all I can think about and suddenly—I feel ashamed.
But whoever is out there listening to my plea decides to cut me a break, because Raven takes one last look around and heads back inside. It then occurs to me that she may have seen me run out back before (or someone may have) and that, coupled with an ominous-looking all-black Land Rover just idling in the alley, might just send up some alarm bells. So I need to get the hell back in there ASAP and make up some fucking excuse about where I’ve been. I put my hands on his chest and push him away.
“Um. I gotta go.” I bend down, grab up my t-back, and start to step into it when I realize. “Shit. Do you have anything I can clean myself up with?”
“Uh,” he says, looking around. “Uh, here.” He pulls off his t-shirt and hands it to me. And I see the scars. Again. Oh, right. He said I don’t want to know. OK. I do a quick inventory of all the information I currently have about this dude.
—He walks around looking like he’s homeless but clearly has money to burn.
—He has scars all over his body that I don’t want to know about.
—He fights men with guns like he doesn’t care if he lives or dies.
—He may think I’m REALLY an angel. Which may make him A CRAZY PERSON.
—He probably has an actual name but I have no idea what it is.
—He fucks better than anyone I’ve ever met.
—I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him.
Assessment: This guy is bad news.
I don’t know what the hell I’ve been thinking or why I haven’t been able to get him off my mind, but that shit stops right now. I grab the t-shirt from his hand and contort myself to try to wipe myself clean. Which, at present, feels like it’s gonna take a lot of scrubbing and a long, long time.
“Do you want some help?” He reaches to give me a hand. I pull away.
“Nope. Got it. Thanks.” I keep wiping. I just want to get the hell back inside. Back inside Pete’s Strip Club. Where life makes sense.
I finish getting all of him off all of me to the best of my ability, wipe my hands, throw the shirt back at him, pull my panties up, fix my top back over my tits, adjust my filthy fucking angel wings, and look him square in his eyes. Which look confused. And maybe a little sad. Like a kid who’s just dropped his ice cream cone on the sidewalk.
The way they did last weekend.
And that annoys me a little bit because… because I lost that night. And now it’s happening again. This isn’t me. It’s not. I don’t do this shit. And I know things have been hard, but that’s not why I’m doing it. That’s not why I’m all of a sudden losing my shit. It’s… He’s still looking at me like that. “What? I demand.
“I—Nothing,” he mumbles.
“OK. Well, then, I gotta go. See ya.” I pat him on the shoulder and head back in. Because this has to end. Now. I cannot lose myself to this fucking sadness again. I can’t. Because if I do, no one’s gonna pick me back up. Not this guy, for sure. He’s not gonna catch me when I stumble. He’s not gonna give me a hand up when I fall. He’s just some random weirdo who stumbled into my life at just the wrong moment, but that’s it. Random. There’s no purpose to what we’re doing other than survival.
And I can’t go into survival mode again. I refuse to climb Everest again. I won’t do it. Because if I have to scale that rock wall one more time I’ll lose more than just my fingers. I’ll lose every single part of me that’s left.
“Hey,” he calls out. Shit. Don’t. Whatever it is, just… don’t. Just let me go.
I sigh. Turn back. “Yeah?” I say, still annoyed.
“I don’t… Do you have plans for Halloween?”
And at that, any feeling of anything good that I have left drains immediately from inside me. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the biggest one is that I am reminded, with startling clarity, that the most essential reason to stay away from this guy is that he knows NOTHING about me. And I can see no scenario now where changing that relationship would be a positive move. Because my life is being held together by the most fragile of adhesives, and that’s sheer will. And this… situation… saps my strength. It tugs at my ability to hold it all together. And I am one hundred percent sure that if I take it even the smallest step further, my world is likely to be blown completely apart by this other human being. Blown to smithereens. I don’t know how I know that. But I do. So I let any light in my eyes dim itself out and I stare straight through him and say…
“Thanks again for the help. Take care.”
And then I open the door to the club, step inside, let the door close behind me, raise my chin up, and head off to give lap dances and make men think I’m in love with them.
Chapter Eleven - Tyler
“Thanks again for the help.” “Thanks AGAIN for the help.” Was she thanking me for the sex? Handling the guys chasing her? Both? Does it matter? She dismissed me. I can’t blame her. I do that shit to women all the time. I wonder if it’s because she knows that I’m gonna burn her Heaven down. She may sense that I’m bottled lightning. Of course she does. She’s an angel. They’re omnipotent. I think. Are they? They gotta be. They’ve got that great vantage point from up there in the clouds. I wonder if—
“Has the Klonopin helped at all?”
Oh. Right. That’s Dr. Eldridge talking. It’s… some day of the week. I’m just not certain which. Or what happened since the other night. Which is something I’m getting used to. I only know I haven’t stopped thinking about the alley and Scarlett. But other than that? Shit. I mean, I literally couldn’t say how I got here today.
I do know that I’ve blown off my last couple appointments with her, but decided to keep this one because… I’m not sure. A bunch of reasons, I suppose. Because I can’t stop thinking about Scarlett (even though I’m not gonna talk about Scarlett and what happened in the alley with the gun and the fight and the fucking). Because Halloween is this weekend, and Scotty died on Halloween (even though I’m not gonna talk about Scotty and how even though Evan says it isn’t, it still feels like it’s my fault). Because I’m really, really fucking lonely and feel like I’ll always be that way (even though I’m definitely not gonna talk about that).
But I guess mostly I’m here now because Dr. Eldridge is nice and I feel like I owe it to her to show up every now and again so she’ll feel like she’s helping me. Kinda the same way I wanted to give the doctors in the hospital what I felt like they needed when they showed me my scars. I don’t know what it is with me and wanting doctors to feel OK about themselves. Maybe it’s because med school is expensive and they should all think the money they spent was worth something. Who knows?
But if I’m being honest with myself (and fuck it, why not be?) there’s another reason I decided to come today. It’s because Dr. Eldridge is what I imagine my mom would be like if she had lived. Well… lived longer. She did live for a while. Long enough to have me, after all. And on that level, I guess I’m kinda glad my mom isn’t alive and I’m talking with Dr. Eldridge instead. Shit. That’s not right. That isn’t what I mean to say. Fuck. I’m not glad my mom is dead. That’s a fucking stupid thing to say. But I didn’t. Say it. I’m just kind of thinking all this. So why am I apologizing? And to who? The universe? I dunno.
Point is simply that I’m grateful my mom doesn’t have to see the fucking basket case her son has become. But then I suppose there’s a real possibility I wouldn’t be the way I am now and things wouldn’t be like they are if she hadn’t died when I was a kid. Hard to say. Nature/nurture and all that. Maybe I’d be this fucked-up weirdo no matter what. She used to call me her “favorite son.” I was, of course, her only son, so we both knew she was making a joke. And I appreciated that. I appreciated that even as like a five-year-old, my mom didn’t treat me all precious and shit. She just treated me like a regular person who just happened to be shorter than she was.
I know I got my sense of humor from my mom. She was also the smartest person I ever met. And even though I was thirteen when she died, thirteen years with somebody is enough to get to know whether or not they’re smart. And cool. And irreplaceable.
God knows what the fuck she saw in my dad. I think it’s possible that maybe he wasn’t the way he is with everybody else when it was just the two of them. I think maybe she was the magic panacea that temporarily remedied his chronic asshole-i-ficatiousness. (Not a clinical term, but the right one.) And when she died, there was no counterweight anymore to keep him from turning into what he turned into.
Anyway.
What I’m trying to say is… I’m pretty sure I kept this appointment with Dr. Eldridge because I could really use a mom right now.
“Tyler?” Dr. Eldridge interrupts my mental ramble. Again.
“Sorry. What?” I’m sitting in my shrink’s office thinking a bunch of stuff that I’m paying her to talk about, but then not actually talking about aloud. Maybe I should talk with someone about that.
“The Klonopin. Has it helped your anxiety at all?”
“I think so? I’m not sure. I took some with a bunch of booze last week and may have punched a hole in my wall. But on the flipside, if I did, I don’t remember it so I don’t feel anxious about having done it. So that’s good, I suppose.”
She does this half-smile, half-frown thing that is accompanied by a sigh. I get it. I exhaust me too.
“Have you been getting out more? Like we talked about? Seeing people at all?”
“I dunno. Kind of,” I say. “I’m sort of seeing a girl, I think.” What the fuck? I just told myself like two seconds ago that I wasn’t gonna talk about Scarlett. Jesus.
“How’d you two meet?” she asks sweetly. Hell. I gotta lie. Right?
“Strip club. She’s a stripper. At Pete’s. That’s where she strips. Pete’s strip club. You know it? It’s just off the Strip.” OK, that was an absurd sentence, but it seems I have no control over my mouth, so to hell with it. Let’s see where this goes…
She smiles and laughs a little. “No, I don’t know it. So you met her there? At the strip club? Where she strips?” She smiles wider. (Goddamn, she reminds me of my mom.)
“Yeah,” I say, unable to keep from smiling myself.
“OK. Well, that’s terrific,” she says.
And that’s it. That’s all she says. No prying. No cajoling. No judgment. She just lets it sit there. I’ve been made to see a few therapists over the years and Dr. Eldridge is, no question, the fucking tits at this job.
“So what else?” she asks. Which is genius. Because now she knows I know she’s not gonna try to manipulate me and shit, which means that she’s created a safe space for me to say more, and figures that I’m ready to open up. Sometimes I’m too smart for my own good, I’m afraid. Because since I know that’s what she’s doing, there’s no fucking way I’m gonna fall for it.
“The anniversary of my best friend Scotty’s death is this weekend.”
Oh, come on, Tyler!
“OK. You wanna talk about that at all?” Her brow is furrowed almost imperceptibly.
“Shit. I dunno.” No. I do know. Hell with it. Dam’s open. So I say, “I guess. Sure. Ok.”
She nods and waits politely while I decide how to begin.
“Fuck. I don’t… Me and Evan—you know Evan.” She nods. “Me and Evan and Scotty were best friends since like kindergarten. And you know how kids will become close and then, y’know, like get fickle or whatever and stop being friends?” She nods again. “We didn’t. We just stayed best friends. All through elementary school, middle school, high school. We were brothers. None of us had brothers, and we wanted them, I guess, so we became them for each other.”
I pause to consider what parts of the story are important. We only have fifty minutes together and some of that time is gone. So I decide just to cut to the chase.
“But so, after high school, Evan joined the fire department because that’s what he had always wanted to do since we were kids. And by the way, Evan had like a 4.0 GPA. Could’ve gone to Stanford or an Ivy or something, but the guy just really, really wanted to be a firefighter.”
(That part isn’t actually important to the story, but it is important to distinguish Evan’s trajectory from my own. I barely finished high school and it would be easy to think that Evan’s a fucking wash-out like me and had limited options. But he isn’t and he didn’t. He’s just an honestly noble motherfucker. Or father-fucker, as is a more accurate designation. No disrespect intended. That’d be one lucky father. Anyway.)
“But I needed to get the hell away from here, so I joined the Navy, right?” I pause to make sure the doc is still with me.
“Right. Yes.” She is.
“Yeah, right, so, Scotty. See, Scotty always, well, he always kinda looked up to me and Evan, I guess. I dunno. I mean we were the same age, but he was always a little smaller and a little more… boyish… and just like super-eager to, whatever, to prove himself, y’know?”
She nods again. And I suddenly realize that I haven’t talked about Scotty in kind of a long time. It feels good and ter
rible all at once.
“And like I said, we were best friends, and I think he saw Evan becoming a fireman and me becoming a bomb tech and whatever, and… look. Scotty never really wanted to do that kind of thing. Like, he was fascinated by it—fire and explosives and stuff, I mean—but I think he really kind of wanted to figure out WHY things burned. Or WHY things blew up. Or WHY this chemical interacted with that chemical or whatever. Like the dude shoulda been a scientist or physicist or something, but…” Holy shit. I realize that I haven’t, in fact, talked about this next part to anyone. Ever.
“Yes? But what?” She has this warmth in her eyes that just fucking sucks me in.
“But… I gave him shit about it. Like all the time. I just like constantly gave him a hard time about the fact that he was gonna spend his life in a lab or a classroom or wherever instead of out there DOING shit. Like I was going to. Like Evan was going to. And I told him shit like…”
I take a long breath, thinking about what an unconscionable cocksucker I can be. Dr. Eldridge waits patiently.
“Just shit like, not everyone can be a hero. Some people have to carry the hero’s jock. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Just dumbass fraternity talk and shit like that.”
“OK,” she says. Still no judgment. Which is making this harder. Because I don’t even have the choice to be defensive.
“And Evan used to tell me to ease up on him. But I thought that I was just doing what brothers do to each other. Giving each other a hard time.”
“I’m sure you were,” she says.
“Yeah, but… Fuck. But I wasn’t. Or, shit, I was. I mean that’s what I was trying to do. Trying to be. But like, I didn’t know how. If that makes sense. So basically I think I was just channeling my fucking dad. Just saying the kind of mean-spirited, putting-somebody-else-down bullshit that he does. Y’know. Being a fucking prick.”
Dr. Eldridge nods her head, takes a calming breath and then asks, “So how did Scotty die?”