And she had begged me to watch out for her daughter, make sure she was safe, save her if Papa’s hired men had tried to do her harm. And I had done it. I would have given up my life to bend to her wishes.
And in return, she had her daughter check out by a doctor. Not because of the men who helped me get her out, but because she had been alone with me.
I was the danger.
As I walked the grounds behind my father’s compound, I pondered the questions that I wanted answered. I wanted to know just what she thought I would do to Dominique. Did she think I would’ve killed her? Did she think I wanted the reigns to my father’s family so bad that I would kill for it?
I stood idly outside my father’s indoor pool. My mind wavered slightly, the drinking striking home. I used both hands to rub my face. The few mangled hours of sleep I had was taking its toll. I didn’t need another drink.
Yet, I wanted one.
The indoor pool’s bartender smiled at me before pushing a glass in my direction, filled to the brim with nothing but liquor and a cube of ice.
I dipped the tip of my index finger inside my drink and swirled it. I watched as the ice cube barely moved, almost as if it wasn’t interested in moving to my speed. I gave up; the finger went into my mouth as my tongue lapped at the drink.
I personally felt that God had made a boo-boo when He had made functioning addicts. My memory was always sketchy. I remembered the bad more than I ever did the good, which was the opposite as to why I drank in the first place.
I drank to forget the bullshit.
If I stopped drinking now, gave up the addiction, most would think I would feel better – be more connected with my surroundings.
But I knew the truth.
When I woke in the morning, sober, my hands shook, my head hurt. One drink and I became normal. The world was happening, spinning, and I was proned – thanks to my friend, Mr. Acohol – not to care, like I didn’t feel the movement of life beneath my feet.
I put the glass to my lips and smiled as I took the first gulp. My drinking made my world better; one sip, one gulp, and I was terribly stoic to the bullshit that my life had to offer.
I was almost to the point where the world was slowly disappearing in a drunken haze.
The haze shifted when Dominique called out to me from behind. “Drinking the moment you opened your eyes, huh, Tristan?”
I swiveled around and there she was, smiling at me in her string bikini. I eased back, my elbows resting ontop of the bar and enjoyed the view of Dominique’s flawless body. Her waist was slender but her hips were filled out and her legs looked strong as if she regulary worked out.
If Lulina should be fearful of anything, it should be at the way I was drawn to her daughter.
I didn’t smile. I focused on Dominique, studying her body, thinking about I would do to it if it was pressed up against me again. I licked my lips and raised an eyebrow. My eyes took it’s time appraising her, starting at her feet and rising to her face.
I loosened my tie even more and gave her a slow smile and let it spread.
Dominique put a hand on her hip. She persed her full lips as her eyes twinkled, as if asking: do you like what you see?
“No, dear, it’s just his horrible habit he gotten from the men in his family,” Lulina answered Dominique’s question intended for me.
Lulina was sitting at one of the tables set around the pool. Dominique ignored her mother. I did the same. We stared at each other for a long moment.
Dominique mouthed the words: “Miss me?”
I mouthed them right back.
And the question was left unanswered by both parties.
“Come to me, Tristan.” Lulina motioned me over with her own drink in her hand.
I sat with them. Dominique was on my right and Lulina on my left.
Lulina threw an arm around mine and buried a long, wet kiss on my cheek. “You must come and have a dip with us.”
I used the sleeve of my suit jacket to wipe the spit and lipstick off. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
Dominique seized the other arm. “I want you to, Tristan,” she pouted.
“It’s been a minute since I swam. I may sink to the bottom and drown,” I inform her.
She tugged me closer. “I’ll save you.”
“Why would you do that?”
She leaned in and kissed the side of my mouth. “You walked into a house, filled with my father’s men, to rescue me. Giving you mouth to mouth to save you is nothing. In fact, I may enjoy it.”
I didn’t think to add that there where two other men who had done the same thing. I had only killed one man, and that was under strict supervision and coaching.
And she had done all the rescuing on her lonesome.
Dominique bent her head, slightly, her eyes looking at me from under her long eyelashes. “Tell me you’ll swim.”
“I’ll swim.”
“Tell me that I can put my mouth on yours if you need air.”
“My life is yours to bring back if that happens,” I answered.
“You won’t mind if I enjoy our mouths together, Tristan?”
“Who would?”
Dominique opened her mouth for another command but stopped when Lulina pushed her glass off the table.
“Oops,” she said and I wasn’t convinced.
Dominique smiled, her cheeks coloring. “I should be careful around you. We keep this up and I’m going to have another doctor visit if my mother has anything to do with it.”
There was a joke somewhere and I couldn’t seem to find it. Or, I was just having a bad day with metaphors. Everyone was talking in circles instead of killing the elephant in the room because he had all the secrets.
Dominique shrugged her shoulders, innocently. “Since you’ve agreed to go for a swim then go to the locker room and grab one of my dead step father’s shorts.”
“I guess I’ll do just that.”
She looked happily at her mother. “You were right, mother, men will do anything you tell them to do. If you ask them the right way, I mean.”
I felt stupid and used, and predictable.
Lulina threw her head back and laughed. “Then while he’s doing what he was told, I’m going to help myself with another drink.” She left to the bar, wagging her well formed ass for my benefit, I was sure.
Dominique scooted closer to me. It was apparent she was waiting for her mother to leave. “You didn’t answer my first question.”
“What question was that, there were so many?”
“You’re deflecting, Tristan, and its rude.”
She smiled secretly. Her long eyeless fluttered while she tilted her head. She had not moved her hand from my arm and I could feel the heat of her body burning through my coat sleeve. The tie around my neck seemed more of a noose now. I moved to loosen it but Dominique caught my hand. Her soft fingers enclosed over mine, leading my hand away from the tie. I watched as she leaned down and pressed her soft lips against my knuckles; one kiss for each hand.
She was seducing me with her mother in ear shot… And she’s doing a faboulous job at it.
The women, I so called myself seducing, may not have given me a second glance if I didn’t have a hundred dollar bill clenched between my teeth, and didn’t look like a homicidal manic – and if I did look like I would kill them, skin them alive, and stuff what was left of them in my pocket as a souvenir, I would have to have a fifty with that hundred dollar bill for them welcome my pressence. My seduction game was off by a large margin. As for Dominique, she did it with a finesse; she brought a whole new zeal to the game of getting what you want from the opposite sex.
She looked up and met my eyes. “Do I do something to you, Tristan?”
I said nothing.
She laughed. And I saw a flash of her perfect teeth. She stared at me, her bottom lip now trapped in her mouth.
Dominique carefully placed my hands on her lap and left them there. She laid her palms flat on my chest. Her warm hands
moved up, dragging slowly. Her fingers stopped at my tie, but she didn’t loosen it, she tightened it.
“If you’re adamant about not swimming, you don’t get to remove clothing.” She smoothed out the tie and made it look better over my wrinkled shirt. “And, yes, Tristan.”
I gulped. “Yes, what?”
Her eyeslashes fluttered as she blinked rapidly, “I missed you. All I can think about is how your tongue was in my mouth and the way it tasted.”
I played along with the dangerous game. “How my tongue pushed into your mouth? Is that all?”
“And how I wanted something else pushed into my mouth, then after, how I wanted that something else pushed someplace so much more personal.”
She smiled and I gulped again.
Dominique the victor, her game well played.
I grabbed her hands away from me. “You know we can’t do this.”
Lulina fell back into her seat. “What are you guys whispering about?”
Thankfully I had already taken my hands away from Dominique’s legs.
“About him kissing me in an elevator,” Dominique bodly stated.
Lulina and I both had taken sips of our drinks and both choked on it. I realized then I had an innate way of getting into these debacles.
Dominique continued, “We had to look like a loving couple when he was bringing me to you.”
I felt Lulina’s hot stare on the side of my face. “You kissed my daughter?”
“It was more like a peck, Lu,” I bold faced lied.
Dominique nodded to this and I began to breathe easier. “Tristan was a gentleman about it. Even his tongue in my mouth was in a gentleman way.”
It’s cliché to say it, but if looks could kill, I would have fallen dead, my body smoldering from the two fireballs shot out each of Lulina’s pupils. Dominique too - only because she was sitting a little too close to the intended target.
***
I didn’t have enough sense to look away while Dominique took her time walking down the pool steps and into the water. Or hide the lecherous gaze on my face as the water parted for her bare olive colored calves.
Lulina splashed water into my face. “She’s your niece, Tristan.” She splashed me again.
“I just wanted to see her wet,” I tell her.
Dominique dipped her head underwater and swam further away from her mother and me. Lulina grabbed my shoulders and led me to the deeper end of the pool, vying for my attention and winning.
“She’s my daughter, Tristan. She’s your niece,” Lulina began when she was positive Dominique wouldn’t overhear the conversation.
I cringed at the words. “I’m aware of that, too. It’s not by blood but I’m aware of it, Lu.”
“I see the way she looks at you,” she argued, “I see the way you look at her.”
“Come on, Lu,” I sang, sarcastically, “you sound almost as if you don’t trust me.”
Lulina grabbed for my waist and pulled me closer to her. Her full lips became moist as she licked her them slowly and deliberately. The vulnerable woman in the hotel room I had accidently seen was long gone.
Lulina was back in stride and seemed crueler than usual.
“You’re mad about the doctor visit,” she stated, her eyebrows raised as if she just now came full circle on how much of a bitch she truly was.
I gritted my teeth. “Livid.”
“So that’s it? What you and she were doing was getting back at me?”
“Why the doctor, Lu?”
“I needed to make sure she was okay.”
“You knew she was okay because I delivered her to you. You asked me to watch out for her and I almost took a bullet for it.”
Lulina bit her bottom lip and her eyes watered. “I was scared.”
“Of?”
She glanced in Dominique’s direction and I touched her chin and pulled her head back to me. “She has something, Tristan. Something I had long since lost when I was her age.”
Again with the metaphors.
A tear slipped down Lulina’s cheek, and I didn’t have the heart to make her clarify what she meant.
I used my thumb to wipe away the tear. Lulina reached up and grabbed my hand. “I miss you inside me, Tristan. I miss us.”
“There is no more us, remember?”
“I want you back. Johnny’s dead so there’s nothing stopping me from having you.”
“You sure are a star widower, Lulina.”
“I loved my husband,” she argued with cruelness laced in her words and shoved my hand back as if it was a piece trash and she didn’t want it under her nose anymore. “I loved my husband,” she said again, almost as if she truly believed it.
“And I saw it so easily,” I said, matching her tone, “When you told me my brother was dead and kissed me aftwards then invited me into your room to have sex, I could see the love you had for him in your eyes.”
Lulina hauled back and slapped me. The sound of the hit bolted to the walls and flew back out, sounding like a mean echo – the echo was more like applauds from some audience that I hadn’t seen.
Then she slapped me again.
“Sober up, Tristan,” she said, “sober up and then get the fuck out of my house.”
The same words, two times in the span of an hour, and I found it best to listen this time.
CHAPTER TEN
If we are God’s creations then why the imperfections…
The busted window in my apartment wouldn’t budge an inch. The heat I felt may have been inside my head, the stuffiness, the enclosure, could have been from my own fruition, but I worked at the window like a convict would at the last barrier to freedom.
The whole day had been a long stint of blistering suffication.
Zander sat on my torn couch, nursing a beer and puffing on a cigarette. “It ain’t opening, man.” He slurped noisily while I fussed and fought with the window. “You fucked Lulina again, didn’t you?”
The window finally broke open with an angry scream. Frosty air blew and burned my cheeks.
It didn’t feel like a relief.
Zander had seen the chink in my armor and went in for the kill. “I can always tell when you’ve been rolling around in her cunt.”
“It was back in Miami,” I whispered.
He chuckled. “Before or after she told you your brother was dead.”
I glared at him, knowing that he knew the answer no matter if I opened my mouth or not.
He tilted his head back and drained the beer. “She’s going to get you killed.”
“Go ahead and say it, Zan. She’s going to get a good man killed.”
He laughed. “You aren’t a good man.”
Finally, he got it.
I couldn’t act like it didn’t sting when he said those words. Or miss when he said that I wasn’t a good man.
“So what’s this hard on you got for her daughter?” He asked.
“There’s nothing going on with me and Dominique.”
“Tell yourself whatever you want to believe, Tristan, but I can see your heart sumersaulting from here by me just saying her name.”
Just having won the battle opening the window, I was losing another one in trying to close it.
Someone gave an angry knock on my door which almost caused me to jump right out the open window that I had fought so hard to open, and, actually, that would have been a very interesting way to end my day – as fucked as it had been.
I opened the door and Ally stormed in.
“I need to talk you,” she said.
This was bad with her parents at home, maybe asleep, maybe not, but at home, which meant Ally didn’t need to be here. Zander was too much of an old woman when it came to drama so he didn’t even act like he was going to budge from the couch to give privacy.
Ally was a mess. Her eyes were bloodshot and angry, her clothes hung off her body like she had lost weight. Her hair was down and messy. Her green eyes had an edge that was never there before.
And I ha
d to remind myself that I had only broken things off with her this morning.
She bared her teeth and I recoiled. “You don’t get to just throw me away, Tristan.”
She turned on her heels and went into my bedroom. I followed after her with the intent on having a discussion… quietly.
“You can’t be here. Your parents, Ally. What are you thinking?”
Ally didn’t turn to me until she heard me close the door. When she heard the click of the lock, she threw her arms around me. Her lips pressed so firmly to my mouth.
“Take me back, Tristan,” she mumbled, her voice wet with tears.
She pulled my sweatshirt up to my armpits and I felt her tongue licking around my nipples. Her hand grasped at my belt buckle. She undid the belt and made fast work at the button to my jeans then to then work on the zipper.
I grabbed her hands away from me.
Ally bucked against me, wretching her hands out of my grasp. She grabbed for the back of my neck and brought my head down for a kiss and tried to get my mouth open with her tongue.
I captured her roaming hands and shoved her away.
Too hard.
She stumbled and fell to the ground. I moved to help her, appalled at my reaction. Ally looked up at me, her lips quivering, the water building back in her eyes.
And I crumbled.
“I love you,” she said, her voice hoarse, the tears constricting her throat.
I lost my temper again and punched the wall. The cheap plastering broke through. “I said it’s over!”
Ally was a shivering, crying mess, and it was my job to get her half way straight before she walked out of here. She was of age of consent now but hadn’t always been. If she wanted to make trouble for me she very well could.
I took the soft approach. “I’m a piece of shit, Ally. You deserve better.”
Ally stood back up, her shoulders squared and her jaw locked. “I want you, Tristan. I love you.”
I took another approach. “Okay, maybe I don’t want this anymore. Maybe I want a real woman.” I walked around her and pointed to the door. “Now get the fuck out of my house.”
Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) Page 12