by Penny Dee
“Sure thing, sweetheart.” He gave me a wink. “You go.”
It was just getting dark when I got home. Caleb wasn’t home and it was funny, but even after living with him for such a short time, the place already seemed empty when he wasn’t there.
As I placed my handbag on the kitchen counter, my phone buzzed with a message.
Caleb: Not going to be home til late. Don’t wait up.
Me: That won’t be a problem. I’m beat. Going to soak in the tub and then head to bed.
Caleb: Bad day?
I thought about the moody lady with whisky-colored eyes and auburn hair. Usually people loved my baking, so when I got an unhappy customer it really left me bothered. But tonight I felt even further unsettled. A strange feeling lingered inside of me when I recalled her comment about my pregnancy. She had brushed the comment off with some reasoning about me rubbing my belly, but something still felt a little off. I sighed. Maybe she was right. Maybe my pregnancy hormones were affecting me and it was nothing more than an accurate observation. I let it go and flicked Caleb another message.
Me: All good. Have a good night.
And he replied straight away.
Caleb: You too. See you tomorrow.
We hadn’t touched each other since we’d agreed to keep things platonic. But it didn’t mean I had lost my lust for him. I was so wildly attracted to him it was crazy, and the way I was in a constant state of arousal for him was pathetic. But I refused to show it. Caleb seemed unfazed by our no-sex agreement. He never pushed. And his easy-going nature was comforting. Some nights when he got home late I wondered if he had been with other girls at the clubhouse. He never mentioned anything and I refused to ask. If this was going to work, it was important that we kept things separate—he had his life and I had mine. We were in this for the baby only.
Yet the thought of him driving that big cock into anyone else made me nauseous. And sometimes I questioned how much I wanted to keep things platonic, or if somewhere along the way I was going to want more.
CALEB
I hadn’t lived with a woman since living at home with my mom and sister. I was used to living with men. Beasts of men who drank and smoked, and who worked out in the gym and left their stinking clothes on the floor in their room. I was used to testosterone. Grease. Dirt. And the smell of sweat, spilled liquor, and stale weed.
Living with a female was completely different. They smelled good. Looked good. Everything about them was good. But fuck me, they were messy keeping themselves that way. Honey had a bottle for everything. Hair care. Skin care. Hair removal. Skin removal. Makeup removal. Hair gel. Eye gel. Skin peels. What the hell was a skin peel? And they all cluttered the bathroom. Me, I had a toothbrush, a shaving kit, deodorant, hair product, and a comb. I was allocated one drawer. One drawer out of six. Whereas, Honey had an entire drawer for makeup alone.
Not that I was complaining. Living with Honey was a breeze. In fact, living with her was proving to be a lot of fun. We got along well. And the place seemed quiet without her if she wasn’t home.
Since moving in I had gone along with her demands for keeping our relationship strictly as friends, but damn, if it wasn’t for my right hand I’d be suffering the biggest case of blue balls known to man.
She was sexy as fuck. And because we lived together I’d accidentally caught her in various stages of undress a few times. Like last week when I’d walked in on her after a shower. Hell, I didn’t know she was in there. I came around the corner and there she was, butt naked. Gasping, she’d quickly wrapped the towel around that beautiful body of hers while I’d made some witty comment. I mean, I think I did, to be honest I couldn’t really remember because, at the time, all the blood in my brain had gone straight to my cock and all I could think about was making her gasp again.
Then this morning when we’d collided in the kitchen. She’d snuck out of her room wearing nothing but a tiny pair of panties and a tank top, thinking I was still in bed, and raced to the kitchen for a glass of water. But I was leaving the kitchen and we ran smack into each other. Literally. Our bodies collided. And I’m not going to lie. The sight of Honey in those tiny panties and the fleeting touch of her hips against the palm of my hand made me hard. And after an awkward apology, I’d returned to my room, closed the door, and jerked off.
It was going to take time to get used to not being able to touch her. And I was going to get some serious wrist cramps.
I hated the whole friends thing, but I wasn’t going to pressure her when she had our baby growing in her womb. Stress, I was told, was no good for the fetus. So I made a vow to myself to keep my goddamn hands off her until the baby was born.
Instead, I focused on my work. Things were going well at the studio. My reputation as an artist was growing and I was frequently booked out. I was enjoying it. Some days I got to work on some really interesting pieces where I got to test my ability as an artist, as well as my skill with a tattoo gun. Other days it was standard designs, or something simple like quotes, birthdays, or song lyrics.
Like the one I was working on now. She was my last client for the day. Her name was Lulu and the tattoo I was inking into her skin were lyrics to a Justin Beiber song. I loved doing lyrics, it was interesting to see what songs and words spoke to people enough to have them permanently stained into their flesh. I’d done a lot of them over my ten years as a tattoo artist. But a Bieber song? Not until now. Usually the lyrics came from more classic rock ’n roll or grunge anthems—less pop and more cool. My own lyrical tattoo was down my left arm and quoted a line from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”.
Lulu chose to put her Bieber lyrics down her right outer thigh.
After I finished, she stood in front of the mirror, admiring my handiwork. Her legs were long. Her dress short.
“I love it,” she gasped breathlessly. “You’re a genius.”
“Thanks, sweetheart. Happy I could satisfy.”
She climbed back on the bed so I could dress it. While I applied antiseptic cream and covered it in wrap, I went through how to look after a new tattoo, not that she needed it. This girl knew the drill. She had a sleeve and a massive dragon down the other thigh.
“All done,” I said. “How does it feel?”
Dark brown eyes gleamed up at me. “It feels real good.”
I stood up and went to my desk to gather the paperwork for her to hand to Pandora out at reception. But when I turned around, Lulu was off the bed and standing next to my ink station, completely fucking naked.
What the fuck?
“Ah, what are you doing, sweetheart?”
She pulled her hair over one shoulder. “You don’t like what you see?”
She had a banging body. Tanned. Smooth. Hard thighs and perky tits. But it didn’t belong in my tattoo area fucking naked. She came toward me, her expression seductive, her lips slightly parted, one eyebrow raised. I raised one right back at her.
“Becky told me what a good lay you are,” she said. “Told me all about that big cock of yours.”
Becky? Who the fuck was Becky?
“I think there’s been some kind of mistake, darlin’, I don’t know a Becky,” I said.
“She came in here a few months ago. Heart tattoo. Just below her belly button.” She indicated to the area on her body, drawing my eyes to the thin strip of pubic hair between her legs. I quickly lifted my eyes back to hers. “She said you were sure something.”
I thought back to the blonde woman who I now knew was Becky. Fucking her on the tattoo bed had been a mistake. I’d never done anything like that before and I wasn’t quite sure why I did it then. Only that life back then seemed out of control. Less anchored. A special kind of hell had hit the Kings of Mayhem in the form of Elias Knight only a few months before, and in the aftermath and carnage of his vendetta I did a lot of stupid shit. I acted out. Made poor decisions. Like Becky on the tattoo bed.
I made no excuses for it. I did it. I owned it. I fucked up.
But it wasn’t hap
pening again. Not at my place of work.
And definitely not while my baby grew in another woman’s body.
“You do remember her, don’t you?” Lulu asked, walking back over to the bed and sliding her naked ass across it.
“Of course, I do. Becky. Nice girl.”
“She is. She’s the nice one. I’m the bad one.” She raised her eyebrow and opened her legs so I got an eyeful of pussy. A piercing of some kind glittered amongst the slick folds of flesh. I wasn’t sure what it was. And I had no intention of finding out.
I walked over to her dress laying in a heap on the floor and picked it up.
“Not today, darlin’.” I handed it to her. “It’s a real sweet gesture but it ain’t happening.”
Lulu pouted. But her disappointment didn’t stop her from making another attempt at getting what she wanted. She closed her legs and sat up, reaching for me and trailing a finger seductively up the zipper of my jeans. “I promise you, you’ve not had a pussy as fine as mine.”
I stepped back. This wasn’t happening. “You need to go.”
She glared at me, her face tightening, her eyes sharpening.
Rejection can go two ways.
Clean or dirty.
One, the rejectee can get teary, hurt, apologetic. Or two, they can get angry and decide the only way to overcome the rejection is to rain down some kind of hellfire on their way out the door.
Lulu went with option two.
She shoved on her dress and then stormed out, swiping everything off the top of my ink station and calling me a pussy on her way out.
“Wow, what did you do to piss her off?” Pandora asked, appearing in the doorway five minutes later. I looked up from inspecting the scattered disaster of ink vials on the floor.
“Did she pay?” I asked.
“Hell yeah, she did. You think I’m going to let some crazy-ass bitch leave here without handing over the coin they owe?”
I smiled at her. Good old Pandora. She had a decent set of lady balls. Not a lot intimidated her.
“Good,” I said, picking up three ink vials and a tube of antiseptic cream off the floor. Crimson ink spread in a puddle across the floor like a pool of blood. “Would you mind grabbing me the mop and bucket from the closet in the hall?”
“Sure thing.”
When she disappeared, I picked up the remaining ink vials and the box of latex gloves laying on its side by the pooled ink.
“So, are you going to tell me what you did to make her so angry?” Pandora asked again, reappearing with a mop and bucket.
No. I wasn’t.
“Here, let me do that,” I said, avoiding her question as I took the mop from her. I looked at her outfit. She wore tight black jeans, grey knee-high boots, and a tighter-than-tight black t-shirt screaming Baby Doll across the front. “You look like you’re extra dressed up. I don’t want you to get ink all over your clothes. Is it date night?”
She grinned. “Roger is taking me to see a band over in Humphrey. He’s on his way over to pick me up.”
“Go. I’ll clean this mess up.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Go enjoy your night.”
“Thanks!” She started to walk out but stopped and turned around, a mischievous grin spreading across her perfectly shaped red lips. “You know, we should have a code word for the next time a client hits on you.”
She glanced at the CCTV cameras in the corner of the room and then grinned. “Have a good night.”
CALEB
The flowers turned up two days later. A dozen black roses with all of their heads chopped off and scattered around the thorny stems. They arrived at the studio in a long, gold box with a card attached that simply read Caleb.
The message was a dark one. Whoever was sending me these gifts was pissed.
At first I thought it was Lulu. Was this her idea of payback for turning her down?
But one look at the card and I knew the writing was the same as the card attached to the box containing the lacy thong and Polaroid.
Without knowing how, I’d pissed off my admirer.
“Wow, she’s angry,” Pandora said, walking into my office and perching herself on the end of my desk.
“Who’s pissed off?” Cade asked, walking in after her.
“Her,” Pandora replied. “His secret admirer.”
“Stalker more like it,” Cade said, looking at the box of severed rose heads.
“Who dropped the box off?” I asked Pandora.
“It was waiting by the front door when I opened up this morning.”
“You want to take this to chapel?” Cade asked.
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re kidding, right? And get laughed out of the club because of a box of severed flowers? No, thanks. It’s just some crazy Jane who will eventually own up or stop.”
“Either that or she’ll put your head in a box,” Cade said with a frown.
“Well, I think it’s sweet. I mean, not the dead flowers, but everything else has been nice.” Pandora looked at the Easy Rider movie poster behind me. “Maybe the flowers are from someone else. Lulu, maybe?”
“I thought of that, but I doubt it. Lulu doesn’t come across as being that committed to a cause.”
“I don’t know, she seemed pretty pissed off when she stormed out the other day.”
Cade looked at me. “What did you do to Lulu?”
“He did nothing to her. That’s the problem.” Pandora pushed off the desk. “Anyway, I came in to tell you your last appointment has canceled.”
My last appointment was a three-hour appointment to finish off a sleeve. The client was a regular called Kitty Kat who was a hostess over at the Red Room, a fetish bar in Humphrey. She was no stranger to a tattoo gun and I’d done so many of her tattoos she was like a walking portfolio of my work.
“Damn, did she reschedule?”
“Of course. But not for a couple of weeks. She’s come down with mono.”
“Okay. Send her some flowers with a note to get well.” I was big on looking after my clients no matter how cheesy I had to be. “But not flowery flowers.”
Pandora cocked an eyebrow at me. “Right. Flowers that don’t look like flowers. That should be easy.”
“You know what I mean. Something weird. Go with something you would like.”
“What I would like?”
“Yeah, something, I don’t know, strange.”
Her red lips gaped at my use of the word strange.
“You know what I mean. Unusual. Interesting. She’s a dominatrix, for heaven sakes.”
Cade held up the box of decapitated black roses and shook it.
“Not my style,” Pandora said, unimpressed.
I took the box off my brother and threw it in the dumpster in the alley behind the studio. When I came back inside, Pandora had returned to the front counter but Cade was still in my office, leaning against the tattoo bed, his legs crossed at the ankles.
“The new girl you’re seeing, do you think she’s involved with these gifts?” he asked.
“Who says I’m seeing anyone?”
“You suddenly move in with a girl none of us know anything about and you seriously want me to believe she is your roommate and nothing else?”
I shrugged it off. “I couldn’t live at the clubhouse forever.”
He gave me a don’t bullshit me look. “Try again, little brother. That doesn’t make sense. There has to be another reason—”
“She’s pregnant,” I interrupted him.
I didn’t see the point of lying to him. He would find out soon enough.
Plus, I wanted to get home to Honey. She was home because she’d had a couple of big days at the store and was exhausted. Now that Kitty Kat had cancelled, my afternoon was free and I figured maybe we could spend some time together.
I looked up to see Cade’s jaw drop. Slowly his brows rose and he let out a deep breath. “And it’s definitely yours?”
I explained the situation to him. The one
night in the motel. Her roommate stealing all of her stuff. Honey’s determination to keep things uncomplicated by not being romantically involved. I told him about the break-in and my priority in keeping Honey safe, and he listened quietly, then slowly nodded in agreement, because put in a similar situation, my brother would do exactly the same.
“Have you told Honey about the gifts?” he asked.
“Are you kidding me? She’d freak out.”
“She deserves to know.”
“Maybe if she wasn’t pregnant.” I opened my scheduling book on my desk and checked my appointments for the next day. I had a late start. “I don’t want to stress her out unnecessarily.”
“Fair enough. But if the gifts get any more sinister, you’ll need to come clean.”
“The gifts aren’t going to get anymore sinister,” I said, snapping my appointment book shut. “Look, we’re not telling anyone about the baby until after Tully’s wedding next week. Honey wants to meet the family first, so try and keep this to yourself before then.”
An amused smirk spread across my brother’s face and a roguish gleam took up in his eyes. Trying not to chuckle, he patted me on the back. “Just make sure I’m there when you tell Mom. I wouldn’t miss that for the fucking world.”
He started laughing as he walked away.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
Twenty minutes later I finished up in the studio and headed for home.
HONEY
I stood under the spray of warm water and let the gentle needles of warmth crash against my skin and spread their calm over my body. Slowly my muscles began to relax. The last few days had been tiresome. It felt like I was on my feet and at the bakery all the time. The store was doing well, and Sailor and I seemed to always be rushed off our feet, which was awesome for the business account, but hell on my body.
Knowing I was exhausted, Sailor insisted I take a day off. And I’d known Sailor long enough to know he’d just nag at me until I did.