by P. Dangelico
Tears fill her eyes, her lips tremble. I open my arms and stand my ground. She’ll have to come and get me if she wants me. I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to. She has to come willingly.
And she does.
She walks right into my open arms and hugs me back.
“I don’t need to chase anything. All I want is right here…I love you, D.”
“I love you too.”
“Am I still dumped? Because I’m stuck on you like Gorilla glue, Dora Ramos.”
She giggles into my shirt. “I d-didn’t dump you.”
“Erroneous. You took all your stuff.”
“I was upset…and I had to study for my c-chem test.” My smile fades as we stare at each other.
“So you’re saying I’m undumped because I’m so good-looking you can’t stop wanting me?”
She shakes her head, her warm loving eyes holding mine. “I’m saying I love you for you…” On her toes, she place a brief kiss on my lips. “No other reason.”
“Will you come back home with me? I can’t sleep without you.”
She nods and I breath a sigh of relief. Life is good again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dallas
“W-what are you thinking about?”
I glance up from the fire still burning in the pit and check out the girl of my dreams. Lying back on the pool lounger, her big eyes watch me from above her book. She’s been busy studying for the GRE she’s taking soon. Which reminds me on a daily basis that I’m going to lose her next year––a fact that I am in no way ready to deal with.
“Well? W-what w-were you thinking about? You get this really s-serious face when you’re mulling something over.”
No one has ever asked me that question. Not one person in all my twenty-two years. Not that I can remember at least.
I get up from my pool lounger to straddle hers. Taking the book from her, I drop it, grab her face, and kiss her like I mean it. She giggles and it hits me in the chest, a slow warmth spreading through my limbs, driving out the loneliness.
“W-What was that for?”
“For being my girl…because I love you… for giving me a chance. Does a man need a reason to kiss his woman?”
She snickers. “No.”
I had no intention of falling in love. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of avoiding that dangerous condition for the last four years, and yet here I am. “You.” The truth feels good on my lips. “I was thinking about you. I want you to meet my family––Brenda. My grandfather…”
I unblocked my mother a few weeks ago. Seeing Dora and Katherine attempting to have a civil relationship makes me want to try with my problem parent too. Life is short. Too short to keep carrying around this resentment.
“We can add my shitbag of a father at some point.” Fuck knows why I would subject someone I care so much about to my family, but this feels necessary. Significant even.
Her eyes flash and her face flushes. She scoots closer and wraps her legs around my waist, pressing her body against mine as the last of the smoldering embers in the pit die out. My dick gets hard at the feel of those luscious thighs holding me closely and my hands run appreciatively over them. I can’t stop touch her. It’s an affliction. A compulsion. It’s love.
“We can meet Brenda for lunch one of the days she comes down to see her shrink,” I go on while planting a kiss on the side of her bare neck. Her body is a map of freckles marking all the spots she needs to be kissed and I’m the right man for the job.
When she doesn’t answer, I pull back and find a carefully blank expression on her gorgeous face. She can’t fool me anymore. By now, I know all her faces and this one tells me she’s nervous.
“It’ll be fine.” A slow smile spreads on my face as I go back to kissing a path from the curve of her shoulder all the way up her neck. “That’s what you said to me when you sacrificed me to your parents. Karma works fast sometimes.”
Chuckling, she pushes my shoulders. “So d-dramatic. I left you alone with them for a f-few minutes.”
“Jay deadlifts five-hundred pounds. Do you know how much damage he can inflict in that amount of time. One minute is too long.”
“He t-told you that?” The surprised on her face is almost too cute.
“He showed me his weights…”
In the quiet, she searches my face. “There’s s-something else you want say…” Her amusement drops and her voice gets quiet, slips under my skin and soothes me. “Y-You c-can tell me anything, Dall. You know you c-can.”
Her delicate fingers thread through my hair and scratch the back of my scalp. Closing my eyes, I lean into her touch, let her have me anyway she wants. Because this…this is where it’s at, where I belong, what I needed without even knowing it.
“Will you move in with me at the end of the semester?” Her fingers still and my eyes blink open. Her face is blank, her eye wide. My heart starts to race and panic sets in. What if I read too much into it?
“Yes…” Her grin is so wide it takes up her entire face. “B-But I’m warning you right now––we’ll face resistance.”
“Your parents. We’ll find a way to work it out with them.”
Parents don’t matter. No one matters but us. As long as I’ve got her, nothing else matters.
She yawns and I check my phone. Almost eleven. “Let’s go to bed,” I murmur and pull her up off the chair with me. We walk inside and I remember Banjo needs a walk.
“Have you seen Banjo?”
“S-Sleeping on his new orthopedic bed,” she tells me as she walks into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water.
Rounding the other side of the couch, I see that Dora’s right. My boy is sound asleep on his new bed with his back to me. But something about him raises the hair on my arms. Something feels off. My steps slow as I take in his prone unmoving shape on the mattress.
Getting down on my knees, I run my hand over his fur, his body already cold. My throat closes. My eyes sting. Banjo’s gone.
Everybody leaves. My best friend. Banjo. Before long Brock and Cole will be moving out too. Then there’s Dora. She’ll be gone in a year. It’s gonna kill me to let her go. I can already feel it––my insides trashed––and it’s a year away.
“Have you had enough for today?” I ask her, the girl I love, the one that’s gonna leave me soon and take my heart with her.
She paddles back to me with a huge grin on her beautiful face. It’s covered in freckles from all the time we’ve spent surfing lately. She straddles her board and we drift for a while, staring out at the horizon.
“I’m e-x-xhausted.”
“Let’s go home.” Then I catch what I just said. My house isn’t a home. It’s barely mine and certainly not hers. Home is not a place, it’s the people who fill it.
“The house feels weird without him…empty. First Rea now this…”
“I know. I m-miss him too. It’s g-going to take time.”
“Except every time I think I’m clear of one mess another one takes its place.”
Dora catches me spacing out and brushes my thigh. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Taking my wrist, she pulls me closer. Our boards kiss. Then our lips.
We paddle to shore, and while Dora grabs our things, I carry our surfboards back to the new G-Wagon I bought the other day. Community service accomplished. Traffic school completed. Driver’s license reinstated. Thank the fucking heavens.
One at a time, I secure the boards to the roof while Dora towels off her hair. My chest aches as I watch her behind my sunglasses. Can you love someone so much it physically hurts? Because I feel that all the time now and it scares the shit out of me.
“Darn, I l-lost my c-comb,” she says, searching her beach bag. “Give me a minute.” She takes off for the beach before I can answer.
“’Sup.”
I glance to my left and see Holloway and the rest of his douchebag crew getting out of his Tahoe.
“Holloway.”
I haven’t se
en him since that scene he made at the Malibu Farm. I wasn’t even dating Mia, his ex. That was me trying to be nice. She started crying in the middle of a Stat class we have together so I invited her for a bite to eat to get her mind off of the break-up. No fucking good deed…
They start unstrapping their boards from the SUV and watching me at the same time. My feelers immediately go up. This guy is bad news and I don’t want him anywhere near Dora.
“Found it,” Dora says strolling back to our car with her comb in hand.
Holloway and his band of ratfuckers walk up with their boards tucked under their arms. They could’ve gone straight to the beach and yet they chose to come over and undoubtedly cause trouble.
“Get in the car, D,” I tell her, my voice barely over a murmur. It earns the desired effect––her immediate attention. Her rust-colored eyes dart back and forth between me and the guys. As she comes around the silver G-Wagon, she passes them on the way. I watch Holloway rake his dead stare from her face down her body and it sparks a rage in me unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. I guess you can call it a pile-up of bad circumstances.
“Didn’t take you for a chubby chaser,” he says, his boys chuckling.
Dora is far from chubby. That’s not the issue, though. The issue is that he’s a dead man because A: he doesn’t have the right to look at her and B: offer an opinion.
I turn away from the car to face them, smile. The same shit-eating grin I’m famous for. Slowly, I walk up to Holloway. who’s smirking, and pat my gut. “I mean I gained some weight, but I wouldn’t call me chubby.”
Holloway chuckles darkly, exacerbating the tension already pulled to breaking point. “I wasn’t––”
Bam.
My fist flies, connecting with Holloway’s face without thought to consequences. He stumbles back and drops his board. Holding his mouth, blood flows between his fingers. The guys drop their boards too. Holloway’s eyes, packed with rage, slowly lift to meet mine.
Then all hell breaks loose.
“They g-got one g-good shot in before I broke it up,” my bodyguard says while she cleans the laceration on my cheekbone with hydrogen peroxide. The ones near the bone always tend to bleed more. It stings like a bitch too.
I can’t complain though. Right now I’m in my bathroom, sitting on the toilet, and being tended to by the woman I love while Holloway and the ratfucks are probably still kicking and screaming in pain in the parking lot where we left them.
“It was o-one against four. T-They could’ve r-really hurt you.”
Dora steps closer and stands between my split legs wearing the one piece bathing suit she surfs in sometimes. She inspects my face. It’s a minor cut but if she wants to take care of me, I’m not objecting.
“But they didn’t,” I remind her. Then I start chuckling. It can’t be helped, and frankly, it feels good to laugh again. The image of those guys being laid low by Dora and her small can of pepper spray is too awesome not to celebrate.
I run my hands up her bare legs and cup her ass while she works. “Good thing you were there to save me, babe.”
“Hello, LEO’s daughter. H-Have w-we met?” She smirks down at me, presses the gauze a little harder against my cut and I flinch.
The laughter starts in my gut and works it’s way out, my entire body shaking with it. Shortly after they jumped me and everyone started throwing punches, I heard screaming and it wasn’t coming from a female. It took me a moment to realize that Dora was pepper spraying the hole lot of them.
“It’s n-not funny, Dall. W-What if I hadn’t been there?”
Like molten lava, the laughter bursts out of me and keeps coming. “You got some on me too!”
“I t-told you to s-step away,” she says with the cutest self-satisfied smile. “Nobody g-gangs up on my m-man.”
By the time we got back in the car, all four of them were on the ground howling in pain, and I can say from personal experience with good reason. “They have my sympathy.”
It took me days to get rid of the sting completely.
“It’s just a little c-capsaicin,” she innocently remarks. “Anyway––I told them t-to wash with m-milk…”
She’s quiet for a while. “He called me c-chubby.” Her hand stills. “I heard him…I know w-why y-you hit him…I don’t want you g-getting hurt because of me.”
I love this girl. She’s the best partner anyone could ever wish for. Looking up into her sweet face, my chest expands and a fist gets stuck in my throat. Gently, I reach up and wrap my fingers around her small wrist, take the gauze out of her hand. Those big brown eyes meet mine.
“I love you…you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” Taking her hand, I place it over my pounding heart and cover it with mine. “I love you,” I say louder, clearer, with every fiber of my being until she hears it in her dreams.
Her eyes well with tears, her lips tremble.
“I love you, Kitten.”
Standing, I kiss her gently as I slip the bathing suit straps off her shoulders, hook a finger in the fabric, pull it down and expose her beautiful body. Then I kiss her, make love to her mouth, let her make love to mine. Her small hands push down my swim trunks and cup my balls, strokes my shaft the way I like it. She’s come a long way since that first night and she gets braver every time.
“I love you too.”
I lift her onto the counter, fish a condom out of the drawer on the left and roll it on as she watches. I need her. I need to bury myself inside of her and forget the world exists because outside the two of us, it’s all shit anyway.
“This way,” she says, sliding off the counter and facing the mirror. She presses he ass back into my dick and rubs up against me. My hands cup her breast and she throws her head back against my shoulder. I’ve never had this level of intimacy with anyone. With Beth I was too young and the rest I simply didn’t care about. Dora owns me. My body, my heart, my mind. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to be with her. Nothing I wouldn’t resort to to protect her.
Grabbing her hips, I enter her from behind and she whimpers. Her hand on the mirror, palm flat, her eyes trained on me. She watches as I drive my body into hers, give her everything I’ve got. Body and soul. I’m all in. We move against each other in counterpoint, and she rides me over the edge. I come right after her, a painful cry ripped out of me. Sated, content, grateful. I bask in us. Until I remember all these feelings are temporary.
Dora
That’s three times last night. On any given day, Dallas has a high sex drive, but last he was insatiable. Not that I’m complaining. He’s dead asleep when I leave for class in the morning. I place the briefest of kisses on his lips and whisper, “Dream a little dream of me.”
Two days later, after the epic sex marathon, something is very wrong with my relationship. I didn’t notice it at first because I was so busy studying for the GRE. And I don’t want to slip into paranoia, but I haven’t seen him and he’s barely texted. Even our evening calls have been brief and distant, which is completely unlike him.
Now that he has a car, he’s been driving himself to the shelter, our schedules no longer overlapping. Problem is, he’s already missed two shifts this week.
He’s not obligated to help out. The hours he needed for his community service were satisfied months ago, and no one is holding his feet to the fire, but had Vi and Mika known he was going to flake-out they could have arranged for some other volunteer to fill in. And that isn’t all that’s wrong.
Spotting him across the quad, I catch him laughing it up with two girls and a guy I don’t recognize and make my way over.
“Dallas…”
He turns, and spotting me, his face goes blank, the humor that was there a second ago just disappears, drops right off his face. No kiss, no smile, no affection, no indication I’m his girlfriend. Nothing. My stomach drops.
“You m-missed your t-time at the shelter again,” I say as soon as I catch up with him.
“I can’t do this right now…�
� he replies, searching around for an escape hatch. “Maybe later. After I study for my comm test we can talk.”
So cold, so distant. I have a hunch why he’s doing it, but for now I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because I trust him and that’s what you do for the people you love.
“Okay…no p-pres-sure…I understand…are we doing something tonight?” I dare to ask with my heart jammed in my throat.
He makes a pained face. “Going out with the guys tonight.”
He hasn’t been out with his friends in a long time so I don’t fret. It’s not fair of me to highjack all his time. That’s not the bad part.
“Who is that?” I overhear one of the girls he’s standing with ask as I’m walking away. And that’s when all my fears come to life. Because the sweet boy I fell in love with is nowhere to be found. He’s been replaced by an unfeeling traitor.
“A friend,” he tells her. That’s the bad part.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dallas
“Oi,” I hear coming from somewhere behind me.
Needing to clear my head, I was out of the house and on the water by 6:30 a.m. I haven’t been able to focus on anything lately. It’s a miracle my grades haven’t taken a hit. I can’t even tell you how long I’ve been sitting here straddling my board and staring out into space…thinking about Dora.
I miss her. It’s a constant, excruciating experience with no end in sight. I haven’t caught a single deep breath in two weeks and I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. I can’t let her go and I can’t risk falling any deeper. Which leaves me nowhere.
Quinn paddles up and assumes the same position, bobbing on the water next to me. Sunlight catches the new metal in his nose. Since the season ended he’s added more piercings and tats. It makes me think of Dora’s tattoo…and how many times I’ve had my mouth on it. Everything makes me think of Dora.