“Come again?” I cupped a hand to my ear.
“Shut up.” She smacked at my shoulder. “You were right when you said it allows me to act out my fantasies, the dirty things that I never thought I wanted to do, the things I shouldn’t want to do, if you force me…I enjoy it. I can enjoy it. It’s weird.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes.
“It makes perfect sense. The psychology of sexuality is pretty interesting. And we’re all different. You know you can tell me anything and I’ll never judge. I want to hear all the dirty things you think in that pretty, little head of yours.” I tugged on a stray strand of her hair.
“Mmm…like watching you get off gets me off? When you start to groan and talk dirty… Your cum face? So hot.” Her eyelids lowered, irises darkened, lips swept into a sexy smirk.
“Oh yeah? Wanna see it again? Right now?” I thrust my hips to nudge her ass with my erection.
“Let me recover! At this rate I’ll be sore for days.”
“Good.” I nipped at her neck as my hands kneaded her thighs. “Are you working tonight?” I finally pulled away.
Her eyes fluttered closed and a low sigh passed her lips. “No.”
“Stay the night.”
“Here?”
“At home, in Rock Island. Stay with me.” I ran a hand up her thigh and under the shirt of mine she’d slipped into this morning. After I’d sunk myself into her again. Of course. Sleepy Sunday morning sex. I fucking loved it.
“Hmm…I dunno…” She tapped her chin adorably. I couldn’t get enough of her silly mannerisms.
“Stop teasing. You know I’ll win.” I slid my hand higher to grip at her hip, my thumb teasing at the inner corner of her thigh…just nearly touching her heated center.
“Always so cocky.” She slapped my cheek.
“I always win. This…” I dusted my thumb over her seam, “Is mine, remember? And if you’re not working, I want inside you tonight. And maybe even the next night.”
“Okay…” she said softly. “But I’ve got a secret.” She leaned into my ear, nudging her nose along the shell, scraping her teeth along the lobe. My dick twitched and began his slow rise to attention.
“Yeah?” I gruffed, hardly able to contain my desire.
“You’re a pig,” she whispered and wiggled in my lap, rubbing against my erection.
“That’s it.” I spun her around and lifted the shirt to land a hard smack on her ass.
“Ow, fuck!” She pressed a soothing palm over her cheek.
“We’ve only just begun, baby.” I grinned then ran two fingers between her legs to test her readiness. “We’ve only just begun.”
Summer drew to a close and it had been a few months since I’d first made it my goal to open Dillon up. That night at her house, where it’d all begun, when I’d backed her against the wall and told her she was mine in no uncertain terms.
Dillon and I were good, still no talk of commitments in any way, but things had calmed down. With her second experience at LUST behind us, it felt like we’d turned some kind of corner. We’d finally settled on the same page, and while I knew it would take time to get Dillon where I wanted her, namely in my bed, every night, she’d spent a lot of nights there already. We’d taken to staying at each other’s houses a lot of nights of the week. Sometimes she’d even crawl into my bed after work in the wee hours of the morning since I’d given her a key.
I never knew why she did it, what mood she was in to make her come to me like that, so out of character for her, but I didn’t ask questions. If she was in my arms and happy, sated post-orgasm and staying, I wasn’t about to rock the boat.
The town slowly seemed to accept that we were together. We hadn’t been hiding it well, the looks exchanged at the bar, flirty touches, fights, all on display for every fucker in the place to see, including Wild.
He assumed I’d played to her baser instincts. I had, but not in the way he’d suggested.
I refused to play with her feelings. I was straightforward, honest, and gave her the best orgasms of her life.
A warm September afternoon and we were enjoying the last of the warm temperatures by meeting Wild, Kat, and the twins for the Founder’s Day town picnic.
I held the wrinkly, chubby freeloaders in my arms as Dillon and Kat laughed at how awkward I looked juggling the two of them. It felt good.
Like we were a couple, like we were something.
My heart was growing for her. I hoped hers was doing the same.
As the portable charcoal grills were cleaned and packed away, Kat and Wild took the kids home and Dillon and I walked the shoreline to find a spot to watch fireworks. They were launched from a boat in the middle of the bay and they were always fantastic. Even better than the Fourth of July. I sucked in a rush of salty Maine air and smiled.
“I like this,” I murmured and clasped her hand in mine. She squeezed it for a moment before turning back to the water. “This looks good.” I nodded to an empty spot of shoreline covered with blonde sand and rolling white waves.
She plopped down and crossed her legs. I sat behind her, legs wrapped around her knees, and ran my palms up and down her arms to warm her in the rapidly cooling evening air.
“I had fun today.”
“Me too.” She squirmed in my arms and then looked down the beach to where the rest of the town was milling around waiting for the show to start.
“Wild’s good with babies. Who knew?” I commented.
“You are too.”
I only shrugged in response.
“You want some of your own someday?”
“Sure, I guess.” I watched the breeze play with golden strands of her hair. I pulled her hair off her neck and placed a soft kiss at her nape.
“Do you have to be so touchy-feely?” she whispered and scooted a few inches away.
“I thought you liked my hands on you?” I ran my palms down her thighs and tickled the threads of her cutoffs that blew on the breeze.
“I do…in private. I hate public displays.”
“You hate a lot of things,” I grumbled but continued to wisp my fingertips across her skin.
“It’s a hard limit. It makes me uncomfortable.” She scooted and avoided my eyes.
“Dillon,” I huffed but didn’t say more.
“Seriously, you’re all about breaking boundaries, invading my personal space.” She rubbed her palms over her arms to warm herself.
“Don’t do this.” My heart fell. Just when I was feeling good about where we were headed.
“Don’t do what? You’re taking too much, sometimes you ask too much of me. I’m not ready,” she mumbled and dug her toes in the sand. I watched her pretty pink nails bury themselves in fine granules as a slow ache took up residence in my chest.
“I can’t kiss you in public? Everyone knows we’re together.”
“We’re not together, Slade.”
“Christ, Dillon! This is so much bullshit.”
“You knew from the start…”
“That you’d be like a dead fish? Nearly emotionless? Christ, will you ever be ready?” I ran a hand through my hair.
“I don’t know,” she whispered so softly the breeze nearly carried it away.
I watched the waves smash the rocks as her words played in my head. I sucked in a deep breath as I came to a conclusion. “I’m sick of waiting.”
“Okay…” she trailed off and turned to look at me.
“I’m really sick of waiting. What’s not to trust? This is me, we grew up together, you know my history, you know fucking everything!”
“This is a lot for me to deal with.”
“What? Being with me? Give me a break. You fucked my best friend and his future wife in the bar for chrissakes! How the fuck do you think I deal with that? You’ve fucked half the guys in this town, guys I know, friends, people I have to see every fucking day and I know they know your body. They’ve been inside you,” I gritted out the last part as my fists tightened at my sides.
“I can
’t believe you’re doing this.” She wiped errant tears from her eyes. “You’re a prick. Just say it! Say I’m a slut. Wouldn’t be the first time.” She stood and stomped down the shore.
“Dillon!”
“No, Slade. Fuck off. You believe everything you hear? Then I guess I’m a slut. I don’t do commitment, guess I’m just like my dad. Hell, even if we were together, how can you trust me to not fuck around, fuck one of your buddies? It’s what you think I am anyway!”
“Jesus Christ, Dillon.” I grabbed for her elbow and she spun, eyes on fire, tearing up my gaze and making my heart fall.
“Let me go,” she seethed.
“Dillon.”
“Let me go, Slade, or I’ll scream.” She twisted in my grip. “Let me fucking go!” She ripped her arm from my grasp and walked with defiant steps across the parking lot to slide behind the wheel of her car.
“Fucking Christ.” I shoved my hands deep in my pockets.
“Trouble in paradise?” Some old-timer passed puffing on a cigar.
“Something like that,” I muttered and wondered where this left me.
I didn’t know if I could stand to have her out of my life.
I didn’t know if I could stand to have her in it.
“Hey, honey.” I placed a gentle kiss on my little brother’s scruff-darkened chin. “How are you?”
“Been better.”
“Yeah? What’s up?” I settled into the chair across from him in the small diner.
“Dad stuff. Bad Dad stuff.” He frowned and his eyes darkened with anger.
“God. What now?”
“He knows we’ve been seeing each other.”
“What? How?” I sat straighter in my chair, alarmed.
“He’s got eyes everywhere. Probably a crack whore in his ear,” he huffed.
“What did he say?” I reached across the table to clasp my hand over his.
“He’s pissed. Threatening. Wants to talk to you. It’s fucked up…I don’t know what he wants, but this put him over the edge. I think us being apart…serves him for some reason. I just can’t figure it out.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” I scrunched my face as I tried to make the connections. “There isn’t any reason for us to be apart; it’s not like you know anything that I don’t.”
“Actually…” Brian’s eyes flew to the table, his fingers suddenly interested in the polished wood grain.
“Oh god, Bri…what?” My heart flew into my throat and sat lodged there as I waited.
“Dad’s business practices…I’ve been privy to some of them, I guess.”
“Okay…?”
“He used to pack me into the backseat–do all the things he did with you, hookers and blow–but I think he took me somewhere he never took you…”
“Okay…you’re scaring me, spill it.”
“It’s a place. An establishment if you will.”
“Seriously? Like prostitutes?”
“Something like that, I’m not really sure. I sort of vaguely remember where it is, it’s been so long, I was a kid. I remember he took me to meetings there all the time, like his little sidekick, like he was grooming me.”
“This is weird.” I slumped back in my chair as I processed the new information. “You don’t remember a name or anything? A street?”
“No, it was in the city somewhere.” And suddenly my brother never looked more kid-like. Susceptible. Guilty. Broken.
“Oh god, has he tried to…recruit you? Have you done things for him? Sold drugs? Anything?”
He only shrugged in response.
“Oh god, Bri. No wonder things are so fucked up. I should have made you move in with me, get you away from him.”
“It’s not all bad,” he said meekly.
“Really?” I shot him an irritated glare.
Again the shrug. He’d been reduced to body movements only.
“What did you have to do for the Audi, Brian?” My voice rang loud and clear. His eyes shot to me and the words hung in the air as if suspended by marionette strings.
“Brian?”
“A lot.” He chewed his bottom lip, a nervous habit I also had. We were so much alike, he and I, except in the most fundamental of ways. The things that made me me and him him. He succumbed. I got out by the skin of my teeth, and I’d failed to see that he hadn’t.
Tears flooded my eyes and I clenched my teeth together. “This is bad, Brian. You know where he works, what he does. He doesn’t want me to know. He’s wanted in my life all this time to manipulate me so his secrets were safe. When I blocked him out, and you and I still talked, he lost all control. Fuck, Brian! Fuck!”
“People are looking,” my brother whispered and looked from the table across from us and back to me.
My anger cracked and a smile formed.
“You’re such a big, overgrown kid.” I grinned and then my smile fell when I realized my dad had given me a very real distrust for men, and he’d given my brother the inability to grow up, speak for himself, develop a sense of independence. He’d stripped him of his life.
I could have killed him. Rage boiled as the dark memories washed over me. The back seat of his old Cadillac with strange women in the front seat. Drugs, liquor, lies.
I clamped my hands at my legs. “What do we do?”
“There isn’t anything we can do. I just wanted you to know.” My brother stared at his untouched glass of soda.
“But there can’t be nothing,” I sputtered.
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore, shouldn’t see each other. It’s just becoming too much.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m afraid he’ll hurt one of us.”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat as my eyes burned with tears I was unwilling to shed. “I won’t let him,” I croaked and clasped his hand in my own.
“There isn’t anything to stop it. He does what he does.”
“No.” I shook my head vehemently.
“Yeah,” he murmured before pulling his hand away. “Sometimes you get a bad deal in life, sis. We got a bad deal.” He shrugged and then pressed the cool glass to his lips and drank. “So tell me how you’ve been. What have you been up to? Still seeing that guy?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I shook my head and gazed out the window to the busy downtown harbor of Camden.
“I don’t care. Tell me anyway.” He grinned that charming grin as if the world hadn’t just been stolen from under us.
I sucked in a long breath and tried to push my dad out of my head. “We had a fight.” I frowned and picked at my cuticles under the table as I thought about the fight we’d had on Founder’s Day a few nights ago.
“Uh oh. Your turn to spill it.”
The server took our orders before I started. “He just wants so much so fast. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“It’s not really a surprise that this is about our dad, right? You recognize that?”
“Of course,” I mumbled.
“So what about this guy makes you uncomfortable? You’ve known him for a while right?”
“Almost my whole life.” I smiled at the server when he dropped an appetizer at our table.
“So what is he? Alcoholic? Gambler? Fetish for hookers?”
I laughed, releasing some of the tension that had knotted at my shoulders. “He travels for work sometimes.” Even to my own ears it sounded silly, but that didn’t make it any less true.
“And you think because our dad was a worthless no good bastard this guy is too?”
“I don’t know if he is or not.” I shrugged.
“Really? You’ve known him your whole life and you don’t know if you can trust him?”
“Well, I trust him…”
“Look, sis, most people have this intuition to give fellow humans the benefit of the doubt, it’s in our nature to hope for the best in people. Problem is, you and I got screwed from the start. We were burned by the most important guy in our life, esp
ecially you, being a chick and all.”
“Nice,” I grunted.
“You know what I mean.” He shrugged and I could see he was slightly uncomfortable with the depth of this conversation. “So that was broken in us from an early age. We have to try extra hard to remind ourselves to give people the benefit of the doubt. Better to trust someone and get hurt than to go through life never trusting anyone.”
His simple straightforward words swept the breath from my lungs. How it was possible I hadn’t learned that at some point in the twenty-six years before now, I don’t know, and yet there it was. Realization blasted through the blackout curtains I’d had surrounding my heart all these years.
“Tell me you know what I mean.” He watched me with cautious eyes.
“I know what you mean.” I smiled as tension eased and I took a sip of my water. “I so know what you mean. Thanks, baby bro, hate to do this to you, but I just realized I have something to do.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise before a knowing grin split his face. His beautiful smile that looked so much like my own, wise beyond his years. “Okay.” He laughed as I rushed out of the restaurant.
Twenty minutes later and I was launching myself up his porch steps. Heart beating, I pounded on his door before fumbling for the key on my keychain.
Finally I pushed it in and heard the lock click. Tossing my keys in my cavern of a bag, I stepped into his house and called. Nothing.
“Fuck!” I yelled before spinning on my heel and heading for my car.
I drove to the bar looking for his truck. Unlikely that he would be there on a random weekday afternoon, but it was worth a try.
To no avail.
Wild’s truck parked at the marina caught my eye. I jogged over and found him working on a catamaran.
“Hey!” I waved.
“Hey, Dill, what’s up?” He stood, looking concerned as he brushed his hands through a work towel.
“Seen Slade?”
“He’s in Portland. Something wrong?”
“No. I just hadn’t seen him in a few days. I have something to tell him,” I rambled, searching for the right words to explain my frenzied actions. “When did he leave?” I chewed on my lower lip as I watched the wind whip through Wild’s unruly, dark hair.
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