He raised his hands shoulder-high and shook his head. “No catch. Just food. I’m hungry and don’t want to look like a dumbass eating alone. We don’t even have to make eye contact.”
I was hungry. Really hungry. I was hollow with it. And following him to a public place wasn’t as if I was traipsing into a dark alley. Not that I was necessarily worried about my ability to protect myself, but there was too much depending on me. I couldn’t afford to behave like a complete fool. But food I didn’t have to pay for and no expectations that followed? Didn’t really seem like much of a risk at all, actually.
I nodded and he winked at me before he turned toward that battered truck. “It’s called Gabe’s. I’ll meet you there,” he tossed over his shoulder.
“Hey, wait!”
He paused and glanced back, eyebrows raised in question.
“That’s it? No comment about—this?” I indicated my face with a jerky hand.
“I’m sure you’re told you’re pretty often enough.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I know.” He gave me a look that sent blossoms of warmth through my chest, making me frown. “And I did comment. I asked you if you wanted to eat.”
With that, he climbed into his truck and, without waiting to see if I would follow, started it and pulled out. Maybe he didn’t really care if I was coming. Or maybe he was betting that I would. If it was the latter, he bet correctly, because without hesitation, without even really being able to understand why, I put my car in Drive.
Chapter Three
He was right. Gabe’s was pretty shitty. The tables had an unfortunate shine to them, one of the florescent lights kept flickering, and the whole place had a faint burned-grease smell to it. But they were open and busy enough to suggest that no one had died from E. coli recently. I tried to pretend that I hadn’t caught sight of the line cook using his spatula to scratch his head through a window that went into the kitchen.
Ashley, our bored-looking waitress, had barely made it two steps away from our table after delivering our food before Masochist was focusing his attention on me.
“So,” he started and I held up a single finger, cutting him off.
“Hold it right there, Boy Wonder. You said no talking, remember? No talking. No eye contact. We haven’t even been here twenty minutes and you’re already reneging on that.”
“Don’t believe in letting anyone get away with anything, do you?”
“Hell, no.” I bit back a smile when he pointedly turned his head and scanned the other occupants around us, occasionally peeking back in my direction through too-long lashes. I didn’t necessarily mean to use that time to study him, to note the way his hair fell in dark, messy waves across his forehead or the way his five-o’clock shadow peppered his strong jawline. I definitely didn’t intend to notice the lean but defined muscles of his arms that his jacket had hidden.
“You’re cheating,” he accused without looking at me.
“How do you figure? This isn’t eye contact.”
“No. But it’s creepy.”
“Most guys would be honored if I went anywhere with them, let alone looked at them at all.”
“Deep, a sadist, and arrogant. You’re everything I ever wanted in a girl.” His tone was light, obviously joking, and yet I felt a wave of heat go through me, warming up bones that always felt at least a little cold.
“Moving kinda fast there, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.” He sneaked another peek at me and smirked when he caught me looking back at him. “Ah, Sadist. Now who’s trying to break the rules? Try to control yourself. It’s starting to make me uncomfortable.”
For reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, or maybe didn’t want to attempt to name, I found myself laughing in earnest. And yet an edge of something jagged hummed underneath the playful bantering, as if we sensed a darkness in the other and were weighing whether or not to engage or acknowledge it.
I wasn’t sure what it said about me as a person that it was the latter that had me crossing my legs and leaning toward him over the table as far as I dared.
“I’m not so good at control.”
Whatever response he’d been expecting that wasn’t it and certainly not in the tone I used, a little breathy, almost a purr but too hard to really be considered one, judging by the way his head jerked in my direction. My expression never changed. I didn’t wink or laugh or anything that would suggest I was joking. After a second of searching my face, a slow grin spread over his lips, the edges of it razor sharp.
“That makes two of us.” His voice came out a little thick and I’ll be damned if a shiver didn’t skate up my spine, trailing its warm fingers behind it.
I shouldn’t have been so immediately and thoroughly turned on by such a simple sentence and yet there I was, picturing myself pushing him up against a wall while he attacked my mouth with his, hands hot against my skin. You’d have thought I’d been deprived, that I hadn’t been with a guy in so long that I was taking to fantasizing about it in shitty diners across from boys whose names I hadn’t even bothered to ask for. And that wasn’t the case at all. While I might not have been interested in a relationship of any kind, I wasn’t opposed to the quick fling, a night of uncomplicated sex in order to knock the edge off. But they always ended up being nice boys. Boys who were gentle and acted like we were making memories rather than simply scratching an inch. And so I ditched them before any ideas they had turned to plans.
Masochist, though. Something told me that Masochist knew how to scratch an itch and leave it at that. Something told me that the beast I sensed he was well acquainted with made itself known when it happened.
“My mama’s dying.”
I hadn’t meant for that to come out. I hadn’t even known I was in danger of it coming out, what with my current train of thought. I’d known it was there, though. It was always there. There was never a moment when it wasn’t prowling back and forth at the end of my thoughts, a demon that danced and cackled and did its best to never let me forget.
The hum that had been between us, heavy and electric, abated some, slunk back to the edges of our little corner now that this statement was out and on the table, so solid it might as well have been something physical we could touch.
Maybe I should have had the urge to duck my head, to hide my face and drown in mortification, because who did that? Who announced such raw and ugly truths to people they’d only just met? I didn’t, though. Instead, as those seconds ticked by in the background, I held his gaze defiantly, a dare. I didn’t have much but I had my pride and no matter if I meant to say it or not, I’d said it and I’d stand by it.
Finally, he grimaced.
“That sucks.” Somehow he managed to make those two small words sound sincere. It wasn’t just a response. He wasn’t just saying something because he felt like he needed to say it while inwardly cringing back. He genuinely meant it.
And, really, could it be summed up any better?
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It does.”
So we shouldn’t be doing this, I didn’t add. I shouldn’t be doing this. Even just for a night, I probably shouldn’t do this because there was always that chance that I wouldn’t want to stop after a night. I’ve never had that urge before, I didn’t continue. But I have a feeling I could with you. I don’t know why and I don’t think I like that.
“You guys close?”
“She’s my mother. Of course we’re close.”
“Doesn’t always mean that.” He took a drink of soda I’m sure was as flat as mine. “Sometimes it just means you share DNA.”
I opened my mouth, a biting retort on my tongue, but something about the way he said it made me pause.
“Almost sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
My suspicion was confirmed when he gave a nonchalant shru
g and stretched his legs out under the table just enough to be in my space but not so much it was intrusive.
“Every family has a black sheep.”
“You this cryptic naturally or are you putting in a special effort tonight?”
“Natural. It’s part of my mysterious charm. Workin’ for you?”
“Almost.”
“Good.”
He was silent for so long I thought maybe that had been his attempt to change the subject, but finally he nudged my leg with one of his boots. “If I show you mine, you gotta show me yours.”
I nudged him back. “You trying to get my story or for me to flash you?”
“Either.”
“Deal.”
He grinned at me and straightened a little bit, and I knew, I knew that when we left here tonight, I wouldn’t be going home. I think he knew it too.
“I was passed around my family. Like, I don’t know, a really ugly heirloom. Something they felt obligated to keep but no one really wanted.”
I wasn’t sure how he was able to deliver a line like that and still manage to sound so—sexual. I didn’t know how the fuck I could hear a line like that and still be turned on.
Maybe I just understood what it felt like to not be wanted in ways that mattered.
I shook my head.
“Shitty. What about your parents?”
“Just my mom. Don’t know my dad. No one does. They figure I must look like him, though. Probably why she couldn’t stand to have me around. Can’t really blame her there.”
I gave him a questioning look.
“She was raped. I was the result. She apparently tried to do the noble thing. You know, have me and shit. My aunt Cathy, that’s her older sister, said my mom had planned on keeping me. Left school, came home and everything. Couldn’t do it, though. Took one look at me in the hospital room, handed me over to a nurse and never looked at me again.”
“Damn,” I swore in a low voice, and now, at least, any sense of wanting to climb him like a tree vanished. “And that was just it?”
He shrugged.
“Yep. My grandparents kept me for a while. Being with them was the first thing I remember. But they were old and had a hard time keeping up with a kid. My great-aunt Bonnie came down and took me back upstate with her for a couple years. Mean old broad, but funny. I love the hell out of her. Eventually, though, she couldn’t do it anymore either. I was pretty wild. Constantly into trouble. Nothing serious back then. She lives in Butt-Fuck Egypt, though. Farm country and I got bored up there in the middle of nowhere. Finally Aunt Cathy and Uncle Dennis came and got me. Stayed with them until I finished school, then they basically told me to hit the bricks. They’d done their job and now it was over. So. Like I said, sometimes family just means DNA.”
“Yeah. Shit. I guess so.”
Masochist nodded at our waitress when she stopped long enough to drop off our check. He flipped it over and winced before pulling out a couple of bills from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” he asked when I pulled my purse toward me.
“Giving you the money for mine.”
He pointed at me. “We had a deal. I mean, granted, you did break it, what with the talking and the looking and I’m still extremely uncomfortable with the extent you eye-fucked me, but I’m a man of my word.”
I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“We’re close,” I said instead of trying to insist.
“Hmm?” He quirked an eyebrow and waited for me to continue.
“My mama and me. Well. Close enough. It’s always been the three of us. Her, my brother and me. Kinda had to be. There was no one else.”
“That really does suck then.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah. Kinda does.”
We sat there for a minute, quiet, each lost in our respective thoughts.
“Never caught your name,” he said suddenly, as though he only just remembered. Hell. Maybe he did. Maybe we’d come up to the place where names mattered, sped past it, and now we needed to backtrack.
No earthly good could come from telling him, and yet I saw no reason not to either.
“Rosie.”
“Well, Rosie, what do you say we get out of here? I don’t know how much longer I can deal with feeling like we are imposing on Ashley with our presence. I’d say that’s why I gave her a shitty tip, but to be honest, it’s because I blew most of my money on a hot bartender earlier.”
“She sounds like a bitch.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “But I happen to like them bitchy.”
I’d gone home with people for less.
The sky was an ashy gray when we emerged, and soon it would be streaked with the first rays of the sunrise. As if what was left of the night sensed that its time left was limited and wanted to punish those who were happy to see it go, the air had a stronger nip to it, almost stinging. Goose pimples broke out along my bare arms, and I rubbed at them briskly as we crossed the parking lot toward our vehicles, gravel crunching under our feet. I told myself that I wouldn’t look over at him, that it was flirty and dumb and I was neither of those things.
I caught his eye.
“So. Where to now?” he asked, leaning against the back of his truck when we reached it. “Night’s young, you know. Or the morning is, anyway.”
I glanced up from where I’d been digging in my purse for my keys, considering him for a moment.
“You’re going nowhere fast, aren’t you?”
“I’m going somewhere. Just taking my time getting there.” He straightened, shoving his hands deep in his jacket pockets, and took a step toward me that I didn’t back away from. “What about you, Sadist Rosie? You going nowhere?”
“I’m already there.”
He nodded, expression mostly neutral and maybe a little approving. Then he reached out and caught me by the belt loops, pausing long enough for me to resist if I was going to before dragging me forward. Again, he hesitated, his lips only a breath away from mine. It was only a moment, the barest of seconds between two heartbeats, and yet it felt as if it stretched out until it was almost unbearable.
I grabbed him by the neck with an impatient snarl and closed the last of the space between us. I felt his lips turn up against mine and for a moment that was all that existed, all that mattered. The smell of him, faint cologne and something that reminded me of an autumn night surrounded me, shoving every noise, everything that buzzed and hummed on a constant loop, from my mind. I pressed myself closer, making a noise of approval when one of his hands came up to fist in my hair and tugged.
There was something nearly angry in the way our mouths moved against each other. Something scalding in the force of it. It was almost cathartic, giving as hard and insistent as I could, gripping a little too tight and pushing a little too hard and having it matched. It was unleashing the beast and the storm that came with it, and having one meet it, just as eager. It was an outlet I could snap and claw at, and it returned, biting back just as hard. Enough to feel the blood close to the surface without it being drawn.
I was the first to pull away, reluctantly, dragging in oxygen in big, desperate gulps.
“Damn,” he swore, his hands never moving from where they held me in place “This is the part you can leave if you want to. Because if we do that again, my next question is going to be a clichéd one.”
“Yours,” I answered, pulling him toward me once more. “The answer to that question is your place. So don’t waste time asking it.”
Chapter Four
I insisted on driving, though there was something physically painful about putting that much space between us for the short drive to his apartment.
I crinkled my nose slightly as I pulled into a space near his truck and climbed out. Though not nearly as sad and run-down as
my looming ruin of an apartment or Mama’s sad, desperate one, his wasn’t much better. It had the air of a place that had once been nice, with its wide columns and small balconies on the upper floors. But whatever good intentions there’d once been had been abandoned and replaced with cheap, mismatched patio furniture and peeling paint.
Masochist came around the back of his truck toward me, snagging my hand in his and pulled me toward the closest building.
“Come on,” he said. “And if the guy from 1C comes out, don’t make eye contact.”
“Why?”
“By this time, he’s spent the entire night dropping acid, so there’s a chance he’ll think you’re a dragon.”
“Wonderful.” I pulled short suddenly, causing him to come to a stop just feet from the building’s entrance. “Wait. How do I know for sure you’re not gonna kill me and sell my skin on the black market?”
His mouth curled up in slow grin. “Having second thoughts, Sadist?”
“Just checking.”
“If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t have wasted the money on dinner first.”
“Perfect. Lead the way.”
The hall was dim and depressing, and as we climbed the stairs, a baby cried out from somewhere below us. The urgency I’d felt before had been doused slightly. Maybe I was having second thoughts. I’d known, of course. Or had strongly suspected. Those from this side of the tracks usually did. We recognized ours. Because that was all that existed here. This side and that side. There were always little tells, even when the other person tried to hide it. And Masochist hadn’t. Like his beast, he’d made no attempts at disguising who he was. But still I’d hoped. I don’t even know why, but I always did. It was from the girl who had sneaked her mama’s few battered romance novels, who believed in shit like white knights and true love and princes disguised as commoners. I didn’t even want that. Not me, not this girl who’d spent her whole life in the worst parts of town. But that delusional girl still existed underneath and at times like this she made herself known.
Losing Streak (The Lane) Page 4