by Cora Brent
“Damn,” said Brick in appreciation, only his Tennessee origins tweaked it slightly to sound more like ‘Dayum’.
“Spectacular,” agreed Aspen and offered a round of good-natured applause.
Mary was pleased with the finished product. She offered me a neatly rolled pack of bills, all singles and fives. I promptly unrolled it and handed half the stack back to her.
She didn’t question the favor, which was a good thing because I didn’t know how to explain it without sounding like an asshole. ‘Maybe if you take some of this back it’ll help you keep that shit out of your veins.’
Of course Aspen noticed and had to say something. At least she waited until the bell above the door stopped pinging after Mary’s departure.
“Some charity work, Mr. Gentry?” she laughed.
I threw her a look. “Something like that.”
Aspen crossed her arms and tried to look severe, a tall task for a five-foot-two blue-haired sprite. “Is it going to become a habit? I just want to get some idea about our revised pricing structure going forward, especially with the voice of reason out globetrotting.”
I snorted. “Deck’s the voice of reason?”
She wrinkled her upturned little nose. “Deck might actually be a minor deity.”
“He might be,” I agreed and tossed the cash on the shallow front counter. Aspen was devoted to Deck, but there’d never been anything romantic about it. He hired her a year ago and I never got the full story but I had the feeling she’d been in some kind of trouble that he’d extracted her from. Aspen and Deck’s girlfriend Jenny were good friends. Anyway, once Aspen and Brick –another wayward soul in Deck Gentry’s wide circle of humanity – laid eyes on each other, full color fireworks erupted.
She opened up her mouth to needle me some more but Brick wrapped a meaty arm around her waist and redirected her thoughts by sneaking his hand under her shirt.
Aspen squirmed and twisted around to face her boyfriend. She forgot all about me and my charity case. Meanwhile, Brick was zeroing in with the kind of intense expression one guy recognizes in another. It means, “I better get a piece of this before my dick busts open.”
I suppressed a smile and looked away. “Why don’t you guys take off?”
Brick didn’t rip his eyes from his girlfriend. “You sure, man?”
“Yeah. I’ll be heading out as soon as the boys get here.”
Aspen and Brick scurried out the door all wrapped around each other. I hoped in all their urgency they wouldn’t get caught humping in an alley somewhere. It had happened before. After switching the sign on the shop to ‘Closed’ I checked my phone.
About an hour ago Saylor had texted a picture of the girls as they grinned side by side at our kitchen table with large bowls of macaroni and cheese. Their sweet smiles were full of the best things in the world. I put the phone down.
Something was eating me, something I couldn’t quite put a name to. It had started gnawing on my insides at some point this afternoon. There was no reason in the world to feel this way. All was well with my girls and my brothers and life in general.
“Shit!” I jumped half a foot in the air when the door swung wide open. Without thinking about it I grabbed a steel baseball bat that we kept up front on the off chance of an unwelcome visitor.
“Cord!” Aspen gasped, her wide eyes absorbing the sight of me standing there like a slugger at the Home Run Derby.
Brick elbowed his way in, jostling her behind his powerful form as he glared at me. I couldn’t blame him for that. I would have had the same instinct to protect what’s mine.
“Sorry,” I muttered, lowering the bat.
“You expecting trouble?” he asked slowly and with suspicion, his sizeable muscles already coiling beneath the military fatigues he still wore regularly even though he’d been a civilian for more than a year.
“No,” I coughed. “Just my imagination going to weird places I guess.”
Brick kept his eyes centered on me for a few seconds. When Brick looked directly at you sometimes you got the feeling he saw more than you meant for him to see.
“All right,” he finally said and stepped aside to give Aspen some room because she was too short to talk over his broad shoulders. She swatted him playfully on the ass and darted over to the front counter to root around in a sea of post-it notes.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said breathlessly, as she selected the pink square of paper that she’d apparently been hunting for, “you got a call while you were inking. Well, not you. They were actually looking for Deck. I figured it was shop business so I asked the guy if he wanted to talk to you. He said you would probably be interested in what he had to say as well since the boys were your family too.”
“Boys?” I was confused. Anxiety started climbing. “Creed and Chase?”
“No, no.” She peered at her own chicken scratch writing. “He was a cop. Said a couple of your cousins got themselves hauled into the station down in that town you guys all come from.”
I relaxed. Slightly. In my head I took a quick inventory of all known Gentry relations still inhabiting the hardscrabble landscape of Emblem. Some were in prison. Some were dead. Some had run off to parts unknown. The few that were left weren’t really on my radar, but it didn’t surprise me that Deck might have taken an interest in them, particularly if they were young.
My father’s cousin Elijah had passed away a few years back and left behind a couple of boys who would be in their late teens now. There was never any doubt the boys were Gentrys – they looked the part from head to toe – but as I understood it, there was some speculation that Elijah died without realizing he wasn’t the sperm donor. It could have been my Uncle Chrome, Deck’s father, long dead. Or maybe it was even Benton. Neither idea would surprise me.
Aspen pressed the sticky note on my shirt and I swiped at it. The number was an Emblem one. I made out the words Officer Driscoll on the paper and understood. Fred Driscoll was a longtime buddy of Deck’s. Hell, he might have even been on his payroll for some reason or another that I didn’t care to know about. Everyone called him Gaps and he was tolerated, if not respected, as one of Emblem’s peacekeepers.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “You guys have a good night.”
Aspen bounded out of there cheerfully but Brick hung back and gave me an odd look.
“Just so you know,” he said mildly, “you ever need some help cracking heads, there’s a few bullet points I didn’t add to my resume.”
“I appreciate that,” I told him, “but I’m holding out hope that my head cracking days are over.”
Brick flashed me a grin and followed his girlfriend out into the honeyed light of a spring evening.
I stood there alone, staring at the numbers on the note. There was no reason to bother Deck over this. Whatever it was I could handle it myself. I flattened one hand on the smooth counter and with the other I dialed the number with slow precision, sighing while I waited for the connection to take me back to Emblem.
CHAPTER FIVE
CREED
No matter how early I woke up, Truly always beat me to the punch.
It was like the woman had some kind of paranormal talent that let her know what moment I’d be opening my eyes so she could plan ahead. Before I sat up I inhaled the aroma of cinnamon rolls and ruefully figured I’d be hitting the gym extra hard this afternoon to make up for it. I’d never turn down Truly’s cooking though. It might as well have been written into our vows that whatever she baked, fried, roasted or grilled would find its way into my stomach.
My boxers were somewhere unseen and I didn’t bother looking for them before I opened the bedroom door.
Two steps later I froze when I heard Truly’s bright voice in the living room. It was awfully early for company but she was evidently talking to someone and there I stood, about to enter the light with my junk swinging in plain view.
I relaxed when she paused and there were a few beats of silence before she spoke again. Obviou
sly whoever she was talking to was on the phone and not in the living room.
“Well honey, you know I’d love for you to come visit but I don’t get why you can’t tell me exactly where you are or what’s going on.”
Truly was in a state of half dress and pacing around the tastefully decorated room. My eyes noted the full black skirt and pink lace bra and communicated the news to my dick. He woke up immediately.
But rather than creep behind my wife, rip the phone from her hand and demand my marital rights, I reached for a full mug of warm coffee that was sitting on the counter, draining half of it in two gulps.
Truly paced in the other direction without noticing me and let out a deep sigh. Whoever was on the other end of that phone had managed to get her flustered and Truly didn’t get flustered easily. Since the other party was obviously someone who didn’t live local, I discarded the usual suspects like Saylor and Stephanie. Truly had endured a nomadic childhood and didn’t keep in touch with anyone from her youth.
Anyone, that is, except for her sisters.
Apparently the caller had something urgent to do because Truly abruptly said, “Okay, well you call me back as soon as you can.” Then she held the phone away from her head and blinked at it with some bewilderment, like it was threatening to produce legs and walk right out of her palm.
“Which one is it?” I asked and she spun with a gasp.
“Shit, Creedence, you give a girl a heart attack.”
Truly flounced over to the couch and sat down hard while I tried to stop noticing the way her full tits bobbed briefly and threatened to bust out of the flimsy pink lace.
She watched me as I made my way over to the couch and sat beside her. If she was thinking straight she would have noticed my dick aiming for her like an arrow but she was too distracted, crossing her arms and pulling at her lower lip.
“Meridian,” she finally said.
My wife had three younger sisters; Augusta, Carolina and Meridian. None of them were anything like Truly or anything like each other. All were born of different fathers to Truly’s hapless train wreck of a mother. Augusta was in grad school in Oklahoma and engaged to a rough and tumble rancher while the youngest, Carolina, was doing all right on her own with a scholarship to NYU.
Meridian, or Mia as her sisters called her, was a question mark. She hadn’t come to our wedding and I’d only met her once, the year after Truly and I got together. She’d crept into town unannounced, showing up at our apartment looking like a chalk outline of a person who could be smudged away with the sole of a shoe. Not that she was high or banged up. But with one look I could tell I was staring at someone who got scraped up easily by life’s rough fabric, the kind of person who suffered her bruises on the inside.
None of these things needed to be said to Truly. She knew already and she merely sighed when her sister disappeared in the middle of the night after spending five days sleeping on our couch. Last we’d heard, Mia had returned to some farming commune she used to live on in the Pacific Northwest.
“So what’s the deal with the mystery sister?”
“She’s on a Greyhound bus and called from a rest stop outside Portland,” Truly explained, her southern accent emerging more strongly, as it always did when she was stressed, angry or impassioned. “I don’t know, honey, it seems like something’s wrong, like maybe she’s in some kind of trouble. I mean something’s always off with that girl but I got the shivers talking to her just now. She kept her voice in a whisper, saying she was on her way and only had a few days to get everything taken care of but then she wouldn’t tell me what kind of ‘everything’ she was talking about.”
My attention kicked up a notch. If Truly’s troubled sister was possibly heading in our direction and bringing some problems with her it was best to know what they were sooner rather than later. “She hinted that she was coming here but wouldn’t tell you why she only had a few days?”
Truly shrugged. “I could spit out a thousand guesses but none have any more chance of being right than the other. When I talked to Aggie the other day she mentioned she was worried because Mia hadn’t checked in more than once in the last six months.”
I put a comforting hand around Truly and rubbed the back of her neck. “That sounds pretty much like Mia.”
“Yeah.” Truly sighed and rolled her head back, closing her eyes as my fingers dug more deeply into her tense muscles. “Maybe there really is such a thing as an extrasensory sibling sense, you know kind of like when you get to feeling a little off because something’s going on with Cord or Chase. I just can’t shake the notion that Mia’s got more on her plate than she can chew and Creedence did you know you haven’t got a stitch of clothing on?”
As an answer I moved my free hand between her legs.
“You’re incorrigible,” she sputtered but she still parted her knees and gave me access. I yanked her panties down and worked quickly to get her to the brink. She forgot all about sisters and other problems while she moaned and squirmed and bit her lip.
As hot as it was watching her get off on my hand while her nipples spilled out of her bra, I’d reached the point where I needed a workout or the couch was getting creamed.
Truly didn’t need to be told. The second I pulled my fingers away she was on me; skirt yanked up, knees digging into my hips. I slid in there smoothly and she let out a high little sound of pleasure as I grabbed her and pushed deep. The feel of her shuddering orgasm and the noise she made as she reveled in it was too much to keep any dick in control. I let go inside of her with my hands everywhere, my body thrusting hard and deep as possible.
She moaned and shouted my name while she rode me in a fever that happened to shove her gorgeous tits right into my face. I sucked on them eagerly as I spent every ounce of me that was left.
Truly let out a soft sigh as I withdrew.
“I hate that part,” she breathed, “the part when you leave me.”
I touched her face. The classic beauty on the outside didn’t tell nearly the whole story of who she was. Sassy and tender, intelligent and kind, she was the total package.
“I’ll never leave you,” I told her honestly. “I love you.”
I didn’t get to hold her in my arms for long. The cinnamon rolls she’d pushed into the oven right before her phone rang started to smell a little smoky. I ate them anyway. Truly exclaimed over the time and then darted back to the bathroom for a second shower since I’d messed up the results of the first one. I polished off a few more cinnamon rolls and another cup of coffee waiting for her to emerge in a perfumed cloud.
“I’ve got to run, baby. I’ve got a class on Marketing in Twenty First Century Fashion in about twelve minutes and then I’ll be up in Scottsdale all afternoon because Ross is giving all us lowly interns a peek at the fall catalog although I do hope they’ve moved past the same old tired designs that keep cropping up for the last several seasons. You have a show tonight? Oh no, that’s right. You’re meeting the boys. Well you give them my love and tell them we need to have the whole Gentry crew over, maybe this weekend, because my hostess talents are getting rusty. You listening to me, Creedence?”
I put down my coffee cup. “I’ve told you a million times, Tallulah Lee Gentry, I’m always listening to you.”
She smiled a beautiful Truly smile and offered me a soft, sweet kiss before pulling on her shoes and heading for the door. I was more than used to the way she’d talk on and on. I meant it when I said I was always listening. I always have been. I always would be.
“Love you!” she called and blew a kiss.
“Love you too,” I shouted back.
I hoped she wouldn’t spend too much energy today fretting over her sister’s unknown troubles. From everything I knew of Mia she wasn’t a fan of self-disclosure so worrying was a waste of time. But I knew the pain of watching someone you cared about struggle with her demons. It was a different kind of hell.
After jumping in the shower myself I decided to spend some quality time with my guitar.
For years all my playing came from the gut, or the heart or whatever region tickles your sentiments. There was no training, no lessons. Just me and the music. But once I started performing I understood I had a lot to learn. I’d never been an eager student, not even when I was a kid, but it turned out that all it took was the right subject. I learned how the black dots on a sheet of music translated into sound and even started writing some of my own. It wasn’t country and it wasn’t rock. It was something in between and it was enough to catch the attention of a few music scouts who whispered big ideas about tours and label deals. So far I’d sold a few songs that I’d composed but then drawn the line there. I couldn’t imagine being prettied up and trotted out all over the nation, curling up on a shelf-like bed in a stinky tour bus every night and wishing to god I was home with my woman.
No. The famous life was never my ambition. If it meant that I wouldn’t get any further than four shows a week and an enthusiastic local following then I was fine with that. With Truly beside me I was planning on building something a lot more important than superstardom.
When I emerged from the music I was surprised to see that it was well into the afternoon. I should be used to the way time stood still when I was deep in a music trance. I knew it was the same way for Cord and his art.
Speaking of Cord, I remembered that if I wanted to squeeze in some time at the gym before I had to go meet the boys then I’d better get moving.
The gym I’d recently switched to was a little more upscale than the ones close to the university. There were still the usual muscle rats roaming around looking for someone to impress and a few soccer moms sweating on the elliptical machines but other than that the place was pretty empty.
I worked the weight machines for a while and then spent some time on the treadmill. I could have easily gone a lot longer but the evening approached. I still needed to shower off and stop at home to change into something that didn’t include gym shorts.
The plan was to meet out in Tempe at Scratch, the tattoo place Cord and Deck have been running together since Cord’s girls were babies. As I got close to the university I saw a lot of youthful faces rolling down the sidewalks on bicycles and skateboards. I shook my head with a small chuckle that these kids should seem so young to me when it wasn’t too long ago that I was living down here among them.