“You’re not banging dudes?”
I raise one brow and suck in a long breath. “You’re not banging chicks?”
He turns away. My cell buzzes on the counter again. It draws his attention immediately. I know why.
“You can do whatever you want to do, Macs. I’m not your girlfriend. Or your mom. Just go.”
He smiles. It hurts my stomach. It’s what he wants to hear. “You’re my dream come true, you know that?” he exclaims.
The pain in my stomach turns solid and sinks even further. I can’t and won’t go on any dates with anyone else. Crossing my legs at the ankle, I try to squelch the desire coursing through every nerve ending. “Yeah, yeah. I get that a lot. So next date?”
Macs senses the change. He turns my face using one finger on my chin. He can’t see disappointment. I won’t let him. The shield is confidently in place.
“Third base date?” He studies my face, ostensibly looking for any sort of deceit. He won’t find it.
“You won’t leave with blue balls?” I try a joke.
He laughs, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He holds my chin in his hand, like I’m a petulant, disobedient child.
Instead of saying something meant to reassure me, he leans down and kisses me, his tongue diving in my mouth. He’s careful to keep his body away from mine. It’s just a kiss. Something I can’t say I’ve ever had. A kiss with desire and moans, one that doesn’t lead to anything else. No blow jobs, or finger banging, a meeting of mouths just because we both enjoy the way it feels. I think anyways. I can’t get a true read of him. Both of his hands are on either side of my face. He holds me reverently, gently.
He pulls away and looks at me through eyes that aren’t hiding anything for the moment. My kiss has disarmed him if only for a second or two. He’s just as intrigued by our chemistry as I am. “I’m not going to be with any other women, Tay-la,” he growls.
“Oh,” I say.
It doesn’t make any sense. Men don’t look one way and then act another. They always behave in a predictable way. Men like Macs take what they want from whoever they please.
“I don’t want to have sex with anyone else. Just to clear that up,” I explain.
“You don’t say?” He smiles.
I roll my eyes. “You’re so cocky. I should, just to spite you.”
Shaking his head, he says, “Never do anything to spite me. That would mean I care and I don’t. I’m not doing anything to ruin our science experiment. Now I’m curious as to how this will play out.” The smile fades from his face. He doesn’t like the idea of my having sex with another man. It’s something, I guess.
“I’m not a science experiment,” I deadpan.
He backs away from me, toward my large, ornate front door. “I don’t fuck experiments, babe.” He’s not fucking anything tonight. Or, according to him, he’s not. I’m not sure I believe him. “And I’m definitely fucking you. Your body is going to haunt my damn dreams,” he says, very obviously running his eyes up and down my body. A jolt of energy spikes in my system, like electricity taking the place of blood in my veins. “Not tonight. Call your friends back and tell them about the first kiss with a side of orgasm.”
I can almost feel his tongue on my neck from remembering it. I shiver. He watches. Forgetting his keys on my counter, he leans forward to grab them. I notice he glances at my phone.
Placing my hands on my hips, I say, “I’ll walk you out.”
Clutching his keys, he chuckles. “No, you won’t. Not unless you want to fuck in my backseat?” Macs tilts his head to the side in the direction of his car. When I don’t respond he says, “Thought so. Good night. I’d kiss you, but I can’t.”
My heart skips along this furious pace I’m not familiar with. I get a little light-headed. It has to be lust. I need to have sex, or engage in a long date with my vibrator. He flashes his dimples and he’s out of my door and heading down the hallway to the elevator. One of my neighbors is unlocking her door, her little barky dog in her arms. She gapes as Macs walks by, and as if I’m a second thought, she turns her huge brown eyes my way. I wave my hand and then put a finger under my chin and bring my lower jaw up to meet the top with a click of teeth. She scurries into her apartment with an embarrassed scowl on her face. I laugh but can’t tear my gaze from his retreating back.
The way you move says a lot about a person. I see it in yoga, through the poses and the fluidity of movement. I can decipher their skill level, determine things about their personalities. The way Macs moves is something else entirely. Something predatory lies in the depths of his stride. It drips with confidence and danger. He has a sway in his walk, his muscles preventing him from looking ordinary, even though he’s not even trying for extraordinary. It’s something that comes naturally to him. He doesn’t look back before he gets on the elevator.
Not even a quick backward glance in my direction. I hear my heartbeat in my ears, a cacophony reminding me I’m in dangerous territory, and feel the wetness between my legs. He doesn’t just walk like a predator. He is the goddamn king of those motherfuckers.
Chapter Ten
Macs
The elevator doors close and I take a huge deep breath. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Walking away from her was the hardest thing I’ve done in a while. My dick is steel hard and dripping in anticipation. I don’t think that fucker has been this drooly in his entire life. I couldn’t think straight with her in front of me. I know it’s because I need to fuck. It had nothing to do with her personally. I’m sure of it.
I’m sure of it.
Her neighbor was hot. I could easily get in her pants. What if Teala heard? Why do I care if Teala heard? I rush out of her small lobby and make a right hand turn to exit into the parking garage. I’m still catching my breath when I slam my car door and start the engine. It’s like I just did the obstacle course. I feel crazy. Out of control. My phone is still glowing in the cup holder, the messages pouring out of it like my favorite song. I turn up my music to drown out everything else. My head is too full right now. My cock is too full right now. It should be considered a dangerous weapon.
I told her I wouldn’t sleep with other women. I thought it was a lie when I said it, but now I’m not so sure. It’s as if a part of me, the good part of me, spoke and now I have to obey him because my pride won’t let me lie. I’m good at my core. It’s everything else that’s fucked up. I need sex. It’s akin to denying me oxygen. Surely she wouldn’t fault me if I picked up my phone and hooked up with one woman tonight. She knows what she did to me. What did John call Jessica? Sexual Napalm? Yes, that. Teala is that to me. It is partly because I can’t have her whole body up front, but also partly because something else.
I like her.
I like her personality. She’s funny. I find myself enjoying her company the most when we’re just talking. I liked telling her things about myself. I like kissing her. I like the way she smells. I like the way her body presses against me. I lift the neck of my shirt and take in a breath. It smells like her. It’s sweet. It’s sex. It’s forbidden. I slam my steering wheel with the palm of my hand with a groan. “Fuck!”
My voice is loud and angry even though it’s not anger I feel. It’s something I don’t recognize. My phone chimes and I’m so irritated that I look at it. As I suspect, they are messages from my app. Women who could fix me right now if I let them. I scroll through the messages and one pops up while I’m scrolling. It’s a text message from Teala—a photo.
I click it open. It’s the sloth photo in her bathroom, no message attached. I laugh. How stupid and asinine. I take a deep breath. I don’t reply, but I’m not so frustrated anymore and the sloth made my hard-on recede a touch. It’s enough. I put my car into gear and drive home.
I think about Teala all the way home, our kisses on replay in my mind. I’m dissecting every move and every word spoken between us. Does it help decipher what is happening between us? Not one bit. I’m not certain there’s anything there but pent-up lust and the promise
of mind-blowing sex. Also, I’m not sure what compels me, but when I pull into my drive, I ignore all the notifications from my matches and head into my phone settings to change my background to that stupid fucking sloth.
I can’t look at it without smiling. She’s right.
****
Repacking a parachute after it safely guides you to land from twelve thousand feet is the bane of my existence. It doesn’t matter how good you are at repacking, it still takes fucking forever. You have to do it right, perfectly, or you’ll die on your next jump. Perhaps that sounds a tad melodramatic, but it is truthful all the same. Tahoe is in the space next to me, rolling and packing with extreme precision. A lot of times we have people do this for us, but not today. Everyone is busy doing other shit.
The drop zone is a large open field with a few ratty structures and an airfield for takeoff and landing. Airplanes buzz overhead and parachutes litter the sky above the drop zone. My team goes up in waves. Today we’re doing HALO jumps, high altitude, low opening. It’s just an average day at the office. I have my phone silenced so it doesn’t interrupt me at inopportune times. After I finish packing my chute, I take out my phone to check the time and see I missed a call from my mom. She left a voicemail. She’s in the generation of answering machines, so she always leaves a godforsaken message even though my voicemail greeting says, “Are you sure you can’t text me?”
My stomach grumbles, reminding me I haven’t had lunch. I walk to the trailer in the corner to find my cooler of food and listen to my mother’s voice as I go.
“Sweetie, are you okay? The news is saying awful things. Have you watched it? I know you’re busy, but you really should turn on the television every once in a while. That’s silly, though. I’m sure you know what’s going on. What’s that?” she asks someone in the room. My father. “Your father wants you to call him tonight. He has a theory.”
Raising my brows, I let out a long, annoyed breath. I love talking to my parents mostly, but my dad has some real theories about the state of our world. Let’s just put them into the conspiracy category for lack of a better word.
I sit down at a tattered table in the corner and nod at a teammate named Mason. He grins at me and tosses an obscene gesture my way. I’d send one back if I wasn’t listening to my mother prattle on about the terror attacks happening.
“Okay, Gem,” she says, because I’m the crown jewel. “I’ll let you get back to work now. Call us later. We miss you. Are you coming home for a visit soon? We’d love to see you. Please be safe,” she says.
My father’s beard scruff rubs against the phone and then his voice says, “I love you, Son. Kick some ass. Come home soon, though, okay?”
It takes a lot to make me feel guilt. They just had a full-on one-sided conversation and guilt is all I feel. I’ll have to go home soon to visit them. Especially before I deploy. I’m not so naïve as to assume it won’t be the last time. My job is one of the most dangerous in the world. Imminent danger is evident in every facet of my life. Take today, for example. I’m jumping out of airplanes over and over. The odds will stack against me one of these days.
I compare it to cats. How many lives do they have? Nine? How many life sucking hobbies and adventures can one person practice before they catch up to their given amount of allotted lives? You can never anticipate how you’ll go down. Personally, I hope I go down in a blaze of fire and glory, doing something to help my country. Most people want to fall asleep peacefully and never wake up. Not me. I want to know I’m alive when I go. I want to feel every nerve ending as they click off for the final time. I want to feel it all.
My morbid thoughts are broken when Mason throws a wadded up napkin. “Where are you at right now?” he asks.
My sub sandwich is half gone. My friends know not to fuck with me when I’m eating. It’s a sacred time of day. I love food.
“Fuck off, Mason. I’m trying to eat a peaceful lunch.”
“Chute packing got your panties in a bunch? You Pre-madonna,” he says.
He’s wearing the smirk that lets me know he’s trying to bait me. It’s no secret that I’m different than my friends. Where they could give two shits about their clothing, hair or their appearance, I’m in the opposite camp.
I once told a group of them that I pay forty dollars for my haircut every three and half weeks. Combine that with my collection of designer T-shirts and it was a recipe for a slew of nicknames. If I have to wear T-shirts, why shouldn’t they feel soft and nice against my skin? Most men don’t care about stuff like that. I get it. It doesn’t change me, though. My money is copious because I don’t have a family. All of my bonuses are saved for the most part or are poured like water, into my house.
“I like nice things,” I say, shrugging and chucking the napkin back at his head. It’s a direct hit. “Just because you’re fine wearing batman boxer shorts doesn’t mean that you should. Standards, fucker. Get some.” I’m joking, but I see the competitive glint in his eye. We’re all type A personalities. It’s a constant battle to best each other. At work and at home. If you can drink five beers and act rationally, I can drink six. Target practice is a pissing match. How hot our chicks are, too. Though that’s mostly an unspoken rule if we’re talking about wives.
Chicks and fucking are fair game in discussions so long as they’re only girlfriends or sidepieces. The second they turn into wives, you forget they have a vagina. It’s odd because you know sordid details about Mold-A-Dildo kits, and fingers in asses, and what sounds they make while they have orgasms, but when your buddy marries that same hot girlfriend, you are supposed to forget it all.
Mason changes the subject to our next jump, and I listen to him prattle on and nod in appropriate places, because I’m still eating, and he doesn’t expect me to respond verbally. My phone flashes a text message. It’s another photo from Teala. Of some green fucking plant in the lobby of her yoga studio. Where are the tit pics? She doesn’t send me actual text messages very frequently. It’s usually photos without captions. I turned off all the notifications for my fucking apps. Deletion wasn’t an option. Not yet. I’m not ready. And what happens after I fuck Teala and return to my old carousing ways? I don’t have time to reinstate my profiles. It’s freed me in a way I didn’t know I craved. The tether to my phone disappeared.
I’m not sure what she expects me to reply with. I’m staring at the photo when Mason makes his way to my table. I’m finished eating.
“Who are you swiping at?” he asks.
No one has noticed I’m not my normal self. I’ve realized I wanted this challenge. Needed it, even. It’s not about Teala even if it seems that way. It’s about determining how much control I actually have over my body and emotions. I control things. Nothing else does. Not even my dick. I snap a photo of the trash from my lunch in front of me and send it to her. If she wants a game of random, I’ll give her that.
“Ahh, you know, just the usual,” I reply.
Mason scrunches up his face.
“What the fuck are you doing? Did you just take a picture of the water bottle?”
This is where I could come clean, but Mason has a big mouth and everyone will know within hours that I’m not swiping any pussy on this trip and it will be more of a spectacle than I want. Typically, I’ve got at least three chicks waiting in whatever city we’re traveling to. It’s a game. See how much of a whore Macs can be. My need for sex almost affected a start time once and I got in trouble. Not real trouble, but it was enough to force a chick cap. I meet Mason’s eyes.
“Texting my friend. How’s your girlfriend?”
A trick everyone should know. People love to talk about themselves. They prefer it to almost any other sort of conversation. Even if it’s bitching about their horrible lives, it still means more than if I was talking about my awesome life. He takes the bait.
“I broke up with her. It got stale.”
Picking up my trash, I wad it using one hand. “Too many missionary trips?”
He shrugs. “She was a
wful at head, too.”
I nod like I know exactly what he’s talking about.
“Joining the dark side now?”
Mason squirms. “No one is as dark as you.” Little does he know. “It’s hard to find anything stable with all the trips. It’s okay, though. Being single works right now anyways. Maybe after deployment.”
I agree with him and tell him it’s a great idea. I tell him about a few of the apps I use, and he seems interested, if only for the reason to switch the conversation back to me and my life.
“Hey, I gotta get back at it. I want to get on the next lift,” I say, hiking my thumb at the door. I palm my phone when Teala texts back and slide it into my pocket. My dirty little secret isn’t so dirty.
He’s looking at his own phone, searching the app store for the ones I just mentioned. Mason is a good guy. I wonder if I can turn him into a baby me. The thought makes me smile and cringe. Giddy with power, but sorry for the corruption.
Mason mumbles his goodbye, and I amble out the door into the cool breeze. I take the phone out of my pocket to find a photo of her bare foot against a solid dark, wooden floor. Just one foot, and I wonder where the other foot is. Is it in some yoga pose pulled over her head? What position is that? Could I fuck her in that pose? My mind wanders away from me for a second and I tamp down on my testosterone coursing straight to my dick.
Her toenails are light blue, like an Easter egg. I think it’s an unusual color choice for nails. Red and pink are what I’m used to. One of my favorite sights is of pretty pink nails on fingers wrapped around my cock. Yes, that’s a sight I like, one I’m accustomed to. I resist the urge to ask if her fingernails are blue and send a photo of Tahoe floating to the ground in the distance, his large lumbering legs dangling like useless strings. She won’t be able to recognize him nor has she even met Tahoe before. That’s a meeting I’ll avoid at all costs.
That is amazing! You must love that. What do you love? Give me a list. Is the text message Teala sends back.
Hero Hair (The Real SEAL Series Book 2) Page 9