Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Well, whatever. I’m packing all this shit in the truck and taking it to Goodwill on Saturday. If you don’t want me to fix the loom, then you can do something else in here.”

  Fuck, her eyes were all shiny. She was going to cry. “You’re sure?”

  He wrapped her up tight. “I love you, sis. I’m sorry I don’t get out of my head enough to act like it very much.”

  She hugged him back and laughed out a sob. “I love you, too. Loser.”

  “Skank.” Pressing a kiss to the top of her head, he sighed and glanced around the room. “Gimme a few minutes in here right now, though, okay?”

  She sniffed and stepped back. “Okay. I’ll go check and see how Leah’s holding up with the History of the Wesson Family Farm presentation Dad’s got going.”

  He laughed as Deb went to the door. It was Leah’s first time here, and their dad had had the photo albums and family Bible sitting out, ready for her.

  “Hey, Max?”

  He turned back. Deb had leaned back in through the doorway. “You seem different.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s good. It’s like you breathe deeper. Is it Leah?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He smiled at the thought. “I love her.”

  Deb grinned and gave him a nod, and then she left him alone in the room he’d shared with his twin.

  ~oOo~

  “Hey. Whatcha doing?”

  Sitting on the floor in the middle of his old room, Gunner looked over his shoulder and smiled up at Leah. She’d worn a little flowered dress and dressy flat shoes to come to the farm for supper, like she was trying to make a good impression, despite his father and sister knowing her all her life.

  “C’mere.” She came in and took his offered hand, and he drew her down to sit at his side. “Did you get the whole family saga?”

  “I think so. I liked it—especially your baby pictures. You and Martin were so cute. Your dad said you were born hugging.”

  “Yeah. We were MoMo twins—he tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Monoamniotic and mono—something else.”

  “Monochorionic. Same amniotic sac and placenta. It’s pretty rare, and there are all kinds of complications that can happen, but we were mostly okay. My mom had a C-section early, and we were in there all cuddled up together.”

  “That’s the sweetest thing in the whole world.”

  Except for the part where he’d been starving Martin in there, but he didn’t say that to Leah.

  “We slept together pretty much every night until we were in sixth grade, way after we had our own beds. It wasn’t twisted or anything like that. We just slept better together. Then puberty happened, and it got weird.” He laughed to himself, remembering the first time he’d woken with morning wood, in the same bed with his brother. Yeah, definitely the last time they’d shared a bed.

  “I don’t have siblings at all. I can’t even imagine what it was like to be that close with another person. To share everything.”

  He shrugged and fiddled with the gizmo in his hands. Sitting in here, going through his boxed-up childhood, Martin’s boxed-up entire life, Gunner was raw and achy, but he was trying to be okay. Having Leah beside him helped.

  “What’s that?” she asked, nodding toward his hands.

  “It’s the spinner for a game we made when we were…six, I think? I made it from an Erector set. Martin drew the board, and I made the pieces. I guess this thing is all that’s left.”

  She took it from him and flicked the hand, making it spin. It still moved smoothly, whirring against the little rubber teeth he’d fashioned from an old tractor belt he’d scavenged out of the barn, until it stopped and locked in on a red wedge. “You made this when you were six?”

  “It’s not complicated. Only a couple parts.”

  “Still. You’re so good at stuff like this.”

  “I like making shit. My hands are a lot steadier than my head.”

  She put the spinner down and picked up a paperback book he’d set aside: Dune. It was thick and heavy, like a doorstop. Martin had liked to read and had read aloud to Max a lot—and not just school stuff, but just for fun, too. He’d died before he could finish Dune. Max hadn’t really enjoyed the story he’d heard—it had been really complicated, and Martin had kept fading out while he was reading, going back to think about passages they’d already finished. But Gunner didn’t want to give that book, Martin’s last book, away. He would never read it, but he’d keep it.

  “Can you tell me about Martin?” She set the book in her lap and looked up at him.

  “I’m sure Dad gave you the whole story.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I mean. I want to understand what it was like for you to have Martin.”

  That was the biggest question she could possibly have asked, and he laughed in surprise. “Fuck. I don’t know if I can explain it.”

  She simply waited, looking up at him like she had all the time in the world, so he took a deep breath and tried. He’d have to carve out old scars and make fresh wounds to do it, but sitting here amidst the remnants of his twinhood, it seemed the right place and time to say things he’d never formed into words before. This was apparently the day his brain had chosen to try to confront its complicated feelings about Martin’s death.

  “You know how you hear stories about twins having telepathy?” She nodded. “Well, it’s true. I mean, we couldn’t hear each other’s thoughts like words in our heads or shit like that, but we just…we just knew. We barely talked when we were alone together, because we didn’t need to. We’d get the same earworms at the same time, nowhere in earshot of each other. I knew what his mood was, even if I hadn’t seen him for hours. I knew if he’d eaten, or if he was tired. Same for him. When I was on the mound in a game, and he was in the stands, if he went to take a piss or get a soda or something, I knew he wasn’t watching, and I knew when he was back, without having to look. We always just knew. Like there was a little piece of us in the other.”

  Gunner picked up the book and stared down at the cover: yellow and orange, showing a generic desert landscape. No indication of all the weird shit going on inside. “I knew when he died, too. The exact second it happened. I couldn’t see him. We were in the wrecked car, and help hadn’t come yet. I was conscious, but in shock. I couldn’t move or talk or anything, and everything was quiet—the creepy quiet when you know it should be loud but it’s not. I still didn’t understand what had happened. And then the piece of him inside me just blinked out of existence, and I knew he was dead. I knew he was dead before I’d gotten enough sense back to realize we’d wrecked.”

  His hands were shaking, so he set the book down and shoved them under his legs. “Losing Mom was bad, but losing Martin was like dying and not being able to lie down.”

  Leah scooted closer and wrapped her arms around his arm. She leaned against him, but she didn’t say a word. Gunner let his head rest on hers. After a minute, he told her more. He saw now where he wanted his words to take them.

  “It’s not losing Martin that made me crazy. It’s not like that. Losing Martin just turned the crazy loose.”

  “You’re not crazy, Gun.”

  He shrugged her off his arm and met her eyes. “Yeah, Lee. I am. A little. You know it. You’ve seen it. Don’t make believe it’s not there. The shit in my head—a lot of it is not normal. I don’t understand a lot of it, but I know it’s not normal. I need things—” He stopped, unwilling to follow that sentence to its conclusion. “Anyway, I was like this before he died. It’s just…he kept it under control. Just by being here. I don’t know if I can explain it. It’s…when he was here, I wasn’t ever alone, and so mostly shit was okay. Since he died, I think I’ve been trying to figure out how to be okay alone, and I can’t do it. Maybe it’s being born like we were, but I’m not whole on my own. I need someone to hold onto.”

  “That’s not crazy. Most people need someone. I know I do.”

  “It’s more than that. I need to feel somebody in
here with me. I haven’t felt right since Martin died. I’ve been spinning with nothing to stop me.” He brought a hand up and cupped it around her cheek. “Except lately. Since this summer, I’ve felt okay more than not. Since you. I feel you in my head. You’re what I need. I need to hold onto you.”

  She simply studied his eyes, hers moving back and forth, like she was reading his brain. Then she unwound her arms from his, picked up his hand, and laced their fingers together. When he curled his fingers and closed her hand in his, she smiled.

  “You are holding onto me. I need that, too. I need you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Leah reached over Gunner’s sleeping body and switched off his alarm a minute before it was set to go off. Before she could shift back to her side of the bed, he groaned groggily and caught her around the ribs, holding her in place on his chest.

  “Hey. Morning.”

  “Morning.” She pressed her lips to his, then brushed her cheeks over his beard. It had filled out completely since they’d trimmed it back in the hospital, and it was getting long. She liked it—the way it made him look dark and serious, and, especially, the way it felt on her skin.

  When she tried to move back to his side, he caught her by the hair and held her, sealing their mouths together again, making the kiss something more than a morning greeting. She moved her leg so she straddled him and felt the rod of his cock between her legs. But he groaned and stopped when she flexed on him.

  “Fuck, I can’t. I gotta open the station.”

  “I know. I just wanted to torture you a little first.” She moved off of him and nestled against his side, her head on his chest. His hand settled on her hip, his fingers stretching over her ass.

  As always, her fingers immediately trailed over his belly and chest, over and around, up and down. When his skin was available to her, she had to touch it. Always.

  She loved everything about his physical form. Not just his firm, sculpted muscles, especially those high ridges at his hips, but the hair over his body, the way it caressed her skin everywhere when they were bare and touching, during sex or like this, just being close. She loved his piercing blue eyes and the rugged, scarred face they were in, which told everything he was feeling all the time. She even loved the creases that had already, while he was still in his twenties, formed between his eyebrows and the way they showed pain, even when he laughed. Those creases made her want to hold him and love him and take care of him forever.

  She loved his tattoos, too, though most of them were scary or creepy. Not the demon on his belly—she hated that one. It was ugly and weird, and at first, she’d had to close her eyes and not think about it when she got down eye level with it. Even that, though, said a lot about Gunner. She’d never asked, because he seemed as embarrassed about that piece as she was off-put by it, but Leah wondered where his mind had been when he’d had a demon’s head tattooed around his cock.

  Her fingers traced over the smooth lines of his new scars, and she couldn’t help herself. She scooted down and leaned over his belly, licking along the one they’d made to repair his damaged stomach. His cock jumped.

  “Leah,” he groaned and tangled his hands in her hair. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Work.”

  She had work, too, though not nearly as early. She had plenty of time. Ignoring him, she moved down more and brushed her nose over the granite length of him. He could have pulled her hair to keep her away, but he didn’t.

  “You sure?” His whole body shivered when she blew lightly over his tip. “Because I need you.” She picked up his cock and licked it. He tasted like their sex of the night before.

  He flipped them over so fast, she could only gasp as her back hit the mattress. He’d managed to both flip and drag her up so they were face to face, and with the next breath, he shoved himself into her. She’d been ready—she’d been ready before she’d turned off the alarm—but she still cried out at the force of his entry.

  He grinned down at her, already panting. “You need me, you got me. But I have got to get to work, so buckle up, baby.” He pushed his hands under her and hooked them over her shoulders. When he did that, he meant to fuck the shit out of her, hard and fast. Leah wrapped her arms and legs around him and held on for the ride.

  Which was what she’d had in mind in the first place.

  ~oOo~

  A bit more than three months had passed since Leah had moved from her father’s house, since she’d had any real contact with him at all, but she was still driving to Grant three days a week for her job at the mayor’s office. The Biddy Brigade had gotten bored with harassing phone calls, and the job was more or less as it had always been. Except that she still felt an ache, driving through the only town she’d ever lived in and knowing she wasn’t really welcome there anymore.

  Mayor Bradford—Burt—had kept her in the loop as well as he could, so she knew her father was keeping his life going. After two weeks with no services at Heartland Baptist, he’d resumed his work. The Brigade was helping him keep the house and making sure he ate.

  There had been some scandal, Leah had learned from Burt, when the congregation had discovered her father’s trouble with scotch, but it hadn’t, after all, ruined him. He’d become a town project.

  Before Gunner, Leah had seen her life through the pinhole aperture of her father’s needs. She’d been unable to imagine doing anything at all but fill the role her mother had abandoned. Finding out that he hadn’t needed her so completely, that he hadn’t collapsed without her, hurt even more than his condemnation of her.

  She couldn’t suss out whose fault it all was—had he warped her into thinking that he couldn’t live without her, or had she used it as an excuse not to think about what she wanted for her life? Had she stayed in that Preacher’s-Daughter box because it was safe?

  And wasn’t she doing the exact same thing with Gunner? Her life now revolved around him. His friends and family had become hers. She took care of him—kept the apartment, made his meals, learned his moods and his needs and did all she could to anticipate and meet them. He had secrets of his own, too, though he kept them even from her. He took care of her, too, in ways she’d never experienced before, but she was, in essence, living the same life she’d always lived.

  She’d replaced one man for another. It wasn’t as simple as that—she was much happier with Gunner than she’d ever been before, and their relationship was obviously much different from her relationship with her father—and yet it was that simple. Was that all she was—a helpmate? Was there nothing she wanted beyond that? Nothing for herself?

  She honestly didn’t know.

  One thing she did know: that restlessness she’d felt living with her father, that thing that had compelled her to sneak out at night—that was gone. With Gunner she had no need to go out and be wild and take drugs to let herself feel free. She did feel free. No longer was she The Preacher’s Daughter. Now she was simply Leah, and Gunner loved her for who she was.

  The question that now presented itself, as Leah sat at her desk in the mayor’s office: did she love herself? Would she be happy forever living for Gunner?

  She opened the bottom desk drawer and stared down at the jumble of college brochures Burt had placed in her view over the past several months. From big state schools, to little liberal arts colleges, to community colleges. Just about every kind of higher education in Oklahoma, and a few beyond the state lines. She’d never been beyond the state lines.

  Certainly she had no interest in moving away from Tulsa. The life she wanted, forever, was with Gunner. But did she want more from that life than she had?

  The door to Burt’s office opened just as her hand moved toward the brochures, and Leah instead slammed the drawer shut, feeling strangely guilty. Burt didn’t seem to notice. He leaned into the room with a smile.

  “Did you proofread the ballot? We need to get it to the printer by this afternoon if we’re going to have it ready for Election Day.”

  It was a presidential election ye
ar, so the ballot for Grant was much more involved than it had been the previous year, when Leah had also been working with the mayor. That ballot had been a single page. This one was a small booklet that would take two weeks to print, and Burt wanted to have them in the office at least two weeks before Election Day, so they had time to accommodate delays or mistakes without upending the whole democratic process.

  In addition to national, state, and county races and measures, Burt was up for reelection. He ran unopposed, as he had for the past twelve years, but even so, he campaigned as if his office was at risk. He often said that his opponent was complacency.

  “I did. It looks good. Are you sure you don’t want to check it over again yourself?”

  He shook his head. “I already did, and I trust your smarter eyes. I wasn’t valedictorian when I graduated from Grant High, after all.” A knowing smirk lifted his cheek as he nodded at her desk. “Speaking of which, don’t think I didn’t see you with the drawer open. You finally thinking about college?”