by Tracey Ward
I moved my hands up the smooth, hot skin of her thighs where they disappeared under the thin fabric of her skirt. They rode up, flared out, and reached around to cup her ass as she slipped her tongue inside my mouth and groaned. I dug my fingers into her perfect, round flesh and pulled her closer to me.
I hadn’t dated or even fooled around with a girl since the night of the fight, and for a guy that was used to getting laid on the regular, it was torture. But so was this. So was having Laney on my lap with her hands in my hair, her tongue in my mouth, and no clear idea of where this should stop. I got the feeling I couldn’t count on Laney to say when and I knew I couldn’t look Dan in the eye if I slept with her on the first date.
I had to be strong. I had to stop it.
Just not yet.
She breathed deeply, pushing her body toward me. Encouraging me.
I drug my hand up her side and ran it over the smooth material of her tank top until I held her breast in my large palm. It nearly filled it and I nearly died.
Laney moaned, breaking away from the kiss and leaning back to look down at me. She smiled, her hair a tousled mess and her face glowing in the dim green light of the car’s consul. She was perfection. Kiss swollen lips, smoldering eyes, and lips parted to release long, easy breaths as she continued to grind against me.
She didn’t say a word as she stared down at me. She never spoke or asked anything of me as her hand drifted down the front of my body, her fingers tripping and stumbling over the muscles on my stomach until they fell on my belt. I thought she’d take hold of it and try to open it, a move that I knew I had to stop if I had any chance of ending this before it went too far. But she skimmed over it, and at the edge of my sight I saw her hand disappear up under her skirt.
Her breathing changed. She exhaled sharply then inhaled deep and long. In and out, forward and back with the movement of her body against mine. I watched her face as her eyes fluttered, her mouth falling open as a low moan escaped it. Her speed picked up and I rocked her hard against me with my hand still on her ass. I found the edge of her underwear and strained it to ripping by pushing my palms underneath it until I felt her skin against mine.
I wanted to rip those underwear off and push her hand aside. I wanted to take over, take her, taste her, feel her, dive down deep inside her until those blue eyes went black and she lost control, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead I did something I’d never done before.
I watched her.
It wasn’t intimate and it wasn’t creepy. It was sexy. Her body and her eyes, her breaths and her movements – none of it was meant to be romantic or sweet. I wasn’t supposed to see her soul or give her a glimpse into mine. She wanted me to look at her so I could see how turned on she was. That was it. Clinical and cold, but still disturbingly hot.
Her hand was still in my hair pulling and pinching until it nearly hurt while her other hand made her own body shiver. She shuddered as a high, tiny whimper burst from the back of her throat and my dick pressed hard and painful against my jeans. Against her and her hand as she kept grinding against me.
It didn’t take her expert fingers long. She knew what she was doing and I understood as she stared down at me, her lip being devoured between her teeth and gasps coming quick and forceful from her throat, that she was using me. She was watching me, imagining me, masturbating to me as I sat there underneath her clutching her ass and driving her lithe body forward and back.
It was the hottest fucking thing I’d ever seen.
When she threw her head back and let loose a high cry, I leaned forward and buried my face into her chest. I kissed it feverishly, licking the salty tang of her glistening skin. I felt her call of pleasure vibrate through her breastplate against my lips and tongue as her body trembled under my hands and she clutched my head to her. Her entire body shuddered and she whimpered like she was weeping. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t avoid it. I couldn’t miss it.
I let go of her ass and brought my hand around to her front, our fingers tangling together. She took hold of me, pulled me in, and let me feel her. She was slick and hot, still coming. Still pulsing. I didn’t dive inside, I’d never come out if I did, but I ran my finger along her lips once, dancing over her swollen clit to make her cry out. The sound made my chest swell with the primal desire to do it again.
Eventually she calmed, gently pushed my hand aside, and pulled herself upright. She grinned down at me with hooded eyes and flushed cheeks before leaning down to kiss me softly.
“Next time,” she whispered against my lips, “I get to watch you.”
***
Two months later I was graduated from high school with honors and a perfect four point GPA, my eighteenth birthday was coming up fast, and I was still dating Laney. I even took her to my senior Prom. She was there at graduation with the rest of her family holding up signs with my name, and when I came out into the crowd to say hi to them, she ran into my arms and kissed me full on the mouth. That sealed it somehow. That physical affection in front of her parents locked me in and I started to think maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. We could date casually through the summer, then I’d leave for college, she’d hate the long distance thing, and we’d both move on. Easy. Clean.
“You’re banking on her getting bored?” Callum asked, kicking sand up with his bare foot.
“No.” I surveyed the crowd of people on the beach around us. Laney was down by the water with her friends splashing and laughing. No one could hear us. “Not exactly.”
“But you want her to break up with you?”
“Kind of.”
“What is wrong with you?”
I chuckled. “So much.”
“She’s perfect, man. Gorgeous. A certified ten, plus she’s fun and she’s easy.”
I shot him a sharp glance. “Watch it.”
“No, no, no, no! Not easy like that. No. Easy like easy going. Like chill. She’s cool.”
“Yeah, she is.”
And she was, but there was still the fact that we didn’t have much in common. Leave us alone in a room together and we didn’t have a word to say to each other. We were nothing other than fun and a whole hell of a lot of sex, something that didn’t bother me with other girls, but with Laney it always came back to the fact that this was Dan’s daughter. That was a rough point for me. I liked the way things were with her because she didn’t want jack shit from me besides my body, but it felt wrong that that was all I wanted from her too.
“What I don’t get is why you’re looking to break up with her for not wanting all of the shit other girls wanted from you,” he complained. “I think you’re perpetually unhappy.”
“I’m not perpetually unhappy and I’m not looking to break up with her. I’m worried because I’m having empty sex with Dan’s daughter.”
“Is it good empty sex?”
“It’s fucking phenomenal, but it’s still—“
“Dan’s daughter, yeah, I heard you.”
I cast him an annoyed look. “It bugs me.”
“So what? You think you should be marrying her or something?”
“God, no, but I should probably do something. We’re not even exclusive. I should probably at least commit.”
“What are you? A Jonas Brother?” he asked scathingly. “Is she asking you to commit?”
“No.”
“If it ain’t broke…”
“Yeah,” I replied, shrugging vaguely. “Yeah, maybe leave it alone.”
“He gave you permission, dude.”
“He gave me permission to date her, not sleep with her.”
“If he knows anything about her, he knows that’s pretty much the same thing.”
“Yeah.”
It didn’t really matter. Things were going to take care of themselves soon enough. I was days away from turning eighteen, a fact that Laney didn’t know, and once that happened I wasn’t sleeping with her anymore. I was still gun-shy as shit about the law after my misstep last year and I wasn’t about to run the ri
sk of someday being hit with a statutory rape charge. I didn’t think Laney was the type to throw something like that around wildly, but who knew? I didn’t feel like risking it. So in just a few days I would be putting a moratorium on sex with her, and without sex we were nothing, so that would be that.
My phone started ringing in my pocket. It was Dan.
“Speak of the devil,” I muttered before answering, “Hello?”
“Kellen, where are you right now?”
“At the beach with Laney and some friends. Do you need her to come home?”
“No, actually I need to talk to you. Come home with Laney when you’re done, will you? You need to… there’s something important we need to talk about.”
“Okay,” I agreed, my palms beginning to sweat slightly.
“It’s nothing you’ve done wrong,” he assured me, catching on to my hesitant tone. “It’s something that’s come up. Something I don’t think you want to discuss on the phone. Just come home when you can, alright?”
“Yeah, we’ll be there soon.”
“Take your time. Have fun, just make sure you come see me before you go home tonight.”
I ended the call and slid the phone back into my pocket slowly.
“Everything okay?” Callum asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Dan wants to talk to me. Something came up.”
“What kind of something?”
“I have no idea, but I’m going to grab Laney and head over there. It sounded important.”
“Alright, man. I hope everything’s alright.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Laney didn’t want to leave. I told her I needed to go see her dad and she was quick to clarify that he wanted to see me, not her. Not both of us. She handed me her keys, kissed me goodbye, and ran back into the water with her friends where the sun was setting in a blaze of red and orange over the vibrant green waters.
I left without looking back.
When I got to the house Dan looked surprised to see me so soon.
“I didn’t mean to rush you,” he apologized, letting me inside. “It could have waited until later this evening.”
“I know, but I wasn’t doing anything. Not really.”
“Where’s Laney?”
“She didn’t want to leave.” I handed him her car keys. “Callum and the girls are there if she needs a ride so she let me take her car.”
“Okay, well, since you’re here let’s go back to my office.”
I followed him through the house. It looked empty and I wondered where Jenna was on a warm summer night. Since I was done tutoring her and Laney and I had started dating, I saw Jenna less and less. Also, she’d started hanging out with a girl named Sam recently, so most of our conversations were through text. I hadn’t even met her friend. I’d only heard Sam’s name in passing and I saw one picture of her on Jenna’s phone. She was a Goth chic with dark eye makeup and all black clothes, but in the picture she’d been smiling broadly. The two of them had looked really happy.
“Have a seat,” Dan told me, taking his place behind the desk. He pulled out a large envelope that reminded me of the packet of college applications he had given me. “I got this at my office today. It was mailed to me from a law firm in Las Vegas on behalf of a client of theirs. A Barkley Thorp.”
“Barkley? Really?”
Dan grinned, but it quickly disappeared. “Yeah. He’s a high roller in Las Vegas and a poker champion for more than a decade. He’s invested his money wisely over the years and he’s made himself a millionaire a few times over. In fact, he owns the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team.”
“What does he have to do with me?”
His eyes held mine steadily, unflinching. “Kellen, he’s your father.”
The words didn’t mean anything to me. My dad had been a non-entity my entire life. No human, living, breathing body or ridiculous ass name could be attached to him to make him real. He was a phantom. A wraith. A ghost in the back of my mind when I boxed. If I ever entertained the idea of him being alive, it was to feed him to the animal.
“No,” I said faintly.
“Yes.”
I gripped the arms of my chair with white knuckles. “What does he want? What’s in the package?”
“Financial documents,” he answered, laying his hands gently down on top of the envelope. I noticed he didn’t try to hand it to me. It was probably his only copy and he was right to worry what I’d do with it. “They’re your documents for accounts in his name and yours.”
“I don’t have finances. I definitely don’t have financial documents.”
“You do now. Inside this envelope is the paperwork for a savings account that was started for you the day you were born. Mr. Thorp started the account with twenty thousand dollars. He’s added eight thousand eight hundred and eighty eight dollars every month since then. His most recent deposit was last week.”
I shook my head, my blood boiling. “No. No. My mom and I never had that kind of money.”
“She refused to touch it. She wrote Mr. Thorp and told him he was more than welcome to keep adding money to the account for you, that she wouldn’t make your decisions about him for you, but that she’d never use it. That was the last he heard from her until you moved away from Las Vegas. She wrote him again and told him you were both leaving town and for him not to look for you. To leave her alone. She swore she would tell you about the money when you turned eighteen and he could try to contact you then if he wanted, but otherwise he was to leave you both alone. He respected her wishes.”
I snorted but it sounded more like a snarl. “Easy to do when he’d already been doing it for ten years.”
Dan didn’t answer. He sat patiently as I worked through the rage building inside me. I hadn’t talked about my dad in a long time. I never forgot how much I hated the son of a bitch for ditching my mom, but it was easy to lose that anger at him in the rest of it. To merge it all into one roiling pot of wrath that bubbled and steamed, fueling my movements. That fed the animal.
I swiped my hand over my mouth quickly. “Why that number?” I demanded. “Eight thousand eight hundred and eighty eight? What is that?”
“He says that eight is his lucky number.”
“I was born on August eighth,” I ground out. “Eighth day of the eighth month.”
Dan nodded slowly. “I know.”
“Shit,” I muttered, standing up and stretching my suddenly aching legs. “What does he want?”
“He wants to make sure you know about the money. That’s why he started hunting for you. He didn’t look before because your mom told him not to. When he found out you’ve been in the foster system he was very upset. He had no idea your mom had passed.”
“What a horrible shock for him,” I deadpanned.
“He wants you to take the money your mom refused, Kellen. He wants you to use it for your education, to buy a house, to take care of yourself. He’d love to teach you how to invest it if you’d let him.”
“That fucker can’t teach me anything.”
“I told him that would probably be your response.”
“You’ve talked to him?” I asked severely.
“No. I talked to his lawyer on the phone today when I opened the package. I would never speak to Mr. Thorp without your consent.”
“Why did they contact you and not my foster father?”
“They found you through your arrest record. I was on file as your attorney in that hearing.”
Red flames of shame scorched my cheeks. “So he knows I was arrested? He must be so proud.”
“He offered to pay for my services in your defense.”
“He can go fuck himself!” I shouted, losing control. I shook out my hands, trying to pull it in. It only took a moment for my whole body to start shaking.
“Listen, son,” Dan said softly. “Calm down.”
“No, I—I have to go. I can’t. I don’t want anything to do with any of this. Burn it. Burn it all. Tell him to take it back or give it to a diff
erent charity because I don’t want it.”
“There are limits set on how much you can withdraw each year. It can’t be given away. Not that easily. Besides, I think you should give it some time. Calm yourself down and get some distance from it. This could be a very good thing for you.”
“I don’t want it. If my mom didn’t want it, then I don’t want it. You can have it. Use it to send the girls to college. How much is it? Will it cover their tuition?”
Dan sighed. “Kellen, it’s two point five million dollars.”
I almost threw up. It was such an insane amount of money, I couldn’t even stomach it. I couldn’t process it.
I stormed out of the room. Out of the house.
Dan didn’t call out and he didn’t follow me.
I did the math that night. I sat down and thought it through in the dark of my bedroom as the neighbor’s music blared through the walls until after two in the morning. My mom had told him to leave us alone for a second time when we left Las Vegas. She told him to stay away as we moved to Los Angeles, deep into the last days of the cancer killing her. She knew. She knew she was leaving me alone and there would be no one left to take care of me, and still she told that man to stay away and never look for me. She’d taken the one person that could have saved me from foster care – from the abuses I took day after day after day – and she blinded them.
Why? Why the fuck would she do that me? How could she do that to me?
I stared out my window at the smog ridden city glowing with electric life, and I watched the structure of my mom’s pedestal begin to crack.
Chapter Nine
One Month Later
“Please, Kellen,” Laney breathed. Her hands gripped my shoulders tightly. “Please, baby, please.”
I looked down at her where she was sprawled out over the backseat of the car. Her dad’s car. She had backed hers into a light pole at the grocery store and sent it into the shop for the scratch to be repaired. Now we were rolling around in her dad’s car and doing things that made me cringe to think of Dan getting into it in the morning. I felt like a skeeze right then, more than I ever had before.