“Why do you still have them? No, actually, I really want to know why you have them at all. What the hell, Clay? You know that’s not healthy, right? That’s not normal.”
“How do you know that, Emily?” He was starting to feel a little defensive. “Guys like porn, all right?”
“That much? You could open your own adult store. There were at least three boxes of that crap. I nearly lost my lunch.” Her eyes glowered. “Is that what your little movie theater is for? So you can jack off in private?” He’d been tense up till that point, but when she suggested he used the theater to masturbate to porn, he started laughing. “I’m serious, Clay. I need to know.”
He took a deep breath. He was starting to sense that it really bothered her. “All I’m gonna say is that’s a part of my old life.”
Her hands were folded just in front of her coffee cup, her knuckles white. “Not good enough.”
Okay, so he was starting to care for this woman—a lot—but he wasn’t going to start baring his entire soul to her. “Sorry, but that’s all you’re getting.”
She sat still for a few moments, staring inside her coffee cup. “All right. Then I’m giving you my two weeks’ notice.”
“What? You kidding me?”
“No. I’m dead serious.”
“You’re leaving if I don’t tell you about something that means nothing to me now.”
“Yeah…because right now you seem like some weird creepy pervert. I need to understand.”
Part of him wanted to tell her. He did. But the other part of him—the part that believed she was just playing around with him before she decided to marry douche boy after all—didn’t want to say a word. So maybe she’d take a compromise. “Look—I’m not ready to tell you. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll tell you two months from now.”
“No dice. You’re just hoping I forget it.”
He let out a breath. “No. I’m hoping I feel like I can trust you more then.”
She looked hurt. “You don’t think you can trust me?”
He forced his jaw to relax. “It’s my guts—everything inside—you’re talking about here, Emily. You have no idea.”
Her voice was quiet. “What do you need from me to know it’s okay?”
He wasn’t worried about her saying anything. She’d signed the non-disclosure statement day one of her employment. No, he was worried what Emily—the girl he was starting to fall for in a huge way—might do to him once she heard his story. He shook his head. “There’s nothing you can give me that will make me feel better about it.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” She finished her coffee and stood. “You have my two-week notice. Do you need that in writing?”
He sighed. “Wait.” He couldn’t believe he was going to fucking do it. “I’ll tell you. Sit down.” He walked over to the liquor cabinet. He would do this…but he was going to need a stiff drink first—or maybe several.
Chapter Twenty-three
THE WHISKEY WAS hot going down, and Clay knew it was going to hit him in a few minutes. “Okay…the porn collection. Sorry, but I’m gonna have to backtrack a little for you to understand it.”
“That’s fine. I’m willing to listen.” She refilled her coffee too, and that was good, because Clay was able to feel his muscles relax just a little bit—and that was all he needed.
“So…the story starts a long time ago. I graduated high school, right? Barely, but I did. The only thing that kept me there was band. Oh, and my friends. But graduation came, and me and my friends were excited to pursue our band dream full time. It was one of the most fun times of my life. We just wrote music—not much at first and definitely nothing worth recording—and played gigs. Fucking incredible. We lived like there was no tomorrow.” He ran his hands through his hair. So far, not bad.
Still, he poured another drink and took a swallow before continuing. “I dated some, but Jet? He was pretty new. He was the reason I could get up onstage and do what I did. He was fearless. And I met this beautiful woman. Christ. Her name was Abigail, and she turned my whole world upside down. She was incredible. She made me laugh. She made me happy. And I didn’t give a shit that I had nothing. I and my friends worked shitty little part-time jobs and played gigs. That was it. It was my world, and I wouldn’t have traded anything for it.
“Anyway, Abby…she rocked my world. I’d never felt anything like that before. It was hardcore and intense, and I would have done anything for her. But her dad hated my guts. Abby—she’s African American, and her dad hated me just because I was a white boy. He didn’t think I was good enough for her. But we didn’t care. We kept seeing each other. We loved each other.
“And then she got pregnant. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Well, after giving it some thought, I knew I didn’t want her to get an abortion. My kid was growing inside the woman I loved. I wanted to do the right thing. So we got married. Yeah, her dad was really pissed then. My piss-ant job, though—no way it would pay for her medical expenses. She got on Medicaid, but still. I knew she couldn’t move in with me and my loser friends. That was no kind of life for my new wife and baby. I quit the band and got two almost full-time jobs, both shitty. I wanted to be a good man. I wanted to take care of my family.
“We were so happy at first. We lived in a shitty trailer in a shitty neighborhood, but it was ours, and we had a baby on the way.
“The jobs started to take their toll, though. I hardly saw Abby. I mostly slept when I was home. I did get to talk to the baby through her tummy, though, you know? And I was able to pay all our bills, but I was tired. Beyond tired. Before I knew it, the baby arrived. Little Jasmine Yerica Smith. She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Had her mama’s eyes and lips. I was the proudest daddy you’ve ever seen. I cried. There’s nothing like watching a child come into this world, but you can’t believe what it’s like when it’s your own. It’s a miracle.”
Okay, so now he was veering into the sappy. He needed another swig of whiskey. “I had a few days off from work, but I had to go back to both jobs at one point. Nothing had changed, really—I was working a lot, sleeping when I could, and spending as much time as I could with my wife and daughter. Our time together was quality, but there wasn’t much of it.
“Anyway, Jas was about seven or eight months old when I noticed Abby getting distant. And, uh, it took a while, but…” He swallowed. Now they were getting to the hard part. Could he keep himself from getting emotional? He had to. “I found out she was having an affair. It—ripped my heart in two. This woman I loved so much, more than life, and she was sleeping with someone else. That just killed me.
“We talked. And it was fucking stupid—I know. But we decided to work it out. She said she was sorry, that she felt so lonely without me, and she said she’d never do it again. I believed her. She was my baby, you know?”
Okay, now he was being a pussy. He was only able to keep going because Emily’s features had softened. She’d stopped looking so angry and started looking like she cared again. “So we made another go at it. I had to keep working, though. Even with my two jobs, we could barely make ends meet. Abby asked if I wanted her to work, but her job would have just barely paid for daycare. It would have been stupid to have Abs work so someone else could raise our kid. It bothered me, though, because I missed a lot of important things with Jas…but at least I knew her mom was taking good care of her.
“And then she did it again. She should have just fucking stabbed me in the heart. I was lost then. I stayed with some friends for a few days and then we talked. She wanted to try again, she said, but I couldn’t trust her anymore. She was going to keep stomping on my heart, and I was a dumb ass if I let her. Turned out she’d been screwing around with the same guy she had been the first time. Maybe she’d never stopped. I didn’t want her to hurt me again.
“It wasn’t long before I had the child support people crawling up my ass. I really wanted to take Jas, but I couldn’t. She knew her mom better, spent more
time with her. She hardly knew me and, besides, I’d have to pay a babysitter all the time. So I lost the woman I loved and my daughter at the same time. It was like my heart was pulled out of my chest and thrown into a shredder. So I decided fuck it. I wasn’t gonna keep working my ass off doing shit I fucking hated for nothing. No one appreciated my hard work. Oh, I kept the better-paying shitty job. I was a cook at a down-home restaurant. Nothing fancy, but steady work. They would keep me working days. And then I called Brian. He and I had been in our first band together, and I knew he was still playing in a band. But I asked if he wanted to do something with me again, and he said hell, yeah, and Last Five Seconds was born. Not the one you know now—we’ve had a few changes in line up. Still, that was the beginning.
“That’s when I really became Jet. Before, Jet was just kind of a way to be a bad ass onstage, you know, to kind of get over my nerves of being in front of an audience. He still was. I didn’t want to get hurt again. But you gotta realize…I was, like, twenty-four or something. I was horny. Goddamn. I could have had sex twenty times a day. Porn helped. I’d put in something—and it varied. What worked one day sucked the next.” Emily grimaced. “Sorry. You get the idea—the porn made it to where I didn’t need a girlfriend. I didn’t have to worry about a fucking messy relationship, right?
“It was pretty lonely, though, and pretty boring. Jet was full blown by then. I discovered when I was Jet, I could fuck a woman and not give a shit. It kept me from getting hurt.
“A few years later, though, I let my guard down. There was this woman I let in. We were friends at first, but she was something else. She was safe-ish…she had a boyfriend and didn’t seem interested in me—until she was. Jet had that effect on women. We were actually together for a while. It was great while it lasted, but…well, she saw the porn too. I used to keep it on these bookshelves. Part of it was to scare women away—and it worked. I hadn’t wanted to scare her away, but I thought she loved me for who I was. Aw, she did. It just didn’t work. She loved somebody else, and I was kinda just rebound guy.” Fuck. He did it again. He told her something he shouldn’t have.
Still…she was listening and she wasn’t saying anything. Should he keep going? “So…the porn now? Just a reminder. You need to know? I wanna watch porn, I got my computer, and I got Pay Per View. I don’t need DVDs anymore. And if you had really checked out my movie theater, you would have booted up the computer and found movies on there. And under the skirt of the table are DVDs me and my buddies watch. No porn.”
Emily seemed hesitant, but she said, “Still, why do you have to keep it?”
Clay smiled. “You think Goodwill would like seeing that as a donation?”
She laughed. “Okay. You got me. You could throw it away.”
“Yeah, I guess I could. It’s not hurting anything, though.”
Emily didn’t say another word at first. “So why don’t you have visitation with your daughter?”
“I do.”
“I’ve been here close to two months and have never seen her.”
“She’s in some kind of summer camp. She’s gonna be here in two weeks. I can’t wait for you to meet her.” He searched her eyes. “That is, if you plan to still be here.”
“I just have a question. Who slept with me?”
“What do you mean?”
Emily took a deep breath. “You talked about Jet and Clay. Has Clay ever had sex with anyone other than Abby?”
“Oh, yeah. He loved Val too.” He finished the whiskey in the glass. “Sorry. You probably didn’t need to hear that.”
“So…who slept with me?”
He swallowed. Oh, God. This was either gonna make or break him, and he didn’t know that he had the balls to do it. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Didn’t matter—he was already splayed out on the table, and all she had to do was chop his head off. “Clay.”
She searched his eyes, and he saw her eyes soften. “Then I’ll stay.”
Chapter Twenty-four
EMILY FELT BAD about making Clay bare his soul, but she felt better too. She’d been thinking he was a complete perv. She knew guys liked porn but the amount he owned was completely crazy, what appeared to be an obsession. Hearing his story, though, made it better. It was more in the past, and she thought she could deal with that.
She probably wouldn’t have felt quite so bad if she had been more serious about their—whatever it was. Relationship felt like too strong a word, but friendship didn’t quite cut it. Still, she wasn’t serious at all. He was her guy for now. She still wasn’t sure about her future, with or without Bryce. She didn’t think Clay was the right guy for her in any capacity—but he was a hell of a lot of fun, and there was no denying how great he made her feel.
In fact, she didn’t know that she’d had that much fun having sex ever. The guy was a master in the bedroom. Well, more out of the bedroom. They didn’t do it much there. They’d done it on the washing machine, out back in his pool one night, in the shower, in the office, the living room, the stairs leading to the basement, the kitchen (twice), the hood of his car, the music room multiple times, once hanging on his big amp, and then another time in his room with her sitting on his dresser. Even in bed, she didn’t think they’d done it the same way twice. He made her feel so good. Some days she could hardly wait for Mary to get the fuck out of there, and Clay had gotten good at shooing Brian and other occasional visitors out the door mid-afternoon so they had the house all to themselves.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to try the theater downstairs. No matter what he said, she just couldn’t bring herself to go there yet.
One afternoon at four o’clock, the house was quiet. She’d finished the work she’d planned for the day, but she’d been thinking about Clay all afternoon. If he’d walked in the office door, she might have jumped on him even if Mary had still been in the house. She was feeling a little hot, a lot out of control, and she was wanting him again—wanting his mouth on her, his hands getting a little rough, finding new ways to bring her pleasure. He was like a drug, and she needed a fix.
She went to her room to change clothes into something a little more comfortable. If the house hadn’t been so eerily quiet, she might have considered putting on a little lingerie to surprise him. She walked over to her dresser, and as she opened a drawer, she saw a card with her name on it. It looked like Clay’s handwriting, but she hadn’t seen it that much. She was curious as hell.
She opened the card, and it was simple. Just white linen, and it had a gold S stamped on the front. It seemed formal. She opened it, expecting an invitation of some kind printed inside, and it was, but it was handwritten:
Jet requests your presence. Please come to my room at your earliest convenience.
She almost started laughing. It was cute and funny. And, for some reason, she was feeling even warmer than before. Clay had told her less than a week ago that she’d never been fucked by Jet, and now maybe he was willing to show her that side of himself. She felt her nerves get a little tingly, and she didn’t want to linger. She was wearing a white sundress—not exactly sexy—but she couldn’t wait.
She kept her cool and walked down the hall with a steady gait. When she got to the living room, she saw that his bedroom door was open, so she walked over to it. He wasn’t in there, though, not that she could see. So she called for him. “Clay?” She walked into the room a little bit and saw something on the foot of the bed. She got a little closer and saw a rope coiled up. Her heart started beating a little faster and she wondered what it was for. “Clay?”
She heard his voice coming from the bathroom. “Sorry, but Clay’s not here. I thought you were coming to see Jet.” He came out of the doorway in all his glory. He wasn’t wearing a shirt—nothing unusual there—but he was wearing ripped jeans, dark sunglasses, a choker, and his guitar was strapped on. It was then that she noticed he had a small amp plugged into the wall next to the desk. He picked up a cable and plugged in his guitar. “I wrote you a little somet
hing…just to kind of give you an idea of how you make my blood boil.” He cleared his throat. “Let me know what you think.”
At first, she almost expected him to start singing, even though she knew that wasn’t Clay’s thing. He sang for his band, but he didn’t go solo. And he didn’t this time either. He started playing the backdrop to a song, a steady rhythm, but then she recognized it was a bridge of some kind, building to a solo. And what a solo it was…it moved her with its passion and energy, and if Clay had ever been able to capture the essence of Jet, he’d done it then and there in his music. She took a deep breath as she felt her pussy clench against nothing but itself, aching for him again. It was damn hot.
He looked at her, a smirk on his face, also pure Jet, and she felt feverish then—not just hot and bothered but beyond. She felt like she was falling in too deep, that there would be no cure for what he was doing to her, and she started to think that maybe she didn’t want it to end. But she took another deep breath, wanting to stay in the moment, and she bit her lower lip. She could see him raise his eyebrows even under the sunglasses, and then he lifted his guitar up so that the shaft pointed up and almost in her direction. He stuck out his tongue and licked the side, and damned if she didn’t let out a soft moan. She couldn’t help it. She was helpless already, and she thought he knew it.
In one swift motion, he pulled the strap over his head and leaned the guitar against the desk. Then four steps and he was right there. He pulled the glasses off and tossed them toward the desk too, and she had no idea if they’d hit the target, nor did she care. She was mesmerized by him then, a paralyzed victim ready for his strike. He took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was slow, hot, and full of meaning. She thought she’d come as soon as he touched her.
Feverish (Bullet #3) Page 17