Asher (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 6)

by Hope Hitchens

  I covered her body with mine, pulling out smoothly before thrusting into her. In and out. I had to control myself. I needed a rhythm that would make this last.

  “Faster, please,” she pleaded below me. No. Not now. Not when tomorrow could be our last day. Not when this could be the last time. I pressed down into her. No room for fear, doubt, any of that bullshit that could steal even a second of her from me. I balanced my weight on my elbows and forearms, our bodies connected. Chests heaving together. I sucked a spot on her neck as my cock stroked her. She was pulling my hair, moaning, pulsing around me.

  I heard her crying. Don’t stop, she whispered. I tried to concentrate on keeping my strokes long and deep. I wasn’t letting this pass me by. Her fingers raked down my arms. Her moans were so hot. She bit down on her lip as she shuddered. Her arms wrapped around my neck. Her pussy clenched and throbbed around me. I couldn’t have lasted through her orgasm if I tried. I exploded, milking myself inside her. Her hands were on my face, and she kissed me.

  I love you. It was right there. I’d never wanted to say it to anyone in my life. If my tongue wasn’t in her mouth, I would have said it. I love you, Jenny or Felicity—it didn’t matter.

  Her. This girl. I loved her.

  I eased my cock out of her, stroking her hair. Her cheeks were wet, and her nose was red. Her lips were puckered and pink. I saw her part them like she wanted to say something.

  “That was incredible,” she whispered. “Thank you.” I smirked. She didn’t have to thank me for that. It had been good for me too. Fuck, way more than just good. Just tell her, I thought. Right after that, though? She probably wouldn’t believe me. After sex was when you could get away with saying anything you didn’t mean. I rolled onto my back, pulling her into me. In about fifteen minutes I finally fell asleep.

  I opened the shop while Felicity got us coffees from the place across the street. I hadn’t been to the gym that morning, which I knew I’d regret, but I didn’t want to leave and come back to find her gone.

  I wouldn’t fucking stop her if she wanted to leave, I just didn’t want to lose her like that. She hadn’t had a whole life before. She’d talked about stuff, and I knew she hadn’t fallen out of a tree or whatever, but fuck. I knew she had a life, and this wasn’t it, not really, but every day I’d wake up and know I wasn’t alone. I’d come to the house and see her there, see her stuff, talk to her. She had started to feel like part of my life. She’d come into my life like a hurricane, and I couldn’t come back from her. She’d fuck me up just as hard if I lost her.

  I was in my office when she got back with the coffees, handing me my cup. She sat in my seat, swinging slowly side to side as she sipped her coffee.

  “Is this what you do when you get here so early?” I asked. “Sit in your boss’s office and touch his stuff?”

  “Usually I get to work, or one of the others is here, but I know you’re never here this early. I feel like I have to sit here and keep you company,” she said.

  “What do I miss when you guys are here without me?”

  “Nothing important,” she said lightly. “I actually wanted to talk to you about that.”

  “What?”

  “Could you… not tell them?” she asked.

  “Who? Tell them what?”

  “Don’t tell them what I told you. Just… call me Jenny, like nothing happened.”

  “You want me to lie to them?”

  “I want you to let me tell them,” she said, defensively. And when will that be, I wanted to ask, but didn’t because I wouldn’t get us anywhere taking cheap shots at her.

  “Fine,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m just wondering what next,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you. What’s next? My bed, my home, this job, they’re all here for you if you still want them,” I said. “I’m not asking you to tell me now, but I have to know. Should I get comfortable having you around or are you going to leave?”

  “I’d really like to continue staying with you,” she said. “But-” she paused. Oh boy. “I’m just afraid of what that means. I have something to lose now. I never thought coming here would lead to this, and maybe that’s my fault. Maybe it was even the wrong thing to do, but now I have this… and you and I’d like to keep it. I don’t know what to do about my parents.”

  “I can help you,” I said. At this point that was just the automatic response I had to anything she wanted and anything she asked me. “I can talk to them if you want. You don’t have to do any of this alone.” She looked down at the lid of her coffee cup, not really letting me know what she was thinking.

  “I have another question,” she started. “We live in the same house. We sleep in the same bed. We have sex…” she trailed off. She was waiting for me to confirm or deny what she thought was or maybe wasn’t happening.

  “If it walks like a duck,” I said, shrugging.

  “Who do you tell other people I am to you?” she asked, looking up at me. I felt her eyes weren’t going to let me know how she felt.

  “Nobody’s really had to ask. I don’t know what you tell Mal, but the guys know the deal. Any special term you want me to use?” I asked. I saw the small smile before she hid it.

  “I just want to hear you say it,” she said.

  “I don’t know a lot of girls who enjoy the fuck buddy title as much as you seem to,” I said. She gasped.

  “You do not,” she said, angry before I started laughing. She pouted and got up off my chair, making her way to the door.

  “Where are you going? Come back.”

  “Are you speaking as my fuck buddy? Because I don’t think I want to come back if you are,” she said. I walked over to her and held her around the waist.

  “I’m sorry. Girlfriend,” I said, “that better?” She smiled and leaned up to kiss me. I held the back of her neck, pushing my tongue into her mouth. I broke the kiss looking at her. “I love you,” I said. Her eyes widened.

  “You don’t have to-”

  “I love you, Felicity. I need you to know that.” Her eyes became glassy, and she kissed me. How long did we have before everyone else came in? I squeezed her ass wondering whether she had ever been bent over a desk and fucked before.

  “You’re my boss; is this sexual harassment?” she asked, looking up at me.

  “Work hasn’t started yet,” I told her, kissing her again. She swatted me off of her and went out to her desk to start working. I watched her leave and shut the door behind her.

  This was great. It was great. Everything was great. She wasn’t leaving. Not after that. She wanted to know who she was to me so she could stay here. Girlfriend had been the right answer. It had been the truth. Now she knew she had me. She had me, and she wouldn’t leave.

  It was still sort of messy, but we’d work it out. It was like that the day after, and the day after that. Three days total. We woke up and went to sleep together. She waited for me in my office so we could go home together.

  At some point, she finally said it back, and I let myself think that everything was fine. I was used to her getting up before me, so when she did one morning, I didn’t think anything was wrong. I didn’t think anything was wrong when I got to work and she wasn’t there. When my first appointment walked in though, and nobody was at the front desk to greet them, I realized what had happened. I called her, getting nothing every time. When I got home, I noticed everything that wasn’t there anymore: her duffel, her clothes, her toothbrush.

  She was gone.

  20

  Felicity

  How hilarious would it be if I hitched my way back to Seattle the way I had to LA from Bermuda? One last hoorah? Resurrect that girl Jenny Davis and thumb my way up to Washington State?

  Yeah, no, I got the train, like a normal person. Like I should have done in the first place. The way you do when you actually have somewhere to be. I wasn’t doing that dumb shit anymore. Safety hazards aside, it wasn’t me a
nd this, though not free, would get me back to Seattle faster.

  I had made a narrow enough escape as it was. I didn’t need a way to get caught because if I was, I would never make it out. I wanted to get caught too much to let it happen. What I needed to do was take a step back and start piecing my life back together in a way that made the picture I wanted to see.

  This was what was best. I had botched this entire experience. I had to dump the files and start again. Again. I had wanted to start over, but I’d just let myself fall ass-backward into some other girl’s life. It wasn’t real, but then it started to feel that way, but in the end wasn’t real enough to stop from eventually imploding.

  I hadn’t said anything to him since the night before when I had last seen him. I had turned my phone off so I wouldn’t feel him reaching out to me. It felt cruel. It didn’t make it better because I also felt like shit. It made it worse. It sucked, but I wasn’t going to make it if I let myself get drawn back before doing what I had to do.

  I spent most of my time on the train in my seat. I didn’t really care to try to see a movie or talk to anyone. I slept a lot, but it was still a thirty-six-hour ride, and my mind wandered back to LA, to Asher, more than just a little. Watching the landscape outside change as I left the city behind wasn’t the same as it had been getting from the ranch to LA. I had wanted to leave Bermuda behind. LA was still calling to me, screaming in the back of my mind. Everything I had left still pulled me back.

  The train finally got to the station in Seattle at around eight the next night. Callie, forewarned of my arrival, had arranged for me to crash on her couch for a night in preparation for seeing my parents the next day. Wanting to be alone when I got there, I hadn’t asked her to pick me up. I got a cab to the house. Both she and Vince were out. Perfect. I cried myself to sleep watching Grey’s Anatomy.

  My parent’s house was empty when I got there. I unlocked the door and was greeted by Dr. Speckles, their overweight, smush-faced cat. I looked around. I’d lived here eighteen of my twenty-four years, and the only reason I knew it was not someone else’s house was my key had unlocked the door.

  Dad was at the university and Mom might have been working too. He was a professor, and she was a florist unless she’d started doing something else while I had been too depressed to notice. His brilliance wasn’t the reason I wanted a master’s degree. I’d wanted one because it was difficult to be a research scientist without one.

  Oh yeah, I could re-enroll now that I was back. I could do a lot of things since I was back. See what all the people I used to know were up to, get my own place, reintegrate as an actual part of society again.

  Ugh. It all sounded awful. It was like having to eat gluten-free doughnuts when you knew what the real deal was like. All I needed it to do was rain, and I would be back out that door bee-lining for sunny California again.

  I walked in and climbed the familiarly creaky steps up to my bedroom. Asher’s house had the stairs on the outside I couldn’t help thinking. On the wall by the stairs was eighteen years of family photos; baby pictures, family portraits, graduation, everything. He had no signs anywhere that he had people he’d come from.

  He had talked to me about his mom and Florida where he grew up, and the foster homes. I had started to read one of her books that he had in his office. I had imagined being around long enough to meet her.

  Instead of feeling like a homecoming, it felt like a giant step backward. My room was exactly the same as it had been when I was a kid, frozen in time. Walls plastered with posters and photographs, the fuzzy faux fur blanket I had made my parents get me, which at this point, Dr. Speckles got far more use out of than I did. The things I left behind when I went to college and didn’t want to move with when I went to live with Callie.

  It was me. All the me’s I’d been during the time that I had lived there. That wasn’t to say I’d become a different person when I’d been gone, but I’d grown, and parts of me had become bigger than who I was in the past. Like when the jeans you wore when you were sixteen don’t fit you anymore as an adult. Or they do, but you wore them when you were sixteen so you feel you can’t anymore.

  All it had taken was coming back home to realize it wasn’t where I wanted to be anymore. It wasn’t where I felt I belonged, and the people who lived there weren’t the people I wanted to spend all my time with. I suspected it would feel that way—that wasn’t what the problem was. The problem was telling my parents.

  In the time before they got to the house, I had a shower, did some laundry, ate a sandwich and packed a suitcase all while trying not to call Asher. It was still too soon. I had to do it better this time. One thing at a time. I had a number of things to prepare. First, I called Callie, telling her when to expect me back again, then sent an email to my old university, then spent several minutes clicking through Google. I think my mother was in the house before my father was, but in any case, I waited until it was both their voices I heard downstairs before going to see them.

  Mom saw me first, accosting me before I had even made it all the way down. She smelled like she always did. Like Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door perfume and some sort of fruity Head and Shoulders shampoo. She was crying. My father was a little more restrained, letting me get all the way down before he hugged me. He shepherded us into the living room where the next part of the welcome could begin: the interrogation.

  What the fuck were you thinking, why did you leave, do you realize how worried we were, all asked with frustration and anger, rightly felt. I couldn’t even pretend to feel bad about it. They’d gotten me as a daughter instead of a girl who would have sat her thirty days in the desert diligently before returning to their home and resuming a carefully monitored life under their supervision.

  Felicity would have loved that plan, but I was Felicity, and I didn’t. I could appreciate the sense and the caution. I could see the reason and their motives presenting it. But I couldn’t see the version of me that would take it instead of trying to rebel. I had gone through the trouble of creating another person I could defer to when I didn’t like the way things were going when really; I had just underestimated my ability to be a bigger person than I thought I was.

  Sooner or later, the cookies made an appearance. With coffee and hot chocolate. My parents took opposing positions in the quest for the truth: my father demanding and annoyed, and my mother placating him while shielding me from his ire. None of my answers were good enough, but they were the truth. As much of the truth as I could tell without telling them just how Asher felt when he was inside of me and how he was a big part of the reason they were about to be seeing a whole lot less of me.

  My father’s whole thing was the leaving rehab part. The inpatient treatment was only covered by the insurance in part. The other part they had paid, and they’d paid for a thirty-day stay, and I hadn’t even completed half of that. That was probably the part I felt the worst about. Not just hurting them, but everyone else I hurt doing this stupid, stupid thing.

  Once that bit was over, they finally started talking about what next. I sat up a little straighter because this was the most important part.

  “I can talk to her old supervisor. She can re-enroll during the winter intake,” my father was saying.

  “Actually, I’m not staying,” I announced. They stopped, and he looked at me like I’d just addressed them in Latin.

  “Stop it, Lissy. You just got back,” my mom said brusquely.

  “I mean it, Mom, Dad. I’m not staying here. I came here to apologize and show you that I was okay. I didn’t come back to live with you.”

  “Lissy,” my father started, weary, “we can talk about this in the morning. Let’s have dinner, enjoy being together after our time apart and then we can talk about this when we’ve all had some time to process this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I’ve made my mind up. I’m staying with Callie until I can move into my own place in Los Angeles.”

  Right then, the announcement that I was pregnant, o
r that I was going to join a cult would have gone over better. I guess I never really knew how upset or passionate my parents could get because I’d never awoken that sort of emotion in them. I’d been their nice, hardworking girl who’d never done anything wrong.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” my father said.

  “I can’t stay here. I think I’ve shown you that I can take care of myself. I don’t want to be babied anymore. I want to have my life back, and I don’t think I can do it from here. I still want to talk to you guys, I’m not cutting you off, but I don’t want to lose what I’ve gained these last few weeks.”

  They tried to negotiate with me. They were probably expecting something different from me. Something more typical, I suppose. Someone more agreeable. Someone more like the person they’d dropped off in the desert. Happy to stay with them and slowly reintegrate myself into real life again over a year or so. Becoming immobile again sounded horrifying. Slowing down in any way sounded like a nightmare. I’d finally gotten my power back, and not even their pleas would get me to relinquish it again.

  Callie and Vince’s was close enough to walk to. The sound of my suitcase rolling on the sidewalk was sort of loud in the quiet night. I’d only packed the clothes I had thought were essential. When I was moving to LA, I’d have to get everything. They were upset, but I didn’t think they were so mad that they wouldn’t let me back in their house. I got to the house in about half an hour. It was a two-bedroom place with a backyard. Callie had said I could have my old room because she and Vince shared one.