My eyes became fixed on the green pleather couch. It was the single most hated piece of furniture in the entire home. Modeled after the 1950’s original, the Danish-modern lime green piece was hideous, to say the least.
I spun toward Tito, who was standing immediately to my left. The sudden movement caused me to lose my balance. I stumbled—more planned than accidental—hoping that he’d catch me.
He did just as I hoped.
Unlike Jared, Tito’s muscles were hard, like steel. My eyes fluttered momentarily at the feeling of being cradled in his strong arms.
For some women, a one-night-stand is nothing more than a dick fix. One rung up the sexual ladder from masturbating while Selena Gomez’s Good for You plays in the background. A true fuck ‘em and forget ‘em scenario that rarely includes the exchange of phone numbers, and never included the use of a real name—at least not entirely. Kissing and foreplay were prohibited. It was too intimate. Too personal.
I wasn’t one of those women.
By no means was I a slut, but I’d had my share of one-night-stands. In my opinion, nothing was off-limits—nor should it be.
Kissing, hugging and oral sex was welcome. The use of toys, candles, bath bombs, and the preparation of a post-sex meal was a common occurrence.
A quickie caused me to feel like the slut I swore I wasn’t. Having an intimate night filled with kissing, caressing, sex, and a bath allowed me to convince myself it was a perfect date that simply didn’t work out.
Cradled in his arms, I ogled him with drunken eyes. “Kiss me.”
Without argument, he complied.
Be it the wine, bottled-up anticipation, or the kiss itself, I’ll never know. Nevertheless, a tidal wave of emotion rushed through me. My purse fell to the floor. Pawing over every inch of his body, I searched for the right place for my hands to land. Eventually, they came to rest against the taut muscles of his back.
The kiss continued, growing more intimate with each beat of my heart.
If Tito’s ability to kiss was any indication as to what the night held, letting him go would be difficult, if even possible.
At that moment, I had no intention of releasing him. Instead, I’d allow him to use me as he wished, making me his real-life sex doll for what remained of our night together. When he was finished, he’d leave satisfied.
Rubber-legged, I’d stumble to my bed, nestle myself between the 1,800 thread-count sheets, and fall asleep armed with memories I’d later use to tell stories that would cause even a seasoned sexual veteran to gasp.
My body melted into his. He continued to kiss me like it was the last opportunity he’d ever have to do so. Paralyzed by euphoric bliss, my eyes fell closed.
His thick cock throbbing against my hip brought me out of my dream-like state. On the brink of a desire-induced internal inferno, I fumbled to find his belt.
The well-aged denim of his jeans was all that stood between me and a night of sexual bliss. I giggled to myself at the thought of him bending me over the green sofa and satisfying me to no end. Desperate to release his stiff dick of its confines, I frantically wrestled with the buckle of his belt.
Our lips parted. His hands pressed against my chest, pushing me away.
It wasn’t a “get away, you crazy bitch” shove. It was more a delicate “step aside and let me get that for you” push.
Watching him do it would be far more satisfying. I took a step back and prepared for him to release the beast. He wiped the edge of his index finger across his lips. In anticipation of what was to come, I did the same.
My gaze fell to his crotch.
Much to my surprise, his hands weren’t unbuckling his belt. In fact, they were doing the opposite.
He repositioned his bulge and buckled his belt. “I should probably go.”
“Go!?” I gasped. “Whaaaaat?”
“You’ve had too much to drink,” he said, his voice nearly inaudible. “Let’s leave it at a kiss.”
My pussy was soaked. Mentally, I’d already fucked him a dozen times. Prepared for an all-night debate to support my sexual cause, I crossed my arms over my chest. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“You can barely stand,” he said.
“Pull my pants down and prop me against something,” I reasoned. “I’ll be sober in no time. Probably after no more than a few strokes.”
“We’ll have to do it some other time.” He leaned forward and kissed me softly. “I’m sorry.”
Incapable of formulating a reasonable response, I stood on wobbling legs and watched as he sauntered to the door.
He opened it and glanced over his shoulder. “Thank you. I had a good time.”
Still processing the loss of my brown-eyed biker, I stood with my drunken mouth agape and stared. The clunk of the door closing behind him was a reminder that our night together was over.
My quest for what I was after, however, had only begun.
216
Tito
I set the 300-dollar bottle of scotch down beside my chair and took a seat. “Where’s Braxton?”
Hap rocked his chair onto the rear legs and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Hasn’t made it yet.”
“I can see that.” I chuckled. “I was wondering where he was. He’s normally here by now.”
“He keeps his whereabouts a secret.” He glanced at the bottle of scotch and then whistled through his teeth. “That’s a 300-dollar bottle of scotch.”
“I’m well aware.”
“He’s never wrong,” he said dismissively. “You should remember that when betting against him.”
“No one is right 100 percent of the time,” I argued.
“He is. At least when he offers to make a bet.” He dropped his chair onto all four legs. Following a moment of what appeared to be deep thought, he looked at me. “Can’t recall that he’s ever lost one, really.”
“Now’s a fine time to tell me.”
He laughed. “Couldn’t get a word in edgewise the other day. You two were bickering like an old married couple.”
“We weren’t bickering.”
He lowered his chin slightly. “You’ve been in a piss-poor mood since you lost that hat. You were bickering.”
“We were having a discussion.”
His look went stolid. “It’s high time you and I had a discussion.”
I raised my brows in wonder. “About?”
“About the fact that my lips are parched.” He nodded toward the cooler and grinned. “Pass me a beer, Kid.”
I handed him a bottle of beer. “Drink too many of those things, and you might end up losing your physique. A guy’s got to watch it at your age.”
He glared. “It’s fucking noon.” After a lengthy stare, he twisted off the cap and threw it at me. “I’m not a lush. I’ve got a one-day a week relationship with beer. When you get to be my age, you’ve got to watch several things. One is carb intake, and that’s why I drink Ultra. The other is having snot-nosed neighbor kids coming over and raising my blood pressure.”
I reached in the cooler and retrieved a cold beverage. “At my age, I can drink as many of these things as I—”
“Save it, smart ass,” he said with a wave of his hand. “What I want to hear is how you came about buying that high-dollar bottle of scotch. That gal wanted your wiener and that’s it, huh? She was using you, just like Brax said.”
“I don’t have a wiener.”
“Prick, willie, pecker, schlong, dong. Call it whatever you want to call it.”
I took a drink. “Cock.”
His brows pinched together. “That’s kind of brash, isn’t it? Cock? Sounds like a term out of a porno movie. ‘Hey lady. Why don’t you grab a fistful of my big cock?’ Hell, that sounds rude. You don’t really call it your cock in front of women, do you?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged. “I really don’t call it anything in front of women.”
The unmistakable sound of Braxton’s SUV accelerating from a stop war
ned of his arrival. Hap nodded toward the street. “There’s Brax now. We’ll ask him what he thinks about this.”
“We don’t need to ask him—”
“We’re a family, goddamn it,” he snapped. “If we can’t talk about matters openly, they’ll end up eating us up inside.”
“Nothing’s eating me up inside,” I insisted. “And, we don’t have a matter to discuss.”
Braxton parked, but left the vehicle running.
Hap gestured toward the driveway. “Looks like someone’s pissed off.”
Appearing to be in a heated discussion with someone, Braxton was talking on the vehicle’s hands-free phone. His brows were knitted together, his hands were waving in all directions, and the veins in his neck were protruding.
After several minutes, he shut off the vehicle and opened the door. Wearing dark jeans, dress shoes, and a sport coat—which was casual dress for him—he glanced at each of us, and then sauntered up the driveway.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Had some business I had to take care of.”
Hap gestured toward the beer cooler with the neck of his bottle. “Sunday’s supposed to be a day of rest.”
“I can’t decide when the phone rings,” Braxton responded. “When I do, I’ve got to resolve whatever it is that presents itself.”
“I need to present you with something,” Hap said.
Braxton opened a beer and took a drink. “What’s that?”
“A couple of things, actually,” Hap said. “One, The Kid won’t discuss his dick in front of women. Second thing is this: there’s a bottle of scotch beside his chair, which means that gal wanted to use him for nothing but sex. He refuses to discuss that, too.”
“I haven’t refused to discuss anything,” I argued.
Hap peered beyond me, toward Braxton. “Hey, Brax. What do you call your wiener? When you’re talking about it in front of a woman?”
“Depends on the woman,” Braxton responded as if the topic were a matter commonly discussed.
“Give me an example,” Hap said.
Appearing to give the subject some serious thought, Braxton took a long drink of his beer. He lowered the bottle and glanced at what remained. Seeming satisfied, he looked at Hap. “In a doctor’s presence, I’d call it a penis. In the presence of a timid woman, I’d probably refer to it as a dick. If she was more open-minded and a little mischievous, I’d call it a cock.”
“Didn’t realize cock was such a common term,” Hap said.
Braxton looked at me. “Is that what you call it?”
“Unless he’s in front of a woman,” Hap interjected. “Then, the topic’s off-limits.”
“You won’t discuss your junk in front of a woman?” Braxton asked, his eyes narrowing as he spoke.
“Said he doesn’t discuss it in front of women,” Hap said.
“Let him respond, Old Man,” Braxton said with a laugh.
“He took my earlier reply out of context,” I explained. “What I was meaning was this: in front of a woman, I don’t need to make reference to it by name.”
“Don’t need to?” he asked. “Or won’t?”
“It’s not necessary,” I responded.
“So, you don’t discuss it in front of a woman?”
“I don’t need to.”
“But you’ll sit here and discuss it at length,” he said. “You don’t think that’s odd?”
“We’re getting way off the subject. Like I said, there’s no need. It’s not like I have some strange hang up.”
He drank what remained of his beer and stood. “Sounds like you do.”
“Well, I don’t.”
He walked to the front door and pulled it open. “I’ll be right back,” he said over his shoulder.
Somewhat mystified by Braxton’s lack of acknowledgement to my response, I looked at Hap.
“Don’t look at me,” Hap said. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”
Braxton disappeared into the house, and then returned in a moment with three whisky glasses. He paused after stepping onto the porch and nodded toward the box sitting beside my chair. “Am I to assume that’s for me?”
I handed it to him. “It is.”
After removing the bottle from the box, he poured three glasses of whisky and gave each of us one.
He raised his glass. “To friends, family, and the fucked up things we get ourselves into.”
Hap and Braxton took theirs in one gulp. I sipped mine, but then decided to do as they did, and down it in one drink. As the warmth of the liquor slowly worked its way to my stomach, I set the glass beside my chair.
“So, tell me about your date with the hat detective,” Braxton said.
“Well, we went to that restaurant you recommended—”
“What’d you think?” he asked.
“It was great. Like you said, it’s kind of a run-down dive, but the food was fantastic.”
“The waitstaff is…interesting,” he said. “Most of ‘em are over sixty.”
“Ours was pushing seventy,” I said.
“Nothing wrong with being seventy,” Hap snarled.
“Then what?” Braxton asked, smirking. “Did you go back to her place and point at your dick?”
I rolled my eyes. “She wanted to have sex, but all I did was kiss her. I left after that.”
He gave me a look of sheer disbelief. “So, not only is it off-limits to discuss, it’s off-limits, period?”
“She was drunk,” I said adamantly. “I wasn’t going to have sex with her if she was so drunk that she could barely stand.”
“Wine?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“They pour a hefty glass at that place.”
“They sure do. I only drank one and I felt like I’d had enough. I asked her when we were leaving if she was okay. She said she was, but I could tell she wasn’t. By the time we got to her house, she was tanked.”
“How many did she have?”
“Three. Maybe four.”
“Jesus. How big is she?”
“She stands about five-four and weighs maybe one-forty,” I responded. “She’s no newcomer to drinking wine, though. She drank her first glass just like you drank that glass of scotch.”
Hap cleared his throat. “So, you wouldn’t fuck her because she had a little too much wine?”
“I wasn’t going to take advantage of her if she was drunk.”
“Did she say she wanted sex?”
“She made it clear,” I said with a laugh. “She was pretty pissed off when I left.”
He peered into his empty glass. “Damned shame things are the way they are.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“If you were drunk and she ripped your clothes off, it’d be called a fun time,” he said. “If she’s drunk and you do it, it’s rape. I suppose it was a good decision on your part to walk away. Especially beings as you don’t really know her.”
“My fear of her claiming rape isn’t why I walked away.”
“Why’d you do it, then?”
“Several reasons,” I said.
“Enlighten me,” Hap said. “I’ve got to live vicariously through you and dip-shit over there, and he refuses to talk to me about women.”
“I didn’t like the thought of having sex with her if she wasn’t even going to remember it the next day. Then, I don’t know. I guess I realized we had some things in common during dinner. I was hoping if I withheld on the sex that she might go on a second date.”
Hap raised his empty glass and turned it upside down over his open mouth. “In theory, that sounds like a good plan. May or may not work.” After a considerable wait, a lone drop of whisky fell onto the tip of his tongue. He grinned. “What did you two have in common?”
“She was bold, quick-witted, and had a really good sense of humor. She was also intelligent. Very much so, to be honest.”
“All characteristics that you clearly don’t possess,” Hap said with a l
augh. “Sounds like a match made in heaven.” He leaned forward and looked past me, at Braxton. “You planning on hoarding that bottle of scotch, or are you going to share it?”
Braxton tossed the bottle through the air like it was a boomerang. My muscles tensed at the thought of it crashing down on the porch and shattering in a thousand pieces.
As if it were as common of an occurrence as tying his shoes, Hap caught the bottle mid-flight, by the neck.
He gave Braxton a thankful nod. “Thank you, son.”
“Thank our naïve friend,” Braxton said.
“I’m not naïve.”
“I’d argue that,” Braxton said, raising his open hand over his head.
While my focus was on Braxton, the bottle of scotch flew into my field of vision, from behind me. No differently than his father, Braxton snatched it from the air without a second thought.
“You had no idea that girl wanted to use you for sex,” he said, uncorking the bottle. “I did. Considering that we both had the same information to formulate our opinion, I’d say that makes you slightly naïve.”
“I think my judgement was clouded.”
“By what?”
“Hope.”
“Hope?” He poured his glass half full and handed me the bottle. “Of what?”
“That there would be more to it than that,” I responded. “More than just a one-night-stand.”
“What were you hoping for?”
I held onto the hat for ten years, denying the existence of everything associated with how I obtained it. Realizing I lost it brought a flood of suppressed memories that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. With those memories came pain.
Tremendous pain.
I hoped being in Reggie’s company could eliminate that pain.
Being honest wasn’t going to be an easy task. I poured my glass half full of whiskey. Being vague with Braxton prompted him to poke and prod until he got the results that satisfied him. In the end, he controlled the outcome by asking the right questions or diverting the conversation along a path that evoked the response he was after.
I sipped the scotch. Despite my efforts to hide it, the fact remained.
Devil's Disciples MC Series- The Complete Boxed Set Page 113