Ty’s stomach panged a warning. Looking up, he saw she’d put on lipstick, and her dark red hair was fluffed around her face. No. Not a fucking chance.
Her age didn’t bother him—far as he was concerned, consenting adults were all the same age in the dark—but she had a wide, earnest smile like this was a high school disco and he was the teacher she’d had her eye on all year. He didn’t have the fucking energy. He just wanted to get drunk enough to go back to his hotel room and pass out. If he was horny, he could always crack open the complimentary moisturiser and wring himself out. It wasn’t as good as a blowjob, but it was a lot less messy. Metaphorically speaking. He picked up his drink without meeting Sandy’s gaze. “Nice to meet you.”
“Are you staying across the road?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Sandy rocked on her heels. “Is it a nice room?”
“Nice enough.”
Part of him felt guilty about how he was acting. There were better ways to do this. A few years ago he’d have told her he had a physically demanding job and needed sleep, or that he had a girlfriend. Then again, a few years ago he did have a physically demanding job and a girlfriend. Now he was just some mid-level, middle-aged corporate asshole with a borderline drinking problem and an unfinished manuscript, of all the fucking clichés. So he waited for Sandy to read his near-silence as a complete lack of interest and leave him alone. The moment never came.
She leaned closer, her thick purplish perfume surrounding him like an eighties miasma. “I finish up in twenty minutes. Want some company?”
Across the pub, Middleton had her hand in Buddy’s hair and was kissing him so deeply she looked at risk of falling into his face. Ty genuinely considered Sandy’s offer. He could bed her and make her scream so loud everyone in the hotel block heard it. Then tomorrow when the guys were ribbing him in that half-admiring, half-jealous way, Middleton would know she wasn’t the only one who could pull on a work trip. She’d have to look at him and wonder how he was in bed, see him as a guy who could get laid instead of some old man she offered meringues to at work.
For a second Ty was sold, then the stupidity of the idea sank into his bourbon pickled brain like water soaking into soil. Unprofessional, inappropriate, and not to mention tacky. He raised his glass again, downing half the too-cold liquid inside. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m headed to bed as soon as I finish this.”
Sandy raised a heavily plucked eyebrow. “I’m saying I can keep you company in bed.”
“I heard you.”
“Well, you’re not gonna turn me down, are you?”
Ty closed his eyes, feeling the dirt and grit that had collected there. Why couldn’t anything ever be easy? “Sorry, I’m not interested.”
“Why? You got a better offer?”
Ty’s gaze jumped to where Middleton stood sucking face with her teen paramour. “No.”
“Then why—”
“You a mum?”
Sandy frowned. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t do mothers.”
Her mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious?”
“I am.”
For a moment she stared at him in confusion, then the reality of what he was saying seemed to hit her right between the eyes. “You’re an asshole!”
“I know.”
“You don’t know it enough.” Sandy’s palms found her hips, her elbows sticking out like the handles on a premiership cup. “Finish your drink and get out of here, or I’ll chuck you out.”
“Not a problem.”
She shot him a look of pure venom and stormed away. Ty felt a twinge of remorse, but the relief was much, much greater. He didn’t need a fly-by-night fuck, he needed to start sleeping off what he hoped would be a manageable hangover. He finished his drink, stood and pulled on his jacket. It was a nice coat. A double-breasted wool affair Veronica had found in a boutique store when they were staying in Dublin. He almost choked when he saw the price tag, but she’d insisted he buy it. “You look like such a catch in it, Tyler. Like a handsome stranger you fall in love with on the train.”
As he buttoned up, he cast a last glance at Middleton, who was still making out with Buddy by the jukebox, oblivious to him the way she’d been all night, the entire time he’d known her.
Outside, the winter air was sharp as a knife. Ty breathed it in, feeling pleasantly warm and cold, sober and drunk. He lingered by the beer garden, inhaling deeply, wishing he could smoke like the kids around him. He had dropped the habit when he joined the MFB. You couldn’t be a firefighter who voluntarily gave yourself smoke damage, but years later he still craved the taste, the smell.
“Have you seen Trigger?” a stringy-haired kid shouted, audible even over the crowd. “He’s, like, two seconds away from fingering that chick right at the bar.”
Ty paused as all the kids in Stringy-Hair’s gang—teenagers far gawkier and more acnefied than Buddy— turned and looked at Middleton through the window.
A Burmese kid with a nose ring groaned. “Fuck me, who is she?”
“No idea.” Stringy-Hair sounded wistful. “Trigger just walked up to her and asked if she wanted a drink. I hate that cunt sometimes.”
A doe-eyed kid in a beanie laughed and held up his phone. “Don’t be jealous. Did you get Trigger’s snapchat?”
“He snapchats me twelve times an hour,” Nose-Ring complained. “What’s this one about?”
“He said if he can get that chick back to his dorm he’s keeping his laptop open.”
Several boys hooted and Stringy-Hair downed the last of his pint. “That said, we should head back and get comfortable before the show starts.”
“Solid plan.” Beanie-Baby began tapping on his phone. “I’ll tell Trig we’ll be ready in a halfa.”
Drunk and a member of Gen X, it took Ty a few seconds to realise what was going on. When he did his pleasurable drunk-cold sensation vanished. Buddy was going to cam himself and Middleton fucking, and let all his friends watch. Ty’s hands balled into fists. For some unfortunate reason, watching porn with your mates was a male rite of passage, like doing a burnout in your mum’s car or discovering soap made terrible lube. But this, what they were planning to do to Middleton, was completely fucked up. He needed to do something. The kids were busy finishing their beers and arguing if there were any chips in the dorm kitchen. None of them noticed Ty enter the beer garden or walk up behind them. He cleared his throat. “Having a good night, boys?”
The group turned, their expressions hostile until they caught sight of him—six-two and built like the metro firefighter he no longer was—their facial features became neutral real fast.
“Uh, yeah.” Stringy-Hair gave his friends a sidelong glance. “We’re, uh, having a good one.”
“Glad to hear it.” Ty walked over to where Beanie-Baby was lighting up a big-boy cigarette. “Can I grab a smoke?”
“Sure.” Beanie-Baby handed him a Winfield Blue along with his lighter. It was purple and had a topless chick on it. Ty was one hundred percent sure it was meant to be ironic. Kids these days had no fucking taste. He lit up and took a swift drag, relishing the hot prickle in his throat.
“Thanks.” He tossed the lighter to Beanie-Baby then stepped back so he had all the little assholes in his line of vision. “I think we should have a chat about your plans after you leave this pub.”
The boys looked at one another in drunk confusion. Beanie-Baby laughed. “We’re going back to our dorm, y’wanna join us?”
He was expecting his friends to laugh, but they just nudged the ground with their sneakers and looked at their phones. Ty was sure some of them already knew what was happening. He locked eyes with Beanie-Baby. “If you wanna go back to your dorm and have a circle jerk, that’s your decision, but you’re not gonna do it watching your mate fuck one of my employees.”
It was satisfying, watching their faces fall. The most satisfying thing Ty could remember experiencing in weeks. Maybe months. He smiled at
the mortified boys. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re gonna swear on your sad little lives you’re not gonna do what I heard you say you were gonna do, then you’re gonna run back to your crusty dorm room and jack off to Porn Hub like good little boys, understood?”
There was a spatter of mumbled consent but Beanie-Baby scowled at him. “And if we don’t?”
Ty pointed at the CCTV camera fixed to a nearby brick wall. “Then I’ll call Senior Sergeant Gerry Handler down at Bendigo Police Station. He’s a friend of mine. I’ll tell him what you were planning on doing. I’m sure he’ll be able to ID every one of you rapey little fucks from the security video.”
“It’s not rape—” Beanie-Baby began, but Nose-Piercing elbowed him in the ribs. “We were joking,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that.”
“Yeah, the sincerity in your voice is heart-warming.” Ty ground out his barely smoked cigarette on one of the wallets sitting on the picnic bench. Beanie-Baby gave a hiss of outrage but was elbowed into silence again.
“C’mon, let’s go.” Stringy-Hair picked up his phone and shoved it into his pocket. The rest of the gang followed suit, muttering under their breath. Ty watched them go, his anger thrumming like a live wire. From the way they were talking, he’d bet money they’d done this before, the perverted little shits. He breathed deep, telling himself he shouldn’t follow them and give them a more physical taste of his fury.
He turned to the pub window and found Middleton still getting warmed up by the boy who planned to exploit her. If he didn’t help, no one would, but god he didn’t want to talk to her. Not now that he was drunk and alone and had spent so much of the night thinking about sex. Maybe he could just wait till Buddy went to the toilet and king-hit him? Maybe he could text her. Something like ‘your boy's an amateur pornographer and he wants to make you a star, so go to fucking bed’ should do the trick.
As he shoved his hands into his pocket, he considered doing the lowest thing of all—nothing. Middleton was a savvy girl, surely she’d notice if the kid started fucking around with his laptop? And if she didn’t, that was none of his business. This wasn’t a burning building, and he wasn’t a firefighter. Not a hero, not a good guy, just a drunk moron who’d singed a kid’s wallet and insulted a woman who wanted to shag him.
So leave. Leave.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t move an inch. Ty sighed and allowed his feet to carry him toward the pub door, his guts twirling like spaghetti through fork tines. Middleton and the kid were still making out when he tapped his employee on the shoulder. She unstuck herself with some difficulty and turned to face him.
When Ty was a kid, he and his brothers had set off a whole crate of fireworks at once. A blistering rainbow had exploded inches from his face, and even though his mum burst out of the house screaming for them to move, Ty hadn’t. He’d stayed still, drinking in the colours, watching them burst through the air and set pineapple trees ablaze. Looking at Middleton was kind of like that. It burned, stung, made him immune to his own stupidity. Every time he saw her face, with its upturned nose and lightly freckled cheeks, he wanted to do terrible fucking things to it. Up close he was powerless against thoughts of tearing her out of her high-necked, knee-length clothes and keeping her naked in his bed for a week. Transform her from a good girl into a writhing animal who lived to pleasure his dick.
This was why he never fucking talked to her.
“Um, Mr Henderson?” Middleton said in her throaty voice. “Can I help you?”
Why did she have to sound like that? Like someone was perpetually stroking her to an orgasm? Why couldn’t she have a girly, high-pitched voice to match her girly, high-pitched personality? Ty unclenched his teeth. “We’ve gotta be up early for the seminar tomorrow. Time to go to bed.”
Middleton blinked at him. The whites of her eyes were pure milk, the irises a chocolate brown, sweet as her godawful personality. “I understand, Mr Henderson, but I kind of want to stay up. I promise I’ll be on time tomorrow no matter what.”
She took Buddy’s hand and smiled at him. He smiled back at her like he wasn’t planning on showing all his friends what her pussy looked like. Ty gritted his teeth. Again, why couldn’t anything ever be easy? “That’s great, but GGS isn’t paying for you to get poked on the company dime. Wrap this up and go to bed. Alone.”
Middleton’s plaything, whom Ty had been resolutely ignoring, cleared his throat. Up close he had a meathead's face, a broad nose and a thick mouth. “Who are you?” he asked.
Ty straightened his shoulders. “I’m—”
“Oh, sorry, introductions!” Middleton beamed at both of them. “Sam, this is my boss, Tyler Henderson. Mr Henderson this is—”
“I don’t give a shit, Middleton. Say goodbye to your friend and—”
“Wait up…” Buddy’s dopey expression grew dopier. “Why is he calling you Middleton? Isn’t your last name McGrath?”
She beamed at him. “You remembered! All the guys I work with call me Middleton.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the only girl and I have brown hair, and my name’s Kate.”
Buddy continued to look confused.
“Middleton.” She enunciated the word as though to a two-year-old. “Kate Middleton. Get it?”
Buddy stared at her, demonstrating he very much did not get it.
“The Duchess of Cambridge? Prince William’s wife? The future queen of England?”
Ty had heard enough. He gripped Middleton’s upper arm, ignoring the jolt of electricity that shot up his hand. “We’re leaving now, okay?”
“Okay.” Middleton pulled out her phone. “Just let me find a picture of Kate Middleton to show Sam.”
“We don’t have time for this, you need to go to bed.”
“Hang on a minute.” Sam moved toward him. He was tall enough that he and Ty were eye-to-eye. “Just because you’re Katie’s boss, doesn’t mean you can tell her what to do.”
“Yes, it does.”
Buddy’s forehead wrinkled. “Well, yeah but, like, not when you’re not working.”
“We’re on a work trip.”
“Yeah, but like, she’s at a pub. She’s not at work.”
In other circumstances, this might have been funny, but the last of Ty’s patience was waning. He tugged Middleton’s arm. “You done?”
She shook her head. The fruity scent of her hair washed over him like a strawberry haze. “Hurry up.”
“I will, I’ll just be a sec!”
Sam looked from her to Ty. He flexed his sinewy upper arms. “Why don’t you get out of here? I can look after Katie.”
Ty released his hold on Middleton. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, why don’t you fuck off?”
For all his big words, the kid looked uneasy. Just like his mates, he was all talk, too green to hold his own, too young to shut his fucking mouth. Ty got a nice firm grip on the kid’s neck, one that could be mistaken for paternal comradery. “From what I heard, the only ‘looking after’ you were planning on doing involved your friends and a webcam.”
Buddy’s face contracted. He didn’t look like a big man anymore, he looked like what he was—an overgrown kid with more hormones than sense. “You didn’t…I wasn’t…how d’you know…?”
“Your mates are drunk, Trigger, and something tells me they’d be shit at keeping secrets even if they weren’t.”
The kid’s gaze darted toward the beer garden. “That was a joke.”
“Ha-ha-fucking-ha.” Ty tightened his grip on the kid’s neck. “Think Middleton’d like to hear your joke Trigger? Think she’d find it funny?”
Buddy glanced at Middleton, who was thankfully still doddering away on her phone, completely oblivious to their conversation.
“Don’t look at her,” Ty said. “Look at me. Explain to me why you were going to violate a woman for no other reason than it would entertain your fucking friends.”
“Come on, man, I wasn’t going to do that. We’re not even going bac
k to the dorms, we’re gonna go back to Katie’s hotel room.”
“No. You’re leaving, and you’re never coming near Middleton again, understood?”
Sam looked like he wanted to protest. Ty squeezed his hand, compressing the nerves in the kid’s neck, feeling his spinal cord go taut. “I said, understood?”
The kid scowled at him, then nodded.
“Good.” Ty let go of his neck. “Now fuck off.”
But before the kid could leave, Middleton shoved her phone in their faces. “Here we go, royal wedding!”
Startled, Buddy jerked his head, making Middleton drop her phone on the floor. “Shit, sorry, Katie.”
“It’s okay.” Middleton got down on her knees and began looking for it.
Ty rolled his eyes. “I reckon that’s your cue to leave, Trig.”
“But—”
“Found my phone!” Middleton thrust the device into the air. Ty looked down to see her beaming at him from her knees. His first thought was of her smiling like that before going to town on his cock. The second was that something about her was off. Her pupils were blasted—big as black holes and shiny bright. “Middleton, are you on drugs?”
“No!” She looked shocked at the suggestion.
Ty believed her, but her voice was blurry and her eyes were gleaming like wet tar. What could she be on? He hadn’t seen her drink anything tonight, all throughout dinner she’d sipped raspberry lemonade like a nine-year-old.
A dark thought occurred to him and he grabbed Sam’s upper arm, too furious to make it look like anything but a threat. “You give her something?”
“No!” Buddy looked as shocked as Middleton. “Never! I wouldn’t even know where to get stuff like that!”
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Buddy.”
“I’m not! I swear!”
“You know…” Middleton knelt up a little straighter. “You know, it’s weird, Mr Henderson, but sometimes when I drink and take Ritalin, I have blackouts. I look normal, but I’m checked out inside. I once ordered a pizza, ate half, wrapped up the leftovers and when I woke up, I thought someone had broken in to my Aunt’s apartment and left a thin crust Mexicana in my fridge.”
So Steady: Silver Daughters Ink, Book Two (Silver Daughters Ink Book Two) Page 29