Bri
Did I miss him? I almost laugh at the question, but my heart is beating too fast in my chest right now for me to find anything funny. But the question is ludicrous. Missing him doesn’t even come close to the effect his absence has had on me . . . on us. I keep working the wrench, but really I don’t have any clue why anymore. I’ve forgotten what I originally knelt down here to do. Slick’s always had this effect on me, for as long as I can remember. But I’m a woman now; I won’t play the nervous girl.
“I missed you,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.
I stand up, turning away from him, and walk to the other end of the room to where my rag rests on the counter.
“Then why won’t you look at me, Brat?”
Brat . . . I remember when I was a scrawny kid and he first started calling me that. Back then we were just kids, and I didn’t have a crush on him and he certainly didn’t have a crush on me. I can’t remember the exact moment when Slick stopped being a wild older boy and became a man. All I remember is being fourteen years old and flaring with hormones and wanting nothing more than for him to sneak into my bedroom one night. But he wouldn’t. He was too respectful for that. And he had no interest in girls under eighteen. But when I turned eighteen . . . as I wipe my hands, the memory hits me, just as his thrusts hit me that night, the writhing, the shaking orgasms, the trembling pleasure of it all.
“I’ll look at you,” I say. But my conscience is heavy. This is all so confusing. I feel guilty even if him being captured had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t like I hid her from him. He just wasn’t here.
There’s a laugh in his voice. “Go on, then.”
Placing the rag down, I turn and face him. My breath catches for half a second, but I fight away that girlish response. I can’t stop my body from aching at the sight of him, however. He’s much the same as he was when he left, even if there are a few more scars on his knuckles. He’s tall with sky-blue eyes, startling eyes, the sort of eyes to make you take notice. Tall, muscular, with a kind yet tough face and oil-black hair shaved close at the sides and longer on top. Now, after his long ride, his hair droops down over his eyes. His arms—and his back, I remember—are tattooed with the roads he’s ridden during his time as a courier.
“See,” I say, smiling nervously as he just stares at me. “Looking at you isn’t a problem.”
“You seem uncomfortable,” he says, approaching me. He moves with the calm confidence of a jungle cat, his mass of muscles resting beneath his languid movements, but as I watch him, I get the feeling I’ve always gotten: that if he wanted, he could move with ferocious intent. I remember that night, when my feelings were confirmed, and a hot tingle moves down my spine.
“I’m not uncomfortable,” I say, looking up at him.
We stand close together now, about a foot apart. He wears his leather and a pair of scuffed blue jeans and workman’s boots. He looks rough, tired, and yet somehow still handsome as hell. He grins at me, that same cocky grin underlain with real emotion. “Good,” he says. “I just . . . I’ve gotta say, Brat, it’s damn strange seeing you like this. I thought by nineteen you were pretty much all grown up, but it looks like you still had some growing up to do.”
I’ve had to grow up, I want to say, but don’t.
Instead, I say, “You look about the same. Rough. Scary. The sort of man you want to stay clear of.”
“Is that right?” He steps forward, now so close that his body is almost pressed up against mine.
My heartbeat goes into overdrive now. I let my hands rest at my sides, sweating, shaking. My legs fidget, as though they either want to run or be wrapped around his waist. My mind is the worst culprit of all. My mind throws up images of Slick, memories of his naked body, writhing, thrusting, phantom sensations of his breath on my neck, his lips on my breasts.
“What are your plans now, then?” I ask, trying to redirect the conversation. It’s not that I don’t want to be with Slick—he’s come to me every night these past two years, burning into my dreams—but I can’t, not until he knows everything. He might feel different if he knew the truth.
But he doesn’t want the conversation to be redirected, I can tell. “How is it, Brat, that you can wear an overall and still look sexier than any woman in lingerie?”
I blush. I don’t want to. But that’s the effect he has on me, gazing at me—no, into me—with those sky-blue eyes. “You’re just talking to talk now,” I mutter.
“Then why are you blushing?”
“I’m not blushing!” I protest, but even so I turn my face away from him. “You’re such an ass, Sky.”
He chuckles. After two long years, hearing him laugh is about the sweetest thing there is. Having him lean over me and talk all this bullshit is just as sweet. But what would be far, far sweeter than both is to open the garage office, drag him inside, and lose myself in him for an hour.
His fingers are rough on my chin, but I’ve never minded his roughness. He turns my face back to him. “I thought about you a lot when I was away,” he says. “A damn lot. So you’ve gotta see how surprising it is to come back, not to the nineteen-year-old Brat I left behind, with the tomboy hair and the tomboy—well, everythin’—but to come back to . . . look at you, Brat.”
Without thinking—if I was thinking, I wouldn’t do it—I reach up and press his fingers into my face, enjoying the roughness. For a long moment, we just watch each other. Then I let my hand drop and take a step back. “I . . . I need to work on the bike.” I turn away.
Slick walks around me, intercepting me, and says, “I was thinkin’, Brat, why not pick up where we left off?”
Again, we are standing face to face, bodies almost touching. My nipples, hard, scream out at me to step forward another inch, let them press into his pectoral muscles. My clit aches, sending signals through my body for his rough finger to be pressed against it. My breath comes quicker, so quick I have to bite down on my lip to stop from panting. How easy it would be, to throw myself at him. I want to, I’ve thought about it countless times since he’s been away, not knowing if he was dead or alive.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I whisper, glancing down.
He lifts my gaze again. “No,” he says, “it isn’t.”
He leans down. We’re about to kiss. In the split-seconds between his words and him beginning to lean down—less than a second, the breath of a moment—I no longer care about my reservations. Slick has had his effect on me, as he has many times before. And I welcome it, despite the complications. An hour, two hours of pure pleasure. Then, the complications will be aired.
His lips brush mine. I let out a small moan.
“Brianna!”
Dad’s voice cuts through the moment like a butcher’s cleaver. I place my hand on Slick’s chest and push away. Slick steps back, a bemused smile on his face, and then the bemusement turns sour as he sees Dad—or Grizzly, to Slick—standing there with one of his angry looks. Dad has an entire assortment of these, one for each occasion. This one isn’t blind rage, more like understanding anger; he understands why we might want to kiss, but he does not condone it. All of this displays itself in the deep-lined etches of his wrinkled face. Even now, at twenty-one, I find him imposing. Not as tall as Slick, but wider, bald but sporting a bushy grey beard, his eyes a deep brown, he looks like some old great bear, gnarled but still tough.
“Boss,” Slick says easily. “Bri was just tuning up my bike. Long ride back.”
“Right,” Dad says. “I’ll send one of the pledges out.”
“I can do it—”
Dad barks, “You need to pick up your daughter. That damn babysitter isn’t going to take care of her for the rest of her life, you know. I’ve had her on the fuckin’ phone—the club phone—askin’ how much longer you’re going to be. You said you’d pick her up in the morning.”
“Oh,” I murmur, remembering. I’d only come into the garage area for my car keys, which I’d left on the counter yesterday before crashing in the clubhouse after a long job. Heather had taken care of Charlotte overnight, but she has work this morning. But then I’d seen Slick and just sort of went into auto mode.
“Daughter?” Slick says. “Daughter? What the . . . I thought you . . .”
“I better go,” I say quickly.
I don’t look at him, can’t look at him, or these past two years will spill out in a jumbled mess. I pace away from the counter, reach Dad—who stares down at me with his disapproving bear’s stare—and then have to return to collect my keys. I pick them up and leave the garage as quickly as I can, head bowed, annoyed at Dad for interrupting us, annoyed at myself for being so rash with Slick, for letting my defenses down, and most of all annoyed with those bastards in Seattle for taking him hostage to begin with. All of this would be so much simpler if Slick had been here for the last two years.
Climbing into my car, I start the engine and make my way toward my apartment building. I keep thinking about the kiss, the almost-kiss, the barest touching of lips. I keep thinking about how it would’ve felt to press my lips hard into his, to reach down and squeeze his cock, a cock I’ve only ever felt inside of me once. Sometimes, since he’s been away, I’ve woken up in the night with my hands wedged between my legs, in my crotch, fingers rubbing furiously at my clit and Slick naked and sweating and manly as hell in my mind.
I push those thoughts far down, but then my mind just turns to Dad and Slick, to wondering what they’re talking about. I hope Dad doesn’t confront Slick about it; I hope he just leaves it, pretends he didn’t see anything. Dad is a good man, but it seems that nobody is good enough to even broach the idea of being with me. He says he wants me to settle down and find somebody, but every man is a monster and he doesn’t want me or his granddaughter at risk, especially after Mom. Mom . . . That’s why Slick was so surprised, I think. I once told him that after I learned what happened to my mother—she died giving birth to me—I would never have children of my own.
“Well,” I mutter, pulling into my apartment building’s parking area, “things change.”
I walk past the people leaving for work, swipe into the building, walk up to the second floor and enter the apartment. Heather barely has time to be angry before she gives me a peck on the cheek and rushes out to work. She was my mother’s best friend, and she’s taken me under her wing since I was a little kid. It’s not like Grizzly was going to show me how to use tampons and remind me to use condoms. Though that second lesson didn’t sink in so well. With her short, dyed red hair, fierce and loyal, Heather Chapman makes the perfect babysitter.
I find Charlotte in her bedroom, sitting on the floor, flipping clumsily through one of her picture books. “Panda, panda, panda,” she says, pointing at the panda. “Mommy, Mommy, panda, panda!”
I go to her, kneeling down. She’s got a head of sparse, thin, bright red hair, a wide open face, and looks especially pretty this morning in her pink outfit.
“Hey, princess,” I say, kissing her on the forehead.
She beams.
“Mommy, horsey!” She flips the page, but when she can’t find the horse, she begins to cry.
I flip through the book for her and find the horse, which stops her weeping only after I’ve pointed at it a dozen or so times, and repeated the same number of times the word, “Horse.” I love Charlotte, more than anything, more than life, but as I point at the picture book I think back to that quick brushing of lips, to Slick, and can’t help but wish Dad had walked in one hour later.