He jacked her car, she hotwired his heart.
The icy blast of the shower shocked some of the last night’s fog from my head. I rolled my shoulders, trying to work some of the stiffness out. Stretched my neck to one side until a rattle of clicks popped. Then the other way. It helped, but not much.
Pulled my fingers through my hair, gripping it. Shook my head in the chilling flow. Took a breath in before sticking my chest right into the freezing stream. Man, that wakes you up fast. That and coffee, and I’m good to go. Cold water rinses a thick head clear in no time.
What they call mixed feelings was what I had, washing away the scents of last nights girl. The memory made me smile some. Stiffened and re-awakened my cock, facing forward for the new day. Pecker, as they say, up.
The side of my head was still sore above my ear. As I reached across my shoulder a stab of pain shot over my shoulder blade. What happened? Oh yeah, the idiot in the bar. Big guy with a razored Mohawk cut, a Marine from a nightmare, big daddy drawl, pawing that quiet girl who obviously didn’t want him around.
“You know you want it, babydoll.” Ugh, his voice. Why do guys act like that? More to the point, though, why is it, at the first sniff of trouble, my feet are steering me right at it?
First, I’d tried telling him nicely. “Pal, she’s just not into it. There are lots of girls. One of them will jump for your charm. Leave this one alone, okay?”
That was the bit I did wrong: telling him what to do. He hadn’t made up his mind until then. But I knew it; I got it wrong on purpose. I knew he’d take a swing.
He was built like a double-trunked Redwood. Why the fuck would I start a fight with a guy like that? If that first punch had landed, I’d have been out for the count.
I stepped out of the way of his Flintstone-club fist. Spun with my forearm hard into his stupid face. Hooked my ankle behind his. Slammed my left hand into his nose.
He hit the tiled floor with a crack.
There was a murmur around the bar. A bar fight in Bernie’s isn’t exactly headline news. But the crowd was on my side. That always helps. He moved to get up. I stood over him, ready to put my foot on his chest. Could have slid it up to his chin. And he could see how easily I could do it.
A sound rolled around the bar like a bowling ball. I definitely had the crowd. The guy got up to leave.
He was headed for the door. I turned back to the bar to see that the girl was okay. No making a move, just wanted to make sure she was all right. Okay, I’d watched her slink in and she was hot. Off the scale. So I wanted to make sure she was taken care of, and maybe I was thinking the best way to take care of her might be if we spent a little quality time.
That way I could make sure she was under something secure and protective. Like me. No way did I feel entitled to a prize, but I thought it only fair to give her the chance to offer.
That was when I felt the steel legs of the chair hit hard along my shoulder blade and across the side of my skull.
I lurched forward and went down. My arm waved and I took a table full of glasses with me as I stumbled. Beer and broken glass everywhere. I turned and scrambled up fast. Grabbed the center leg of the small round table in both hands. Jabbed the wooden top straight at his face.
It connected, but without much force. He was still standing. I threw the table at his body and as he fended it off I hit him hard in the throat. He staggered backwards. Reaching. Stumbling. His arms flailed. I shot my fist to knock upward into his jaw. As he crumpled, I reached for a pool cue.
Standing over him, I held the point of the cue against his eye. Quietly, I asked him, “Are we done here yet?”
The murmur around the room gave me a satisfying glow.
He nodded as he scrambled backwards on his heels and elbows. This time I watched him, held the pool cue by its end, and kept it pointed at his eye. Watched him scuttle all the way out of there.
That all accounted for the throb on my shoulder and the pain on the side of my head. It wasn’t what gave me the headache.
When she looked up from the bar—stopped hiding her face and her fabulous body in the protective hunch of her elbows and her rounded shoulders—as she unwound her back, straightened up and turned toward me—she looked like a model. It was like the lights went on. Boy, I do remember now. She was really grateful.
She bought a bottle of tequila and said we should take it to her place. Who was I to refuse? And I’m still long, fat, aching, and twitching, all along the part of me where she showed her appreciation the most.
Now those are some happy shower thoughts, right there. Mm, I could still hear her quivering moans. Feel her clawing my chest as she woke the whole street to tell them my name.
The water bounced and cascaded over me and I shook my head in the flow. No time to think about any of that now. There was a car to be stolen, and if I was late, my life might be on the line.
~<>~
It was still early when I parked up by the apartment building where Tynie lived. His rented apartment was on the fourth floor of a gray, concrete slab in a mess of gray, concrete slabs. The elevator was not reliable, and it always had an acrid, lingering smell of some kind, so I used the stairs.
The balconies on each floor that connected the apartments had most likely been open when the blocks were built, but now they had hard curtains of smeary plastic. The owners of the block most likely put it up to stop people throwing each other off and into the street, or maybe it was to stop themselves.
The plexiglass must have been transparent when it first went up. Scratches on the inside and out, discoloration from the weather, and age had all blurred the view of the outside world. The gaps around the edges created stomach-level slices of cold air.
I banged hard on Tynie’s door and waited a moment. Then I banged again, harder. I shouted Tynie’s name. After a few moments I hit it again, five or six times.
“Tynie! Tynie, come on, will you?”
After a few seconds, Tynie’s voice came from the back of the apartment.
“Ryan! Is that you?”
I banged on the door again. “Tynie, you know it’s me. Come on, we’re going to be late.”
After I hung around a little longer, I beat on his door again ten or a dozen times in a row.
“Give it a fucking rest, will you?!” A voice from the apartment next door.
“All right!” I shouted back. “Come on, Tynie, the neighbors are getting mad.”
There was some noise from the back of Tynie’s apartment. I heard him shuffle toward the door. When he dragged it open, slouched and hanging his messy head of black hair, he still pretty much filled the doorframe.
“Ryan,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep. “We don’t have to go and work for Gregor, do we? I don’t want to go work for Gregor, Ryan.”
When we were in high school together, Tynie had been known as “difficult.“ He had rarely talked to anyone there, and when he did, it was either by shouting or throwing something. Usually furniture.
He was a genius with computers, at math, and with engines. Anything to do with vehicles, Tynie had an uncanny talent for. He was even pretty good at driving them, so long as it didn’t involve interacting with any other drivers. Tynie was temperamentally unsuited to traffic. Never even got a license.
He took a test in high school. When he was asked to parallel park in a somewhat restricted space, he just rammed the cars in front and behind to knock them out of the way. No more drivers’ ed for Tynie after that.
“Today we do, Tynie. Today, we got to work for Gregor.” I didn’t like it, either. The more I knew of Gregor, the less I wanted to be around him.
The money was good, but he wasn’t great company, and neither were the guys he worked with. And neither Tynie nor me were cut out to be career criminals. Not Gregor’s kind, at least.
Gregor was a big-time bank robber. Very serious—big-time crime, big-time stakes. He was hard-assed, no compromises, and a violent reaction was never far below the surface.
Tynie might’ve been reassured if I’d told him I wanted to stop working for Gregor as soon as I could. Tynie didn’t do well with uncertainties, though. Black or white, yes or no. Tynie was kind of binary. He got uncomfortable around the gray areas.
He couldn’t hear “soon” without saying, “Now! Why not now?”
It was never good to discuss things with Tynie that you weren’t certain about. Better to reach a conclusion first, then tell him. He could deal with that, whatever it was.
“We’re working for Gregor today, Tynie. Ready to go?”
Still looking at the floor, he said, “I’ll get my gamepad.”
Tynie’s gamepad was a tablet of some kind, part Fisher-Price, part homebrew, in a multicolored rubber case with odd-shaped bulges. He either built it or had modified it from a hybrid of commercial tablets. When he wasn’t using it for work, he was hunched over it, lost in a game.
He followed me down the stairs to the RAV4 in the parking lot.
“It’s a BMW today, isn’t it, Ryan?” Tynie nodded as he climbed into the passenger seat and strapped himself in. Already, he was pulling something up on his gamepad.
“Yup,” I said driving out of the lot, “Either Corporate Brad, or the Dragon Lady.”
Tynie was already absorbed in a game. Without looking up, he said, “Corporate Brad.”
We slid out into the angry jostle of morning traffic. “Why?”
“He’s very neat.” He frowned in concentration at the game. “He takes better care of his car than that woman.”
I would have preferred the Dragon Lady, mainly for the off-chance of another look at her cute slave girl. She gave me a warm feeling, way down inside. And the glow reached out, too.
What Tynie said made sense, though. Over the past few days, I’d staked out three BMW SUVs. All of them were black, top of the range S7s and in great shape.
Tynie’s call was good, and I liked to let him make decisions when I could, so we would hunt Corporate Brad first. Corporate Brad was what we called the anxious, skinny guy with the thin spectacles and close-cropped hair. Whatever he was, he probably wasn’t corporate in reality.
His hours were regular, though, and that made him a prime candidate as a BMW donor. He usually had breakfast at the same time, at the same Denny’s. His BMW stuck out there among the pickups, but he always parked right by the exit farthest from the restaurant. Another point in his favor as a potential supplier.
We would swing by there first. If his car was in the lot, then his would be the lucky getaway vehicle for Gregor’s big score.
My thoughts went back to the slave girl, then they got all mixed up with the girl from the bar. I remembered how her stomach flexed as her hips rolled along the rail of my hard cock. The swish of her lovely, soft ass as it glided back and forth along my tensing thighs.
Oh, the big, slow bounce of her round, caramel breasts. The brush of her waves of hair across my chest. Her nails scraping along the tatts on my hot, wet six-pack.
Through the splash and patter of the water, my ears still echoed with the wild, wet explosions of tension and release that rose from inside her and devoured me so completely.
Her groans as she clenched and hammered herself harder and harder against my thighs.
Most of all, I remembered my frustration when I wanted to taste her more. Deeper, and for longer, and she clawed and dragged me up, in a rush for what she called the “main event.” And all the time people call me selfish. Damn.
As the picture of the slave girl floated back up in my mind, I wondered how she would taste. Still, we were going for Corporate Brad, so I would never find out.
It was another day, there was sure to be another damsel.
CHAPTER ONE
A tall, mysterious man stood over me from behind, his sandalwood scent conjured images in my mind. Ancient forests and a dark quest.
Something dangerous. Strange places we would have to travel. We would be companions in an adventure. Close companions.
Seated at a long, pale wood table, I was dazzled, bathed in long shafts of morning light. The sun glared through the high windows of the library. Sounds were odd and disconnected, like they were in slow-motion or I was hearing them through thick liquid.
The sounds distracted me, made it hard to concentrate on what he wanted to teach me. I couldn’t focus properly on the huge open book.
His voice aroused me, kindled my desire. His eyes danced with the fire of knowledge. His tongue flicked across his lips as he saw my understanding begin to awaken. He leaned forward and the scent of his body made me want...
Then things fell on me from out of the light. Live, moving, heavy things.
“Haley! Get up, get up, get up!” Waynetta’s voice rasped like a high-pitched saw as the study hall blew away like wisps of cloud. Tarquin’s little hands bashed at me through the covers, barging away the last fading fragments of my sweet, long gone sleep.
The squeals of little voices and thunder of little bodies landed on top of me like they’d been dropped out of the air. They felt like they were made of knees and elbows.
It was a shock, just like always. By now I should have been getting used it, but the five o’clock barnstorming still took me by surprise every time.
There was no point in fighting it. If I didn’t force myself up and out of bed now, Aileen’s children would only pound away at me until I did. There’s no way to sleep with two kids bouncing full of morning energy on top of you.
~<>~
When Aileen interviewed me in her sumptuous kitchen, I should have been the one trying to convince her of my excellent childcare and domestic abilities, of which I had an almost perfect score of zero.
When she offered me the job, it should have made me pause. The only thought I had was that I would be able to pay down some of my tuition fees. I should have stopped to wonder why this woman would be ready to hand the care of her children to somebody like me. Somebody who clearly had no skills or qualifications. My idea of a balanced diet was to alternate chocolate cake with ice cream, or get the Hawaiian topping on a pizza.
Almost every kitchen that I knew smelled of nothing at all except the faint whiff of antibacterial wipes. Aileen’s kitchen smelled fresh, appetizing, and bright. It turned out to be the first of many deceptive things about my new employer.
The small, nodding, golden Buddha should have been my first clue that Aileen was not quite the calm, straightforward, rational person she seemed to project.
She produced the golden figure, a little thing a couple of inches high, with a sticky base. The blissful smile and lofty eyebrows bobbed as his head nodded and kind of drifted from side to side, like a Bollywood dancer. His right hand was raised with his two middle fingers folded down and the outer two pointed heavenward.
“You need one of these for your car.” Aileen held the little ornament towards me.
“He’ll protect you in your car. He’ll protect your car, too. He’ll keep you from having crashes, help you find parking spaces, keep you safe and bring you good car karma.”
A big smile lit Aileen’s face. She said, “Car karma!” and she clapped her hands. “That’s really good. I’ll use that.” She fished in a bag for a notebook and a pen. “I have a little company.” She said, “We make things like this. Things that transform people’s lives and bring them peace and joy.”
As she said it she made a note. Her lips were pulled between her teeth as she wrote, ‘CarKarma,’ then she looked up, smiling, “But this is going to be the one that really transforms our world.”
She picked up the little Buddha and held it towards me again. “You gave me that inspiration.” She stopped a moment, “At least, your presence here was a part of me having the inspiration.” She smiled. “We really are going to get along.” I wasn’t so sure, but I had debts and they were a great motivator.
The little Buddha’s head rocked woozily round and around, from side to side. “Really,” Aileen nodded, too, holding it towards me. “You should have one.”
Fresh in my memory was the spreadsheet I made with my mounting college fees. Particularly the horribly long number in the bottom right hand corner.
~<>~
When Aileen finally stumbled into the kitchen around 10:00 to yawn over the breakfast I prepared for her, she’d shouted over her children’s hyperactive, over-tired shrieks, “Mommy’s delicate this morning, darlings,” which only drove them to run harder around the kitchen and in circles around me, yelling louder.
Aileen told me it was “lovely” that the children were so fond of me.
While I blitzed her curly kale, edamame, quinoa, and cress smoothie, Aileen moved to muss the children’s hair and hold them in front of her. They looked the perfect, idyllic family. For about a half a second.
Tarquin beamed as he pulled Wanetta’s hair. She screamed and chased him, squealing around the tiled kitchen.
“We’ll have to drop them at the party in about twenty minutes,” Aileen said, “and then I’ll need you to come with me. Just run a couple of quick little errands while I get my treatments. Then you can go back to the party and look after them from there.”
A few little errands. I knew that would involve visits to any number of stores, with lists of the most unbelievably specific demands. No, it wasn’t enough that I would have to provide crowd control, quite possibly unaided, to dozens of hyper-energetic, mood swinging mini athletes, but first I would have to be her surrogate customer from hell, with a mission to ruin the mornings of about a dozen perfectly nice business owners.
As Aileen’s demands rolled off her tongue, I pictured how the color would drain from the shop assistant’s faces as the corners of their mouths struggled to hold the expression of agreeable politeness that upmarket stores always strive to provide.
“A little table, with mother-of-pearl and Abilene inlays, and a glass top. Carved in the Islamic style, like the one in this painting,” she pointed at an old picture in an art book, “Only with a glass top, of course.” She smiled, serenely. All of Aileen’s requirements were like that. Unbelievably specific about things that were mostly unachievable, yet incredibly vague about the things that were essential.
About an hour later we drove up to the house of the pool party and Tarquin and Waynetta exploded out of the back of the car. Aileen said, with uncharacteristic sense,
“Haley, maybe it’s better if you stay with the children and I can take care of my little errands.” I couldn’t decide whether that was a blessing, a miracle, or a curse.
The front door of the house swung open and a thin, shell-shocked woman in her late twenties stood in front of a waist-high raging sea of mostly blonde, tousled heads. Plump little bodies dashed, writhed and flailed, through a crackling storm of little voices. The devil, or the deep blue sea? I thought.
Of course, the apparent outbreak of sense was just one of Aileen’s tricks. Pretending she could come to a reasonable conclusion, when a perfectly deranged one was just in reach.
“No,” She smiled at the hostess. “I’m sure they’ll be fine here.” The thin hostesses eyes seemed to float in her head. Aileen said, “You’ll take care of them for half an hour, won’t you?” The woman looked slowly around, and without waiting, Aileen thanked her and we left. When Aileen said, “half an hour” it always turned out to be four times that at the very least.
Aileen drove us to one of the ritzy little mini-malls that were her home away from home and on the way she recited her incomprehensible array of errands and tasks. Stores and businesses I was to visit with her requests. Her demands that would stretch the politeness of a Royal butler.
She left and I practically twitched as I curled up for just one, peaceful moment on the creamy, soft, leatherback bench seat of the massive BMW. If Aileen came out of the salon-spa and found me asleep, I would never hear the end of it. But I had been awake since Tarquin and Waynetta had run into my room at five-fifteen that morning.
I would take just a couple of moments peace for myself before I went to chase and hunt for all of her fastidious needs.
More than anything, I wanted a brief visit back to my dream in the sunlit study hall.
RIGHT NOW