Livianna
Road trips were one of two things in my experience.
They were long, tedious, exhausting endeavors. Or they were fun, junk-food and karaoke-packed adventures.
With Cam and Astrid, they were the latter. Sure, Cam didn't sing, but when we would put on something that he deemed good enough - meaning no pop or stadium country or singer-songwriter - he would tap his fingers on the wheel along to the beat while Astrid and I belted it out. We ate things that only came from drive-thru windows. We slept all in one room like a bunch of teenagers. We made a good time out of a bad situation.
A road trip with Roderick, this man I barely knew, yeah, unfortunately, it was the former.
Mind-numbingly boring.
By the hour mark, after shifting in my seat about two-thousand times, I decided it would be mildly less tortuous if I knew the man a little better.
"So, when did you join up with The Henchmen MC?" I asked, half turning in my seat to watch him as he drove.
"Couple years back. Just so happened to hear they were having a party, looking for new members. Went in to be surrounded by lifer bikers and cage fighters and various other badasses. Never thought there was a chance in hell they'd take me. But they did."
"Not from a badass enough background?" I asked.
"I was no saint. I did some shit. But I knew nothing about being a biker. I'd never even seen a biker TV show, to be perfectly honest. It was a shock when I was told I could go speak with the prez. And then he told me I could prospect."
"From what I hear, Reign is particularly choosy about his crew."
"I think after shit went down and he lost his men, he decided to build it up with exactly the type of men he wanted on the crew."
"You mean no more scraggily-bearded, racist, misogynistic old men who think the purpose of life is to do as many devil's triangles as humanly possible?"
"Now that is a great visual," Roderick grumbled, nose scrunched up.
"Is he progressive enough to have any chicks on the team?"
"He let Maze prospect years back."
"But didn't let her join in the end," I guessed.
"Something like that. It was before my time, so I can't say for sure how it all went down. How long have you been an arms dealer?"
"About seven years."
"Is that how you met Camden?"
"Yeah. I met him on my third big gig. This was from then," I told him as we pulled up to a red light, reaching up to drag down the neck of my sweater to reveal an ugly, puckered scar.
"He shot you?" Roderick exploded, angry for that young, naive me that no longer really existed.
My smile went a little warm at that. "No. His friend did. He picked me up off the ground, got me out of the fire fight, brought me back to his place. I was losing blood so fast I was barely conscious by the time he got my shirt off, doused me in whiskey - along with his fingers - and then dug inside my body to fish the damn thing out."
"Shit," Roderick grumbled, shifting in his seat.
"I screamed so loud my throat bled," I admitted, not caring that it didn't make me sound like some badass. Even years later, just thinking about his fingers digging inside my body, pulling something out, then stitching me back together as best he could made a shudder rack through me. "I've had a lot of close calls in my day, but I don't think anything has ever hurt quite like Camden's ministrations."
"Did you realize right away that he didn't speak?"
"Within about a few hours of demanding he tell me basic things. Like where we were. What his name was."
"How do you know his name?"
"I don't," I admitted, shaking my head. It was probably the thing that irked me most in my life - not knowing the actual name of the man who meant so much to me. "I call him Camden because that was where we met. In the streets of Camden."
"Your relationship is pretty unique," he told me, preaching to the choir.
I couldn't help but wonder at times what my life would be like without him. More dangerous, surely. Less comfortable as well since he'd come to me with some contacts that I didn't have at the time. But also just much more lonely.
I loved Astrid.
She was like a little sister to me.
But maybe that was it.
Where Astrid was someone who looked up to me, someone who I protected and provided for, Cam was simply my peer, someone on the same page as me, someone sharing the same burdens of care with me.
He was my sounding board, my closest confidant, my dearest friend.
When we had come across Astrid, and I had this bone-deep need to take her in, brush her off, try to rebuild the broken pieces, he had been right there with me, helping me, doing drops when I was busy trying to help Astrid out of a hole, or bringing us dinner. Then, finally, when she was ready, showing Astrid that she could trust men, that there were some good ones out there still.
Astrid referred to us as Mom and Dad at times. Which was mostly said in jest. As a lot of truth often was.
We had been like parents to her.
We sat up at night worrying about her if she was out.
We nursed her when she was sick or hurt.
We tried to build up her confidence, teach her life skills, then, eventually, show her how to be part of our lifestyle in a productive way.
We were, for all intents and purposes, a little family of misfits. And as the hierarchy went - both by age and experience - we were much like the parents and she was like the little sister or grown ass daughter. If not for him, I never could have helped Astrid the way I had, never could have provided the safe, stable place she so desperately needed.
And I would have been so, so lonely without him.
I couldn't help but wonder, too, what his life would have been like without me.
Sure, it seemed like he had some colleagues - as shitty as they were - so he had been able to come up in some ranks somewhere, get a reputation for himself. But would that have been able to continue? Would he ever have felt like he could let his guard down? That he had a place he belonged? A family?
It had taken a bullet to bring us together, so that scar was something I wore with an odd sort of pride, with joy even. When I was on a job alone, I could catch myself touching it for reassurance, to show me that while I might have been alone in the moment, I was never alone because I always had him.
"He seems like a good guy."
"The best. We're lucky to have him. I'm sure your sisters feel the same way about you."
To that, Roderick snorted. "I think my sisters feel about me all the time the way you felt toward Cam when he was mad about you going on this trip with me. They think I am too over-protective for no reason."
"Because you shielded them from all the ugly that you are intimately acquainted with," I supplied.
"Maybe that was a fuck up," he agreed, clearly not having had the luxury, even as a young boy.
"It was well-intentioned. But I guess... if you always gate a kid from the kitchen to keep them safe, they never actually learn that it is because the oven is hot."
"That's true," he agreed, nodding, thinking of all the times he had gated his sisters.
"Do they know about you? About being a Henchmen?"
"They call me a hypocrite," he agreed, rolling his eyes. "I protect them from everything while I am out breaking the law left and right."
"Surely, they must know that you are doing it all for them, right?"
"They think it is for our ma. And that is true enough. She slaved away for years for us. I wanted to make her life easier."
"Yeah, but they're young. So by doing it for your mother, you did it for them as well."
"Like you said... they're young," he said, giving me a knowing look.
"When did we get so old, huh?" I asked, knowing that was what he was thinking. Wondering when the hell we went from being young and stupid ourselves to suddenly old and wise enough to look down on others and call them young and stupid.
Though, I had a feeling that Roderick, much like me, never got much of a chance to be a kid, to be carefree and selfish.
Maybe that was part of the draw to The Henchmen for someone who - from the outside - didn't seem to be cut from the biker cloth.
A biker gang - especially an outlaw one - gave him the freedom to finally let loose a little. Be reckless. Drive too fast. Drink too much. Sleep around. He got to be free to have some fun while also making a living. And likely supporting his mother. If not fully, then mostly. And, I would imagine, his sisters a bit as well. Especially if any were in school or something.
"What?" he asked, and I could feel his eyes on my profile.
To that, I snorted. "I'm starting to really feel bad for stealing from you. You have a lot more going on than one would think for just some biker."
"Think you'll find most bikers are a bit more than they look like, mami," he told me, shrugging. "What made you get into arms dealing, Livvy?" he asked after a long moment.
"I can't claim it was intentional, really," I started, remembering those first few terrible months of nothing but hard work and uncertainty. And pain. There had been so, so much pain. "I sort of fell into this... group..."
"Gang?" he corrected, wanting clarity.
"They would like to call themselves that, yeah," I agreed. "They were certainly violent enough. But lacking the leadership and organization and planning necessary to really pull it off. But, yeah, I found myself with them."
"How?" he asked, making me stiffen a bit. "If you don't mind talking about it," he clarified.
Did I?
With general people, maybe.
People who were nice and normal, who didn't understand things like how one ends up wrapped up in criminal organizations.
But I was in a car with an arms dealing biker. If there ever was a person who might understand, he was it.
"I left home when I was sixteen. With no actual plan of course."
"Comes with the territory of being sixteen, I think."
"Yeah," I agreed, nodding.
Though, really, it was more that I couldn't take any more of the screaming, the slapping around, the unfairly restrictive rules. There were only so many times you could cover angry red finger and palm-print marks on your cheek or pick chunks of your hair off the floor before you decided you were done, that if you had to endure one more attack, you'd lose it, grab the knife out of the block on the counter, and go all patricide on the person who got some sick sort of pleasure in beating you down day in and day out.
So I followed that impulse, packed a bag full of what I thought were essentials - clothes, makeup, what little cash I had from birthdays or babysitting the kids on the block.
I didn't think, however, to snag some of the things of worth in the house to hock for money to buy food. I didn't even grab the sleeping bag from the back of my closet.
But once I was gone, there was no way I was going to go back.
"There was a lot of cold and hungry in those days," I admitted, remembering clearly the gnawing pangs that kept me from sleep for days on end.
And then I came across Eman.
Eman was a good ten years older - too old, predatory even - but attractive, driving a decent car, offering to get me off the streets.
Nothing - not even a full belly - was ever free in life, though. And there was not much kindness in Eman's heart to speak of.
And young, pretty homeless girls didn't have much to offer.
At the time, it didn't feel as wrong, as skeezy as it did looking back. It didn't occur to me that gratitude shouldn't have to involve spread legs or an open mouth whenever Eman wanted it, even if I didn't. I hadn't known enough about the world to know that he had been using me, grooming me.
I just knew I wasn't so cold.
I wasn't starving.
And so long as I did what Eman wanted, no one was slapping me around.
It was better than the streets.
Or so it seemed at first.
And Eman's friends and him got it in their heads to start dealing in guns.
They compiled a nice little arsenal stealing from other low-level bangers in the area, wanting a big supply before they started getting their name out there to other organizations.
Then it happened.
Eman decided I wasn't just his plaything anymore. He wanted me to welcome everyone else with spread legs too.
"Fucking bastard," Roderick hissed, knuckles going white on the wheel while I fed him the ugly details of my young life.
"It didn't get that far," I assured him. "I might have been young and naive, but I wasn't completely spineless."
I plied Eman with drink after drink, let him have me one last time, waited until the booze made him too tired to function, then I carefully packed my stuff. I learned my lesson from the last time though. I didn't just pack my clothes. I packed the stacks of cash Eman had sitting around, some of his prized watches and chains. Then I tiptoed down the halls, going into the garage, and grabbing a bag of his guns as well.
"I had no plans on dealing the guns," I told him, shaking my head. "I think I was just thinking of them as protection, knowing there was no way Eman would let me get away with stealing from him, making a fool of him."
I hadn't needed the guns, though.
By the next afternoon, I was a state away. The next day, another state was between us. Until I was as far east as I could go, and there was no way Eman could find me.
"What did you do when you hit the city?" Roderick asked.
"I stashed the guns in a storage unit in the apartment building I started living in. And went straight. Got jobs. Got my GED. And then I met Vasily.
Vas.
The Russian arms dealer.
He came into my diner, sitting at the counter, drinking bitter coffee that he spiked with vodka while I pretended not to notice.
And then some frat guy asshole who had been sitting next to him grabbed my ass as I walked past, startling me, making me drop my entire tray.
Before my boss could even come out to scream at me - me, not the frat guy asshole - Vas grabbed the guy's forearm, pinned it to the tabletop, and slammed his mug down onto the jerk's hand.
Bones cracked.
Screams followed.
And then my boss came out, yelling at me as expected.
"You," Vas said, pointing a giant hand at me. "You don't work here no more," he added in an accent so thick that I found him hard to fully understand. "No more. You have jacket?" he asked, waving a hand at my somewhat skimpy robin's egg blue waitress dress. "You," he added, turning to my boss. "You give her money," he demanded, not taking no for an answer until my boss took the money out of his own pocket, shoving it at me. "We go," Vas said as sirens got closer. "Now. We go now."
And, not having a whole hell of a lot of choice, I followed him out and into his sleek sports car.
I let him take me back to his apartment, so upscale that made me worry I might get my cheap all over his expensive furniture.
"Why you work there?" he asked, pouring me straight vodka without asking if I even liked it.
Vas was good looking in an older, very rough way, tall, wide, with a nose made crooked from one too many breakings. His skin was a bit ruddy around his cheeks, but his dark hair was full, his jaw strong, and his deep blue eyes wise.
"Because I needed money," I told him, shaking my head, trying not to be intimidated in all my twenty-year-old uncertainty about the whole situation. "To pay bills," I added when he simply stared at me, uncomprehending.
"You need money when men grab your ass? Why not work at strip club then?"
"I don't want men to grab my ass. But my boss. My former boss would fire me if I made a big deal about it."
"It is big deal, no? To be touch without permission?"
"It is," I agreed, finding myself almost misty-eyed, and horrified by that.
"Then no more. You work for me."
"Oh, ah, I'm not some kind of..."
"As maid. You clean. I see you clean at diner. You clean here," he invited, waving a hand around his massive space. "What you make a week?"
"About four-hundred."
"Four-hundred. I double it. Yes?"
And, really, was there any choice to be made?
"Yes."
"So Vas was an arms dealer?"
"He was an importer," I clarified.
I hadn't known that at first, of course. All I knew was he was rich, he paid me well to simply clean his apartment, and he never put his hands on me. Or let anyone who visited put theirs on me either.
It was safe.
Comfortable.
And after four years of anything but those things, it was welcome.
Even when I started to see things, notice things. Things I was wise enough to recognize as criminal.
Guns.
Stacks of cash.
Fake passports.
And I finally understood why there was a locked guest room I wasn't allowed to clean, a room that had a lock that could only be opened by a key Vas wore around his neck.
"I worked for him until I was twenty-three," I told Roderick, body flooding with a nostalgia I had forgotten all about. so much had happened. It was easy at times to forget the good times, the easy times.
"What happened?"
"I hurt my ankle falling off a ladder to clean his top shelves. It was just a sprain, but Vas didn't want me to have to walk all the way to the subway to go home. But he had a quick stop first."
"A drop," Roderick guessed.
"Yeah," I agreed, letting out a long breath, feeling the sting of pain, fresh as it had been that day.
He'd left me in the car parked at the corner of the street. He'd gotten a bag out of the back.
Then he walked to meet a trio of men.
He hadn't even gotten within ten feet of them before the gunshots rang out.
I remembered the way his body jolted - his massive, seemingly unshakeable body - jerked as each bullet ripped through his flesh.
The men grabbed his bag and scattered before his body even hit the ground.
the windows were up in the car.
I was a block away.
I couldn't hear it when he hit.
But I felt it.
The impact.
Somewhere deep inside of me.
I didn't think in the moment. I threw the door open, flying down the street, dropping down beside his body, tears streaming, begging him to hold on.
"No cry," he demanded, hand raising even as blood slipped from between his lips and I knew he was dying. "No cry. You made life brighter," he told me, chest starting to rattle, throat starting to choke on his own blood. "Take it," he demanded to me, tone almost desperate. "Take it all."
Those had been his last words to me, his life draining away with one godawful, horrific death rattle.
My entire body was shaking, tears streaming.
"What did he mean?" Roderick asked.
"I didn't know right at first, until I moved his hand which he had put to his chest. But it wasn't his chest. It was covering the key around his neck. He wanted me to take everything. Before his bosses got wind of his murder, I imagine."
And with little other choice, I pulled the key as the sirens got close, getting back into his car, driving it back to his place, letting myself into an apartment I knew I would never see again, a place that had been a refuge for me.
And I walked down the hall to the locked room, slipping in the key, opening the door.
Finding the guns.
Finding the cash.
Everything I would need to get started.
"So you did."
Taking a deep breath to push back the bad memories, I nodded. "Yes, I did."
"Was Vas a... boyfriend?" Roderick asked, tone careful.
"No. No. It was never anything like that. I think he was... lonely. Being so far from home, not able to make any contacts in case they stab him in the back. I think he just liked having a friendly face around. Like a friend or a sister or something, never anything even remotely romantic. He was just... a good man who needed company."
"Getting started was rough, hm?" he asked, reaching to turn down the volume on the GPS.
"After Vas? Yes," I told him honestly. "Let's face it. Gun running is - as a whole - a boy's club. No one wanted to take me seriously."
"What is this from?" he asked, pulling to a stop at a red light, reaching over to snag my chin, turning my face, then running a fingertip down the scar on my jaw, one that met me in my reflection every morning, reminding me never to let down my guard.
"My first deal," I admitted, trying to ignore the way that my belly fluttered at his soft touch.
Was there anything more shocking than a soft touch from a rough man?
"Don't want to talk about it?" he asked, having to release me to keep driving, making me oddly wish we were having this conversation somewhere stationary. So his hand could stay there. Or, better yet, move on, find other delicious places to touch.
"Ah, no. It's fine. Just me being green, naive, a bit too excited to get going in this new career path with no actual training, no way to defend myself. I made a contact with a member of some low-level street gang for a few AKs that I had from Vas along with a couple of the guns I had stolen from Eman all those years before, kept stashed in my storage locker. They decided they didn't want to pay what we had agreed on beforehand. I refused to back down. The leader pulled out a knife to do this," I told him, waving toward my face. "And attempted more. But I kept a souvenir from Vas - one I kept tucked in my waistband."
"You killed him?"
"Honestly? I don't know. I double-tapped and hauled ass."
"Did that need stitches?"
"Maybe it would have healed better had I gone to get some," I mused, shaking a head at my paranoia back then, terrified that somehow someone might figure out how I really had gotten the injury, and then I would have been hauled off to jail or something.
It was amazing the things you believed when you didn't know any better.
"You want to stop for lunch?" Roderick asked, letting my story rest for a while. It had been the longest I had spoken in a long time, the most details I had maybe given anyone before, save for maybe Cam who simply never had a way to interrupt me, I imagine.
"Lunch sounds good," I agreed.
The rest of the drive was less tense, conversation easier, though not quite as personal. We talked of little things. Like what our homelands had been like. Mine, Mexico. His, Puerto Rico. About coming to America. About how it was impossible to find decent empanadas or burritos in any restaurant in the States.
It was dark out when we finally made it into Virginia, getting to the hotel Astrid had texted to tell us she had gotten reservations for us just a few minutes later.
And it took about three minutes from there to figure out that Astrid had - yet again - attempted to fuck with us.
She'd gotten us one room.
And the lady at the front desk told us with a sorry head shake that there were no other rooms available, something that made Roderick fight to hold back a smile.
"She thinks I need to get laid," I told him as we unlocked our door, figuring it was best to clear the air, get the elephant out of the room and all that.
"And she thinks I'd be the man for the job?" he asked, and damn that smirk of his, bringing out his dimples. Never before had I been a fan of the darn things, always finding them boyish. But on Roderick, those boyish marks were somehow, well, sexy.
"She gets these... ideas in her head," I said, sidestepping the question as we moved into a room dominated by a king-sized bed covered in creams and champagnes, taunting us, I felt. Or maybe that was just my libido talking.
"And follows through with them," Roderick agreed, taking my bag from my hands, putting it inside the closet with his.
"That's my Astrid alright."
"She's a good kid. A handful, I'd imagine, but well-intentioned."
"So, do you think this meeting is going to be worth our time?" I asked, moving away from the bed to look out the windows. At the lovely view of the parking lot.
"I don't think he's going to have the Double Trigger, but if he has the Eagle then we can't complain too much. That is two of them out of the way since you still have the Howdah."
"True," I agreed, inwardly worried about the Double Trigger, the one that had been impossible to find in the first place, the whole reason I had needed to steal from Roderick to begin with.
"And maybe by the time we get back to the city, Astrid and Cam will have made some progress on the last one. There's still time."
"Is Reign pissed at me?" I asked, having secretly harbored the worry for a few weeks in secret.
"For stealing from us?" he clarified. "Nah. I mean, he's not happy to be out a gun, to have a pissed off client, but he's always been the kind of man to understand everyone else's hustle. You had to do what you had to do. Now he has to do what he has to do."
"And if we don't find the gun in time?"
"Honestly," he started, sitting down on the foot of the bed. "I don't know. But that's my problem."
"How is it your problem when I was the one who stole from you?" I demanded, annoyed for him on principle. "And, not to split hairs, but he was the one to send you there alone, wasn't he? No backup."
"It was still my job to make sure we made the drop, to protect the goods, to keep the client happy. That was on me. I failed at all three. Which makes it my fault in his eyes."
"You wouldn't... get kicked out for this, would you?"
"Honestly, I don't know. No one has fucked up like this since I have been a member, so I'm not sure how this is handled. Just an ass kicking or some kind of re-prospecting period or what..."
"I think you got pain enough for it," I mused, walking over to touch the material covering his forearm, shocking back a bit when he flinched. "Does it still hurt? Shouldn't it be healed by now?"
"I forgot to pack my new batch of antibiotics," he admitted, reaching to roll his sleeve up, peeling back the fresh gauze he had rolled on before we had left the city. "The first ones weren't cutting it."
"Dog saliva is pretty filthy," I agreed, moving closer, trying not to let the worry show on my face at the very red gash down his arm still. It should have been mostly healed, on its way to getting the stitches out, not sore and angry looking.
"You can say it," he said, giving me a small smile. "It looks pretty bad."
"The antibiotics, are they oral or topical?"
"Oral."
"Time for something topical then," I told him, going to grab my wallet out of the side of my bag.
"Where are you going?"
"To get something for your arm before it gets gangrenous and has to be chopped off. I mean, how can you ride a bike with one arm missing, right?" I asked, rushing out the door.
I was browsing the supplies at the closest pharmacy when my phone rang.
"You're never allowed to be in charge of setting up the reservations ever again," I greeted Astrid.
"Oh, stop. You know you are already all a-flutter at the idea of being in bed with that yummy piece of man meat."
"A-flutter?" I repeated, tossing another couple things into my handcart.
"In your lady business," she clarified and I could hear the smirk in her voice.
"There is no fluttering."
"You liar."
She perhaps knew me too well.
"Where are you that he's not around?"
"Getting some stuff to treat his arm with. It's not healing right."
"Oh, look at you. Getting your nursemaid on. That is some fun foreplay if I ever heard of any before. You gonna put on a white dress and fishnets while you do it?"
"Stop. Poor Camden is probably having a heart attack with all that talk."
"Don't worry. He's my next project. Once I know you've gotten some."
"How is the search coming?"
"There have been a few leads actually. I should have more pinned down by the time you're back. But no rush. Enjoy all that bed time with Roderick!" she called, hanging up before I could say anything more.
Picking up some last minute snacks in case I was up all night and hungry, I headed back to the hotel, now more acutely aware of the lady business fluttering as I opened the door to find that while I was gone, Roderick had showered.
Meaning he was standing there with his back to me... shirtless, his pants hanging down low on his hips.
Astrid was wrong, though.
It wasn't fluttering.
No, this was definite pre-orgasm tightening.
And then, oh, and then, he turned.
I'm not sure there was a word for the shock that moved through my system, making my knees go a bit wobbly, making me slam back against the door.
Because, well, damn.
A low, whimpering sound escaped me, making his head cock to the side a bit, a confident smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Want me to cover up?" he asked, sounding like he had no intentions of doing so no matter what my answer might be.
"This is, ah, distracting," I told him, trying to keep my eyes from wandering down the deep indents of muscle, the way his Adonis belt disappeared into the waistband of his pants.
"Distracting from what, mami?"
Oh, God.
He was doing this on purpose.
He had to be, right?
"To, ah, treating your arm," I remembered, waving one of the bags up at him. "I have some stuff to pour over it, so we might be better off doing it on the sink. Over," I rushed to corrected, unable to keep eye contact. "Over the sink," I tried, voice calmer.
"We'll just look past that Freudian slip," he agreed, turning to move back into the still steamy bathroom, standing beside the sink, waiting for me. "What do you got?"
"Well, to start, some witch hazel. My grandmother always used it on my cuts as a kid," I told him, putting the bottle down on the counter.
"Is Sierra Mist a new medical cure I don't know about?" he asked when that bottle followed.
"No, that's for me. Sierra Mist is the most underrated soda. But only the ones with the real sugar, not the corn syrup."
"Good to know."
"And then we have some of this," I told him, flashing the little amber glass bottle at him.
"Tea tree oil?"
"It smells godawful, but Astrid swore it was the only thing to help the infection she got when she got her... when she got some piercings," I was careful to cover. "And then some triple antibiotic cream to put on after. I figure between all three, you should be less red in the morning. I got fresh gauze too."
"You seem pretty adept at this kind of thing."
"We tend to get a lot of injuries in our line of work. It's easier not to have to spend six hours in the hospital each time. This shouldn't burn," I said, pulling the seal off the witch hazel to pour it over the arm he held over the sink. "It doesn't have alcohol. This might, though," I warned after mopping some of the excess fluid off with a washcloth, careful not to touch the cut itself. Then I shook the foul-smelling oil onto his arm.
"I thought you were exaggerating. This smells fucking awful."
"I'm kind of used to it," I admitted, shrugging as I once again got rid of the excess, waiting for the rest of it to dry on its own as I fiddled with the triple antibiotic and gauze, then squeezing a huge glob on, spreading it around with a small strip of bandage.
"It still somehow reeks," he said after I completely re-bandaged his arm.
"I'd tell you it will wear off, but that's a lie."
"If it works, I suppose it will be worth it."
"Alright, hop out. I want to take a shower," I told him, cleaning up the supplies, taking the bag when he came back in to offer it to me.
Then I took the longest shower in history, trying to psych myself up - or down - before climbing out and realizing my pajamas were really meant for sleeping in my apartment around my loved ones or in a hotel room by myself.
And since sleeping was hard enough not wearing jeans, I opted to wear my gray wifebeater and black shorts that could be called nothing other than, well, booty shorts.
I brushed out my hair, taking a deep breath, and moving out into the bedroom.
Roderick's head lifted from where he was sitting on the left side of the bed, the covers only pulled up to his waist. I moved around to the other side of the bed, feeling his eyes on me, not able to take it anymore. "What?"
"Mami, you thought I was a distraction?" he asked, shaking his head.
"I was anticipating being alone in a hotel room. Or I wouldn't have had half my ass hanging out," I told him as I climbed under the covers.
I couldn't be sure of it, but I could have sworn he said And wouldn't that be a damn shame?
"What's your TV preference for sleep? On or off?"
"Um, either works really. I don't sleep well anyway. But if you like it off, keep it off. I will turn it on after you go to sleep if I am up all night."
"Okay. I have an alarm set for the morning."
"Thanks," I agreed, turning away from him to curl up on my side, feeling the bed move as he slid down to lay flat.
And then the impossible happened.
I fell to sleep.
Quickly.
No fuss.
No tossing.
Just easily.
Like a normal person.
I didn't wake up, in fact, until a few hours later.
In a different position than I had fallen asleep. Which was not unusual.
What was unusual, though, was the fact that I had someone else in the bed.
Someone else who I was now plastered all over.
As in I had my whole front on his whole front, my leg cocked up, my head in his neck, my hand closed in a fist on his shoulder.
And his hands, yeah, they weren't exactly down at his sides either. One was draped across my lower back, dangerously close to the swell of my ass. The other was across my back, his fingers still in the hair at the nape of my neck.
Asleep, though.
Thank God for small blessings.
I didn't move right away, however.
Despite knowing I should have.
It had been so long since I felt the touch of a man. And something deep within me was craving it too much to move away just yet.
So I stayed there, hearing his heartbeat against me, feeling the rise and fall of his steady breathing, the way his hard lines pressed to my much softer ones.
Only when these realizations started stoking a fire in my system did I slowly move, planting my hands on either side of his body, starting to press up.
"You didn't have to move," Roderick's sleep-rough voice said, making me start, looking down to find his eyes a little hooded with sleep. "You were all over until you settled down on me."
"You're not a pillow," I insisted.
"I don't mind," he told me, giving my lower back a little squeeze with his arm. His other hand raised, tucking a few strands of my hair behind my ear, the touch oh so gentle yet again. And damn if it didn't send a tremble through my body. The external kind. The kind he was sure to feel with his body plastered to mine.
His hands stilled, fingers still brushing the side of my jaw. His eyes - sleep suddenly gone - held mine, looking for something. Either he found it - or he didn't - depending on what he was searching for. But his fingers moved, sliding backward, cupping the back of my neck, applying just the barest bit of pressure, waiting for me to make a move, close the distance, give him the green light.
I knew it was a bad idea.
I knew there were about a dozen reasons why I should have simply moved away like I had planned to do.
But I couldn't seem to bring myself to care. Not with his body beneath mine, his hands on me, his eyes getting hooded with his own anticipation.
So I forgot all the reasons as my head lowered, as my lips pressed to his.
He was pliant for a long second, seeing if I would pull away quickly. When I didn't, his hand tightened on the back of my neck as his lips got harder, hungrier, more demanding, making me plant both my knees on the sides of his body.
Unfortunately, the position quite literally opened me up to him. And the thin material of his pajama pants and my glorified panties did nothing to stop his hard cock from pressing into me, stoking the fire burning through my system.
The head rubbed over my clit, making a low, almost pained whimper escape me.
Some sort of deep, rumbling growl moved through him in response, making his body knife upward until he was sitting upright, his arm crushing my body to his as his teeth snagged my lower lip, biting to the point of pain before his tongue moved inside to claim mine.
My arms went up around his neck, encircling it, crushing my breasts to his chest as his tongue worked mine.
His body curled, moving to press me down on the mattress.
But his arm was still under me.
His hurt arm.
Making him let out a hiss and loud curse as my body weight pressed down on it.
"Sorry sorry sorry," I said, voice a bit frantic as I lifted up, curling into a seated position as he got onto his knees, pulling his arm upward.
He wouldn't say it, but I could see the pain in his eyes.
"Here, let me check," I said, reaching out for the edge of the gauze, unwrapping it carefully, expecting blood. Like a gush of it. You didn't roll around in bed with a woman when you had as many stitches as he had.
"Lucked out," I murmured when it looked like just one stitch pulled, leaving a small little trickle of blood. "And, actually, this looks a lot better," I added, seeing the bright, angry redness mostly gone. "You might want to just go dab some more tea tree on the pulled stitch though," I advised him, finally looking up to find his gaze fully on me, not his arm.
"Livvy..."
"What?" I asked, feigning ignorance.
"We started something here," he added, not the type to simply let things drop, it seemed.
"And now it is over," I told him, wishing like hell I meant it as much as it sounded like I did.
Roderick watched me for a long moment, eyes unreadable, before turning and walking away, closing himself in the bathroom.
He came back out a few moments later, reeking of fresh tea tree oil, getting into his side of the bed.
This time, he flicked on the TV, wanting the distraction. In a mood, it seemed, though content to keep it to himself. It was something I would normally be grateful for. But I found myself fretting about it, wondering what the look had been in his eyes before he had closed himself into the bathroom.
I was not a 'talk it out' kind of girl when it came to guys and the literal or figurative stickier things in life, but I sat there pretending to watch Friends reruns while my brain raced with all the possible things he might have been thinking, what he was thinking about me.
And I couldn't help but wonder if he would make a move again, if the door was closed shut.
I mean, not that I wanted it to happen again.
That would be a huge mistake.
It would only complicate things.
I knew that rationally.
But my body was saying that maybe, just maybe, once all the gun replacing was finally done, we could hop back into a bed for some sweaty fun.
One for the road, as the saying went.
One night that would put an end to the clawing need in my core.
Roderick eventually fell to sleep what felt like ages later.
And my creepy ass couldn't help but watch him for a long minute or two, the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the way his muscles somehow still contracted on and off even in sleep. People were supposed to soften while unconscious, but Roderick was all hard lines. Even his jaw seemed like steel as he slept.
I forced my eyes away, turning back to the screen, watching the episode where everyone mistook a raw defrosting chicken for Rachel's hairless cat, something that always used to make me laugh, but not managing to muster any humor.
Three hours of Friends turned to George Lopez which then turned to infomercials. And I sat awake watching all of them, knowing sleep was a pipe dream, something that would never come to me. Even though the larger part of me wanted me to fall asleep again, to roll into him again, to wake up to him touching me again, to finish what we had started.
But there were things in life that, no matter how much we wanted them, we simply could not have.
And judging by the way Roderick gave me the figurative - and literal - cold shoulder when his alarm woke us up, turning his back on me as he sat off the end of the bed, shooting off texts in silence, then disappearing into the bathroom, only emerging when he was showered and dressed, telling me the shower was all mine and that he was running down to grab some breakfast, yeah, it seemed like there was no way anything was going to happen with us again.
Which was fine.
What I wanted.
At least that was what I tried to tell myself to ease the weird sinking sensation in my stomach.