Chapter Two

Race

 

She looks like sex on a stick – red hair like fire streaming down her back, pretty lips puckered up in a sigh, her skirt hitched up those twigs of hers are all an invitation for guys like me. If she’s not conscious of what she’s doing, I’m gonna make her know what signals she’s sending.

 

“Delilah?” I reply back. My lip twitches slightly at the light weight of her name.

 

She doesn’t look like a Delilah. It’s not a name you hear around Denver or all the other hundred and one places I’ve lived over the past ten years. It’s a flower’s name. It’s a name for the spring. It’s a name that doesn’t belong in the blistering heatwave they’ve been having in La La Land.

 

“Yeah. Delilah.” She smolders. All the girls do.

 

I hear something drip off her words – want. She licks the corners of her mouth with the tip of her tongue, unknowing that it’s a signal. She can put up a tough girl act, talk shit about me behind my back, and then challenge my territory and position, but she can’t hide the fact that I am who I am.

 

Still, she surprises me when she doesn’t offer up an apology. She holds her tiny piece of ground on the edge of the deck. Her arm still is tangled around the banister for support, though I’m doing my best to hold on to her with a drink in my other hand. I can tell she’s been drinking already tonight. She’s not wasted, but a few more drinks and she’ll be gone with the fishes. This is a girl that holds her alcohol well, but not as good as some of the pros that are taking up the front row of the bar.

 

“Well, Delilah, I don’t appreciate hearing you talk crap about me when you know nothing of me.” I growl. “You do know who I am, right?”

 

She pauses as she thinks over her next steps. She can keep this cool girl attitude going and try to impress her way out of a fight. Or she can drop it all and run. I try to watch her body for signs that she’s going to cave under the heat of my stony glare.

 

Finally, she croaks out, “I know you’re some tool from Denver who thinks he owns the damn bar because he was appointed vice president of the local MC.”

 

I chuckle slightly. The rumble gets caught in my chest, and I brush away a small, surprised cough. I take a small sip of the drink I brought out for her, not caring who it belongs to anymore. This girl is more proud than I thought, and she’d drink me into submission – I can tell that from the fire her in voice and the way she keeps my eyes fixated on hers. I let go of my grasp of her waist, and she stumbles forward a little, catching herself before she lands on me again.

 

Once she’s got her feet under her, I pass her the drink. “Whiskey. Neat. You don’t look to me like a girl who mixes business with pleasure.”

 

“No. I take it straight. It’s better to savor.” She eyes me cautiously as she takes a seat in one of the vintage rockers the bar has got lined up against the back wall of the patio.

 

Delilah eases her back into the metal and then crosses one leg over the other. Her black-mesh stockings creep up the length of her legs, and I can see by the hem of her short skirt where the elastics around her thigh stops. The bare, pearly white skin nearly matches her crisp shirt.

 

“You work here?” I ask as I lean against the railings. I like to know who is under me, and who I can get under me.

 

She sputters a laugh similar to mine earlier, hiding the guilty humor with the back of her hand. When she’s composed herself, she explains, “I don’t do the whole Bad Devils shit. My daddy was in the MC, and I promised myself I wouldn’t become a legacy or some passed around princess like the girls inside.”

 

“Your dad still in this club?” I search for some familiarity, but shit if I’m any good at names. It’s gonna take me a solid year or two before I learn all forty-five full-time member’s names and aliases. Their stories would be even longer.

 

In Denver, I stuck to myself, kept out of everyone’s business. But that’s clearly not the order of operations in L.A. It’s run more like a traditional brotherhood. And if this girl is someone’s claim, someone’s child, I probably should put it down in the back of my brain.

 

“Used to be,” she answers somewhat quietly. “Don’t know where he is now. Probably dead like the rest of the old dogs. You all seem to die out quick.”

 

“Life passes like a shadow,” I murmur to myself. Delilah shoots me another curious look. I try to turn my back on her, but she catches me with another question.

 

“What the hell was that? ‘Life passes like a shadow?’”

 

I’m not one to share, especially with barflies like her, but I humor her. “It’s a motto of mine. Work in the night. Live in the day. Remember that life is only temporary. Better to live fast, die young.”

 

“You’re a fucking poet?” She smiles wildly at me.

 

“With another four of these, I can be.” I wink. “I pride myself on being everything you don’t expect.”

 

“What the hell does that mean?”

 

“It means that I’ve been around these parts – lots of fucking parts to know what would surprise a girl like you. I know just about every thought that’s been spinning through that pretty little head of yours since you spotted me. It’s what I do. I study people. I see what makes them tick and what ticks them off.”

 

“You can’t be serious.” Her voice goes deadpan, and her chair begins to nervously rock.

 

I’m used to this reaction from girls about to give in to me. Her fingers wrap around the arm, her knuckles turning white under the stress of the silver and gold rings around her fingers. After a beat, she spins her head and looks directly into me as she spits out, “I think you’re a bullshit artist.”

 

“Try me,” I suggest, not letting her bad attitude break my mood. It’s too fun to play with girls like this – to lead them on like dogs on a leash. I offer to her, “Let’s make a game out of it. I’ll tell you your story, every bit of it from your birth till what you did today. For every point I get right, you take a drink.”

 

“You get me drunk? That’s the point of this game? What’s in it for me for playing along? What happens when you get my story wrong because you’re a terrible liar who knows nothing about me or my history?”

 

“Fair. Even though I will win and get you hammered, I’ll play along. Every question I get wrong, I’ll take a chug of tequila. It’s the only drink strong enough to get me hammered. And if you win, you get the rare satisfaction of seeing me get my damn guard down.”

 

She appears to mull it over, my words turning in her mouth and her brain. The knuckles ease up slightly and begin to wrap against the metal. Her nails make a twinkling sound as they strike the steel frame.

 

Finally, she takes the last swig of her drink and says, “Fine. I’m in. Go get us a bottle of tequila and another few glasses of whiskey.”

 

Delilah Anne. I got that guess of her middle name on the first try. Her last name, Smithson, was a wrong answer. One drink for me. One drink for her. But I keep that last name in the back of my mind as I suck my tequila down hard and fast – fast enough to feel the tingling of my hair stand on the back of my neck. I was honest with her on that – tequila is my weakness.

 

“You like rock music. I can tell by the way you dress.” It’s my next, softball guess. All girls who go to bars like this are into rock music.

 

She nods slowly and picks up the glass to her puckered lips, but before she can take another sip, I sneak in, “But you secretly like pop shit too – the kind you hear on B93. You dance and sing to it in your car on the way to work. But you wouldn’t admit that to a guy like me, would you?”

 

She pauses and eyes me with those almond, doe eyes. They look slightly heavier than when we started this game. Even her hand looks less steady as she sighs and tips the clear liquid back as easily as if it were water.

 

She coughs and then proclaims with slurred words, “You tell anyone about that, Race, and you die.”

 

“I don’t take threats too kindly, girl,” I snap back. “Do you know what that would cost you?”

 

“I don’t care!” she shouts so the few people who have been brave enough to join us outside turn their heads tentatively towards us. “I don’t give a fuck who you are!”

 

She’s drunk, but this is my territory now. Any test to it, even by some prissy princess who can’t hold her drinks, is walking into the danger zone. I steady myself before I reach over to her, grabbing the empty glass from her hand.

 

Her head whips up in shock. “What the hell, man!”

 

I point a long, calloused finger square into the center of her bare chest, right above the last button fastened and say as firmly as I can, “I don’t fucking care who you are, Delilah. You’re just like the rest of the girls I’ve met. You’re just some messed up, twenty-something chick who had potential when she was growing up. Top of your class in middle school, faded away in high school, couldn’t catch a break and make it to college. You ended up doing something maybe your mama did… In this outfit with the bleached-out stains, I bet you waitress at a ritzy place that’s better than you and full of people you think you deserve to be. But let me tell you something, Delilah Ann Smithson. You’re not as good as you think you are. And you certainly ain’t shit around here. So, if I were you, I’d keep your head down, your mouth closed, and your fucking legs spread because that’s all you’ll get at a place like this with a man like me in charge.”

 

There’s a fleeting moment when I think she’s going to slap the fuck out of me. Her shaking hand wraps around the chair’s arm, and she lips the words, “How dare you?” But nothing comes out. She’s speechless. For the first time since I set eyes on her, her spicy, out-of-place words have escaped her.

 

Finally, when I’m about ready to get the hell out of here and find something a bit more… easy, Delilah reaches over me to the small table I’ve laid the nearly empty bottle of tequila on and pulls it back to herself. Without breaking eye contact, she puts the lip of her bottle to her mouth and proceeds to chug.

 

Seconds pass and small drops slide out the side of her mouth. But she goes on until it’s all gone – the remainder of the bottle.

 

After a deep, blistering swallow, she asks without any hesitation or anger in her voice, “Where can we go?”

 

“Follow me,” I command her. “Don’t make it too damn obvious.”

 

I stand to my feet and head back inside the bar. The boys are getting rowdy. There is the crashing of glasses on counters, hands slapping backs and asses of the ladies serving them, and raised voices as fights threaten to break out. I’m okay with this. I love the noise, the hell breaking loose, the feeling that any moment something could happen. And with sloppy, angry Delilah following me with those flashing lips and tits, I know it can and will.

 

I pull her into the back room – the room where Nico and I’ve set up shop while our place in headquarters is being finished. It’s not much to look at – a few chairs, two desks, and some paperwork still sticking out of the beat up, wooden filing cabinets – but I didn’t bring Delilah here to impress her. I’ve brought her here to take a piece of that body and to show her who is running this territory now that I’m in town.

 

She looks around cautiously, scanning the room in apparent approval. She stops at me, moving her eyes from my boots to the top of my head. A sly smile leaps across her face and the color in her pale cheeks goes from nonexistent to nearly the same shade of her fire red hair. As she licks the small corners of her lips, I know she’s mine.

 

“You’re the boss,” she whispers.

 

“Yeah, I fucking am,” I reply coldly. “Get on the desk.”

 

“What?” She looks over her shoulder at the emptier of the two.

 

“You heard me. Jump up there.”

 

She walks backward two or three steps before her ass hits the edge of the long wooden desk. She lifts one leg slowly up and then another until her ass is resting on the top and her legs dangle. Her toes barely touch the edge. She looks towards me for my next command.

 

“Strip.”

 

“You mean—”

 

“STRIP,” I nearly yell out, but she doesn’t back down or away. Instead, a hand moves to the few buttons still fastened on her tidy white shirt.

 

One by one, she removes each one, more and more skin revealing itself as she goes. When she gets to the waist of her tight little skirt, she squirms the remaining fabric out from under the folds and quickly opens it wide like pulling back curtains on a stage. Her white, strapless bra stands out on her pinkish skin.

 

“That too.” My voice hitches in my throat. I watch with a drying mouth as she reaches behind herself and undoes the latches of her lingerie. She presses her shoulders in on themselves, her hands covering her melon-sized breasts. Even with all of her bullshit, she’s nervous about the exposure. There’s something sort of… cute about that.

 

“The skirt and whatever’s under them too.” More white panties she has to shimmy out of. She keeps them matching unlike some of the hood-type girls I’ve been with. How girl scout of her.

 

She sits with her legs crossed and pulled in and her hands wrapped around her chest. She quietly turns back to me, strands of hair covering her eyes, as she asks, “Is this enough for you?”

 

“No.” I pace towards her, and pull her arms to the side, then push my way through her legs. My hands move through her hair till I can pull her head to mine. Her lips open for me quickly, almost too quickly. She wants this too. Her warm tongue flicks inside my mouth, and I can practically get drunk off the taste of second-hand tequila and whiskey. Goddamn is it intoxicating.

 

Our hands move over one another – pulling, pushing. Neither of us can get on the same page as the other as she yanks at my clothes and I lean in for a taste of her round, plump tits. Eventually, we’re there, together – both naked, both panting, both begging for more. My cock throbs as her fingers and thighs brush against it. It burns to be inside of her; to explore her with all its muscle.

 

There’s not going to be any foreplay tonight. There’s no need. She asked for this, and I’m giving the girl exactly what she wanted. While I could probably spend hours between her legs, kissing her thighs and breathing in that lavender and honey smell wafting from her pussy, I can tell that rough and hard is the only way to wet this bitch’s appetite. Even her kisses, the ones that trail over my neck and shoulders, seem to beg for it without words. Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.

 

I place an arm around her small waist and, in one quick move, I pull her up and into the air. She turns in my grasp so that when I set her down, it’s on her stomach and hands. Her feet struggle to catch the ground again, but I don’t let her readjust. I lay my chest on her and my hands on hers as I mount her from the back.

 

My throbbing rod searches for her soft opening between the luscious curves of her apple bottom ass. She moans a deep and rattling moan that echoes throughout my own body when I do find it. The tip teases before I force my way in. Whatever breath she had in her body escapes her in one rushing sigh.

 

I pull myself out as quick as I am in. The feeling of release is making me delirious. Her wet, tender folds beckon me back in, and I obey the call. This time, I ram myself into her as hard as I can. Her cries are almost overpowered by my own shouts.

 

“Take it!” I order her. “This is what you wanted. I know you, Delilah…”

 

“Yes! God, yes!” she screeches back, her head raising.

 

I grab hold of the long strands of red hair as a bridle. She manages to lift her chest so that it matches up with mine. My body engulfs her as we move as one. Her body follows mine while I take off, slowly at first, until I am rocketing directly into her with no possibility of stopping. Each push into her opens her up, loosens her skin, reduces the friction. She eases into it with her hips matching mine in reply like some kind of conversation without words.

 

I wrap an arm around her hips and feel for the tip of her pubic bone. My fingers linger around the top of her slit until it opens up around my cock and hand. Her clit practically finds itself. And at that moment, everything changes. She becomes another person in another world.

 

Her voice thickens, and she gasps for air. Her body becomes wild and free. Even her eyes, when they open, burst into flames like none I’ve ever seen before. She pushes her whole self into me, managing to cup her hand around my cheek and then moving an arm around a neck. She floats off the ground as she pulls herself up the top of the desk.

 

Her moves only pull me deeper into her. The smell of her hair against my nose, the taste of her lips, the feeling of her sweat tickling my skin – it pulls me into some kind of damn spell. My head goes blank, and I focus on that feeling in the pit of my stomach that burns and growls in response. One movement after another, and I grow closer to releasing what’s inside of me.

 

I know how dangerous this is, to be this close, to be this ready to explode, but I can’t help myself. She feels so right. This feels so right. Her pussy softens and pulsates around my cock until I can’t control it anymore. It’s the part of me that cannot be contained. I have to unleash it. I have to let it go…

 

It only takes a few seconds, maybe five or six at most, but I release myself into her with one last, deep thrust. My body quivers as it recovers, and hers recoils slightly inward. We both look down, slightly away from one another. But there’s a stillness between us that I haven’t felt in a long while.

 

It’s like riding the highways. At first, it can be fucking terrifying to go that fast and that far. But after an hour or two, it comes without you knowing what you’re doing. You ease into it until the sound of the engine is gone, the wind whipping against you is a breeze, and the sun beating on your back feels like it’s always been there. It’s still. It’s easy.

 

It’s this moment between Delilah and me as we both wait for the other to react.