Chapter 22 Practice
Practice
Gemiah
“Hi, cutie. Welcome home.” The guy in Josha’s kitchen turns from rummaging in a cupboard with a dimpled smile, and I halt in my tracks.
This is not a tweaked-out twink in an anonymous sex club.
This guy is all compact muscle and porcelain skin in too-short cut-off joggers and a loose tank top.
With the blue eyes and chocolate curls, he looks like a younger me.
Before the mileage and the tats and the prison haircut.
This guy is a threat.
And he’s acting like he lives here.
“Hi, Ellis,” Josha says, moving to drop his backpack on the breakfast table as I blurt:
“You have a boyfriend?”
He shakes his head, but my relief is cut short when Ellis pipes up.
“We haven’t really put a label on it yet.” He winks at Josha, flashing that goddamn dimple again.
This is not happening.
“Ellis is one of our acts in the show this year,” Josha says, like that explains why the guy is in his house, all chirpy and tousled, looking like he just rolled out of bed.
“I’m the Chinese pole act.”
“Really? Pole.” I shoot Josha a flat, disbelieving look. At least his type hasn’t changed, although I’m guessing Gem 2.0 comes without the mommy issues and crippling addiction. Josha leans against the table, crossing his arms and arching an amused brow.
He doesn’t have to look so fucking pleased with himself.
“Are you going to introduce me to your scary hunk, or are you keeping him all to yourself?” Ellis sidles over to the table, giving me an appreciative once-over. I bare my teeth in response.
“Ellis, this is—”
“Quill.” No way I’m giving this little weasel the ammunition to go running back to Big Top telling everyone the family fuckup is home.
Josha gave me a reprieve, and I’m taking advantage of every minute of it.
I won’t set foot on the lot until I have to, and since my parents are still a couple days out, the gossip can wait.
“Quill? Like the movie Josha made me watch, with the talking tree and the green queen?”
“Ellis has a crush on Gamora,” Josha explains.
“That bitch slays.”
He showed this guy our movie? This shit just gets better and better. Although Ellis’s observation isn’t wrong—I had more than a few Gamora fantasies myself as a teen. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate the casual way Josha dropped the comment like a callback to a conversation they’ve had a dozen times.
Did they watch it on a laptop in his bed the way we used to?
“You’ve seen it too? No offense, but you don’t exactly seem like the ‘saviors of the universe’ type,” my new arch-nemesis observes, with a skeptical glance at my ripped jeans and motorcycle boots.
“Guardians of the Galaxy,” Josha and I say together.
“Right.” The dimple makes another appearance, this time directed at me. “You’ve got more of a pull-your-hair-while-I-face-fuck-you-into-submission kind of vibe.”
My eyebrows shoot toward my hairline, while Josha tries to smother a cough in his shoulder.
“Ellis,” he says once he’s got his face under control. “What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t stay here—thank fucking god.
“You asked me to feed Zombie.”
At the sound of his name, the cat in question saunters into the room sporting his one-eyed pirate leer and aborted exclamation-mark tail. I crouch down and hold out my hand, and he beelines right to me, chirrupy purr rumbling in his chest.
“Hey, you little miscreant,” I murmur, rubbing my thumb over the short fur above his nose as he buries his face in my palm. “Been taking care of your daddy for me?”
“Damn. I thought he hated everyone but you,” Ellis says to Josha, watching, and I can’t help the satisfied smirk that breaks over my face.
I’ve always been Zombie’s favorite. It used to drive Josha crazy that the little cat would escape the Garrity trailer every night to come yowl at the door of the Airstream until I let him in.
“We should get the Triumph unloaded,” Josha says, pushing away from the table. “I’ve got my own shop here now where the chicken coop used to be, and most of the tools. We can snag the rest from Big Top tomorrow.”
“Of course he has a motorcycle,” Ellis scoffs, but his stupid smile never wavers. Why the fuck is he so goddamn cheerful? “Need some help?”
“Sure.”
“No,” I say at the same time, locking eyes with Josha.
“Got it,” Ellis chuckles. “I’ll get out of your hair, then.”
About fucking time.
“So that’s the type of guy you’re into these days?
” I ask, leaning against Josha’s truck in front of the glorified shed that now houses my battered Bonnie.
Josha leans next to me, swigging from a bottle of the yerba maté shit he’s addicted to.
I have a Coke, and I’m pretending not to wish it were a beer.
“Ellis is sweet.”
“Uh-huh. So it’s not because he’s a watered-down version of me?”
He rolls his eyes. “I just said he was sweet. He’s also gay.”
Yeah, that argument is getting a little old. Maybe I don’t meet Josha’s criteria for inclusion in the gay club, but at this point, I’m running out of ways to show him how I feel about his dick. Or, at least, ways that don’t require his participation.
“A gay boy who has a crush on Gamora,” I remind him.
“Who doesn’t?”
“I always thought you were more into Star-Lord.”
“Stop.”
“Stop what?” My face is the picture of innocence, Bambi eyes and all.
“Playing stupid, for one. And acting like you have any right to give a shit who I mess around with.”
They’ve messed around?
All playfulness drops from my tone. “I told you; I’m not watching another man touch you ever again.”
“No one’s asking you to watch.” He shrugs, taking another pull of his maté, but there’s a whiskey sparkle in his eye.
“Are you…fucking with me?” I ask incredulously.
He scoffs. “That would be a switch.”
“I can’t tell if you’re flirting or actually mad.”
“Can it be both?”
Oh my god, he is flirting.
“Sure. But seeing him in your house still makes me want to wrap my fist in your hair and face-fuck you into submission.”
His ears go red as he scowls. God, it pisses him off when I turn him on. Which is disturbingly hot. And also totally his own fault for flirting with me in the first place. Am I not supposed to take the bait?
“You don’t get to be jealous,” he insists. “Especially not of Ellis.”
Stubborn fucker. Setting my can on the hood, I shift to cage him in, bracing my hands on either side of his hips.
“I’ve always been jealous.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Fisting his hands in my Henley, he spins us with a rough shove, slamming me back against the truck. “I’m the one who had to watch you at parties with your tongue down a different girl’s throat every night. What were you ever jealous of?”
The maté bottle rolls away, spilling the last of its contents into the dirt. The door handle digs into my lower back, and dappled sunlight halos his hair and paints his cheekbones gold. Blood surges to my cock, and I hook my fingers in his belt loops, hauling his hips to mine.
“The guy who’d finally deserve you. The guy who’d come after me. The guy you’d fall in love with. I hated them all.”
“You were the guy I fell in love with,” he growls, driving his thigh between mine. “Was I supposed to wait forever? Was I supposed to save it for you? This mouth you rejected? This body you couldn’t get far enough away from?”
I groan, eyes locked on his mouth, and grind helplessly against him.
“Or was I supposed to practice?” He dips his head, bringing his lips close enough to breathe the next words into my ear. “To learn all the ways to destroy a man from my knees so that the next time I saw you, you’d be the one begging?”
My brain stutters to a complete and grinding halt.
Holy. Motherfucking. Shit.
“Please.”
His lips are a whisper away. His muscular thigh presses treacherously against my aching sac, and his knuckles dig brutally below my collarbone. He’s all molten menace and tight-wire tension, a breath away from breaking.
“Please,” I fucking beg.
“No.” The smirk on his face is so wicked, so completely un-Josha, that my knees go out from under me, and I clutch at his waist to keep from buckling into the dirt.
“Rocket,” I breathe, grasping for the right words.
Something hard and hopeless flickers in his eyes, and if I can’t change his mind right now, I might actually die.
“Pretend…pretend we’re seventeen again, and we’re lying in our hammock, and everything is perfect.
Pretend you’re the reckless one, and I’m the smart one—smart enough to let you do whatever you want to me.
What did you want to do to me when we were perfect, Rocket? Do it now.”