Chapter Two – Jack
Chapter Two
Jack
I went to a diner, my mind reeling. Why would Thea want to see me?
I knew what I hoped—and I knew what I shouldn’t be hoping, at the same time.
Still though, God, at the thought of those legs that’d wrapped around that pole, wrapping around me instead?
An urgent, almost electric, need flowed through my body from stem to stern.
The arrival of a small four-door made everything moot as Thea got out of it and grinned at me. “Eager much?”
“Politely punctual,” I said, smiling back. She was wearing slip-ons, a tank top, and yoga pants now, hauling all of her stripper gear in a huge duffle bag at her side. “Can I take that?”
“Please,” she said, handing it over to me. “God, how I have missed southern men.”
“Is it all that different out here? Or just an occupational hazard?”
“Bit of both, I suppose,” she said, as I followed her up a flight of stairs outdoors. She unlocked her door and let me in.
Her apartment was cozy, full of warm-colored overstuffed furniture and a nice entertainment system.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, before taking her bag from me and disappearing into the back, where I assumed her bedroom was.
I heard water running and sat down on her couch.
I currently had a strange definition of home, sleeping in a closet-like studio over the tattoo shop—I preferred this one much more to that.
“There,” she announced, returning without make-up and her hair back in a tousled bun. “Sorry if the magic’s gone.”
“Hardly,” I said. If anything, her willingness to be casual amplified it.
She walked past me and into her kitchen, opening the fridge up. “It’s not too late, is it?” she asked, leaning over the door to offer me a beer.
“Haven’t you already had forty of those tonight?”
“Ha. Only if apple juice counts as whiskey.”
“Then I’ll take one.” She brought it back to me and sat on the end of the couch, close enough to touch, but still far away enough to make it hard.
“Thanks,” I said. I popped my beer open and looked around again at the room and then her, trying to hide my frank disbelief that I was here and that this was happening. “How’d the rest of your night go?”
Thea looked surprised. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah. What’s it like? I mean I knew you always loved to dance—"
“Yeah.” She gave her beer a shy look. “It’s—it’s different then what you see on TV.
No one shows the back stage stuff. My boss—well, you saw her.
She’s her own kind of scary. But I guess you have to be when half the girls are high—there’s so much bullshit back stage.
” She took a long swig of her beer, definitely her first of the evening.
“Girls arguing about which guys are their marks—which songs belong to them—figuring out which girls are desperate enough to work a group before Rosalie assigns you anyhow—it’s a lot of drama.
But where else can you make a couple hundred bucks a night with no degree? ”
“Tattooing? But only if you’re very, very good, and lucky, and willing to work every Friday and Saturday and your clients are smart enough to leave tips.”
“Oh my God. Clients,” she said, making air-quotes around the word. “This guy tonight tried to show me photos of his wife and kids.”
I sputtered the sip of beer I’d been taking. “What the fuck?”
“I know, right? Sometimes they just want to pay you to listen about their day. If you’re topless, all the better.”
“You’d think therapy would be cheaper and smell less like cherry lotion.”
She laughed. “Also, like come on. We’re covered in glitter! If you’re going home and your wife still does your laundry, she either knows and doesn’t care, or she’s got her own thing on the side.”
“Maybe they just ‘lose’ their luggage at the airport before they go home.”
“Maybe,” she said with a grin, then shook her head. “I can’t believe that you’re not mad at me, Jack.”
“I’m not exactly a zen monk—but all that was in the past. I like who I am now. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
I didn’t know it was true until I’d spoken the words, but it was. Ever since Bruce’d taken me under his wing, I had cash on hand and a way to get more. Even better, I had respect, from others and from myself, something high school had been far better at taking away from me than creating.
Thea sank back into her couch. “Man, if I could go back—there’s so much I would change.”
“Like what?” I asked.
She looked over at me. “You really want to know?”
“Of course,” I answered, then added, “I want to know everything you’re thinking.
” I felt foolish for saying it the second the words left my mouth, but it was too late at night for me to be on my guard, and I’d meant it besides.
I’d wanted to know what was going on inside Thea’s head since seventh grade at least.
Instead of laughing as I instantly feared, she seemed taken aback, and I watched her set her drink down in a deliberate fashion, before reaching up to undo her bun, like the ‘librarian’ in so many music videos. “I would change this,” she said, crawling over the distance between us on her couch.
I stayed still as the answer to a thousand teenaged prayers unspooled like a film reel in my mind.
She was on all fours, and came close enough I could feel her breath.
“I never should’ve,” she started to apologize—the apology that I’d waited years for, only now I didn’t want to hear it.
I leaned forward and kissed her instead.
Her lips were as soft as I’d always dreamed they’d be. My head tilted and she leaned in. It was natural for our lips to part, for our tongues to taste, and I reached a tentative hand up to touch her cheek as she crawled forward, moving to sit in my lap.
There was no way not to be hard. Years of watching her, and all the events of tonight—no amount of thinking about baseball or horror films could cure me.
I wound my hands around her waist, finding where her shirt ended to touch silky skin—but I needed to ask where this was going before we went on.
I pulled my head back, taking her lower-lip with me in between my teeth, tugging her closer to me as her hands ran up my chest and neck and into my hair to keep me close.
“Do you fuck as good as you kiss?” she whispered.
“Absolutely. But,” I said, and she leaned back, her beautiful lips pulling into a pout. “I don’t want apology sex, Thea. So if that’s what this is, it’s late—let me go home and jerk off in peace.”
She gave me a thoughtful look and then moved in a very conscious way, grinding slowly against me, relishing taking the power I pretended to have over myself back. “Is ‘friend I haven’t seen in a few years’ sex okay? Or what about ‘sex with hot guy who turns me on?’”
“Either of those will do,” I said, and caught her hair with one hand, while I sent the other underneath her shirt.
I wound her hair into my fist and pulled her mouth to mine again.
Her hands fluttered for a second—then started undoing the buttons at my neck, as my other hand sank under the elastic of her bra and reached beneath, bunching up her shirt, so my thumb could graze her nipple.
“Too much clothing,” I complained, releasing her hair and pulling up her shirt as she twisted to let me, and then she was sitting half-naked on my lap.
I was awestruck by her, for a second—and then I brought my hands up to maul her, firmly grasping every piece of her lovely smooth skin I could touch—then I bowed her forward so that I could kiss her, from her collar bone down—I had to taste her breasts, it was an animalistic urge.
She moaned as my mouth reached her nipple and she played one hand in my hair—the other she tried to shove between us, to get further down my chest, at what was hidden in my jeans.
I sucked on her and nuzzled her with my now 5-am-o-clock shadow, trying to eat her, smell her, feel her all at once.
Her nipples went hard and I gently bit one while pulling at the other.
“Oh, yeah,” she breathed, and I felt her hips rise as her ass clenched against my thighs, as though she were fucking an imaginary cock.
I was dying to give her the real thing—but I wanted to give her so much more, first. “Stand up.”
“What?” She lolled forward, eyes a little cloudy.
“Stand up and take those pants off.”
She made a disappointed groan but then got up and stood a few feet away. “These pants?” she said, hitching her thumbs into the waistband.
“You heard me,” I said.
She turned so her ass was facing me and looked over her shoulder. “Are you sure?” she asked, pressing them slowly down, revealing an inch of creamy skin and the beginnings of a pink thong.
“Very,” I said, in a tone that broached no teasing.
She swung her hips from side to side, slippery-slipping them off as slowly as she could.
“All the way?” she asked, bending forward, so that I could see the satin veiled promise between her thighs.
“Everything,” I commanded.
She took her time with the thong, making the moment last—then turned around more slowly, shyly, to show her body off. She was small and tight and only the thinnest line of fur ran down toward her clit like a suggestive arrow—like her body already knew exactly what I meant to do to her.
“C’mere,” I said, gesturing her closer. She came nearer—and it took a moment and some manhandling for me to make myself clear, as I made her stand on her couch over me, a foot on either side of my hips, so that the space between her thighs was directly in front of my face.
“Jack—" she breathed.
“Shh—" I said, and anything else I was going to say was buried against her pussy.