Chapter Nine – Angela #2
When I was done with the outline, I pulled back and he raised his arm to look at it closely. “Not half bad.”
“Thanks,” I said, relinquishing the gun. Then I realized I’d forgotten to leave space for the scroll where ‘Mom’ would go, and started cursing, and he laughed.
“Don’t worry about that. I’m not gonna let you fill it in. I’m too manly for a red heart, but the hair’ll cover the outline soon. And there’s no way I’d let you try lettering on me, not without practicing a ton first.”
I heard the sound of a bike coming near and then parking as the engine shut off, and Gray walked in, holding a bag. At seeing Wade and I close, his eyebrows rose.
“Been teaching your girl a trade,” Wade said.
Gray smiled at the both of us, half-wicked, half-sweet. “I hope it made her hungry.”
“It did,” I said, standing quickly, crossing the room to him. Gray took my hand and gave Wade a look, before pulling me back to his bedroom. I didn’t realize until hours later I’d forgotten my Pbr.
My parents were, as you might imagine, pissed.
They’d just come to grips with the thought of me leaving for college, so finding out where I was really spending my time—and where Willa and I quickly started living—if I hadn’t been eighteen, they would’ve come and ‘rescued’ me, by taking me home and chaining me to my bed.
But Willa and I knew we’d found true love, the kind you only read about, that blotted every other thought from your mind, just like a good high.
I kept going to school, taking the bus in, or on more thrilling days riding the back of Gray’s bike, while Willa made a rough attempt at it, dropping all but her easiest classes, working at the Cash 4 Gold store at the end of the strip mall.
Going back and forth to UNLV felt like a tunnel between two realities, the world that everyone else participated in, and the world at the bar with Gray and Willa that was mine.
None of the boys on campus could even begin to tempt me from either of their sides, they all seemed like children comparatively.
Whereas being with Willa and Gray every night—the knowledge of each other only we could share—seemed to make me wise.
The real world only interrupted infrequently, one: during one of my mother’s anxious weekly phone calls, and two: when once a month most, but not all, of the Pack left for the Farm for a night, to take care of Pack business.
And anything that was Pack business, Willa and I were not to know.
We’d begged Gray to let us in—we’d held nothing back, so him having secrets felt unfair.
“You know how to have fun without me. So just stay in here and lock the door.”
The first month that made sense, and the second, and the third, but by the fourth—“Please, Gray,” Willa pleaded, but he was adamant.
“What do you think they’re doing out there?” she asked me, after he was gone.
I had guesses but I wanted them to be wrong. Gray didn’t have a ‘real’ job—I knew enough to know I didn’t really want to know how he made money. “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to the bar,” she said, unlocking the door and stomping out.
I followed her. Wade was behind the bar, with only a smattering of the local set left behind. Willa went over to pick all the songs she liked on the jukebox.
“How’s school?” he asked. The hair on his arm had indeed covered up my thin heart.
“It’s all right.” I shrugged.
He leaned over the bar toward me. “You still curious about my guns?”
“Focus on the task at hand, Wade,” Daziel, another older pack member, reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wade said, blowing him off, setting up a row of shot glasses, filling them to the brim with tequila. After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled out two more to top off.
“Them too?” Daziel asked.
“Why not? They’re suffering as much as the rest of us.” He pulled something else out from behind the bar after that, a bottle with an eyedropper. I tensed, but he put it into every shot glass, the clear fluid he squirted instantly blending in.
At some appointed time Willa and I were not a party to, all the men came up. She and I hovered at the far side of the bar, and Wade shoved over our shots. “To the Pack!” he shouted, and as one, the men drank. Willa and I did too, or tried too—I sputtered in pain.
“Fuck, Wade,” Willa said, coming up with a smile, even though her shoulders hunched like she was wounded. “That needs lime and salt.”
“Lime and salt’s for pussies,” he said, leaning over to top her shot off.
The third time that threw me out of our little perfect life was when Gray came home late one night, covered in blood.
Willa was out at the club with the other girls, under Nikki’s watchful supervision.
She was like the Pack’s den mother, not much older than we were, but you could feel that she belonged in a way that Willa and I didn’t yet.
She was able to get anyone in to any club, anywhere in Vegas, even when you were under twenty-one, a talent that Willa made frequent use of, while I was home studying, books and laptop open on Gray’s desk.
Gray stayed out late fairly often, but usually we could tell when something like this was coming up, there was a tension in the air, an urgent need to act.
Sometimes, beforehand, he acted out on us, fucking us so wildly we almost couldn’t come up for air, other times we acted on each other, holding each other close and quietly, neither one of us wanting to say aloud what we were thinking: ‘What the hell had we gotten ourselves into again?’ But then the storm would break and it was easy to convince yourself that that storm was the last.
I was unprepared for him to come home looking like that that night though, his arrival startled me.
“Oh my God—Gray—are you okay?” He strode across the room and started shedding clothing while I hovered nearby. “What happened?” I pressed.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
“Then I don’t want you to know,” he said, going into the bathroom. I heard the shower turn on as I leaned against the door.
I never knew what to do in times like these.
To take him at his word? Or show him that we had something I thought was worth fighting for—even if fighting meant ignoring what he’d said?
I hovered nervously and then started taking off my clothes—I knew the fastest way to make everything peaceful again.
I opened the bathroom door, steam billowing out.
Gray stood in the open shower, hidden by only a half-wall of glass and tile. Red streaks were staining down his back.
“You’re hurt,” I breathed.
He looked over at me angrily. “I’ll be fine.”
For all that he thought he knew what was best for everyone, all the time, why could he never see when he needed caring? I picked up a washcloth and walked near. “Just….” I began.
He made a growling sound but didn’t move as I came up behind him and started patting it at his back.
The edges of a single bullet wound were puckering, like it was old, even though the blood said it was fresh.
It’d heal and scar soon and be just another thing about Gray that I would never understand.
“You’re still innocent. I want to keep you that way,” he said, turning toward me, pushing the washcloth away.
“Why?” I asked, looking up at him as the shower rained down on us both.
“So every time I fuck you is like the first time,” he said, pushing me back against the wall.
I ran my hands into his hair as his body pressed against mine, our mouths locked on one another’s. His hands searched up and down my sides, pulling my hips towards his, making me feel his hard-on between my thighs.
We were too good at this by now to take long—I spread my legs and arched forward as he pushed up, his cock finding home—and—no condom. I was on birth control, but still, no condom—his cock slid in as he groaned, and I knew I didn’t care. I wanted to be his, skin to skin.
“This is how I wanted it,” he panted, feeling it as I did, a strange new closeness between us.
All I could do was nod as he pulled one of my legs up, to reach himself deeper inside me.
His other hand caught my wrist and planted it over my head, against tile.
“How I’ve always wanted it,” he murmured.
I tried to move my trapped hand and found I couldn’t—but I could use the anchor he’d given me by pinning it to curl myself up on my toes and—my free hand wound around his neck for balance, as he pulled my bent leg closer still.
In his kinder moments, Gray would ask things like, ‘How is that?’ and ‘Is this going to work for you?’ But I knew I’d caught him off-guard here and made an offering of myself, and that’s how he was going to take me.
He leaned into the wall, into me, pounding into my pussy with swift smooth strokes.
My free hand clawed up his back like whatever had just hurt him, my mouth kissing and biting his chest, his shoulder, and his lips were on my neck and everything spun together, the water raining down on us both, making me feel like I was drowning in him all over.
Still thrusting, he leaned down and touched his forehead to mine.
“I’m gonna cum inside you, Angela.”
I nodded so he could feel it as I whispered, “Okay.” His grip on my wrist and thigh tightened and I felt off balance as he pulled me into him, while pushing both of us back against the wall—I heard him suck in a breath, his whole body tensing, ready to shove me full of his cum—and at the thought of him finally unloading himself into me at long last—I teetered on my standing leg and reached down and rubbed and—just as his hips jerked and his cock bobbed I came with a howl, throbbing against him bodily.
“Yeah, Angie-girl,” he said, pinning me up on his jetting cock as I spasmed and took it from him. “Yes—that—that,” he growled, into my ear.
He freed me slowly, leg first, then wrist, kissing me madly, lips, neck, and chest, making my nipples stand at attention, as I felt his load drip out of me, the water carrying it away.
Then with a burst of cold air the door was open and Willa standing there, looking between us with a mischievous grin. “What did I miss?”
Gray looked at her over his shoulder. “Nothing you’re not going to get from me next.”
The night went on, and I never did find out who’d shot him.