Chapter 8 – West
WEST
K ira climbs out of the Jeep, looking more tense than before she left, and I seem to automatically toss my socket wrench down on the work table and saunter over to her.
My blinders are on to the curious looks I’m getting from the other mechanics as I hone straight in on her, wondering what’s happened.
“You alright?” I ask, meeting her in the middle of the garage.
She blows out a shaky breath but nods. “It’s a long story, but in a nutshell, my father just cut me off.”
“Fuck,” I grumble under my breath. “I’m sorry.”
“I was able to withdraw some money before it went through,” she continues, as Agnes pushes her way out of her side of her lopsided Jeep that’s parked half on the curb. “I can give you a down payment while I figure out what to do next. I just have to make some calls.”
I nod. “It’s okay.” And before I know it, my hand is on her bare arm, trying to settle her. “What about after that? What are you going to do?”
She shakes her head, holding her arms out slightly when Agnes pops up at her side.
“You’re going to stay with me,” she announces, placing a grandmotherly arm snugly around Kira’s waist. Kira looks from me to her but before she can respond, Jackson inserts himself in the conversation.
“Is this the driver of the Rolls?”
“Hi,” Kira says to him, her head whipping to him then back to me.
“She ran away from her wedding,” Agnes fills in.
“Whoa,” I see Jackson’s head jerk back in my peripheral and I notice Razor and a couple other workers’s tools have gone silent.
“Back off, Jack-Wagon,” Agnes warns Jackson. “Or I’m not babysitting on your next date night.”
His lips fold together in a thin line before he obliges, and Kira takes in a breath of the air he just cleared. “Honey, you’re staying with me,” Agnes repeats to her. “You can lay low at my place until you figure this whole shit-show out.”
Kira looks to her, astonished. “I can?”
“I’ve got a big house with empty rooms since my kids and then grandkids moved out. If you can help out around the place, run an occasional errand for me, and you don’t mind underground gambling and debauchery, I’d love to have you.”
Kira lets out a nervous giggle, but honestly, I wouldn’t write Agnes’s antics off as joking, necessarily. “Okay,” she finally says quietly.
“Go grab whatever things you have, I’ll go home and get a room ready,” Agnes concludes, sliding her grasshopper shades back down on her face and turns to stride back towards her horribly parked vehicle.
“Get back to work, Razor,” she scolds when she walks past him.
“Your guns aren’t bulging enough.” At her age, things like sexual harassment falls under the umbrella of things she couldn’t give two shits about.
“She had to have been a model at one point.” Kira watches wistfully after her.
“Man, can she lead with her hips.” She shakes her head with a sigh before turning back to me.
“I’m not doing something stupid, am I?” She looks up at me, her blue eyes trepidatious and I have a sudden urge to pull her to me, but I catch myself.
“No, no. Not stupid, princess. You’ll be safe there. She’s harmless. Mostly.”
“Good,” she breathes out. “I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing, but I just can’t go back to Chicago, at least not right away.”
“Take it from me,” I tell her, with a tenderness in my voice I don’t recognize. “There’s no place like this town to lay low.” I feel my heartrate ratchet up. I overshared. But then again, she pretty much opened her closet door within the hour we met and let several skeletons come screaming out.
“Okay.” She widens her bright eyes, looking nervously optimistic, and with Agnes out of sight, Jackson of course, chooses this moment to make a reappearance at my side before Kira’s next words. “Is your apartment open? I guess I better head up and grab my things.”
At the same time I see Jackson’s stupid face snap in the direction of mine, I take Kira gently by the arm and steer her in the direction of the office. “Let me grab you the key,” I mutter in her ear.
Once I’ve retrieved my keys from the top drawer I hand them to her and she offers Jackson a smile as they pass each other through the door. He slams it shut behind him and immediately crosses his arms.
“Start explaining, buddy.”
I do my best to look unfazed, and give him a cool look. “I’ve got nothing to explain.”
“New girl,” he ticks off one finger at a time. “Car broke down after running from her wedding. Her shit’s upstairs in your apartment.”
“Hey, watch yourself!” I scold, holding a finger up at him. “You know I take this place and my work seriously, and I’m nothing but fucking professional! ”
Kira’s wedding dress would argue…
“Yeah, put the pieces together and you’ve got a stranded woman who had no place to go, and I - the guy that towed her car, and the only face she’d met, let her crash at my place.
Like I said, nothing to explain. Now get your ass back to work, fucker.
” I smirk as I place a toothpick between my lips and point in the direction of the garage; hoping the humor in my voice will distract him.
He gives me a smart grin and a headshake that say he’s not buying an ounce of my shit but he’s letting it go.
I waste no time opening the office back up and striding back out to work; picking up where I left off on the routine maintenance on the sedan which happens to belong to one of Agnes’s many grown grandkids.
It’s around forty minutes later when I finish and realize Kira hasn’t made a reappearance.
After writing up the invoice and calling the owner to let them know they can come get their car, I make my way up the stairs to make sure she’s all good. Only I’m ill-prepared for what I find.
Kira
I gather my few toiletries from the bathroom, dropping them on West’s bed and grab my yoga pants from the chair I’d draped them over.
I’ll have to wash them when I get to Agnes’s house because there’s nothing else in my ridiculous luggage that I’m eager to wear while laying low.
When I pick them up, I see Wests’s t-shirt that I’d borrowed and look longingly at it before I turn to put the comfy pants in my suitcase.
My eyes find it again when I look over my shoulder, deliberating if it would be okay to wear it again.
When I shucked it off this morning, I was thinking that it was gross to continue wearing a shirt I got drunk in and slept in, but fuck, it was comfortable.
And to be honest, I like the way I looked in it.
So foreign, but so natural, like the way I was always meant to look and feel - like someone who doesn’t take life too seriously.
Fuck it.
I whip off my eighty-dollar tank top and grab the shirt off the chair, slipping it on again.
The cotton feels like heaven whispering over my skin, and the smell of hot, sexy, rugged mechanic engulfs me.
The lusty memory of yesterday comes rushing back to me, of the man in question staring into my eyes as he pummeled his cock recklessly into me.
Those dirty hands smudging my dress, that dirty mouth making me ache.
My slutty little friend in my panties sighs dreamily, but then starts to weep forlornly when she and I both realize that I’m never going to have sex like that again.
The filthy, no-holds-barred fucking that sinfully sexy man gave me yesterday was the holy grail of sexcapades, and now that I’ve found it, there’s no hope of finding it again, and my vag should just retire.
Okay, that’s depressing, and now my panties are soaked. Call it arousal, or my vaggie’s tears, it doesn’t matter. I need to shake it off and grab life by the balls. West didn’t say he was in any hurry for me to pack up, and neither did Agnes, so perhaps I could get one thing out of the way.
Guilt over the getaway car is hanging over my head, and while I’m not eager to talk to anyone in Chicago other than Toby, I need to call one of them. And frighteningly enough, Preston is the least of all those evils. He’s a bag of dicks, but he’s all bark.
Shimmying out of my pants, I change into clean panties and flop on West’s bed. Wearing nothing but his shirt makes me feel empowered to verbally hand Preston his ass.
After dialing his number, I only wait one ring before he picks it up.
“You whore!” He screeches down the line and it startles me enough to move the phone away from my ear a second before rolling my eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. Look, can we cut past the drama and talk about getting your uncle back his car?”
“Why the fuck would I want to do anything your way, right now?”
“You wouldn’t,” I tell him, choosing not to get into the blame game rabbit hole with him.
It’s counterproductive to dealing with the car situation.
I may be broke with no place to live, officially, but that’s my problem.
The car gives me ties to that world, and something for them all to hold over me.
“But listen, can you just get me your uncle’s number or give him mine?
He didn’t leave any information in the glove compartment or anything. ”
“That’s because that car was just for show, you idiot!
He was being nice enough to let us borrow it for the wedding, but he didn’t keep anything anywhere in it, it was in pristine condition for display.
What, you thought you’d find his registration amongst a users manual and some fast food napkins like some simpleton? !.”
This is going great. “Look, the car has some damage done to it, and I’m going to help get it fixed -,” I start to explain, but Preston cuts me off with more bitching, right when the door to West’s apartment swings open.
“Damage?!” Preston shrieks into the phone again. “What the fuck did you do to it?! I swear to god, you’re like every other woman that can’t drive for shit! Just another reason I’m better off without your useless ass! Seriously, what the fuck did you crash it into some podunk lemonade stand?”
My still somewhat hungover brain is trying to process Preston’s dramatic onslaught and West’s emerging presence, leaving me no time to react when I feel the phone taken from my hand.
“Actually, the car broke down due to lack of routine maintenance, which the owner should’ve known if he was any kind of car enthusiast,” West informs Preston cooly, holding the phone up to his ear.
“See, letting a car sit in a showroom without running the engine and getting the fluids flowing once in a while isn’t good for its performance or resale value. ”
Speaking of fluids flowing…
Competency porn is a thing, it turns out. The way West is standing over me, rattling off all these complex, mechanical facts like it’s second nature is turning me on almost as much as the way he’s pinning me to his bed with his intense stare.
He’s in another pair of worn-out jeans and wearing a t-shirt similar to the one I’ve shamelessly confiscated only it’s black with the logo in white, and oh… shit. That’s why he’s staring at me. I’m in his shirt again and not much else.
“Beyond that, the spark plugs”—ooh, more dirty talk—“hadn’t been changed in fuck knows when, and had so much build up, I’m embarrassed for him. Oh but I will say the thing has good shocks,” he winks at me and I’m done. Another pair of panties soaked through.
“And as for you, son, you hadn’t maintenanced your woman properly - ever. Took care of that for you too, by the way,” he licks his lips as my thighs find each other and start caressing each other. Good god, the way he’s telling Preston off is a whole other aphrodisiac in its own class.
“You son of a bitch!” I hear Preston scream through the line, and West offers up a smug smirk. “Are you the fucking loser asshole who fucked my wife?!”
“She’s not your wife,” West scoffs, with narrowed eyes. “She’s all mine now. And if I were you, I’d get your uncle in touch with her before I just have that sorry excuse of a collector’s car impounded.”
“Who the fuck are you? Tell me who the fuck you are so I can -,”
“What are you going to do, rich boy? Beat me with a badminton racket? I’ve got a business to run here, and I don’t have time for this bullshit. Just get your uncle in touch with Kira. I’ve gotta go.” His hand finds my bare thigh and grips it possessively. “Looks like she needs me again.”
And with that, he signs off, leaving me staring up at him with my jaw hanging open and my breath coming in desperate little pants. I feel sweat forming at the back of my neck as he licks his lips again and speaks.
“I just said that to piss him off,” he explains. “I don’t have any claim on you. I just didn’t like how he was talking to you and I wanted to get under his skin,” he goes on, yet he’s not moving his hand from my leg.
Every cell of my skin starts to hum as I place my hand on his, and gently guide it up further, looking up at him to see if I’m the only crazy one here.
My question is answered when his body comes down on top of mine, our lips crashing together, and his hand riding further up my leg to palm my pussy.
“Fuck you’re hot in my shirt,” he growls, nudging my legs open with his hips. The scratch of his denim jeans against my bare thighs makes me writhe.
“You’re hot when you’re putting my ex in his place,” I groan back as he nips at my bottom lip.
Not to mention hovering over me with your tattoos blazing.
“I want to get inside you. Please fucking let me inside you.”
Fuck, he’s begging but in a gravelly, demanding tone and the conundrum of it fucks with my head as his mouth comes down over my tit, sucking the nipple through the cotton of his t-shirt.
“Ah! Yes!” I cry out as the sensation makes me writhe. “Put it in, please put it in.”
God, it’s so dirty with West, just like I always wanted to experience.
He leans away briefly to fish a condom out of the side table drawer, but as soon as he’s back, I grip his t-shirt; keening beneath him as the smell of sweat and his delicious musk put a spell on me.
In fact, it must make me black out for a moment, because the next thing I feel is the unparalleled, thunderbolt of pleasure that comes with him slamming his cock inside me.