Chapter 33
chapter thirty-three
Mateo
My wife tucked herself into my side— my fucking wife —as I pushed a strand of her dark hair behind her ear and pulled her warm, smooth thighs against mine in the backseat of the SUV.
“Say it again, Tally.” I kissed her neck gruffly, begging to hear the words tumble from her lips. There was only so much I could do without getting banned from rideshare services indefinitely, and the drive to the nightclub our friends had migrated to was in stop-and-go traffic.
Her skin pebbled beneath my mouth. “I’m your wife.”
The blunt tips of my fingers curled around the inside of her thigh, and she squeaked out a noise that had my eyes cutting to the driver’s in the rearview mirror. He quickly bowed his head. I wanted her to keep saying it, engrain it in my ears, speak it into permanent existence because I still felt like I was dreaming, floating on a cloud.
“Do you think he wants a show?” I asked softly, deliberately brushing my lips along her earlobe. Her head fell back on my shoulder. “Because you’re driving me crazy.”
She clamped her hand over mine as it inched toward the hem of her dress, but not before I felt the heat underneath, and my fingers twitched. “You can wait.”
“I can’t.” I turned her face to me and captured her lips with mine as my slacks tightened at the zipper. Of course we couldn’t . That didn’t keep me from pushing it, swelling her lips with my teeth, drawing a pretty little mark to the surface of her skin where it would be hidden by her hair. “I want to fuck my wife.”
She ran her fingers up my shaft and I sucked in a breath. “Behave, husband. The night is still young.”
That was the problem. We had to show face for the rest of the night, because the scavenger hunt wasn’t won, and there were people waiting patiently for us to find our way back to them. But I didn’t give a single fuck about any of that at the moment. I wanted to call it quits and drag Natalia back to the villa with her hair wrapped around my fist. On the other hand, it was our only day in Vegas, and Ophelia and Pike had put in a lot to plan this. We owed them our participation.
“I know Phee is practically a minute away from sending a search party,” Tally said. “I promise it will be worth the wait. Let’s not blow our load too early.”
“When I do I’m filling your mouth.” I grabbed her chin and jammed my thumb in between her lips, feeling her silky tongue lap at the pad of it. She bit my finger and I wrenched it away, wincing.
“They’re going to have questions,” she said. “We weren’t even speaking to one another an hour ago. Clearly something happened.”
“What they’re going to assume is that we solved our issues one way or the other—emphasis on the other —and now we can all enjoy ourselves drama free.” A tiny problem I’d forgotten about reared back to memory, and my face pinched together.
“What is it?” she asked.
My touch danced along her kneecap, and a spot she’d missed shaving prickled my skin. “My brother might have kissed your sister.”
Natalia’s face warped the same way as mine had. Her manicured eyebrows shot to her forehead. “Which?—”
“Mia.”
“On purpose?”
“Out of desperation.” I tilted my head. “For the scavenger hunt.”
“Oh, fucking hell.”
“She may have slapped the shit out of him.”
She was less surprised by this. “And then what?”
“I don’t know.” My shoulders lifted and fell. “I left to find you before the fallout.”
“You didn’t stay to get the tea? You didn’t want to know what was going to happen? Did she seem vengeful, or just perplexed? I mean, the slap was purely consequential, you don’t just kiss people. The two of them have been going at it for two days, though. This is bad.”
“Bad as in, he kissed her, and she slapped him.”
“Bad as in, if he’s not in the hospital by the time we get back, there are more evil spirits at play.”
“You’re perplexing me , Tal. It’s not our problem. Angelo has a habit of getting himself in trouble and this is no different. But this is to say I’m sure our showing back up hand in hand won’t be the most talked about thing in the room.”
She relaxed. The lights and billboards filled the leather interior with a rainbow of colors, and Tally leaned over me to gaze out the window at the advertisements and neon. For the first time in months my body turned like an ignition key and idled. Hummed. I wanted to bottle this moment and keep it on a shelf like rare whiskey. I wanted to age with it, revisit it, show it off, take tiny, secret sips. My wife in my arms in the backseat like this. All the noise was outside and we were watching it pass by, unscathed, like a bubble.
“I’m so happy right now,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
I pressed a kiss to her hairline. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
Natalia’s eyes sparkled with the bright reflection out the window as she looked up. She pointed toward the sky but I was completely caught up in the button curve of her nose and the natural pout of her lips. Lost somewhere admiring how fucking beautiful she was and how badly I wanted our future children to look just like their mom.
“Look, Matty.”
I reluctantly followed her voice.
Full moon.
Of course.
Everything in my life was a circle, folding back in on itself at all the right times. Following me from one substantial event to the next like a time marker. Reminding me to slow down, perhaps. Urging me to feel everything as deeply as I did because it didn’t make me weak, it made me real.
I held her tighter. “Do you remember when I told you that story about being a kid and howling at the moon because I could pretend I was a wolf, and it just made sense? There was something so childlike and innocent about giving in to an impulse like that, and no one ever questioned it either?”
“That was our first date. You should have known back then I wasn’t going anywhere because instead of sending you home, I dragged you up the stairs to my apartment.”
“Well what I didn’t tell you was that, when I was deployed, I would do it too. I would be scared and alone on a post for the night, wondering if it was going to be the last full moon I ever saw because there was no saying what the next twelve hours would bring, let alone another month. And I’d howl to remind myself that that little kid still lived in my chest, his soul was in there, he was going to be fine, and he was going to make it back home.”
Natalia scratched her fingers softly through the hair at the nape of my neck.
“But the real reason I went to hell and made it home was because you were waiting for me here. Like fate. Then I told you that story that night and you turned around and howled at the moon with me and goddammit, Tal, something dormant in my body woke up for the first time. It all connected.”
“You’re the first person who ever stopped and made me look,” she murmured. “I needed you just as much.”
Our car cruised through lighter traffic and Natalia unfurled herself from my lap, waving toward the driver. “Excuse me,” her sweet voice called out as she knocked on the sunroof. “Can you open this?”
The large window retracted and I grabbed Natalia at the knees as she stood, poking her head and shoulders through the vast opening. “Baby, what are you doing?” I couldn’t help the smile that split my mouth in half as she looked back down at me through the feathers on her dress, completely taken with herself.
“Come on, Mateo, be my big bad wolf.”
“Will I even fit?” I laughed and stood. Our bodies pressed flush against one another, which did nothing to tamper that earlier incessant lust as she inadvertently straddled my thigh. I hoisted her higher and held her hips against the edge of the open roof.
There was a mumble of protest from inside the car but it got drowned out by my wife filling her lungs with air and bellowing toward the bright yellow Vegas moon like the tiny she-wolf she was. My chest hurt with happiness. Everything in my body hurt, like my emotions were trying to burst through my skin and getting stuck. I could combust with it. “Fuck, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said softly.
I followed her lead and let the sound rumble to life deep in my chest before howling toward the sky. We took turns letting it out, all the way to our destination.
We found our wedding party in the dark nightclub and Pike sighed out in relief as if the last two hours of his life had aged him twenty years. “All good, I assume?” he asked.
“All is great, brother.” I smiled so hard I felt my dimple deepen in my cheek. So much for playing it cool. I would keep our little wedding chapel secret for as long as I needed to, but fuck if it wasn’t going to be hard not to tell my best friend. I wanted to shout it. My lips thinned awkwardly and Pike tilted his head. “We worked it out.”
“She chewed your ass out, didn’t she?” He glanced down at a mirthful Natalia. She was loving every second of that assumption, because Pike was used to watching her give me hell. He’d been on the other side of the wall to it for over a year.
“She laid it on really good,” I fibbed. “We had a lot on our minds.”
“Where’d you two run off to?” Echo shouted over the music, then reached down attempting to ball tap me but was thwarted by my hand. “Got anything left in there, Cap?”
Ophelia swatted his arm. “Leave them alone, Tyler. They love each other again.”
“I could go all night, pretty boy,” I said. “You could learn a thing or two.”
Natalia squeezed my fingers and blinked her long eyelashes at me and I leaned down to ravage her with a kiss that quickly put everyone in the wedding party on the same page. Back to our game and our night, at a club somehow louder and more packed than the previous two. Vegas was becoming one blur of lights and thudding bass with our scavenger list items stuck like pins through a map.
Angelo’s eyes were hidden in a plastic cup full of beer and I crooked a finger toward him. He silently, reluctantly, stepped up to the plate. There was a nervous glint in his eyes, but there was nothing left to say. He knew exactly why I was summoning him. The same way we knew as kids that our father was going to discipline us for stealing gum from the corner store, or riding our bikes down the train tracks. We answered the call, and suffered the consequences. I sighed, because it hurt me as much as it hurt him, and then I gave him one good slap on the side of the head.
His lips thinned and he rolled his neck on his shoulders. “I deserved that.”
“Mia is a hard fucking limit.”
“I’m not interested,” Ang replied, so quickly it gave me pause. “I just don’t feel like doing a jig at your wedding. You should be a little more appreciative.”
“We’ll see when we win.” There wasn’t much left on the list to make a fool of ourselves with, thankfully. A few less daring objectives, and one more salacious one. It wasn’t like we had to do everything there; we just had to do one more thing than the girls, and I’d lost count of them anyway.
We found a large round booth to sit at and ordered another round of drinks. Every one of us had crossed the threshold from sober to sentimental, entering that weird fuzzy limbo where the trips to the bathroom were like getting off a carnival ride and finding your feet again. My heart was fueled, my chest was warm, I sipped my gin, and across from me my bubbly wife got lost in a martini glass and teased her tongue over her lips to lick off the excess.
Dammit if I didn’t think about licking it off myself.
Natalia’s heel inched out and grazed my shin below the table. When the toe of her shoe crept up to my knee, I snatched her ankle, drawing patterns in the bone with the pad of my thumb. I couldn’t touch her like I wanted to, which was becoming a problem for my body. My manhood was rebelling against my wish to remain cool and collected and instead was playing the pop-a-boner-in-public game. I needed something to alleviate it. A brisk walk, a cold shower, ice down the back of my shirt, anything. I dropped Tally’s ankle and stood.
“Does anyone need anything?”
Everyone at the table declined and I sped off before anyone decided to join me. A small alcove beside the bar was empty, and I stood in it with my hands behind my head and my eyes closed, picturing mangled, boot-bound athlete’s foot and the unattended barracks bathrooms at Fort Liberty.
Yep, that’d do it.
For the time being, at least. Until I caught another glimpse of Tally and my cock decided it wanted to be a real boy again.
I pulled out my scavenger list as a distraction. Get the DJ to play your song request.
That was easy enough, right? What kind of DJ didn’t take requests? The stage he was on was the most challenging part. It was higher than the dance floor, made to look like a bird cage or maybe a jail cell, with a tiny ladder in the back and an opening through the bars to come and go. There was hardly enough standing room for one guy and all his equipment, and I wasn’t entirely confident in the stability of the thing after watching him jump to the beat of a bass drop and rock the floor like a boat.
My first try was shouting through cupped hands toward the guy with no luck. I wasn’t going to throw a drink, but I wasn’t seeing too much of an option outside of climbing the ladder myself. That would likely get me ripped down by a meathead bouncer and thrown out of the club entirely. I opted to back up enough into the crowd to wave my arms like I was directing airline traffic. After a solid two minutes of lifting eagerly onto the balls of my feet and doing my sedentary jumping jacks, I caught his attention. He lifted one of his headphones off his buzzed head and beckoned me up toward him.
The second I reached the top of the DJ platform, I could feel a thousand eyes on me from below. I easily picked my bridal party out in the crowd, watching me skeptically. Natalia had a worried, confused dimple between her brows.
“You okay, man?” the DJ asked. Below the booth was loud, but inside it was deafening. My brain recalibrated taking in all the switches and knobs, the buttons glowing green and red. I clocked an open laptop at the center of the setup and squinted at a Spotify playlist actively running. This dude wasn’t even fucking mixing at all.
The platform we were on started to sway and I cut to it. “I have a request.”
“Nah, man, I don’t do that. I have a pretty strict setlist. You don't want to mess with the flow, you know? Can lose the whole crowd that way.”
My attention darted to the laptop again, and he took one step in front of it, blocking it from view.
“I won’t tell anyone your secret if you play one song for me—for my wife,” I added, knowing if anything he’d care more about her. His blue eyes sliced toward the buttons and he pushed one back and forth as if he were actually doing anything. “We just got married. Think of it as a first dance song. The crowd will love it.” I was a few inches taller and about fifty pounds heavier than him, and I used that size and practiced intimidation to make it seem like there was no ultimatum. “Please,” I tacked on.
He scratched the back of his head and stuck his tongue into his gums. Another beat picked up, skipping over itself, and the music man twirled his fingers around a turntable and threw his fist out in the air. Tapping a button, an airhorn screeched, followed by a blast of smoke on the busy dance floor. This was the equivalent of an adult sensory table.
“What song,” he shouted. There was no question, just reluctant acceptance.
“Good man.” I clapped his chest.
My song request was personal, somewhat of an inside joke but more an anecdote of Natalia and me. And despite thinking it might ruin the flow , or whatever unremarkable words he used about the stolen setlist, it slipped into the tracks like it always belonged. It met the alluring vibe of the club right in the middle between sensual and euphoric. I waited for the first few bars of the song to play before slipping back down the ladder and into the crowd toward my wedding party, feeling extremely pleased with myself and awaiting the reaction of my bride.