Chapter Twenty-Seven Bram
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bram
I was already pacing, phone in hand, warring with myself about whether secret hookups get to retrieve wayward brats or whether that’s AITA material, when Leo calls.
“While I’d love to leave a very hot, very drunk Velma on your doormat like a DoorDash order, I also remember very vividly that you are a gigantic motherfucker and I’d rather not test your godlike anger,” he says when I pick up.
“What?”
“Madelyn is currently warbling ‘Part of Your World’ from The Little Mermaid while lying on a sidewalk outside an Irish pub,” Leo explains.
“She’s pretending to have a mermaid tail.
She also told me to do something absolutely disgusting with a knockoff Gucci belt we found abandoned in a potted plant. ”
I hear a trilling voice above the general clamor and shouting of the Snake Pit on Halloween, singing about bright young women sick of swimming.
“I’ll be right there,” I say, already going for my car keys.
“Spoken like a good Boss Daddy Bram,” Leo approves, and then the call ends, leaving my screen open to the picture sent to my phone two hours earlier from an unknown number.
Maddie in a strange bathroom, giving me a coy look over her shoulder, red lips pulled into a kiss, skirt flirted up just enough that I can see the juicy swell of her ass.
The thick-rimmed glasses and the thigh-highs she’s wearing—obscene. Impudently filthy. I’ve already saved the picture to a hidden folder* on my phone.
With a growl, I text Fern to tell her that the house is hers for the next twenty minutes and then I go outside to my car.
TOMBAUGH AVENUE, THE main artery of the Snake Pit, is still in party mode when I get there, although only a few of the bars are still serving drinks, and the party has shifted from shots and well drinks to flasks and weed vapes.
And it’s not like the Snake Pit is Rome under Caligula or anything, but seeing all the reckless young people and the for-real grown-ups who definitely have no business partying like they’re twenty-two is making me itchy under my skin.
I need to find Maddie, see her, make sure she’s safe, and then I want to ask her exactly what she thought was going to happen when she sent me that picture.
And then—and then—all sorts of raw, caveman reactions jostle inside me when the crowd parts, and I see the white glint of Leo’s hair, and then Madelyn Kowalczk sleeping soundly at his feet. Flat on the cold, hard sidewalk in a delicious display of turtleneck and short skirt.
I want to scoop her up, haul her home, and take her over my lap. And then hold her close, because Jesus Christ, seeing her passed out on the sidewalk while drunk, rowdy frat boys horse around just a few feet away . . .
I reach Leo, who, other than the drying vomit splattered on his tuxedo pants and dress shoes, looks like he just stepped away from a dinner with an ambassador. And then I drop down to a knee and gently rouse Maddie.
“Your nanny threw up on my shoes,” says Leo, unnecessarily.
“Childcare provider. Where is Junie?” I ask Maddie, who’s just opened her eyes behind her fake glasses. They are a shock of green in a world of cool shadows and golden streetlights.
Maddie manages to look scornfully defiant as I help her sit up—an impressive feat, truly, to still look like a czarina while reclining on a sidewalk—and I notice that her red lipstick is still immaculate when she replies, “She left me on the sidewalk because Gatsbys and Mothmen don’t get along.
” She pronounces this statement with great import, like she’s preambling a talk on bipartisanship and trade agreements.
Something dangerous rolls through me at the admission that she’d been left alone, a spill of red ink in clear water, and I bite back the words crowding behind my lips, piling on my tongue.
I don’t roar at the sky. I don’t threaten to handcuff her to my bed so she can’t go wander down dark, cold streets drunk and alone.
But, oh god, I want to.
“You were going to chase after Mothman,” Maddie says to Leo, the suspicion as heavy in her words as alcohol. She’s pointed a finger at him—or at where she seems to think he is, but it’s currently pointed at a clump of frat boys who are dressed as different Dolly Partons. “That wasn’t nice of you.”
“I thought I’d say hello to Junie,” Leo says, the neutral words layered with cool indifference. Maybe a graze of malice.
I meet his eyes, which are suddenly the dangerous silver of my high school bully. Of Junie’s high school bully. There are a lot of years between that Leo and the Leo of now, but when it comes to Junie Ellis, I don’t know that there will ever be enough.
“Okay,” I say. “We’re done here. Maddie, can you—no? Okay.” I help Maddie to standing, my hands wrapped around her shoulders to keep her from toppling over. I grit my teeth when I feel how cold she is through the thin fabric of her turtleneck.
“Thank you for staying with Maddie until I got here,” I tell Leo.
Leo lifts a shoulder, expression bored.
“And keep away from Junie Ellis,” I add.
His beautiful mouth twists into something bitter, but he doesn’t speak, only inclines his head in the way of someone acknowledging something has been said. And then he leaves, all wide shoulders and tailored wool and platinum hair, vanishing into the bustle and crush of the party.
“He even makes—hic—an exit like Gatsby—hic—” Maddie sways and I help her navigate the sidewalk until we get to the end of the block and past the pedestrian barricades.
We get to my car and I help her inside, not waiting for her to try to buckle herself in before doing it myself, and then slide behind the wheel.
I take a deep breath before I start the car. I have never felt like this. Ever. I don’t know what to do with all these wild instincts, which belong in a 1940s pulp fiction novel and not in a present-day, non-romantic, sex-based, 1099-implicated relationship.
We drive the seven blocks home in silence.
I park and turn off the car, and then help her out of the passenger’s side and up the porch steps.
I stop her just inside the front door to kneel and remove her high heels.
She has a small blot of pinkened skin on the side of her thigh with pinprick specks of blood trying to bead through. A scrape.
“Madelyn,” I say calmly. “Have you seen what that sidewalk has done to you?”
Maddie blinks down at me and then narrows her viridian eyes. “You sound excessively judgmental right now,” she says with disapproval in her tone. “That sidewalk was very good to me.”
She hiccups, loses her balance, and then grabs onto my shoulders for support.
I finish pulling off her heels and set them to the side. And then I stand up, staring down at her, making a decision.
“To the shower,” I say, and start guiding her to the stairs.
“Ooh, sexy,” she says. “But wait, don’t you want to screw me while I’m wearing these thigh-highs?”
I do want to screw her while she’s wearing those thigh-highs. And that turtleneck, which clings deliciously to her pert tits and then the curves of her waist and belly. And that skirt, which starred so naughtily in that very improper selfie she sent me.
“You need a shower, Ms. Kowalczk, and then water, and then bed.”
She looks back at me over her shoulder as we go up to my floor. Even soused, she manages an expression of such unutterable disdain that it nearly knocks me back.
Until I remember how cold her arms and feet had been when I’d touched her. Until I remember the scrape on her thigh.
“Up,” I say sternly, and her disdain immediately melts into a pout.
“You’re so mean,” she mumbles as I herd her over the top of the steps and down the hallway, into the bathroom.
“I am going to undress you,” I tell her as I close the door to my en suite. “I’m going to make sure you don’t have any more damage from the sidewalk, which was very good to you. And then I’m going to wash you. Is that okay?”
“Is sex in there somewhere?” she asks, reaching for me.
I grab her wrists and give her a sharp look. “No. Behave.”
It is a testament to my willpower that I’m able to peel off her thigh-highs without breaking my own rules, or that I’m able to pull her slutty panties down from under her skirt without bending her over and making her understand—acutely—how protective and possessive she makes me feel.
I somehow get her into the shower and propped against a tiled wall under the hot spray without doing anything untoward, and start soaping her soft, still-chilled skin as she stares unabashedly at the hard-on in my lounge pants.
I’ve tucked my cock into the waistband, and the swollen head is just visible as it tries to peek out, and Maddie is watching it with the avaricious gaze of a Victorian opium eater.
“Why don’t you get undressed and come in here with me?” she asks in a low, dick-jolting voice. “It would be better than getting your clothes all wet.”
“You, my brat, are too drunk to have sex. And even if you weren’t, I think I might want to spank you more than I want to do anything else.
What were you thinking, putting yourself in danger like that?
Completely drunk on a cold night in a town you still barely know?
And that’s not even touching on the Snake Pit of it all, with all the other drunk people. If Leo hadn’t found you . . .”
“Oh, you’re big mad.” She sighs. “Can’t you be tiny mad instead?”
I give her a forbidding look before I get the shampoo.
“It wasn’t like we planned to be unsafe, it just happened, and I really needed a drink after Veronica Balentine told me we couldn’t have sex anymore—don’t worry, I’m not going to listen—”
“When did you see Veronica Balentine?” I ask, a fresh irritation nestling inside me.
I hate the idea of her ensnaring Maddie into that circle jerk of donors, candidates, and power players.
Of her perverting Maddie’s hunger to get shit done into something wan and feeble and status-quo preserving. Or worse—ambitious and profitable.