Chapter Ten
America
Why does he have to be so damn infuriating? I storm out through the employee entrance. Icy rain penetrates my uniform before I can get my jacket on and flip up the hood, but it barely cools my anger. We used to get along fine, now every other word out of his mouth makes me angry.
I didn’t mean to lose it inside. Telling Gray that I was with Everett last night was only the tiniest of trivial lies. We’re taking a few days to think. Well, I am. He’s still all in. Because I didn’t tell him a damn thing about what’s really going on with me.
I didn’t tell him I fucked Gray in the bathroom last night. What would be the point? But telling Gray I took Everett to bed last night, that was purely malicious. He doesn’t mean to hurt me every time he opens his mouth. I have ten good years of knowing him that says he doesn’t. But it stings all the same.
It hurts that I can’t shake these feelings I harbor for him while he can’t get over my best friend. I pick up an empty coffee tin and scream as I hurl it at the wall just as Gray steps into view.
“Fuck.” He ducks, narrowly missing being hit by the flying missile. “America. Christ. Are you trying to injure me?”
“Leave me alone, Gray.” I pace with bouncy, jerky steps back and forth across the pavement as the can rattles and rolls over the uneven ground until it hits a trash can. Arms wrapped around myself, I bury my fists in my armpits. If I have to hear one more thing about how he wants to protect our friendship… “Go away. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Can’t do that.” He storms over and grabs my waist, hauling me out of the rain and under an overhang.
“Let me go.” I punch his chest. Then let go of a flurry of small blows that seem to bounce off him without any kind of reaction.
Except to make him breathe harder, faster as he backs me up against the bricks. He holds me there with a hand around my throat that has my pussy clenching so hard I cry out.
He licks his lips, and then they’re crashing against mine. He thrusts his tongue inside my mouth and swallows my whimpers. “Why can’t we be friends like we used to be?”
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” I surge forward and kiss him back.
“Why did you have to fucking sleep with that tool?” He hikes up my skirt and takes a hold of my panties.
“That tool is about to be your new client,” I toss back at him. “And soon to be my boyfriend.”
Yet here I am, eagerly falling into whatever this is with Gray. Unable to stop even though I know I should.
“Bullshit.”
I yelp when he yanks my panties clean off me.
It stings for all of a second while he holds them in his hands with a look in his eyes that says I’m in for it now. “No, he’s not your boyfriend, Rica.”
His words make my heart race like crazy, my clit throb. I never knew this side of him existed, or that I would want to play with it so bad. “What are you going to do with those?”
“Open your mouth for me,” he orders.
I open for him.
He wads up the lace and places it between my teeth. “Bite.”
I slam my teeth down hard enough that he jerks his hand back. His expression turns filthy, his gaze burns hotter. He unbuttons his tan chinos and takes out his cock. Those big hands grab my ass and haul me up, my protest—not really a protest at all—muffled by my own panties when he enters me hard.
His lips scrape over my throat. His teeth nip my tender skin. His hips piston unrelentingly, fucking me like he wants to drive out his demons by possessing me.
It sets me on fire. My panties cover up my screams as he drives me closer and closer to the edge of an orgasm. Gray makes me experience things that I’ve never felt with anyone else. He makes me so mad. So freaking angry I could wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze. And he makes me so hot the flames lick up inside me, eating me alive.
My orgasm pounds through me. My inner walls spasm with every punishing stroke.
“That’s it.” Grunting, he thrusts into me one more time before he comes. “My dirty, sweet girl.”
“Mmnnuughphh.” Damn it. I forgot about my panties, and I need to catch my breath.
He hooks his fingers between my lips and tugs the lace free.
“Not yours. Not your anything.” It hurts that I’ll never be, especially when he says things like that. It’s confusing.
“You’re not going to be Everett Mann’s girlfriend.” He pants against my collarbone.
“You can’t stop me. You don’t get a say in who I see or date,” I exhale the words as I push at him. My break must be up, which means any second Vicki is going to come looking for me. “Put me down.”
“He has a type.” Gray keeps me pinned between him and the bricks. “Women who don’t understand that it’s all a game to him. Trust me on this. He’s a player, Ri—”
“America, can you finish, oh…” Vicki gapes when she notices the not safe for work position Gray and I are in. “Lucky bitch.”
“Vicki.” My face grows hot as Gray does his best to shelter me from view.
“Break time is over.” She turns and flounces back inside.
“Shit.” That was awkward.
“Fuck.” Gray shakes his head. He slips out of me and lowers me to my feet before tucking himself back into his pants and buttoning his fly. “Didn’t mean for that to happen. Will you get in trouble?”
“Vicki is cool.” I smooth out my uniform, regretting my new lack of panties when I start to leak. She’s unlikely to report me to the owner. At least not for one indiscretion. “But this can’t happen again. Don’t come to my work. Don’t call me.”
He grabs my elbow as I turn to walk back inside. “About Mann. You’re confident and sweet and you believe everyone is on the level, but you have shitty fucking taste when it comes to boyfriends.” He hesitates. “Men.”
“What does that say about you?”
“Nothing that I probably don’t deserve,” he says.
“America,” Vicki calls out to me. “Move your bleeping arse.”
“Rica, tell me you won’t—”
I yank my arm free. “You have no say, Gray. You’re not entitled to an opinion on what I do with my life.”
“I’m looking out for you. As your friend I am asking you—”
“I should have spit on your Danish,” I snarl at him before I storm back inside the cafe. “No. No. I should have given you the jelly slice. It has a whole layer of Jell-O, Gray.”
He blanches and then turns green. He hates Jell-O beyond any reasonable kind of hate.
He tries to follow me. “Rica—”
“ Maldito mamón .” I shut the door in his face and fight my way out of my coat. Where does he get off trying to control who I like and who I see? And what the hell is with shortening my name all of a sudden?
I shove my coat on a hook.
It makes it sound like we’re more intimate than we are. Than we’ve ever been.
My jacket falls on the linoleum.
“ Merde .” I sigh as I pick it up and put it back more gently and purposefully. We used to be friends.
He picked me up from school every day for a whole year though it was out of his way, to make sure those boys he found harassing me didn’t have another chance to get me alone.
He brought me soup and medicine when I caught mono my senior year. Spent an entire weekend playing Mario Kart and quizzing me for my Latin exam.
He checked in every week while I was working on my undergraduate degree, and we’d talk about everything from how stressful exams were to the meaning of the Voynich manuscript; a document in an unknown language from the fifteenth century that the best cryptographers haven’t been able to decipher.
That’s not something people know about. He put time and effort into being able to discuss it with me. He made it feel like I was important to him.
My harmless crush developed into something more because of that friendship. I didn’t mean for my affections to grow stronger and stronger, but how could they not? I’m almost certain his currently being an asshole comes from a good place too, though I don’t need him to be in my business, and I don’t appreciate it.
I take off my apron and grab a fresh one—no one needs to see that crumpled mess—then get back to work, staffing the coffee machine while Vicki takes the next order.
“Your new beau is a looker, isn’t he?” Vicki says when we have a break between customers. “Pretty good with those hips, I bet.”
She thrusts a couple times in my direction. “How do you have all these men falling all over you? That soccer player from the Cardinals. This American boy. What does a woman have to do to get some action like that? Sacrifice a goat?”
“He’s a friend,” I say. “That’s all.”
“Friends don’t beg forgiveness like he did. They also don’t fuck like that.” She taps a chipped pink nail against her chin. “Do they? If they do, then I think I need to make new friends because it’s been a while since anyone has stuck it to me. Or in me for that matter.”
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“If you say so.” She grins widely and then bustles toward the back. Stopping in the doorway she adds, “Oh. Your chap, the distinguished looking one with the glasses and the beard. He was in, asking about you.”
I grow sickeningly overheated from my toes to the roots of my hair. I start to tap, counting up and down my fingertips over and over. It’s been weeks since the last time he came in. I figured he’d gone back to his wife or moved on by now. I still need to unenroll from school, but I’ve been avoiding it. And him. “Did he… leave a message?”
“Said he’d be by again another time.” She looks suspicious. “Is he bothering you?”
I hate that Gray has a point about my taste in men. Taste that includes him too. So much so my heart leaps every time he touches me, despite the fact that he is being an asshole.
“Nothing that I can’t handle.”