4. Crash
CRASH
The clubhouse seems so quiet, now that all the guys from National have left.
I’m lying on my bed with my boots still on, staring at the ceiling fan turning slow enough to count the blades.
Down the hall, behind the third door, Cassidy Harlan is sleeping under the same roof as me.
I keep replaying the restaurant.
Not the waitress. Marissa has been wanting to fuck me for two years, and I’ve taken her up on it twice. It was good. We have fun.
Then today she leaned over that counter, making it very obvious she wanted my cock, and I felt nothing. Less than nothing. An itch of irritation, because she ignored Cassidy.
Then Cassidy figured out the whole history in about four seconds. And I felt guilty.
Guilty. And I did nothing wrong.
That’s what I keep thinking about. The fact that I wanted to apologize for things I did before she ever came home. Like I owe her an explanation.
Then there was that guy. That fucking drunk.
Big sunburned bastard, hand on her thigh, and I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the bathroom door, and I remember crouching over him with my knuckles split. The middle is gone.
I’ve hit men before. I’ve killed men before. Club life. A one-percenter.
Every time before tonight, I decided to do it first.
Nobody fucking touches her.
That feeling was primal. I wasn’t only trying to protect my best friend’s sister.
And then the other thing. The sentence I cut off, because I couldn’t say the words.
She doesn’t belong—
I couldn’t say that she doesn’t belong to me.
Every cell in my body disagrees.
I drag my hands down my face.
The girl I knew left four years ago and never came back. The woman who took her place is somebody I’m meeting for the first time.
Nothing wrong with that part. I met a woman, and I want her. Simple as it gets.
The problem is whose sister she is.
Decades of friendship, and not once have I given him a reason not to trust me.
He left this morning and made me promise to protect her. But maybe she needs protection from me.
There’s no version of this where I get what I want and keep being the man Saber thinks I am.
The ice machine rattles down the hall. Somebody kills the music downstairs.
It’s even quieter now. And the quiet gives me space to think about her arms around my waist when she was on the back of my bike.
On the way back from Rosa’s, she reached around me and flattened her palms against my stomach, and her thighs opened around mine, and for six minutes she was pressed against my back with the engine running through both of us.
Every gear change rocked her into me. Her chin at my shoulder. Her thighs spread around mine, and her pussy pressed against the small of my back. Two layers of denim did nothing. I felt the heat of her the whole six minutes.
She held on tighter than the road required. And I was hard the whole fucking ride.
She knew. She had to know.
I sit up. My boots hit the floor.
I need a shower. A cold one.
That’s what I need. Freeze it out, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and be her brother’s best friend again.
I go into my bathroom and strip down, turn the left tap all the way, and step in before I can talk myself out of it.
The cold shocks my system, and I stand in it with my hands flat on the tile, head down, water hammering the back of my neck. Breathing through it. My knuckles ache where they split on the drunk’s face, and the cold makes them ache worse.
Good. I need to focus on the pain to forget about her.
It doesn’t work. Fuck.
I’m as hard as I’ve ever been in my life.
Then I give in.
I turn the hot tap up. The water warms, and steam starts to lift off my skin. My hand is already moving down my stomach before the temperature evens out. I let my head fall back against the tile.
I grab my dick in a grip that’s too tight, and it punches the air out of me. A groan gets out before I can stop it, and I bite down on the next one.
It’s her instantly. No warm-up, no anonymous body. My mind only pictures her in specific detail.
Cassidy on that bike, except in my head she does the thing she didn’t do, slides her palms down off my stomach, lower, then rubs my cock through the denim while I’m doing eighty on an open road.
I can’t do a single thing about it, but white-knuckle the handlebars and let her.
In my head, I can build it exact: the wind, the engine vibrating, her grip testing me through the fabric while her thighs clamp down, her laugh against my spine when she figures out what she’s done to me.
My fist works at a slow and brutal pace. The water is hot down my chest, and my hand moves faster.
I imagine her on the stool at my bar, grabbing my cut and pulling, because she’s exactly the kind of brat who’d pull a man down to her level instead of coming up to his. She’s kissing me with that smart mouth still curved against mine, biting my lip when I try to take control, hard enough to taste.
Then I’m lifting her onto the rail I’ve polished a thousand times—the weight of her real in my hands, denim under my palms, her boots locking behind my ass. Her knees opening for me the same way they opened around the bike.
I’d drag her to the edge of that rail, and she’d let me, and the fantasy is so detailed it’s not a fantasy, it’s a plan. My mouth is on her throat, her fingers are in my hair, pulling like she means to steer. She’d talk through it because that girl has never once shut up at the right moment.
It feels good to give me what I want, doesn’t it?
Fuck yes, it does.
Then she’s under me, bare, my name in her mouth, begging, and I give her everything she asks for.
My breathing goes ragged. Steam thickens until the room is all white noise and heat, water drumming the back of my neck, running off my jaw, into my mouth.
I spit it out, and my hand speeds up. The slap of it is obscene in the small, tiled room, louder than the spray, and I couldn’t stop now with a gun to my head.
My thighs start to shake. The pressure builds low and mean, climbing the base of my spine, and I let the sensation spread.
In my mind, her pussy is tightening around my cock, making me come apart.
I come so hard my knees nearly buckle, hips driving into my own grip, spilling over my fist while the water takes it, forearm braced against the tile. My forehead drops against it, the whole thing tearing through me in waves that keep coming past the point I expect them to quit.
Her name jams behind my teeth and stays there. It has to stay.
I don’t move for a while. Water beats down on my shoulders. My pulse is in my ears, my throat, the ache of my knuckles. The steam drifts and thins.
The water runs. I stay against the wall until my legs are mine again.
I shut off the tap and stand dripping in the dark, and there’s no story I can tell myself anymore.
I just jerked off to my best friend’s little sister.
And I can’t take it back, can’t unfeel it.
Tomorrow, I have to look her in the eye and pretend I feel nothing.
I towel off and then lie down on my bed on top of the blanket.
She’s just down the hall. Saber’s miles away. He trusts me.
This is day one of him being gone, and I already failed.