9. Diesel
DIESEL
The mattress feels too lumpy tonight, or maybe being alone makes it harder to ignore. I flip onto my back for the fourth time in ten minutes, staring at the ceiling, and try to remember the last time I actually just slept in this bed.
Bass from the reception thumps through the wall behind my headboard, steady as a pulse. Every few minutes something crashes hard enough to rattle my window—a chair, a body, something—followed by a peal of laughter that could be Sasha’s or could be one of the sweetbutts. Hard to tell.
Havoc and Sasha have never been shy about putting on a show once the drink starts flowing.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they’re christening the head table right now in front of God and half the club, her dress hiked around her hips while he growls something filthy against her throat.
That’s usually the kind of party I’d be right in the middle of—Honey on one arm, a drink in the other, watching my President fuck his new wife in public because that’s just what a good reception looks like around here.
Instead I’m up here. Alone. Staring at the ceiling.
Something bangs against a wall hard enough that glass rattles somewhere down the hall, followed by giggling pitched high and breathless. I clench my jaw and roll onto my side, putting my back to the noise like that’ll do a damn thing to block it out.
I keep thinking about those framed-out houses past Bluebell’s pen. Bare rafters, open walls. A place to come home to instead of sleep off a party.
I never wanted one. Not once in almost twenty years of clubhouse living have I looked at Sharon’s blueprints spread across the table during church and thought that could be mine. The dorm room’s always been enough. Four walls, a lock, somewhere to crash before the next run.
Tonight I want one. Bad enough it scares me a little, lying here mapping out where a couch would go, whether I’d want a porch, if Bluebell’s pasture would still be close enough to hear her at night.
I know exactly why that thought showed up, and it’s got nothing to do with Sasha’s wedding and everything to do with a woman standing ten feet from me in the dark by those same half-built houses, hair down around her shoulders, smelling like vanilla and something floral that’s been stuck in my memory since I was a teenager.
Christ. I’m hard just thinking about it. That blue dress. The way it caught the moonlight when she crossed her arms like she needed something to hold onto.
I press the heel of my hand against my slacks, more reflex than decision. Doesn’t help. Doesn’t do a goddamn thing except confirm what my body already knows—I’m not sleeping tonight until I deal with this one way or another.
Fine.
I work the button open, drag the zipper down, and free myself with a hiss I don’t bother swallowing. Nobody’s here to hear it, and even if there was, half the club’s currently occupied doing worse.
I wrap my hand around my cock, let my head fall back against the pillow, and my mind goes exactly where I knew it would.
Not the parking lot from seventeen years back. Not the ring, not the way she looked at it and then looked at me like she was sorry before she’d even said the word no.
Tonight.
Her hair down, gold under the string lights wound through the trees. That blue against her skin, simple the way she’s always worn things, because she never needed to try harder to be the best-looking woman in any room she walked into.
I picture my hand in that hair instead of just imagining it loose.
Pulling her close by it, tilting her head back the way I used to when we were kids figuring out what our bodies wanted in the back of my truck, except now I know exactly what I’m doing.
Exactly how to make a woman shake apart from the inside out.
I stroke myself slow at first, matching the bass still thumping through the wall, smearing the precum over my shaft with each pass.
Penny in that dress, but it’s coming off. My hands working the zipper down her spine while she breathes my real name against my jaw—Evan, the way she said it out by the houses, low and rough like she’s not used to how it feels in her mouth after seventeen years of not saying it.
Penny on her knees for me. Penny under me.
Her badge coming off with everything else, tossed somewhere I can’t see it because right now none of that matters.
Not the uniform. Not the years between us.
Nothing except the sound she makes when I finally get my hands on her the way I’ve wanted to since I was eighteen years old and too stupid to know how to keep her.
My grip tightens. My hips work, fucking up into my fist, chasing the relief I haven’t found anywhere else tonight.
Penny arching under me, saying my name like a question, except this time I’ve got an answer for her. This time I follow her out of the reception and drive her somewhere private.
I’m close now, breath coming faster, jaw clenched tight enough to ache.
I let myself picture the last thing—her face right before she comes, that stillness she wears like armor finally cracking open for me and nobody else, those blue-gray eyes locked on mine because there’s nowhere else either of us wants to look.
“Penny,” I breathe, and then I’m gone, my body seizing in pure pleasure, spilling hot over my fist and the front of my slacks. The good ones Sasha picked out weeks ago because she said I needed to look sharp standing up there next to Havoc.
Sasha’s going to kill me if I don’t get these cleaned. Right now, I can’t bring myself to care.
I lie there after, heart still slamming, dick softening, hand sticky, slacks stuck to my thigh, staring at the ceiling, and stop pretending this will pass if I wait long enough.
Nothing’s ever going to feel like that. Not Honey, not any of the blondes I fucked. Not the club, not the runs, not the money or the violence or any of the things I’ve built a life out of instead of the one I actually wanted.
Just her. Penelope Carpenter, cop, standing ten feet away from me tonight like she’d walked straight out of every fantasy I’ve been too much of a coward to let myself have.
I’m done fucking around.
Seventeen years is long enough to spend circling something I should’ve fought harder for the first time.
Doesn’t matter what she does for a living now, doesn’t matter that she built a career on the opposite side of a line I’ve stood behind my whole adult life.
I’ll figure out how to make it work, same way I figure out how to make anything work once I decide it’s worth having.
I’m getting that woman back.
Her career. My club. I’ll have to face both if she gives me the chance. I’ve spent seventeen years assuming she won’t.
Time I asked her.