Chapter 6
JOSIE
Ipulled my t-shirt over my head and dropped it on the floor. No bra because I didn’t need one, and Casey didn’t let me wear one. My nipples hardened and I didn't cover myself.
Lucien didn’t move as his eyes went down my body like a slow burn. My neck. My breasts. My stomach. I unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them down with my underwear and stepped out of them and stood there completely naked and I let him look.
He took his time. I watched his breathing change and his jaw tighten. He was getting hard through his jeans and knowing I did that to him made my skin flush from my chest to my throat.
"Stunning," he said, barely above a whisper.
And I believed him.
He pulled his shirt over his head and I saw the full canvas of ink across his chest and his arms and the ridges of muscle under dark skin that looked like it had been carved.
Then his hands went to his belt and he unbuckled it slow, watching me watch him, and he pushed his jeans and boxers down and stepped out of them and I gasped.
"So it's true what they say," I said.
He was thick and hard and long and I felt my thighs press together involuntarily just looking at him.
He laughed.
“What’s that?”
We both knew.
I crossed the room and he caught me at the waist and lifted me like I weighed nothing and I wrapped my legs around him and felt the length of him press hot and hard against my pussy and I was already so wet it shocked me.
He carried me to the bed and put me down on my back and the weight of him settling between my legs made me moan before he even touched me.
He didn't rush.
He kissed my neck and I tilted my head back and gave him everything.
He dragged his mouth down to my throat and across my collarbone and when his lips closed around my nipple he sucked hard and I gasped and arched into him and grabbed his head.
He bit down gently and the sting shot straight between my legs.
I was dripping. He moved to the other nipple and rolled the first one between his fingers, pinching just enough to keep the heat building, and I was grinding against him already, trying to get friction, trying to get anything.
"Patience," he said against my skin.
"Fuck patience."
He smiled against my breast and then he went lower.
He kissed down my stomach. Bit my hip bone. Dragged his tongue along the crease of my thigh and I spread my legs wider and I didn't care how desperate I looked because I needed his mouth on me more than I needed anything.
He spread me open with both thumbs and looked at me. I was swollen, wet, and aching for him. The eye contact alone almost made me come.
"This pretty pussy," he said. "All for me."
Then he licked me from bottom to top in one long slow stroke and my whole body jerked. He did it again. And again. Taking his time. Tasting me. Learning the spots that made me twitch and then going back to them over and over until I was shaking.
He sucked my clit between his lips and flicked his tongue across it fast and hard and I grabbed fistfuls of his short curly hair and pulled him into me and moaned his name.
He slid two fingers inside me and curled them up and found the spot that made my vision blur and he worked it in rhythm with his tongue and I felt something building deep inside me.
"Right there," I begged. "Oh God right there don't stop don't stop don’t…”
He didn't stop. He held that exact rhythm and the orgasm ripped through.
I had never had an orgasm before. My back arched off the bed and my thighs clamped around his head and I came so hard I screamed.
My body convulsed and he kept going, licking, fucking me with his fingers while I rode it out and when I tried to push his head away because it was too much he grabbed my wrist and pinned it to the mattress and kept his mouth on me and dragged a second gushing orgasm out of the first one that made my legs shake so hard I felt faint.
When he finally came up his mouth and chin were soaked and he looked like a man who had just had the best meal of his life.
I was still trembling when I reached down and wrapped my hand around him. My fingers didn't close all the way. He was thick and hot and hard as stone and when I stroked him he dropped his head and groaned and I felt the sound vibrate through my whole body.
"I need you inside me," I said.
He spread my legs wider and positioned himself and pressed the tip against me and I bit my lip because the pressure alone made my toes curl.
He pushed in slow. Inch by inch. Stretching me open and filling me in a way I had never been filled and I gripped his arms and dug my nails in and gasped because it was so much.
Almost too much. The perfect edge of too much.
"Look at me," he said.
I opened my eyes and he pushed all the way in and held there and we stared at each other. There was nothing in the world except his body inside mine and his eyes on my face and the feeling of being completely and utterly full.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Move," I whispered.
He moved in long deep strokes that dragged against every nerve inside me.
He pulled almost all the way out and drove back in and I cried out each time because I couldn't help it.
He hooked one arm under my knee and pushed my leg up and the angle changed and he went deeper and hit something inside me that made me see white.
"Fuck," I gasped. "Right there."
He locked into that angle and fucked me with a rhythm that was relentless and controlled and I clawed his back and left marks I hoped would last for days. He was watching my face. Reading every sound. Every shift. When my eyes rolled back he did whatever he'd just done again. And again. And again.
"You going to come for me?" he said.
"Yes. God. Yes.”
He reached between us and pressed his thumb against my clit and circled it while he drove into me and everything inside me pulled tight like a wire about to snap.
"Come for me, Josie."
I came apart as another orgasm tore through me in waves so intense my body locked up and I couldn't breathe and couldn't think and I clenched around him so hard he groaned and swore and I felt every pulse of him inside me as I came and came and came.
"Come with me," I gasped.
He buried himself deep one final time and his body went rigid and I felt him let go. Hot and hard inside me. Pulsing. He groaned my name into my neck.
We lay there. His weight on me. Sweat between us. Hearts pounding against each other. His breath ragged in my ear and mine in his and neither of us moved because neither of us wanted the feeling to end.
After a while he rolled to the side and pulled me against his chest and I pressed my ear to his heartbeat and it was hammering as hard as mine.
"Lucien."
"Yeah."
"That was…”
"I know."
I smiled against his skin.
No man had ever made me feel like my body was mine instead of his. No man had ever paid that much attention to every gasp and shiver and shift like my pleasure was the whole point. No man had ever looked at me the way he did. Like I was enough before he ever touched me and even more after.
I lay there listening to his heart slow down and I thought about the girl in that photograph, laughing and thinking she knew what it felt like to be wanted.
She had no idea.
I did now.
The ride from New Orleans to Terrebonne took just over an hour and I spent every minute of it pressed against Lucien's back with my arms around his waist and the wind pulling at my hair and the rumble of the engine between my thighs, with five Jokers in formation behind us like a wall of thunder rolling down Highway 24.
I wasn't scared. That was the strangest part. I'd spent years being scared of Casey without knowing I was scared of him and now I was riding back into his territory with my cheek against the leather cut of a man who made me come three times in an afternoon and I felt nothing but ready.
Lucien had asked just once.
"You sure you want to go back there?"
"I need my things."
"What things?"
I'd thought about it, and the truth was there wasn't much. Some photos of my mama before she died. A silver bracelet that had been hers. A shoebox of letters she wrote me when I was in college that I could never bring myself to throw away because they were the only proof she'd ever loved anybody.
"Not much," I said. "But it's mine."
He nodded. That was it. Twenty minutes later five bikes were idling outside waiting for us.
We pulled onto Casey's street and the houses were all the same. Big lawns. Big trucks. Big fences hiding small men. Casey's was at the end of the cul-de-sac. White Colonial with green shutters and a wraparound porch he'd never once sat on because porches were for poor people. His words.
There was a silver Lexus in the driveway that wasn't his.
Lucien killed the engine and I climbed off and pulled my helmet off and the Jokers rolled in behind us and parked in a line along the curb. The sound of six bikes dying at once left a silence that felt surreal.
I heard faint music coming through the screen door.
Lucien walked beside me. Morrow and the others stayed by the bikes. Close enough to matter. Far enough to let me handle it.
I didn't knock. I'd lived here long enough and paid for it in ways that didn't involve money so I opened the screen door and walked in.
It took me a second to place the song. Procol Harum. "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Casey came around the corner from the living room in a tank top and basketball shorts with a beer in his hand and he stopped dead.
He looked at me, then Lucien. Then he looked past us through the door at the line of Jokers standing beside their bikes in his cul-de-sac and I watched the blood drain from his face so fast it was like someone pulled a plug.
A whiter shade of pale.
I almost nudged Lucien to say listen to the song but I didn't because this wasn't the moment for laughing.
"The fuck is this?" Casey said. His voice was steady but his hand wasn't. The beer bottle was trembling.
"I came for my things," I said.
"What things?"