5. Rick
Chapter five
Rick
S he’s been out there all day.
I should be the kind of man who goes out and helps her. I almost did, a few times, when I heard the cursing and watched Aspen nearly stumble and fall over her feet more than a few times. But I held back. Since then, I’ve spent the better part of a few hours from the office upstairs watching her kick things around in her flip-flops, curse endlessly, shake her fists at inanimate objects, get into wrestling matches with dried-up old vines, and have a near screaming match with the tree she was trying to prune.
Aspen found the little garden shed with all the tools at the far end of the yard. Rakes, shears, shovels—they’re scattered all over back there. I went upstairs to the office as soon as she went outside. Cracking open a window shouldn’t have been as delightful as it ended up being, but I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything. It’s hard when you have someone cursing up such a creative storm outside.
“You farfing meatball brain of a fucksickle! If you don’t come down right now, I’m going to get the chainsaw and finish you off, I swear!”
I lean forward a few inches. She’s trying to prune one of the larger trees. It looks mostly dead, so cutting it down might not be such a bad idea. She’s really struggling since she’s standing on the ground and trying to cut some of the straggly limbs with a tool that looks like it would be better suited to medieval torture.
Do we even have a chainsaw? I don’t think so. And by we, I mean me. It’s just hard for me to think of this place as mine. I never wanted it. I still don’t. I can’t wait until the day I can get rid of it. Some days, I want to trash the whole thing, but that would be counterproductive to the sales aspect.
Aspen is spirited. I’ll give her that.
Alright, she’s beautiful.
And watching her discreetly from up here has made me have to adjust myself in my jeans three times already, and it’s only been a few hours. I’ve cycled between a dick so painfully hard that my jeans are crushing it to giving a stern lecture to myself that makes it go semi-hard, to shifting my gaze back to her lithe, fit little body with all those lovely curves attacking my backyard, which made me hard as steel again.
“Alright, that’s it. It’s the chainsaw for you, dearie. I’m sorry, but you have to come down.”
My dick doesn’t give a shit. He punches at my fly like he’d welcome a fight with that whirring-chained mothersawer.
I keep telling myself that If I were a gentleman, I’d go out and help her.
But I’m no savior. I’m no gentleman. I don’t even want this. She shouldn’t be here.
“It’s time, sweetheart. It’s time.”
Oh, shit!
There’s Aspen, coming out of the garden shed, which looks more like a second small house in the yard with all weird square angles like the big house, holding an actual freaking chainsaw. A real one, not one of those much lower-powered plug-in things.
She drops it on the ground, tears the cover off the blade, then picks it up again and studies it, her nose crinkled.
I asked you to look after my sister, not let her maim herself cleaning up your mess of a yard, dickweed.
I can practically hear Jace in my head.
I shoot out of my chair and nearly collapse on the floor. It feels like I’ve been dick punched. What the hell? I fall on my side, gasping. I’m sure my face is ten thousand degrees, redder than red, but all I care about is the violent pain shooting through my groin.
These jeans are normally not so tight.
I’m normally not as hard as a steel pipe in them.
Sex hasn’t been a priority for me in years. Too busy staying alive, I guess, to worry about things like that.
But I’m worried about it now.
For the love of mac and cheese, my jeans have trapped my dick. They’ve eaten my dick, and they’re not letting go. I’ve had a lot of painful things happen to me, but this…this is the worst that I can remember in recent history. Never underestimate the crippling effects of a penile injury. It’s a little bit like chopping your own foot off. With a spoon.
Should I try to sack myself?
No. I should undo the zipper and—
No. What the hell am I thinking? It’s quite possible that I’m not because my brain has been utterly obliterated.
Am I drooling? Shit, I think I’m drooling. There’s wetness on the floor below my mouth. Yup, that’s me. Salivating all over the place because I’m going to start gagging right away, and my spit has nowhere to go when it wants to all come up so badly. I barely tasted those eggs earlier, but I don’t want them to make a reappearance and give me a chance to appreciate just how blackened they were.
I flop onto my back, and there .
My jeans shift just enough that their toothy maws of eternal sharklike destruction finally release my man meat. It feels like a chewed-up sausage at this point, but when I fumble with the button, tear open the fly, and run my hand down my length overtop my boxers, I find that it’s in one piece. There’s no blood or anything. Thank god. Because it feels bloody. It feels destroyed.
“Mother of grilled cheese!”
You have got to be kidding me right now.
How? How long has she been standing there?
Not long, I guess, because Aspen whips around while I race to get my jeans done up. My dick still feels bruised, and shoving it back in there feels like stuffing it into the maw of a mulcher. I very nearly make a noise of pain, but I bite it back, even if my stomach spins a circle and I taste bitter bile at the back of my throat.
“This isn’t what it looks like.” I force myself to zip up and get into a crouch. I can barely face her.
“Yeah…” She clears her throat. “You weren’t just rubbing one out on the floor of your office or anything.” It looks like she just licked a lemon’s asshole. “We’ll go with that because I can’t imagine what you would have been doing otherwise, and I honestly don’t want to know.”
“I was having an issue!”
“With your…with your wiener?”
Jace would kill me for discussing my wiener with his little sister.
Or…would he?
In his letter, he did write that he wanted us to get married. That he couldn’t imagine two people better for each other than us. After I left, he must have taken some hard hits to the head.
“It was pinched, okay? My jeans…they trapped it at a bad angle. It felt like it was being amputated. I had to free it and then check for damage.”
She quirks a brow. “So you weren’t rubbing one out?”
I cannot crouch here and have this conversation without straight-up dying.
Neither of us looks at the other for a long beat of silence. The office is a thousand degrees of magma-hot humiliation.
“Erm, okay, so you were having a medical emergency. Alright, fair enough. Has it been resolved now?” she asks.
My dick is still hard through all of it, so I guess that means it’s still functioning. “I’m fine.” Other than the pain throbbing through it. Was that happening before the jaws of steel incident?
“Alright. That’s…that’s good. I just came up here because I need the chainsaw, and it’s not working. I swear it’s probably the carb. Isn’t it always the carb on small motors?”
My head shoots up. “You know about small motors?” No, that’s not a turn-on. That is not a turn-on in the least. Though my dick says otherwise. It’s now screaming hard, and not just because of its recent brush with denim death.
“It’s just something I’ve heard my dad complain about over the years, although I did take motors in high school in shop class. But that was a hot minute ago, and I don’t think I can take that thing apart on my own.”
Is now the right time to tell her that she’s certainly not going to use that chainsaw? That would be a no. If she’s anything like Jace, telling her she can’t do something is a surefire way for her to lose a limb trying to prove she can.
“Could I take a look at what you’re trying to cut down? Maybe it can be saved. Maybe I should call someone.”
“Someone like a gardener or a team of professional landscapers? That would probably be a good idea. It’s disastrous down there. It’s so, so freaking sad. I think it must have been beautiful. I…oh.” She stops, and when I look at her again, she’s studying me. Hard . She’s remembering what I should never have blurted out earlier, down there in the kitchen. I don’t know what I was thinking. One sniff of compassion, and I lose my freaking mind? Keeping this girl at arm’s length is what I need to do, and I can never forget that. I’m no good for her. No. Good. At. All. “Even if you don’t want gardens, I think someone might have to come and clean it up properly. I put real effort into it, but I barely made a dent, and I don’t want to make things worse. If you don’t want gardens, you could just cultivate, uh…a lawn?”
“Or a pool,” I add.
My grandfather absolutely abhorred pools.
Aspen brightens. She’s sweaty, and there are streaks of dirt on her forehead and jawline that I’m just noticing now. I’m also struggling against noticing how her clothes are clinging damply to her body like she just had a humid, hard workout bath out there. The bits of dead leaf matter in her wheat-colored braid do nothing to detract from her hair’s shiny, lush allure.
I bet she still smells good.
Maybe even better for being sweaty.
Get it the fuck together right the fuck now.
“I think the pool will add value to the house whenever you decide to sell it,” she says cautiously. “Plus, it’s California. Doesn’t everyone have a pool?”
It’s decided then. A pool it is. “I’ll call a team to come in and start clearing the place out.”
“Alright, well, it’s your house and your decision. I’m going to go and take a shower.”
I should just let her go, but for some reason, I have to blurt the most embarrassing thing I could ever say at her retreating back. “I really wasn’t twizzling my bacon up here.”
“Garp.” That would be her choking on her own spit. “Yeah,” she coughs. “I believe you.”
She races away, and goodness help me, I don’t know if she really believes me or not, but I’ve just embarrassed us both thirty-four times more than if I had just let it go.
I jump up, grab my phone, and nearly keel over as I swear my dick gets a cramp from being cramped in my jeans. They’re not even that tight. I don’t know what’s going on. I think the only medical emergency with erections is when you’ve had one for longer than a day?
I dial the first landscaping company I find after doing a quick search. I don’t care if they have a zero-star review. They can come and get rid of everything out there, and it would be a vast improvement to the place.
After they promise me a crew within a few hours, I fall back onto my chair.
I take the first deep breath I’ve taken in years .
Someone is going to come and wreck the place, and then it’s going to be transformed. It’s going to be changed. It’s going to go from something a man—a man who should have wanted me, cared for me, and loved me—loved a thousand times more to something he would have abhorred, and I couldn’t be happier.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing it before.
And now that I’ve started, what else can I tear down, get rid of, and transform in here?