Chapter Twelve #3
Christ, he hadn’t talked about this in years.
But now that he was, it seemed like he couldn’t stop.
Which was why he didn’t.
“For him, he has no clue. Says he thinks he’s bein’ helpful. What he’s being is controlling. He had no
say in the wedding, even though he tried to horn in, about everything. And that
flipped his switch. His choice, he would have planned the whole thing and it
would have been an eighties throwback nightmare. But he didn’t pay for shit.
Didn’t even offer. Even if he did, it wasn’t his ass getting married.
That was his payback.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Lottie said.
“I disinvited him before he walked into the reception.”
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“I beat the shit out of him in the parking lot.”
Lottie sat on his couch, staring at him.
Mo stood at his island, staring at her.
Seconds ticked by and through them, he watched her face get
hard.
There it was.
He was an asshole, just like his dad, except an
out-of-control one, not a control-freak one.
And now she knew it.
“Good,” she bit.
He felt his entire body jerk.
“What?”
“Good,” she snapped. Then she yelled, “What a dick!” She
jumped to her feet just as Mo heard the door to the condo open. “Seriously!
Total dick!”
“Everything cool?”
Mo twisted to see Mag standing there, looking alert while he
glanced between Lottie and him.
“No,” she clipped. “Mo’s dad’s a dick!”
Mag turned his attention to Mo.
“I mean, he ruined his sister’s wedding day!” Lottie
shouted, so in her snit, it was like she hadn’t really registered Mag had
entered, even if she was responding to him, which was something since not many
women missed Mag doing anything. “Who does that?”
“I see your relationship has moved to Tales from the
Darkside,” Mag remarked.
“It happens,” Mo replied.
“Warp speed, brother,” Mag returned. “Heard you two didn’t
make it ‘official,’” he did the air quotation marks just to be an asshole,
“until yesterday morning.”
“We didn’t,” Lottie butted in.
Mag looked back to her, fighting a grin and murmuring,
“Mm-hmm.”
“We didn’t,” Lottie repeated.
“All right, darlin’. I totally believe you,” Mag said.
Lottie gave up on that (wisely) and turned to Mo, throwing
an arm out at Mag. “So, he’s not the one who’s a god?”
Mag also turned back to Mo, brows raised, no longer fighting
anything. Smiling flat-out.
“I told her about Auggie,” he shared.
“Right,” Mag murmured. He went back to Lottie. “Mo’s the
only real god among us. He put up with Tammy for two years before she did him
the colossal favor of breaking up with him.”
Mo looked to the ceiling.
Terrific.
He had no clue she’d already met Tammy.
Mag was in Test the New Woman mode.
Fuck.
“I hear that,” Lottie returned. “Met her at King Soopers.
Real peach.”
“You ran into Tammy with her?” he asked Mo, jerking his head
Lottie’s way.
“Her name is Lottie,” Mo replied.
“You ran into Tammy with Lottie Mac, Queen of the Corvette
calendar and every other man on the planet’s wet dream?” Mag amended.
Mo wasn’t finding this even remotely acceptable anymore.
And damn sure not funny.
“Though I’m the other man,” Mag stated, again
grinning because he read Mo’s face. “Seeing as she’s dating my roommate.”
“We did,” Lottie affirmed, and regained Mag’s eyes. “And
her new man, Peacock Pete who wears a two-hundred-dollar shirt to go grocery
shopping.”
“Her new meat was there too?” Mag asked Lottie.
Lottie nodded her head, the bunch of her hair swept up at
her back crown bouncing around. “Unh-hunh. When he
stopped checking out my tits and figured out who Mo was, I’m pretty sure he
pissed his two-twenty-five rag and bone chinos.”
Mag burst out laughing.
Lottie smiled at him.
“Holy fuck,” Mag pushed out through his hilarity. “That I
would have paid to see.”
“Tammy was the star of the show,” Lottie shared. “I thought
I’d have to scratch her eyes out before she begged Mo, right in front of
Peacock Pete, to let her go down on him in the alley.”
Mag busted out laughing again but he did it turning his
attention back to Mo.
“Told you she was gagging for it. You totally should have
tagged her convenient and left the scraps to Peacock Pete.” He went back to
Lottie. “Sorry, darlin’. No offense to women on the whole. Just referring to
women like Tammy.”
“She’s not a woman,” Lottie returned. “She just has the
equipment.”
Looking at Mo, Mag indicated Lottie with a thumb. “I like
her.”
“Take a number,” Mo muttered.
“You want a beer?” Mag asked Lottie.
“It’s barely eleven o’clock, Mag,” Mo informed his bud.
“I’m feelin’ like a play by play
of the Tammy Incident and anything involving Tammy is better consumed with
alcohol,” Mag replied, then he returned to Lottie. “What’d she do when she got
a load of you?”
“Nonverbal throwdown. Immediate,” Lottie told him.
“I’ll bet. Pea green. Fuck, wish I’d been there to see
that,” Mag replied.
Lottie then looked at Mo and declared, “I think I like him.”
“He’s an asshole, baby,” Mo shared.
“The fun-loving kind who’s only inappropriate when
discussing women who are bitches and on occasion waxing poetic about a
spectacular blowjob,” Mag put in.
Lottie watched him say this and again looked at Mo. “I’ve
decided I totally like him.”
Mag chuckled and moved to the fridge.
“What are you doin’ here anyway?”
Mo asked his roommate. “Aren’t you on mission?”
“Nope, it’s done. Finished the debrief and now I’m gonna shotgun a beer then haul my ass to Coors Field for a
day game. Meeting Boone there,” Mag stated, tagging a beer from the fridge and
turning to them. “You guys wanna come?”
Hell no.
“Mo has to pay his bills online and then I have to do a deep
dive into his psyche as to why he put up with women like Tammy before he met me
and after that we’re gonna have a fuck-a-thon. I
don’t think we can fit it in our schedule. But thanks,” Lottie answered for
them.
Mag held his beer in hand and stared at her through all
this.
Then he shot a shit-eating grin at Mo and announced, “I
fucking hate you. You got the only good one left.”
He might be right about that.
And Mo was down for the fuck-a-thon.
The rest?
“You want Lottie doing a deep dive in your psyche?” Mo
asked.
“If I didn’t think you’d pull my balls out through my
throat, I’d share I would give it up about Nikki if I got all the rest.”
“Nikki?” Lottie asked.
“You shouldn’t have gone there, brother,” Mo muttered.
Mag looked to Lottie. “How’s this? You don’t treat him like
a piece of shit,” he tilted his head to Mo, “I’ll bust out my good Scotch and
drown my sorrows while crying on your shoulder and laying my broken heart at
your feet. You do end up treating him like shit, Axl, Aug, Boone and me will
build an effigy of you and burn it, like we did Tammy, because apparently that
works.”
“I’ll take that deal,” Lottie immediately replied.
“Well, all right,” Mag said quietly, eyeing Mo’s woman up
now with open approval.
They shared a moment of solidarity and Mo let them do that
before he reminded his friend, “Weren’t you gonna
shotgun that beer and then get the fuck outta here?”
“Right, I have plans.”
He then took out his army knife, set the beer on its side on
the counter, slipped out the blade, shoved it in the bottom side of the can and
put the hole to his mouth before pulling the cap, downing the brew like he was
eighteen years old and standing in the living room of a frat house.
Mag gave out a big, “Ah,” when he was done, crunched the can
and tossed it in the recycling before he strolled to his bedroom, saying, “If
you’re behind closed doors, I’ll lock up when I go out and catch you two on the
flipside.”
And then he shut his door behind him.
Mo looked from Mag’s door to Lottie.
“Nikki?” she asked.
He knew she wouldn’t let that go.
“I’ll explain later.”
“Scale of one to ten with Tammy being a five, what’s my
challenge?” she asked.
“Eighty-two. He was gone for her. Lost. Couldn’t find his
own ass if she was in the same room. And she was for him too, if he’d give up
his job and go work at a bank or something.”
“Oh boy,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” Mo agreed.
She wandered to him, saying, “I’ll get on that later.”
He bet she would.
Mo went back to his laptop to log in to his bank.
Lottie stopped at his side.
“Mo?” she called.
He lifted his eyes to her.
“I will never, not ever, treat you like shit,” she
whispered.
“I know, sweetheart,” he whispered back.
They shared their own moment of solidarity.
“Pay your bills, honey,” she urged. “We need to go get some
lunch and carb up for our fuck-a-thon.”
Mo decided right then they were having Italian for lunch.
He did this grinning at her.
Then he paid his bills.
They were necking, Lottie sitting on his dick in his
lap.
Mo was sitting up, his arms curled around her, his legs
straight, her legs curled around his hips, her fingers trailing over the skin
on his skull.
When his cock lost it, and her, they kept necking.
It was a while after that when he lifted her up and set her
on her side on the bed, bent in and kissed her chest, then threw the covers
over her and left her there to go deal with the condom.
They’d carbed up on pasta with the
addition of a salad (Lottie eating a lot of the last, a little of the first) at
a restaurant down the street from his house.
And since Lottie didn’t want to waste time commencing their
fuck-a-thon (and Mo didn’t either), they’d walked back to his place and spent
the rest of the afternoon doing that.
She hadn’t done a deep dive into his psyche about why he put
up with the likes of Tammy.
Then again, he suspected she knew she’d already handled
that.
He rejoined her in his bed, pulled the covers over them,
curled her in his arms and started making out with her again.
His bed had definitely been broken in.
And there’d been some action, if not the full go, in her
shower that morning.
So that left her couch in front of her TV and finishing up