Chapter Fourteen
Chapter
Fourteen
Dream Girl
Lottie
I raced down my steps as best I could wearing only
one shoe, and turned into the living room.
My ears had not deceived me in what they heard while I got
dressed upstairs.
The boys had arrived.
Hot guy action was everywhere.
Axl stretched on my couch.
Auggie lounged crossways across my armchair.
Boone sitting on my counter in the kitchen.
Mag with his head in my fridge.
And Mo standing in the kitchen, wearing a dove gray shirt
with a sheen that made it almost silver, dark gray trousers, head tipped back,
corded throat on display through his open collar, downing water from a black
Hydro Flask.
I did not have it in me to react to all this goodness in my
living room and kitchen, even Mo looking extra double hot wearing nice
clothes and downing water in a way I got that view of his throat.
We were leaving in five minutes for his mom’s and I was in a
state.
“Babe, what the fuck? You don’t have beer?” Mag stated after
pulling his head out of the fridge.
“I only drink beer on special occasions or at your place,” I
replied.
He stared at me saying, “That’s impossible.”
“Crib is tight, Lots,” Auggie told me as I rushed by him (or
limped by him on one spike heel, one bare foot, clutching my other shoe to my
chest as well as the bag I was switching out to).
“Thanks,” I muttered to Auggie.
Mo had come out from behind the Hydro and was staring at me
in a way that, if we weren’t imminently going to dinner at his mom’s, and his
buds weren’t hanging around being hot, I would be on my back on the kitchen
floor getting fucked.
Good to know he liked the dress.
But I couldn’t even let that penetrate.
“How can you not drink beer?” Mag demanded to know.
“She’s fit, asshole,” Axl called. “That’s how. Not everyone
has your metabolism and a cast-iron liver.”
“Mac, babe, seriously, that calendar on your fridge,” Boone
said to me as I dumped all that was in my hands on the counter by his hip.
I looked up at him.
“What?” I asked.
“Three-month oil changes?” He shook his head. “Check your
manual. Unless you drive a Chrysler Lebaron circa
nineteen eighty-two, it’s either five thousand or seven thousand. Sometimes
even ten. That three-month or three-thousand-mile gig is totally overkill.”
“I just knew that was a scam,” I snapped.
He grinned at me. “Good you now got men in your life who’ll
look out for you.”
I already had men in my life who looked out for me.
But none of them told me about the oil-change scam.
I would have words with Eddie.
Then Tex.
Later.
At that moment, I needed to freak out.
“Can I ask when my woman became all of your woman?” Mo
requested to know from behind me, and he didn’t sound happy.
“Until we get our own,” Mag answered breezily. “You know
sister wives? We’re like brother husbands.”
“No you aren’t.”
There was my man’s Brook No Argument Tone.
“Without the benefits, of course,” Mag added.
“Lottie, babe, step up the matchmaking shit,” Mo ordered,
leaning hips against the counter beside me as I reached to my purse so I could
switch out what I needed to my clutch.
But I felt it, that “it” was strong, and I had to stop what
I was doing to look around.
I turned my head side to side to see everyone’s attention on
me.
Even Axl had pushed up on my couch so he could look around
the back of it my way.
“Matchmaking shit?” Boone asked.
“Lottie’s gonna set you boys up,”
Mo told them.
I was?
“Let them be strippers. Please, God, if you love me even a
little bit, let them be strippers,” Mag prayed, head tipped back, eyes to my
ceiling and everything.
“Actually, Mag, we have a girl working her way through
college at the club. She wants to be an engineer. And she’d be so your
thing,” I told him.
His eyes came to me. “An engineer?”
“Software.”
Mag started to look like he might be quietly choking.
He clearly was when his next words sounded strangled. “A
computer nerd?”
“Yep,” I said and turned back to my purse, trying not to
smile.
Though I would never, in a million years, introduce Evan to
him. He was a dawg. He was hot and he was funny and he loved Mo and he was
sweet to me.
But he was a dawg.
And Evie was very pretty, in an understated way, when she
didn’t have teased-out hair and wasn’t (somewhat awkwardly, she never got the
hang of it, but she was so pretty, it didn’t matter) slithering on a stage with
bills poking out of her g-string.
I already felt bad enough—for Mag and the women he
involved—that Mag was working out his heartbreak from Nikki by tapping as much
ass as he could to block out the pain.
Mo had told me she was the reason he needed a place to live.
Nikki and Mag broke up three weeks before Tammy and Mo broke up. He’d been
sleeping on Axl’s couch, until Mo’s breakup saved him from chronic back pain.
I wasn’t going to subject Evan to his This All Could Be
Yours If Some Other Woman Hadn’t Fucked Me Up Routine.
Until…
“No offense to your friend, but I’ll pass,” Mag told me.
That bought him my attention again.
My attention with squinty eyes.
“You got a problem with smart girls?” I asked sharply.
“Well…” he shrugged, “yeah.”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Why?” I rapped out.
“Babe, if they’re smart, they can figure you out. Not
everyone is level-headed, even keeled and adjusted like Mo,” Mag returned. “I
don’t need some smart girl figuring out my shit. I can’t even figure
out my shit. What I know is, my shit is such shit, I don’t want it
figured out.”
“Has it occurred to you that if you had a smart girl around,
she might help you with that?” I asked.
“As he said, this would require him wanting his shit sorted,
and Mag prefers to be a hot mess,” Axl declared. “And not because he doesn’t
want to figure out his shit. Because him not doing that is a woman magnet.”
“The broken one they think they can fix,” Auggie added.
“Better that than the lost puppy,” Mag fired at Auggie.
“That’s me,” he said through a grin. “All ready to go to a
good home. Happy just to be fed and watered. But I’ll perform for treats.”
I looked to Mo. “How do you put up with this shit?”
“It’s a lot easier to tune out when I got a beer in my hand
and some game is on TV,” he replied.
I’d bet.
“What are you all doing here anyway?” I asked the boys.
“Moral support,” Axl said.
“Preparing you for the Morrison women onslaught,” Boone said
at the same time.
Onslaught?
There was going to be an onslaught?
Every fiber of my body grew tight.
“Jesus Christ, when are you motherfuckers gonna stop being scared of my sisters?” Mo demanded to
know.
Scared?
These badass commandos were scared of Mo’s sisters?
“When they stop bein’ scary,” Mag
pointed out.
“You get, Mag, that they’re only scary because they’ve
figured out your shit,” Mo returned.
“Yeah. There you go. Fuckin’ terrifying,” Mag
replied.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod,” I chanted.
Here I was again.
Nervous!
I’d met boyfriends’ families. And okay, if I cared about
them, I got nervous.
But not like this.
No other way to say it.
I was a wreck.
“I’m gonna kill every
motherfucking one of you,” Mo threatened, sounding like he’d do it.
After he did, I felt his fingers curl around my chin and he
used them to pull my head around and tip it back.
I blinked up at him.
“Look at me, sweetheart,” he urged gently.
“I am,” I choked out nervously.
“Okay, focus on me,” he amended.
I tried to do that.
When I somewhat succeeded, I felt the boys had surrounded
me.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Mo declared.
“What if they don’t like me?” I asked. “I can’t have them
not liking me, Mo. They’re part of you. They’re blood. They’re sisters.
I have a sister!” My voice was rising with the increased beating of my heart
which was keeping pace with the increased level of my panic. “I know how
important sisters are! If they don’t like me, I’m gone. I can’t have that.
Ohmigod!” That last was nearly yelled. “You beat up your dad for one of them.
If they don’t like me, I’m not even a memory.”
I lost his attention as his eyes slid up and did a half
circle and his lips growled, “Yup. Gonna kill every
motherfucking one of you.”
“Babe,” I heard Boone call.
I pulled my chin from Mo’s hold only to have my body tucked
into Mo’s hold a different way (this being with his arm) as I turned my head to
look up at Boone.
“You may or may not believe this. Regardless, it’s true,”
Boone started. “To get Mo, the tougher wall you had to climb was us.”
He jerked his chin to the others and I shifted in Mo’s
clinch so I had my back to his front and I could take them all in.
“You might not have noticed, you bein’
you, together like you are, sure of yourself, but I threw down with you
practically the minute I laid eyes on you,” Mag reminded me.
He did that. It was semi-subtle, in the sense it was not
like getting hit by a freight train, more like getting hit by a bus.
But he did it.
“I know,” I told him.
“You won me over in about a minute,” Mag told me something I
knew at the time, and was happy about at the time, but being reminded of it in this
time made me feel a whole lot better.
He wasn’t done.
“It was you bein’ pissed Mo’s dad
is a dick. It was hearing about you takin’ on Tammy. It was you bein’ hilarious. It was knowin’
we were gonna have a beautiful woman among us who was
also one of the guys. But most of all, it was the way you were with Mo. First
time at our place, it was like you’d been there a hundred times before and you
two were just chill.” Mag shot me a grin. “Outside you shoutin’
about his dad. Mo was goin’ through his mail and you
were shoutin’ about his dad and you were all about
him. I had to push it, ’cause he’s my boy. But I
didn’t have to push hard.”
“For me,” Axl put in, “it was the fact I was worried I
wouldn’t get out of your house before you jumped on his dick.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him.
“I wasn’t even there for you,” Axl went on quietly. “He