I knew Ren watched this and I didn’t care. I was beyond caring, about a lot of things.
He took me to a house in Cheesman Park, a big, old, graceful one. He expertly parallel parked in front (and I had to admit, I was impressed, I could never parallel park) and walked me to the door. Inside it was a big, house-wide front room, side dining room to the back and left, kitchen on the other side, behind a wall, lots of windows with some stained glass. A split, sunny staircase in the middle where Ren led me up and to a bedroom.
Ho-ly crap.
I halted and turned to him. “Ren –” I started.
He gave me a gentle shove inside but took a step back, hand at the doorknob. “If you need anything, call,” he said.
Then he left, closing the door behind him. I stared at the door then turned and looked at the room.
More big windows, hardwood floors, dark wood furniture with a big bed, four high, spiked posts, wine-colored sheets and comforter.
I sighed. Nothing for it.
I threw myself on the bed, bounced a couple of times and curled into a ball.
You’re just latching onto this to protect yourself, Good Ava accused in my ear.
Yippee! We’re in Ren’s bed! Bad Ava yelled.
You need to talk to Luke, Good Ava advised.
You need to touch yourself in Ren’s bed. Mm, yum, Bad Ava advised.
Good Ava glared around my neck at Bad Ava. Stop talking about Ren!
Bad Ava glared back. Ren called us “honey”, we’ve been around Ren with LOTS of other women. He’s never called ANY of them “honey” like he did to us.
Good Ava had no comment because Bad Ava was right.
I closed my eyes tight and decided instead of sorting through my rampaging thoughts, I was going to try to think nothing at all.
That didn’t work so I started to sort through my rampaging thoughts.
In the end, I realized I had two choices. Be sloppy seconds to Jules for as long as it lasted and who knew how long it would last. Jules was with Vance, very with him, no way Luke was going to get in there. He might need sloppy seconds for a good, long while if his sexual appetite last night was anything to go by. Or I could get the hell out and fast.
Since I couldn’t get the hell out and fast, (which was my preferred choice) considering my life was totally fucked up and Luke had made it clear he wasn’t done with me, I’d have to take the first.
At least until I got my sextuple revenge against Dominic Dickhead. Then I was off to Jamaica for the longest vacation in history.
On that unhappy thought, I slipped into a wee nap.
I woke up when the bed moved. I saw a thigh and looked up. Ren was sitting on the bed looking down at me. His face was totally soft and gentle.
Wow.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said quietly.
I got up on an elbow. “That’s okay,” I said, my voice still sleepy. “What time is it?”
“After five. You hungry?”
I had missed lunch. I still wasn’t hungry.
“Yeah,” I lied.
He took my hand, helped me out of his bed and we went downstairs. Ren made spaghetti while I watched and drank red wine. Considering I was coasting on the dregs of morning toast (with unmelted butter), the red wine hit my head like a shot.
Therefore by the time we sat down at his dining room table with bowls of (delicious, it must be said, Ren could cook) spaghetti, I had had two glasses of wine and was working on my third. I wasn’t quite drunk but I was in a talkative mood.
Unfortunately, Ren asked what was happening. So, seeing as I felt like talking, I told him.
Everything.
From Luke moving into the house across the street; me being Fatty, Fatty Four-Eyes (that last part, Ren knew, I met him pre-weight loss and he’d been nice to me then too); having a crush on Luke since time began; all the way to the cookie swipe (though I just said we did the business, I didn’t go into detail, thank goodness, his eyes got a little scary just hearing the “we did the business” part).
He listened without comment to all of this.
When I was done he asked, “Did you get your head together?”
I nodded.
“What’d you decide?” He seemed very interested in my answer.
Yikes.
I sat back and took a sip of wine. This was going to be the hard part.
“I need you to take me back to Luke’s,” I told him in a quiet, don’t freak out on me voice.
His mouth got tight but, to my surprise, without a word or a freak out, he nodded.
That said a lot about him. All of it good.
Hell and damnation.
We did the dishes and he took me back to Luke’s. He walked me into the building and when the elevator doors slid open, his hand came to my neck before I could walk in.
He brought me close, his face dipped to mine and I saw the hungry look in his eyes. This time it was more intense because I could see it was mingled with anger or frustration or both. I figured whatever he was going to say was going to complicate my complicated life significantly.
I was not wrong.
He started talking and I vowed that if I ever got caught in a man pickle again, I would choose a man who was not a straight-talker.
“After he gets done with you, screwin’ with your head while he’s fuckin’ your body when he knows you have serious feelings for him, or you get done with bein’ with a guy who would do that, done with a guy who’s thinkin’ of someone else when he fucks you, when you decide you wanna be with a guy who is thinkin’ of nothin’ but you when he fucks you, Ava, you call me.”
Ho-ly shit!
What did I do with that?
I just stared, I couldn’t do anything else.
“Do you understand me?” he asked.
At that, I just nodded.
I understood him. Ee-yikes but I understood him.
“Good,” he said and he sounded pissed off. Even pissed off, he still brushed his lips against mine. I registered that the lip brush felt nice while he walked away.
I shrugged off the lip brush, got in the elevator and used the key to Luke’s floor. I did my now familiar holding-of-the-breath-until-the-doors-slid-open-to-Luke’s-loft and I let it out on a gush when they did.
He was sitting at a stool in front of the bar, the kitchen garbage can a few feet in front of him, sorting through one of the piles I made for him (tossing most of it in the garbage, I might add) and eating one of my Milano cookies. He was still in his Tom Petty mood, I knew this because Tom was singing “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” on the stereo.
His head swung around when I walked in.
I opened my mouth to say “Hey” when he spoke. “Where the fuck have you been?” he bit off.
Hmm.
Someone was in a bad mood.
It was about to get worse. I knew it would because I was going to make it get worse.
And I did it on purpose.
Barlow Bitch Blood was pumping so watch out!
“At Ren’s,” I answered.
The air in the room went scary as I walked in, got close to Luke, put my phone down on the bar and grabbed the bag of Milanos. I shoved my hand in the bag, studiously avoiding the scary air and Luke’s gaze and nabbing a cookie.
“Ava.”
I looked at him. He was in his controlling-fury mode, I knew it with one look.
“Yeah?” I asked, sounding unconcerned and a little surprised at myself that I could pull it off.
“You wanna tell me what you did at Zano’s?”
Not really.
Still, I answered, “I needed space to get my head together. He gave it to me. I spent the afternoon at his place, alone, and took a nap. When he got home from work, he made me dinner and brought me back here.”
I’d gone from lying through my teeth every other second to being honest when it was definitely not good for me. I should have stuck with lying. Even though all this was perfectly innocent, I could tell Luke didn’t l
ike it, not one bit.
“Now that you answered that question, you wanna tell me why you couldn’t get your head together and take a nap here?”
I shrugged, being Queen of Calm. Barlow Bitch Blood was apparently latent. I’d lived twenty-nine years hardly ever being a bitch. Now it was coming out in spades.
“Okay, then you wanna tell me what your drama was about at Fortnum’s?”
I was starting to bite into my cookie, I took it out of my mouth and said (back to lying),“I didn’t have a drama.”
“Then what was that?”
“It wasn’t a drama.”
“Eddie said he saw you crawling on all fours.”
Jeez!
This was so annoying. He had sources everywhere.
“I dropped a contact,” I lied.
Luke glared at me and then said, “Ava,” in a very low, very lethal voice.
“I told you, I had somewhere to go. I had to meet Ren so he could help me out.”
“When did Ren Zano become the one who helped you out?”
“Yesterday, at dinner,” I told him breezily, shaking my cookie in the air for effect.
Not a good answer. I knew this because the scary air started pressing in.
Surprisingly he let it go and asked instead, “Where did you sleep?”
Again I was about to bite into my cookie but stopped and asked, “What?”
“At Zano’s, where did you sleep?”
Uh-oh.
Before I could fight back the Barlow Bitch Pull it popped out of my mouth. “In his bed.”
Eek!
Red alert! Red alert! Scary air hitting danger zone! Evacuate the premises immediately!
Then Luke growled in a voice so low, I barely heard him, “You’ve got to be fuckin’ shittin’ me.”
“Luke, it was no big deal. He wasn’t there,” I decided to go back to breezy.
I was standing a few feet in front of him, between him and the garbage can.
He leaned in but kept his seat. I leaned back. I did this mainly because his intensity was kind of scaring me.
“You wanna call Zano right now? Ask him, shoe’s on the other foot, he fucked you three times, you fell asleep with his cock inside you, how he would feel about you takin’ a nap in my bed?”
It was then I saw his point.
Then again, if it was Ren fucking me, he would have been fucking me. Not some fill in until he sorted out his feelings for another woman.
On that thought, I lost interest in my Milano and threw it back in the bag. I put the bag on the counter and sifted my fingers through my hair, leaving my hands on top of my head. Then my eyes moved back to Luke.
He was holding his body perfectly still and I got the impression he was doing that so he wouldn’t strangle me.
Time to defuse the situation. I controlled the Barlow Bitch Pull and took a deep breath.
“Luke,” I said softly. “Give me a break. It’s not like, in my life, I’ve ever been in this situation. I’ve no fucking idea what I’m doing.”
“What you do is, you let me sort it out for you. That’s why you came to the fuckin’ office in the first goddamn place,” he snapped, no less angry for my soft voice.
I dropped my hands and looked at him direct in the eyes. “That’s not the situation I’m talking about,” I said, voice still soft.
“Give me a clue.”
Nope, no less angry. I looked away, closed my eyes tight and licked my lips.
Could I do this? No, I couldn’t do it. Still, I did it so I guess I could do it.
I looked back at him and on another deep breath, I admitted, “You know, Luke. You know that most of the time I couldn’t get a guy to look at me. Much less a hot guy. Now I have four. Four, all after I’d sworn off men. I don’t know what to do.” My voice went ultra quiet, barely even a whisper, even so there was an accusation to it. “You know. You, of all people, know.”
That’s when his body unstuck. Before I knew what he was about, he leaned forward, his arm snagging me around my waist, and he pulled me around the garbage bin and to him, between his legs, our torsos tight together. His other arm closed around my upper back, pinning me against him.
“I’ll tell you what to do. You come to me when you gotta sort shit out. I’ll take care of you. You come to me when you need somethin’. I’ll take care of it. I’ll also tell you what not to do. You don’t have dinner with another man. You don’t sleep in his bed, I don’t care that he’s not in it with you. You don’t leave me standin’ on the sidewalk while you take off with a guy who, days earlier, kidnapped you and threatened to blow your fuckin’ head off. You don’t –”
“Okay I get it,” I broke in quietly.
His arms tightened and he gave me a mini-shake. “You better get it, Ava. I’m not goin’ through the last six hours again.”
I looked at the piles of stuff on the bar. I had left him several, now there was only one. I had come home and he was sitting, sorting through it and eating a cookie.
I looked back at him, confused. “Organizing your paperwork?” I asked.
He stared at me a second as if three identical noses had just popped out on my face then his head dropped back. I could almost hear him asking for patience from the divine. His chin came back down so he could look at me.
“I mean worryin’ where the fuck you were and if you were okay considerin’ the last look I had of you, you had tears in your eyes.”
Oh. That.
“I’m over that,” I lied, so not over it and so never going to tell him what I wasn’t over. Not in a million years. “It was a girl thing,” I lied again for good measure. In my experience, men hated to talk about “girl things”. I was hoping even the brutally honest ones would shy way the hell away from any discussion of a “girl thing”.
He stared at me and I got the impression he totally knew I was lying.
Finally, and thankfully, he decided to let it go. “Zano fed you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Good. Now I can fuck you.”
My knees did a little wobble. “We didn’t have dessert,” I stalled.
His head (and, I must remind you, his fantastic mouth) started coming toward mine.
“Glad he left that to me,” he said before he kissed me.
* * * * *
It wasn’t like last night where it was all go, go, go or shocking but world-tilting surprise or all about Luke giving then taking.
This time Luke went slow and we took turns. He let me touch him, taste him, stroke him, take him in my mouth and I liked it, a lot. He had an unbelievable body and, let me tell you, it was fun as hell to explore.
When he was through letting me, he flipped me over, spread my legs and settled between them. I felt one of his knees come up for better leverage and I was certain he was going to slam into me again. I was ready for it, I wanted it and I stared at him in a fog, my body burning, nearly begging for it.
He didn’t slam into me. Instead, I felt him right there, ready to come inside when his hands came up to either side of my face. Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, he slid inside me watching my face the whole time. My lips parted and I held my breath as he slowly filled me until he was buried deep.
I waited for him to move.
He didn’t. He just kept watching me.
“Luke,” I whispered, pressing my hips into him.
“Be still, Ava,” he said then his mouth came to mine and he asked, “Do you feel that?”
Yeah, I felt it. It felt great.
“Yeah,” I told him.
I felt him smile against my mouth but he said, “You don’t feel it.”
“I feel it.”
“Then you don’t get it.”
I wanted to get it but he wasn’t moving.
I licked my lips and since my lips were close to his lips, I licked his lips too.
His eyes went molten and he moved, slowly at first then faster then harder until we both came, breathing heavy in each other’s mouths. I
t was the first time in my life that I climaxed with a partner at the same time. If I thought the other sex was mind-blowing, I was wrong. Reaching orgasm with Luke was mind-blowing, mind-altering and world-tilting all at the same time.
I was so screwed.
After, his mouth at the skin behind my ear, he murmured, “You ever run away from me with tears in your eyes again, Ava, I’ll hunt you down. Do you understand?”
I didn’t move. This wasn’t sweet, after-sex talk. His voice was low and husky but he was being perfectly serious.
“Do you understand?” he pushed.
I decided it was best to nod. I was unable to process this after a big time orgasm when Luke was still on top of me, when Luke was, at that moment, my whole world.
Mouth still at my ear, he said in The Voice, “I’m bein’ patient, babe, but pretty soon you’re gonna have to let me in.”
No way in hell. He was already in as far as he was going to get, literally and figuratively.
“Don’t call me babe,” I said to take the post-sex conversation away from me letting him in.
I meant it this time in a way I didn’t mean it before. I didn’t want him to call me “babe” and Jules “babe”. It made it less special. In fact, it made it not special at all.
His head came up and he looked down at me. His eyes searched my face and then he dropped to his side, taking me with him.
When we were face-to-face and he had my leg wrapped around his hip, he asked, “What’s this now?”
“Nothing, just don’t call me babe. I don’t like it,” I lied. I had really loved it before, if I was honest with myself. Now, I hated it.
His fingers sifted through the hair at the side of my head and he kept his hand at the back and twisted my hair in his fist.
“You mean it,” he said.
“Yeah,” I told him.
“I’m not even close, am I?” he asked, what I thought bizarrely.
“Close to what?”
“To gettin’ through to you.”
Whoa.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Stop right there.
Or, wait. Maybe, not.
“No, Luke. You’re not. I tried to tell you but you won’t listen to me,” I pressed closer to him and lied through my goddamn teeth. “You’re never going to get close. Trust me, it’s not gonna happen.”