I woke up this morning with the stench of blood clinging to my nostrils. The blood of a brother was powerful, fucking lethal. It had the kind of potency to ignite my rage, and in any case, it wasn’t the smell of blood that I was pissed with when I woke this morning.
It was the fact that Old Don, a.k.a. the president of the chapter in my hometown, had fucking carked it and now, instead of me staying in Washington with the brothers I’ve been around for ten years, I have to go back to the hole-in-the-wall town of fucking Halsin.
I left for a reason; I need to stay for another.
I close the front door to my house and drop my bike keys on top of the console table in the doorway.
“Nik, that you?”
“Yeah…” I say, running my hand over my head while making my way into the kitchen. Whatever she’s cooking, I smelled it from the street over. I pull her in and kiss the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her sugary shampoo. “We gotta talk, babe.”
Lydia wipes her hands with a dishcloth and pushes her hair out of her face. She’s hot as fuck. It was the first thing I noticed about her when I pulled to the side of the road to help her. She’s a vet and had been called to an accident site where a dog had been hit by a car where I just happened to be riding past. I helped her carry the German shepherd into the ambulance van she was driving and managed to grab her number while I was there. She didn’t come fucking easy, nowhere near as easy as any other piece of ass I wanted.
She and I make it work. In a way.
If anything, she keeps me grounded and distracted and keeps the image I need to maintain to the outer circles.
“What is it?” Her brown eyes search mine in worry, the small wrinkle line between her brows deep. She’s always so fucking stressed about that line, so I make it my job to give her shit about being four years older than me.
“I’ve gotta ride back to my hometown.”
She leans back against the kitchen counter, crossing her legs at her ankles. “You haven’t spoken much about your hometown.”
“Hmmm.” I step back, falling onto a dining chair as she moves to the fridge, pulling me out a beer and flicking off the cap. “There’s a reason for that.”
She slides it over to me, chewing on her bottom lip. “For how long?”
I reach up to her hand and intertwine her fingers with mine, pulling her down onto my lap. “Just for a few days. I’ll be back with an update.”
She rests her hands on my cheek. “You’ll come back to me?”
“Yeah.”
She presses her lips to mine and I suck her bottom one into my mouth. Sex was the hook for Lydia because she was fucking good at it. She’d do shit like she was doing now, strutting her ass upstairs while removing all pieces of clothing. Pulling out my phone, I open a new text…
Game on. You ready?
My lips curl into a sinister smirk. Have been waiting since I fuckin’ left.
Everything she thinks she knows is going to be torn from her perfect little fingertips, and I’m going to make sure they’re bleeding when I do it.
And I ain’t talking about Lydia.
“Did you tell him that Niko was back?” Cece asks through the phone, though I can barely understand what she’s saying because she’s eating so fucking loud.
After our dinner last night, I sat and listened to them both as they moved from subject to subject and I sat quietly in the corner. I was always the drunkest in the group because the two of them would do the most talking while I was doing the drinking. Neither of them has really asked into the depth of my life, and for so long I’d appreciated it, but what if I wasn’t me and I had a life like them both and needed to vent, spew, emotional dump on friends? I would find them both neglectful.
“I did. He’s coming home this weekend, so I guess we will talk more about it then.”
“…and how do you think he feels about that? You think he’ll beg God to make sure you don’t go for the devil dick?”
I stand after stretching, hitting my phone to speakerphone and tossing it onto the floor to stretch on the barre. “One, you’re an idiot. Two, what do you mean?”
She pauses. “Don’t be dense, Mer. Everyone that knew you and Niko when you guys were young always knew you both had a thing.”
My foot slips from its stretch and I quickly correct myself, squeezing the wooden barre in my hand while glaring at my phone. “What the hell are you talking about?” It’s not a lie, but it is a secret in the way that only Niko and I know.