Edison (The Henchmen MC 10)

"Lenny," I called when she shuffled from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable which seemed completely foreign for her. She didn't strike me - or anyone - as someone who wasn't perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and therefore in any situation she found herself in. Her head jerked up, startled, almost like she had been so up in her own mind that she forgot I was even there. "Come over here," I offered, my arm draped across the back of the couch.

There was a slight hesitation before she moved toward me, still clutching her mug between two hands, looking off at her stereo where Eddie Vedder was begging to know why the woman he loved couldn't be the star in his sky.

Even seated, her body was still taut as a string, and there was a part of me that was wondering if the smallest pressure would send her off.

But that was a risk I was willing to take when I let my arm slip down and wrap around her shoulder, pulling her more tightly to my side. My other hand reached for her mug, my fingers brushing hers as I took it from her to put it down next to mine on the coffee table.

She still had her gaze focused forward even as the song changed and Kurt Cobain's voice started asking about where his love slept the night before.

"Lenny," I called, watching her profile. "If you want me to leave, just say it."

"If I wanted you to leave, I wouldn't need for you to give me permission to tell you to leave," she shot back, but she still wouldn't meet my gaze.

My other hand moved out, snagging her chin, forcing her face in my direction.

And it was pure vulnerability I saw there.

I wasn't arrogant enough to think it had anything to do with me. I didn't figure Lenny for the kind of woman who got sappy about sex. In fact, whatever it was that had prompted her to invite me over via text was likely what was on her mind right then. I figured that whatever it was, she needed an escape from it.

I was the escape.

And, I guess, if that was what she needed from me, if that was the only capacity she had room for, then, well, I could be an escape.

"I get it," I told her, nodding. "You're a woman who knows her own mind." My arm curled around her, allow my fingers to whisper down the side of her neck, sending a small shiver through her body. "So, tell me," I started, hearing my own voice dipping lower. "What was on your mind when you invited me over tonight?"

And just like that, the vulnerability was gone, replaced with something else, something burning, something that looked fucking good there...EIGHTLennyIt wasn't that I was having second thoughts about the sex.

Sex was sex.

I'd never had flowers and candy and love making and all that sappy stuff. I doubt I would want it if I had.

It always had been, and I figured it always would be, about the release. Physically, sure, but also emotionally, mentally.

If my days were too long, too filled with useless garbage, that was when I called up a guy I had an agreement with, that was when I knew I needed to come so I didn't murder an entire town because everyone seemed to choose to be an asshole that day.

That was all it was.

And that was all it would ever be.

But I couldn't shake this weird sensation I felt inside, like this was something different.

Logically, that made no sense. I barely knew the man.

Maybe it had less to do with him, and more to do with me, and what was coming up soon, what it would mean for me in the short and long term.

Maybe I was, what was the word? Projecting.

It had to have nothing to do with him.

Those words, I swear, they were like a challenge to myself.

I needed to prove them true. I needed to know that I wasn't being some sappy chick about it all.

My hand planted at his far shoulder as I raised up onto my knees, then slowly slid to straddle him, watching those dark, bottomless eyes of his, loving the way they went heavy-lidded, seemed to somehow burn into me with their heat.

"Something like this," I told him a moment before my lips closed over his, swallowing the low, deep, primal growl in his chest as I did so.

There was an unfamiliar dropping sensation in my stomach, similar to that of driving over a deep slope at a high speed when I was too young and reckless to know any better.

Scary and addictive.

Exciting, but because there was danger involved.

I shook off that thought, trying to convince myself that there was nothing here to be dangerous - just bodies enjoying bodies.