Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

It wasn’t what seemed to be our usual desperate fucking. It was slow and sweet, like we had all the time in the world, like nothing was more important than sharing our bodies with each other.

The words making love popped into my head just as the orgasm coursed through my body, seeming to only intensify it with that realization.

Because with all the sex I had had in my life… I had never had someone make love to me. I wasn’t even entirely sure I understood the turn of phrase until Shane showed it to me. And, judging by the contented yet confused and a bit awestruck look on his face as he looked at me after he came as well, I was pretty sure the experience was a new one for him.

He held me for a long while until his phone started blowing up across the room and he sighed, smacked my ass lightly, and got out of bed to go get it. He did this completely naked, I might add. And I felt no embarrassment whatsoever in watching as he answered his phone and moved around the kitchen making coffee.

I passed out while he was in the shower and woke up alone with a note on the coffee pot when the smell eventually dragged me from bed.

Need to handle some gym shit. I’ll be back in a couple hours to fuck you. Fee said you’re off today so I’m gonna take you out to Chaz’s. Mark owes you a couple rounds. He reminded me this morning.

He didn’t sign it and there was no real sweet sentiment to it, but it took just about everything I had not to carefully fold it and tuck it away in my overnight bag for safekeeping.

But I wasn’t that big of a sap.

Except I was and I had it folded in my bag for a second before I grabbed it again, balled it up, and made sure I mushed it into the old coffee grounds in the garbage so I didn’t try to save it again.

I took an obnoxiously long shower in his luxurious bathroom, put on some makeup, but not much because if he had plans to fuck me when he got back, I knew it would be of the rough, wild, sweaty variety and I didn’t need mascara running down my face.

I wasn’t wrong either.

Shane got in around four, gave me a good solid fucking that I swear made me have a complete out-of-body tet-a-tet with God, then we got dress and hit Chaz’s.

Mark did as he had promised, buying us rounds. Eventually, Ryan and Eli showed up, joining in until I was good and wasted. Years of drinking with men who did so like they were stranded in the Sahara making my tolerance good and therefore preventing me from ever getting to the point where I was sloppy.

“Come on now, he’s hardly the prize of the family,” Mark said, hopelessly flirting with me (and any other girl one of his brothers showed interest in, just to piss them off). Mark was the shit-starter of the family I learned really quickly. Shane was the brute with a lot of opinions and, luckily, enough brains to back them up. Ryan, the business head. I couldn’t really get a feel for him, always being so staid. I couldn’t even tell if he liked me and I found myself overly concerned with that approval. Eli, well, was Eli. He was a strange mix of restrained and friendly. His dark intensity didn’t seem to lessen in getting to know him better, but instead became one of the most interesting things about him. I learned around the fourth round that he was a painter and a writer and that some day he hoped to make that a bigger part of his life. There was a sadness when he said it though, as if he knew the chances were slim.

Sometime around midnight, two guys walked in, making the Mallicks shake their heads. One was slim, a swimmer’s kind of body, completely covered in tattoos, even across his neck, with slicked back hair and green eyes, dressed in tight black jeans, a black Alice In Chains tee, and freaking creepers. Beside him was a giant mixed-race light-skinned black man who was tall and wide and tatted as well with a sharp, perfect face and a relaxed kind of confidence about him.

“Who are they?” I heard myself asking, considering them over my drink.

“Shooter is the fuck with the greaser look,” Shane informed me, jerking his head at the man in question who gave him a smile that faltered a bit as the man’s eyes followed the length of Shane’s arm to where it draped over my shoulders. Then the smile positively threatened to split his face.

“And the other?” I asked.

“Paine. He’s a tattoo artist. He’s done some of my work.”