“Do you want me to write down those numbers for you?”
“Yes, please and thank you.”
On the drive home, I’m vibrating with excitement. This is good. Very good.
“Did you hear that, baby? Mommy and Daddy are going to a party! Are you excited? I’m excited. I have to call your Grandma, make a plan for when to pump those extra bottles, and we have to call the babysitters that Auntie Rach recommended to see which one we like best. And Mommy has to figure out what to wear! It’s gonna be great. We still have to do the rest of our Christmas shopping this week, and you have an appointment with Dr. Lopez on the tenth, and then we’ll focus on the party, okay?”
I can’t wait for DJ to actually start responding to me because sometimes I feel like a crazy person. Not today, though. I’m all cried out, and I’m a woman with a plan.
I’m going to put on my sluttiest biker chick clothes, the ones that will keep Dylan’s hands glued to my waist the whole evening. He’s gonna look at me with the same awe and wonder he had in his gaze when I walked into his tattoo parlor almost two years ago, and we’re not going to be Mommy and Daddy for one night, we’re gonna be Marissa and Dylan again.
And it’s gonna be great.
It has to.
Chapter 2
Slim
“How are things at the shop? Any problems?” Prez asks me during the Wolves' annual Thanksgiving poker game at the clubhouse.
I pretend to examine my cards.
It’s been a little over three weeks since Rebel started working for me. Three weeks of long, torturous mental foreplay. Edging. Orgasm denial. Pick your poison.
Every day she’s shown up looking like a Suicide Girl, (un)dressed in a way that shows off all her tats (and some of her tits), and with her makeup done in that sexy maneater way of hers.
“Nope,” I say.
I’m not stupid enough to admit that my biggest problem is self-inflicted. I assigned Rebel a workstation facing away from me so she wouldn’t notice I was watching her. Unfortunately, that also means that whenever she bends over while working on her clients, I’m treated to a perfect view of my tattoo on her lower back. The one I put there because I was turned on by the idea. The infamous bullseye.
Blood surges into my cock at the thought of painting it white with my cum again. Images of the countless times I’d pounded into her from behind flash through my brain, and I consider folding, in case I have to run into the bathroom to rub one out like a horny teenager.
Those first days when Bell started working for me, I would mumble my hellos and leave any instructions I had for her and my other two artists with our receptionist. I played it cool on the outside, but I watched her joke and talk with her colleagues, and every time we all sat down to dinner in the breakroom, I was all ears.
Secretly, I was begging for glimpses of her life during the last six years. Where had she been? With who? Was she seeing someone now? Had she thought about me at all?
Once, she told Buzz that some hotel in Hawaii was overrated. I looked it up afterwards, and it turned out to be a luxury resort. Who had taken her there? I was angry and short-tempered for the rest of the night, and when I got home, I lost it with Marissa about not teaching the boy to sleep in his own room.
Afterward, when they’d both fallen asleep with tear tracks on their faces, I wanted nothing more than to take it back. I knew Junior needed his mom and was too small to be left alone in a dark, empty room. Unfortunately for him, the thought of Rebel fucking some rich guy in Hawaii had been too much for me to bear.
“I’m happy to hear that. Keep doing what you’re doing,” Prez says before calling.
I don’t think he’d be saying that if he knew the truth.
That first week, I gritted my teeth until I got home, where I would wake Marissa and try to get it out of my system, but unlike in the first few months of our relationship, pulling her hair frombehind and pretending like she was Bell wasn’t working for me anymore. Not when I had the real thing in front of me every fucking day.
During Rebel’s second week at Inkspiration, the shop got a new playlist, which sounded like the soundtrack of the hot, sticky summer of ’99 when Bell and I got together. Rebel had come up to me during my patch-in party and whispered in my ear. “I have a present for you. Meet me in your room in ten?”
The rest was history. Before the night of the party, I had carefully kept my obsession to myself; she was the club princess and my friend’s younger sister, meaning she was untouchable on two counts.
I’ve always thought that she must have used her incredibly skilled mouth to suck out a tiny part of my soul that night, and she just… never gave it back. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for my inability to be indifferent to this woman.
One night, two weeks after she started working for me, Rebel and I were on cleanup duty. She went and clicked around on the computer, and the speakers started blaring Poison by Alice Cooper. She gave me a look I knew all too well, and I knew resistance was pointless.
I grab her hard enough to leave bruises as I slam my mouth on hers. I feel her lips curve against mine, and I bite the lower one to scold her for gloating, but the pain makes her moan. That coveted sound sets my blood on fire, and I’m inside her before the song is over.
However, it isn’t lovemaking. It is an almost angry reclaiming.
