“You said everyone knows their place. So what’s my place in all of this?” She took another step toward me, and I swallowed and willed my cock to go down before she saw the effect her words were having on me.
“You’re Gauge’s kid,” I said, my words feeling thick in my mouth.
“And you’re Hardy’s kid,” she replied.
I nodded and we both stayed silent, taking in each other’s expression. Laney broke the moment first and began walking around my room, looking at the posters on my walls as she did. She was wearing a small backpack that had a shit-ton of buttons and patches all over it. My room wasn’t exactly huge, so it didn’t take her long to finish the inspection, and by the look of disgust on her face the verdict clearly wasn’t good.
She went and sat on my unmade bed, kicking her dirty little ankle boots off and crossing her long brown legs. Who the fuck knew when it had last had the sheets cleaned. Probably fucking never. I decided right then that I’d be getting one of the club bitches to wash my sheets later that day.
Laney took another sip of her beer and looked at the posters of naked women and bikes spread all over my walls, her eyes falling to the one right above my bed—the one she had drawn on almost two years ago to the day—and she smiled.
At some point in the last year, Butch had moved out of our room, deciding that he needed his own space, which was fine. It gave me more room for my things—not that I had much. Just my magazines and tapes, records and clothes. But still, it was good in some ways to have more privacy—especially as I’d grown into more of a man. I’d started getting interested in building bikes in the last six months, and manuals and bike parts filled a large plastic tub in the corner. One day I was going to build myself the most badass beast of a bike.
I realized that I needed to get dressed, since I was still just wearing a towel and my hard-on was blatantly fucking obvious beneath it now. I grabbed my jeans from the end of my bed, the chain that I had hanging from the belt loop to my wallet jangling noisily. I stepped into the jeans, forgoing underwear, and I started to pull them up. My towel was just about to fall when Laney looked back over at me and I quirked an eyebrow at her and smirked.
“Ya mind?” I asked, gesturing with a nod of my head as I let the towel fall at my feet.
“Oh god, sorry,” she said, her cheeks flushing even redder as she quickly looked away.
A small smile played at the corners of her mouth as she turned to stare at the poster again. I pulled my jeans all the way up and kicked the damp towel into the corner of the room with the rest of the mess. My hard-on for her seemed much less obvious hidden behind some denim instead of a flimsy towel, but it was still pretty fucking obvious and I willed little Jesse to calm the fuck down before Laney noticed and ran screaming from my room, calling me a pervert.
Laney reached over to the side of the bed and picked up a pen. She knelt up on my pillow, her snatch so close to where I put my face every night that I knew that I’d never wash that fucking pillow ever again. I grabbed my crotch and pulled at my dick, which was pressed up against the zipper, trying to escape from my pants and get into hers.
She leaned up higher, her T-shirt rising enough so that I got a look at the smooth olive skin on her back that was just begging for me to run my hands down it. She drew a smile underneath the breasts that she’d previously drawn sunglasses on, and then she turned back and smirked at me, giving me a little wink and laughing.
I flushed bright red and smiled back. I dragged a hand through my still-damp hair, grabbing the back of my neck where it felt painfully tight. Her eyes traveled over me as if seeing me for the first time. Her gaze strayed to my bare chest, to where I knew the muscles were hard and firm, aVforming at the base of my stomach that looked like a fucking arrow pointing toward my dick. She swallowed, watching as I lowered my hand from the back of my neck and took a step toward her, and her tongue darted out to wet her lips.
I opened my mouth to say something to her when my door opened and Hardy filled the space. He took one look at Laney kneeling on my bed, beer in hand, and her perfect ass practically hanging out of her cutoffs, and then he took in me with my own beer and just a pair of low-hanging Levi’s hanging from my hips.
“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me, Jesse?” he growled out, and if I could have shriveled up and vanished right then, I would have. “This is Gauge’s kid, and you’re thinking of fucking around with her? Have some fuckin’ respect, boy!” He reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder before pulling me around to face him. He glared right into my face, anger pouring from his hellish eyes and boring straight into mine.
“It’s not what it looks like, Hardy,” I gritted out. “I was just trying to get her away from the shit happening out there.” I jerked a thumb out the door, but I already knew it was pointless arguing with him. Shit had been getting worse with us the older I got—as if the more I grew into a man, the more he hated me. Clearly he saw something in me that he didn’t like, but I’d be damned if I knew what it was.
“The shit out there?” he snarled, his dark eyes boring into mine like he was trying to drill a hole through my fucking skull.
“The fuckin’ and shit,” I responded, desperately trying to contain my anger.
“You puttin’ your brothers down now too, boy? There’s somethin’ wrong with what they’re doin’? I know you ain’t popped your own cherry yet, but you tryin’ to tell me you’re a faggot, boy? That you don’t like pussy?” He sneered at me, and though my chest burned with an anger so fierce that all I wanted to do was lash out, I refrained, knowing it would be pointless.
My dad had been a fucker to me my whole life, and I had never known why. We’d come to live with him as boys, me more of a boy than Butch, and I had never felt anything but hate coming from the man, no matter how much I’d tried to please him.
The man hated everyone and everything, and never had a good word to say about anything—me especially. And up until then, I’d never really cared. I stayed out of his way and he stayed out of mine. The way I figured it, soon enough I’d be a prospect and I’d force some damn respect from him, one way or another. Ain’t nothin’ I did gonna change the way he felt about me until I did—that much was obvious.
But right then a hatred I’d never felt before blossomed to life in my gut, roaring its way up my spine.
And he fuckin’ knew I’d popped my damn cherry too! Bitch named Apryl did that for me when I was barely fourteen years old.
“No, sir,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Nothin’ wrong with fuckin’ women, and nothin’ wrong with what my brothers were doing, just didn’t think Gauge would want his kid seeing Pops banging some twenty-year-old bitch with her tits and cunt hanging out.”
“Also, sir, if I can interrupt,” Laney said, coming forward with one hand on her hip. “Only uneducated fucking idiots use the word faggot, Sir—you’re not an uneducated fucking idiot, are you? I mean, this is a time for spreading love, not hate. At least if the sixties taught us anything. At least that’s what my mom used to say.”
I saw the change in Hardy’s face—the look of utter shock that she had just spoken to him like that, becauseno onespoke to him like that, ever. I don’t think his own mother ever got away with speaking to him like that. And if it had been any other woman, she’d have felt his hand across her cheek and more, but Hardy couldn’t do shit to Laney because she was Gauge’s daughter. Though I had no doubt in my mind that Gauge would catch shit from Hardy for this mess.
We were at a standstill: Laney with one hand on her hip and her eyebrow quirked like she hadn’t just called the meanest fucking president this side of Georgia a fucking idiot, me still held in Hardy’s grip and more in love with that woman than I was with my own dick, and Hardy looking like he couldn’t decide whether to kill me, kill this chick, kill us both, or walk away.
Decisions decisions…
“If you weren’t Gauge’s kid, I’d make you regret talking to me like that, girl,” he growled out, glaring at her, but she only smirked in response, clearly not afraid of anything.
