Emma Jo Jackson: That’s your easy question? I can’t wait for the hard ones…
Deputy Lloyd: I’m sorry! Shit! I mean shoot, not shit. Dammit. SHIT! You know what, maybe we should take a break. This isn’t starting off very well.
Emma Jo Jackson: Um, okay, sounds good. So, you’ll just call me then?
Deputy Lloyd: Call you? Like, on the phone? You want me to call you?
Emma Jo Jackson: To tell me when you’re ready to get back to the questions. You know, give me a call when you’re ready to do that since we’re taking a break.
Deputy Lloyd: Oh, ha ha, yeah! Call you about this interview and the questions I need to ask and the… interview. Yep. Sure, no problem. So, I’ll just call you about… that.
Emma Jo Jackson: Okay, well, I’ll talk to you soon.
Deputy Lloyd: Yes, on the phone. Where I’ll call you to talk about the interview. Excellent.
*Chair scraping, door opens and closes*
Deputy Lloyd: Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!
CHAPTER 15
Coffee: You can sleep when you’re dead.
—Coffee Mug
Leo Hudon’s tongue is in my mouth.
I repeat, LEO HUDSON’S TONGUE IS IN MY MOUTH!
Sweet mother of God this man can kiss. Just the right amount of pressure from his lips, just the right speed of his tongue swirling around mine and the nibbling of my bottom lip, and how his hand moved from my cheek to slide around to the back of my neck, clutching a handful of my hair in his fist…
A moan floats from up from my throat and he angles his head to the other side, deepening the kiss until I want nothing more than to hop up into his arms and wrap my legs around his waist. As it is, I’m already fisting handfuls of his shirt up by his chest and if this kiss lasts any longer, I might just rip the thing right from his body.
Leo’s hand at the small of my back that holds me firmly against him suddenly starts moving south and before I know it, his hand is on my ass, pulling me right up against the hardest erection I’ve ever felt.
LEO HUDSON’S HAND IS ON MY ASS.
I CAN FEEL LEO HUDSON’S PENIS.
My brain starts malfunctioning and instead of thinking about how this is the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life, I start hearing his teenage snort in my head and his squeaky puberty voice explaining to me how the Pythagorean Theorem works in between fun facts about a goat’s scrotum. It happens before I can stop it.
I laugh.
Right into Leo’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I apologize in between giggles when he pulls his head back and looks down at me with one eyebrow raised questioningly at me.
“Not to brag or anything, but I’ve never had a woman laugh when I was kissing her before,” he deadpans, giving my ass a little squeeze.
I giggle again, removing my clutching hold of his shirt with one hand to clamp it over my mouth.
“Mer muffing my muff,” I mumble from behind my hand while my shoulders shake with even more laughter when I hear my own voice and how the words came out.
Leo lets go of the hold he has on my hair, brings his hand around between us, and removes my hand from my mouth.
“Try that again. In English,” he requests, still looking down at my face in confusion and probably a little regret that his twelve-year fantasy isn’t really living up to his expectations.
“I said, you’re touching my butt,” I repeat, a weird choking sound coming from my mouth when I try to stifle another laugh.
“Yes, you have a very nice butt. Is there a problem?”
I shake my head back and forth, but I’m still smiling like a loon and trying not to laugh out loud. This went from hotter-than-standing-in-the-middle-of-a-forest-fire to wondering if I’m on an episode of Candid Camera and someone is going to jump out from behind me and shout, “How does it feel to be kissing Leo Hudson, the nerdy guy in high school who knew just how far you could stick your arm up a cow’s ass before it would become uncomfortable for them?!”
When I don’t answer Leo’s question and just continue to shake my head back and forth, trying my best to shake the funny out of my system until it falls out of my brain forever, his eyes suddenly narrow and he shuffles his feet forward, moving me backward as he goes.
He keeps staring down at me with a serious expression on his face and when my back slams into the wall behind me, I forget everything that was funny just two seconds ago. Leo bends his knees and uses his hips to push me up the wall until I have no choice but to wrap my arms around his shoulders and hold on tight. His hand slides from the ass of my pajama shorts and his warm, rough palm glides down the back of my thigh, pulling it up and hitching it over his hip.
“Still feel like laughing?” he asks in a low, rough voice.
Laughing? What’s laughing? Who’s laughing?
I can’t remember how to speak, and when I don’t answer him, he bends his knees again and pushes up, his erection hitting me right between the legs now that he’s got me spread open for him and still holds my thigh tightly in place on his hip.
“How about now?” he questions in a quieter voice, dipping his head down and pressing his lips to the skin of my neck right under my ear.
Even if I could figure out what words mean and how to use them, I wouldn’t open my mouth to answer him if you paid me all the money in the world. My silence just makes him keep going, and there’s no way in hell I’m stopping anything right now.
His lips make a trail of kisses across the edge of my jaw until he gets to my mouth and pauses before putting those masterful things back where I want them.
“Just to give you a head’s up, I’m gonna touch your ass again. Then I’m gonna kiss you while touching your ass because I really like how it feels in the palm of my hand. Just for the hell of it, I might even touch your tits because they feel really fucking good pressed against my chest right now. Any objections or laughter you need to get out of your system before then?” he asks in total seriousness.
I shake my head frantically back and forth, the tingling between my legs while he spoke growing into a damn inferno while I thought about and anticipated everything he said he would do to me, wanting it more than I want air to breathe right now.
“Excellent. Brace yourself.”
Leo’s mouth crashes to mine again and he swallows my groan of pleasure at the same time his hand slides back up to palm my ass and he pushes his hips harder between my legs.
I see stars, I hear choirs of angels singing, and I most definitely am not thinking about the workings of a pig’s urinary tract. When he pushes his tongue past my lips and kisses me deeper, all I can think about is that tongue pushing into another place on my body and his hands touching more than my ass.
My hips move up to meet him, wanting to feel more of that hardness between my thighs, wondering how in the hell I’ve gone thirty years without ever experiencing this kind of heat and need for another person and the crazy, insane notion that the person I’m feeling it with is someone I’ve known practically my whole life.
Leo lets out a groan from the back of his throat when my thigh tightens around his hip to pull him into me harder. My hands move from his shoulders to grab onto fistfuls of his hair at the back of his head, clutching and tugging on it to make sure he keeps his mouth on mine and never stops kissing me. My back slides up and down the wall with each slide of his hips between my legs and when my toes leave the floor, I take the opportunity to wrap my other thigh around his waist to join the first one. I’m so lost in the moment, clinging to him like he’s a tree I want to climb, that I don’t hear the creak of the stairs until it’s too late.
“OHMYGOD, OHMYGOD, OHMYGOD!” Emma Jo shouts in surprise.
Leo throws his arms up in the air like he’s being held at gunpoint and moves away from me so quickly that I slide down the wall and land in a heap on the floor.
“Heeeeey!” I complain, scrambling back up to my feet and rubbing my sore ass that slammed against the hard ground.
r /> “I’m sorry! Oh, my God, I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were still awake, and I didn’t know Leo was here, and I’m sorry! Oh, my God!” Emma Jo rambles, throwing a hand over her eyes.
“You don’t have to cover your eyes now, the show is clearly over,” I deadpan, shooting Leo a glare for dropping me on my ass. The same ass he just told me he really liked and I can’t believe he would let that kind of harm come to it.
“Sorry,” he mouths to me with a sheepish grin and a shrug of his shoulders before turning to face Emma Jo. “Sorry about that, Emma Jo. Did we wake you?”
“Nope, no, not at all. I just got up to get something to drink. Don’t mind me, feel free to carry on with…whatever,” she tells us with one hand still covering her eyes and the other one making some sort of circular motion in our direction before she turns around and runs face-first into the wall behind her. “I’m fine, it’s okay, I’m fine!”
Walking around Leo, I rush over to Emma Jo. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I turn her to face me, reaching up and pulling her hand away from her eyes.
“Seriously, we’re done here,” I inform her.
“We’re nowhere close to being done here,” Leo says from behind me.
Emma Jo laughs and I roll my eyes, shooting him another glare over my shoulder since my bruised ass is a little pissed off at him right now.
There’s a light knock at the front door and when I move to answer it, Leo holds up his hand to stop me, stalking over to it and asking who it is.
“It’s Buddy, I saw your car out front. You got a few minutes?” we hear through the door.
Leo pulls it open and steps back, motioning for Buddy to come inside. Buddy lifts his foot to move, glances up and sees Emma Jo standing behind me, and immediately puts his foot back down and shuffles backward out onto the porch.
“You know what, I’ll just wait out here. It’s fine. Don’t want to impose or anything. How are you doing this evening, Mrs. Jackson?” Buddy shouts from out on the porch.
“Um, I’m fine. Uh, and you?” Emma Jo yells back.
“Fine! Just fine. Everything’s good,” he replies loudly.
“Buddy, you want to tell me what you came over here for, or are you just going to shout it from outside there for the whole neighborhood to hear?” Leo asks with a sigh, still holding the door open while he shakes his head in annoyance.
“Um, well, it’s about Mayor Jackson’s autopsy,” Buddy says to Leo in a quieter voice, whispering the last part in an effort to keep anyone else from hearing, and I suddenly remember about the whole not a heart attack thing and how Emma Jo doesn’t know yet.
“Autopsy? Do you normally do an autopsy on someone who died from a heart attack?” Emma Jo asks, hearing everything Buddy said just as clearly as I did.
To the normal observer, it would sound like Emma Jo was just casually asking a question, but to me, I can hear the slight quiver of panic in her voice and see her eyes dart to mine, all wide and freaked out before she quickly masks them when Leo turns around to face us.
“Emma Jo-” Leo starts in a soft voice, but I quickly cut him off and turn to face her, grabbing onto her shoulders again and blocking her face from the guys with my head.
“Emma Jo, it looks like Jed didn’t have a heart attack. He was murdered,” I inform her, stressing that last word even though I don’t know why the fuck I felt the need to stress it. Saying the word murder is stressful enough without that added emphasis, especially when the ones who murdered him are standing right here next to two officers of the law, one of which I was just dry humping against the wall.
“WHAT?! HE WAS MURDERED! OH, MY GOD, NO!” Emma Jo screams, her bottom lip quivering while her shoulders start to shake with the worst fake crying I’ve ever seen in my life.
I quickly pull her into my arms and pat her back, shushing her with a fake soothing voice and speaking loud enough for the guys to hear, telling her I’m sorry and that everything will be okay. She wails louder and throws her head down on my shoulder, her whole body shaking as I hold her and rock her back and forth.
“Overkill! Bring it down a notch, crazy!” I whisper in her ear before looking back over my shoulder and giving Leo and Buddy sad smiles while they stare at us uncomfortably, like any good men do when faced with a hysterical woman.
“I’m so sorry, Emma Jo. I wanted to tell you earlier today when I first found out, but we needed to run some preliminary testing on the cause of death first before I could say anything,” Leo explains gently.
Emma Jo whips her head up from my shoulder and stares at me with wide eyes.
“It’s fine. Be cool. They have no idea about the pie or they’d be arresting us right now,” I whisper out of the corner of my mouth while Emma Jo sniffles loudly a few times to cover my whispering.
Buddy finally chooses to step inside the house, moving to stand next to Leo in the open doorway, nodding his head.
“I’m sorry too, ma’am. Hey, is that blueberry I smell? Did you make a blueberry pie?” he asks, lifting his chin and sniffing the air a few more times.
“What? What blueberry pie? There’s no blueberry pie here. We don’t know how to make pie,” I ramble, turning around and moving next to Emma Jo to fling my arm around her shoulder and give her a tight squeeze of warning and a little Please God help me!
“Nope, no pie baking here. I don’t like blueberry pie. The smell makes me gag. Blech,” Emma Jo adds with a scrunch of her face in disgust.
“You make blueberry pies every year for the church bake sale. The whole town raves about them and is always saying you should open your own pie making business,” Leo reminds her with a confused look on his face.
“Really? REALLY?” I ask with a wide fake smile, my head whipping to the side to stare at her.
“Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot. You know, on account of how my husband was murdered and all? OH, MY GOD, I CAN’T BELIEVE HE’S GONE!” she wails, turning into me and burying her face in the side of my neck.
I give the two confused men standing in the doorway another sad smile while I pat Emma Jo’s back soothingly as she continues to moan and cry like a dying pig against my throat.
“It’s been a long day. I think I need to get Emma Jo back up to bed,” I tell them.
Buddy nods his head in understanding, turns and walks out the front door as fast as he can, obviously beyond uncomfortable with the scene happening right now and how much Emma Jo is carrying on. Her cries get louder and louder until I’m pretty sure I can hear dogs howling in response down the street.
Unfortunately, Leo doesn’t move as fast as Buddy. He stands by the door for several minutes, looking back and forth between me and Emma Jo in my arms. I can’t tell if that’s a knowing look on his face or one of complete and utter confusion, but I hope to God it’s the second one. I really don’t want to go to jail, and with my ass still stinging from him unceremoniously dumping me onto the ground, I’d really like a repeat performance of what happened tonight, preferably not from behind bars or during conjugal visits, thank you very much.
“We’ll talk tomorrow. First thing in the morning. Don’t go anywhere,” Leo says, pointing his finger at me all caveman-like. He takes one last look between me and Emma Jo, shakes his head with a sigh, turns and walks out the door.
As soon as it clicks closed and I hear Leo’s footsteps thump down the porch steps, I pull Emma Jo out of my arms and throw my hands up in the air.
“I don’t like blueberry pie. The smell makes me gag. Blech!” I mock in my best Emma Jo voice.
“I’m sorry! I panicked! Do you think they know?”
“That you gagged about the pies you make EVERY YEAR FOR THE CHURCH BAKE SALE?! Yep, I’m pretty sure they caught that!” I shriek.
“It’s fine, I’m sure it’s fine. If they knew, they would have arrested us immediately, right? I mean, from what I saw when I came down here, Leo wasn’t exactly getting ready to slap his cuffs on you,” she says with a wag of her eyebrows. “Or was he?”
I smack
her in the arm even though I’d really like to know the answer to that question myself.
I wonder if he brings his handcuffs with him when he’s not in uniform? If Emma Jo hadn’t interrupted us, would I be handcuffed to a headboard right now screaming Leo’s name?
“Well, there’s only one thing to do. You need to keep doing what you were doing when I walked in on you guys. There’s no way Leo will arrest you if he’s busy sticking his tongue down your throat,” Emma Jo says with satisfied nod.
“And what about you? Are you going to stick your tongue down Buddy’s throat to keep yourself out of jail?” I ask sweetly.
“What?! What are you talking about? Buddy Lloyd? Like he’d really want to kiss me,” she scoffs, her cheeks reddening in embarrassment.
I laugh, moving over to the hall closet, opening the door, and pulling out the white garbage bag I stuffed in there this morning.
“What are you doing?” Emma Jo asks, following behind me as I carry it through the house.
“Sneaking out of the laundry room window to burn the evidence in your backyard so no one sees. And then we’re going to sit down and discuss Deputy Lloyd and how long exactly you’ve had a thing for him.”
“You sound like your mother,” Emma Jo complains when I flip the light switch in the laundry room.
“Eat me,” I growl with a flip of my middle finger.
CHAPTER 16
Recorded Interview
June 3, 2016
Bald Knob, KY Police Department
Deputy Lloyd: Are you sure you don’t want your parents present for this interview, Caden?
Caden Jefferson: You want to talk about the night Mayor Jackson was murdered, right?
Deputy Lloyd: Yes.
Caden Jefferson: Then definitely not. My parents thought I was in my room all night, but I was really at a party down at Bald Knob lake with a bunch of friends. You’re not going to tell them what I say in here, right? Because, I’d be grounded for life if they knew I lied.
Deputy Lloyd: No. Everything so you say is confidential right now. Unless of course this goes to trial and you’re called in as a witness.