I cringed at the language and became aware, suddenly, that I was being just the sort of nosy neighbor I despised, peeking out the blinds. I stepped back from the window but could still see through it. Could still hear Mrs. Ossley’s shouts through the open screen. More thumps and thuds as more things flew out the back door to land in the grass, and then I saw what they were.
Books.
The bitch was throwing books. One of them struck Gavin on the shoulder and fell in a flutter of pages to the grass. He bent to pick it up, his arms full of them. His face had twisted.
She threw another one, and I realized she wasn’t just tossing them out the door. She was aiming for him. This one, a thick hardback, struck him in the hip hard enough to knock him back a step.
They say that people in tense situations can do things like lift cars or run into burning buildings. This wasn’t as dramatic as that, but I did move fast, without thinking, and was out my back door and into my yard before I even had time, really, to ponder it.
A waist-high chain link fence separates our patches of grass. Mindful of my privacy, I’d had it installed when I moved in. It had served to keep my neighbors from encroaching on my property, but now it kept me out of theirs as effectively.
“Gavin,” I said. “Are you all right?”
He startled, though he had to have seen me flying out of my kitchen. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mother answered for him.
“Get inside the house, Gavin.”
I looked over at her. Silhouetted in the light from her house, she was no more than a shadow. I had no trouble seeing the glass she still held. Apparently not even throwing books was enough reason to set it down.
Gavin bent to pick up the books she’d thrown.
“Leave that,” she ordered. “Get inside.”
“Mrs. Ossley. Is there a problem?” My voice sounded colder than I’d meant it to, and it must have antagonized her.
“No, Miss Kavanagh” came her retort, the words spitting out of her like they tasted of vomit. “Why don’t you go back inside and mind your own business?”
“Gavin?” I asked quietly. “Are you all right?”
He nodded and moved toward the house, then paused to pick up one more book. This once had landed, open, in a puddle left from a late afternoon shower. The spine had bent and cracked, and a few of the pages fluttered to the ground when he lifted it. Mud splashed the rest of them.
It was my copy of The Little Prince. The one my childhood neighbor Mrs. Cooper had given me. He handed it to me over the fence, refusing to meet my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
I had nothing to say as I took it from him. I could only watch him head inside. The shadow in his doorway moved aside to let him in, and the door slammed behind him, leaving me standing in my pajamas with a ruined book in my hands.
Chapter 10
“This is the place you took me to, the day we met.” I looked up at the sign, which showed a rather grisly drawing of a wolf’s head, mouth tearing into the body of a sheep. “The Slaughtered Lamb.”
“Very observant.” He held the door open for me to go inside. “Let’s find a table.”“I could hardly forget a place with a name like that. Do they serve food?”
“Very good food.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m starving.”
We found a table toward the back and sat. He smiled as he handed me the menu, which featured traditional pub food like fish and chips and shepherd’s pie. He grabbed the beer list.
“Me, too.” He studied the list. “I’m glad you eat.”
I laughed. “Of course I eat.”
“No. I mean you eat,” Dan said. “I take some women out and they just nibble.”
“Oh.” I kept my eyes on the menu and fought back a blush. “Well. No, I don’t suppose I miss many meals.”
“Hey,” Dan said so I’d look up. “I like that.”
“Do you?” As he had the habit of answering his own questions, I had a habit of posing ones that didn’t need any.
He grinned. “Yeah. I do.”
Compliments, unless they’re about my mental prowess, fluster me. Not because I automatically assume the person giving them isn’t sincere, but because I am never quite sure if they expect me to give them one in return.
“Good” was all I said, and looked up as the waiter approached. “I’ll have the fish and chips, please, with malt vinegar and tartar sauce, and fries. And…a Guinness?”
I looked at Dan, who nodded. “Make that two. Of everything.”
The waiter, who couldn’t have been any older than the minimum drinking age himself, smiled. “Hey, a chick who drinks real beer. Cool. Most girls drink light beers.”
Dan looked at me, then the young man. “She’s something else, this one.”
The waiter nodded, two men sharing an appraisal. “I can see that.”
It struck me, their differences. Dan, clean-cut but not preppy, favored expensive business suits or khaki pants, oxford shirts, whimsical ties. Today he wore dark denim jeans, straight-legged, low slung and a white T-shirt beneath a scoop-necked black sweater of fine knit, light enough to wear in the summer heat, the sleeves pushed up on his forearms. Casual but not sloppy.
The waiter, in contrast, wore his jeans cinched with a black leather belt studded with small spikes. His dark hair looked like silk, shorter in back and long in the front to fall over one eye. Tattoos covered his arms and multiple piercings ornamented his ears, his eyebrow. His nipples, too, I noticed through his tight white T-shirt. He had eyes of startling blue and a voice that spoke of too many cigarettes, pitched lower than you’d expect from someone so slender. He flashed me a smile of brilliant, white teeth, and I understood why the group of girls sitting in the corner had been giggling when we came in.
“What’s your name, man?” Dan reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
He offered me the pack and I took one, a man’s brand, not a dainty menthol or clove cigarette. I let him light it for me and sucked the smoke in deep, holding it long enough to impress both of them before letting it out in a series of rings.
“Nice,” admired the waiter. “I’m Jack.”
“Dan.” They shook hands. Dan indicated me with a slight lift of his chin. “This is—”
“Jennifer.” I gave the false name without pause.
“Nice to meet you, Jennifer,” said Jack and he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles.
I glanced at Dan, who smiled through smoke. I looked back at Jack, who could have been flirting with me, or just being silly. I didn’t seem to be his type. Too old, too conservatively dressed.
“Be right back,” he said. “Holler if you need me.”
Okay. The look he gave me proved it. Definitely flirting. I watched him head toward the bar, stopping to elicit another round of giggles from the college girls. He looked over his shoulder at me and shot me that striking grin again.
“He thinks you’re hot.” Dan stubbed out his cigarette.
I’d barely smoked mine, but I put it in the ashtray to smolder. “Does he?”
“Definitely.”
I gave him a thoughtful look. “Does that bother you?”
There was no reason it should. I was simply curious. Dan grinned.
“Nope. Why’d you give him a fake name?”
“I don’t like just anyone knowing my name.”
“So you usually give a fake one?”
I tidied the menus and put them back in their holder. “Yes.”
“You told me the truth.”
I looked into his eyes, and we shared another of those looks I couldn’t quite describe. “Yes.”
“Lying to someone about your name could cause trouble later, if you want to know them better and they find out you started off the relationship with a lie.”
“I told you the truth,” I said evenly. “Why should you care what I tell anyone else?”
“I guess I don’t.” He looked to the bar, wher
e Jack was filling glasses with our Guinness. “Do you think he’s good-looking?”
I studied the waiter. “He’s young.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“He’s cute,” I said. “He’s got that punk-band Goth look going on.”
Dan lit another cigarette. “If you weren’t with me, would you go home with him?”
I didn’t answer right away, because Jack came back with our drinks. He set them in front of us, flashed me another grin and told us our food would be out shortly. He seemed disappointed when we told him we didn’t need anything else right then.
“I might,” I said when Jack had moved away to take care of his other customers. “I doubt it, but I might.”
“Do you want me to leave, so you can?”
I think he was trying to shock me, or at least to gauge my ability to be shocked, but all I did was pick up my cigarette and make some more rings. Dan leaned back in his chair and drank his beer. His gaze speared me.
I speared him back. “Do you want to leave so I can?”
He glanced at Jack, then leaned in close to me. “I want to watch you with him.”
The cigarette stopped on its journey to my lips. Dan’s face was very close to my cheek. I gave my head the slightest tilt.
“Do you?”
He nodded and nuzzled the spot just below my ear for a second. “Yeah.”
I ground out the cigarette and pulled away from him to drink some beer. My stomach fell away and heat swirled within me. I drew my cardigan together at my throat then laid my fingers on the beads embroidered along the collar. I rubbed them with my fingertips before putting my hand flat on the table.
“You just want to watch?” I blinked and drank more beer as I waited for Dan to answer.
He looked at Jack again. “Did you have something else in mind?”
I, too, looked at Jack, who caught us both staring and gave me a small nod. I looked back at Dan, but when it came right down to it, the words wouldn’t come out. What do you say to the man you’re fucking when he asks you if you’d like to fuck another man?
“You want to fuck us both.”
He always knew the right way to say it.
I nodded, unable to put voice to my assent, though the thought of it alone was enough to make me wet.
Dan looked thoughtful. “That would make you happy?”
“Happy?” I laughed. “I don’t know if it would make me happy, but…I think I’d like it. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do that?”
I nodded at the group of girls in the corner. One of them was giving the other a lap dance, earning applause and appreciative glances from a covey of young men at the table next to theirs.
“Girl-girl action,” I murmured. “Bisexuality is the new black.”
Dan leaned forward again and loosed my hair from its twist. He finger combed it around my shoulders and slid his hands through it at the back of my neck as he whispered into my ear.
“If I asked you to fuck another woman, would you?”
I had to swallow against my dry throat before I could answer. “If you wanted me to.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Christ, Elle, you’re so fucking…I can’t…”
He pulled me into an embrace I wasn’t expecting. He pressed his face into the side of my neck, breathing me in, his hands warm on my back. I sat, stiff, uncertain if I’d done something wrong or too right.
He sat up and looked into my eyes. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”
I shook my head. “Don’t say that. I don’t like it.”
He put his hands on my face, then traced my mouth with his thumb. “You’ve got the hottest fucking mouth. Do you like that?”
That made me smile. “I have a big mouth.”
“Who told you that?” He stroked his fingers through my hair again, almost like he was petting me, a gesture that took me aback but pleased me at the same time.
“My mother. My brother.”
“Ah,” he said. “What do they know?”
I didn’t answer. He traced one of my eyebrows. I felt silly, but let him do it.
“If I asked you to be with another woman, that would be for me. Not you.”
I shrugged a little, bewildered at what he was getting at. “I guess so.”
He took his hands away from my face and looked over his shoulder at Jack by the bar. “But that would be for you.”
I had no words for a moment. “Dan,” I said at last, and this time I was the one who leaned forward to touch him. I put my hands on his shoulders, our knees touching, our eyes meeting. “What is this all about? What is this? Why are we doing this?”
He slid his hands along my arms, circled my wrists, then took my hands into his. “Fuck if I know. But I don’t want to stop, whatever it is.”
What sort of picture we made, holding hands so close like that, gazing earnestly into each other’s eyes, I don’t know. I didn’t care. That simple touch excited me and yet grounded me, too. I was excited but not anxious.
Sitting there in the Slaughtered Lamb with Dan holding my hands and asking me if I wanted to take him and Jack to bed at the same time, the numbers went away. Like he’d turned off a switch in my brain the same time he’d turned one on between my legs. Desire made me forget counting, but it was Dan who made me feel comfortable enough to let it go.
I looked at Jack once more. “Do you think he would?”
“I think he’d give his left nut to get in your pants.”
“Very nice,” I told him. “So elegantly put.”
Dan laughed and leaned forward to nuzzle my neck again. “Yes, Elle, I think Jack would love to fuck you.”
He slid his hand under my skirt as he said the words, between my thighs, straight to my lace-covered cunt. He touched me, and my body jerked. He nibbled my earlobe, then pulled away while I tried to catch my breath.
I’d finished half my beer when the food arrived, but felt as drunk as if I’d had three. Jack set our plates in front of us and gave us silverware and napkins. I kept my gaze on the table as Dan made small talk with him, and he went away.
We ate. Grease slicked our fingers, and the malt vinegar puckered my mouth. The food was delicious, eating it a sensual pleasure heightened by Dan feeding me bits of his fish with his fingers. Messy, silly, but very, very sexy.
He sighed and pushed his empty plate away, wiped his fingers clean and patted his stomach. “Good stuff.”
I hadn’t managed to finish it all, but neither had I left much on the plate. Jack, who’d left us alone while we ate, appeared.
“Can I get you a box for that?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
That grin again. It transformed his face. I wondered how many skirts that grin had lifted. Probably a lot.
“Anything else tonight? Something else to drink?”
I shook my head again. Dan leaned back in his chair. His arm stretched out to grip the back of my chair. Possessive.
“Actually, Jack, we were wondering what time you got off work.”
Jack didn’t skip a beat. “In about half an hour.”
I couldn’t look away from him. The stud in his tongue flashed when he spoke, and I imagined what it would feel like on my skin. It would be warm from his mouth, I thought, and my nipples hardened.
“Then I guess maybe we’ll have another round of Guinness,” said Dan. “And wait for you?”
Jack gathered up our plates and trash while he answered Dan, but looked at me. “Sure.”
It was as easy as that. I watched Jack walk away. This time he didn’t look back over his shoulder at me. He brought us beers a few minutes later. Dan paid our check. We drank, and Dan talked, a steady stream of observations requiring little answer on my part, and I was grateful he didn’t expect me to speak. I wouldn’t have been able to. All I could think about was what was going to happen.
Dan chose the motel, and Jack followed us on his motorcycle. I stayed in the car and watched him smoke a cigarette while Dan go
t us a room. My palms hurt and I looked down to see my nails had made crescents in the skin. I rubbed the palms together to soothe the marks away.
Dan closed the door behind us all and locked it while Jack set his helmet and leather jacket on the chair by the window. I didn’t know quite what to do, just that my every muscle felt stretched taut in anticipation, every sense heightened.
They made it easy for me. Jack moved forward and took me in his arms. He was taller than Dan by an inch, and at first it felt awkward, the adjustment, the way I had to tilt my face up higher to look at his. He held me against him for a moment and kissed my cheek, my neck, my jaw, like he knew I would refuse him my mouth.
Dan came up behind me and swept my hair to the side to kiss the back of my neck. His body pressed mine, his hands on my hips, pulling them back against his groin. Jack moved closer in the front, pushing his bulging crotch against my belly.
This was what I’d thought about sometimes, when I touched myself. Being surrounded. A man in front, a man behind, strong arms holding me and two mouths leaving wet marks on my skin. Sandwiched between them, I didn’t even have to worry about standing upright, because they kept me from falling.
Two mouths. Four hands. Two erections, as yet shielded by clothes but impossible to ignore as they pressed their bodies to mine. Dan ran his hands along my thighs, inching up my skirt and sliding his hands beneath to find my bare skin. Jack tugged my shirt from my waistband and worked the buttons without fumbling. They both kissed me. My neck, throat, shoulders, back, over my clothes and under, leaving no spot unattended while they undressed me as swiftly as if they’d rehearsed it.
I stood in my bra and panties, still wearing my shoes. Jack glanced over my shoulder at something Dan did and nodded like they had an entire language I didn’t understand. Dan nibbled the back of my shoulder, and Jack got on his knees in front of me.
I startled at how suddenly he dropped. His head was at my waist. I backed up a step in reaction, but Dan was there to keep me from fleeing. His sweater was soft on my bare skin.
“I—”
“Shh.” Dan whispered in my ear. One hand curved on my rib cage, just below my breast. The other anchored my hip.