Well, fuck. I shouldn't have done it, but I did it. I stayed when I should have gone, and I let Harvey and his grandkids or whatever the hell they were tug at my heartstrings. Truth was, I didn't want to come here and do this in the first place. Something about the whole deal felt off. Harvey had no reason to be spreading lies about our product. We'd been dealing to him for twenty years or more. He was always loyal. Always a good customer. But one little rumor makes its way back to Dutch, and suddenly he's on the shit list. I didn't like it.
I crouched down, next to Harvey, and tried to look him in the eye, but his eyes were rollin' crazy.
“Was it true, Harv?” I asked. “Try and look me in the eye, Harv. Was what you said true?”
What he'd said, to illuminate the situation a bit, was that the last batch of horse we'd sold him had been less than sub-par. It'd been cut so deep, it was barely worth shooting. Didn't even smell like the shit we usually sold. Now, I wouldn't know too much about the smell of heroin, but a junkie like Harvey? Yeah, he'd fuckin' know.
Harvey looked at me, clearly using every ounce of energy he had, straight in the eye. He nodded.
“Yuh,” he said. “T'ue.”
“Well, fuck,” I said. It didn't excuse him spreading that shit on the street; he should have come straight to us if he had an issue. But still, it meant something bad was happening' somewhere along the delivery chain. I stood up. The kids were gone, the boy spirited away by his sister or cousin or maybe even his mother for all I knew. I reached into my wallet and threw two hundreds on the ground. It wasn't much, and knowing junkies it would probably disappear straight up Harvey's arm, but it felt better than leaving him there broken and broke.
I got out of there, then. I was fixin' to meet Bex at Peach's, but I thought maybe I ought to talk to Dutch first. Our men were strictly forbidden from touching our product – or any smack, for that matter. Hell, it was right there in the bylaws that any brother who was found roped up and doped up would face serious consequences – including possible excommunication.
You wanted to fool around with weed, x, coke, meth, special k, angel dust, whatever, you did it with your own money, not the club's product. And you kept your shit together. Start going out of control, and it'd be rehab – or consequences. And absolutely no heroin, ever. You can't trust a junkie, and there are times when trust is all a club has. Can't get a damn thing done when your ranks are filled with speed freaks and ropers.
So if our shit really was being pinched, and it was happening in between us getting it from Mexico and us dealin' it in Cutter, we needed to nip it in the bud. Whether it was goin' to someone's personal stash or for someone to sell on the side, it didn't matter. That person, when we found 'em, was gonna fry.
Cross
I didn't mean to take my anger out on Bex, but I can see how it probably seemed that way. It just happened that I saw her so soon after talkin' to Dutch, and she just happened to be lookin' like a candy apple, sweet and rosy and edible.
Dutch hadn't had much of an opinion on my opinion about whether or not we had a problem. Well, actually, he did have an opinion; only, it went to the tune of “stay out of it.”
His words, exactly, were: “it ain't your job to go 'round askin' questions, it's your job to go 'round gettin' answers. Leave the detective work to Blade and me, boy.”
Suffice to say, my feathers were a little ruffled when I left his office. I was fixin' to drown my sorrows in a pint glass, maybe try to find Grinder and have a little father-son heart-to-heart, but Bex offered me a better outlet, in the form of a text message.
“I'm at your apartment. Can we talk? Also, didn't your pa ever teach you to lock a door?”
You could have mistook my smile for a toenail moon, it was so wide. She had some good timing. Of course, a woman tellin' you she wanted to talk never meant anything good, but she seemed to be in a jokin' mood, and she was at my apartment. A woman wants to talk about how she never wants to see your face again, she does it on her turf. A woman wants to talk about “whether or not we're exclusive,” she comes to you. And never before had I thought I wanted to have that second type of talk.
“Be there in a blink. And until you came through that door, I didn't have anything I meant to protect.”
Ha. There. See how she liked that. We'd do our fair share of talking', but not before she finally let me into that heaven between her legs. Dutch was about the last thing on my mind as I straddled my Vincent and made for home.
Sure enough, there she was, sittin' on the very edge of the thing some people might hesitate to call a couch. Her eyes, big and green as all of Missouri, went straight to me when I came through the door. She was leaning' forward, in a tight blue top and faded denim shorts, the top equipped with a V-neck that tantalized and mesmerized.
“Ain't you supposed to be at Peach's?” I asked, crossing the room, not even tryin' to hide my smile.
“I was,” she said. “But it was just for training, so it only took a couple hours. Cross...”
“Yeah, I know, you want to talk,” I said, dropping down to my knees in front of her and taking her hands from her lap. I kissed her fingertips, heard her sighing. “And we can talk all you want. But first...”
“Ah!” Her shriek was the good kind, the kind that ended in laughter, as I grabbed the belt loops of her shorts and yanked them forward. Her back hit the sofa, and I crawled up her body, forced my way between her thighs, found her lips mid-laugh and took them against my own.
She felt so damn soft underneath me, and she smelled like vanilla and fresh cut grass. My hand twined in her hair, clutching a handful of silky black strands, her moan vibrating against my tongue. I pinned her to that couch, one hand on her hip, her shirt bunching up as I sought her flesh, her lips and tongue moving against mine, eyes closed in bliss.
I could feel the gentle swell of her hip bone under plushy flesh, my thumb tracing the skin of her stomach, my hand pulling her hair until her head rolled back on her neck. She was moving against me by then, her hips undulating against my own. Kissing down her neck, she gasped and shivered at the tickle of my beard, while my hand moved upward, under her shirt.
“Cross,” she moaned, her hands now falling to my hips, tugging them closer so that she could roll herself against me. Biting her neck got her to moan. Grinding against her pussy got her to cry out. And finding her breasts, her hard nipples begging for my fingers, got her wrapping her thighs around me.
But I couldn't do anything properly halfway on and halfway off the damn sofa; and she deserved better than the springs digging into her back. So in a single sweep, I lifted her up, making her gasp again, her pink lips opening in an adorable o shape. I carried her, still kissing her neck, to the bedroom, only releasing her long enough to do away with my shirt.
Then I was diving back down, covering her body with mine, feeling her heart beat hard underneath those perfect breasts. God, I wanted inside her. I needed it. I needed to feel every inch of her velvet pussy, clenching around my cock, her juices flooding down my balls. I wanted her naked and bouncing on my lap while I cupped her breasts and twisted her nipples. I wanted her ass in my hands, my cock driving against her so hard and fast that she couldn't do a damn thing but moan my name while she came and came and came...
“Cross!”
By then, I had my hand on her shorts, struggling with the stupid button while my mouth took every inch of flesh I could find. The button popped free – I think it broke off, actually. My hand dove down, found her pussy, felt it soaked through her panties, the fabric framing her lips like a second skin. Her clit was a hard, swollen button, clinging to the fabric, and the minute my thumb rolled across it, her body stiffened.
“Cross, oh, shit, Cross,” she hissed, teeth gnashing together. “Please, wait, I can't...”
I didn't know what she couldn't do, and it was too late, anyway. Because she was already coming, already bucking her hips against my hand as my thumb rubbed and circled her clit, her slit already gushing until her panties were all but drenched.
Her head snapped back against the bed, rolled back and forth in pleasure, her hands on my shoulders, nails digging into my flesh. It was the most beautiful thing in the fucking world. I wanted to watch it again. I wanted to watch it happen while I was balls deep inside her. I wanted...
“Please!”
Now, I could hear what I hadn't heard before, whether because it wasn't there at all, or because I was too far gone to hear it. The desperation that wasn't wholly lustful.
“Please,” she said again, and grabbed my wrist. “I need...first...I need...we need...please...”
Her brain clearly wasn't working properly yet, but the meaning was clear. My cock hated me for not ignoring her and diving in anyway. Don't think I didn't consider it for a second. But a woman doesn't always have to say no for you to know that's what she means. Any real man will tell you that. And any real man stops when his woman wants him to. So I backed off, my heart beating wild in my chest, my cock roaring a protest through my veins, my hands trembling. Then something awful happened. Something that killed my boner in half a second.
She started sobbing.
Well, shit.
Bex
I had to stop him. I wasn't going to let him in – not that way – until he knew. It was harder than you'd think; the orgasm took me by surprise, it came on so damn quick and hard. It almost ruined my will. Almost. But I wasn't going to go any further before he knew the truth. Even if stopping and knowing it might never start again was enough to turn me into a wailing baby. He sat down beside me, breathing hard, looking unbelievably patient for a man who'd just taken a fall straight out of the gate.