Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
His thumb traces the underside of my breast and I kiss the corner of his mouth. Then his jaw. Then back to his lips because I can't stop.
We stay like that.
Just kissing.
Unhurried and stupid with it.
Eventually we pull apart and I go into the bathroom to clean up. When I come out of the bathroom, I can hear the crinkle of plastic bags and know he's getting the food out.
It feels so good to be here with him at the new trailer. No eyes on us. Mercy safely away at boarding school, no brothers to worry about. No dirt floor.
A real place where we can be alone.
Be ourselves.
I go into his room and open the closet, finding all his clothes still here. T-shirts on hangers, like they've been waiting for him to come home. I pull one off the hanger, read the front—it's some metal band, I think. No one I've ever heard of.
I tug it over my head. It's long enough that it doesn't matter if I have underwear on, but I drag them up, watching Legion opening up containers. His jeans are back on but his fly is still open, button still undone, because his cock is still hard.
He winks at me. "Come on. Come eat so we can get movie night started."
God, I love this man.
I will never get tired of him and I will never give him up.
We grab our containers—his is the kung pao, mine's the lo mein—and carry them to the coffee table. Legion drops onto the couch first and I tuck myself under his arm like I've been doing it for years, like this is our thousandth Tuesday and not our first. He points the remote at the TV and the movie starts with this synth-heavy score that sounds like it was recorded inside a neon sign.
"You're gonna love this," he says, and there's something in his voice I almost never hear. Ease.
I've never seen Big Trouble in Little China and within ten minutes I understand why he picked it—it's ridiculous, and loud, and completely unserious, which is maybe the most generous thing he could've offered me tonight.
A story that asks nothing of me.
Legion mouths half the lines before they happen. He does this low deadpan impression of Kurt Russell that's terrible, genuinely awful, and I laugh so hard lo mein almost comes out my nose, which makes him laugh harder. He nudges the garbage bag of popcorn toward me and I grab a fistful without thinking about where it's been, butter soaking through my fingers, salt on my lips, kernels falling between the couch cushions where they'll live forever and I don't care.
"That's the best part coming up," he says, pointing at the screen with a chopstick.
It's not the best part. The best part is him saying it.
I lean my head against his chest and feel his breathing change when he laughs—this low rumble that moves through his ribs and into mine. His fingers trace absent patterns on my shoulder. Not sexual. Not leading anywhere. Just there.
And I think—this.
This is what I wanted.
Not the silo, not the claiming, not the desperate midnight rides across the creek bed.
Just this ordinary, unremarkable, butter-fingered night on a couch that still smells like the warehouse it shipped from.
A man who knows every line to a stupid movie and wants me next to him while he watches it.
I have never had this before and I love that he's the one who gives it to me.
"I heard from Destiny," he says, out of nowhere.
My head snaps to the side and I look at him like he just said I come from Mars. "What?"
"Yeah, she called the clubhouse yesterday afternoon. Don't even know how she got that number."
I blink at him. But he's eating popcorn like this is just normal conversation. Like his seventeen-year-old sister didn't get knocked up by my thirty-one-year-old brother and run away with their offspring like they're never comin' back. "Well…" I'm breathless from this new information. "What did she say?"
Legion shrugs like it's no big deal. "Said everything's good. I gave her my number so she doesn't have to call the club next time. She sent me a pic of the baby. That little shit stain is fuckin' cute as all hell."
I'm… speechless. Flabbergasted. I grab his shoulders and shake him. "Legion Kane! How did you not tell me this first thing!"
He looks at me like he's got no idea why I'm so riled up. "I kinda forgot about it, to be honest."
I just blink at him again. Many times in a row. So many times, he begins to laugh.
"You wanna see the pic?"
I'm about to reach for his throat when he slides away, gets up, and finds his phone on the floor where it must've fallen out of his pocket earlier in the evening. He settles back down on the couch, flipping through his photos, then hands it to me.