44 Chapters About 4 Men (9 page)

Knight’s post-breakup rage had been so apocalyptic that my mother had actually let me stay home from school for three days after a particularly psychotic screaming episode he’d initiated outside of my Spanish class.

This
man
, Harley, was exactly what I needed. In my mind, he was a fifteen-foot-tall Minotaur with devil horns, who breathed napalm and could beat the shit out of Knight with nothing more than his giant, veiny man cock, but now that I had him on the phone, he sounded like gritty, crystallized, slow pouring honey.
Mmm…

Despite being lulled into a state of calm by Harley’s deep, unhurried drawl, my stomach was doing somersaults, and my skin was flushed in pink blotches from head to toe. What was happening to me? I was positively giddy. I felt excited but at ease, wanted but not hunted, and flirty without fear.

I hadn’t realized until then how hypervigilant I had been with Knight. Whenever he and I had been together, I’d found myself subconsciously scanning my surroundings for makeshift weapons and mapping out potential escape routes. It was like being in a relationship with a tranquilized velociraptor—or a skinhead who had recently started taking hard-core steroids.

Thank God Harley couldn’t see me because I was all goofy grin and blushing cheeks and twiddling fingers and suppressed squeals.

After I nervously agreed to meet him for coffee that weekend (
Coffee!
How grown-up!
) and stumbled through my awkward good-bye, Harley delivered the final blow.

I bit my lip, trying to hold in all the excited girlie noises, until he said his farewell. I was hoping he’d be quick about it because I could feel the giggles percolating up behind my clenched jaw, but there was nothing quick about Harley James.

I waited for what felt like hours, listening to what I imagined was a self-confident I’ve-got-her-now smile on the other end, before Harley finally crooned in that sexy gruff voice of his, “Night, night, Lady.”

Swoon!

As soon as I heard the click on the other end of the receiver, I immediately devolved into a giggling, writhing, convulsing puddle of hormones. Harley fucking James—bad-boy legend, winged mythical griffin of sex and rebellion—had called me Lady!

Lady!

Of course, in true bad-boy style, my knight in shining bondage pants
1
turned out to be a drug-dependent slack-jawed loser who lived in his mother’s basement and couldn’t manage to sit through a tattoo from start to finish, let alone a GED exam. But since
that
story isn’t going to make Ken do anything other than get tested for Hepatitis C,
this
is what I planted for his reading pleasure instead…

1
In case you’re wondering what the hell bondage pants are, they’re ridiculous polyester plaid nightmares with loops and straps and zippers all over. They aren’t actually used for bondage. They are more of a sexual impediment than anything, but in the late 1990s, nothing got me wet faster than seeing a gorgeous guy with his legs tethered to one another.

“Harley, I can’t. Not tonight.”

“Pleeeease? I
promise
I’ll have you home by curfew this time. I fucking pinkie swear. I’ll even grab some beers from work and pick up dinner on my way home. Just come over. Pretty please?”

Besides being a locally infamous bad boy, Harley was twenty-two and worked at a liquor store. To a seventeen-year-old high school senior, that’s basically the equivalent of dating Jared Leto.

“Harley, I can’t. I have to finish addressing my graduation invitations tonight, or my mom is going to fucking murder me. She’s been asking me to do it for weeks, but I keep blowing it off to hang out with you.”

Harley grumbled into the phone.

I was usually easier to sway than this, and I could tell he was getting flustered. Harley James wasn’t used to having to convince girls to make bad choices, but I knew I was one fuck-up away from losing my car—a punishment worse than death to a seventeen-year-old girl living in a town with no public transportation.

Harley had the blond-haired, blue-eyed baby face of James Dean with the body of a guy who’d done a little time for grand theft auto, hit the weights hard while he was in the clink, then decorated all his new swollen muscles with flames and hot-rod tattoos once he’d gotten out. While he might have looked hard from the neck down—pun not intended!—Harley was playful and flirty and fun to the core. Unfortunately, he was
so
carefree that he didn’t take anything seriously, including my curfew or my parents’ threats. Harley was definitely the devil in a Sunday hat.

“So, bring your invitations with you and do ’em over here. I’ll even take those big ole boots off and rub your feet while you work.”

Mmm…

Just like he had known it would, my mind started wandering down a rabbit hole of other things we could do with my boots off. I guess Harley was getting tired of me pretending like I wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, because before I could even snap out of my daydream and slurp the drool back into my mouth, he unleashed his secret weapon.

“I miss you, Lady.”

Boom.
There it was.
Asshole.

Even though I’d seen Harley almost every night for weeks, I had to admit, I missed him, too. He was just so light and airy. Compared to the brooding mood swings I’d tolerated, endured, and at times barely survived when I was with Knight, Harley made me feel like I was swimming in powdery-blue cotton candy. He smiled. He laughed. He made me laugh. When I spoke, he’d gaze at me like I had little butterflies and sunbeams dancing around my head. Knight used to look at me intensely, too, but it was more like a salivating jungle cat watching a gazelle. Harley, on the other hand, looked at me like I was the fucking
Mona Lisa
with pride and joy and disbelief that I was actually his.

I sighed into the phone and acquiesced, “Fine. But you’re licking the stamps.”

“Oh, I’ll be licking a lot more than stamps.”

Three hours later, I was sprawled out on Harley’s living room floor, addressing my invitations safely behind the virtuous cover of my makeshift chastity wall. Chinese food cartons, empty Camel Lights boxes, crushed PBR cans, throw pillows, D-grade horror movie cases, calligraphy pens, and tiny towers of completed invitations divided Harley’s living room down the middle, separating me from the oh-so tempting mountain of muscle car–covered muscles that had been eye-fucking me from the couch all night.

When we’d met, Harley was renting a little bungalow from his uncle, who had pretty much let him decorate it however he wanted. So, basically, it was dripping with neon signs he’d stolen from the liquor store where he worked and not much else. It was a blank canvas that I couldn’t wait to get my hands all over. I didn’t know if Harley actually wanted my help with decorating or if he was just humoring me, but anything I wanted for the place, he’d buy. After a few months, he even asked me to paint a mural on his bedroom wall. I’d been painting for years and could probably have done at least a decent job with whatever he commissioned.

When I asked him what he wanted, he just said, “Us,” with that full-lipped big smile I couldn’t get enough of.

Knowing Harley’s taste, I spray-painted a web of letters, his name and mine, in an aggressive sharp-angled font that took up the entire wall above the black leather headboard that I’d picked out weeks prior. I’d chosen colors that resembled the hues in his flame tattoos—reds, oranges, yellows, and electric blue. Every time I saw it, my stomach fluttered as I remembered the squealing, tickling spray-paint fight that had ensued before we’d completely devolved into a rolling rainbow-hued pair of bodies undulating on the tarp-covered carpet.

When he could tell that I was almost finished with my invitations, Harley surreptitiously slinked over and began thumbing through my done pile. “Damn, Lady. This shit looks seriously professional. Why are you still in school? You should just move in with me and do this for a living!” Harley beamed like it was obviously the best idea anyone had ever come up with.

I blushed and kept working, trying to pretend like I wasn’t swooning over everything that had just come out of his mouth. “Uh, thanks for the offer, but calligraphy pays shit, Harley.”

He laughed and ran his fingers over the scrollwork on one of the thankfully dry envelopes. “Where did you learn to write like this?”

“My mom’s an art teacher. She taught me calligraphy when I was just a kid so that I could help her address our Christmas cards.” I gestured to the scattered piles of white all around us. “Now, I’m her bitch.”

Harley poked me in the ribs with the corner of the envelope he’d been admiring, “No, you’re my bitch,” he said with a huge twinkly-eyed grin.

Being this close to him, feeling the heat coming off his body and the warmth oozing from his every word, was making it really hard for me to concentrate. I needed to finish and go home. Finish and go home. If I didn’t leave in the next fifteen minutes, my ass was going to be car-less and stranded in suburbia for the next month.

While I furiously tried to get through my final pile and ignore Harley’s electric presence just inches away, he carefully picked up envelope after envelope, studying them intensely and handling each one with care.

After a few minutes, he mused, “You really have a thing for letters, don’t you? Like on my wall, I said you could do anything you wanted, and you did letters.”

It was so perceptive, so sweet. He just opened his eyes, got still for a moment, and saw
me
. Who knew Harley “Fun and Games” James could be so insightful?

That little observation earned him my undivided attention. I looked up and replied, “I guess so, yeah. I like to write, and I kind of feel like, by using different fonts and designs, I can make what I’m trying to say more beautiful.”

Locking his playful robin’s egg blue eyes on my hunter greens, he quipped, “Unless it’s your name. There’s no way to make
you
any more beautiful.”

Gah, Harley! You’re making me blush!

No one had ever complimented me as sincerely or as often as Harley. I didn’t even know how to respond. Everything he said was so perfect and personalized. He complimented the things he knew I was insecure about or secretly proud of. No generic you’re-so-hot bullshit. Every acknowledgment seemed to be the perfect shape and size to fill whatever void I was feeling at the time. Only, at that particular moment, the only void I could feel was the one throbbing between my legs.

Our close proximity on the floor was really starting to cloud my judgment. If he had just stayed on the couch with the chastity wall of garbage between us, like I’d begged, maybe I would have actually finished my invitations.

Instead, I decided to fight flirty with flirty. “We’ll see about that. Give me your hand.”

Harley gave up his right hand with an arched brow and an achingly coy little smile. I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb while I went to work, penning my best Old English across his knuckles. When I finally released him, he turned his fist around, so he could admire the word
LADY
I’d scrawled upon it. His expression went from curious to elated to something else…mischievous? He briefly opened his fist before closing it again, this time gripping a handful of my shirt in it as he pulled me up and onto his lap.

“I’m never washing this hand again,” he teased before stealing a kiss that wouldn’t end until sometime well after dark and well after my curfew.

I woke up, adrift on a scattered sea of envelopes, sore and sated. Two thick and thoroughly tattooed arms were clamped down around my waist, the only things keeping me from floating away on a foggy cloud of pheromones and bliss. That is, until I realized that the ridiculous Jamaican accent coming from the TV belonged to the one and only Miss Cleo.
1
Miss Cleo’s presence in the room could only mean one thing. It was after midnight. And I was fucked.

I wriggled out of Harley’s embrace and darted around the room, gathering my belongings and snatching and swatting at the square pieces of paper that were stuck all over my naked body as if I’d been tarred and feathered. Where each envelope had been an intricately penned name or address was left behind, in mirror image, on my skin.