Devil's Angels Boxed Set: Bikers and Alpha Bad Boy Erotic Romance (48 page)

Garret leans back and coughs, beating a fist against his chest. He catches his breath and draws in deeply with his lungs.

“Here, you try.” He exhales, grinning. He grabs a key from his pocket and digs a small lump out of the vial. Holding it up to my nose, he tells me to pinch one nostril and inhale with the other.

My stomach is churning. The colors and shapes swimming before my eyes are nauseating, sickening. I want to vomit.

Trying to calm myself, I take a deep breath, just like Garret had. The cool air of the bus floods my brain and slows my pounding heart.
Get a hold of yourself
, I think.

I look down at the cocaine on the end of the key. Garret’s eyes are gentle but imploring.

“It’s all good, babe. You’ll love it, I swear. And I’m right here with you." His voice isn't hovering near my ear. It's inside me, urging--no, begging--me to take that final step. 

Old Jodie would never have done this.

I lean forward, pinch my nose, and do the bump.

The second it hits my bloodstream, all hell breaks loose. The colors that had been pleasantly murmuring at the edges of my vision vibrate, then implode, like someone had thrown a bomb through a stained glass window. My skin shudders, contorts, writhes with an unfamiliar force. My eyelids are wide open.

I rock violently back and forth in Garret’s arms. He is biting my neck and whispering into my ear, “Ride it out, baby, ride it out, it’ll be okay in just a second.”

I remember sticking a fork in an electrical socket when I was six years old. The feeling of invisible hands yanking me around then was similar to the loss of control I felt now. I am being thrashed around from the inside, from the outside, from every angle and force in the universe. Physics and colors rebound in and through me.

Then, like breaking through the surface of water in which I had been drowning, sheer euphoria replaces the terror. Light streams from every reflection in the mirror, from every brilliant white edge of Garret’s teeth, from the depths of his shaggy blond hair. His eyes are rippling with motion that defies explanation but enchants me, draws me in.

As soon as I look at him with half-lidded eyes that hint at the depth of my passion, he knows we are together. He knows I am with him, with every fiber of my being.

His tongue plunges into my mouth again. I claw back at him, trying to pull him closer, closer. I want every cell of him to touch every cell of me. I want his warmth to be my warmth. I want his heartbeat to propel mine. I want more than just his voice inside me. I want everything. The thought comes again.

More.

Our hands rip one article of clothing off after another. His shoes go flying; my heels are savagely torn off and discarded. He yanks down the zipper on the back of my dress until the once-taut garment sags, held up only by the jutting cliffs of my broad hips and meaty thighs.

Garret’s eyes are roaming over my body with each newly exposed piece of skin. His hands follow, tracking down the smooth porcelain texture of my arms, my breasts, my stomach, my thighs, until one exploratory fingertip grazes the subtle sensitivity of my moist slit.

I gasp; colors whirl. The ecstasy and cocaine and the furor of my emotions are mixing together so powerfully that I can barely sustain the tide. Waves of pleasure ripple from the point where his finger is churning slow circles against my hypersensitive clit.

Looking for purchase, for balance, for something to stabilize my reeling mind and body, I rub my hands down the thick hardness of his chest and his abs. I yank off his belt, undo the clasp and zipper of his pants, and strip him of the garment.

We are standing now; I don’t know when that happened. I slither down to my knees, letting my mouth trickle against his muscles as I go down. His manhood is pressing an insistent bulge against the fabric of his boxers.

I lay a hand against it, stroke gently, barely. He moans and laces his fingers behind my head, urging me forward.

I look up at him and grin mischievously. “Not so fast,” I say. The words coming from my mouth are spiked with a chemical sexuality, a raw kind of teasing hunger that I didn’t know I possessed. The drugs hadn’t created it; rather, they had drawn it out of me from a spot in my brain that I never knew existed.

He moans again. I lick the fabric above his shaft, lathing heat and moisture playfully upon him.

“Please,” he whimpers.
The magic word.

I unsheathe his manhood and take it into my mouth, lap my tongue against the engorged head. His cock is standing at rigid attention as I bob and suck. Garret pulls my dress off; now, I, too, am naked, on my knees on the floor of the tour bus.

The same, well-worn thought crosses my mind –
Old Jodie would never have done this.
I look up at Garret, see the open-mouthed pleasure scrawled across his face, and decide that I don’t give a fuck.

I slurp against him, then rise and stare Garret in the eye. 

“Make me moan.”

He moves quickly, throwing me back against the row of seats behind us. He falls to his knees, spreads my legs, and dives in, the fat width of his tongue causing earthquakes of bliss to tremor from my dripping cleft. I lose track of how many times I near the brink of an orgasm and fall back again, over and over.

My eyes are dilated wide. Rays of light flood in from every angle as if it were emanating from him, as if he were creating it, as if he were a conduit for light to come from somewhere far and foreign for the sole purpose of piercing my eyes now and making me want him as badly as I do. I am craving him, needing him, wanting him closer and closer to me. I want him to meld with me so I can soak up every ounce of everything he is and everything he means.

He represents the flight I am feeling, the flight I felt when I told Bellamy to fuck off, the flight I felt when I left his office and imagined soaring between skyscrapers.

He slides into me. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper. My body swallows him whole, absorbs him. As he starts to thrust, every stroke sends me higher and higher, draws more and more of the ballast from my thoughts. I bury my head against a seat cushion and heave the loudest moan I can – anything to dispel the sheer overwhelming power of the feelings from Garret’s cock fucking me and the drugs running in torrents through the canals of my brain.

His muscles bulge and flex with the strain of his motion. I scratch long red roadways down his back, marks that make him moan and cry and fuck me harder, harder, harder. I am banging my hips against his, rising to meet him, feeling weightless and wanted and warmed.

Garret is fire, Garret is flight, Garret is freedom. Garret is fucking me and I am becoming all of those things as long as he is in me and with me.

Together, we soar like birds.

***

I wake up the next morning, or maybe it isn’t morning. The sun is filtering through my blinds at the wrong angle for it to be morning.

I check my clock; it reads five in the afternoon.

I blink, rub my eyes, and check again. Still five. Panic hits me like a truck.

My exam. I missed my exam.

I grab the cell phone from my rickety bedside table and flip it open to call Sarah, or Garret, or anyone who could help. I see that I have a voicemail. I press play.

“Ms. Sutton, this is Jack Hermann, the Assistant Dean of Academic Integrity at your university. We were informed that you were not present at your exam this morning and as such, have failed the class. Given your situation, we are unable to confer a degree or allow you to graduate as scheduled this semester. Furthermore, since the deadline for course withdrawal passed several months ago, we are unfortunately not able to refund you for the cost of the classes in which you were enrolled. Please contact my office if you have any questions.”

Oh shit.

Old Jodie would never have done that.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sarah wraps her arm around my shoulder as tears stream down my face. My whole body lurches with each racking sob. I dig the heel of my palm into my eye, trying to dry the tears, but they keep coming endlessly, torrentially.

“Sarah, what am I going to do?” I bluster in between coughing fits. She shushes me and strokes the back of my head tenderly.

“Shh, honey, shh. It’s gonna be okay. Just try to breathe,” she murmurs. “It’ll all gonna be okay.”

I hit play on the phone again. The tinny, amplified voice of the voicemail rings out of the speaker. “Ms. Sutton, this is Jack Hermann, the Assistant Dean of Academic Integrity – ” The sound cuts off as Sarah mashes a button.

“Turn that shit off, Jodie. You don’t need to hear it again. You’ve listened to a thousand times already. It’s not going to tell you anything new.”

I say nothing. Sarah sighs. We sit in silence for a few moments. She inhales sharply a few times, as if to say something, but falls quiet again. Eventually she squeaks out a hesitant question.

“How did this even happen?” she says. She talks slowly, choosing her words carefully. “You’ve been … different lately. I feel like Old Jodie would never have missed an exam.”

The words cut through the fog swarming my head like a whip, in spite of Sarah’s reluctance to voice them.

Old Jodie.
I had lost all contact with any concept of Old Jodie. The forces that had compressed her, shaped her, poked and prodded her have been afterthoughts lately. I haven’t thought about my mother in months. I don’t fear Bellamy the way I once did. Even the sick nausea that he used to inspire in me has cooled.

“I don’t know,” I say. She sighs again.

“C’mon, Jodie,” Sarah urges. “Just talk things out. It’ll help, I promise.” She wipes a tear from my cheek.

Where to start? I wonder. With the magazine in Bellamy’s office? With that first kiss? That first concert? Or did it all go back farther – is Mother lurking behind the picture somewhere, still tugging and yanking at my thoughts? Is this her doing? Would she laugh at me now? 

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I whimper. “I don’t know.”

I shake my head to clear the swirling miasma of thought. Too much rationalizing, too much fruitlessly spinning my wheels. None of it would fix things. I had missed my exam; that was my fault. I try to trace back the sequence of events, but I can’t even begin to touch the memories from the tour bus. That particular time span is so overwhelming that it makes my heart flurry and my head swim and my gut churn every time that I even start to picture a red backpack.

A wave of discomfort roils through my stomach. I lean forward to puke, but can only heave a gag with my face buried in the trash can.

This is the bottom,
I think.
I blew it.

So many figures are wrapped up in the sickly tide of thoughts surging through my head: never-ending iterations of Garret and Bellamy and Carla and Mother and Sarah and myself, so much of myself, so many different Jodies, all whirling in the furious currents of my mental purging. They all collide, morph, rot, decay, and disappear, over and over again.

I try to give shape to the flood. I tell Sarah about the tour bus debauchery and all the lines I have crossed since Garret first kissed me – all the rules I’ve broken, the self-imposed boundaries that once dominated my life. The crumbling is physical as much as it is mental. As I speak, the breadth and depth of my crying dwindles to a slow trickle.

Eventually, my story dies down, too. Sarah sits quietly for a while.

“Look, Jodie, babe,” she begins. Her voice is gentle but admonishing. “You told me yourself a long time ago that you need to put your priorities first. You’ve got bills and class, right?” I nod. She continues, “And aren’t those the most important things?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”

“So here’s the cold, hard truth,” she says. “Garret isn’t helping with any of that. He’s hurting you, Jodie. You have to see that.”

She pauses to let that sink in, wincing. I can see that she is trying to be tender. She doesn’t need to be, though. She is right. It isn’t hard to acknowledge that. A small voice piques up in my ear, a voice I haven’t heard in a long time. It sternly echoes Sarah.

You have to see that, Jodie.

“You know what I think?” Sarah says. The words rush out of her mouth. “I think you’re gonna keep getting hurt if you don’t get back to your priorities. I think you put yourself in a dangerous place with Garret. You need to stick to what you used to do – school, work, just surviving, you know? All this rock star lifestyle bullshit? It isn’t for you.”

In my chest, I feel a weight shift like a balance tipping. The voice urges it on.

“The drugs, the sex, Garret – that’s not you, Jodie. That’s not what you’re about. It shouldn’t be. It can’t be.” The caring in her voice only makes it sting more.

I feel buffeted about by winds from every angle. I have been coasting on those winds for so long now, but Sarah’s words remind me that I am not a bird. I can’t handle this. I can’t fly.

“I just want the best for you, Jodie. But you need to get back to the old you. You can’t keep doing what you’re doing now.”

Something clicks, something final, it seems. The last of the tension leaves my body.

“He’s distracting you from what’s important, Jodie. You have to see that. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Sarah is right.
Click.
The voice doesn’t say anything, but I can almost hear it smile, all too pleased.

***

My voice warbles out a timid “Hello?” I can hear Garret breathe into the mouthpiece.

“What’s up, Jodie?” he replies nonchalantly. I want to vomit. My whole body is writhing with so many conflicting sensations that it is a miracle I don’t simply shatter.

I am not a bird.

“Garret?” I say. It is like speaking into a well, a cavern, something that swallows my words and offers nothing in return. I stare at the ceiling, gulp, and try to give shape to my thoughts.

“Yeah?” he drawls, distracted. He can’t see the fear on my face or the quaking of my hands.

“Garret…” I repeat dumbly. I feel slow and thick. My lips won’t work.

“Jodie? What’s up, babe?” A tinge of concern piques his voice, just a shade of it though.

“Garret, I…” My voice chokes itself off. I can’t do this. I need the freedom. I need what he gives me, what he makes me. I can’t go back to my life before this.

He’s distracting you from what’s important, Jodie.

I hear Sarah’s voice and the dean’s voicemail echo between each thought. They intertwine and play off one another like coiling snakes. I feel so cold. I feel so heavy.

A dozen times, I try to speak and can’t.

You have to see that, Jodie.

Click.

I am not a bird.

I can’t hear; I can’t think. There are so many voices and shapes in my head. The tide surges. The world churns in front of my eyes.

The warmth I used to feel when I heard Garret’s voice is sloughing away through the mouthpiece. The cavern of the silence is consuming it, stealing it. The foggy weight that I hadn’t felt since that first kiss is stealthily resuming its familiar perch on my neck and shoulders, over my eyes, and surrounding every breath. I can’t fly, after all. 

I am not a bird.

“Garret, I missed my exam,” I blurt. That wasn’t what I meant to say. I know he doesn’t care about that. I know what he will respond, and he does: “So what?” I can picture him, lounging in bed, lazily plucking at a guitar while a joint dangles from between his lips. The epitome of flight.

I can’t fly with him, can I?
No.

I cough and shiver. Why won’t my hands work? Why won’t my voice work? Why is there a thick jelly over my mind that reduces every thought to a damp, slippery halt?

Sarah’s voice booms in my head.
You have to see that. You have to see that. You have to see that!

She is right. The balance thumps with finality. The voice clamors for me to do it. It wants me to say what I need to say. Like a crowd at an execution, it roars for the action.

I say it.

“Garret, we need to talk.” 

I hang up the phone and cry. Garret hadn’t said much after I finished rambling. Just a muted, “Okay, I hear you. Do what you gotta do, I guess.” Then he was gone, his voice and his jaw and his eyes sucked away into the recesses of '
Did that really happen?'

I cry for a long time, lying curled into a question mark on my bed. Every nerve aches and cries with me. The balance in my chest remains resolutely locked, although the stern voice continues to whisper soft condolences.

You did the right thing.

You had to break it off.

This was necessary.

I feel cold. The heat in my apartment won’t work. I press my face into the pillow and cry harder.

***

I am wrapped head to toe in jackets, tights, and a pair of conservative boots. A scarf winds around my throat and chin. Still, though, cold stabs through every chink. I am hollowed and emptied and I have no familiar bulk against which to lean or reassure myself. The wind batters me back and forth.

I slink into the bank building, struggling to pull the massive bronze door shut behind me. An old woman glares at me as gusts seep through the cracked opening. I try to offer a quick apology, but my throat won’t work. Instead, I cough, flush red, and turn my head, hurrying to the back of the line.

The swathes of people in front of me are slumped in a raggedy queue. I scan the crowd with dull disinterest. A tall, rapier-thin black man dressed in a slim navy suit, a squat Cuban lady with hair in tight, damp ringlets against her scalp, a –
Wait.

My heart clogs my throat. I squint at the figure – a broad-shouldered, leather-clad man with combat boots and blond hair that hangs shaggily down to his shoulders. His back is to me, his head down as he eyes the message on his cell phone. The timpani pounding in my chest ratchets up another notch. I swear I recognize that jacket, those particular boots. I have seen that hair before. The glint of a familiar earring…

He hears a noise and pivots to face me.

It isn’t Garret. The eyes are set too close together, the lips drawn too thin and tight. The nose swoops in a brazen, scarred hook, not the straight arrow I remember. I let loose a deep exhale and realize I haven’t been breathing. I am flushed, sweating.

Ever since that phone call, I have been seeing variations of Garret all over the city. Every rocker in a leather jacket, every teen with long blond hair, makes my stomach plummet and my head ache.

You did the right thing.

You had to break it off.

This was necessary.

I sag through the rest of the day, shivering throughout. I haven’t felt warm in weeks.

I am not a bird.