Unable to stop myself, I reach out and grab her left hand. She drops the hand that’s in her hair immediately and looks down at me. Her eyes hold a curiosity she refuses to voice. I give her hand a light tug and bring her closer to me. She moves slowly, but doesn’t pull away. I move back in the chair, which gives her enough room to crawl into my lap. Not that she will, but it’s something I’m about to try to make happen.
“Come here, baby,” I say quietly and pull her down on my lap. I hold her firm, expecting a struggle, but she doesn’t give me one. For once, she’s agreeable and plops into my lap. She turns to face me and shakes her head just slightly. Her silence is so absolute that it makes the entire room feel sad and lonely. Or maybe that’s me, because when I’m near her, I just want to be closer. If she’s standing next to me, I want to touch her. If she’s in my lap, I want her naked. If she’s bitching at me, I want my dick inside her. It never seems to be enough, and I wonder if it ever will be.
“Don’t think I’m going to feed you just because you’re trying to be charming,” she says, but it comes out as a whisper. Again, so very quiet.
“I bet if I made you come a few times you’d want to feed me,” I say lowly and bring my lips to her neck.
“No,” she says, but her body sinks into me.
“No? You don’t like this?” I ask her as I place gentle kisses on her neck. A shiver runs up her spine, making her body shake in response.
“No, and I’m not going to feed you,” she says. Quiet. Breathy. Fuck. “That’s not what we do.”
I stop what I’m doing and pull back, narrowing my eyes, and give her a hard look. Trying to keep my voice quiet so I don’t send her running, I say, “What we do?”
Her eyes travel around the room before they land on my cut. She reaches up and places a hand above my heart right on top of the patches that says FORSAKEN and FORT BRAGG. Giving me a soft pat she lets her eyes travel back up to mine. “This. You’re Forsaken and I’m a Lost Girl. I’m not your girlfriend, and I’m not your Old Lady. I don’t do feeding times.”
The realization of what she’s talking about hits me between the eyes and makes my gut turn to mush. We were on our way somewhere before I fucked it all up. Now she’s just compliant and disconnected, and I hate it. The way her voice sounds and how she’s touching me, she might as well not even be in the room with how present she is. As much as she pissed me the fuck off, and fucked up in front of the club, I’d take every insult she has to give better than I can take this. It’s maddening.
My head swims with a thousand responses I could give her. I could try to make her feel better by telling her that it’s not like that with us, and I could tell her that brothers fall for Lost Girls all the time. She already knows I want her for my woman, I want her voted in, and even if she doesn’t want to believe it, I believe that we can get over this shit. She pisses me off, and I’m going to piss her off, and she’s just going to have to come to terms with that. But if I tell her that, she’ll run. Nic doesn’t do sweet because she doesn’t know what to do with it, but asshole she understands. Only, I don’t want to be an asshole right now. I like the quiet and the closeness. I like feeling of her pressed up against me. The last thing I want to do is to give her a reason to run, and being an asshole would do just that.
“You think too much,” I say with a grumble.
“And you don’t think enough,” she protests. She’s wrong, but fuck if I’m going to argue with her right now. I don’t know how many more screw-ups she’ll forgive before she convinces Chief or Diesel to get the club to vote on shooting me. Not that they would, but I wouldn’t put the attempt past her.
“Look,” I say and lean toward her. Her entire left side presses against me. Her skin is so cold, and her nipples strain beneath the aged tee shirt. “We make the rules. If we decide that all we do is fuck, then that’s all we do. If we decide that you cook for me, then that’s what we do. There’re no fucking rules here, baby. The only rule is ‘you don’t fuck me over and I don’t fuck you over.’ That’s it.”
She turns her head away from me. Raising her chin toward the ceiling, she says in a much harder voice, “But you did fuck me over. You fucked me over, you humiliated me, and you’re acting like it’s on me to do better.”
“Clean slate, babe. I fucked up, I get that, but we gotta move past that shit.”
“No,” she says getting loud as fuck right in my ear. “Fuck that, and fuck you. You wanna be my man, you need to do better. You wanna call the shots and take care of shit in my life, then show me that you can. Buckle up, dude, and quit puttin’ that shit on me. You fucked up, and I moved on.”