“The secret is to add a little poultry seasoning in it,” she says with a nod down to the container before looking back to me. “Tom, Jim… whatever. The point is she wants to dump him.”
“Didn’t care for the guy anyway,” I say as I continue to eat. “And I could totally tell he wasn’t Miranda’s type.”
Which also seems to say something about how I’ve integrated into Jane’s life since I’ve even gotten to know her best friend quite well. I’ve been around her enough to know that she needs a good guy with a strong hand who won’t take her bullshit. Apparently, though, she either gravitates to assholes with low self-esteem or wimps who like to kiss her ass.
Jane snickers. “He so was not Miranda’s type. And that thing he did with his nose…”
“That snuffling noise whenever he finished a sentence?”
“What was that?” She laughs.
“No fucking clue, but it was driving me batty,” I commiserate.
“Oh, my God,” Jane says as she continues to laugh. “Can you imagine them in bed together? ‘Oh baby, that feels so good.’ Then that god-awful snuffling sound.”
I watch, chicken poised halfway to my mouth, as Jane laughs with abandon. With such radiance. Green eyes shimmering whimsically. Completely in the moment… with me… sharing something that we both found funny as hell.
Sharing something with me that I don’t remember having in forever and a day.
I drop the chicken to the paper plate and reach across the expanse of the blanket. I lean toward Jane at the same time I cup the back of her head to pull her toward me, and I lay a swift but soft kiss on her mouth before I release her.
Her eyes are wide with surprise when I pull back, because I’m not the most spontaneously affectionate person.
“That was different,” she says.
“It was?” I ask, feigning ignorance.
She nods. “You usually only kiss me when you… well, you know… you want sex.”
That would be true. I love kissing Jane, which leads to fucking ten times out of ten.
But that wasn’t my intent just now. Hell, I’m not even sure what my intent was, but I was filled up with a gloriously warm, euphoric feeling that was due solely to the woman sitting across from me and, before I knew it, I was giving her a kiss.
I try to play it off though. Looking around at the picnic area, I casually say, “Who says I don’t want to have sex here?”
Jane rolls her eyes at me, and I grin. Crazy how easy my smiles have been coming the last few weeks.
Like this picnic.
I couldn’t imagine doing something like this… all normal and romantic. It’s a completely foreign concept, and yet I’m drawn even stronger to these things with Jane. My curiosity about this laid-back, normal way of life is stirring, and perhaps I’m even remembering a bit how to live this way.
It’s hard to describe to anyone what it meant for me to go undercover with Mayhem’s Mission. Hell, it’s even hard for me to understand it at times. But in order to do it, I had to let go of every bit of my humanity, and I had to embrace a life bankrupt of any morals, decency, or kindness. My Mission brothers were a ruthless gang involved in serious criminal enterprise from drugs and illegal guns to sex slavery. And that was only the tip of the iceberg. It was the “business” part of what they did.
But there was another part.
A darker part.
It was where I had to convince them that I was cut from the same cloth. I had to do terrible things to people that, without the immunity the government has provided me, would land me in jail for the rest of my life. I have so much blood on my hands that it won’t ever come off.
So yeah… I get why she was surprised by this little act of affection on my part. Given my past, I’m just as surprised.
But goddamn… she is crawling under my skin, invading my senses, and turning me inside out. She makes me laugh, which is a practically unheard of accomplishment. She’s witty and funny and full of personality. Jane is a force of nature that has the strength of a hurricane, and fuck if she didn’t roll right over me.
Hell… even sex with Jane is fun. I’d thought she might be a little shy or reserved, but she’s not. She’s an incredibly sensual woman who perhaps needed just a little encouragement to explore more of that side of herself. Once she understood that I found it incredibly erotic for her to be vocal about what she wanted, the sex became even better.