Asking for Trouble (24 page)

She shrugged as the seconds ticked
by, as he said nothing. “Well, guess I’ll go to bed.”

“No, you won’t.” That got him, just
as she’d hoped it would. “You’re going to lie down across my lap. Right now.”

He was going to do it. The thrill
of it sent a shock right through her, so sharp she shivered with it. She knelt carefully
on the couch beside him, got her balance, then set her hands down on the cold leather
across from him and lowered herself down, the bulk of his thighs raising her
pelvis high, the toes of her shoes digging into the smooth surface behind her.
The arousal in her was like a live thing, pulsing and beating, and she was
panting already.

“Turn your head towards me,” he
instructed. “I want to see your face while I do this. I want to watch you feel
it.”

She obeyed, and he stroked her
cheek, and she opened her mouth a little and sighed.

He put one hand on her back, used
the other to pull her skirt up around her waist, then sat for a moment, ran one
big hand over her. The size and the weight of it, her vulnerable position, it
all felt so good, and she wriggled into him, rubbed herself over him, needing
the contact, needing more.

“You’re a very bad girl,” he said,
and she could see that he wasn’t looking at her face after all, not right now.
Instead, he was watching his hand move over her. “You push me and push me. But
I’m going to let you decide. How many smacks do you think you deserve for
running out without talking to me? For dancing like that, and letting that
asshole touch you like that?”

“Two,” she said as best she could
with her cheek against the cold leather of the couch, while his hand stroked
again and again over her bottom, her upper thighs, awakening tingles of
pleasure along her skin that made her squirm, while the most insistent part of
her screamed for his touch. “Two, please, Joe.”

He laughed softly. “Oh, I don’t think
so. I just changed my mind. I’m going to decide.”

And then he slapped her. Not hard,
because she’d known it wouldn’t be hard. But the sound rang out, shockingly
sharp in the silent air of the loft, and she felt the sting of it, and jerked
against him.

And then he spanked her again, and
again, four, five, six times. Her hands gripped the leather surface of the
couch, braced against the blows, coming a bit faster now. The warmth was
growing, every smack sounding loud, and she was wriggling and moaning, the
excitement leaping inside her.

He stopped. “Am I hitting too
hard?”

“Quit ruining it,” she said
crossly, and he laughed a little, and then he was talking to her again.

“You’ll never—”
Smack.
“Do that—”
Smack.
“Again.” A pause. “Are we clear?”

“Yes. Yes.” It was a gasp.
         

Another smack, harder this
time. “Not good enough. I want to hear, ‘Yes, Joe.’”

“Yes. Yes, Joe.”

His hand was rubbing
again, taking the sting away, and the tingling on the surface was no match for
the fire that was consuming her now. “Never going to run out on me again?” he
asked softly. “Never going to flirt with other guys just to make me mad?”

She didn’t answer right
away, and got another smack for her hesitation. “No,” she moaned. “No, Joe.”

“Good.” And finally, his
hand was between her legs, diving, inside her where she was slick and so wet,
and beyond, and she was so close, going up fast, moving into his hand, her
mouth open, her breath coming in keening sobs, her hands gripping the leather,
hanging on.

Then he took his hand away,
and she cried out her protest at the loss.

“You just remember this,” she
heard. “Because next time, it’ll be harder.”

“Oh. Yes.”

He gave her one more smack,
the hardest yet, which started all the tingles up again. His hand moved down
again, and he was rubbing her like he meant it, finally letting her climb, and
she was spiraling high, and moving hard against him, and starting to cry out as
he told her she was his, told her what he’d do next time, told her everything she
wanted to hear, and she was shoving off with her palms, her knees, pressing
into his hand, as wave after wave consumed her, and she shook and shuddered and
moaned out her release.

He kept going until the
convulsions had become a final shudder, then he lowered her legs to the floor,
pulled himself out from under her, and moved her legs back up onto the couch.
She started to sit up, but a hand on her back had her down again. She felt him
lifting her hips, sliding a cushion underneath them, lowering her over it.

“Stay there,” he told her.
“When I come back, I expect to find you exactly like this.”

She lay there and
trembled, and waited as his steps retreated.
Condom,
she realized through a haze of delicious anticipation.

A minute, two, and he was
back again.

“You listened,” he said,
and there was amusement in his voice. “Looks like I finally found the secret.”

“Huh,” she managed. “Just
because you turned me on so much. And stop
joking.”

“Sorry, baby.” She heard
the smile, still, then the rasp of a zipper, the soft sound of clothes hitting
the floor. “You need me to be tough? You need me to talk dirty to you?”

She couldn’t answer, just
nodded, and he was on the couch with her, behind her, over her. It was a good
thing, she thought irrelevantly, that he had such oversized furniture. She lost
the thought, though, because his hands were at her throat, reaching underneath
to unfasten the two little buttons fastening her sweater around her neck, and
he was pulling the fabric back, his hands gently tracing where it had been.

“I wanted to do this so bad
that first night,” he said, his voice low. “The first time you wore that
sweater, I wanted to put my hands right here. I wanted to put you down and
unbutton you.” He was settling his considerable weight over her, the warmth of
his skin a shock against her bare lower body. She could feel how aroused he
was, did a little more wriggling at the pleasure of it.

He was kissing the side of
her neck now, his hand pulling the hair away so his mouth had full access. “You
know how pretty your ass looks right now?” he murmured in her ear. “It’s pink,
just like your pretty little underwear. It’s got my handprints all over it,
because I spanked you hard, didn’t I? And now I’m going to finish the job. I’m
going to hold you down and do you hard from behind.”

And then he did it. His
strong fingers were digging into her hip, and she was backing into him, wanting
more, asking him for it, begging him for it. He wasn’t talking anymore, but she
was making enough noise for both of them, until she was lost again, until he was
joining her, gripping her harder than ever, going so deep she could feel him
all the way inside her body, like he’d taken it over, like it really was his, groaning
out a long, filthy string of curses that had her shaking. And, at last, with a
final shudder, collapsing on top of her.

Somehow, Joe got some air
back in his lungs, pushed himself up to sitting, pulled Alyssa into his lap.
She was still wearing her sweater, skirt, and heels, he realized. He hadn’t
even undressed her. He’d been
gone.

She nestled into him,
wrapped her arms around him, and he held her and thought,
Damn.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he said.
“Time for bed.” He stood up with her and then, because he couldn’t stand to put
her down, carried her on through the hallway, into the bedroom. He set her down
on the bed at last, knelt beside her and unfastened the shoes, rubbed her feet,
the red marks where the straps had been.

“Hurts?” he asked when she
sighed.

“Yes.” She smiled at him,
slow and satisfied. “Feels so good to take them off.”

He sat beside her on the
bed, pulled the sweater over her head, because she wasn’t making any move to do
it, then flicked the clasp on the front of her bra and ran a thumb over the
little red spot there.

“You’ve got lots of sore
places for me to rub and kiss, don’t you?” he asked.

“Mmm.” She let him push
her gently back on the bed, find the side zipper on her skirt, and pull that
off too. He gathered her clothes, folded them carefully, and set them on a side
chair.

“Joe,” she sighed, “only
you would spank a woman and then fold her clothes.”

“Complaining?” He came
over to sit beside her again.

“No.” She shivered, and he
pulled her up, held her close.

“Let’s go take a shower,”
he said. “And next time,” he told her when he’d helped her to her feet, “I get
to do what
I
like.”

“You liked that,” she
protested, following him into the bathroom. “You can’t tell me you didn’t,
because I won’t believe you.”

“It was all right for a
change,” he said with a smile, twisting all the faucets in his big double
shower, testing until the water was warm enough, then holding out a hand to
her. “But you’d better not need it that way every time, because my heart can’t
take it.”

“Did you really not like
it?” She was shivering again as the warm spray hit her, and then she was
relaxing into it, looking so pretty with her hair streaming around her, with the
water running over her.

“Hell, yes, I liked it. I
loved it. But,” he said, laughing a little as he picked up the soap, “I was
terrified I’d hurt you. All in all, it was fairly exhausting.”

“Mmm.” She was sighing
again as he started to soap her up.

“Plus,” he said, “it made
my hand sting.” And she laughed and took the soap from him and started to wash
him, which felt pretty damn good.

“So what’s your way?” she
asked, her hands lingering on his chest, moving down to his abdomen, and lower,
where things were waking up again, amazingly enough, because he’d have sworn
she’d pulled every last bit out of him. “What’s your favorite, that we’re doing
next time?”

“That would be,” he told
her as her hands continued to move, “with you on your back. I’m old-fashioned
that way. When you’re holding my head in your hands, and you’re making so much
noise that I’m thinking my neighbors must be about to call the cops. When I’m stopping
just to watch you squirm, just because I love to hear you beg. When I’m feeling
you come, and then I’m sliding inside you while you’re still going, and I can
barely hold you down. That’s the way we’re doing it next time. My way.”

She smiled, slow and
secret, and leaned back against the stone tiles, because he was working on her
now, sliding his soapy hands over her breasts, pausing for some extra attention
where it seemed necessary, thinking that he was going to have to make sure that
they got their fair share, because he hadn’t done nearly enough, not yet. He
kept on, one soap-slicked hand making a leisurely journey down her body, then
settling in where she needed it. He could tell her legs were about to give out,
that he was going to have to carry her on out of here, and that suited him just
fine.

She sighed as the water
poured down and the steam rose, arched into his hands, and said it again.

“Yes, Joe.”

“So what’s happening today?” she asked him the next morning
while they were eating breakfast. Not too romantic—oatmeal—but
she’d seemed fine with it. No matter what she thought, she was nowhere near
high-maintenance.

He looked at her cautiously, hesitated.

“You have work to do,” she realized.

“I really do have to get that app to Michael today,” he
explained. “I’m sorry, but I do.”

“Can I say something?” she asked, and he tensed, waiting for
it. “I get that you have to work hard,” she said, her face serious for once. “I
get that you
want
to work hard. I’m
not going to ask you to take every weekend off. You couldn’t even if you wanted
to, and I know it.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do. It’s who you
are.
You’re driven, just like Alec, and you love what you do. I
admire that. Really, I do. All I want is for you to put me first when you say
you will. I want to be able to count on that, so if you say we’re going to
dinner, that means we’re going, not that maybe we will and maybe we won’t, if
something important comes up.”

He winced a little. “Important as opposed to you.”

She didn’t mess around. “Yes. That’s how I felt.”

“I know. I got it.”

“As long as you make time for me,” she said, “as long as
you’re with me when you’re
with
me,
I’m good. As long as I feel like it
matters
to you that I’m with you, and not with somebody else. That you can’t . . .”
She waved her spoon in the air. “Take me or leave me.”

“I can show you that.” He had to smile a little. “I kind of
thought I already did. I was working pretty hard last night to convince you of
it. I thought that was the point.”

“Mmm.” She was looking dreamy now, and he remembered the
feeling of her under his hand, the way she’d squirmed, the sounds she’d made,
and got a kick of pure lust that told him work was going to be delayed this
morning.

“But,” he managed to get in before it took him over
entirely, “tonight’s my do-over on dinner. I’ll pick you up at seven. And from
then on, I promise, you’ll have my undivided attention.”

That wasn’t the way it worked out, though.

They were in his car, on their way to the Cliff House. He’d
decided on the full cheesy treatment: Sutro’s Restaurant in the big white
historic building with its floor-to-ceiling windows looking straight out onto
Seal Rocks and the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean, candlelight and white
tablecloths and a walk on the beach afterwards. It would be dark and cold and
windy out there, but that would just mean she’d have to snuggle up and hold his
arm again. She needed to feel special, and he was going to make sure she did. He
might be a slow learner, but he got there eventually.

His phone rang, and he glanced at the dashboard display in
surprise, punched the button to answer. “Cheryl?”

“Hey, Joe.” His sister’s voice came over the speakers. “I’m
at the airport. Want to come out for an hour and catch up?”

“SFO? I didn’t realize you were going to be coming through.”

“Yeah, weather, we got rerouted. What do you say?”

Joe glanced at Alyssa. She was looking back at him, wary,
waiting. “One second,” he told Cheryl, and put her on hold. “It’s my sister,”
he said to Alyssa. “I know I said I’d take you out, but . . .” He gestured a
little helplessly. “I’m going to have to ask for another rain check. Do you
mind if I take you home?”

“Of course you need to see your sister,” she said. “But you
don’t have time to take me home. You can drop me off and I can get a cab, or I
could come with you. I’d like to meet her.”

Joe wasn’t at all sure that was a good idea, but saying no
seemed like an even worse one. “Cheryl?” he asked, punching her up again. “OK,
see you there in half an hour. Which terminal, and where?”

“Uh . . .” The tired laugh came through. “International,
that seems to be where I am.”

He pulled a U-turn and headed for the freeway as he finished
making arrangements with her.

“And here I made this big promise to concentrate on you
tonight,” he told Alyssa once he’d hung up.

“Don’t be silly. I’m excited to meet her. You know my family
so well, but I’ve barely even heard you talk about yours, except that your
sister’s in the Air Force. That is—is she still?”

“Yeah. I don’t see her that often, though.”

“She’s your only family?”

“Yeah. She’s the only one.”

The Saturday-evening traffic lightened as the miles of 101
South sped by, and Joe knew he should talk, but he didn’t know what to say, so
as usual, he shut up. Alyssa seemed to understand, though. At least, she wasn’t
pressing him with any more questions.

He found a spot in Garage A, and they made their way down the
elevator, along moving walkways, up escalators and through hallways into the
soaring space of the food court of the International Terminal, thronged with
travelers speaking a dozen languages. Family groups, couples, solo voyagers,
some excited, some bored or weary, some businesslike, another day at the office.
And one woman standing in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt next to a pillar. Tall
and fit, but not slender. Short dark hair and dark eyes, looking not much like
Joe, but familiar all the same. The sight of her, as always, welcome, and yet not
welcome.

“Hey,” she said as the two of them approached. She reached
up to give him a quick hug, a peck on the cheek.

“Hey, Cheryl. This is Alyssa Kincaid. Alec’s sister,” Joe
added. She knew who Alec was, of course. It wasn’t like he’d
never
seen her, just not often. Their
visits had been short and a little awkward, and it was too long since they’d
lived in the same house, since they’d been in each others’ lives. And too hard
to think back on the time when they were.

“Hi.” Cheryl held out a hand to Alyssa, and Joe saw his
sister’s assessing gaze, her serious expression.

That was their similarity, he realized, seeing her through
Alyssa’s eyes. Temperament. Watching and waiting and evaluating before they
spoke, before they acted. Caution. Inborn, or a response to life, he didn’t
know.

“Want to get a drink or something? Dinner?” he asked,
reaching for her small black wheeled suitcase. “What do you have time for?”

“A drink and a snack.” She smiled, finally. “I could use a
beer.”

“Me too,” Joe said, and he smiled back, felt something
easing.

Small talk as they selected a bar, placed their orders.
Cheryl’s trip to help teach a logistics course at Ramstein in Germany, how
she’d liked the country, how glad she was to be headed back to Alaska.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I grew up hot all the time, and now
I love the cold. Spending some time in the Sandbox . . . Afghanistan,” she
explained for Alyssa’s benefit. “I thought, yep, been there, done that, got the
T-shirt. I couldn’t get out of that hellhole fast enough. Just like home.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, frowning down into his beer, his tension
back. “I was glad when you were back safe from there.”

“Were you?” she asked.

He looked up at her. “Of course I was.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “I wasn’t sure. It’s hard when we barely
see each other. I wish we did. But here we are now,” she went on more briskly,
“and I’m glad, because I wanted to talk to you face-to-face about this.”

“About what?”

“About Mom.”

“What about her?” He could feel Alyssa beside him, silently
listening, focused on him, and he hated that she was there, but he was glad she
was, too.

“I finally went to visit their graves last year,” Cheryl
said. “I wasn’t going to, it just happened. Another layover, and I was there,
and I did it, and I was glad I did. But I wanted to talk to you about . . .”
She paused, looked at Alyssa, and shrugged. “About a tombstone. Well, a marker.”

“I’m not buying her a tombstone.” The words would barely
come out.

“I didn’t realize she didn’t have one,” Cheryl went on
relentlessly. “I’ll admit, I didn’t follow up. I figured you’d do it.”

He wasn’t frozen any more. Now, he was mad. Cold, hard mad. “Why
would you think that?” he asked her. “Why would I do it? I made the funeral
arrangements. I paid for everything you told me she needed. I paid for the
hospital, and the nursing home, and the hospital again, and the funeral. Nobody
can say I abandoned her. Nobody can say I didn’t help, and God knows I had no
reason to. Now I’m supposed to do more? I put out a hell of a lot more than she
did for me. Or than she did for you, either. She didn’t even deserve as much as
we did for her.”

“No, she didn’t,” Cheryl said. “But Dad did. How do you
think he’d feel if he knew she was lying there beside him without a marker? He
loved her. I want to do it for him, and for us, and I want you to do it with
me. I want us to be able to remember the good times, before. There were lots of
good times. And she
did
love you.
Maybe you don’t remember, but I do. She loved me, and she loved you, and she
loved your dad. Once.”

“Too bad she loved meth more,” Joe said. “How can you defend
her? You of all people?”

“Because I forgave.”

“Some things aren’t forgivable.”

“Everything is forgivable. Walking around with all that
bitterness in you—Joeby, it eats you up inside. I know. You have to let
it go.”

“No. I don’t.”

“The person you can’t forgive,” Cheryl said, reaching out
and putting a hand on top of his clenched fist where it sat beside his glass,
“is yourself. That’s why you don’t come see me. That’s why you haven’t visited
their graves. Because you haven’t, have you?”

Anywhere but here. He needed to be anywhere but here.

“You don’t want to remember because you think you let us
down,” Cheryl said, not letting him off the hook, and he needed to be
gone.
“I know, because I felt the same
way. I didn’t want to remember how I let you down, how I ran and left you in the
middle of that. I felt so guilty, it was hard for me to face you. I just wanted
to forget it, wipe it all out. And you feel like that, too, don’t you? You
think you should have been able to stop it. But how could you? You were a
child,
Joe.”

“He told me to do it.” The words were coming whether he
wanted them to or not. “Before he left. He told me to look out for the two of
you while he was gone. He told me,” and he could barely say it, “that I was the
man of the family now. Some man. Some
man.
”

“He shouldn’t have said that,” Cheryl said. “I know how much
you idolized him. I loved him too. He was more of a dad to me than my own dad
ever was. He treated me like his own, always. I loved him, but he was wrong.
You were eleven years old. You don’t make an eleven-year-old boy responsible
for his mother. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right.”

Joe moved restlessly, wanting so much to get up and leave,
but he didn’t. He owed Cheryl that. He owed her a lot more than that.

“Go get help,” Cheryl said. “I did. Get help to let it go.
Not for her sake, or for mine. For yours.”

“I had therapy,” he said. Now he was sure how he felt about
Alyssa being there. He hated it. “I had a whole long year of it. I’ve been
through it all. I’m done.”

“Think about it.” Cheryl looked at her watch. “I have to go.
I wish we’d met under better circumstances, Alyssa. I hope we still can.”

She got up, and Joe rose too. Cheryl reached for him, and
this time, it wasn’t a brief embrace. She held him tight, and he wrapped his
around her, too, held her for a long minute, and felt the emotion threatening.

“I love you, Joeby,” she said, pulling back at last, her own
eyes moist, a couple tears making their way down her cheeks. Cheryl didn’t cry
either, not that he’d seen, not for years. They were both survivors. But she
was crying now. “Please find a way to let it go. I want my brother back.”

He was silent as he and Alyssa walked back to the car, as he
held the door for her, got in, spiraled down the endless ramps of the garage. She
didn’t talk either, to his relief. Alyssa always talked, and he could sense the
tension in her, the eagerness to ask. But she didn’t. She sat still and waited.

He spoke at last. “She’s my half-sister.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“When my dad left for Kuwait, I was eleven, but you know
that too. You heard. She was fifteen. That was a big difference. We weren’t
that close, not then.”

“And then your dad died,” Alyssa prompted when he didn’t go
on. “He didn’t come back.”

“No. He didn’t. He died. He was on a cargo flight, and the
plane crashed. He was a mechanic. Mechanics aren’t supposed to die in wars, but
he did.” His hands gripped the steering wheel tight, and he pulled onto the
on-ramp heading north, gunned the big engine.

“And then something happened?” she asked.

“It was all right for a year or so. I mean, it wasn’t good,
but it was all right. But then my mom got this boyfriend. Dean. I wondered how
she could stand to be with somebody like that after my dad, because he was
nothing like my dad. My dad,” he said, and it was running away with him now,
the need to tell, to say the words
.
“My
dad was a good man. I mean, people say that, but he was a
good
man. He was a supervisor, in charge of a whole shift. He was
respected. He was . . .” He hesitated. “He was loved.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I see.”

“But Dean . . .” His hands continued to flex, and he was
driving too fast, staying in the left lane, but she didn’t seem to notice, and
the speed felt good. “We couldn’t figure it out at first, Cheryl and me. We
were so stupid. He’d be all full of energy, all up and pumped, and my mom was
that way too. And then he moved in, and everything changed. She stopped going
to work. She told us she was sick, and she looked sick. So did he. And it just
got . . . worse.”