LUKE (4 page)

I grinned as I crawled onto the bed, lay down on my back and watched him slip the condom over his full length and crawl onto the bed, stealing between my spread legs. He reached for the mason jar and unscrewed the cap.

“What is that?”

“Coconut oil.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to oil me up?” I asked with disbelief.

“You said it was your first time in a while, right?” I nodded. “Well, I figured a little extra lub couldn’t hurt, and I’ve found coconut oil to be the bed lub you can use.”

“Sounds like it was a very scientific experiment. And just how did you find this out?”

“A girl I hooked up with used it.” He blushed. “She swore it worked wonders and that it didn’t dry out or get sticky.” He shrugged. “It seemed to do the job when we used it.”

A girl he hooked up with? I felt a small tug of jealousy as he reached into the jar and pulled out a small amount. I gasped as I felt the cold oil touch my folds, but I had to admit, it did feel good.

His fingers slipped into me then back out. They touched my clit, massaging gently. I moaned as pleasure overwhelmed me. If he kept doing that, we wouldn’t make it to actually having sex. I pushed his hand away from my clit, feeling my cheeks burn as I did it. His grin only widened as he pulled his hand away and came closer to me. His head touched my folds, and he pushed into me slowly.

I gasped. For the first time in my life, there was no rough feel to it. He was careful as he pulled away from me. “Is it alright?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice to say that it felt amazing. His lips lowered to mine. He kissed me gently.

“Tell me if it hurts you at all. We’ll go nice and slow, okay?”

“No.” I nipped his lower lip. “I want it fast.” If I were going to have sex with him, we were going to do it right.

He grinned as he pushed back into me, a little harder this time but still careful.

My eyes rolled back as my hand reached out for my clit. I played with myself as he pushed into me faster and faster; still his eyes locked on mine as if he were trying to make sure I was okay with every thrust. I moaned, my eyes rolling back. I tried to keep eye contact with him, but I could already feel it coming. No. it had to wait. He pushed into me faster and harder. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. I moaned louder with every thrust.

He reached out, his hands resting on my hip; he pulled me closer to him with every thrust. I moaned louder.

“Harder.” Yes, that was what I wanted. He slammed into me. Again and again. My moans grew louder. Oh, God, it felt so good. “Yes,” I moaned. “Oh yes.”

He slammed into me hard enough to make me flinch, pleasure and pain mixed together as he let out a deep breath. Harder. He slammed into me again.

Everything went a hazy white as my hips arched towards him. “Oh yes,” I moaned, my nails digging into the blankets as pleasure surged through my body. My hips buckled, grinding with his cock inside me. My fingers rubbed my clit faster and faster as another wave of pleasure surged through me, this time a little softer. Then another, this time even less than before.

My hips fell back against the bed as I gasped for breath, forcing my eyes open to see him staring at me. A blush touched my lips. “Well, that was quick of me.”

He laughed softly. “Not as quick as me.”

I have to admit, I was so caught up in my own pleasure that I didn’t realize he had orgasmed. He dropped down onto me gently, his arms wrapping around my waist, and I wrapped my arms around his body and pulled him close to me. My lips touched the top of his head, and we lay like this for several seconds before he pushed himself up, his lips touched mine and he rolled out of bed. He threw the condom out, slipped into a pair of pajamas and came back over to me. I lay there still trying to catch my breath as he cuddled close to me, his lips touching my cheek, making their way down my body and towards my back. His fingers brushed my hair aside, but I wasn’t able to move away quick enough.

He grabbed me. “What is that?”

“Nothing. An old burn. From a curler or something.” I tried to pull away, but he rolled on top of me, careful not to put too much weight on me, and studied the burn. “No. I know what a cigarette burn looks like.” He brushed my hair aside softly. “Who did this to you?”

“An ex,” I admitted softly. He rolled off me and gave me his full attention.

“What happened?”

I took a deep breath as I pushed myself up. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him as I spoke. “Like I said, I was young when Mick and I got together … I was, stupid to be blunt. I believed love was romantic and sweet, now I understand that it’s not like that. It’s …”

“What?”

“It’s real. It’s honest and fucked up and makes you want to kill someone some days, but you stick around because you can’t think of your life without them. That’s what love is, but no matter how fucked up it is … it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t tell you that you’re useless or make you feel hated. Anyways, Mike and I were together for a long time. We both had a lot going on when we were younger.” I looked at him as he took my hand. “I found a positive way to deal with it. It sounds stupid, but I fell in love with self-help books. Mike … Mike started smoking weed until that wasn’t doing it for him. It is so cliché, but he started hanging out with the wrong people. He started doing meth and heroin. I tried to fight him, I tried to save him, and I tried to do everything that I could think of to stop him from killing himself. He … he just never cared. He moved out on his own when he was 15. I tried to convince him to stay with me and my parents, but he wouldn’t have it. He … his parents didn’t even care, and I think more than anything that was why he didn’t care about himself.”

“Having a rough childhood doesn’t give him a reason to burn his girlfriend.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t. We fought so much, we were good at hiding it, but the fact of the matter is that we didn’t love each other at all … he resented me for not finding a way to deal with my pain but to overcome it, or at least try to. He didn’t. He hid his pain, he stuffed it away and … and eventually that wasn’t working for him. He took his pain out on me.”

“By abusing you?”

I nodded.

His eyes widened. He reached out and took my hand. “Jade, I’m so sorry.”

I shrugged. “There’s nothing that can be done. It’s in the past, and I try to keep it there.” I fixed my hair so that the burn was covered again. “I work hard not to let my issues drag me down. It works sometimes.” I gave a shaky laugh.

***
 

I couldn’t believe the woman who sat in front of me.

I leaned towards her, my lips touching hers for a fraction of a second. For someone who had struggled through such an early age, she was so strong, to want to keep her past in the past and admit that she struggled with it but that she was trying to get better. It was something I had to respect, hell even admire.

I pulled her into my arms and held her tight. “I promise you, I will never hurt you.”

After seeing Becky suffer people like Jade’s ex-boyfriend … They made me want to kill. The idea of seeing another woman with scars from her past abuser, seeing a woman with bruises from her current boyfriend, seeing a woman emotionally traumatized ... It honestly broke my heart.

I had no clue how Jade dealt with it every day, how she lived with it. I pulled her tighter into my arms.

“Will you stay with me tonight, please?”

“Of course.” Her arms wrapped around me as I guided us down onto the bed.

I woke up to the smell of bacon. Luke was nowhere to be seen, so I rolled out of bed, grabbed the shirt he had been wearing last night and slipped into it as I made my way to the kitchen.

“Morning.” He smiled as he flipped a pancake.

“You should have woken me up. I could have helped.” I looked around the room. It was the picture on the fridge that caught my attention. I picked him out easily in the photo, and I was pretty sure one of the other people was Jacob. There were two guys and a girl that I didn’t recognise.

Luke’s voice snapped me back to reality. “The idea was to bring you breakfast in bed.” He laughed softly. “When do you have to be at work?”

“I called in sick earlier.” He’d been out cold when I slipped out of the bed and went to the kitchen to make the phone call. All that cuddling had made me want to sleep in, so I decided to do something I hardly ever did and call in sick. I was already sure it had been worth it. “So, what do you have planned for the day?”

“I’ve got to go into work for the dinner shift; until then I’m all yours.”

His words got a blush out of me. I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be dirty or not, but I liked the sound of it.

He flipped the pancake again and then moved it onto a plate that he set on the table after flicking the stove off. The table already had everything I could need on it. A glass of orange juice, butter, syrup, jam, peanut butter; bacon, scrambled eggs and cutlery.

I piled two pancakes onto my plate, along with a few spoonful of eggs and a couple pieces of bacon. “It looks amazing. You know you really didn’t have to do all this.”

“I know, but I like cooking and … well, I wanted to show off for you.” He grinned as I looked up at him.

“Well, you’re doing a really good job.” I saw a blush touch his cheeks before looking back down at my plate. I cut into the pancakes. “So, just to be clear … where is this going?” I hated to be the one to ask the question, but I had to know.

After what felt like forever, I glanced up at him for a second. He was mulling my question over.

“I’m not sure,” he confessed. “I’ve got to be honest with you … I might not be around for much longer, at least I might not be able to see you for much longer.” His words confused me. “But I really like you, Jade. You … I … as stupid as it sounds, I never thought I could care about someone this quickly.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going to be around for much longer?”

He shrugged. “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry, but I promised some people I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.”

“Is it dangerous?”

Nodding slowly, he mumbled, “Yes.”

I put my fork down; suddenly I wasn’t in the mood to eat. “Then why are you doing it?”

“For someone I care about.”

“Why would someone you care about want you to do something dangerous?”

Luke paused. “To be honest, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t want me to do it.”
She?
“But nonetheless, the chances of me actually doing it are very high.” I frowned, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I sat there trying to figure out what it could be that he was going to do. Who she was, why she was so important to him … I was just trying to piece together anything that made sense. I couldn’t, so I opened my mouth again.

“Who is she?”

“A friend who was more like a sister than my own sisters.”

“I’d like to meet her.” I wanted to know what her deal was, and maybe if I met her I could get a better idea of what stupid shit he was about to do. I saw something pass across his face. Maybe if I met her, I could tell her that he was about to do something stupid, and she would know what it was. Then again, maybe it wasn’t any of my business.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”

“Why not? Are you hiding me from her?” I snapped.

“Of course not.”

“Then let me meet her.”

He was quiet for a couple seconds before getting to his feet. “Fine. You want to meet her, go get dressed, and you can go meet her.”

Thanks to the trip I took to my parents last weekend, and the fact that I was an A-class procrastinator, I had clothes to change into that I hadn’t worn last night. Luke hopped into the shower but left the door open so I could do my makeup in that mirror.

I tried not to spy on him in the shower, after all, that was just creepy, but I couldn’t help turning my head to check in on him a couple times when I heard a deep sigh escape him.

“If you really don’t want me to meet her, we don’t have to go,” I finally said.

“It’s not quite that simple,” he called over the water. “But I need to go anyways, so I might as well take you along with me.”

The more we talked about it, the less it made any sense to me.

The shower shut off, and I turned to face him as he got out of the shower. I looked just in time to see him without a towel around his waist. I hadn’t been paying as much attention to his body last night as I should have. My eyes widened a little when I saw his muscular legs; I remembered those abs, and his chest and, of course, his cock. I swallowed dryly as it twitched. My eyes locked on it.

Luke made a noise that snapped me back to reality.

“You like what you see?”

“Yea.”

He closed the distance between us, and I reached up and ran my fingers through his hair. He stayed perfectly still as I styled his hair for him. I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing until I almost had it perfect. He waited until I pulled away from him to put some wax in it, and I slipped into a pair of skinny jeans and one of his sweaters he let me borrow. Once he dressed, we were off. My pulse raced as we made our way to his car, which Jacob had apparently returned.

The drive was quiet. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, and he didn’t seem to want to talk, which was fine with me. Stopping at a corner store, he picked up some flowers, an odd thing to take to someone who is like a sister to you—if you were to ask me.

Three minutes later, my heart dropped into my stomach as everything fell into place and we came to a stop outside the cemetery gates.

Luke refused to look at me as he turned the engine off and slipped the keys into his pocket. I was out of the car and at his side in a matter of second. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s fine. Like I said, I should stop by anyways … I’ve been putting it off, and it might be nice to have some company.”

I grabbed his arm as he made his way towards the gate. Holding onto him tightly, I let him lead the way in silence.

He weaved his way around the cemetery as if he knew it like the back of his hand—and I was sure he did—until we came to a stop in front of a small headstone.

Becky Jackson

1990-2005

Forever missed

It all made sense now. I glanced down at his wrist with the tattoo on it. 9/22/2005

I squeezed his arm gently before pulling my hand away from him, took the flowers from his hand and knelt down. He followed me. “Hey Becks,” he whispered as I removed dead flowers from the plastic vase by her headstone and replaced them with the colorful ones Luke had just picked out for her. He turned to me. “You’d like her. You kinda remind me of her, she didn’t have a very high bullshit tolerance either.” He laughed softly.

I reached out and touched and covered his hand with mine. We sat like this for a long time, neither of us saying a word as he stared down at the headstone.

I felt such a bitch. I’d been mad earlier when he told me he wouldn’t introduce us. And now here I was … I’d made him come down here, even if he said he’d been needing to do it, it was still my fault we were here.

He squeezed my hand gently as he pushed himself to his feet, and I got up along with him. He glanced at me, then at the headstone and back at me. “Well, I’m ready if you are.”

“Of course,” I whispered.

I took his arm again, and we made our way back down to the gates. Luke came to a stop, his eyes locking on a man. I stared at him, but the only thing I really noticed was the scar on his cheek. I swallowed dryly as he came to a stop in front of us, looking me up and down before turning to Luke. “Did you just bring her flowers?” He held a single rose in his hand. Luke nodded.

“But she’d like having us do it on the same day. She’d just be happy to have more flowers.” A soft smile touched the man’s lips. “How have you been?”

“Fine considering everything. You?”

“I’ve been … alright.” He looked at me before returning his gaze to the man. “We were all going to try to get together this weekend, are you going to come?”

“Yea.”

I cleared my throat. Both men turned to look at me. “I um, I’m going to go get the car started.” I held my hands out for the keys. Luke nodded as he reached into his pocket and pulled them out, and I gave him a smile. I turned to the man he was talking to and gave him a smile before making my way to the car. Once I was mostly out of earshot, I could hear them start speaking, but I wasn’t able to make out what they were saying.
 

***
 

“Jacob’s started looking for him,” I said as soon as I was sure she was out of earshot.

Priest nodded. For a fraction of a second, I saw something resembling a smile spread over his lips. “Good. I want him to pay for what he did.”

“He will.” It was a promise. Becky had been like a sister to me, and I wasn’t going to forget that.

He shot a glance towards the car. “You’d better get back to her before she starts to get worried. Anyways, with Jacob looking for him, you won’t have much time, so make the most of it, and that means being with your girlfriend.”

For a man who hardly showed his emotions, he could really put things into perspective.

“She’s not my girlfriend.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to say it, but I did.

Priest snorted. “Sure.” He patted my shoulder. “Anyways, I’ve got a long day of drinking and talking to a dead woman ahead of me, I’d best let you go.” He turned to leave.

My stomach knotted. “If you want, you can come with us.” He stopped, considering it.

“Maybe. You go; I know where you live if I decide I want some living company.”

I nodded. There was no point in pushing him to do something, it would only end with him pushing back and not coming just to be an ass. “I’ll see you later.”

That was a promise.
 

***
 

After a totally quiet car ride home, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Who was that?”

“A friend. One of the only friends I have.” I was surprised by the fact that he told me right away. I’m not sure why, it wasn’t like he’d lied to me at all.

“He knew Becky too?”

“Yea.”

“Were they as close?” I asked as we sat on the couch. I should have been leaving soon, but I didn’t want to. I knew he had to do a dinner shift and it was almost noon. I should give him time to collect himself and get back to his usual self.

“Closer.”

“Was she his girlfriend?”

Luke looked at me, his face frozen in an expression I couldn’t quite place. “He loved her, but they never dated … he seems to think you are
my
girlfriend.”

“Am I?” The second it came out I regretted it. What if he said no? I didn’t want to hear that shit.

“I don’t know, are you? I’d say yes, but I feel like you should have some sort of say in it.”

He smiled softly. I grinned.

“Yes. Yes, I’m your girlfriend.”

He reached out and pulled me into his arms. “I was hoping you would say that,” he whispered against my lips before kissing me gently. His arms wrapped around me, pulling me close.

“But … as your girlfriend … I need to know, should I be worried about you?”

“As my girlfriend? Maybe. But I’ll be fine.” His lips touched mine, and I lay there frozen. I couldn’t believe that after such a short time I could care this much about someone, but somehow I’d managed to get real feeling for this man in the span of a day. He looked at me. “Don’t worry about it. Right now, I need to get a few things sorted out, and then I can tell you everything. But I’m not going to tell you anything until I have the details, alright?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but I couldn’t. I actually had faith that he was telling me the truth, he hadn’t lied to me yet so why would he now? And I had to accept that he was going to do whatever he wanted, plus maybe it was a good idea for him to wait until all the details were sorted out before he told me … that way he’d be telling me the full plan, or situation, or whatever it was.

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

“It involves the man that you saw today. He’s one of my best friends, as well as Jacob and someone else. They were all very close to Becky too.”

“Where did he get that scar?”

“That would be something he’d have to tell you. Sorry, but it wouldn’t be right of me to tell his stories.”

“It’s alright.” I reached out, took his hand and studied his wrist. The scars, the tattoo.