“You realize this isn’t really news, right?”
“It’s more than we had before.”
Isaac turns to me finally, giving me a sympathetic look. “I’ll give you all the space you need. Trust me, Gabby, I have no intentions of hurting you.”
“I know,” I whisper. But I don’t know if I believe him. Trusting men hasn’t exactly landed me in the best situations in the past. Isaac has more baggage than any man I’ve ever even met in Boston. He’s not some trust fund baby whose biggest problem is deriving some meaning out of his life of excess. He’s… rough. Mysterious. Dark. I saw something fucking terrifying in his eyes, but I also felt utterly safe in his presence despite my horror.
Even now, I feel safe with him. I know he won’t hurt me.
And I feel so sure of that, it makes me wonder if I ever knew this feeling before or if I had always been pretending before Isaac stormed his way into my life.
Chapter Nine
Tylee
Scum rolls out of bed, giving me a clear view of his ass cheeks, still red from where I smacked them, still sore from the place I sank my teeth into them. Yummy. He walks over to the small fridge in the motel room and has the decency to get me a Keystone Lite – my favorite.
“Cigarette?”
I join him in a seated position at the edge of the bed. He groans.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says. “Everybody wants the job done, nobody wants to be the one to do it.”
“That’s right,” I tell him. “That’s right.”
The man has been fighting demons ever since I saw him. He’s nothing like Isaac, that’s for sure. I’d have to lie, cheat, start fights, or worse to get a rise out of Isaac. Scum – not his real name, obviously – has this perpetually pissed off look on his face. Pissed at the world. Pissed at the government.
Well, now he’s pissed at “the illegals”. I’ve since learned that means anybody he thinks looks Mexican. I’m not racist, but it’s not my place to tell him what to think or feel, as longas he doesn’t use any of those unkind words in my presence or harp on his weird problem.
“Somebody has to get them out of the country. We step up to do it, they call us Nazis. I mean, what the fuck?”
“Can you get me the lighter, Scum?”
He glares at me and hands it over. I meet his stare with an equally intense one. He needs me more than I need him, and he knows it. Now that I don’t have the kids weighing me down, I can act with a lot more common sense instead of worrying about messy diapers or fixing dinner.
“Here’s the damn lighter. I wonder if you’re even listening to me, Tylee.”
“I’m listening. You’re having a shit time kidnapping all the Mexicans in Missouri.”
I don’t feel good until I take that first puff of a cigarette. It’s nice that he paid for the smoking room so I don’t have to stand in the damn cold just to relax. Isaac calms down after sex. Scum keeps getting more riled up and I can tell that somehow agreeing with him has got him going about politics.
“They’re not goddamn Mexicans. They’reillegalsTylee. They’re gang members.”
“Sure, babe.”
“Those are the kinds of people your brothers get into bed with. Doesn’t it piss you off?”
“If every girl worried about where her brother put his dick, we’d all kill ourselves.”
He chuckles and puts his arm over my shoulder, drawing me in close for a hug. I’m glad that he doesn’t kiss me. It’s not that the sex was disappointing. Scum works hard, knows how to use his tongue, and he gets all gross and sweaty in a way that I actually enjoy with a man. He doesn’t argue about using condoms either. I’m not pushing out any babies for a man who isn’t my husband.
“You’re sexy, you know that, Tylee,” he says, grinning atme with his fox-face. He has a handsome, almost cruel looking smile, maybe because his eyes don’t move and his expression stays hard, even when his lips appear to be grinning.
“Yes,” I respond calmly, resting my hand on his thigh, keeping my precarious position safe with a hand close to Scum’s dick.
“You didn’t come all the way out here just to screw around on your husband.”
“My husband left me,” I remind him sternly. Isaac has been the most stubborn he’s ever been about this. He’s not coming back, which means I was right all along not to put all my eggs in one basket.