Page 156 of The Tempted

Chapter Twenty-Five

2015

She slept on my chest; I had one arm wrapped tightly around her the other hand playing with the ends of her hair. It didn’t matter it was the middle of the day or that I had a shitload of things I should be doing. The only thing that mattered was staying like this for as long as possible. She started to stir, making cute little noises as her body stretched out along the length of my own.

Her eyes opening as she lifted her head off my chest to meet my tired eyes staring back at her. “You’re still here,” she murmured.

“So are you,” I replied, cupping her face in my hands and gazing at her.

“Where’s Luca?”

“With my mom,” she trailed her fingertip along the concave line in the middle of my chest. “She came to my rescue when my body felt like it was splitting in half.”

“How do you feel now?” I asked raising an eyebrow, knowing nothing we did helped matters much.

“You’re not going to hear me complain,” she smiled. “I promise.” She dipped her head, pressing her lips to mine. Just as my mouth started working hers, someone pounded on my door. Good things never last long. When it came to us, someone or something was bound to ruin it. The questions being how severe of an intrusion and how we’d be affected by it.

“Don’t answer it,” she said in between kisses.

I hesitated, contemplating not answering it but I couldn’t do that. She knew it, just as well as I did. She huffed, climbed off me, and brought the sheets up around her body as she stared up at the ceiling.

“Just once I’d like for you to tell everyone else to go fuck themselves,” she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “Just once,” she repeated as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

“I’ll get rid of whoever it is,” I responded while stepping into my basketball shorts, snapping the waistband against my body. “How we going to play this if it’s your father?”

“How about I walk out there naked?” She wiggled her eyebrows mischievously.

“You care if he knows you’re here?” I replied, crossing my arms against my chest leaving it up to her to decide how we should let this play out.

“I couldn’t care less what he knows,” she answered with a shrug. I studied her for a moment, making sure that’s what she wanted before giving her a nod.

“Okay.” I agreed and walked out of the bedroom closing the door slightly behind me. I wasn’t hiding her, but I also wasn’t about to let anyone else see her naked with just a thin sheet wrapped around her.

The banging on the door became louder, more erratic, telling me whoever was on the other side of that door was running out of time or was one impatient motherfucker. Knowing my luck, it was both. I had barely opened the door when Jack pushed through and walked straight into my apartment.

“You were right! That no good son of a bitch is up to something,” he hollered. I closed the door and turned towards him beginning to tell him to keep his voice down but he didn’t let me get a word in edge wise. “I couldn’t wait for you to get back to me about the phone records so I started tailing him. Any reason our friend would be visiting an inmate, in a prison close to the Canadian border?”

“Slow the fuck down,” I said harshly, trying to catch up. “Take a fucking breath man.”

He took a deep breath and sighed, flipping the baseball cap he wore around.

“Lower your voice,” I instructed and nodded towards my bedroom door.

“Shit, you got company I’m sorry man,” he glanced towards the door and back at me, his face full of remorse but not for barging in on me, no that shit was written all over his face. He was about to drop a bomb on me.

“Not just anybody either if you follow me,” I said in a hushed voice.

“You better wrap that shit up if you want to keep her for the long haul. We gotta get a move on.”

“Jack, you need to tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“Gold’s been visiting an inmate upstate, about seven hours away. If we leave now we’ll miss visiting hours. So, I figured we’d drive up there, crash in a hotel, that way we’re up early for when they begin again at 8 am,” he explained.

“You followed him there?” I asked.

“Yes, he spent about two hours inside then trooped it back home.”

“Do you know who he was visiting?” I tried to see where he was going with this. Sure, Jimmy paying a visit to anyone other than his mother who rotted away in a nursing home was out of the ordinary. Still, I didn’t think it called for us to drop everything and hike all the way up yonder.

---