Page 12 of Joint Custody

He let me go. Thank goodness. I released the breath I was holding as my cheeks burned. I pressed my lips together and gave him an awkward shake of the head.

“I get it. You don’t know me. All I’m saying is, I think we had some good chemistry on the dance floor, and ain’t nothing wrong with getting to know each other intimately, here and now,” he said while gently holding the tips of my fingers.

I whisked my hand away and folded my arms across my chest. “Uhmm—” I started and was interrupted by a voice that made my legs tremble.

“Hey, babe. Ready to get going?” I’d only just met him tonight, but I recognized Mario’s voice before I even saw his shadow emerge next to us out of the corner of my eye. Babe? I wasn’t sure how to feel about it, but man, was I glad to escape this awkward as hell moment between me and “Leather Jacket.”

“Oh, yes. There you are. Yes. I, uh, I just have to go find my friends.” My cheeks were roasting from embarrassment now that I remembered where he’d found me. Oh, great and he was getting a clear view of watching my friends get fucked. Amazing. “There’s Laura,” I mumbled to myself as I walked with my head held low in quick steps toward her.

Hm. How did one get through to someone whose eyes were rolled back into their bobbing head while being jackhammered from below? I supposed the tapping would have to work.

“Uhhh, Laura?” I asked while gingerly reaching forward to give her the slightest, hesitant couple of taps.

“Fuck!” she finally said as her eyes focused on me with pure irritation.

“Sorry to interrupt but I was thinking about heading out. I was just wondering if you’ll be done soon?” I rushed to spit out the words as my toes burned a hole into the front of my pink heels.

“Oh, no. It’s . . . cool. Oh, guh . . . yes, yeah, uh, mm, I’ll just catch a cab,” she managed to say.

“Oh, okay.” I was too glad to move on and rush through the same question with the other two girls who told me the same thing. To leave them alone. It felt strange, like I was abandoning them, until I remembered that they had each other and they did this sort of thing all the time.

As I made my way toward Mario who seemed to be enjoying the entertainment, I couldn’t even look into his eyes as I felt like an ostrich without sand with nowhere to hide. I felt his eyes burn into the back of my skull as I walked past him without saying a word, wondering what he might have been thinking of me as I tried to silence the fantasy that made me wish it was him who tried to kiss me instead.

Chapter 7

Mario

Iwasbeginningtoimagine that there was someone somewhere having a great laugh about this. It was like the harder I tried to resist temptation, the harder temptation persisted. It was ridiculous at this point. It felt like I was being slapped in the face with big neon lights flashing “Fuck her” everywhere I went. Seriously? A fucking sex room? It took all the willpower I had not to use the information I came upon by chance earlier to grab her and kiss her, wait for her to beg me to strip her bare and fuck her against the wall.

Even as we stood on the curb waiting for a taxi to come, I was wrestling the urge to press my luck and see if she’d allow me to have her in the alleyway. I needed to get a hold of myself. I was a mess. I couldn’t tell the last time I felt this overwhelming sense of blazing, difficult-to-control passion. Oh, I was so close to forgetting I even had a friend named Chris. But fuck, I did, although, I was tempted to forget it for tonight. Yeah, no. Chris’s sister was better than alleyway sex or club fucking. She deserved a bed. Shit, fuck . . . without me in it because she was off-limits,remember that, fucker?

I needed to resist the temptation of that messy red hair now wild from a night of partying, curling at the nape of her neck, and makeup a bit messed up from the heat of the club, in a dress that was just begging to be set free from her body, and feet that deserved a foot rub. Because there was no switch I could flip to make it so that Chris and her stopped being siblings for a few fucking hours. And I valued our damned friendship.

Perhaps that was the reason I wasn’t sure what to feel as I watched that dude dance with her, hit on her. I should have been furious as I watched his hands travel around her waist and ass as they danced together. I should have wanted to rip him apart when I came across him trying to kiss her, trying to fuck her. And a part of me felt those things, but the other part of me wondered what would have happened if she was down for what he was proposing. I wasn’t sure if I would have stepped out of the shadows to stop them. Or leave. And I wasn’t sure if it had something to do with the fact that I knew I didn’t stand a chance with her or something else.

“Oh, thank goodness.” I heard her say. She hadn’t looked at me since we decided to leave the club. “These shoes are killing me,” she mumbled to herself, and as I tried to get away from my thoughts to find the reason for her gratitude, I saw a taxi slowing down before us.

I opened the car door for her and didn’t think as I placed my hand on her back when she stepped in front of me. It felt good, even if all I could feel was the fabric of her dress. Again, I was playing with fire. I had no right to be thinking about how good she felt. I snatched my hand away as if it burst into flames and got into the car after her.

Sitting next to each other in the back of the cab made it hard to just be. I was being anything but normal, staring ahead, fiddling my fingers on my leg as she turned her head to stare out the window.

“Where we headed?” The taxi man spoke in a foreign accent, an attitude too chipper this late at night as his swollen, sleep deprived eyes stared at us through the rearview mirror.

I turned around to look at Tiffany and made contact with her eyes before she lowered her head and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Um, so did you want to go to your parents’ house or your place?” I asked.

“Oh, no. My parents can’t see me like this,” she said with wide, worried eyes that appeared dark in the shadowed car.

“So, your place?” I asked.

“Uh, oh, yeah. That’s right. You know where it is. You know what, that would be great. Even if it’s just walls and floor, I’d take that over my parents’ disappointment,” she said.

I smiled at her before giving the driver the address to her apartment. “It’s a lot more than just walls and floors,” I told her. “Your brother wanted it to be ready to be moved into, so I spent the whole week making sure it was furnished.”

Her head shot up so she could look at me again, and this time, she didn’t run from our eye contact. She sucked me in when she asked, “Wait, you did?” She looked so touched by my admission, and that made me want to reach across to cup her face and taste those naked, pursed pink lips.

Shit. I was flustered. I cleared my throat as it became hard to find my voice. Then I burst her bubble. “Yeah, well, I mean, I own the apartments and he’s my best friend, so I wanted to make him happy.”

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