I knew he was right. Mia couldn’t be trusted not to try and confront Alejandro, or worse, make a deal to keep her family safe. It wouldn’t have been the first time. She seemed to be blind to her own safety where they were concerned.
“Fuck!”
“I know.”
A heavy palm landed on my shoulder in what was probably supposed to be comfort. The fingers squeezed once before unfurling and pulling away with the pivot of Nero’s heels. I heard rather than saw him walk away. Shame kept my eyes pinned to where his boots had been moments ago, staying there long after his engine had revved to life and the force of his momentum blew past me, leaving me in a cloud of dust, grease, and regret.
He wasn’t wrong.
I glanced in the direction Nero had taken, the hum of his bike a faint rumble in the distance. I blew out a breath and rubbed at my tired face with a hand.
The fucker better come back. I couldn’t do this without him. I couldn’t just start a life with Mia without him. Sex drive aside, she was ours, even temporarily, and I didn’t know how to be just Dav without Nero. We were the people we were because of the other. My life wouldn’t make sense if he wasn’t in it.
Muttering a string of profanities I knew would have gotten me beaten as a kid, I dumped my body back into my car, ignored the three thousand degree jump the temperature inside had taken in the last five minutes and pointed the Mustang’s nose in the direction of Mia’s house.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” I grumbled under my breath, relenting to this new version of my life.
The idea of showing up at her house, waltzing up to her door and ringing the bell like any other normal person would have made sense, except for the fact that we weren’t normal people. Mia’s request not to show up at her house where anyone could see us wasn’t unreasonable; we weren’t the kind of people you introduced to your parents. The people in our community knew Mia, knew her parents. They were loved and respected. Two things neither I, nor Nero, could ever pretend to be, which is why I parked a block from her house and pulled out my phone.
“Hey, you home?” I typed.
She must have been on her phone or near it because her answer was immediate. “Hey, yeah. You okay?”
After her run in with Alejandro and everything else that week, her asking if I was okay only proved without a shadow of a doubt that she was too good for the likes of us. But I was a selfish bastard and it was too late to turn back now.
“Can I come over?” I wrote back and waited with a weird hitch in my chest, a weight that didn’t lift until her bubble popped up on the screen.
“My parents aren’t home yet, but come through the back, please.”
I stowed away my phone, pocketed my keys and jogged up the side street. The majority of the houses in this area were butt to butt, leaving a long stretch of alley dividing the yards. It was a littered mess of garbage and stray cats. The odd child played on rust swing sets or chased each other around abandoned heaps of car skeletons. I kept along the edge, tucking myself into the shadows cast by the dipping sun. I didn’t see anyone watching me, but I kept my head low while simultaneously counting the row of houses until I reached Mia’s.
The back gate swung open with a nudge of my palm. It groaned in distress, a sound of weak protest to an invasion the useless lock was failing to stop. I wondered how they hadn’t been robbed when their only protection was a piece of twine fluttering in the breeze. I’d noticed it the last time I’d snuck into her room, it had bothered me then, too, but it hit harder this time around. My mind was already thinking of ways to mention it to Mia when the backdoor creaked open and the woman in question stepped onto the porch wearing a long-sleeved top and baggy shorts. Anyone with two brain cells could tell it was way too fucking hot for that top, but I knew why she wore it even before I saw the missing light in her eyes.
“Mia.”
I was up the two rickety steps in one leap and I had her up in my arms. The heel of my boot kicked the door shut behind us as I carted her inside.
Somehow, she wound up on the square slab of table taking up the majority of her kitchen. Her knees were wide around my hips, mirroring the tight confinement of her arms laced around my neck. My fingers tangled in her damp, unbound locks, twisting the satin strands into my fist and dragging her face back.
“Did he hurt you?” Her head started to move with the motions of her no, but I tightened my fingers, stopping her. “The truth.”
Her eyes welled even as she bit down hard on her quivering lip. The sight of her unshed tears punched a hole into my chest, stealing all my oxygen.
“I’m okay,” she croaked.
“That’s not what I asked you,” I bit out, struggling to control my hold on her, struggling to contain the urge to get back in my car, hunt down Alejandro, and peel the skin off his bones.
“No,” she whispered at last. “He didn’t.”
Maybe not physically, but there was no mistaking the tremors coursing down her arms, or the fact that she was wearing a full sleeved top during a heat wave. I knew there was more than one way to hurt someone, to cause them fear and shame. He may not have physically threatened her, but he’d broken something.
“He won’t touch you again,” I vowed. “I swear it.”
The liquid surface of her golden eyes glimmered in the faint light shimmering through the lace curtains over the sink. They peered up at me with a trust I didn’t deserve but was too much of a coward to walk away from. She smiled and, although it was weak and void of its usual glow, it warmed all the dead places inside me like the sun chasing away the rain. Her fingers slipped across the back of my head and I was nudged to her.
It was unclear how something as simple as the warm brush of our lips turned into a battle to remove my belt and her shorts. There was nothing but a blur of anxious hands tearing at clothes, tearing at each other. Lips and teeth mashed with ravenous hunger, refusing to part even when I slammed up inside her and she wailed. The table rocked violently. Something crashed, shattering into a million jagged pieces across the worn linoleum. The sound was lost somewhere beneath the grunts and groans as I drove into Mia’s wet heat with the wild abundance of a madman. I tore off her top and chucked it somewhere, never wanting to see it on her again. Her miles of soft skin burned beneath my touch, my mouth, the hard nip of my teeth. She smelled of soap and something lavender, and I hated it, hated the absence of my scent on her. It only propelled me to pound harder.
“Dav!” she sobbed, twisting the material of my top into her fists and clinging. “Don’t stop! I’m so close!”
With a sound between a snarl and a growl, I tore out of her just long enough to flip her over, bend her face down across the cold surface of her family’s table.
“I want you to remember this every time you sit here with your family,” I taunted into the soft curve of her ear. One hand tucked beneath the knee of her right leg and dragged the limb up, forcing her onto the tiptoes of her left foot and widening her stance. “I want you to think of me inside you and you begging me to fuck you.”
I was inside her again, slower this time, feeding myself in inch by inch. When I was halfway in, I slammed up the rest of the way, driving harder with each thrust. Mia clawed the scarred surface, dragging herself high enough to anchor her fingers along metal trimmed edges. I clamped my hands over hers, draping my chest over her arching spine and shackling her into place.