Evan Arden 02.5 Uncockblockable (3 page)

I took in another long breath and blew it out in a huff before I switched the phone to silent, dumped my drink d
own the sink, and threw myself onto the bed to get a few minutes relaxation before going back out.  My head was spinning, so I reached over and grabbed the cigarette pack inside the nightstand drawer – the one that contained my weed.

The little baggie inside the pack was also empty.

“Really?” I yelled out into the empty room.  “Really, Lee? 
That
is
so
not cool.”

Never rooming with him again.  As a matter of fact, I was tempted to say
, “Fuck it!” and just grab a taxi back home and stick him with the entire bar bill.  If he had come to the room right at that moment, or if I ended up back downstairs with a group of chicks wanting to ask me shit about my father, I’d probably lose my cool.

Especially without any weed.

No doubt – I should skip the party.

By a mile.

Some people are just perfectly fine with infamy.

Most people wouldn’t recognize the guy on the street, but if you had anything to do with Chicago’s illegitimate business at all, you’d probably heard the name Evan Arden.  People who didn’t even know him were scared shitless of him.

People who knew him were also scared shitless.

If you actually managed to get up close and personal with him, you’d figure out that for the most part, he wasn’t a bad guy at all – he had a decent sense of humor, could hold intelligent conversations, and took a lot of pride in his work.  If you spent enough time with him, you’d quickly figure out there was
something
inside him just under the surface, and that
something
was pretty intense – like a thousand-year-old volcano that was about to pop the top off a gigantic mountain.  If you had the opportunity to watch him hold a rifle to his shoulder and obliterate a little paper head on a target from five hundred yards away, you’d know just how destructive an eruption from him would be.

The noise at the shooting range would sometime
s put me on edge, but I had lucked out far more than I thought I would have when I decided to hang out with Evan Arden and Jonathan Ferris over the weekend.  I should have known shooting would be involved, but I hadn’t thought about it when I accepted.  I’m not a gun dude.  I don’t have a problem with them, and I end up around them all the time, they just aren’t my thing.

I wasn’t expecting to get any
decent action at the shooting range, either.  It wasn’t exactly the kind of place a lot of women tended to visit.  Not trying to be sexist or anything, but they just didn’t seem to ever be there.  This time was an exception, though, and while Evan and Jonathan were blasting holes in paper people, a hot little brunette with a deep tan walked into the open area outside the range and leaned up against the wall.

Jonathan glanced at me as I started to move away, and I heard him chuckle.

I kinda had Jonathan figured as Evan’s BFF or whatever, but they were as polar opposite as an elderly nun and a Chippendale dancer.  Jonathan could be loud and in your face, but you always knew there wasn’t anything inside of him that was all that threatening.  Well, not physically at least.  I wouldn’t piss him off because he’d have my bank accounts hacked four seconds later, but I never got the idea he was into much violence.  He was just your typical, brilliant, bored kid at one point and discovered the most interesting challenges were using technology to see just what he could get away with.  My dad used that to his advantage, and Jonathan seemed pretty happy to get paid to screw around on the internet and write useful apps to hack websites and other apps, which he then put up for free in the iTunes store.

Of course, once downloaded, the apps would start sending all the user’s private data back to a hosting system, but they rarely ever figured that out.

Without saying a word to my companions, I walked over to the brunette who was leaning against the rail, watching the shooters.  She had on those jeans that were really tight along the legs and high-heeled sandals of some sort.  They were hot, but I thought jeans and high heels together were just kind of unnatural.  I mean, jeans were supposed to make you feel comfortable, and heels were just…well…silly.

“
Is
this
the sort of thing you
like
to do on the weekends?” I asked her.  I tilted my head and half smiled as she turned her eyes to me.

Now before we go any further, let’s get something clear – I have had plenty of people get on m
e for emphasizing words in kind of a random sort of way, but I assure you there is nothing random about it.  It’s quite intentional, and very distinct, which is the point.

People don’t forget me.

Fame or infamy?  I don’t know; I just know it gets me laid.

“
Not really,” the brunette admitted.  “It’s too loud.”

I nodded meaningfully, looked out to the targets, and then back over to her.

“So, you
must
be here with
someone
?”  I wasn’t interested in having my balls threatened by a husband or boyfriend, even if she did have really nice tits.  It’s best to find these things out quickly.

“
My cousin,” she informed me.  “I came to visit, and this is his idea of entertainment.”

Out
-of-towner.  Perfect!

“
So where are
you
from?” I asked as I gave her a little smile.

I made a bunch of small talk
with the chick, whose name was Carolyn, found the occasional reason to inadvertently brush against her, and generally got her to the point where she was smiling and laughing with me.  We seemed to have a few things in common – a love of heavy metal being a big one – and talking with her was smooth and natural.  Once that happened, and considering her feelings towards her cousin at that moment, it was kind of an easy hit though I was happy just hanging out with her, too.

Okay, sure, getting laid
was always in the back of my head, but it wasn’t all about that.

Really!

The thing is?  I like talking to women.  Why?  Because they like to talk.  Talking to guys is freaking aggravating – it’s all the same shit – girls they’ve fucked, video games, guns, sports – it’s totally boring.  Talking to women is different.  For starters, women will talk about anything in the world, from books, to politics, to religion, to their menstrual cramps – nothing’s taboo.  Every group you sit down with will be having a totally different conversation.

You can learn a lot listening to chicks, and I mean about all kinds of shit.  If you can get yourself into a whole room of them and then get really quiet to the point where they forget there’s a guy in the room, you wouldn’t believe the kind of shit you’d he
ar.

Try it sometime.

Really.

My fingers brushed over her forearm with a little less subtlety, and she glanced down at the touch.

“You know, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but you’re actually the first girl I’ve really talked to since…well, for a long time.”

“
Since what?” Carolyn pressed, as I figured she would.

“
Nothing,” I muttered and dropped my hand from her arm and looked down.  She immediately placed hers on my bicep and bent down a bit to look me in the face.

“
You were going to say something,” she insisted.

I let out a long sigh and glanced out at the range where Evan was rhythmically pulling back on the trigger,
switching magazines, and then starting all over again.  His expression never changed – he was in the zone.  He was completely zoned, actually, as in being in a war-zone.

The phrase
shell-shocked
rattled in my head.

“
It’s just…I mean, I just
recently
came home from the Middle East.  Me and my buddy out there are Marines.  We had kind of a
rough time
, you know?  I haven’t been
out
much since we were brought back to the States, you know?”

Okay, so maybe half-stealing Evan’s story was a shitty thing to do, but I was on a mission.

“What happened?” she asked.

I shrugged one shoulder and leaned up against the barrier between us and the range before I looked back at her.

“You don’t
want
the details,” I informed her, “but Evan and I are the only ones who made it home from our unit.  He doesn’t talk about it, though, so don’t
ask
him.  He gets a little temperamental about it when people ask him questions.  I kinda wish he would talk to me, but I understand why he can’t.”

“
That has to be hard on you,” she said softly.

Girls always got all soft-spoken when you talked to them about tragedy.

“I miss the other guys,” I said.  “Everyone else in our unit.  No one else around here knew them, but he won’t talk about them.”

She reached up and placed her hand on the side of my face. 
I leaned a little into her palm as it caressed my cheek.  The softness of her touch made my cock stir a bit and was an interesting contrast to the gunfire around me.

“
That really is awful,” Carolyn said as she looked straight into my eyes.

I smiled slightly, shrugged one shoulder slow
ly, and looked away in a meager effort to appear…what?  Embarrassed?  Shy?  I didn’t know exactly what it conveyed – I just knew it worked on pretty much every chick I’d come across.

“
It’s all right,” I said softly.  “It really has been a
while
.  I mean, at least we’re out in public again, and I can stand to be here and talk to you, right?  There was a time
neither
of us could really
talk
to anyone.”

“
Well, I’m very proud of you, then,” she replied.

“
Thanks.”  I smiled again, dropped my gaze for a moment, and then quickly made eye contact with her again.  She had soft hazel eyes, which were nice enough to look at, but not as interesting as her tits.  She had really, really nice tits.

They weren’t really big or anything
– nice tits don’t have to be.

Jonathan walked back from the shooting area with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.  If he had been anyone else, the management probably would have thrown a fit, but no one said anything to him.  Maybe if he had been alone
, someone might have made a comment, but we both walked in with Arden, and everyone here knew exactly who he was.

Like I said,
Evan scared people.  Not me…well, not really.  I would never let it show if he did, but the guy sometimes looked like he was just going to start shooting people.  I didn’t think he’d ever make a move on me or anything – he was completely loyal to my dad – but sometimes he got this far away look in his eyes, and you could just tell something wasn’t right about him.

The dude just wasn’t stable.

Jonathan could be physically intimidating – he was a big guy – but just not in the same way.  He always seemed to be having fun with people even when he got a little pissy.

“
Are you still in the Marines?”

“
No,” I replied.  “Honorably discharged.”

“
What do you do now?”

A flash of the dude fr
om the previous night gave me my answer.

“
I paint.”

“Houses?”

“No.”  I snickered.

“
An artist?” She said with a raised brow. “That's a bit of a switch.”

“
I know,” I replied, “but my doctors said it was a good idea to do something creative.”

“
I guess that makes sense,” she said. She still sounded skeptical and watched me very closely. “So you paint what?  Landscapes?  Fruit?”

“
People.”

“
People?”

“
People.”

I watched her exp
ression while she contemplated.

“
I do body painting,” I lied through my teeth and hoped she wouldn’t ask me to prove it.  I’d talked to the actual body painter enough to be able to sound like I knew what I was talking about, but I hadn’t used a brush and paints since sixth-grade art class.

“
As in, all over body painting?” she asked.

“
Yep.”

She narrowed her eyes and stared at me intently.

“What would you paint on me?” she asked.

I looked her up and down for a moment, though I already had my answer. She was built just like one o
f the women in that guy's book.

“
A butterfly,” I said after a pause.

“
A butterfly?”

“
A butterfly,” I repeated. I wondered how many times we were going to play repeat after me.

“
What, on my back?”

“
No,” I said quietly.

“
Where?”

With what looked like trepidation, I reached out my arm and placed two fingers on her shoulder.  I made sure my touch was just barely
noticeable before I trailed them down, over her collar bone, and to the top of her left breast.

“
Your chest.”

She stared at me for a little while.  Her eyes were a little distrustful,
but through her shirt I noticed her nipples contracting under my touch.  She took a long breath and smiled.

“
That could be really interesting,” she said.  “Too bad I’m heading home tomorrow.”

“
I don’t have any paint with me anyway,” I said as my hand dropped, brushing over her erect nipple as it lowered back to my side.