OGs: Deep Down (18 page)

“I get you don’t want me here in the morning, but it’s still dark outside. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m not in a good place right now.” She never was when memories overwhelmed her. Plus there were the panic attacks; those always left her shaken.

“I can distract you,” he said, nuzzling her neck.

“I’m sure you can.” Although by the looks of it, he was the one who needed distraction. He probably didn’t know it, but his jaw was still locked. He wasn’t in a good place right now either. “I can distract you too. Maybe I could return the favor from early in the evening,” she suggested, glancing at his hard-on.

He pinned her with his stare. “You know fucking you with my tongue is not doing you a favor, right? I enjoyed it as much as you did. There’s nothing you have to return.”

“Still. I’d like to,” she insisted, moving down to kneel on the floor between his legs, skimming her fingers slowly down his ripped chest, pausing for a second to admire the elaborate tribal tattoo that adorned his lower abdomen.

She had no clue how to suck a pierced cock, but she could figure it out. As soon as she leaned on him and her lips brushed him, he stopped her.

Mike loved oral sex, giving and getting it, but for some reason he wasn’t open to it now.

She looked at him questioningly. Her Mike had been very easy to read; it wasn’t that he wore his heart on his sleeve, but whatever he was feeling, it radiated through him, permeating the room. This Mike now was more guarded, more closed off.

She lowered her gaze to his cock, throbbing and pulsing in her hand, when something from his tattoo caught her eye. Was that her name between the complicated artwork? Before she could get a word out, he jerked her onto her feet and pushed her on the bed.

“Mike!”

“Don’t want to fuck your face now, kitten.” He flipped her on her stomach. “Get on your hands and knees and raise that sweet ass of yours to the sky for me. You promised in the community center I could ride it, or have you forgotten already?”

Okay, so it looked like he wasn’t going to let her go down on him. Not only that, but there was not going to be any discussion about the why either.

She went on all fours. “You can ride my ass if you pull my hair.”

He positioned himself behind her and then fisted her hair, pulling at it as he licked her exposed throat and thrust into her pussy, parting her tender flesh. “That’s a given, baby. That’s a fucking given.”

* * * *

After leaving her exhausted and deeply asleep, Mike walked out of Kyra’s a bit before dawn, totally drained, his heart heavy, his balls hurting from coming so many times.

He got in his truck and rubbed his chest, trying to relieve the pressure, but the gnawing ache that made breathing difficult didn’t go anywhere.

He’d spent the night fucking Kyra, emptying himself inside her tight pussy again and again while she came apart in his arms, screaming his name and marking his back. He’d had the best sex of his life—hell, every time with Kyra was the best. He should be relaxed and satisfied, basking in afterglow and contentment, his mind blown to hell and back, floating in la-la land. Instead, here he was, his chest so fucking tight he could barely breathe.

He was so frustrated, so angry, so sad, so pissed off, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt hollow and full of rage at the same time.

Going home to sleep was out of the question. There was no way in hell he was going to be able to close his eyes and calm his racing mind enough to rest, let alone sleep, so he drove around for a while, until he found himself in front of his grandmother’s house.

He’d planned to track her down sometime later, but what the heck. He had a bone to pick with her for her stunt in the community center. He might as well do it now.

He didn’t bother knocking on the door; he went around the house and walked into the backyard. She was an early riser, so there was only one place she would be at six o’clock in the morning, and that was watching the sunrise.

This time was no exception.

She smiled as she noticed him approaching, and patted the chair near her.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked, sitting by her side, no animosity in his tone.

She gave him a once-over but didn’t comment on his clothes, or lack thereof. “Honestly? I was thinking of you, my boy. I’m tired of seeing you suffer.”

“You didn’t need to feign an injury and lock us in.”

“Would you have come to the community center if I hadn’t? Or stayed if you could have walked away?”

He rubbed his face. “Hell, I don’t know.” Probably not.

“I was not risking it. For the past days you’ve been miserable. Growling at everything and everyone. Shutting me down. Refusing to talk to Kyra whenever she approached you in the gym. I don’t know what happened that made your already tense relationship with her escalate to hostile, but I wasn’t going to sit by and watch you both suffer without butting in.”

He had a huge lump lodged in his throat all the time he sat there, watching the sun peek from the horizon, dying to tell his grandmother all that he’d found out about Kyra’s life, but he didn’t. Not his story to tell. But there was something that was his to bear.

“I fucked up,” he admitted, letting out a long breath.

“What do you mean? What happened?”

He shook his head. “Not now. Then. Seven years ago.” So many regrets. So fucking many.

She looked at him softly. “You did the best you knew at that moment. So did Kyra.”

“Well, my best was sorely lacking.”

She patted his arm. “No, it wasn’t.”

Hardly. “What do you do with all the what-ifs, Grandma?”

“I’m eighty-one. If there is one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that looking backward only gets you a stiff neck and a head contusion when you crash into the lamppost you didn’t see in front of you.”

True, but still. He’d been so sure of how things had gone wrong in the past, where Kyra had gone wrong. Now he wasn’t so sure anymore.

And that motherfucker Drake. He’d left her to take the fall. He was so going to pay for that. Mike was going to figure out a way to do that even if it killed him.

He tore his gaze away and, leaning his head on the chair, let out a long breath. “Kyra came back for my birthday a month after leaving, wanting to patch things up. I don’t remember anything from that night. I was too drunk, but apparently she found me with Jess.”

“Jess?” she asked, flinching.

He nodded. The only time in his life he’d drunk so hard he’d blacked out and it had to be that night. “She went back to the ship. You know the rest.”

“I’m so sorry, Mike. I know you had it rough these past years. I’ve seen you in so much pain, but you need to believe that everything happened for a reason. Maybe you guys needed this time apart to truly appreciate who you both are.”

Worst of all? He’d thought Kyra had been happy. He’d been hurt beyond belief, existing rather than living, but even then, he’d been so proud of Kyra when she made it. He hated that she’d been exposed to that asshole Drake, that she hadn’t been as happy as she should have been. She deserved the fucking world, not grief. Not jail. Not panic attacks.

“Kyra had it rougher. She’s carrying demons.” And he didn’t know how to deal with that.

“Kyra’s been carrying demons for a long time, honey. Since she came to Alden. You were just too young and in love to realize it. And she was just too good at concealing it.”

“I know,” he mumbled. But now there were more, and he had contributed to them.

Kyra had been like a damaged flower when he met her. She’d bloomed with him, but she’d been very reserved, which he had always thought had to do with losing her parents at a young age. But not his affection or his family’s or her foster parents’ seemed to make those demons fade. There had always been something driving Kyra forward. She needed that recognition. She needed to prove to the world she could be someone.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“The same nothing that has you up at six, wearing the same clothes as when I locked you up in the community center yesterday afternoon along with the girl of your dreams?”

He kept his mouth shut.

“Yeah, I figured so.” And she just smiled that frigging annoying, know-it-all smile. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but there is always a higher plan. Always. Even when we can’t see it, things always happen the way they are supposed to happen. And always for a reason.”

Well, she was right; he didn’t want to hear it.

“I believe in fate. It’s everything set.”

“Really?” he snorted. “Then what was that shit about you locking Kyra and me in if not interfering with fate?”

She rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t interfering. That was lending a hand. Sometimes fate is just too busy.”

“Right.” He was going to say something more, but then her phone chimed, and he got sidetracked. “Who is sending you messages at this time of the day?”

“My girls. I think we got an STD.”

Mike choked on the breath he was taking. “What?”

“Senior Texting Disorder. Greta read about it in a magazine. I think we got it. Read for me? I left my glasses inside.”

Mike hesitated, but what the hell.

6:00am and I’ve been awake for 2 hours. I hate getting old. What are you girls doing?

His grandmother chuckled after he read it to her. “Poor Greta. She loved sleeping so much she was late for work half the time. Now that she doesn’t have anywhere to go, she can’t sleep. That’s the irony of getting old for you.”
Beep-beep
. Another message. This one from Wilma.

I’m in the garden panty dropping.

Next one:
Blasting pussies.

Next one:
PLANTING TULIPS, dammit!

Hate architect.

Next one:
AUTOCORRECT, hate autocorrect.

In spite of everything, Mike broke into laughter. “Not reading this to you,” he said, handing her the phone. He didn’t know about the OGs, but Wilma’s phone sure had a disorder.

“What?” She squinted at the screen for a while, then laughed too. “Wilma’s cell is acting like a dirty old man again.”

* * * *

The Ultimate Disco Dance workout was her last class of the evening, so after it finished, Kyra took a fast shower, picked up her gear, and headed out of the gym and up to Mike’s apartment, where Sara had told her that his grandmother had taken Sam.

Kyra climbed the stairs two at the time and rang the bell.

The gym was on the ground floor of a two-story building, which belonged to his family. She’d heard that the space above the gym had been renovated and turned into two apartments. He lived upstairs in one of them, but she’d never been there before.

Rebecca opened the door. “Hi, honey, come in. You done for tonight?”

Kyra nodded, stepping in. Wow, such spaciousness. It was a huge, open-floor-plan apartment with picture windows, high ceilings, and a flight of stairs leading to a bedroom. “What are you guys doing here? I thought I was supposed to pick Sam up from your place.”

She’d tried to get a babysitter for Sam instead of relying so much on Greta and Mike’s family, but they hadn’t let her. They’d actually paid Abby, the girl she’d hired, for the whole month, and then they fired her.

“Mommy!”

Sam was standing on the sofa, her hands on the back cushion, bouncing. In front of her, a huge flat-screen TV.

“Hi, baby.”

“Come sit with us. We’re watching
Karate Kid
.”

“We were going to go home, but we came up here to drop some things, and Sam wanted to watch a movie, so we stayed here,” Rebecca explained as they walked over to the sofa.

“Mike has the biggest TV, Mom. It’s like the movies.”

Yeah, she could tell. Kyra kissed her excited kid. “Ready to go home?”

“No!” Sam all but yelled. “It just started. Let’s watch this together. This is so cool.”

“I’ve seen it already, baby.” What red-blooded American hadn’t?

“Please, I want to see the end.”

Rebecca grabbed her purse and turned to Kyra. “I need to go, but you guys can stay. Whenever the movie ends, just close the door on your way out.”

“I don’t know.” Kyra didn’t want to be here without Rebecca, especially since Mike didn’t know they were there either. She’d insisted on them keeping their distance. Barging into his home and getting comfy to watch a movie would more than cross that boundary.

Rebecca must have read her mind, for she leaned toward her. “Mike has classes late tonight. You could probably see all the
Karate Kid
movies, and he still wouldn’t be here.” Then she hugged Kyra, kissed Sam, and left.

Kyra sat on the couch, and Sam snuggled against her, placing her little head on Kyra’s lap. “Aren’t you hungry, baby? Don’t you prefer we go to supper somewhere and finish this another day? I can rent it, and we can watch it at home.”

Sam shook her head, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Already had supper.”

Ookay. Failed attempt.

Kyra looked around, curious about the place Mike called home. It was a perfect bachelor pad, and there was nothing of her or their time together in there, except for the rocking chair in the far corner, in front of a window. They had bought that rocking chair when they’d lived together during her college years.

There were very few memories she’d treasured from her childhood before coming to stay in Alden, and one of those was her grandmother sitting in her rocking chair, chatting with Kyra while they watched TV or Kyra played and her grandmother crocheted. She was the only biological relative Kyra remembered with fondness.

The kid on the screen was waxing cars when Kyra heard someone opening the door. She turned to see Mike dropping his duffel bag on the floor and coming their way. He was fresh from the shower, his hair still wet.

“Hi, girls,” he said, leaning near Kyra behind the sofa, his forearms on the back of it.

“Mike, can I call you Mr. Miyagi?” Sam asked, turning to him.

He barked out a laugh. “Not if you expect me to answer, baby girl.”

Sam pouted and was about to protest, but something happened on the screen, and the movie sucked her right back in.