Oxygen Deprived (Kilgore Fire Book 3) (7 page)

I hadn’t gotten the chance to study him too closely yet due to the power being out, despite spending nearly four hours in each other’s company.

“If you want,” he acquiesced.

His blonde hair reflected the color of the fire, making it appear reddish blonde when it was in fact graying blonde.

“Okay,” I hummed. “My worst sexual experience?”

He nodded.

I grinned.

“Danny had to take a little blue pill for the majority of our relationship if he wanted to get hard,” I admitted. “So then he’d last for hours, and I hated having sex with him.”

He blinked. Slowly.

“That’s it?” He wondered.

I nodded. “His cock was, I don’t know, just weird. It was shaped like a banana. It was skinny, and it was really curved. Something about it… it was just ugly, ok? And even worse was that he didn’t know what to do with it. Ugh. It got to be that I dreaded having sex with him, it was starting to gross me out.”

His mouth dropped open.

“Then why were you still with him?” He blurted in surprise. “And why the hell did you flip the fuck out and fuck his car up…and him?”

“I don’t really know,” I confessed. “He felt…safe. We didn’t do it all that often, and now that I know why, it’s not as soothing as it once had been. Danny and I were really good friends before he asked me out, and it’s hard to lose ten years of friendship.”

“So you stayed with him out of obligation, and because you didn’t want to lose his friendship,” he rumbled.

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

He gave me a look.

“Why’d he do this to you? Treat you like that? Take all your things when he left?” He pushed. “You’re not telling me everything.”

I bit my lip, wondering if I should tell him the next part.

“I wanted to get married, to have kids,” I finally explained. “Lots of them. I’m already pushing thirty. He just seemed like my safest bet to get that.”

Something flashed in his eyes so fast that I couldn’t read it before it was gone, but it definitely had me intrigued.

“My cock’s considered large. And on a scale of large cocks, it’s on the larger side,” he changed the subject.

My eyes flicked to his lap again, but the blanket was still in the way.

His chuckle brought my eyes back to his.

“I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “But you can’t just say something like that and not expect me to look.”

His smile had flutters erupting in my belly.

“I’ll have to remember that for next time,” he said. “I win.”

I looked down at the cards between us, all of which were now on Drew’s side of the invisible line, and I cursed.

“Cheater.”

He shrugged. “I’m older and know more tricks. Cheating in cards is relative. It’s more like knowing all the ways to play the game.”

Why bother spraying Febreeze after you shit? All it does is make it smell like shitrus, not citrus.

-Text from Aspen to Naomi

Drew

So the nights at Aspen’s house continued.

We were on day six of our fucked up winter storm.

I’d worked a double shift the two nights before, and today was the first time I’d seen her in nearly fifty hours.

I felt like a fucking juvenile. All I could think about was if Aspen was warm enough, or if she was keeping herself well entertained.

Then I’d pulled into my driveway to see a massive snowman in her yard the size of which I’d never seen in Texas.

The sign on the front of the massive snowman said, ‘Do you want to build a snowman?’

I’d laughed all the way up her driveway, and when she opened the door and I’d smelled the bacon cooking, I’d come inside and hadn’t left since.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Aspen asked, egging me on.

I lifted my beer, the ninth or the tenth, and stopped when I realized it was empty.

“You want the truth?” I asked.

“We are playing truth or dare,” she said, laughter filling her voice.

I shrugged.

“I was in college,” I said, apologizing ahead of time for what I was about to tell her.

“Okay…” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye before taking another swig of her bottle.

She passed it over to me, and I took a drink of her wine.

“I thought you said you weren’t allowed to have alcohol,” I said after I took a long swig.

“I’m not.” She took another swig. “But it’s either I drink, or I run away. I think drinking is the better end of the spectrum.”

I didn’t argue with her. I just hoped they didn’t randomly show up and test her.

That would suck.

Aspen giggled, causing my gut to clench even more tightly than it had been throughout the day.

God, the way she laughed, so uninhibited, was so sexy.

In fact, the woman had a way of making me feel things I’d never experienced before in all my forty-two years of life.

Just by
laughing
.

“When I was in college, my roommate used to always come in and steal my stuff. Nothing was sacred. My clothes. My shoes. My food.
My deodorant.” I took another swig of the wine and passed it back
. “Then, one day, I came in to half of my tube of toothpaste gone and I just…snapped.”

Her eyes widened so far that it was almost comical.

“What did you do?” She pushed.

I closed my eyes.

“Did you just blush?” She asked.

I started to laugh.

“I’m not proud of myself,” I admitted. “Now that I’m a firefighter, I realize how terrible bodily fluids are to share, but then…” I shook my head. “I was well and truly pissed, so I masturbated into a Ziploc bag and then squeezed it all into the toothpaste tube.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“You didn’t,” she said, almost sounding envious.

I nodded again.

“I did,” I winced. “And I felt terrible about it after it was all said and done,” I told her. “I forgot about the toothpaste, having put it in a drawer and never looked back at it again,” I smiled slightly at the memory. “Then one day I happened to glance in the drawer to find it nearly all the way gone, and I wrote my roommate a note.”

“What did the note say?” She leaned forward, listening intently.

She was now on her knees, waiting for me to finish the story.

“I said, ‘It’s wrong to steal, and I don’t appreciate your using my stuff without asking first. I hope you enjoyed brushing your teeth with my jizz in your toothpaste over the last month’,” I admitted.

She gagged, slapping her hand over her mouth before she rolled over onto her side and started laughing uproariously.

I watched her roll around the floor on her back, tears coming down her cheeks as she laughed too hard to control her bodily functions.

“That’s…” she wheezed. “Epic.”

“What about you?” I asked her.

“Truth?” She said, raising her brow in question.

I nodded, practically vibrating with the desire to hear her answer.

“It’s not really funny like yours. Mine’s my worst shame. I have nightmares about it,” she sighed softly.

I looked down at her, purposefully letting her see my disappointment, and then nearly laughed when she sighed so exaggeratingly.

But what I expected to be funny, was anything but.

I could’ve guessed just about anything would’ve come out of her mouth than what did.

“I’m not my father’s kid,” she whispered darkly.

My mouth dropped open.

“And that’s a shame to you…how?” I wondered.

She bit her lip.

“If I tell you this…you have to promise not to tell anyone,
ever
,” she ordered fiercely. “You cannot ever tell. If you tell, I’ll probably be disowned by my mother, and I love her so much that I’d probably kill myself.”

I blinked.

“If it’s that big of a deal…” I started. “Then I don’t want to know.”

She waved me off.

“Downy’s father died before I was born…” she started.

I nodded.

I’d heard that in our previous talks.

“Okay,” I circled my finger for her to continue.

She bit her lip.

Then she opened her mouth and said words that I would’ve never expected to come out of her mouth.

“I’m not Downy’s half-sister. I’m his full sister,” she blurted.

I blinked.

“Ummm,” I asked in confusion. “How?”

She got up and ran to her bedroom, then came back a couple minutes later with some documentation in her hands.

“Out of spite, one day when I was eighteen or nineteen,” she started. “I got really mad at Downy, and I was going to prove to him once and for all that we weren’t related.”

I nodded.

“Don’t ask why, I was a kid,” she ordered.

I held up two fingers in a scout’s honor.

She gave me a dirty look that clearly told me she’d fuck me up if I ever thought about telling.

“So I steal some of his hair, and then sent some of my hair in, to
have it analyzed.” She handed me the paperwork.

“What’s this?” I asked, looking at the lines, dashes, and percentages.

“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “This right here shows the likelihood of me being related to him.”

She pointed to a number.

It read:
99.99%.

My mouth dropped open.

“That’s impossible unless…”

She was nodding before I had a chance to finish.

“Exactly,” she said. “So I started to dig. I hired a private investigator to find out how. After running the test two more times.”

“How, at eighteen, were you able to afford this?” I questioned.

She shrugged.

“My parents are wealthy, and when I turned eighteen, a small inheritance hit my account. I blew through it so fast my head spun, and I only have a few things to show for it,” she sighed. “Anyway, so I have this man trying to figure out why, and when he comes to me with the news that I was conceived through artificial insemination from a sperm bank out of Dallas, it all started to make sense.”

“So they froze your father’s…sperm.”

She nodded again emphatically. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

“And have you ever figured anything else out about it, or did you stop once you’d gotten that far?”

She shook her head.

“That’s the shameful part of all this. I went through a hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying to figure it out…but I’d gotten shafted by the PI. He’d taken me for a naïve girl, and I had been,” she admitted.

I shook my head.

“That’s ludicrous.”

She agreed with a grunt.

“But I count it as worth it…
to know
. I just wish I could have more information without bringing it up to my mom. This would break her for sure,” she whispered, picking at invisible lint on her shirt.

A shirt that was clinging to her breasts like a fucking second skin.

My eyes jerked up to her face, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw she wasn’t paying attention to where my eyes were aimed.

She was too busy looking at the fire.

Her hands wringing in her lap as she thought about what she’d just told me.

“What is it?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I want to tell Downy, but I’m scared he’ll tell my mom. Then my father will leave,” she hesitated. “Again. My mom—she tried to leave him once for doing some stupid shit when it came to Downy a few years ago—but she couldn’t function. When he got done serving his sentence, she went back to him. This is the last thing they need right now—me making it harder than it needs to be.”

“You’re thinking like a kid,” I told her. “Think like an adult. You deserve to know who your father is. Why are you so worried about your parents? They’re adults, too.”

She pursed her lips, thinking long and hard before she gave voice to the words that were just at the tip of her tongue.

“My father’s what you would call…difficult,” she finally settled on. “He’s not the nicest person in the world, and he’s just an okay father. Not great, but not the worst either. I wasn’t beaten. I never wanted for anything. Not a day went by that I worried if I would eat the next day, and I always had a roof over my head and a place to sleep.”
She exhaled
. “But he’s mean. Very mean, and it’s my mom who ends up taking the brunt of it if we do something that displeases him.”

“Take it, how?” I wondered.

“Doesn’t take her to the business functions he attends, which she loves. Doesn’t allow her to go out with him at all, in fact. My mom’s pretty needy and clingy. She’s very emotional, and although she’s the best mom in the world, she’s high maintenance,” she explained. “She’s not the kind of woman who would make it on her own. She’d fall apart if my dad left her.”

“Hmmm,” I murmured. “Then I’ll just have to bow to your experience with her. If you think she won’t be able to handle it, who am I to argue?”

“I’ve been fighting with myself about telling my brother, but …” She stopped when I held up a finger for her to hold on.

Pressing the green phone button, I answered my phone.

“Hi, Attie,” I said. “How was your day off from school?”

She didn’t bother to answer.

“You missed the pickup time,” she grumbled loudly.

I looked at my watch and cursed.

“I’m sorry, honey. I thought we’d said we weren’t doing it today because of the snow?” I said.

“And I told you,” she said with not a little amount of attitude. “That I didn’t want to reschedule.”

I didn’t argue with her. I’d figured out long ago that it was easier to just let the attitude go rather than confronting her about it.

“I’m sorry, pickle lily,” I said softly. “Do you want me to come…”

She hung up, and I was left looking at the black phone like a dumbass.

“So…she sounds…nice,” Aspen teased.

The corner of my mouth kicked up, and I stood, taking our plates and dishes to the trash.

“She’s my baby, and I think she’s trying to stay loyal to her mom without cutting me out of her life altogether. She doesn’t really know how to balance that, and I think I get the brunt of it when she’s on the phone. She doesn’t do that when we’re actually with each other. I think she puts that show on in front of her mom to make her feel better,” I disclosed.