Takedown Teague (Caged #1) (15 page)

I closed my eyes as the water poured down my shoulders and back.  I curled the fingers of my right hand around the base and dragged slowly up and over the tip, while the left hand reached down to cup my balls.  In my mind, I lay her down on the bed and lifted one leg up over my shoulder before slowly sliding into her.  Her head was pressed against the mattress, and her back arched as she moaned my name.

“Oh yeah,” I mumbled.  “That’s it, baby.  Take it…”

My hand moved faster over my shaft, and the Tria in my head moved rhythmically with my thrusts against the sheets.  I could see my hand reaching to caress her breast, stroke the nipple, and pinch it.  I thrust faster. Tria cried out again, and my legs shook as the buildup exploded over my hand before being washed away by the shower stream.

“Fuck,” I muttered.  Even standing there in the shower, I felt like I needed a shower.

After I got myself back under control, I washed my hair, which didn’t take much since it was nice and short, thanks to a coupon for a haircut Tria found for me at the grocery store.  I turned around a couple of times to get all the soap off of me, then turned off the water and climbed out.

The line of little bottles Tria had on the shower ledge called to me—I really wanted to know which one made her smell so good, but I restrained myself.  Something about sniffing her shower products seemed pretty creepy—tempting, but creepy.

Back in the bedroom, I poked around in the bottom dresser drawer, trying to find some clean boxers.  The pile of laundry in the corner was now being shoved into a laundry bag Tria brought from her old apartment, but the clothes were starting to hang out the top.  Tria had her dirty clothes in a plastic laundry basket.  Since I had done a crappy job of putting shit away after the last laundry trip, I couldn’t find any boxers and decided to just forget it.

I turned to grab my jeans, which were already laid out on the bed.  At that exact moment, Tria turned the corner and walked into the room.

“Oh my God!” Tria screeched as she simultaneously covered her face with her hands, turned bright red, and tried to get back out of the room without seeing where she was going.  She banged into the wall a bit but managed to get herself out of there.

I had to laugh, not just because the sight was pretty damn funny but also in relief.  If I hadn’t just jacked off, the knowledge that she was looking at my dick would have probably brought him to attention pretty quickly.

Moody little bastard.

I pulled my jeans up and buttoned them.  When I walked into the living room, Tria was on the couch with her head in her hands.

“I am so sorry!” she cried without looking up.  “I didn’t know you were changing.  I wasn’t trying to…to…”

“Tria, relax,” I said with another short laugh.  “Fuck, Yolanda’s always walking in on me, and she doesn’t even have the decency to look away!”

“I just…I mean…I didn’t know you were…”

I walked around her and sat down on the other side.  I had spent way too much time in the cage being mostly naked to really be concerned about any chick seeing my cock, and I didn’t want her to be upset about it.  There was also that distinctly porn-influenced male side of me that just wanted to yank it out and let her get to know it really well so she would know for sure that being looked at didn’t bother me.

That line of thinking was going to have to change pretty quickly, refractory period be damned.

“It’s okay,” I told her.  “Really.  No big deal.  Shit like that is bound to happen when you live with someone, right?

“You aren’t mad?” Tria asked as she peeked at me through her fingertips.

“Not at all,” I said.  “I would have closed the door; I just didn’t realize you were back already.”

“I just got here,” she said, and I was relieved to hear it.  Hopefully that meant she hadn’t heard me in the shower with my dick in my hand.  “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I repeated.

She dropped her hands but wouldn’t look in my direction.  Her shoulders moved up and down a little as she tried to get herself together again.  Eventually, she sighed heavily and then stood up.

“I’m going to make dinner,” she announced.

“Need any help?”

“No, I’m good.”

She went into the kitchen, and I just watched her.  For the most part, we seemed to be comfortable living in the same space together, but there were definitely some things that caused a bit of tension.  Tria kept her clean clothes in her suitcase, refusing all my offers to empty a couple of dresser drawers for her.  It bugged me, partially because she was just so damn stubborn about it, but also because it made the whole arrangement seem more transient than I wanted to believe.  Even in the short amount of time she had been there, I found myself enjoying the company.  I had pretty much lived on my own since I left the house where I grew up, and having someone else around was pretty nice.

Our lives just seemed to…mesh.

She was a morning shower kind of person, and she got out whatever she was going to wear and took it to the bathroom to dress.  I showered after running, and I would usually just change my own clothes quickly while she was in the bathroom.  She made breakfast and supper on most days but was usually either in class or studying at lunchtime.  That worked fine, too, since those were my usual workout times.  We both kept late hours, and though she didn’t come back to watch me fight after that first night, she always waited for me to get home before she went to bed.

Every night, I woke up at least a couple of times to her warmth and scent surrounding me.  Usually I would just watch her face for a while as she slept, and then I would shift back to my own side of the bed.  No matter how many times I moved away, I ended up close to her again.  In the morning, she was always up before I awakened and usually in the kitchen making something.

I loved watching that woman cook.

That thing I had always heard about guys looking for a woman like their own mothers is a bunch of bullshit.  I was pretty sure my mother didn’t even know what part of the house contained the kitchen.  I kept the TV on most of the time when Tria was cooking, but I always leaned way forward so I could watch her.  She put a tray of little round things in the oven, and just seeing her bending over did weird things to the pit of my stomach.  Every time she pulled a spoon out of a saucepan and used her finger to get a little taste of what she was cooking, my dick got hard.

There had to be something seriously wrong with me.

“Ready to eat?” Tria called, startling me from my 1950s television show fantasies.  She was smiling and wiping her hands on a towel, and I had to excuse myself to “wash my hands” before we ate.

After we were done eating Swedish Bean Balls, I still had no idea what they were, but they tasted fantastic.  Conversation with Tria during dinner was also easy and flowed without effort from one topic to the next.  We talked about her classes, technology, the landlord, politics, and the state of the neighborhood where we lived until the leftovers were cold, and I had managed to down about four beers.  We even cleaned up in sync with one another, and by the time we finished, it was late and time for bed.

The only thing that was still weird and awkward was getting into bed together.  It was likely just in my own head because all I could do was think about how I was going to wake up with her in my arms at some point.  I’d watch her sleep for a while, and I was fairly certain I had her face completely memorized.

That night was no different.

I woke to my nose pressed lightly to the back of her neck and my arm wrapped around her stomach, holding her back against my chest.  Somehow, my hand had actually slipped underneath her shirt, and my fingers twitched, aching to stroke softly over the bare skin of her belly.

Inhaling, I closed my eyes again, basking in the scent from her hair and skin and realizing that if I splayed out my fingers, the tips of them could touch the curved undersides of her breasts.  I had to stifle a groan as I spent a moment being overwhelmed by the combination of the fragrance in my nose, the soft feeling of her skin on my fingers, and my engorged cock pressed tightly against her backside.

Shit!

I had to grind my teeth together to keep from screaming the word out loud as I quickly extricated myself and rolled over to the other side of the bed.  My feet swung over and touched the floor, and I quietly launched myself out of the bed, out of the room, and into the bathroom.

My hand was down the front of my sweats before I could even get the lid to the toilet up.  Inside my brain, the scenario from the bed continued with the added memory of feeling her skin and the pressure of her ass on my cock.  My real hand gripped and pumped at my cock while the one in my imagination moved up, caressing her breasts as my lower body shifted to push inside of her from behind.

Semen coated the edge of the toilet seat and part of the underside of the lid.  I braced myself against the tank for a moment as I tried to catch my breath, then wiped the junk off with a piece of toilet paper.  My fingers dug into my eyes and rubbed for a moment while I realized that little bit of clean-up wasn’t going to be good enough.  I found a washcloth and doused it in water and soap, cleaned the toilet off more effectively, and tossed the cloth onto the corner ledge of the shower.

This was all so fucked up.

I was never one to get worked up over a particular girl, but this was getting ridiculous.

“The color looks perfect.” Stacy made the remark as I checked to make sure the paint had dried on the bookshelf.

It ended up about three feet high, two feet wide, and a foot deep with four shelves for Tria to house her books.  It wasn’t pretty by anyone’s standards, but the paint brightened it up, and it would at least do the job for which it was made.

“I think it turned out all right,” I said, tapping the back of one of the shelves with my fingers.  “It seems to be pretty much dry now, too.”

“Are you going to carry it home?” she asked.

“Not much of an option there,” I said with a crooked smile.

“How about you put it in the back of my car and I drive you?” the cook suggested.  “I’m done here until this evening.  I have the time.”

“Really?  That would be sweet!  Thanks!”

I put some newspaper down on the back seat of Stacy’s beat up old Ford and placed the bookshelf on top of it. I climbed into the passenger seat of the musty smelling car and rolled down the window.

“So tell me about this roommate,” Stacy said as soon as the car started moving.  “What’s her name?”

“Tria,” I replied.

“Is she pretty?” Stacy asked.

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“And do you like her?”

“For Christ’s sake,” I growled.  “How many times do I have to tell people it’s not like that?”

She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye as she pulled out into the street.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.  “It’s just that everyone keeps assuming I’m doing her.”

“I didn’t assume anything,” Stacy stated.  “I just asked if you liked her.”

I huffed out my nose.

“You did make her a bookcase,” she pointed out.  “You must not hate her.”

“I like her fine,” I replied.

“Well, tell me about her, then.”

I reached up and scratched the back of my neck.

“She’s smart,” I said.  “She’s studying economics.”

When I didn’t say anything else, Stacy prompted me for more.

“She’s a great cook.  You’d like that,” I told her.

“You don’t eat my cooking so much anymore.  I noticed that.”

I laughed.

“That would make living with someone easier,” she said with a nod.  She turned the wheel and headed down the street and around the block.  “Have you ever had a roommate before?”

“Not really,” I replied with a shrug.  “I mean, I lived with Yolanda for a couple weeks when I was kicked out of my apartment, but that was temporary, ya know?”

“That’s when you first started working for Dordy, right?  When you first started fighting?”

“Yeah.”  I nodded.  “Well, getting paid for it, anyway.  Yolanda got me the job.  I don’t think it would have occurred to me that I could beat people up for a living.”

“You were living on the streets for a while there, weren’t you?”

“For a bit,” I said with another shrug.  I swallowed hard and stared out the window.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Stacy said.  “I spent quite a bit of time living out of my car back in the day.”

“Oh yeah?”

“When my husband walked out, I didn’t have a job.  No education, no experience—I thought I would always be a housewife.  I couldn’t pay for the house anymore, and he was just gone, so I took the kids to live with my parents in the country while I looked for work here.  It was a while before I found something that would let me actually pay for a place.  Dordy took a chance on me, just like he did with you.”

“Whatever pays the rent, huh?”

“Oh, I like what I do well enough,” she said.  “My kids are all grown and moved off now, but you lot make good substitutes.  My kids stayed with my parents for some time while I was working things out.  They deserved better than I could give them then.”

I nodded, and Stacy turned the last corner and parked in front of the apartment building.  I jumped out and lifted the bookcase from the back seat.

“Pie in the sky blue!  Sky blue!” Krazy Katie started screaming from the fire escape.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

“Ignore her,” I said to Stacy. “She’s a nut.”

I gently placed the bookshelf down on the walkway and turned to thank Stacy for the ride.

“Don’t you worry about it,” she said.  “It was my pleasure.”

“It made the trek home a lot easier,” I said with a smile.  “I’ll see ya tomorrow night.”

I turned to pick up the bookcase and drag it up the stairs, but she stopped me.

“Oh, and Liam, dear?” Stacy reached her arm out the window as she called back to me.  I walked back to the car and leaned against the roof with one hand.  “You deserve better, too, you know.”

She patted my arm and then drove away with me standing there in the street and watching her go.  I let out another big sigh, picked up the bookcase, and headed inside.

I had to move the stand that held the television over a bit to make room for the bookcase along the wall.  Once it was situated, I opened up the first box of books and tried to arrange them in some kind of order on the shelves.  Most of the books were fiction—a few classics, a couple of romance novels, Terry Pratchett, and some Stephen King.  It was kind of a weird combination, but none of it really looked like crap.

Well, except for the romances.

There was some non-fiction mixed in—all stuff for her classes or whatever.  I put those on the bottom shelf since they were bigger books and the bottom shelf was a little taller than the other two.  For the most part, I just arranged them by size.

I sat back when they were all on there and admired my work.  With the books on it, it really didn’t look too bad.  The paint made all the difference, and I was going to have to thank Stacy for it again.

I was just standing up and dusting off the top of the shelf when I heard the door open and Tria come in.  She noticed the bookshelf immediately, and her eyes widened in surprise.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“Around,” I said with a shrug.  I couldn’t help but smile as she walked over and inspected it.  “It’s not very pretty or anything, but at least you don’t have to dig around in those boxes anymore.”

“It’s perfect, Liam!” she exclaimed.

Before I knew what was happening, she had turned and thrown her arms around my neck.  A moment later, I felt the light press of her lips against my cheek, and I was relatively sure all the organs in my body had turned to liquid and congregated in my feet.

“Thank you so much,” she said softly as she pulled away.  Her cheeks had flushed, and I found myself clenching my fists to stop myself from jumping her right there and fucking her on the floor.  My tongue felt thick, and it was hard to take in a breath.  I could still feel the coolness of the moisture her mouth had left against my skin.

“No problem,” I finally managed to say after swallowing a few times.

Tria smiled, then turned and knelt down in front of the small shelf.  She started poking around at the books and talking about how much easier it would be to find what she was looking for, but I didn’t hear a word of it.  I just stepped away until I felt the back of my knees hit the couch, and then I sat down heavily.  As soon as my head stopped spinning, I went outside for a smoke so I could get myself back together again.

I lit the cigarette and rubbed my eyes.  Krazy Katie was up above me, hollering out across the street at the guy who was waiting at the bus stop.  Apparently, she was pretty sure he was her mother because she kept talking about being inside of his womb.

Fucking nutcase.

Then again, who was I to judge?  Considering how nutty Tria was making me, I might have been about ready to join Krazy Katie and start screaming at the neighbors.

I was fucked.

*****

Deep water kind of warmth and heaviness covered me as I slowly regained consciousness without actually opening my eyes.  The feeling was familiar but in a way I found slightly disturbing, like I was doing something horribly wrong.  My backside was chilled, and I was pretty sure Tria had rolled over on the blanket again.  The front of me was nice and warm though, so I knew I was pressed up against her body in a totally inappropriate, inexcusable, and completely delectable way.

I didn’t want to wake up and roll away from her, especially considering there was no way I would be able to get the blanket back from her again.  Once she got a grip on it, it was a death grip, and I would sooner go into her purse looking for Tic Tacs than try to get it away from her.  Besides, both my arms were around her again, and it was damn hard to get the right one out from under her when she was asleep.  I had no idea how I managed to get it there in the first place, but about half the time I woke up, that’s where my arm would be.

I took a deep breath and tilted my head up a bit, skimming the tip of my nose over her temple and into her hair.  If I lived with her for the rest of my life, I probably still wouldn’t understand how she could smell so good.  My breath rushed out my nose, and I pulled back a little so I would be able to look at her face at least once before moving to my own side of the bed.  I opened my eyes, and I found myself staring into the bright brown irises of the woman in my arms.

Even the warm parts of my body chilled.

For a long moment, all I could do was look at her and try to comprehend.  I knew something was very, very out of place, and I knew I had ultimately been caught with my hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, but I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do about it now.

Oh yeah—apologize and make it look like an accident.

“Oh…shit,” I mumbled sleepily.  “I’m sorry, I…”

I started to pull my arm out from around her waist but paused when I saw Tria smile and felt her grip my forearm.  In the moonlight from the window, I was pretty sure I could see the flesh around her cheekbones darken, and the sight halted the beating of my heart.

“It’s okay.”

“I didn’t mean to…um…”  I started pulling my arm back, and my fingers grazed over her stomach, but I stopped again when I felt Tria tighten her hold on my arm and shake her head in quiet laughter.  My eyes drifted down to where her fingers coiled around my arm and then back up to her face.

“Liam, you do this every night,” she stated.

Tensing again, I tried to determine what the best course of action would be at this point.  I wasn’t awake enough to be thinking clearly at all, and I wasn’t coming up with any kind of grand plan, that was for sure.  What I did manage to get through my thick skull was that she did not seem to be upset at all.

“I do?” I responded softly.

“Yes, you do.”

“Shit,” I muttered.  I didn’t know if I should confess at this point or not.  “I wasn’t trying…I mean, I didn’t mean to—”

Tria shook her head slowly before turning her eyes back to me.  She looked at me through her long lashes, and her cheeks tinged with her blush.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“You don’t?”  God, I sounded like an idiot.  I wondered if I had completely lost the ability to form a coherent sentence.  I hoped she would realize I wasn’t normally a brain dead moron in bed.

God, I wanted to show her what I could be like in bed.

I looked back at her face, and what I saw there stopped all such thoughts.  Her eyes were tight, her jaw clenched, and I could feel her hand trembling slightly against the skin of my arm.

“When I first moved here,” Tria said in a whisper, “I couldn’t sleep at all.”

Her fingers gripped my arm a little tighter, and her eyes moved to the window for a moment before she turned back toward me and seemed to focus on the top of my arm.

“The noises outside—the car alarms, and the sirens, and the…the…”

She took in a sharp breath and shifted forward a little, pressing against me more.

“The
shots
.”

I glanced at her, and my brow furrowed at her expression until I realized what she meant.

There were a ton of gangs only a handful of blocks away, and they were always going at each other.  Sometimes they had all out fucking wars, but a lot of the time, they just took potshots at each other, usually around four in the morning.  When I first moved to this apartment, the gunshots would wake me up as well.  After so many years, they only woke me up now if there was a shooting in the building, and that hadn’t happened in a while.

Tria took several more breaths, and I felt her fingers relax.  She glanced at me, but then quickly looked away again.

“Since the very first night I moved here, I hadn’t been able to sleep,” Tria continued.  “I probably didn’t sleep more than half an hour the first night I lived in this neighborhood and probably never slept more than three hours total any of the other nights.  I just couldn’t.”

Her eyes still didn’t move back to me but remained trained on my upper arm.  Her fingers moved over the edge of the muscle there.

“It was even worse after that night we met,” she said.  “I don’t think I closed my eyes for days.  I kept seeing them closing in on me.”