HOLD (9 page)

Even though it had been at least a few years maybe the hurt was still fresh.  Maybe that was the reason why Stone grimaced at the ground. 

Or maybe it was something else, like the rusty rumor mill regarding their mother, Tracy Gentry, and my Uncle Chrome.  The boys were definitely Gentry, but there might be a genetic debate about which Gentry had done the honors.  At least that’s what I’d heard. 

I opened up the door to the truck.  “Come on,” I said in a halfway gentle tone.  “Should get you boys home.  School tomorrow, right?”

Stone lost his grim look and became cheerful.  “Nope.  It’s summer.”

“Right,” I nodded.  “I forgot.” 

Chase put a hand on the kid’s shoulder.  “Come on.  We’ll get you home anyway.” 

Stone yawned.  “Fine.  And yeah, I’m over on Citrus Road.”  He tossed the remnants of his food in the trash and called to his brother.  “Let’s go, loverboy.” 

Conway and the girl paused in their tongue fest and stared soulfully into each other’s eyes.  Slowly she allowed her legs to fall from his waist and stood beside him as they quietly grasped hands.  He whispered something in her ear and she tossed her cloud of light brown hair, giggling.  As he nudged her in our direction she shyly hung onto his arm and watched us with soft brown eyes. 

“This is my girlfriend,” Conway said proudly.  “This is Erin.  Babe, these guys are my cousins. They’re the ones who bailed us out tonight.  The dude with all the tattoos is Cord.  That’s Chase on the far side of the truck.  And the big guy is Creed.”

We all waved in turn. 

“Nice to meet you, Erin,” Chase said.  “You go to Emblem High too?”

Erin tucked her hair behind her ear. Then untucked it.  She seemed like the kind of girl who spent half the day doing nervous things with her hair to pass the time.  

“Yes,” she said. 

“You going to be a senior too?”

She nodded, relaxing a little.  “Yeah.  I live next door to Con.”

“Been together for two years,” Conway said and I could tell he was as proud of the fact as he was crazy about the girl beside him.  He wasn’t a bad kid.  Any teenage boy who had already learned how to love would probably end up being okay, as long as he stopped taking shit that wasn’t his. 

  Erin tipped her head up to smile at her boyfriend and the two of them shared a gooey-eyed look.   I knew that look.  It was a
‘You’re my world’
kind of a look.  The only woman who’d ever looked at me that way was my wife.     

“I think I can convince Conway to head up to ASU with me,” Erin said shyly. 

“That’s good news,” Cord told them.  “I run a tattoo place close to the school so you’d have family close by, Conway.” 

“Got to get my grades up a little,” Conway admitted.  “But I think I can do it.” 

“Of course you can,” Chase agreed with enthusiasm. 

“Maybe I’ll come up there too,” piped up Stone.  He’d crossed his arms in front of his chest and pasted an earnest look on his face that I could see right through.  He thought it was all a big cosmic joke.  College, life, love, all of it. 

Apparently this Erin girl saw through her boyfriend’s brother as well.  She scowled.

“Yeah, right,” she scoffed.  “ASU requires better than a D average and a legend of delinquency.” 

“Why Erin,” answered Stone, holding a hand up over his heart in a gesture of offense, “I thought we’d finally learned to get along.” 

Erin was more of a spitfire than she first appeared.  She dropped Conway’s arm and set her hands on her hips, glaring at Stone. 

“We’d get along much better if you’d quit dragging Con into your bullshit.” 

“What?” Stone sputtered.  “What the hell are you talking about?  I don’t
drag
Con into jack shit, sweetheart.  Your golden boy can manage his own life, no matter how much time you waste trying to convince him otherwise.”

“Hey,” Con interrupted.  He shot his brother a harsh look.  “Knock it off, Stone.  You don’t mean it.” 

“I don’t mean it,” Stone echoed although I wasn’t at all sure what he meant.  He obviously had a few personality issues to work out. 

“Okay, that’s enough tension,” Chase scolded.  “Everyone in the truck, including you, Erin.  Since you just live next door to the guys, we’ll drop you off.” 

He climbed into the back cab and shut the door, ending any argument anyone might have. 

Stone rolled his eyes and hopped in the other side.  Cord opened his candy bar and headed to the passenger seat.  The happy couple opted to sit in the back bed, Con lifting Erin gently up even though she was probably capable of getting in there herself. 

It was a quick drive over to The Hills.  When we parked in front of a simple ranch-style house, Stone opened the door.  I thought he was going to take off without saying a word but he suddenly leaned back into the seat and sighed. 

“Thanks for getting my brother out of there,” he said tersely and exited the truck.   It was a weird thing to say.  Not thanks for getting ‘us’ out of there.  Could be that he felt like he deserved to be in there for whatever role he’d played in the Gnome’s auto misfortunes.  Maybe Con had just gone along with his brother because that’s what brothers do.  

I watched Stone in the rearview mirror as he jammed his hands in his pockets and patiently waited while his brother took forever and a day to extricate himself and his girlfriend from the back. 

Suddenly Con came around to my window, Erin in tow. 

“My brother’s not really good at gratitude but believe me, we’re both glad you showed up.” 

“Not a problem, man,” said Cord. 

“You get those grades up,” Chase called from the backseat.  “Next thing I want to hear about you is that you’re heading up to Tempe.” 

“I will,” Con promised and slung an arm around Erin’s waist. 

I leaned out of the truck a few inches to get his attention.  “Stay out of trouble,” I told him.  “Don’t do anything that you can’t undo.  That goes for you too,” I called to Stone who was still rooted to the same spot on the sidewalk.  “I know you heard me.” 

“I heard you,” called Stone and even in the darkness I could tell he had at least half a cocky smile on his face. 

As I pulled away from the curb and gave one final wave to the boys, I heard the identical sighs of my own brothers and knew at that moment we were all of the same mind. 

We wanted things to work out for those two kids, wanted them to shake off whatever demons led them to do dumb shit like steal cars, fuck around, blow off school. 

We hoped they’d step back from the ledge that straddled the good world and the bad. 

CHASE

  There wasn’t much conversation on the drive home.  We were relaxed, just enjoying the comfort of each other’s company.  When we reached the east valley I asked if there was any interest in going for a cup of coffee but Cord yawned and said he’d already texted Saylor that she could expect him home within half an hour. 

“What about you, monster?” I asked Creed, flicking him in the back of the neck. 

“I’m beat,” he answered.  “Got shows the next three nights so I should probably turn in early tonight.” 

I flopped back into the seat and looked out the window, thinking how strange was the march of time, that the archetypal party boys of yesterday were now in for the night by ten o’clock. 

Not that I was complaining.  In fact my brain offered up an appealing flashback from last night; Steph naked and on her knees.  I hoped she was still awake. 

We passed right by Cord’s neighborhood on the way back to Scratch.  I was tempted to ask if we could stop at his house for a minute.  Even though my nieces were surely asleep at this hour I never passed up the opportunity to look at their precious faces.  The sight of them always stirred something soft yet protective in me.  I imagined the feeling was probably ten times more intense for their father. 

But there was really no good reason to disrupt their whole household so I just waved goodbye to Cord as he hopped out of Creed’s truck and into his own, taking off almost immediately.  My car was parked where I’d left it a few dozen yards away from the door of Scratch but I lingered in Creed’s truck for another moment as we watched Cord’s taillights disappear. 

“You did good today,” announced Creed suddenly. 

Compliments from Creedence didn’t come easily so I raised an eyebrow and waited. 

“With the kids,” he explained.  “I mean I’ve always thought you would make an amazing teacher but today when I saw how you were able to get through to those boys I knew it was true.” 

“Yeah, well,” was all I said because I really couldn’t describe how much those words pleased me. 

Creed put his elbow up on the window frame and exhaled thickly.  I knew he was going to switch topics to one I wouldn’t like as much. 

“Pretty relieved we didn’t run into any ghosts tonight,” he finally said.

A shiver rolled through me, a primitive instinct triggered by the memory of something bad.  Yeah, I was also damn glad that tonight there’d been no sign of our parents.  Most likely they were holed up several miles deep into the desert, in the filthy shithole we’d been raised in, a place I had no desire to inhabit again. 

“No ghosts,” I said, feeling strangely troubled.  Violence.  Addiction. Despair.  Abuse.  Those were all the things that were wrapped together in my earliest home and the people who created it. If not for Creedence and Cordero I didn’t know if I’d still be alive. 

“Why don’t we meet up for lunch, maybe next weekend?” Creed suggested as I opened the door.  “We’ll drag Cord out of Scratch for an hour or two, bring our ladies.  I know they miss each other.” 

As proof that our lives had always been hopelessly interconnected, it was a fact that Truly and Stephanie were roommates before we’d met either of them.  Creed got together with Truly first and I’d already happened to take an interest in Steph when I’d seen her skulking sexily around campus.  All of that seemed like it had just happened yesterday yet it also seemed like it had always been true. 

“It’s a date,” I yawned.  I wasn’t tired though, not really.   I wanted to get back to my apartment and press my head against Stephanie’s bare breasts in ways that were both naughty and nice. 

Creed drove away and I jogged back to my car for the short drive back home.  As soon as I parked in front of my building I heard music blaring.  That wasn’t unusual, considering this area was almost exclusively populated with college students who did things like blast music and vomit in the pool. 

As I drew closer to my door though I was startled to realized that the noise was coming from my place.  Of course Steph would have been home hours ago but it wasn’t really her style to blast nineties grunge music into the atmosphere if she was just sitting in there by herself. 

“You’re hanging out with your brothers tomorrow night, right?”

No. 

Absurd thought. 

Unworthy. 

Steph had never given me a single reason to doubt that she was faithful to me.  It was a disgraceful thing to even cross my mind. 

Still, as I pushed the key into the lock I sensed that something was off.  Something that could alter the comfortable order of my personal universe. 

“Hey you,” I said, happy to find Stephanie sitting on the couch and wearing a white t-shirt that wasn’t quite long enough to cover her pink lace panties.  It didn’t seem like an invitation though.  She looked at me strangely, like I was the last person she expected to see. 

I motioned that I was going to turn down the volume on the old stereo that was wedged in the corner entertainment unit.  She nodded.  

“Didn’t know you’d be waiting on me,” I said as I sat down and touched her knee.  “Turned out to be a crazy night.  We ended up driving down to Emblem to bail out a couple of long lost cousins.”  I started giving out details but after a few sentences I realized she wasn’t listening at all. 

She sat there staring at my hand on her knee.  I noticed she had something clutched in her right fist. 

“What’s that?”

Steph opened her palm and stared at the ball of paper inside.  “Nothing.  LSAT test results.” 

“The law school entrance exam?”

“That’s the one.” 

I leaned back into the couch and processed the news.  “When did that happen?  I didn’t know you’d taken the test.”

She sighed and pressed her knees together.  “Yup.  I do that.  I take tests.” 

“Well?” I prodded.  “How’d you do?”

She smiled at me. “I did awesome.” 

I clapped my hands together.  “Babe, that’s great.  So is this happening?  You going to law school?”

She lost her smile.  “No.”

“What?”

“I’m not going.”   

“Steph, you’re gonna have to help me out here.  What do you mean?”

“I mean I need a job more than I need three more years of school to fulfill a fanciful childhood idea.” 

“Honey,” I soothed, pulling her close to my chest.  “Let’s talk about this.  I’ll be teaching full time and even though it’s not a luxury salary it’s better than what I’ve been making.  We can figure out how to make this happen for you.”  She tilted her face toward me and I kissed her soft lips. 

“Chase,” she said, pulling away a little. 

“Shhh.”  I hauled her into my lap, letting my hand creep under her shirt and explore her smooth skin.  “Let me make you feel good right now.” 

“Chase,” she whispered and ran her hand over my cheek. “I love you so much.” She pressed her forehead against mine and widened her knees so that they were on either side of me.  Hell, I knew we were talking about important life issues but my dick was suddenly hard as steel.  I needed something, even if it was just a taste.  She needed it too.  I could tell by the way she’d started breathing hard and pushing herself against me.

Wordlessly I pushed her arms up and then lifted her shirt over her head.  Her eyes were closed and her head rolled back as she started grinding her hips against me.  I deftly reached down and got my pants open, impatiently sliding all that shit down far enough to release my dick. 

Steph still had her panties on but she was getting plenty hot just from grinding so I kept at it.  When I shoved my hand down there to tease a little she let out a moan and sank against my chest.  She was getting closer every second.  Fuck, I loved watching her come.  I was in the mood to watch it right now.  I slid a finger into her to get her to the brink while she bore down hard.  I knew exactly how she worked. Another few seconds and she’d clench up before the explosion shook her.   I wanted to be closer to that.  I wanted to be surrounded by it.  I wanted to fucking explode with her, inside her.  I gripped the flimsy fabric of her panties in a fist, knowing all it would take was a flick of my wrist to make that business history. 

“Let me,” I hissed, tugging hard to let her know what I wanted.

She hesitated, even stopped moving. 

I tugged harder.  “Let me.” 

“Yes,” she panted, rolling her hips in a search for my dick. “Do it.” 

One second later that pink lace was in shreds and I was in there deep with no plans to stop.  She wasn’t on the pill and although we weren’t regularly careless it happened now and then. 

“Chase!” she gasped and there she was, coming so hard she shook everywhere, clutching me and even whimpering as she felt me follow her. 

“Baby,” I whispered a minute later as I pushed her sweaty hair out of her face and searched for her mouth.  I wanted to kiss her, hold her, tell her I worshiped the fucking ground she walked on and that I’d do anything on earth to her, and for her, forever.  

But first Stephanie straightened up and looked me straight in the eye.  She ran one fingertip lightly along my lips and then dropped her hand with a sigh.

“By the way,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”