Page 53 of Duke
“Let me have it, bro.”
“Just go with it,” he said. “Don’t fight it. There’s no point. Once you stop resisting it and just sort of let the mushy romantic lovey-dovey bullshit suck you in…I don’t know. It’s not so bad.”
“Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with my best friend?”
“Shut up, cock-knocker,” Thresh said, with a laugh. “I know it’s weird. You think like it’d be emasculating or some shit, but…it’s not. I swear. The right girl, she’ll make you feel likemoreof a man, not less. I’ve been forced to realize something, brother: we don’t know shit.”
“That’s second time I’ve been told that today,” I said. “And you just used ‘emasculating’ in a sentence—now I know you’ve been brainwashed.”
“Shut up, ass-face. I can still pound your skull in.”
“Yeah, again…you wish.”
“I gotta go. Harris is giving me the wrap it up signal.”
“This shit isn’t a joke, Thresh, and I’m not talking about girls anymore.”
“I’m well aware. I’ve been busy myself.” Another pause. “Okay so I guess I really have to go. Harris wants the line free. Watch your six, brother.”
“You too.”
I hung up, left the phone on the counter, and brought the shotgun with me as I went to check on Temple. She’d been in the shower for quite a while at that point.
The bathroom door was cracked, steam billowing out. I heard Temple’s voice, but she was…moaning. Low, quiet. Erotic.
“Duke…” she whispered.
Shit…she was thinking about me? Moaning like that…
Ten to one she was fingering herself.
I pushed the door open slowly and stepped in as quietly as I could.
And yeah, there she was in all her naked glory. Sprawled out in the tub, water up to her neck, hand between her thighs moving fast and splashing water everywhere, back arched, head thrown back. Tits breasting the surface of the water, nipples hard, her whispering voice saying my name…
I wondered if Harris and Layla kept any rubbers around? I backed out of the bathroom as quietly as I’d snuck in, trotted to Harris and Layla’s bedroom, muttering an apology for being nosy as I rifled through the bedside table drawers. Bingo. I found their stash: several vibrators of varying sizes and styles, a shitload of condoms, fur-lined handcuffs, a cock ring, anal beads…I pushed any possible mental images far, far, far away and tore off half a dozen condoms and stuffed them into my pockets, and then trotted back to the bathroom, hoping I hadn’t taken too long.
Thank god, she was still going. Her hips were flexing, now, her left hand holding her pussy open, her right splashing in circles under the water. Her eyes were closed, tits bouncing and splashing, hair wet and sticking to her face and neck. Still gasping my name—“Duke! Oh god, Duke!”
I shucked my clothes in record time, making sure the Mossberg was readily available, just in case.
Tiptoeing closer to the tub, I ripped open a condom wrapper and left it on the sink for when I was ready.
Then I reached for Temple…
8: SO MUCH MORE
A shower had sounded like the best idea on the planet, until I saw the oversized claw foot tub, and decided a scalding bath was an even better plan. So I ran the bath and sank into it, luxuriating in the piping hot water, my exhausted, stressed muscles soaking up the heat even though it stung the cut on my chest and the nick at my hairline. Neither were anything to worry about, but they still stung.
The thing about a bath is that it leaves a lot of time to think—which, usually, is the point, right? Take half an hour or an hour to just soak and let my mind wander, sort through the events of the day and how I felt about them? But under these circumstances, I wasn’t so sure letting my mind wander was the best idea. There was a lot of nastiness I was actively working at suppressing: heads bashed in, faces shot away, sucking chest wounds, dead bodies. So many dead bodies. So much gunfire. This was all brand new to me; I’d never even seen a real gun up close or heard one shot, much less seen a dead body. I mean, I’d gone to my great-grandma’s funeral, but that’s different—she’d been in a casket, at peace, already dead from natural causes. Watching someone get shot? Watching Duke smash a head in like a watermelon? How was I supposed to feel about it? How do you deal with that? I didn’t know how, so I was trying to just pretend it wasn’t real, that I was watching a Bruce Willis movie. It wasn’t real. I hadn’t really seen…how many was it?…a dozen men die? Nope. Fake. Fake blood. Fake bullets. Fake deaths. This wasn’t happening to me.
Denial was working okay, for the most part. It let me continue operating on something like a normal level instead of collapsing into a quivering, sobbing pile of uselessness. Some instinct deep down kept telling me that I couldn’t afford to panic, yet. I couldn’t afford to give in to the nervous breakdown I felt building up inside me. I had to focus, had to keep my emotions in check…which meant pretending I was fine, pretending all this was fine, cool, great, normal. No problem here. It’s just me, Temple Kennedy, trapped in a Robert Ludlum novel. No big deal, happens all the time.
Only, the longer I lay here in the tub, the more the reality of my situation started to seep through my carefully constructed game of pretend.
I had to distract myself. I needed to relax and not think about the yucky stuff.
Duke was the perfect distraction.