Iron & Bone (Lock & Key #3) (19 page)

A woman in a very tight suit with a briefcase at her side lifted her head from her cell phone and stared at me, a thin eyebrow poking up her forehead. I glared at her, and she went back to tapping on her phone. A pregnant woman was reading a picture book to her young son who was eating a chocolate bar. He looked up at me, and I gave him a tight grin.

I flipped through a parenting magazine and skimmed an article on prepping for the baby’s arrival. I tossed it and shuffled through the other magazines on the table at my side. Celebrity gossip rags, health and exercise rags, pregnancy and delivery—

Ugh, no, thanks
.

I’d been to a lot of places, but a gyno’s office was not one of them.

“Oh, Brent, honey, let me clean your hands and mouth,” said the mom, putting down the storybook. “What a mess!” She wiped down his hands with a wet wipe.

A mess.

Gets messy.

“Very messy.”

I took in a breath and leaned over, my elbows on my knees.

I was fifteen years old at the genesis of my big mess.

Spanish curses, slaps, and a woman’s squeaks and breathy shouts echoed through the thin walls of the apartment.

“He’ll be done soon. Come here.”

Inès shivered, her teeth chattering, as she wrapped her slim body up in mine.

“I hate it when he does this,” she whispered.

“I know. Me, too.”

The sounds of my Uncle Johnny screwing some
puta
, as he called the women he brought home, from his room next to ours was a frequent ritual. His Spanish only came to life when he was mad, drunk, or screwing women, which was most of the time.

This was home for the last five years.

It was Inès’s home though, not mine. Inès and I had shared a bed since I’d first come to live with them, but now, I was fifteen going on sixteen and she was fourteen. It was hard for me—emphasis on
hard
—when she would curl up against me in the middle of the night or cuddle up in my arms after a nightmare, which was pretty frequently. She had turned into this pretty, curvy girl all of a sudden. Just like the girls at school I liked to stare at.

Inès had lost her mom in a car accident long before I had lost mine, and her dad had turned into a freak show.

She had me, and we had each other. We cooked, shopped for food with whatever money he’d left for us, did our laundry at the crap Laundromat down the street, and managed to get our homework done.

Uncle Johnny’s grunting grew more intense, and the woman started letting out more of those weird squeaking noises.

Inès’s fingers traced a lazy trail across my chest and down my middle.

“Don’t.”

“Ticklish?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then, what?” she asked, her fingers still stroking me.

“Just—don’t.”

I was too embarrassed to tell her, but it was painfully obvious and getting more and more painful all the time.

“I know.”

I blew out a breath of air. “What do you know?”

“It’s this, isn’t it?” Her hand stroked over my huge erection.

“Stop it!” I clamped a hand on her wrist.

She planted a kiss on my chest and kept stroking me.

“Shit, stop it,” I breathed, my hips moving.

“I don’t want to,” she whispered.

Her palm cupped my balls over the thin cotton of my boxer briefs, and my body jerked. I choked on a moan.

“Does it feel good?”

“Yes,” I said through my gritted teeth.

She lightly stroked me up and down, up and down. “Have you done it before? With Lucy?”

Lucy, a girl who liked me at school. She’d only let me cop a feel of her tits so far.

“No.”

A noise rolled in the back of Inès’s throat as her hand kept moving over me. My muscles were on fire. I was on fire.
Should I let myself react?
It was too difficult not to react, so difficult to hold it back.

“Oh,” fell out of my lips.

The pear scent of the shampoo we both used floated through me as her head shifted over my chest.

Her hand slid under the waistband of my worn-out boxers.

“Ah, Inès!”

“Is that good?” she whispered. “I’ve heard you when you do it to yourself. You always think I’m sleeping. I want to do it to you.”

My fingers dug into her shoulder, my other hand curled into the sheets at my side, fisting the nubby material. My lungs hurt from holding air in. I was too afraid I’d explode, and then Uncle Dickwad might hear us.

Would I get loud like he did?

If he caught us, he’d throw me out on the street, kill me. He hated having me around, another mouth to feed. But he’d grown to like the fact that I now looked out for his daughter. He didn’t have anything restraining him from his daily or nightly activities—women, drugs, gambling, stealing.

I clamped my jaw down tight against the strain.

She kissed the side of my face and nuzzled my throat as her strokes grew harder.

My feelings for Inès were a secret wish I’d kept locked up in my twisted heart. I barely understood these feelings myself. She was my first cousin, as good as a sister.

We can’t. It’s wrong. So wrong.

But with every stroke of her hand, those feelings exploded like tiny hot-air balloons all through me. It felt good…so good. The wrong made it even better.

“Shit!” My cock throbbed and pulsed, my hips tensed.

A string of Spanish curses and loud drawn-out groans coming from Uncle Johnny and his
puta
were the soundtrack for my very first orgasm at the hands of a girl.

I blew, my cum spurting.

Her body jolted. “Oh!”

Both our gazes went to my dick in her hand. She blinked up at me. Waves of euphoria flooded through me.

“That felt so good,” I whispered.

She smiled against my skin and crashed her mouth against mine. She gave me her tongue, and my stomach flipped. I swirled in a kaleidoscope of color and distorted sensations.

This was what kissing should be like.

This wasn’t what I should be doing with Inès. This was for other girls…for Lucy…

This was bad. This was wrong.

Fuck it. Ah, fuck it.

I took her in my arms and kissed her deep.

She pulled away, giggling, her dark eyes huge, and sparks went off in my chest. I hadn’t heard that sweet tiny laugh of hers or seen such an effortless smile on her face in ages.

“Gosh, my hand is…full of you. This gets messy, huh?”

I dropped to her side and pulled her in close to me. “Very messy.”

“Hi.”

A child’s voice sliced through my fog, bringing me back to the doctor’s waiting room. Two big brown eyes with long lashes stared up at me.

I sat up straight, my eyes focusing on that small face. It was the little boy whose mother had been reading to him.

“Hey there,” I replied, clearing my throat, pushing my hair away from my face.

“Brent, come back here.” The mom gestured at her son. “Don’t bother the man. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Hi, Brent.”

He tilted his head at me.

I gestured at the book his mother held in her hands. “You like your book?”

Brent nodded.

“I like books, too.”

Brent stared at me, as if he’d finally met Darth Vader. A mix of fascination, awe, and excitement sprinkled with dread.

I pointed to his T-shirt that had dancing carrot and broccoli figures on it. “You, uh…eat your vegetables? You like broccoli?”

He only made a nasty face, and I laughed.

“How about cucumbers?”

Brent shrugged his shoulders.

“I like cucumbers,” I said. “They’re really fresh and…refreshing. You got to try ’em. They’re green, too, but they’re tasty. You gonna try ’em?”

Brent nodded. He reached out and touched my silver rings, his fingers landing on my One-Eyed Jacks skull.

“Honey, don’t touch the man!” The mom’s face tightened. “I’m so sorry.” She moved to stand up.

I held my free hand up at her. “It’s fine. Please.”

Brent’s tiny lips parted as his index finger traced the round, smooth head of the skull. “You like that one, huh?” I asked him. “Me, too. That’s my favorite. You like this one?” I pointed to the fanged snake ring.

His eyes widened, his lips twitching as he nodded again.

“You’re a lucky boy to have a mommy who reads to you.”

“Does your mommy read to you?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah, she did when I was like you.” I slid up in my seat, lifting my sunglasses off my face. “She was real busy though, so she didn’t have a lot of time to read to me. But I liked it a lot when she did.” I glanced over at the book his mother held in her hands. A lion, a zebra, and a giraffe decorated the cover. “You like animal stories?”

His eyes lit up, and he smiled.

I smiled back. “Me, too. I liked jaguars the best.”

“Jag-oo-ars?”

“Yeah, they’re big cats that run very, very fast. Like tigers, sort of, but they have spots instead of stripes. They’re beautiful.”

“Ja-jag-oo-ars!” Brent said.

I’d loved tigers, lions, jaguars, cheetahs, leopards, panthers at Brent’s age. My mom would bring home small picture books for me, and we’d sometimes go to the library and search for more. We would both try to sketch the animals, and I’d color while she cleaned our tiny apartment. We’d plaster the kitchen and our bedroom walls with our creations. Our homemade wallpaper would hide the cracks in the walls, the old stains that she had desperately tried to wash off with bleach but would never come out.

“
Mi cachorro
, you are so good at coloring. You stay within the lines, and you make the colors so bold, so alive.
Muy bueno
.”

“Let’s find a jaguar.” I took out my cell phone, got online, and looked up pictures of jaguars for Brent. I clicked on one of a jaguar crouching, about to spring into action. “Here’s one.” I tilted my phone toward him. “What do you think?”

Brent leaned over my arm, his thirsty gaze gulping down the animal’s photo on my screen. He bobbed up and down on his toes, his fingers digging into my forearm. “Ja-goo-ar!”

“Ja-goo-ar!” I roared, and he laughed loudly, hopping on his toes.

“Mrs. Landon?” the nurse called through the glass window.

Brent’s mom slowly pushed up from her seat, a hand over her huge belly.

“Come on, Brent, honey, it’s our turn,” she said. She turned to me, her face softening. “Thank you. He doesn’t usually talk to strangers at all. You obviously made quite an impression. All the best to you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said as Brent shuffled back over to her. “Bye, Brent.”

Brent took his mother’s hand, but his eyes remained on me as she pulled him through the open door.

I rubbed my thumb over the jaguar on my phone’s screen.

Mi cachorro.

My mother always had a variety of sweet names for me. She’d said she was going to use them all whenever she could because, one day, I’d be grown up, and I wasn’t going to let her say them anymore or let her hold my hand or kiss me on the cheek.

She was wrong.

What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice call me “my puppy” in that gorgeous Argentinian Spanish of hers once again.

“Mi flaco.”

I’d been her skinny boy all right.

I wiped a hand over my mouth and took in a short breath.