Look Closer: No Safe Words Here 1-4 out of 5. Boxed Set (12 page)

He snorted and rolled his eyes at me.  He
rolled
his freaking puppy dog brown eyes at me!

“If I’m not your ‘type,’” and he made sardonic air quotes.  “Then what was with you checking me out in your living room just now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said as flatly as I could.  So he’d caught me ogling him.  This was just getting better and better.

“I’d never hurt you,” he said, his voice so soft.  “And I’d never make you jump through hoops, or lie for me—”

“I don’t jump through hoops—”

“And I could make you happy…really happy—” he stared defiantly into my eyes.  “If you’d just let me.”

My mind went blank and I forgot what the hell we were even talking about.  It was as if I’d never even seen this guy before.  When the hell did he get all grown up and soulful on me?

Finally he looked down, breaking our eye contact, and he sighed with resignation.  “I should go.”

He moved toward the porch steps and I was just suddenly there, my hand grasping his bare arm.  I wanted to say something, but the words I wanted to say were all wrong, and jumbled, and bouncing around my skull like demented energy balls.

I looked into his eyes and the words just got further away.  He turned his head away from me, and I finally said, “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

Out of fucking nowhere my little sister pulled open the door, sauntered out onto the porch and gave us both a haughty glower. 

“My lips are sealed,” she said.  “Shithead!”

My mouth dropped open at the same time Mikey’s did.

Natalie huffed in disgust and gave us both her super-bitch smirk. 

“Both of you morons, inside!”

A car with squealing breaks and an even louder exhaust pulled up in front of the house. 

“I’ll pay for the pizza.  You two love birds go inside and get out some plates and pour the Mountain Dew.”

My mouth closed with a click, and I watched as my baby sister skipped down the porch steps and paid the pizza delivery guy.  Who the hell was that emasculating bitch?  I’d known she was brilliant and practical to a fault…but she’d just told me off like she was a gangster and I was some low level nothing.

“When did everyone in my life get so scary?” I mumbled to no one in particular.

“What?” Mikey said.

Natalie turned around and shot us with that super-bitch sneer again.  I gulped, reached out and grabbed hold of Mikey again, and started pulling him to the front door.

“Maybe we should…”

“Pour the Mountain Dew…” he said, his voice quavering.  “Yeah, good idea.”

We hightailed it into the house.

Chapter Sixteen

Tom

It had been such a good day…I just couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.

I’d gone to work at the law office and found out that I’d won a summary judgment against an insurance company with very, very deep pockets.  That was a very nice win.  Then I stopped by my office at town hall to find out the polls were in, and that I was up twenty percent over when I’d won the office two years earlier.  More great news.

I’d come home to share the good news with Lila…I still loved her, and more than anything I loved sharing my highs with her.  But she wasn’t home.  Her car was in the garage, but she’d left a brief note.

Out with a friend.  Gone until @ six.

No signature, no
I love you
, not even a “Hi Tom.”

That was weird, but then I realized what it could mean, and I texted Marcus to come over.  We’d get to have a few hours all alone.  Alone in the house with Marcus.  The mere thought was intoxicating.

He came over.  We’d played a little game with him tying me up with Lila’s silk stockings…and then I’d fucked the goddamn ever-loving shit out of him.  And then I’d fucked that hot piece of ass again in the shower.

All in all, a fantastic day.

I’d hastily made the bed we’d so enjoyably messed up, and I hopped in my car and headed back to the law office.   There was some paperwork on a zoning issue I needed to get filed.

And that’s when things started sliding down hill.

I blew a tire out on the car.  The AAA truck took over an hour to get there, and then the Neanderthal cracked my rim and dented my bumper before he got the spare on right.

Traffic was a bear, and then I got a text from my secretary that the zoning board had decided to deny my request.  And to top it all off, the summary judgment was being suspended, pending an investigation into the presiding judge.

Just what I needed…

Not wanting to push fate, I cut out early and headed home.  The sun had slid out of the sky during my drive home.  I found the house dark, but Lila’s purse was sitting on the coffee table in the front room.  So I pulled out my laptop and logged on the internet to do a little mayoral work.

That’s when my computer crashed.

Not a full on shut off and die.  No, a browser window opened up, and then another, and another, and before I could even blink twice there were about a hundred and fifty pages open.  And then the damn thing kicked off, the screen fading out to white.  About a minute later the computer rebooted itself, and when my desktop reloaded, it was absolutely empty.  So were my documents files, my pictures, even my spread sheets and the pitiful few iTunes I’d downloaded.

Well shiiit…

Finally I shut the damn laptop down and headed up to bed.  I stopped in the bathroom and popped a few Tylenol.  I had one hell of a headache.

I opened the door to the room Lila and I had shared to fifteen years of our twenty year marriage, and all that stared back at me was a bare mattress.

What the…?

On impulse, I headed to Emily’s room.  It was dark and neat, and just as empty as our bedroom had been.  So I tried the last bedroom, the guest room.

There she was, folded in on herself, her pillow clutched to her face.  He was snoring lightly, and damn if she didn’t look peaceful.

I backed silently out of the room and headed back to our bedroom.  Why the hell was she in the guest bedroom?  I stared for a moment at the bare mattress, and then turned around to grab a new set of sheets from the hall linen closet.

That’s when I realized there weren’t any pillows on the bed either.

That’s stra…

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  She’d found something…but what had she found?”

Shit, shit, shit…

What
exactly
did she know?

Chapter Seventeen

Natalie

I’d always found Michael Long nebbish.  He was tall and gangly…and even though he was in great shape, he had a deplorable lack of personality.

That was until about five minutes ago, when he’s suddenly demanded my brother stop fucking the mayor, our own Tom Sherwood—and our next door neighbor.

I’d been minding my own business, but hadn’t heard even a floorboard creak up stairs.  So I decided my brother and the boy blunder had probably gone on a walk somewhere…or whatever two polar opposite gay teenagers did to kill time. 

Hang out at a beauty salon and heckle the customers for their bad hair style choices?  Maybe go get matching his and his tattoos? 

So I trekked back up stairs, grabbed some bills from the mantle stash, and headed for the porch to await the pizza delivery guy my dim witted brother had forgotten about. 

But when I got to the front door I heard raised voices.  One was Marcus.  The other was meek, mousy Michael Long.

“I just wanted to tell you to stop—” there was a pause, and then, “fucking the Mayor.  You could really get hurt…
he
could really hurt you.”

More freaking silence…

What the fuck?

And then more freaking silence…

“You should be with someone better,” Michael said.  “Someone that would protect you and…”

My brother said, “I told you from the start, you are not my type.”

I listened intently for a few minutes.  The whole conversation devolved into my brother and Michael clenched in a somewhat homoerotic arm-lock.  Michael said he “had to go.” And then Dick-Head Marc said, “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

That’s when I opened the door and shooed the big dummies back in the house before they broadcast my brother’s scandalous dirty laundry to the entire neighborhood.

The fucking morons!

*****

So that’s why we’re all three sitting in the kitchen eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew.  My big dumb brother had yet again allowed his penis to get him in deep shit…well, this particular pile of shit was by far the biggest pile of shit he’d ever stepped in.

So I decided they needed someone with actual brain activity to sort things out and keep the big, steaming pile of shit from hitting the fan.

And that person of superior intellect and good judgment would have to be me.

I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to get a six foot three, straight basketball player to let me chain him to my basement ceiling, and also let me fuck him with a double headed dildo.

But compared to my brother’s truly heinous lack of common sense, it was the only sane choice.

“So did you and the mayor at least wait until you were legal before getting all…jiggy with it?”

“What?” Marcus said, incredulous. 

I just stared at him like he was the moron he really was, until it occurred to me that he just didn’t get the reference.

“Before you got all thrusty with him?  You were over eighteen before you two started fucking, right?”

“Oh,” Marcus said, looking all too relieved.  “I’d been eighteen a while…two whole weeks.”

“Wow,” I said, deadpan.  “That long?”

“Asked and answered,” Michael groused.

I shot him with my laser beam of death look, and he didn’t even flinch.  I was starting to like the loser.

I moved on.  “And as far as you know, the running man here is the only other person that knows about you two?”

Marcus looked to Michael.  Michael rolled his eyes and said, “I swear I haven’t told a soul.”

Marcus looked obscenely relieved, and then I saw a thought pass over his face. 

“You didn’t take any pictures or anything, did you?” he asked.

Michael’s face turned beet red, and if that wasn’t the guiltiest look a human being has ever had, I’m Bigfoot!

“I videotaped it.”

Oh great!  So the little pervert had actually watched the whole thing...and had made himself a home movie of it—just a little something to remember it by.

“Tell me you didn’t post it on YouTube,” I said.

“No,” Michael said.  “I just have it on my laptop…and on my cell phone.”

He still looked fucking guilty.

“Where else, peeping-tom boy?”

“I-I…I hid a copy on all my social networking sites…and my email accounts…and on my Amazon Wish List.”

“You did what?!?!” Marcus and I shouted at the same time.

“No one can access them without the pentagonal access code.” he explained.  “I even encrypted the code key pad.”

“That’s good.” I said, feeling relieved.  “So how hard will it be to…” and then a thought struck at my nervous system with the delicacy of a runaway train.  “Did you say you hid a copy on your Amazon Wish List?”

“Yeah,” Michael said, unease in his voice.

Fuck me…fuckmefuckmefuckme…

“Then we have a big problem.”

Chapter Eighteen

Danni

I was having an aggressively bad day.  First I accidentally flushed my cell phone.  Then I backed into a light-poll in the parking lot of the Walmart I’d gone to before school to pick up a new cell phone.  My back bumper fell off and I had to lug it to my back seat, seeing as my trunk was full of cheerleader materials.  Pompoms, banner paper, paints, brushes, five bullhorns and twenty pairs of spanks.

So since my car’s license plate was bolted to the bumper, I was pulled over and cited for driving without my license plate properly displayed.

And somehow during all of this, I forgot my shower tongs.

Cheer practice is long and hard, and one absolutely has to shower afterwards.  So I slipped and slid on my bare feet as I exited the showers.  I skidded when I took the corner leading back to the lockers, and about took out an underclassman.  She was a freshman and a member of the auxiliary cheer squad.  But having to explain why she had been injured would have been just bitter frosting atop an absolute horror of a day.