No Quarter (NOLA's Own #2) (6 page)

“No!” Lili cried out, clapping her hand over her mouth.

“They told the authorities he had slipped and hit his head on the counter, and she got away with it. She was so devastated, so it was easy to believe my parents. I was still so scared that I kept my mouth shut.

“With no one to protect me and my mom drinking to ease her guilt, my dad started raping me again. I only put up with this for about a month after my brother had been murdered. I waited until my father stumbled out of my room one night. Then, I grabbed my gym bag, stuffed it with my clothes and all the cash I had saved up, and snuck out. I left New Orleans.

“I was on the streets for a few weeks in Lafayette when my grandpa spotted me. He made me get in the car. He was so happy. He was going to call my parents to tell them he had found me. I begged him not to. At first, he thought I was just so upset about my brother, but I broke down and told my grandparents what our father did to us and how my mother—
their
daughter—treated me after she’d found out. I told them she killed their grandson when he was trying to save me.”

Not once had Sheri mentioned her brother’s name. I wondered why she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“They took me down to the police station, and I told the officers everything. My grandparents were determined not to allow my parents to get away with what they had done. I was examined, and they found a lot of scarring consistent with what I’d told them. With my eyewitness account of how my brother died—”

“What was his name, Sheri?” I asked her softly. “What was your brother’s name?”

Huge tears rained down, and her lips and jaw quivered. “Evan. His name was Evan Mason Mathews. And he was the sweetest, most wonderful man I’ve ever known.”

Lili jumped to her feet, her little elfin face a mask of anguish, with tears pouring from her swollen eyes. “Oh my God, Sheri!” she wailed.

Sheri jumped up, too, and looked behind her. “What?”

Lili launched herself at Sheri, wrapping her arms around Sheri’s tiny waist, and burying her face in the blonde’s huge tits, sobbing her evil little heart out. Alys and I followed suit, stumbling to our feet and wrapping our arms around them both.

It all made sense now. Sheri needed to give head while Jason banged her from behind because it gave her the sense of love and safety she had had with her brother, the one boy who had loved her enough to give his life to protect her. Sheri had accepted her brother and their relationship for what it had been—something strangely beautiful, if a bit nauseating, coming out of a very, very horrific situation. If their father hadn’t forced it on them, they would have been normal kids, having a normal brother-sister relationship.

I didn’t blame her for finding comfort in what they had been reduced to, and neither did my two best friends.

“Sheri?” Lili’s muffled voice rose from the depths of Sheri’s bosom.

“Yes, Lili?”

“Are your tits real?”

Alys, Sheri, and I burst out laughing.

“Yes, they’re real,” she replied.

Lili sighed. “Lovely.”

A scuffling noise from behind our knot of united sisterhood made Alys and I pull back to see what had made it.

All four of the guys were standing at the sliding glass door, three of them with identical horrified expressions on their faces. But Jason…
his
broken face was full of anguish and devastation as he openly wept for the girl in our arms.

His girl.

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Sheri whispered, mortified.

I glanced at her and saw her eyes tightly shut, another tear squeezing out from the corner of her eye.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

“They heard?”

By the looks on their faces, I had to say, “Yes, I think they did.”

“The window was open,” Phil explained, his voice sounding softly strangled. Raising his hand, he pointed to said window right above the patio.

Jason tentatively walked up to us.

“Baby…” he whispered, touching Sheri’s face and wiping away her tears.

“Oh God…” she whimpered.

“Look at me, baby,” he encouraged sweetly.

I thought my heart was going to break.

When she finally opened her eyes, he pressed his forehead to hers. She drew in a shaky deep breath, and he touched his busted mouth to her lips, just a featherlight brushing.

“Come with me,” he said, his voice barely audible, catching slightly in his chest.

My soul twisted with a crippling ache in the face of the pain Sheri had been living with. She had never trusted anyone, not even the man she loved, with her life story until now for fear of rejection. She had suffered alone in silence for a long, long time.

Phil’s arms wrapped around me from behind, pulling me until my whole backside pressed firmly to his front. The frantic beat of his heart hammered between my shoulder blades. Sensing his distress, I took his hands in mine, lacing our fingers. Squeezing back tightly, he held his breath.

I thought we all were.
If Sheri pushed Jason away now…

“Okay,” she whispered back.

Without looking at any of us, Jason and Sheri headed into the house.

Lili turned her watering eyes on me. “You knew it was bad.” She pitched her voice low since that window was still open.

I nodded. “I figured something along those lines. Granted, not
that
…” I had to swallow hard around the lump in my throat.

Phil hugged me again.

“I’m going to head home,” Lili whispered.

I thought she felt guilty for calling Sheri out like she had, but the end result had been a relief for the woman. Lili’s methods were questionable, yet just by listening and accepting Sheri as she was, she could now start to heal. I thought we all felt the ability to invest our trust in Sheri after tonight, considering she had given so much to us.

“I think I’m going to go home, too,” Alys said quietly.

Flipper rubbed his hands over his face and turned to go into the house, not saying a word. His devastation was evident.

X took Alys’s hand, and he looked close to losing it himself. “If you’re goin’ home, baby, I’m goin’ with you.”

She nodded, and Alys, Lili, and X took off through the backyard, weakly waving at Phil and me.

Taking my hand, Phil pulled me into his half. We went through the living room, up the stairs, and to the bedroom, not saying a single word. As we entered his room, he turned and shut the door behind my back. Then, he used his large self to back me into it. Lightly grasping my wrists, he raised them above my head, pinning me against the door. Lacing our fingers, he dipped his head down and pressed his Third Eye to mine.

“What is it that you’ve done to us, Kenna?” he asked softly, his voice rich and sweet, like cream.

My breath hitched in my chest. “Wh-what do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t think it’s only me who’s been enchanted by you. What sort of fuckin’ voodoo you got goin’ on with us?”

“No voodoo, babe.”

“Not once, in
six fuckin’ years
, did I have a fuckin’ clue that Sheri…” He swallowed hard, and his breathing grew shallow.

“Really?” I asked, a little surprised by that.

“How did you get her to tell you after knowin’ you for only two weeks? She never spoke a word about it to any of us.”

“Well…” I breathed deep, trying to focus but finding it next to impossible with all of him overwhelming me. “I can’t think, Phil! Back up!” I snapped.

He loosened my hands, bracing his on either side of my head, his eyes on level with mine. “Well?”

Swiftly, I ducked under his arm and beelined for the bed before taking a seat. I looked up to find him looming over me, his eyes burning into my brain, searching for answers.

“I’m a medical professional. I’m trained to identify trauma, physical or otherwise. While I’m not a psychiatrist, the way I have to deal with my patients sometimes requires it. I knew Sheri had suffered something…bad…at some point. Slowly, she’s been confessing things about herself, like how sometimes she can only have an orgasm from going down on a guy while being screwed from behind. That sort of set off warning bells in my head, okay? I figured she’d suffered some serious sexual trauma.”

Depravity, abuse, incest—joyful incest, too! I mean, how fucking fucked up was that shit? To be so damaged that you and your brother feel the need to carry on a whacked romantic relationship in order to find comfort—
normalcy
even!

He threw himself onto the bed next to me, lying flat on his back with his bare feet on the floor.

“What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“That she’s so damaged, and we never realized just how much. It was like she said. We all thought she was just a bit of a slut. I mean, we loved her anyway, and she was only slutty with the four of us mostly. She and Jason have weird-ass fetishes of their own that don’t involve us at all…but if we
had
known…”

“What? Would you have not let her travel with you? Not considered her family?”

“We wouldn’t have done the things we did with her!”

“Babe, people don’t get to be like that without something coming along and screwing with their heads.”

“What’s my excuse then?”

“Really can’t compare the two. Sheri was severely damaged by the one man every woman should be able to trust. You’re a
rock star
. Women throw themselves at dudes like you all the time. I think it’s part of the job description.”

He heaved a sigh, but I didn’t let him say anything.

“I never, not for one second, thought you’d live a life of chastity, Phil. If you had come home and
hadn’t
fucked anyone, I think I would have felt bummed out for you.”

“You went
six fuckin’ years
, Kenna!” he said hotly. “
You
waited for
me
until you fuckin’ gave up!”

“I got lonely.”

He sat up, his elbows resting on his knees. “You didn’t go sluttin’ around.”

“So? Would it have made you feel better if I had?”

“No! It means so much to me that…” He swallowed thickly. “I just wish I had had the fuckin’ foresight to give you the same thing.”

I shrugged. “We’re together
now
. And what we have is phenomenal.”

He turned his face toward me. “Too fuckin’ right it is.”

“But with Sheri—”

“How could someone—her own fuckin’
father!
—
do that
to her?” he raged. “And the fact that we…did we fuck her up worse? Is it so bad in her head now because we thought she was just skanky, so we let her suck us off?”

“No. She told me that Jason trusted you guys enough to let her do that. I think he knows that when she is in a certain place in her head, she needs that to feel loved. Didn’t you hear her? She experienced such an intense orgasm when that happened, and I think it was because she loved and trusted her brother so much that she sometimes needs to re-create that, so she can experience some semblance of that feeling.”

“But doesn’t that mean…like the rest of us were her father and that Jason was her brother or some such shit?”

“Not necessarily. In these circumstances,
she
is in control. She
chooses
to reenact the situation. I think she feels safe with all of you, and she was happy that you guys gave her a way to achieve what she so desperately needed. But like I said, I’m not a shrink. I can only speculate. I really don’t think she envisioned you or X or Flipper in a father-type role. It’s purely the
physical
re-creation that she needed to help her with whatever it was she had going on in her head.”

“This is so fucked up.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed.

“Do you think we’re fucked up for going along with it?” His voice sounded so strained, as though his chest were squeezing the shit out of his lungs.

“No, I think you guys are all just a bunch of horny sluts who took advantage of a kinky situation. I don’t think there are many guys who would have passed up on some free head from a hot chick while her weirdo boyfriend tapped her from behind.”

That made his lips twitch.

Oh, good.

“But you think I’m a slut,” he stated.

“No, I
know
you’re a slut. And
I don’t care
as long as I’m the only one you’re sluttin’ up with from now on.”

“You’re too cute.”

I gave him a smile, and I got one with dimples in return.

“Feeling a little better?” I asked him.

“A little, yeah.”

“Good!” I tackled him back on the bed. “Because I’m totally in the mood to take advantage of my slutty boyfriend and make him beg for mercy!”

He erupted into laughter. “You think you can make
me
beg?”

Giving him a look of mock outrage, I asked, “Is that a challenge, Phil
fucking
Deveraux?”

Grabbing my hips, he rocked our groins together, giving me an impish grin. “Hmm…I wonder which of us will break first.”

I slid my hands up beneath his shirt, along his sides.

“Oh, I’m
all
over this,” I told him right before I jabbed my fingers into his armpits and tickled him.

“Oh, shit!” he yelped, bucking me off of him before rolling and pinning me to the bed. He grabbed my frisky hands and held them above my head while straddling my waist and sitting his ass on my pubic bone. “You were sayin’?”

Raising my legs, I spread them wide and then hooked my knees by his ribs while shoving my feet into his armpits, wiggling my toes.

“What the—”

“Yoga, bitch!” I cried, laughing my head off at the incredulousness on his face.

“You sneaky little shit!”

Popping my feet out from his pits, I pressed my heels into his collarbone, flopping him onto his back, his ass sliding onto my belly. He held on to my hands though and dragged me up, wrapping his legs around my rib cage.

My face was in his crotch, my arms stretched above my head. “Well, this is awkward.”

“You’re all bendy, like a fuckin’ willow switch,” he said.

“I know.”

He busted out laughing.

“Shit, Phil, how much do you weigh?” I grunted as he bounced around on my pelvis.

Scooting back until his ass was between my thighs, he replied, “About two fifty?” Sitting up, he placed my arms around his neck and then wrapped his arms around my back. “Did I hurt you?”