NT95 has sent you a custom request.
I stared down at the message in disbelief. I’d asked for space, and Junior’s response was to try to pay for more of my time.
“Open it,” Taylor said, looking over my shoulder.
“I don’t want to.”
“What happened?” Ryan asked, perking up from where they’d been half asleep on my other side. It was after midnight, and we were binge-watching more reality TV to unwind from a long day of filming and editing, Walter asleep in his doggie bed nearby.
“Junior sent me another request,” I said.
“I’m with Taylor on this one,” Ryan said. “You should open it, at least to see what he wants.”
My thumb hesitated over the screen. Asking for space hadn’t been easy, especially because I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Junior and I had defiled that confessional booth. I’d spent the rest of the day turned on, and batch-filming content when I’d gotten home hadn’t diminished my desire. Even now, over a week later, the memory of him barely pushing into me had every drop of moisture in my body moving south for the winter. The sound of his breaths near my ear. The feel of his lips on my neck and his hand at my throat. Fuck, I wanted it again.
Which was why I knew that opening his message was a Bad Idea. I didn’t trust myself to tell him no. I’d either use the cash he offered or the opportunity to finally get answers out of him as an excuse to meet up again. And then we’d probably have full-blown, p-in–the-v sex and my mind would be so blissed out from dick that I’d forget all about the tracker and stalking and everything else he might have done that I didn’t know about.
“Oops,” Taylor said, tapping my screen and taking the decision out of my hands.
The first thing listed in PPV requests was always the price, and my eyes bugged out at the sight of it.
“Ten grand?” Taylor hissed, scooting closer.
Ryan pressed against my other side. “To do what? Kill someone?”
“Come to my cousin’s barbecue,” Taylor read. She looked up at me in confusion. “Is that a euphemism?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
Ryan pulled up their phone and started searching. “I don’t see anything about it being one.”
“Wait,” Taylor said. “Scroll down.” She slid her finger over my screen and then read Junior’s message aloud. “I’m not ashamed of you, Lo. Give me a chance to prove it.”
Uh-oh. I could already feel myself starting to cave, willing to hear him out.
I shoved the phone at Ryan like it was a bomb. “Hit deny. I can’t do it myself.”
They took it, eyeing me. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I asked for time, and instead of honoring that, he’s pushing for more access to me. That makes red flag number . . . eight? Nine? He needs to start learning how to respect my boundaries.”
Ryan hit deny.
A knock sounded on our front door.
Walter leapt out of his bed and ran for it, barking his head off.
No. Fucking. Way.
“Weapons,” Ryan said, our standard response to anyone at our door after midnight.
They went scrambling off the couch while I beelined toward Walter. He was barking so loud that even with the insulation, I was worried he would wake our neighbors.
I grabbed the baseball bat we kept propped by the coat rack and ducked, trying to soothe him into silence. “It’s okay, bud.”
It took a minute, but eventually his barks dropped into a low, steady growling. Standing, I carefully looked through the peephole. Junior was right on the other side of it, wearing his riding gear, helmet dangling from his fingers, hair mussed from wearing it. His jacket was unzipped, revealing a black T-shirt pulled tight across his pecs. My nipples hardened at the sight of him, and warmth bloomed in my core. This was what I got for spending so much time on BikeTok.
Junior suddenly made it worse by running his hand through his hair, his shirt creeping up just enough to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of lower abs. I nearly walked through the closed door trying to get to him, but the sound of my roommates rushing toward me stopped me just in time. I turned to see Ryan holding a can of mace and a taser. Beside them, Taylor clutched the largest, floppiest of her dildos.
Ryan looked over at it agape. “What are you planning to do with that?”
“Dick-whip him,” Taylor said.
“That’s not going to do anything but make him laugh.”
“Oh, really?” She flicked her wrist, slapping Ryan across the thigh with it.
Ryan howled and clutched their leg, dancing away.
Junior pounded on the door. “Lauren? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I called over Walter’s renewed barking. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” he yelled.
“Shut up!” someone shouted from outside, likely one of our neighbors hanging out a door or window. Great.
“Ryan,” I said. “Come hold Walter.”
They limped over, shooting a glare at Taylor on the way, and grabbed Walter’s collar.
I cracked the door. “You have serious boundary issues.”
Junior smiled, devilishly handsome in the dim light. “Let me in and I’ll show you just how bad they are.”
I fought a shiver, refusing to be turned on by that comment. “My roommates are both holding weapons.” Sort of. “And Walter doesn’t like strange men.”
“Good boy,” he said.
“Walter is a girl!” Taylor yelled past me for some fucking reason.
Junior’s smile widened, eyes boring into mine, and I realized what she’d done. Oh, no. He parted his lips and dropped his voice into a bass growl. “Good girl.”
Behind me, Taylor let out a sound like a dying whale, clearly overwhelmed by her praise kink.
“You’re still not coming in,” I said, hating how breathless I sounded.
Junior stepped back on our stoop. “Then why don’t you come out here, and your friends can keep an eye on you from inside.”
I studied him for a moment. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe I could get my answers and, if I didn’t like them, tell him to get lost, and this would be the end of it between us. For good, this time.
I turned toward my roommates. “If I suddenly crawl into his lap, please come grab me before I get charged with indecent exposure.”
Taylor grinned. “No promises. Rap sheets are hot.”
Ryan shook their head. “Ignore her. We’ll obviously stop you.”
I handed the baseball bat to them, gave Walter a grateful pat, and slipped outside.
Junior was leaning against the stoop railing with his legs crossed at the ankle, the streetlights casting his face in sharp angles. God, that jawline was next level. And his cheekbones. There were models who would kill for them. It was like he’d gotten all of his parents’ best features. Mom’s eyes, father’s full lips and strong brows. The way they were put together was devastating, always drew my gaze, always had me hoping he’d gift me with a rare smile because of how it transformed his expression from cold and unapproachable to warm and intimate, just for me.
There were no smiles tonight. Instead, he watched me with a heat in his eyes that had me stopping just outside the door because I didn’t trust myself to get any closer. I’ve been inside you, that look said. I’ve felt you come around the head of my cock. And if you think that was the last time I’ll ever wrap my fingers around your throat, you’re out of your goddamn mind.
He pushed off the railing. “Keep looking at me like that and see if I don’t fuck you right here on these steps.”
A muffled whimper came from behind me that sounded more like Taylor than Walter, followed by a shushing noise. I loved my roommates, but did they need to hear every word that was about to come out of our mouths? Probably not.
“Let’s sit,” I said, careful to keep my distance as I walked past Junior. The man had a way of grabbing me that had turned me skittish.
We took the steps down to the sidewalk and sat on the bottom one. Thankfully, they were wide enough that we weren’t touching. The smell of leather and cologne brought me right back to the confessional, and the last thing I needed was to feel the heat rolling off Junior’s body.
Even looking at him was a problem, so I fixed my gaze across the street, where his bike was parked. “Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“No,” he said, voice low and rough, and, god, I was so fucked if even the sound of it was enough to make me shiver. “I just come here sometimes to check up on you.”
“How did you even know where I live?”
“I’ve kept tabs on you over the years,” he said.
Part of me relaxed a little at the confession. I’d been expecting an argument, was ready to pry information out of him bit by bit, because he’d always been such a closed book, but him offering it up so freely was a nice surprise. “And the tracker? How long has it been in my purse?”
“Only since our first run-in at church.”
I nodded. That made sense. I’d been so distracted when he pinned me to the wall that he would’ve had plenty of time to plant it on me.
“Don’t do that again,” I told him.
“I won’t put any more trackers on you,” he said.
Well, this was going better than I’d hoped. Time to rip off the Band-Aid. “Did you slash a bunch of old women’s tires just because they were mean to me?”
He smirked. “I heard the tires slashed themselves.”
“Oh my god, you did, didn’t you?”
He looked unrepentant. “Let it be their only warning.”
I reared back. “What are you going to do if they’re mean to me again? Burn their houses down?”
“I would never,” he said, the world’s most untrustworthy smile spreading over his face.
“Really? Because your grin is psychotic.”
He smoothed it out, letting the façade of the reformed mobster slide back into place like a second skin. “I don’t think it’ll come to that.”
No, it definitely wouldn’t, because I was never going back to that church again. I couldn’t imagine trying to sit through an hour of Mass with the confessional booth at my back, knowing what I’d done in there. In my mind, Jesus Christ himself popped out of it in the middle of the priest’s sermon, finger pointed as he accused me of blasphemy.
“What else have you done over the past decade?” I asked Junior, because it was clear his interference hadn’t ended with Kelly and our principal.
His eyes were so dark in the shadows that they almost looked black. “How long are your friends willing to wait while I answer that question? We might be here a while.”
I blinked at him. “My parking tickets?”
He nodded.
“The smashed side mirror on my car that got magically replaced overnight?”
Another nod.
My mind raced, thinking back to every problem that had mysteriously righted itself. I thought of our last apartment, and our landlord’s refusal to fix anything for six months straight before suddenly showing up at our door with a crew of three men and getting it all done in a day. After that, not a week went by that he didn’t ask if we needed anything else.
I narrowed my eyes. “Our landlord at the old place?”
A nod.
My heart sank. “Councilwoman Blackwell?”
His expression turned grim, and he nodded again.
I dropped my head into my hands. “Oh, god. I’m going to end up in jail.”
He rubbed my back. “No one can connect you to any of it. I made sure of that. And Blackwell had it coming after how long she led you on.”
I wrenched my head back up. “What did you do to her?”
“Relax,” he said. “Everyone still has all their fingers and toes. Let’s just say I got ahold of an interesting video of her son.”
I felt like crying. “I’ve been working my ass off to get these politicians to come around, and if you’re telling me they all had to be threatened or bribed, I’m going to lose what little faith I have left in humanity.”
He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Don’t. You did all of the hard work yourself. I only gave one or two of them a nudge.”
Oh, no. Patrick McKinney. I’d spilled my guts to Junior about him at Velvet. Was he about to be next?
Do you really care if he is? a small voice asked. The man was a complete bastard and we had nowhere else to go. Yet. But we were working on it. My roommates and I were looking at two more buildings tomorrow, and one of the owners seemed really promising. And in the meantime, we had found the money to make rent and buy ourselves another month.
We were going to do this the legal way. The right way. Junior was trying to get out of the criminal world, and the last thing I wanted was for him to dig himself deeper on my behalf.
“Please stop interfering in my life,” I said.
His one-word response was clipped. “No.”
I blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m serious. I hate the fact that my achievements aren’t my own. That any of them could have come from coercion or blackmail or violence.”
“Look at this place,” he said, thumbing behind us. “You did this on your own. You’re building your empire brick by brick with your own two hands. It’s not like I held a gun to every one of your subs and forced them to follow you. They chose to do it because you’re damn good at your job. You make people feel seen and accepted, no matter who they are or what kind of hell they’re stuck in.”
My heart softened. Was he talking about himself?
“So what if I tried to make your life easier where I could?” he said. “So what if I pushed a couple of politicians into doing the right thing? You shouldn’t feel bad for those snakes. Not after the way they lied to your face and the public about supporting your cause.”
I shook my head. “I don’t feel bad for them. It’s not them I care about in this situation.”
His laugh was humorless. “Don’t feel bad for me, Lo. You don’t know what I’ve done in my life.”
“So?” I said. “Just because you’ve done bad things doesn’t mean you’re not worthy of my empathy.”
He reached over and dragged me into his lap, and I let him, something in his expression telling me he needed this.
Behind us, the door cracked open, Taylor waving the dildo over her head like she was getting ready to lead Ryan and Walter into battle.
I quickly shook my head to stop her.
You sure? she mouthed.
I nodded, and she closed the door again, giving one last shake of the sex toy to remind me to behave.
Junior buried his face against my neck, breathing deeply. This was the problem with us. He could stalk me, interfere with my life, and put up more red flags than an entire circus, and I would still look at him and remember the boy I’d grown up with. The fear, the vulnerability. I knew they were still there, buried deep. I knew he was hurting, that he didn’t want to do the things he did. The fact that he was trying to get out was proof enough of that.
It made me want to pull him close and protect him from the world. Which was ridiculous. Despite my lingering memories, he wasn’t a boy anymore; he was a grown man, a criminal. I’d seen his temper, how prone he was to violence. And yet, I still felt like there was hope for him. That he wasn’t too far gone yet. That I could save him.
Taylor was wrong. Junior didn’t have the white knight kink. I did.
“I’m not ashamed of you,” he spoke into my skin. “And your work doesn’t bother me. You can post whatever you like, and I’ll never try to tell you otherwise. I don’t want to clip your wings, Lo. I want to see you fly.”
Warmth bloomed in my belly that had nothing to do with lust. That was the most affirming, romantic thing anyone had ever said to me, and as his hands stroked up my back and he pulled me closer, I felt the last of my resistance to him melting away. Yes, he’d stalked me, and yes, he’d done other terrible things, but if he was being honest, and I believed he was, then none of it was about control. He’d done it all to protect me, to make my life easier, better, and I wasn’t in danger of falling into the same trap my mother had.
“Come to my cousin’s barbecue with me,” he said. “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want your money.”
“Then what’ll it take?” He pulled back enough to look me in the eye. “I won’t know anyone there besides her and her fiancé, and making small talk with strangers makes me want to gouge my fucking eyes out. I don’t know how to talk to normal people anymore. I don’t give a shit about how long the wait list for day care is or what everyone is watching on TV. And one day, the intrusive thoughts will win and the next time someone asks what I do for work, I’ll just start talking and see how long it takes before they run screaming away from me.” He tugged me close, butting his forehead against mine. “Don’t let Saturday be that day. Don’t let me ruin my cousin’s engagement party.”
Despite myself, I grinned. The mobster and the camgirl, out together at a nice family cookout. What was the worst that could happen?
“I’ll come.”
