Leave a Trail Page 14

  Her smile positively beamed at him. “That would be awesome. They still have chicken, right?” Adrienne didn’t eat red meat. She barely ate meat at all.

  “Think so, yeah.”

  “Good! That sounds awesome! Let’s do that. But first…we got interrupted when you left.” She took his hand and led him to the little couch. Oh, fuck, yeah. That would help the bees buzzing at the base of his skull. That would help a lot. Even being in the same room with her settled him down, but fuck.

  When she pushed him to sit and then started to kneel between his legs, though, he caught her shoulders and pulled her to sit on his lap instead. Too much like the clubhouse. “No, babe. Let’s go to bed.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “We can’t. They gave me Daisy’s bed. It’s small. And anyway, it’s Daisy’s. We can’t do stuff on that bed. It feels wrong.”

  Well, he couldn’t watch her kneeling between his legs, either. He looked around, thinking. Then he brushed her hair back and grinned. “Let’s camp out.”

  “What?”

  “Camp out. Put all the bedding on the floor. Make a nest. You got enough blankets for that?”

  Now she was grinning, too. “Yeah. I think Shannon is expecting a cold summer, because she sent a whole big box of bedding over.” She got up and went to the bedroom, then came back pushing a very large cardboard box. “Pillows and blankets galore.”

  When they had a cozy little nest set up on the floor behind the loveseat, Adrienne plopped down in the middle, looking sweet and sassy and not at all shy or nervous. Badger folded his kutte and hung it over the back of the couch, then kicked off his boots and stripped to his boxers before joining her.

  “You don’t have to do this, babe.”

  She looked down at his tented boxers with a smirk.

  He lifted her head. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything.”

  “I don’t. I told you—I want to do everything. Well, almost everything. A lot of things. Like touch you.” She reached out, slid her hand into his fly, and wrapped her fingers around his cock. He couldn’t hold back his hiss or the flex that accompanied it. Her hand. Fuck. Adrienne’s hand, around his cock. He lay back.

  “Tell me if I do anything wrong.” Her voice was low and husky. When she pulled on his waistband, he lifted his hips, and she rid him of his underwear.

  At first, for several minutes, she touched him lightly, examining him with her hands and her eyes. She trailed her fingers all over him, tracing veins and ridges, feeling the curve of his glans and then sliding down to circle his root. She lifted his balls and when, at that touch, he made some kind of strained grunt he couldn’t help, she scratched lightly all over them.

  Holy Jesus.

  Needing to touch her, he reached out to lay his hand high on her thigh. He could feel her heat. Touching him was turning her on. But she was off limits to him tonight.

  Then she wrapped her hand around him and squeezed a little, and his hips came off the blankets of their own volition. “Fuck, babe!”

  “Was that wrong?” She’d stopped and now was looking into his eyes.

  “No,” he laughed. “Not wrong. Right.”

  Her smile made his heart ache deep in his chest. “Good. How about this?” Her hand still wrapped around him, she slid it up his full length, tightening her grip as she approached his tip, and then back down.

  “Good—good,” was all he could gasp. He wanted to watch, but he was getting close—too close—so he closed his eyes, limiting the stimulation to touch.

  That helped him maintain for a few minutes. But because his eyes were closed, when he felt the soft, warm wet of her tongue on the head of his weeping, desperate cock, he was completely undone. “Fuck! Fuck! Babe, get off! Get off!”

  She did, nearly jumping away, and he slammed his hand over the end of his cock as he came, his semen hitting his palm and painting his shaft. When he could relax, he leaned over for his t-shirt and sopped up his mess, then dropped his head to the blankets.

  Adrienne asked, “Was that good or bad? I can’t tell.”

  “You can’t tell? That was good. Fuck, that was good.”

  “Why’d you make me get off you?”

  He propped up on an elbow, feeling shaky—but not feeling buzzy or even especially achy in his chest. “I didn’t want to come all over you, or in your mouth, and I was too close to ask nice. Sorry, babe.”

  Looking relieved, she lay down at his side, and he lay back, too, so she could rest her head on his chest. He was beginning to get used to that, letting her touch the ruined part of him. The part ruined on the outside, at least.

  “I wouldn’t have minded if you’d come in my mouth.”

  His sated cock twitched at that.

  “Not yet. If you haven’t done this before, that’s too much to start with.” He lifted his head; she was looking up at him. “Can I ask what you have done before us?”

  She blushed, still smiling. “Um, yeah, I guess.” When she didn’t say more, Badger understood that he was going to have to ask her specific questions.

  “Making out—like, Frenching?” He started with the easy one.

  “Well, yeah. Duh.”

  “Touching your ti—boobs?”

  “My ti-boobs?” She laughed. “Yeah. Topless.”

  “Sucking ‘em?” He’d thought this would be kinda sexy, but every time she said ‘yeah’ and he thought about other guys doing that stuff to her, it got markedly less sexy.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hand between your legs?”

  She sat up. “I don’t like this game anymore.”

  He didn’t like the sound of her voice; she was too upset. “Okay. Sorry. You okay?”

  With a glance over her shoulder at him, she nodded. “I’m okay. Can we go eat?”

  “Sure, babe.” Aware that he’d touched a nerve, he dropped it and stood, holding out his hand to help her up.

  They dressed, and then they went together to the Chop House, Adrienne riding bitch behind him. It wasn’t the first time she’d ridden with him, but it was the first time she had when she was his girl, and it was just about the best thing ever.

  They had a nice supper in Signal Bend’s only ‘nice’ restaurant, twined together in the near-privacy of the corner booth.

  Near privacy. They’d been noticed by everybody in the restaurant. Badger was certain that they’d be part of the talk at Marie’s in the morning. As long as the talk was good, he wouldn’t mind that at all.

  After supper, they went back to the B&B and set up their little nest so they could see the television Shannon had had moved in from the storage room. They watched Law & Order reruns until Adrienne fell asleep, tucked safely in the curve of his body.

  Badger felt good. Hidden away in the manager’s suite, his girl—this girl—sleeping on his arm, he could forget all the shit outside that door. He could forget all the shit inside his head.

  Nuzzling into her soft, sweet-smelling hair, Badger closed his eyes and slept.

  He didn’t dream.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Though she was helping Shannon out with weddings and stuff, the B&B got quiet during the week. When summer really kicked in, it would be busy most of the time, but until then, on weekdays, it was normally just a big, empty house. Badger, though, was always busy, either with the animals at the B&B or with club business. Left to her own devices a lot of the time, Adrienne drove around the countryside, taking pictures. Eventually, she began to tire of nature shots of the same kind of nature all the time. She had some great shots, it was true, and she was beginning to think of putting together a digital portfolio and submitting it to a few places.

  But for now, as April became May, she was just killing time, trying not to stress about her life. Then she got an idea for a project. She’d noticed a kind of schizophrenia about Signal Bend, and she decided to try to capture it in pictures.

  In some ways, Signal Bend was almost a ghost town. On the outskirts all around town, and in some places
fairly deep into the town proper, there’d be a strand of abandoned houses and mobile homes, boarded up or not, yards overgrown with new spring weeds, rusted husks of cars and trucks parked alongside, tractors rotting out in the middle of small fields, as if the farmers had just given up right in the middle of their daily work and abandoned the whole enterprise in a fit of pique. These places were eerie and sad.

  Along the edges of Main Street, it was the same: businesses that had gone dark so many years ago that the boards over their windows and doors had turned a washed-out grey, the plywood splitting and curled. Gravel lots so overgrown that actual trees, albeit scrubby ones, were growing up where customers had once parked. A boot shop. A video store. A gas station. A butcher. The police station. All gone but for their skeletons, becoming brittle and crumbling.

  But then, a few hundred feet toward the town square, Signal Bend shook off its caul of decline and began to sparkle. The Chop House had just gotten new awnings and a new sign. Marie’s had a new roof, and they’d recently re-graveled the lot with white quartz, so it sparkled in the spring sun. Valhalla Vin, the wine bar owned by the Horde, looked positively elegant, and would not have been out of place in the swankiest Connecticut suburb. Tasha’s clinic was bright and gleaming. The Main Street shops, only a few blocks on either side of the street, had all been remodeled not long before Adrienne had first come to town, and they all had freshly painted signs on gleaming new windows. They bustled on the weekends, their stock looking fresh—though most of it was antique (the real kind or the ‘junque’ kind, depending on the shop).

  The town square itself looked like something out of a Frank Capra movie—the town hall and the library bookending a park with a gazebo in the center, and benches and roses scattered quaintly, all of it looking bright and shiny. And the neighborhoods surrounding the core of the town were reviving. Houses that had been derelict when she’d started visiting were now restored and inhabited. People had moved to Signal Bend, despite its out-of-the-way-ness or because of it, and were giving it energy.

  But still that death around its edges. It creeped Adrienne out; even as she recognized that the growth and development was new, it was hard not to think that it was the decay that was taking over. At a minimum, there seemed to be a battle between the new and the old, being waged just under the surface. Sometimes, looking through her lens and catching the uncomfortable juxtaposition in a tiny detail, she literally got the shivers.

  One midweek afternoon about two weeks or so since she’d moved into the manager’s suite, Adrienne was strolling along the wooden walk in front of some of the Main Street shops, her camera in her hand, looking for images worthy of her lens. When she walked through this area, she always paid particular attention to the shop windows. Some shops had random mishmashes of goods up front, as if the display window was nothing more than a storage shelf. Others made conscious displays and refreshed them frequently. She found she liked the random windows best; there was always some kind of pattern she could discern, and the pattern she saw changed from time to time, even if the goods themselves did not.

  Fosse’s Finds, one of the larger shops, full mostly of real antiques, was one that had a neat display in the window, and it changed weekly, from what Adrienne could tell in the few weeks she’d been in town. Adrienne was less interested in that window, and she was almost past it when her brain processed something she’d seen at the corner of her eye. A smallish red square. A ‘Help Wanted’ sign, the kind sold at office supply stores, red with white letters, a white field under the word ‘Wanted.” Neatly printed in black Sharpie in that white field was the word Afternoons.

  Adrienne stood and stared at that sign for a long time. She felt a pull forward, into the store. But if she applied for a job, then she was making a choice about her life. Was she ready to do that? She’d spent the last few weeks taking something of a mental vacation, always pushing her worries about her life to the side, unwilling to contemplate the kind of plans her father was constantly reminding her she needed to make. She’d been content to just be, hanging out with Badger as much as possible, seeing Shannon and Show, wandering around town and in the countryside. Getting better at riding horses.

  She spoke to or texted her father every day; if she hadn’t, he would have been on the next flight out. But she’d been noncommittal, giving him vague answers and evasions, telling him she wasn’t ready to take the next step. He asked every day whether she was safe, and he wanted details, sure that the longer she stayed in Signal Bend, connected to the Horde, the more likely she would get hurt—or maybe go bad somehow. He was getting frustrated with her, she could tell, but she hadn’t been ready to be specific.

  What if she was ready to be specific but the answer she gave him meant that she stayed away from home? Made a new home? How would she tell him that? What would he do?

  She stepped back from the shop and continued down the boardwalk. Two shops down, she stopped again. She’d already made a choice, hadn’t she? She wouldn’t leave Badger. Even if she were inclined to try a long distance thing with him, she wouldn’t leave him now, when he was still struggling with his demons. She loved him. He loved her. He needed her. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  She turned around and went into Fosse’s Finds.

  ~oOo~

  “A phone call! To what do I owe such a great honor, dove?” Charles Renard’s rich bass voice, a faint Jamaican lilt still noticeable even after forty years in the U.S., rolled into his daughter’s ear.

  Adrienne resisted sighing audibly. Starting right off with the guilt trip, he was. “Papa, don’t be dramatic. We text every day, and we spoke a few days ago.”

  “Yes, but I called you. I believe this is the third time only that you’ve called me since you left. Is everything all right?”

  Well, yes. Everything was good. She was excited, but she was fairly certain that her excitement was about to take a hit. “Yes, Papa. Everything’s great. I have some things to tell you.”

  “Good things, I hope?”

  “I think they’re very good things. I have a boyfriend.”

  “Excuse?”

  “Badger. You know—I’ve told you about him. You’ve seen his picture.”

  “Badger. One of the bikers, yes?”

  “Yes, one of the bikers. He’s been my friend for as long as I’ve known Shannon. Now we’re more. It’s a good thing, Papa. He makes me happy.”

  “You have a boyfriend in Missouri? This seems rash, Adrienne. Why get serious with someone for such a short time? You’re too young to tie yourself down to someone so far away.”

  Her stomach and her heart flipped places, and she felt a little dizzy, but she pressed on. “That’s the other part of my news. He won’t be far away. I got a job today. I’m going to stay here. Move here.”

  The silence on the line stretched until she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Papa? Please say something.”

  “No, dove. You come home now. Enough with this absurdity. Time to come home and start your life. The life you worked so hard for. The life that your maman wanted for you. Enough. I’ll book your flight.”

  “I drove here, Papa, remember? And I’m not leaving. This is where my life starts.”

  Her father was a preternaturally calm man. He did not yell. He did not get excited. When they went back to his hometown in Jamaica and he fell smoothly into a patois that Adrienne barely understood, he became much more animated. But her father, the man she knew, was a stereotypically tweedy academic who smoked a pipe, thought big thoughts and spoke big words, and did not ruffle. So when he shouted, “NO! YOU COME HOME NOW!” Adrienne jumped and almost dropped her phone.

  “This is an offense! You dishonor your mother! Adrienne Marie Celeste Renard, you will leave for home at once! Tonight! This is not a request!”

  “No, Papa.” Her voice shook, but she said it.

  Another long silence. Then, his voice quiet and strained, he said the worst thing he could ever say to her. “If you are not home in two days, then you do not have
a home here any longer.”

  And the line went dead.

  Adrienne sat hard on the floor in the middle of her nearly-empty, borrowed suite and stared at the words “Call Ended” on her screen. She stared until her phone went to sleep. And then she wept.

  ~oOo~

  She’d stopped crying but was still sitting on the floor when Badger came in some time later. He’d stopped knocking within a few days of her taking the suite, and he had spent almost every night with her since their first night together.

  She looked up when he came in. When he saw her sitting on the floor, her phone still in her hands, his expression shifted swiftly from tired but happy to deeply concerned.

  “Babe?” He sat down next to her and tucked her under his arm, against his chest. Drawing comfort from his touch, she nestled into his embrace and felt tears rising.

  He kissed her head, then laid his cheek where his lips had been. “Adrienne, what’s wrong?”

  She sighed heavily, using the breath to relax her throat and calm her tears. “I got a job today.”

  “What? Where?” He shifted and looked down at her.

  “At Fosse’s Finds. Just weekday afternoons and every other Saturday. But it’ll help keep me away from the money my mom left me. There’s not that much left after Columbia, anyway. I should keep it for something big.”

  Happiness and worry played tug-of-war with his face. “So you’re staying, then? But that makes you sad?”

  “No, it makes me happy. I want to stay. I want to be here, with you. But…I talked to my dad. I told him about us. And that I was staying. He’s really mad. He…he…” She couldn’t say it out loud.

  When she felt Badger’s hand sliding gently over her neck and jaw, his thumb lifting her chin, she closed her eyes and tried to let his touch calm her. “What did he say, babe? You can tell me.”

  “That if I don’t go home right now, I won’t have a home at all.” Saying the words out loud made them real in a way they had not yet been, and she could no longer hold back her tears. She began to sob, and Badger held her tightly again and let her. Then, after she’d run out of tears, he helped her up and led her to bed.