The Debt 10 (Club Alpha) (3 page)

“I want you too,” she said, breathless.

He was dry fucking her and she liked
it.
 
His cock was hard as a rock,
hammering down at her pussy, as she pushed back up into him with her own
hips.
 
She swiveled her pelvis,
rocked against him as he grew more quick and heated, his lips trailing down her
neck.

“I love your body,” she said, grabbing
his strong forearms and then feeling up his arms, to his huge biceps, enjoying
every contour.

“Yeah, you like it?” Chase said, driving
his hips into hers again.

Her pussy was electric with wet
desire.
 
She nodded, moaning,
rubbing her hands up his arms.
 
“I
love your tattoos,” she said, looking at the one on his upper right bicep, as
she slid her fingertips under the sleeve of his t-shirt and pushed the material
up towards his shoulder.
 

“You like ink, huh,” he said, watching
her face as he teased her with his bulging cock, pressing against her hard.

“I do,” she whispered.
 

“Say it,” he commanded her.

“I like your ink,” she sighed, as he
thrust again and again.

As she was trailing her fingers along his
upper bicep, she noticed that there was a raised bump on his skin where a
bullet hole had been tattooed, along with tattooed cracks, making it look as if
the bullet had punctured the surface of something.
 
Above the bullet hole was the phrase
“bullet proof,” tattooed in fancy lettering.

“What’s this?” she purred, rubbing the
raised area of his skin where the tattoo of the bullet was displayed.
 

Chase suddenly jerked his arm away from
her probing fingers and sat back on the couch.
 
His eyes had changed from seductive to
suspicious in a flash.
 
“Why are you
so interested in my tattoos?” he said, unrolling his sleeve to cover the ink
she’d been curious about.

Faith was confused.
 
She slid into a sitting position,
smoothing her hair behind her ear.
 
“I don’t know,” she said.
 
“I
guess I just think they’re sexy.”

Chase stood up and began pacing.
 
“See, this is exactly the shit I was
talking about,” he said, as if to himself.
 
“Complicated.
 
I don’t need
fucking complications in my life.”

 
“I don’t need to know about your tattoos
if you don’t want me to.
 
I won’t ever
ask again.”

He turned and faced her.
 
“But you’ll keep wondering, won’t you?”
he challenged.
 
“You’ll always
wonder why I wouldn’t tell you what it meant.”

“Maybe.
 
I don’t know.
 
Why are you attacking me for something
so small?”

“Because,” he said, “it’s not just some
little thing.
 
It’s my life,
Faith.”
 
He stared at her.
 
“You’re messing with my life.”

“I’m messing with
your
life?” she said, completely baffled.
 
“You must be joking.”

“No, I’m not joking.”

She was starting to feel angry now.
 
“Last I checked, you’re the one who got
me fired from my job.
 
You’re the
one making me sign papers, making me play by your rules.
 
It’s my life that’s getting messed with,
not yours.”
 

“I guess it seems that way to you,” he
muttered.

“It is that way, Chase.”
 
She stood up.
 
“And I don’t really need this shit
either.”
 
She started to walk past
him, fully intending to exit his home and keep going until she reached the nearest
T stop, from which she could get back to her apartment.

But before she could even get by him,
Chase’s hand grabbed her arm, lightning fast, stopping her.
 
“Don’t,” he said.

She glared at him.
 
“Let me go.”

Then he did let her go, and she started
walking again.

“You want to know?” he said, his voice
raising.

“No, I don’t want to know anything,” she
called back over her shoulder, still determined to leave.
 

I
don’t need this crap
,
she thought, even as her heart told her that she couldn’t possibly resist
him.
 
Not even for a second.

“That tattoo is where I got shot,” he
said, and that did stop her in her tracks.

Her mind raced with this new piece of
information.
 
Nobody—nobody—had ever reported anything about Chase having
been shot in his life.
 
Was he
lying?
 
But why would he lie about
something like that?
 
And she’d felt
the scar herself.
 
So it had to have
been something…

Faith turned around and looked at
him.
 
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

He stared at her for a long moment, and
then he stripped off his shirt and threw it to the floor.
 
Chase was standing bare-chested, and he
looked both proud and ashamed, vulnerable and strangely defiant as he watched
her watching him.

He pointed to a tattoo under his left
pectoral.
 
What was pictured there
was a red bow, as if a present had been untied.
 
“That’s where I got stabbed,” he said.

She felt suddenly faint.
 
“Chase, please…”

“You wanted to know, right?” he asked,
stepping towards her now.
 
“You
wanted to know about my cool, funky little tattoos.
 
You thought to yourself, he’s like some
cool hipster football player with all those neat little pictures drawn on his
body.
 
Sexy, right?”

She couldn’t look at him anymore.
 
“I don’t know what I thought.”

“Tell the truth, Faith.
 
You don’t really want to fucking know
about me, about the reality of my life.
 
You don’t really want to know that my mother was a prostitute who got
murdered by some john, and the cops never bothered catching whoever did it.”

She wanted to cover her ears.
 
“Please,” she begged, as if he might
stop talking.

But he continued.
 
“Shit, you definitely didn’t want to
know that I never even met my father.
 
Or the fact that both me and my little brother were in a gang in
Detroit, and we dealt drugs and mugged people and fought with other gangs and
tried to kill people who fucked with us.”
 
He was walking closer and closer to her as he said these things.

She couldn’t breathe or swallow, and her
heart was racing, her body frozen in fear and confusion.
 
This couldn’t be true.
 
None of this stuff was public knowledge.

He’s
just messing with me.

But she knew—she knew as much as
she knew anything, that he wasn’t lying.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she
said.

“Just look at me,” he demanded.

And so she did look at him.
 
The tattoos looked totally different now
to her, as she surveyed them and realized that most, if not all of them, had to
have some kind of gang significance.
 
Even if she didn’t know exactly what they meant, she understood that
they weren’t just cool symbols like what her friends would get from time to
time.

Friends who’d stroll into a tattoo parlor
and page through books with pictures and drawings and symbols—they’d get
a tribal band, a leprechaun, a heart with a boy’s name in it.
 

Those kinds of tattoos weren’t anything
like what Chase Winters had emblazoned on his body.
 
And the reasons for them were altogether
different as well.

Finally, Faith nodded.
 
“I see you,” she said softly.

He was breathing heavily.
 
His eyes were dark, his expression
somehow completely stony and also terribly pained at once.
 
“You see that I’m fucked up beyond
repair.”

She shook her head.
 
“I see that you’ve been through terrible
things.”

“Nothing you could ever even imagine in
your worst nightmares.”

“I believe you,” she said, her chest
catching.

“See, it wasn’t supposed to be like
this,” he told her, shaking his head.
 
He was laughing, but not with good humor.
 

“What was it supposed to be like?” she
prodded.

“I wanted something simple.
 
No strings, no attachments.
 
Nothing emotional.”

“Is that why you chose me out of all the
girls you could have been with?
 
Unless—I don’t know, maybe there are dozens of others,” she said,
as if realizing it for the first time.

He shook his head again.
 
“There are no others.”

She took a deep breath and let it
out.
 
“I’m shaking,” she said,
holding up her hand and realizing it was true.

Chase reached out and took her hand in
his, and his touch was so gentle, so loving, that she was instantly
calmed.
 

“I shouldn’t have told you those things,”
he said softly.
 
“I don’t know why I
did.”

“Because you’ve been holding it all in
for too long,” she replied, and he blinked at her, his expression startled.

“You think?”

“You can’t hold the world on your
shoulders,” she told him.
 
“You
can’t be expected to do all of this alone, Chase.”

He pulled her even closer now.
 
“My life isn’t pretty,” he said to
her.
 
“I do it alone so nobody else
has to deal with it but me.”
 

“What if I want to deal with it?” she
asked, tilting her head up towards him.

“I’d never let you get in the middle of a
fucking war zone, Faith.”
 

She put her free hand on his chest and
rubbed her palm over the surface of his skin.
 
Now, when she drew her finger along the
lines of ink, it meant something different.
 
The truth was, she still found his
tattoos sexy, but for a completely different reason.

His tattoos were personal.
 
Deeply personal, and almost nobody knew
what they meant.
 

But
now I do.

Chase had let her in enough to tell her
about those horrible things from his past.
 
His mother, a prostitute—murdered by a killer who was never
caught.

She shivered, just thinking about it.

Chase watched her as her eyes grew teary,
just imagining what he’d been through in his life.
 
And now she knew that he was carrying
the weight of his history all on his own.
 
It didn’t seem fair.

“I want to know,” she said, still
caressing his chest, understanding now that it was like a map of his life.
 
There was a code that prevented most
from reading that map, but she had the code now.

The code, she realized, was Chase Winters
himself.
 
He was the one who could
explain what the map meant, show her the territory in all of its grim detail.

“I can’t tell you everything,” he said,
his voice tight with emotion, but still letting her touch his body.
 
His muscles flinched a little when her
fingertips ran over them.
 
Traced
the lines that swirled intricately, made pictures and words that had deep meaning,
but most of which was still inscrutable to her.

“You can tell me exactly as much as you
want to,” she said.
 
“Or as little
as you want to.
 
I just need you to
be aware of the fact that I’m okay.
 
I can handle it.”

He smirked a little bit.
 
“You think so.
 
But it’s not quite that simple.”

“I know,” she sighed.
 
“Nothing with you ever is, Chase.”

And then he leaned in and began kissing
her mouth, softly, delicately, his lips tender and patient.
 

She trembled at his touch—but now
the trembling was less from fear than hope, pleasure, lust, and emotion.
 
There was a wellspring of emotion inside
her, and Chase had found the way to tap into it and let it flow.

Faith hadn’t even realized that she had
so much within her, but now that she felt it, the emotions threatened to
overwhelm her.