Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 48061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“I don’t want any favors, thanks anyway,” she says. I shrug it off, buy my coke, and wait for her at the door.
Ishould have ignored her when I saw her, instead of stopping traffic. It turns out I can swallow my pride every day of the week and twice on Sundays if I have the slightest hope of it getting me what I want. Ego is nothing compared to the chance to get my mouth between Daisy Cooper’s thighs again. I damn near black out when I think of it.
The salty taste of her soft skin, the musky heat of her scent filling me as I breathe her in. Wanting her is an electric jolt, the spark I can’t ignore that rips through me with the force of a craving, the kind addicts get where the need for a fix blots out everything else. Who needs to sleep or drink water or go to work or take a shower when nothing matters but that craving that shakes me to my bones?
This minute, she’s exactly what I want. Not Daisy when she was nineteen and things were good between us, not a trip down memory lane. This is a lot more potent than nostalgia. Overwhelming hunger consumes me, so powerful I nearly stagger and lose my balance. Let me taste you, I want to say. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
I could do this, too. It’s not just a fantasy. I have the kind of power that would buy me privacy and discretion. I could give Mrs. Santino a hundred bucks to close the store and leave. All I’d have to do is step over to the counter and offer her a bill, say in a low voice, why don’t you go home, and I’ll lock up when we’re done? She’d wink at me and tuck the money in her apron.
I know exactly what I’d do. It’s an impulse as fundamental as the urge to cross myself when I walk into church, to put my cart back when I’m done at the store. Instincts bred in my blood. Say please and thank you, tie your shoes, tuck in your shirt, put the lid down on the toilet, and the cap on the toothpaste. If you lay eyes on Daisy Cooper again, never let her go. Fall on your knees and eat her out till she doesn’t remember the word no.
Daisy meets my eyes.
“Are you gonna get out of the way or what?” she says, exasperated.
I grin at her and step aside, “It was good seeing you again,” I say.
“It was unexpected,” she says, slipping back into a neutral accent. It probably took her years to talk like she was doing a pronunciation video for people that don’t speak English, cause that’s what it sounds like to me.
“Tell your mom I hope she gets better,” I say.
“Thanks,” Daisy says, holding her grocery bag.
“I could walk you home.”
“Oh, please don’t,” she blurts out, maybe a little embarrassed and it makes me want to laugh.
“Maybe next time,” I say with a grin, using my best PR smile on her.
I step aside and she brushes past me. Forget my pride, I watch her walk away. Things have changed, she’s been away a long time. We’re older, maybe even wiser. But that girl has the same switch in her walk she always had. Watching her, the familiar set of her shoulders and droop of her head as she looks at her phone, I feel something click in place for me. Like the piece I’d been missing found her way home.
5
DAISY
Well, son of a bitch. If I was looking for Benny Falconari, I wouldn’t have scoured his old neighborhood, and I wouldn’t have had ‘getting a frozen Coke on the corner’ on my bingo card either. But there he was in all his goddamn glory. He had on a white t-shirt—a lot better fabric than the old three packs of Hanes he used to wear, and his jeans fit him like every broken-in crease was created just for that ass.
My cheeks go red as a slap because the hot skin of my palms remembers the bunch and flex of the muscles in his back when my knees bracketed his rib cage as he worked inside me, relentless and slow.
I roll my lips under and bite them. My libido dried up and left town ages ago because I had to survive, get a job and a place to live and health insurance and make sure my son hit his milestones and ate his vegetables. I didn’t have time to think about any of the foolishness that got me in trouble in the first place.
I get the bright idea to stop at the store for some good coffee and in swaggers all my worst impulses looking like sex on legs. Muscles I forgot about start to clench and I go hot and then chilled all over like I have a sudden and terrible sunburn with a fever and maybe smallpox or the plague.