Mess Me Up
Page 19

But then I remembered my own parents and realized that not all parents were great—mine certainly weren’t.
Mine weren’t all that bad. They were just beggars.
All through my childhood, they were the parents that didn’t go to anything. Not one single football practice or football game. No pep rallies or track meets. No graduation. Hell, when I signed with Notre Dame, they didn’t come to the press conference that was held afterward. But then I was the number four draft pick, and all of a sudden, they were doting parents. They cared.
They cared so much that they begged me for money every chance they got, and eventually I gave it to them. But, once they’d gotten the house on the lake and two brand new cars, I felt like my obligation to them was over.
So, I started to put distance between me and them.
But, they’d gotten what they wanted, their bills almost paid for, and I hadn’t seen nor heard from them since.
Only my grandmother had really cared about me. She was the one who had shown up to all of those events, at least she did until Tara came into my life and I lost Tyler’s friendship. When the dust had settled, in the end, my grandmother had chosen Tyler.
Not that I blamed her.
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I admitted. “It’s been four years since I disappointed her so badly. I’d rather continue on like nothing’s changed.”
Like my whole world hadn’t imploded from the inside out.
I felt her hand brush down my arm, leaving goosebumps in its path.
“Where are we going today?” she asked, reaching for the spoon I had halfway to my mouth.
I carried it over so that I could put it into her mouth instead, and, like the doofus I was, I lifted the spoon up like one would an infant to ensure that she got it all off the spoon.
Her eyes lit with humor.
“Sorry. Habit,” I admitted.
She shrugged, then patted the arm that she was still touching.
“And I have to go to a meeting with the club.” I paused. “It’s not supposed to take more than ten minutes, and it’s going to be at a restaurant, so we can discuss it over food.”
Her eyes lit up.
Out of the week I’d been exclusively spending with her, I’d noticed that the girl didn’t skip any meals. She also didn’t skip any desserts. Oh, and she ate snacks. A lot of them.
Really, it was no wonder she had a slightly rounded belly.
And I loved her belly. It made me want to bury my face in its softness and go to sleep.
I clenched my hands to keep from touching her.
“Where else are we going?” she asked.
I picked up her coat and handed it to her.
I wasn’t really fond of the shorts, either, but since we weren’t going that far, and she was wearing tennis shoes, I didn’t see any reason to get her to change. Not when we were staying on back roads with a slower speed limit, and I’d never let anything happen to her.
“You got your keys?” I asked as we stepped out onto the porch.
“Shoot,” she said, running back inside.
I stood there watching her ass wiggle and her thigh muscles flex in those shorts as she ran around frantically looking for her keys and felt something stir deep in my gut. A desire for a woman. But not just any woman—Izzy.
I hadn’t felt that kind of desire in a very long time. It’d been years since I’d taken a lover.
Not because I was on some self-imposed ban, but because I’d grown tired of fucking whoever struck my fancy—like I’d done with Tara.
I’d learned quite a few valuable lessons that night Tyler had found Tara coming out of my house. One of them was that there were some things more important than getting your rocks off.
“Oh!” She paused, tapping her finger on her lip. “Can you check the door handle?”
I winced and did as she asked, pulling out a set of keys from the lock.
“Yep.” I held them up and jingled them.
She grinned. “Great!”
Not great. In fact, her leaving those keys in the door was a very unsafe habit, and I got the feeling from her that this wasn’t the first time she’d done it, either.
But that smile of hers was disarming enough that I didn’t reprimand her like I should have …at least not fully.
“You do that often?” I wondered.
“Do what?” She turned to look up at me.
Her innocent eyes weren’t enough.
I knew what she was trying to do.
“Try to be a little more conscious of what you do,” I told her as I jingled the keys she’d left in the door. “That could’ve been really bad.”
Her beautiful eyes were expressive, and her hair was a beautiful mess. It was up on the top of her head, and tendrils were falling down all around her face.
She was free of makeup, and the only thing that I could see out of place at all was a sheen of Chapstick that she carried around in her pocket like it was a lifeline.
Yes, there wasn’t a single thing about her that I didn’t notice.
I even noticed the birthmark on her left hand in the shape of a flying bird.
“Yes, sir. Now…giddy up,” she teased as she settled on the seat behind me.
I tossed her a look over my shoulder, and she giggled.
She kept giggling throughout the entire night, and by the time I was dropping her off on her front porch step hours later, she’d only picked up the pace.
“Ah, God,” she said, wiping away at her eyes. “You have a big goose egg on your forehead!”
We’d hit a bug on the way home, and by bug, I mean a small goddamn bird sized mutant of a bug. It’d hit my forehead and bounced off, and had hurt like a son of a bitch.
But, it was just one of those things when you rode a motorcycle.
“I hit a baby deer once,” I admitted. “And a possum.”
She snorted. “I like your friends, Rome. I think they missed you.”
I’d noticed that myself.
Tonight, every single one of them had acted like I’d come back from a long vacation…and maybe I had.
And I had the woman in front of me to thank for it.
Chapter 12
Dear Diary,
Today my friend asked me to go to the gym with him. I think I need to meet new friends.
-Text from Izzy to Rome
Izzy
I hated cleaning.
Which was funny, since I owned my own cleaning business.
But, since I was so good at it, I did my job, and I did it well.
“Would you mind cleaning the baseboards today, dear?” Mr. Antilles asked slowly, enunciating each and every word like he thought I was hard of hearing. “They’re looking a little dingy.”
I looked down at the baseboards that I’d already done and didn’t see a single dingy part. But, alas, I’d go back over them again. I didn’t want an unhappy client. Especially this one.
He was a US senator who I cleaned for weekly, but only saw when he was in his residence in Texas.
I was not, under any circumstances, pissing him off.
I could just see him ruining my life—and my brothers for that matter—just because I told him to go take a flying leap off a freakin’ cliff and using his dingy baseboards as a pogo stick on the way down.
“Sure, Mr. A,” I said breezily. “Was there anything else you wanted me to focus on today?”
He looked around, shook his head, and shrugged. “What you normally do, dear.”
With that, he walked outside to go swim his laps.
In his Speedo.
Speedo.
His way too small Speedo.
His way too small Speedo that should never, not ever, be worn by a man with a barrel chest and a beer belly the size of a small Texas town.
But whatever.
If he wanted to swim, or pretend to swim, in his Speedo, I’d let him.
As long as he had clothes on, I was a happy person.
Mostly.
The fact that he had so much hair on his body really grossed me out. It especially caused my gut to roil when he shaved himself and didn’t clean up the hair.
Like this morning.
I’d walked into his bathroom, unprepared to find almost a full body’s worth of hair on the bathroom floor, counter, and on the rug. Hell, it was even in the sink.
But these were only just a few of the things that grossed me out.