Page 3 of Demo
I don’t reply. Instead, I hit the gas again and head straight for my husband, who has to jump out of the way. I hear something along the lines of “The fuck’s the matter with you, crazy bitch?”—or a similar sentiment—coming from his mouth as we fly past.
Monty is looking at me as he speaks, and out of the corner of my eye I see his Adam’s apple bob with a hard swallow. “I see things are still a little rocky between you two.”
I shoot him a glare. “Ya think?!”
Chapter 2
KNOX
Sleepingonmyparents’pullout couch is going to be the death of me.
Well, I guess it’s just my dad’s sofa now, since Mom died a few years back. But it’s still the house they owned together for two decades before she died, so I will probably forever refer to it, and everything in it, as “theirs.”
Either way, I’m way too old to be sleeping on a bent-up piece of metal with a glorified mattress pad on top. When I was twenty-five it was doable, but at nearly thirty-five, it’s causing permanent bodily harm.
I can’t believe Lizzie and I used to fuck on this thing.
Anyway, I’m not going anywhere else for the time being. At least not until I figure out if Lizzie is ever going to take me back. Not that I’m sure I want her to. For fuck’s sake, the woman tried to run me over.
I roll over—a metal spear jabbing into my kidney—and glance at the clock: three-seventeen in the morning.
How can time move so slowly now, and yet so quickly when I wished I could have slowed it down?
Even though I tell myself time and time again I won’t think about her, when it’s late and sleep evades me, I can’t help it. This morning, I remember the first time I saw Lizzie.
She thinks we met on a blind date, but I had my buddy set it up. My dad’s company was contracted to do some work on one of the community college campuses on the south side of the city. It was early September, and the beginning of a new semester. It was unusually warm, and I was sweating my ass off as I worked on updating the courtyard. Due to the warm weather, everyone was flocking around campus, lounging on the grass when the benches were all taken.
I wasn’t a student. I never went to college. After high school, I entered the construction trade after my dad, joining his company. He does a lot of work at the colleges, and since many of the people I went to high school with ended up at the local community college, I knew a lot of the students at the various campuses and partied with a lot of them—and went home with a lot of them. So, I knew the campus pretty well.
I was taking a break from work, taking a long swig of water, when the wind caught one of the double doors to a nearby instructional building. It flew open and out came a fantastic female specimen. She had thick arms and legs I could see flexing beneath a short skirt and tank top.
And her center was soft. I could see how it popped out just a little at the waist, where her shirt was tucked into her skirt.Adorable.
She was chatting with a short, portly professor in a pressed suit tucked in at the waist that made him look like a bowling ball. Another rush of wind blew, and a bunch of papers went flying out of his hand and started blowing across the grass like leaves.
Her long, golden-brown locks swirled around her face as she tried to fight them back while scurrying around to help pick up the papers. Even from a distance, I could see her mouth form the word“fuck”as she danced around to catch the blowing pages.Feisty!
No one else stopped to help. Dozens of students—and professors—just kept walking by, not giving a shit.
Trying to stomp a few pages with her foot and then bend down to grab them before they blew away again, another gust of wind blew her skirt up her back and I, and everyone else in the quad, got a glimpse of pink panties that could barely contain a dimpled, juicy ass that I wanted to sink my fingernails and teeth into.
I was too busy thinking with my twitching cock to realize I should run over and help her, and some other lucky bastard got there before I could even move.
Then I realized it was my buddy Jared, and again I hesitated. How had I never seen this chick around campus before?
While I was standing there ogling like a perv, Jared helped her collect all the papers and hand them to the professor. He was a student, and he was talking to her like he knew her. Come to think of it, he came out of the same building, so maybe they had a class together …
By the time I was bounding across the grass toward them, the beautiful brunette had disappeared into the crowd. As I neared, Jared finally saw me.
“Hey, Knox. S’up?” he said as I came to a screeching halt.
Lurching over to rest my hands on my knees and sucking in air like my life depended on it, I cocked my head and locked eyes with my buddy.
“Who the fuck wasthat?” I asked through labored breaths.
It turned out Jared’s girlfriend had a class with this beauty. But I didn’t immediately ask him to set us up. I tried to play it cool, or at least fly under the radar. I made sure to be near the courtyard at the same time every day the rest of that week to try and catch a glimpse of her. Some days I was lucky. Others I wasn’t. One day, I followed behind her and a group of friends, lingering far enough back not to draw attention. She was munching on an apple as they chatted animatedly before breaking apart.
Shortly after, I watched her pass a group of douchebags hanging around another lecture hall who catcalled at her, and without skipping a beat she turned around and whipped the half-eaten apple at the group—clocking the alpha douche in the head.
