Page 86 of Vile Bastards
“What?” I ask, but he just gives a small shake of his head.
“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking, Miss Force: you won’t like it.” He fingers the black zip-up in his hands and then brings it near his face for a sniff. His nose wrinkles up, and his skin visibly ripples with goose bumps. He tosses it over one of the chairs, and I pick it up, lifting it to my own face to smell it.
It reeks of laundry detergent.
With a sigh, I put it over the back of the chair and squat down to dig through the garbage bags. There’s a lot of good vintage stuff in here, to be honest. Like I said, Widow does have style. He knows how to put together what he’s been given, and it’s entirely genuine and without pretense. The jeans have real holes; the faded black t-shirts have just been washed a million times over; if the boots are scuffed, it’s because they’ve been worn.
“Let’s put together a character for you,” I offer up, rising to my feet and shaking out a Linkin Park t-shirt (RIP front man Chester). Well, damn. This really is a treasure trove of vintage glory. “How about this: your parents were scene kids who worshipped studded belts, striped arm warmers, and—”
Alexei snatches the shirt from my fingers and tosses it aside. His eyes hold a quiet fury that he doesn’t seem to know what to do with except to turn all of that rage into … want. He’s angry, and there’s no outlet, so he wants to fuck it all away.
I’m down for that.
“If you don’t like the clothes, you’re really not going to like your new name.”
“Which is?” he asks, as my gaze slips back to the shuttered warehouse doors, and then over to his aristocratic face. Really, he is just like a dog, all that fine and careful breeding. I reach up a hand, fingers hovering in the air over that perfect jawline, and Alexei’s eyelids fall heavy. He stops me before I can actually touch him, squeezing latex-covered fingers around my wrist.
“Marie.” I smile at him, and then slap his arm away. “Your name is Alex Marie, but we’ll just call you Marie for now. Anyway …” I trail off and move around the table, and he follows. “Like many Prescott students, you adopted and absorbed your parents’ likes, dislikes, and sense of fashion because it’s cheaper and cooler to just wear hand-me-downs over Walmart slave labor pieces”—I pause here to hold a hand up to my mouth and whisper—“these are your only choices, mind you, and so you do it. You love emo and metalcore music, refer to social media CEOs as modern-day fascist autocrats, and unironically read Nietzsche. You like, Marie?”
I turn around just in time for Alexei to step forward and slam his palms down on the table on either side of me. His gaze is on my mouth, and he’s nearly panting he’s breathing so damn hard. His pants are clearly tented in the front, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with all of that misplaced lust.
“I do not like,” he responds, swallowing hard. He drags his fingertips across the tabletop, and it’s so absurdly clean that the latex screeches over it, making me shiver. “I don’t want to attend your hellhole high school.”
“You’re not used to doing things you don’t want to do, eh?” I ask, cocking a brow. “Bummer.”
Alexei snatches my chin in his right hand, squeezing hard and drawing my face closer to his. He just keeps staring at my mouth like either a lover or a serial killer. I’m determined that, at the very least, he’s going to be both.
My right hand slips up under the hem of his hoodie, and he grits his teeth as I stroke my fingers over his rock-hard abs. His skin is so goddamn smooth, his muscles contracting as I play my fingertips across them. I can’t resist dragging them down, seeing how far I might get before he stops me.
“No.” Alexei finally grabs my wrist and then starts to step back. I don’t let him, shoving my other hand down the front of his sweatpants until I’m fisting his impossibly hard cock. His breath catches, and he curses in Russian, stumbling back until he slams into the bank of kitchen counters.
Our eyes are locked, his panicked and mine determined.
“No? Who gets to tell who no here?” I wonder, squeezing and twisting my fist, dragging my grip up the length of him as I step forward. My mouth hovers at his throat, just above the ties of his hoodie, and I lift up on my toes, pressing a smoldering kiss there.
He swallows hard, reaching up and snatching my upper arms in a violent grip. Only … he doesn’t push me away this time. His gloved fingers slide down until they reach my hips, and he slips them under my skirt, rucking it up around my waist.
