some begging on my part for him to allow me to touch him.
“I’m gonna give you everything, Shiloh. Every-fucking-thing.”
My body tingled and fear filled my lungs.
“But tonight I’m gonna eat your pussy until you beg me to stop. You wanna do that with my dick in your mouth, I’ll give you that, too. You just wanna ride my face and enjoy it I’ll finish myself off when I’m done with you. But first, we’re gonna take a shower so I’m not licking my come off your tits when I taste those, too.”
The fear slid out and tingles took over, making my skin feel like it was electrified.
“I want you to finish in my mouth,” I told him.
“Fuck,” he groaned. “My dick’s not even soft yet and you’re getting me hard.”
“Then we better hurry and shower so we can get down to it.”
Luke was up and out of bed. I squealed when he yanked me up and dragged me to the bathroom. He had me in the shower before the water was warm and I squealed again when the icy water hit my back. He turned us so he was under the spray. Then he looked down at me, all the playfulness gone.
“You okay?”
“Were you not in the same bed as I was?”
“I know you got off on what we did. But are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure what he was asking but I knew it was important to him so I stopped screwing around and started paying attention.
“With?”
“With us going out with your team, for starters.”
“Yeah. Didn’t you have a good time?”
“Already told you I had a good time, baby. What I’m asking is, are you okay with how tonight went?”
I was so confused and that confusion must’ve shown because finally, Luke got to the heart of his question and he did this with his arms around my waist and my hands resting on his chest.
“I like the way they are with you,” Luke started. “Total respect. They have a mind to you being female but they don’t treat you like an outsider. You’re one of them—totally—but they curb some of the shit-talk. They’re careful to keep the topic of sex off the table.”
I scrunched my nose at that.
Gross.
The same way I didn’t want to know what my brothers did with women, I didn’t want to hear about the guys I worked with.
“Exactly.” Luke smiled, catching my grimace. “With that being said, they don’t hold back giving you shit. I liked that, too. I liked the way they didn’t get carried away with it and when you gave it back, they took it and smiled. All of that is good. What isn’t is you not understanding why they do it.”
I was feeling the stiffness creep in, the unwanted fear, the itch on the back of my neck. Unfortunately, Luke kept going.
“You told me you didn’t have friends, and, baby, that’s just not true. Those men consider you a friend—”
“We work together.” I cut him off, not liking where this was going. “They’re acquaintances.”
“No, Shiloh. They’re your friends. If you called any of those men right now needing help they’d drop what they were doing and come help you. Well, maybe not Valentine, he seemed eager to get to his date, so right about now I’d say he was—”
“Gross. Please stop.”
“Point is, that’s what friends do. They stop what they’re doing when a friend needs them. An acquaintance is someone you shoot the shit with when you happen to see them in passing. A teammate is someone who has your back when the vests are out and the guns are drawn. You seeing the difference?”
I was getting pissed. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what a friend was. I just didn’t have any.
“I’m not dumb.”
“Didn’t say you were. What I’m saying is you lied when you told me you didn’t have friends. And I’m seeing you didn’t lie on purpose but it doesn’t make it any less untrue. Those men are your friends. They're reaching out to you, trying to grab hold, and you’re holding yourself back. And that shit’s not right. And it’s really not right because I know you’d take a bullet for any one of those men but you wouldn’t invite them to your house for dinner or call them if you had a flat.”
Fear was turning into anger, and as hard as I wanted to stop it I couldn’t. I felt it coming on—ugly and mean—choking me as it slid up my throat preparing to strike.