my cock so hard I almost come from how good it feels and how fucking painful it is.
I lick the tear off her cheek before it can reach her lips as I come long and hard inside of her. Spilling everything I have into her. Emotions, vulnerability, love.
“I fucking love you so much,” I whisper as I regain my senses.
She stays on my lap with me inside of her. Our gazes finally break as her head collapses onto my shoulder. The blood rushes from my cock pulsing inside her pussy which is still constricting me like a vise I never want to get out of.
After a long while in the silence with nothing but the sound of our breathing and the occasional creaking of an old rocking chair on the porch behind us, she finally speaks. “I love you, too, Pike,” I hear her strained whisper. “So, fucking much. It hurts. It all hurts so bad.”
She sits up, pulling me from her body. She adjusts her shorts, and I pull up my pants. I feel the loss of her the second my cock slips from her body. I feel it everywhere. In my heart. In the air around us.
In my fucking soul.
Who knew that so much love would result in so much pain.
Mickey sobs. “Something is really, really wrong with me. I need help.”
“Shhhh…it’s okay. We will get you help,” I say as her tears soak my shirt.
“I can’t stay here,” she says, digging her fingernails into the skin at the back of my neck.
“I know,” I admit, resting my chin on her head. “It’s okay. I know.”
Mickey’s loss, what she’s been through, with her family dying, The Reich. I cringe.
What I’ve put her through.
I can’t even begin to imagine all of it, never mind live it. It’s no wonder that it’s too fucking much for her to handle. No wonder she’s breaking. If you punch a mirror, it’s going to fucking break. Even one of the things she’s been through would be too much for anyone else, but yet, for four years, she’s marched on like a soldier who lost an arm and a leg in battle yet picked up his goddamned weapon and kept fucking fighting.
She’s broken, and lost, but no matter what happens, she’ll never be forgotten.
Not by me.
Not ever.
I’m shaking as I pull her even tighter to my chest. I close my eyes, and for once in my life, I allow the feelings to flow. The result is soaking her hair with my tears, silently crying for the girl I love. During this single moment, I allow myself to grieve.
Not just for myself.
Not just for her.
For what could have been.
“I love you, Mic,” I whisper in her hair.
She turns to me with nothing behind her eyes. “Can I go see my sister now?”
18
Pike
One Year Later
Mickey’s been gone for a year. In total, I knew her less than a month.
So then, why the hell am I so surprised when I called the treatment facility she’s been living in to find that she completed her program and checked out over a week ago?
Where the hell is she?
I laugh to myself. Why the fuck did I automatically assume that she’d come here when her time there was up?
“Still can’t find her?” Jo Jo asks, sliding up to me at the bar next to the pawn shop.
I shake my head and take a swig of my beer. “Nope. And you shouldn’t be in here,” I scold.
Jo Jo rolls her eyes. “Yeah, and I shouldn’t have changed their sign to read NUDE BAR FREE DRINKS, but I did.” She laughs. “And the look on Sally’s face was totally worth it when those big burly nude guys came strolling up.”
The kid has a point there.
Leave it to Jo Jo to pull a smile out of me when I didn’t think it was possible. I don’t think I would have made it through this past year without her to distract me from my own bullshit. Or, as Preppy would call it, wallowing.
With the help of Nine, I became Jo Jo’s official guardian shortly after Mickey left.
The night I got arrested I promised Jo Jo she wasn’t going back into foster care, and I fucking meant it. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a liar.
I’ve learned that Jo Jo reminds me a lot of myself. Some of that is good, like the fact that she doesn’t take shit from anyone, and some of it’s downright terrifying, like her ability to manipulate me