Game (Gentry Boys, #3)(17)
Somehow I had to get my shit together. I’d made it so far by relying on myself and keeping up in a man’s world. I needed to find my way back to the place that had no room for sprawling moodily on a battered couch in the middle of the morning and sorting through the past.
“Fuck it,” I said out loud, just because it made me feel a little better, a little tougher.
Dolly stared at me from six feet away. She crept a few feet closer and nudged my hand. I scratched behind her ears and then pulled her into my lap. Usually she only allowed Truly to pick her up but that cat might possess some extra sensory abilities because she seemed to sense when I was feeling crappy and became affectionate.
I could do this. I could shut everything away and refuse to feel. I wanted to close the door on distractions.
And yet…
Whenever I tried, thoughts of Chase Gentry kept interfering.
CHAPTER SIX
Chase
When an addict kicks a habit it is common to dream about giving in again, of lapsing into the clutches of those same demons you’ve struggled mightily to break free of. So it never surprises me when I wake up with the sick surety that I’m back where I started. When I open my eyes and feel the cold sweat on my skin? for a moment I’m positive that every hard fought day over the past month has been in vain.
This time I dreamed of a secret Vicodin stash, overlooked by Cord when he cleaned out my room last month. I swallowed them eagerly, consoling myself that it was only for the lingering pain, months after my surgery. Even my subconscious was dishonest. The only true pain was in my head.
After my dream self was done swallowing, I began to look for something else. I was getting numb, a nice feeling, but I was also fading from the downer effect. I just wanted to feel good. I frantically hunted under my mattress and through the drawers of my dresser. My own heartbeat was horribly loud and I was becoming desperate. I needed to get out of my room, out of the building, out of the state, before I sank into oblivion. The appearance of a badly scratched glass-topped table didn’t surprise me. After all it was familiar, having occupied a corner of the tiny living room in my childhood home. A large pile of multi-colored pills littered the surface. I didn’t know what they were but I knew I needed to swallow a bunch of them to feel better.
I grabbed a handful, intending to shove them all down my throat and say f*ck you to the consequences. But I had inadvertently cleared off a section of the table. When I blinked I saw through the glass. There was something underneath the table. I didn’t want to see what it was, however I didn’t have that option. I was suddenly back in Emblem, back in the place I wanted to leave behind and somehow couldn’t. Sunlight poured through a dirty window and allowed me to see what was beneath the table. It was a body. I looked into the dead open eyes of my mother and everything went dark.
The instant I opened my eyes I knew it had been a dream. I wasn’t in Emblem. I wasn’t even in the apartment I shared with my brothers and Saylor. I was alone in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
The heavy drapes had been closed the night before so even though the bedside clock said it was after eight in the morning the room was dark as midnight. I was lying atop the bedcovers, naked and sweaty, although this time it wasn’t for any good reason. I tried to rub the images of my dream out of my eyes but the sick feeling surging through me was tougher to dispel. Cord had suffered from vivid, awful nightmares since we were kids. It was only in the last few months, since he’d found Saylor, that the sounds of him cursing or crying in his sleep had vanished. My nightmares were new.
Even as the immediate effects of the dream faded I was still left with a crushing sense of guilt. It wasn’t real. It was remorse over having slipped and fallen, of returning to the pills, even though I hadn’t done anything of the kind. The memory of my mother’s body made me wince and I shut my eyes again. She wasn’t dead, not yet, although the last time I saw her she was little more than an animated corpse. And I had left her there. I had left her there with him. The boys always insisted that there was nothing else we could do for Maggie Gentry. They were almost certainly right.
I took a series of deep breaths and directed my mind to go anywhere but Emblem. Stephanie was the first thing to pop up and I was suddenly hard. Now that hadn’t been a dream, that crazy coupling in her hotel room. Steph was different than I thought she’d be. I’d had her figured for a wild one between the sheets, venting all that frustrated bitchiness with rough play, and I couldn’t f*cking wait to get her pinned down and at my mercy. But when I got there I realized she was a lot more hesitant, and a lot less experienced, than I’d assumed. Stephanie Bransky, for all her tough talk and harsh manners, was actually shy. Impossibly, her reluctance turned me on even more, made me want to ruin her time after time. Stephanie was a beautiful girl who tried to avoid being beautiful. I wondered if I’d screwed things up by having at her so quickly.
I wanted to see her again, not just because I was hard as iron and wanted to do something about it, but because I didn’t like how we’d left off last night. My hand went around my dick and started idly stroking as I relived the insane bliss of sinking into her tight center. She was unreal; an innocent temptress who looked like she’d stepped right out of a nineteenth century painting. It was my fantasy combination, what I’d been looking for ever since I knew what knew what to do with a woman. And f*ck, she’d been so wet, so ready.