Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(40)



“Good—good,” was all he could gasp. He wanted to watch, but he was getting close—too close—so he closed his eyes, limiting the stimulation to touch.

That helped him maintain for a few minutes. But because his eyes were closed, when he felt the soft, warm wet of her tongue on the head of his weeping, desperate cock, he was completely undone. “Fuck!

Fuck! Babe, get off! Get off!”

She did, nearly jumping away, and he slammed his hand over the end of his cock as he came, his semen hitting his palm and painting his shaft. When he could relax, he leaned over for his t-shirt and sopped up his mess, then dropped his head to the blankets.

Adrienne asked, “Was that good or bad? I can’t tell.”

“You can’t tell? That was good. Fuck, that was good.”

“Why’d you make me get off you?”

He propped up on an elbow, feeling shaky—but not feeling buzzy or even especially achy in his chest.

“I didn’t want to come all over you, or in your mouth, and I was too close to ask nice. Sorry, babe.”

Looking relieved, she lay down at his side, and he lay back, too, so she could rest her head on his chest.

He was beginning to get used to that, letting her touch the ruined part of him. The part ruined on the outside, at least.

“I wouldn’t have minded if you’d come in my mouth.”

His sated cock twitched at that.

“Not yet. If you haven’t done this before, that’s too much to start with.” He lifted his head; she was looking up at him. “Can I ask what you have done before us?”

She blushed, still smiling. “Um, yeah, I guess.” When she didn’t say more, Badger understood that he was going to have to ask her specific questions.

“Making out—like, Frenching?” He started with the easy one.

“Well, yeah. Duh.”

“Touching your ti—boobs?”

“My ti-boobs?” She laughed. “Yeah. Topless.”

“Sucking ‘em?” He’d thought this would be kinda sexy, but every time she said ‘yeah’ and he thought about other guys doing that stuff to her, it got markedly less sexy.

“Yeah.”

“Hand between your legs?”

She sat up. “I don’t like this game anymore.”

He didn’t like the sound of her voice; she was too upset. “Okay. Sorry. You okay?”

With a glance over her shoulder at him, she nodded. “I’m okay. Can we go eat?”

“Sure, babe.” Aware that he’d touched a nerve, he dropped it and stood, holding out his hand to help her up.

They dressed, and then they went together to the Chop House, Adrienne riding bitch behind him. It wasn’t the first time she’d ridden with him, but it was the first time she had when she was his girl, and it was just about the best thing ever.

They had a nice supper in Signal Bend’s only ‘nice’ restaurant, twined together in the near-privacy of the corner booth.

Near privacy. They’d been noticed by everybody in the restaurant. Badger was certain that they’d be part of the talk at Marie’s in the morning. As long as the talk was good, he wouldn’t mind that at all.

After supper, they went back to the B&B and set up their little nest so they could see the television Shannon had had moved in from the storage room. They watched Law & Order reruns until Adrienne fell asleep, tucked safely in the curve of his body.

Badger felt good. Hidden away in the manager’s suite, his girl— this girl—sleeping on his arm, he could forget all the shit outside that door. He could forget all the shit inside his head.

Nuzzling into her soft, sweet-smelling hair, Badger closed his eyes and slept.

He didn’t dream.



CHAPTER NINE



Though she was helping Shannon out with weddings and stuff, the B&B got quiet during the week.

When summer really kicked in, it would be busy most of the time, but until then, on weekdays, it was normally just a big, empty house. Badger, though, was always busy, either with the animals at the B&B or with club business. Left to her own devices a lot of the time, Adrienne drove around the countryside, taking pictures. Eventually, she began to tire of nature shots of the same kind of nature all the time. She had some great shots, it was true, and she was beginning to think of putting together a digital portfolio and submitting it to a few places.

But for now, as April became May, she was just killing time, trying not to stress about her life. Then she got an idea for a project. She’d noticed a kind of schizophrenia about Signal Bend, and she decided to try to capture it in pictures.

In some ways, Signal Bend was almost a ghost town. On the outskirts all around town, and in some places fairly deep into the town proper, there’d be a strand of abandoned houses and mobile homes, boarded up or not, yards overgrown with new spring weeds, rusted husks of cars and trucks parked alongside, tractors rotting out in the middle of small fields, as if the farmers had just given up right in the middle of their daily work and abandoned the whole enterprise in a fit of pique. These places were eerie and sad.

Along the edges of Main Street, it was the same: businesses that had gone dark so many years ago that the boards over their windows and doors had turned a washed-out grey, the plywood splitting and curled.

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