Before Sinclair

Chapter Three: Call Me Again

THE INSIDE OF Sinclair's apartment is dark, but neither of us is very worried about lights. The moment we're inside and he's closed the door, his arms are around me and his lips find mine again. My absolute horniness makes me brazen as I grip his hair tightly, crush him closer, and wind my leg around his waist.

I feel his smirk as he pulls away. Somehow we are further in his apartment--in his living room, I think--and it's a tad bit brighter now than it was before. I can see his smirk well enough and the smoldering gray of his eyes even better.

"Weren't you complaining about me feeling you up in the elevator? And now look at you, attacking me."

He has me hoisted up so that he doesn't have to bend. Both of my legs are around his waist and I'm so distracted by the feeling of his body pressed against mine that I can't think properly. To put it in simple terms, Freyja.exe has stopped working. 

I don't recognize myself at all as press my body against his. Even with only the moon serving as light, I can see his reaction. And even if there were no light to see, I definitely would have been able to feel it. 

"Cut the s**t and f**k me," I say.

I'm surprised at my words on the inside, but I don't regret them. Sinclair's lips twist in a grin so ovary bursting, I try to clamp my legs together only to pull my tighter against me. Which does absolutely nothing to help the situation.

"Say that again." His hand is on my butt and when he squeezes my body jerks toward him. "Tell me what you want."

"I..." I hesitate, not as confidant as before. I only said what I said before in a moment of lust. Even though my mind is still filled with lust now, I seem to be more present than I was before.

The hand that is not gripping my butt slides its way up my dress and he presses his thumb against me again. He rubs against it until the feeling from the bar returns. The one I've never felt before; the building of pressure against the movement of his thumb. My body freezes at it, waiting for it to wash over and destroy me.

But, like he did in the bar, he stops just when I'm about to explode. My head, which had been tilted back, snapped forward to look at Sinclair who was watching me. His face was amused, but his eyes were telling a different, more X-rated story.

"Would you like me to continue, little goddess?"

I nod.

"Then, tell me what you want me to do."

His eyes hold mine as I swallow and say, "I want you to f**k me, Sinclair."

"Good, petite déesse. I don't think you understand how sexy you are when you speak like that." He trails his lips across my throat and along my jaw. "I'll give you what you want."

He dropped me onto his bed and I blinked. I don't remember us moving here. Did he move us here when he was...doing the thing with his thumb? 

Sinclair removed his shirt and holy s**t, I was never more grateful for the moonlight than I was in that moment. His entire body was inked, and almost none of the skin of his torso had been spared. I couldn't make out all of the tattoos--in the darkness, they were just shapes, and spirals of ink--but I did know it was sexy.

I reached out, like my body had a mind of its own, and touched his chest, running my hand down, across the canvas of tattoos. Sinclair didn't stop me. I had heard stories about how Sinclair didn't like for the women he was sleeping with to touch him too much. It was common knowledge among all the gossiping groups of PTA moms and college girls. He had tossed a woman straight out of his house for touching a specific tattoo somewhere on his torso. None of the women he slept with knew which tattoo it was, so they deemed it better to not touch his torso at all.

I peeked up at him through my eyelashes to find that he was watching me. My hand went to his belt and I swallowed in anticipation. He hadn't thrown me out, so it was easy to assume I hadn't touched the tattoo he hated being touched.

Sinclair placed his fingers under my chin and forced me to look up at him. He was smirking like he had been all night. His face was serious, and the lust in his eyes--lust for me--made me feel lightheaded in a strangely pleasant way.

"If you're going to take me in your mouth, little goddess, look at me when you do it." His thumb ran across my cheek, leaving a trail of fire on the already warmed skin there. "I like those eyes of yours."

And, after I had helped him unbuckle his belt, I did exactly as he requested. 

It's the morning sun that wakes me. I can feel the warmth of it on my bare back and the moment I feel the sun’s rays is the moment I’m wide awake. There is none of the usual early morning grogginess that comes from a night of sleep, and there isn’t even any of the desire to close my eyes and sleep a little longer. Because, from the moment I feel the sun’s rays, I feel other things, too. Like how the pillow my head is resting on isn’t mine, and the blankets covering me also don’t belong to me. And when those thoughts come, so do thoughts of what happened last night.

I can recall Sinclair hovering me. The scent of cigarettes from the bar still hanging on his clothes and another scent—something clean and pure that belonged to him alone—washing over me as he bent to kiss me. More than that, I can remember how his hands felt touching me and how he moved when he was inside of me. He had found out I was a virgin last night and, even though I was afraid he might toss me out, he hadn’t. He had been surprisingly gentle, instead.

I had even come. Twice. I hadn’t expected to come at all my first time since I heard from articles and even Sofia that it was something that didn’t usually happen.

But more than remembering what Sinclair did, I remember what I did. Exactly what had made me so damn bold. I had essentially bossed him around last night. After he had come in my mouth—a thought that made me immediately embarrassed the moment I thought of it again—I had told him that he should reciprocate.

And he had. With a cocky grin, he had gotten on his knees and lifted the hem of my dress, sliding my panties down my legs. And then he had…

My heart raced just remembering it.

I didn’t realize the shower had been running in the bathroom until it stopped. I sucked in a sharp breath and looked at the spot next to me. Of course, he wasn’t there. I had heard those rumors, too. He couldn’t fall asleep around other people. It made sense in the scope of things. For better or for worse, he was the leader of one of the most infamous motorcycle gangs in Willow’s Creek and there were a lot of people—people who probably pretended to be under his thumb, waiting for the moment he exposed his weakness—waiting to kill him.

For someone like him, he never knew if the women who approached him were looking to kill him after they lured him into bed, and he couldn’t take any risks.

Sinclair comes from the bathroom and the moment I see him, my thoughts scatter incoherently. The towel he’s wearing is slung low on his hips and in the light of day, I can see his body a lot more clearly than I had been able to last night. Something fierce is unfurling in my stomach, and I have the desire to get up and throw myself at him.

Sinclair’s eyes meet mine as I’m ogling his tattoos, wondering if my body is in any condition to have s*x again. He wasn’t rough with me last night—he had been trying to be softer with his movements after learning it was my first time—but he hadn’t exactly been gentle, either. I hadn’t minded, of course. In fact, I had preferred the bits when he was less gentle. I preferred it when he was moving more recklessly, cursing in French in my ear…

“Don’t look at me like that, little goddess,” he says, his lips curling up into a grin that isn’t helping my impure thoughts. “Didn’t I tell you I like those eyes of yours? If you keep staring at me like you want me to f**k you again, how am I supposed to remember to let you rest?”

“I don’t want to rest.”

I clamp my lips together the moment the words come out of my mouth. Seriously, what was wrong with me? It was like my body wasn’t my own or like I was behaving based solely on my desires and not at all based on thoughts.

Sinclair’s face changes, and his eyes slide down the blanket. I can tell that, in his mind’s eye, the blanket isn’t there. We had been in the dark last night, with neither of us fully able to see the other clearly. We had only been able to glimpse what the moonlight let us see. The look on his face says that he desperately wants to repeat last night in daylight where he can see my every expression and every part of my body clearly.

As much as that thought embarrasses me, I won’t lie and say it doesn’t excite me. His eyes had been so intense had he had moved against me and the thought of seeing his expression in daylight made electrified butterflies dance around in my stomach.

Sinclair sighs, after a while, running his hand through his wet hair. “You really are trouble, aren’t you? It’s not a good idea for me to go over there, little goddess. If I do, I won’t be as in control as I was last night.”

“I don’t mind.”

Sinclair smiles. “Believe me, little goddess, your body isn’t ready for me being out of control right now. Although…” he trails off, his gaze sliding across my body again. “If you want to come see me again later on, I’d be more than happy to give you a less gentle repeat of last night.”

My lips part and our eyes hold. It’s like it was when I saw him for the first time in the bar. That invisible, electric thread is back and it’s no longer just humming with electricity but crackling with it. The tension between us is palpable.

Sinclair turns quickly and his back looks a little stiff. I admire the tattoos there, silently hoping he’ll drop the towel and come over here again. My body can take it.

“I’ll give you a ride,” he says, his voice a little rough. He pauses and turns to smirk at me, “Home, I mean.”

It turns out that, no, my body would not have been able to handle it if Sinclair had had s*x with me again like I wanted him to. Although it had felt good last night, my entire body is sore when he drives me back home. The way my body feels now reminds me of the time I tagged along to the gym with Odin, only to immediately regret it when I returned home sore all over. This kind of soreness is a little different, though, more pleasant. But it’s clear Sinclair was right in my not being able to handle him being rougher just yet.

“Give me your phone,” he commands, holding out his hand.

I do as he asks, my heart racing. I watch as he puts his number in before he hands it back to me.

He leans toward me. My eyes are trapped in his as they smolder me until I wonder if I’m still Freyja or a pile of burnt flesh in his passenger’s seat.

“Call me again, little goddess.”

When I get out of the car and watch him drive away, my ear still tingles from where his breath touched it. I touch it unconsciously and realized now that I really understood why all the women in Willow’s Creek thought Sinclair Buchanan was a s*x god.

There is no one home when I open the door, which was what I had expected. Mom works at the university in Red Lake County that I’ll be attending as a mythology professor, and Odin has school. These days, the only one really here is me since my courses don’t officially start until next week. College courses usually begin in January, but there were a lot of holdups with Red Lake University. Officially, they say it was due to a large inflation of their staff quitting to pursue different careers, but Mom says it’s because the professors who did quit had been offered a large sum of money to leave the school. She says she doesn’t know why, but she was offered the thirty thousand dollars to leave, but she refused. Mom loved teaching at Red Lake University and there was no amount of money in the world that could make her give up her job.

All in all, the school had barely been able to pick itself back up again. They had only been able to do so thanks to a generous donation from one of their backers, who had found professors to take the vacated jobs. Which was why college was starting in March rather than January.

I hadn’t exactly minded, though. It had been a good time to study a little more about the courses that I was supposed to take and further prepare myself for college life. Although I wouldn’t be living on campus, I would be spending the majority of my time on the campus. I didn’t know what college was like, but I wasn’t naïve enough to believe it was anything like high school.

The thought of how much I would be a fish out of water unnerved me, even though I knew it was necessary.

I make my way to my room which is the last door at the end of the hall. Once I’m inside, I throw myself down on my bed, burying my face in my pillow. And that’s when it really hits me what I’ve done.

A lot of emotions well up inside of me. First shock because I didn’t believe that, when push came to shove, I would have the guts to sleep with anyone. In the end, I thought that, even if I wanted to be rid of my virginity, I would decide against it the moment the option to do just that presented itself. But, not only had I done just what I had set out to do, I’d had s*x with Sinclair Buchanan. A feat that a lot of women who flocked to Carla’s went there just to try to achieve.

Even though people feared Sinclair, they couldn’t help but find him irresistible at the same time. Before I had met him, I really hadn’t seen the appeal of him. Was it the criminal persona people found sexy? Were people just suckers for men with handsome faces and nice bodies? But now I understood that his appeal went a lot deeper than that. s*x appeal oozed from him like he bathed in it.

I had read countless books in my life, even before I started my blog where I reviewed them, and in many of those books, there was always a magnetic male lead who could make the protagonist feel like their nether regions had become Niagara Falls. In the earlier days of YA, that person would always be a smoldering bad boy who did and said whatever he wanted. They always made it seem like the male lead dripped easy s*x appeal and it was something I had always attributed to fiction, something that the authors had fun thinking about and that the audience had fun reading.

Until last night, I had never witnessed true s*x appeal.

I stare at my phone, still clenched in my hand. His number is her for me to dial at any time, and I want to do just that when the soreness of my body has let up. Even now, my brain is filled with memories of what happened last night. The things he said and did, and how I said and did things I never thought I would have said or done. The flames I felt wherever his hands touched come to mind, the warm and soft press of his lips crushing against mine. The weight of his body on top of me…

All of that is just a phone call away.

But I know that I can’t call him again. I can’t see him again. As nice as last night had been, there couldn’t be any repeats. s*x was a slippery slope that could lead to feelings on either side. And if I slip down that slope, I have this odd feeling that I’m going to regret it later on down the line.

But he’s Sinnerman, part of me protests. In what world would he fall for you? He’s slept with countless women before, why would he choose you? What would make you different?

And although, logically speaking, that part of my brain is correct, that odd feeling remains. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t ebb. If Sinclair and I hook up again, I feel like it will end up triggering something catastrophic that I’ll never be able to escape from.

Not to mention Sofia wouldn’t let me be. She was fine with me sleeping with him once—or so she’d said—but she most definitely wouldn’t be fine with Sinclair and I regularly screwing.

In the end, that’s the excuse I use to decide to never call him. Even though I really want to.

Odin arrives home later on in the day. Mrs. Lincoln—the lady who carpools a lot of the boys on the soccer team home after practice—drops him off with a wave to me. I wave back to her from my spot on one of the white rocking chairs on our front porch.

Odin comes walking up the stairs, looking at me kind of oddly. Odin is big for a fourteen-year-old; broad shouldered and tall, dark-skinned and handsome like our father is. He takes after Dad in a lot of aspects. Mom rarely talks about Dad but when she does, it’s to bring up his and Odin’s similarities. Their love for sports and their constant urge to be active, their brilliance in science and math even when neither of them tried to be good at either, and most importantly, how much Odin bore a striking resemblance to Dad when he was young.

I think that last one really hurts Mom sometimes. She has long since overcome her hurt over what Dad did to her, but sometimes when she glances over at Odin, I think she can’t help but see my father and you can see the hurt rise in her eyes. She has moved on but she is not fully healed. My father is like a wound for her, stitched up and fading on the outside, but reopening without her permission every now and then.

The only thing that is different about Odin and Dad is their personalities. I don’t remember much of Dad’s personality, but I know that he wasn’t like Odin. His smile wasn’t as bright and warm as sunlight, and his family did not come before everything else in his life. If it had, Mom wouldn’t be living the rest of her life with faded scars.

“When did you get back?” Odin asks. He’s dragging along all of his football equipment and the moment I get a whiff of it—and him—I crinkle my nose.

“A few hours ago. You need to shower. If I have to keep smelling you, I might either pass out or throw up.”

Odin laughs but trudges inside, leaving me alone again.

While he’s gone, I go back to the pondering I was doing before he came. I’m not sure how long I sit there, staring off into the distance at the houses and the landscape surrounding those houses. I don’t really see any of it, though. To me, it’s all a mass of colors and shapes that aren’t important enough to focus on.

So, when Odin leans out of the house and calls my name, I jump.

“Jesus, Odin, you little s**t,” I hiss, placing a hand over my racing heart. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Don’t blame me for that,” he retorts, giving me a look that says he’s thinking I’m a total weirdo. “I called you six times already, but you’ve been staring at nothing like a lovesick teenager in one of those romance movies Mom is always watching. It’s creepy.” He shudders.

“I’m creepy? What’s creepy is how you follow Ayesha Jones—”

“This has nothing to do with me,” Odin interrupts, looking a little embarrassed. “Or Ayesha.”

I grin smugly, giving him a sly look. “Are you planning on asking her out any time soon? By now, she probably realizes that you constantly showing up at Wallflower when she’s there is because your friends are telling you. You might as well get to it while you’re still young.”

Odin huffs and takes a seat on the rocking chair next to mine, the screen door banging shut behind him as he moves away.

“Why are you sitting out here anyway?”

I give him a look to show that I clearly know he’s dodging my question but that I’ll let it slide.

“I wanted…fresh air.”

That’s not a lie. From the moment I decided I shouldn’t have s*x with Sinclair again, my mind has been in a constant state of war. Because I know that having s*x with him again is not in my best interests but what a person knows and what they want is not often the same thing. Mom used to say that all the time but I never really fully understood what she meant until this very moment.

I know that meeting up with him again wouldn’t be good for me. He was the leader of a motorcycle gang, for f**k’s sake. He was the man who had the police in his pocket and who unsavory business proceedings in, not only Willow’s Creek but in New York and Paris, from Japan to South Africa. He wasn’t someone I should be getting involved with and I knew it. To tell the truth, sleeping with him even once was a bad idea.

But that grin of his was so damn…intoxicating. He was intoxicating. It was like I hadn’t been able to help myself.

Odin is looking at me, but I don’t have the courage to meet his gaze and see what his expression is like.

“Are you okay?” he finally asks, concerned but trying to be gruff about it. I can’t help but smile. “If Sofia is getting you involved in annoying things…”

I laugh. “I’m fine,” I promise. “Sofia can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.” I look over at him, smiling. I reach over and pat him on the head, only to have him promptly smack my hand away. “When has anyone ever been able to tell your sister what to do? Huh?” I reach for his head again.

“Cut it out,” he protests, smacking at my hands, his face furrowed in annoyance. “Is this what I get for caring about you?”

“Yup.”

Mom’s silver Prius pulls into the driveway in the middle of me annoying Odin. As always, when she makes her way up the stairs, her face is drawn and tired. Mom is one of those women who has aged like a fine wine, her brown skin is as supple and youthful as I remember it when she was younger. I can recall a time when she came to pick me up from school, and the staff all thought she was a student until she walked up to the counter and said she was there to pick up her daughter. She has forever been mistake for my and Odin’s older sister, and she laughs it off, used to such comments at this point.

“Have the two of you eaten?” she asks, as she climbs the stairs.

“No,” Odin and I say in unison.

“Is pizza good for you two?”

“I’ll order it,” Odin says, jumping up and running back into the house where his cell-phone is.

Mom looks over at me. She is close enough now that I can see the bags under her eyes. Although she is fond of her work, her work is not often kind to her. She often spends late nights grading term papers or long days teaching seminars. These days, after everything that’s happened with Red Lake University, she and all the remaining professors have had it extra hard, teaching extra courses to the already enrolled college students so that they aren’t having a lacking experience. She has two degrees—one in mythology, and one in literature that she went back to school to get when I was nine—so she’s one of the only professors left who can pick up the slack the others left behind.

“Did you have fun last night? Sofia took you out, right?”

I’m trying very hard not to let anything show on my face right now because I did have fun but not in the way she’s assuming.

“I did.” My voice sounds a little higher than it should, so I clear my throat and try again. “It was fun.”

Mom nods. Normally she would prod further, but I think she’s too tired to be bothered today. Which is good news for me.

“I’m glad you’re getting out more,” she says, placing her hand against my cheek.

“Hey, what do you guys want on the pizza?” Odin yells from inside. “Let me know or I’ll just pick something.”

Horrified, I jump up and swing open the screen door. “Don’t you dare put pineapple on the pizza,” I yell back, running inside with Mom’s tired chuckles following me.