Make You Mine by K.T. Quinn

38

Charlotte

We lay above the sheets, my body stretched across his, totally comfortable with our mutual nudity.

“I suppose you have to leave?” I whispered into his meaty bicep, which was my pillow. The number 3 in his 3194 tattoo was just underneath my eye, stretching across my field of view.

“Not yet, Peaches,” he rumbled in the kind of voice a man only shared with a lover. “I can stay a bit.”

Concern drifted across my consciousness. “What if someone sees your truck?”

His fingers caressed my arm. “I parked on the service road around the bend and walked here. Nobody’ll find it.”

“Mmm,” I said as I cuddled against his body. My lady-parts ached wonderfully from the desperate, vigorous sex.

“So,” I said. “Your text. Were you telling the truth?”

I felt him tense beneath me. Thousands of muscle fibers across his chiseled body all tightening at once. He added a sigh for good measure. “Nothing’s changed, Peaches. I just don’t… feel that way about you.”

The words were another dagger to my gut. It sounded like it hurt him to say it, too. Or maybe I was just projecting my own pain.

“Except you said we couldn’t do this again,” I pointed out, because it was easier than accepting his words. “Yet here we are, doing this again.”

I felt his shrug without seeing it. “You’re really good in bed. I was just afraid of leading you on if you thought it was more than that.”

I closed my eyes and buried my cheek in his bicep. If I looked him in the eye, he would know I was lying. “Nothing wrong with keeping it only physical. Just two acquaintances getting their rocks off while waiting to get out of this awful town. No dates or anything else mushy.”

“Right.” He sounded skeptical, and I waited for him to call me out on it. Instead he asked, “What had you in a tizzy at the diner?”

Grateful for the change of subject, I groaned into his warm skin. “It’s my ex. He’s making it very easy to hate him.”

“How so?”

I rolled over and Jayce rolled with me, wrapping his body around mine so we could spoon. I ground my butt against the warm length of his cock and sighed.

“We had a business together. We shared a food truck. Even though I’m gone, he’s still trying to make the truck’s problems my problems.”

“What kind of food truck was it?” he asked.

“It was called The Toasted Bun. We sold gourmet cheeseburgers.”

“Huh,” Jayce grunted. “What makes a burger gourmet?”

“The price tag,” I said, re-using an old joke Scott and I used to tell people. Jayce chuckled, and I went on, “We locally-sourced all of our food. Grass-fed beef and cheese from local farms. Other ingredients like applewood-smoked bacon, avocado slices, and blue-cheese sauce.”

“Shit, Peaches, you’re makin’ me hungry again.” He lightly kissed the back of my neck. “I grill a mean burger myself. There’s somethin’ soothing about standing in front of a grill watching meat char. I guess it appeals to my inner caveman.”

“You’ll have to make a burger for me sometime,” I said, then winced. What I was suggesting was awfully close to a date.

Jayce only scoffed. “You’d turn your nose up at my boring-ass country burger.”

“I would not!”

“One patty, a single slice of American cheese, a little bit of ketchup and mustard. You telling me that would meet your approval?”

“That’s it?” I asked. “No lettuce or tomatoes?”

“Too fancy.”

“I’d try it,” I said magnanimously. “I’m sure it would be delicious.”

Jayce’s grunt might have been agreement, and it might have been doubt. “So what did Scott do to piss you off? Buy cheap avocados? Skimp on the blue cheese?”

“He decided to take out an expensive ad in a local food magazine,” I explained. “And he charged three thousand dollars to my credit card, maxing me out.”

“Goddamn,” he breathed. “Peaches, that ain’t your standard annoying ex kind of shit. That’s fraud, or something. Identity theft.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It was in our joint PayPal account. So he had legitimate access to it. It’s not like he stole my card or hacked my account or anything.”

“Still. That’s fucked up.”

“You know what the worst part is?” I asked. “He tried to blame me. Like it was my fault he used that card.”

He squeezed me extra tight. “That sucks. Your card should have a notification or something when you get close to your limit, or go over.”

“I thought I did have those settings enabled.”

“Then why didn’t you get them?”

“Who knows,” I mumbled.

But Jayce was frowning against my shoulder. “You sure he doesn’t have access to your account?”

Getting out of bed took extra willpower, and Jayce leaned over and smacked my butt on the way to the laptop. I opened the lid and went to the account page for my credit card. I gasped at what I saw.

“All my notifications are disabled. And the phone… You have got to be kidding me!”

Jayce slid out of bed, his nude body stepping up to me. “What is it?”

“The primary phone number, where all alerts are sent to? It’s been changed.” I pointed. “That’s Scott’s number! Son of a bitch!”

His hand was warm on my shoulder. “You’re getting quite the mouth, Peaches. Not that I blame you.”

I switched over to the security page, then the list of recent logins. It showed the IP address (which meant nothing to me) and the city of origin. “Yep, look at all those Savannah logins. A dozen over the past week. He didn’t just login once to disable my notifications. He’s been watching my purchases since I got here!”

“Holy fuck…”

I let out a half-groan, half-shout. “I’m beginning to realize just how manipulative Scott is. He pretends like he hasn’t done anything wrong, like the charge to my card was just some accident. Meanwhile, behind the scenes he was disabling my notification settings and monitoring my purchases. Unbelievable.”

Jayce shook his head while reading the screen. “If I ever meet this guy, I’m gonna punch him in the mouth for you.”

“If I ever see him again, I’ll do it myself.”

He pointed. “Dispute that shit. Let the credit card company put the hammer down. If you need to, you can prove you were here in Eastland while the charge was made from an IP address in Savannah. Easy, right?”

I hesitated, but only for an instant. I clicked the button to dispute the charge, then followed the prompts on the screen. No, I hadn’t made the purchase. Yes, I still had the physical card in my possession. When I was done I was sent to a screen informing me that the dispute would take three to five days to resolve, and then a new card would be mailed out to me once they verified my identity.

I leaned back in the chair and smiled. “It actually feels really good to stick it to Scott.”

“I’ll bet. Will it fuck up your food truck business?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Do you care?”

I thought about the food truck. The physical truck itself, not the surrounding business and work involved. Scott and I had bought it from a junkyard and fixed it up together with our start-up money. It took over a week gutting the inside, cleaning it up, and then installing the cooking and refrigeration equipment. That was right after we had graduated. I remember feeling so free then. No more college term papers, or job hunting, or internships like my other friends. Just the bliss of self-employment.

But that free feeling disappeared quickly. The truck was a lot of work. Even when business thrived, we bled money. We worked sixteen hours a day, the stress of which revealed the cracks in our flawed relationship. Over time the food truck felt less like an accomplishment and more like a burden. One which got heavier every day.

“No,” I said with a smile. “I don’t care what happens to it.”

Jayce fell back into bed, and I laid down next to him. His arm curled around me automatically. “As fucked up as everything is in this town, at least we managed to solve one of your problems.”

“It’s not really solved, though. Since my card has been frozen, I don’t have a way to pay for anything. Motel money is due tomorrow, not to mention feeding myself. Scott sure knows how to screw up an already awful situation.”

“I’ll bankroll you, if need be,” Jayce suggested. “I’d let you crash at my place, but… you know. Since I can’t, the least I can do is make sure you don’t starve.”

“That’s sweet of you,” I said, “but I can borrow money from my parents.”

“Then I’ll float you until their money gets here. Or at least make twice as many extra sandwiches for lunch, so you have one to take home.”

I leaned over and kissed his bearded cheek. “I always wanted to have a sugar daddy.”

Jayce smirked. “At least until Sid finally bashes my head in with that crowbar.”

The comment made me flinch. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth. No use pussy-footing around it.”

I rolled over until I was laying flat on his belly, my chin against his beard. “Then why don’t you leave, like I mentioned? I know you feel guilty about your sister, but that’s no reason to sit around waiting to get murdered. That’s a waste of a perfectly good beard.” I gave it a little tug.

“I’ll consider it,” he replied. “When my community service is up.”

“Why wait?” I asked, even though I selfishly didn’t want him to suddenly depart tomorrow, leaving me alone in this town. “Skipping out on your community service is just a fine, right?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Jayce said. He sounded like he’d thought about this already. “If I skip out on my service, it might piss off the sheriff and judge enough to trump up some new charges against me. I won’t feel free if someone executes a warrant for my arrest three months from now.”

The sheriff could do that even if he did finish his community service, but I didn’t want to crush his spirits by pointing that out.

“I don’t want to risk it all for nothin’,” Jayce said finally. “If I’m gonna be free, it’s gonna be without anything hanging over my head.”

I nodded as if that settled it. “Then here’s hoping we can finish the community service in time. How many more days do you have?”

He blinked. “Eleven. But it’ll go by a lot faster with a fuck-buddy.” He reached around me and grabbed my ass with both hands, digging his fingers into my flesh. I wiggled my butt for him, and felt his shaft swell underneath me.

“My community service ends before yours,” I teased. “You’ll have to use your imagination for the last few days.”

He grinned wolfishly. “Then I’d better start saving up some memories.”

I squealed as he rolled me over and took me a second time, all worries about my credit card a distant memory.