That's Us

Don't ever read this

“Ken, I can’t. Not tonight.”

“Pleeeease? I promise I’ll have you home by curfew this time. I f*****g pinkie swear. I’ll even grab some beers from work and pick up dinner on my way home. Just come over. Pretty please?” Besides being a locally infamous bad boy, Ken was twenty-two and worked at a liquor store. To a seventeen-year-old high school senior in the late 1990s, that was basically the equivalent of dating Jordan Catalano. “Ken, I can’t. I have to finish addressing my graduation invitations tonight, or my mom is going to f*****g murder me. She’s been asking me to do it for weeks, but I keep blowing it off to hang out with you.”Ken grumbled into the phone. I was usually easier to sway than this, and I could tell he was getting flustered. Ken Spring wasn’t used to having to convince girls to make bad choices, but I was one f**k-up away from losing my car a punishment worse than death to a seventeen-year-old girl living in a suburban town with no public transportation. Ken had the blond-haired, blue-eyed baby face of James Dean with the body of a guy who’d done a little time for grand theft auto, hit the weights hard while he was in the clink, then decorated all his newly swollen muscles with flames and hot-rod tattoos once he’d gotten out. While he might have looked hard from the neck down pun not intended! Don was playful and flirty and fun to the core. Unfortunately, he was so carefree that he didn’t take anything seriously, including my curfew or my parents’ threats. Ken was the devil in a Sunday hat.

“So, bring your invitations with you and do ’em over here. I’ll even take those big ole boots off and rub your feet while you work.” Mmm…

Just as he’d known it would, my mind started wandering down a rabbit hole of other things we could do with my boots off. I guess Ken was getting tired of me pretending like I wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, because before I could even snap out of my daydream and slurp the drool back into my mouth, he unleashed his secret weapon. “I miss you, Lady.” Boom. There it was. Asshole.

Even though I’d seen Don almost every night for weeks, I had to admit, I missed him, too. He was just so light and airy. Compared to the brooding mood swings I’d tolerated, endured, and at times barely survived when I was with Lucas, Ken made me feel like I was swimming in powdery-blue cotton candy. He smiled. He laughed. He made me laugh. When I spoke, he’d gaze at me like I had little butterflies and sunbeams dancing around my head.

Knight used to look at me intensely, too, but it was more like a salivating jungle cat watching a gazelle. Ken, on the other hand, looked at me like I was the f*****g Mona Lisa with pride and joy and disbelief that I was actually his.

I sighed into the phone and acquiesced, “Fine. But you’re licking the stamps.” “Oh, I’ll be licking a lot more than stamps.” Three hours later, I was sprawled out on Ken’s living room floor, addressing my invitations safely behind the virtuous cover of my makeshift chastity wall. Chinese food cartons, empty Camel Lights boxes, crushed PBR

cans, throw pillows, D-grade horror movie cases, calligraphy pens, and tiny towers of completed invitations divided Harley’s living room down the middle, separating me from the oh-so tempting mountain of muscle car covered muscles who had been eye-f*****g me from the couch all night. When we’d met, Harley was renting a little bungalow from his uncle, who had pretty much let him decorate it however he wanted. So, m basically, it was dripping with neon signs he’d stolen from the liquor store where he worked and not much else. It was a blank canvas that I couldn’t wait to get my hands all over. I didn’t know if Ken actually wanted my help with decorating or if he was just humoring me, but anything I wanted for the place, he’d buy. After a few months, he even asked me to paint a mural on his bedroom wall. I’d been painting for years and could probably have done at least a decent job with whatever he commissioned.bWhen I asked him what he wanted, he just said, “Us,” with that full-lipped smile I couldn’t get enough of. Knowing Ken’s taste, I spray-painted a web of letters, his name and mine, in an aggressive sharp-angled font that took up the entire wall above the black leather headboard that I’d picked out weeks prior. I’d chosen colors that resembled the hues in his flame tattoos—reds, oranges, yellows, and electric blue. Every time I saw it, my stomach fluttered as I remembered the

squealing, tickling spray-paint fight that had ensued before we’d completely devolved into a rolling rainbow-hued pair of bodies undulating on the tarp-

covered carpet. When he could tell that I was almost finished with my invitations, Ken surreptitiously slinked over and began thumbing through my done pile. “Damn, Lady. This s**t looks seriously professional. Why are you still in school? You should just move in with me and do this for a living!” Ken beamed like it was obviously the best idea anyone had ever come up with. I blushed and kept working, trying to pretend like I wasn’t swooning over everything that had just come out of his mouth. “Uh, thanks for the offer, but calligraphy pays s**t, Ken.” He laughed and ran his fingers over the scrollwork on one of the (thankfully dry) envelopes. “Where did you learn to write like this?” “My mom’s an art teacher. She taught me calligraphy when I was just a kid so that I could help her address our Christmas cards.” I gestured to the scattered piles of white all around us. “Now, I’m her bitch.” Ken poked me in the ribs with the corner of the envelope he’d been admiring, “No, you’re my b***h,” he said with a huge twinkly-eyed grin. Being this close to him, feeling the heat coming off his body and the warmth oozing from his every word, was making it really hard for me to concentrate. I needed to finish and go home. Finish and go home. If I didn’t leave in the next fifteen minutes, my ass was going to be car-less and stranded in suburbia for the next month. While I furiously tried to get through my final pile and ignore Ken’s electric presence just inches away, he carefully picked up envelope after envelope, studying them intensely and handling each one with care.

After a few minutes, he mused, “You really have a thing for letters, don’t you? Like on my wall, I said you could do anything you wanted, and you did letters.” It was so perceptive, so sweet. He just opened his eyes, got still for a moment, and saw me. Who knew Ken “Fun and Games” James could be so insightful? That little observation earned him my undivided attention. I looked up and

replied, “I guess so, yeah. I like to write, and I kind of feel like, by using different fonts and designs, I can make what I’m trying to say more beautiful.” Locking his playful robin’s egg blue eyes on my hunter greens, he

quipped, “Unless it’s your name. There’s no way to make you any more beautiful.” Gah, Ken! You’re making me blush! No one had ever complimented me as sincerely or as often as Ken. I didn’t even know how to respond. Everything he said was so perfect and personalized. He complimented the things he knew I was insecure about or secretly proud of. No generic you’re-so-hot bullshit. Every acknowledgment seemed to be the perfect shape and size to fill whatever void I was feeling at the time. Only, at that particular moment, the only void I could feel was the one throbbing between my legs. Our close proximity on the floor was really starting to cloud my judgment. If he had just stayed on the couch with the chastity wall of garbage betweenus, like I’d begged, maybe I would have actually finished my invitations.

Instead, I decided to fight flirty with flirty. “We’ll see about that. Give me your hand.” Ken gave up his right hand with an arched brow and an achingly coy little smile. I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb while I went to work, penning my best Old English across his knuckles. When I finally released him, he turned his fist around, so he could admire the word LADY I’d scrawled upon it. His expression went from curious to elated to mischievous in an instant. He briefly opened his fist before closing it again, this time gripping a handful of my shirt in it as he pulled me up and onto his lap.

Ken leaned in, so close that the silver hoop barely containing his big, fat, beautiful bottom lip grazed my parted mouth. “I’m never washing this hand again,” he teased. With every syllable the deep rumble of Ken’s voice vibrated against my mouth and traveled all the way down to the steel barbell piercing in my c**t, making it thrum like a f*****g tuning fork between my legs. I’d only had it a few months and it was still incredibly sensitive. Without realizing it I hummed out loud in response. “Mmm?” Ken replied, mocking the noise I’d just made. “You like to hum, Lady?” He ran the silver hoop slowly across my bottom lip, humming in a low growl that had my n****e piercings singing as well. “So do I.” I prayed for him to kiss me. To stop teasing me and crash those perfect, pouty lips into mine, but Ken Spring would loved to play. And I was his favorite toy. Fisting my angled purple bob with the hand that read LADY, Ken pulled my head back slightly, breaking our almost-kiss and exposing my neck. The coolness of his lip ring mixed with the heat of his breath as he dragged his growling mouth down my throat. His tongue flicked at the base of my neck, then traced the edge of my collar bone, stopping only to skip over the thin strap of my tank top. Suddenly, I felt teeth sink into my shoulder as Ken's firm hands grabbed my thighs and spread them apart so that I was now straddling him on the couch. Closing his lips around the bite, Ken sucked on my freckled shoulder, humming against my flesh as he palmed my ass with both hands and guided my body up and down the length of his massive, almost impossibly hard shaft. Ken’s mouth left my skin with an exaggerated pop. I took that opportunity to yank my tank top off and unclasp my bra as quickly as possible. I should have been rushing to get my ass out the door and home before curfew, but in that moment my only priority was making sure that my n*****s got the same attention that my shoulder had just gotten. My enthusiasm made Harley chuckle. “Looks like somebody wants a hummer,” he teased as I tore my own hes her. “Don’t you have to have a d**k to get a hummer?” I quipped back, chunking my bra to the floor as if it were on fire. “Not the way I do it.” Ken’s bright blue eyes were aflame as they traveled down my body. He knew exactly what I wanted, but was making me wait. Making me lose my cool. Toying with me. Fucker.

Impatient and horny as hell, I threaded my fingers into his soft blond hair and kissed the s**t out of him. My pelvis pressed against his c**k and mimicked the movement of my tongue swirling around his, earning me another one of Harley’s deep, p***y-vibrating moans. Without warning he broke the kiss and pulled away, giving me a cute, chastising look for not

kplaying by his rules.