38. 🍸 Love Potion #9 2.0

**KEKE**

“What will happen when you go to Oakland in two weeks?”
I straighten, pushing my shoulders back into his chest. With determination running through me, I say, “I will remind my parents I’m a thirty-year-old woman and not a teenager in a hospital bed, scared of her own shadow. I’ll tell them I’m no longer running from life… from its disappointments… from its heartache. I’m going to make them see I’m the only one who can learn from my mistakes and they have no right to judge me for making them.”
“You’re right to do so, Keke. I wish my parents were around to talk to. Both of them are dead.”
I hold my breath, waiting for him to continue. Hoping he will choose this moment to tell me more about his past. My prayer is answered when he begins to talk, hesitantly at first, then in a rush, as if to get through it all.
“My dad died in prison almost nine years ago.” He pauses. I guess to gauge my reaction. I tighten my hands around his, showing my support in action rather than words. He kisses my hair and continues, “When I was ten, he got arrested for killing a man. He was trying to stop some guys from harassing a server at a bar. One guy pulled a knife, and in the struggle for it, my dad stabbed the guy in the heart. He died at the scene. We couldn’t afford a lawyer so we got a court-appointed one who was overworked, underpaid, and close to retirement. Needless to say, my dad was sent to prison for a minimum of twenty years.”
I know nothing about the justice system except minorities are railroaded into prison because they can’t pay for a top-notch lawyer and they don’t know their rights. Seems like that goes for poor people of any color.
“My mom and I bounced around for a year and a half, always one step ahead of the rent man and our unpaid bills. It finally caught up with us a few months before my twelfth birthday. We got evicted and had to live in my Dad’s old truck in the parking lot of the diner where my mom worked.”
I turn in his arms. His pain shifts his features into a mask of haunting sadness. “You were homeless before you were on the streets?” My mind can’t comprehend such a scenario for myself. My parents and I aren’t on the best of terms, but I know I can always go to them if the alternative is living on the street.
“Yeah, but not for long. A man who came in the diner for lunch every day liked my mom… and hated me. He proposed, she accepted, and I had a new life. One he made a living hell.”
I do my best not to shake with rage. “What did that bastard do to you?”
He shrugs. “The usual. Verbal and physical. He gave me a scar when I was fourteen.” He rubs his chest as I look at him, shock and anger making my face tight. “We were having a barbecue, and he sent me to the store to get some foil. I brought back the wrong kind.” He lets out a rueful laugh. “That’s the only time my mom threatened to leave him. She nearly fainted at the sight of all my blood and the knife in Gary’s hand.”
A jagged pain implodes my heart. What sort of woman, blessed beyond measure with a child, doesn’t do everything in their power to protect their flesh and blood?
“Let me see it,” I say, forcing calm into my voice when all I want to do is rip apart steel with my teeth.
I watch Justice remove his shirt, shrugging it off his powerful shoulders, down his thick arms to toss it carelessly on the hood of the Aston Martin. I cluck my tongue, pick it up and fold it. His smile is wicked as he takes off his undershirt, handing it to me.
I lay the neatly folded garments on the gray hood, steeling myself for something I don’t want to, but am compelled to see, like viewing the devastation of a hurricane on the news before changing the channel.
When I’m composed enough to lift my eyes, Justice points to the tattoo on his chest—an eagle, with its wings spread, clutching thorny roses in its talons.
In the bright light, I can just make out a thin scar from the top of his left nipple to the middle of his sternum. The scar outlines one of the eagle’s wings and ends in the middle of its right eye. In the times I’ve seen his naked torso—the bedroom, the kitchen, and even the shower—I’d failed to see his scar before.
How could I miss something so significant?
We see what we want to, blocking out the ugliness until it’s right in our faces, my mom always says.
She is right.
Lifting my hand, I trace my fingertip along the line that cuts into his flesh as an offer of solidarity. I too, have my battle scars, both inside and out. It took a while to realize that they only strengthened me. Getting shot helped transform me into the woman I am today, and with all my faults, I wouldn’t trade this me for anything.
And this me wants to kick his stepfather’s ass back under the rock he crawled from.
Justice just has to say the word.
“When are we going to pay a visit to that man to make him pay what he owes?”
Justice doesn’t answer.
I raise my gaze to find out if I’ve overstepped my boundaries. Made him mad like I do when we talk about his precious Pippa. In deference to his deceased mother, maybe he doesn’t want her husband threatened.
“Damn, Keke,” he says, astonishment written all over his handsome face, “you’d level him, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. Without a doubt,” I say, using my if I’m lying, I’m dying voice.
His sea-green eyes glitter. His mouth opens and closes. Opens and closes once again.
In one movement, I’m on the hood of the expensive car, crushing his clothes beneath our combined weight. He nudges my legs open and falls between them, his hard length straining the front of his tailored jeans.
“You’re really something,” he repeats over and over as he uses one had to push his pants down and slide his cock from his tanks. Justice lifts my skirt, ripping my panties with a twist and a hard yank. He’s on me a second later, pushing his long shaft inside my pussy all the way to the hilt. His pumping is fast and furious, sliding me over the bump in the hood, and further and further up the cool metal, towards the windshield.
And I take it. I take it all.
Because even after two days of hard fucking, I want this. Him. Always and forever…
Ah damn.
Just like that, I believe in love… again.