Page 1 of Gluttony

ONE

Loud,deep laughter made Valentina Ivanova wonder what the hell she was doing in this bar, because it wastheirbar.Hisbar. Cool Hands had been an Unchained MC bar since it open almost a year ago. Tonight was her first night there, and she was pleasantly surprised. She was expecting a rowdy bar with dark corners, speakers blaring Pantera, thick smoke, Harley branding on the walls, and sticky, dirty floors. Cool Hands was not that. At all. It was a great place to enact her plans.

She came…becausehecame. Redtube. Towering over her 5’3” height at 6’3”, sexy as hell, covered in beautiful ink, and the perfect combination of all her fantasies into one hot, seductive, mysterious...thirst trap.

Val knew he’d be at Cool Hands tonight because it was a Friday, and Fridays meant the bar was filled with all of Redtube’s favorite things: booze, hard rock, and willing women.

Then again…forty-eight days ago…he’d made a promise to her; he’d wait for her. He’d wait until she was ready to finally meet him in person, something she’d been putting off for months. Because she was a fucking coward.

Her mother, God rest her soul, would be so disappointed in her. So would Ms. Emma Todd, her foster mother who’dtaken her in after her mother’s death. Then again, Val was disappointed in herself. Which was why she was sitting in the booth at Cool Hands, trying to work up the confidence to walk right up to Redtube and introduce herself. The real her. To the real him.

She wasn’t a stranger to Redtube…at least not online. Online they were closer than any two people could be without actually having met in real life. She “met” Redtube almost a year ago when she was scrolling through Instagram and nearly choked on her tongue when his Reel popped up in her feed.

The man was a thirst trap. All glistening, tattooed muscles, his jeans unbuttoned, his big hands shoved into his pants to cup himself…all while wearing a red devil mask to obscure everything but his hair and eyes. And it was those dark gray-hazel eyes that had transfixed her. His body was nothing to sneer at, though, either. And it was his body—specifically a tattoo—that had driven her to slip into his DMs and leave a message.

“You’re Unchained.”

That was it. That was the message.

And, much to her shock, not more than ten minutes later, he’d responded, surprised that she knew what the laughing skull busting through chains tattooed to his well-muscled back meant. It meant that he was a member of the Unchained MC, a local motorcycle club that ran legitimate businesses, wreaked a little havoc when necessary, and had made a name for themselves for helping out the less fortunate, and generally being sexy badasses. She had to admit to him that she knew of them because she lived near their territory.

He'd asked her name, and she’d given him her handle: @xxxDaisyChainxxx

He’d thought that was hilarious—something to do with kinky sex—and then he’d asked her about her favorite sexual positions. She’d been honest with him and told him she had no idea,because sex, for her, had always been vanilla. She’d lied, though, because vanilla sex would be an improvement over what she really had…nothing. She was a big, fat virgin. How could she tell him that, though? The man was walking sex with badassery poured all over him like oil. Telling him about her “vanilla” sex life had been like waving a red flag in front of a thirst trap bull, because he came into her DMs full on, teasing her, embodying every inch of his thirst trap persona.

And she’d hated it. Her handle had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with remembering her mother, who’d died twelve years ago, and how she’d spent summer days with her, making daisy chains while sitting in the grass, lazing under the sun. When she’d told him that, he seemed truly moved by her response, even going so far as to say it was a good memory to have. She’d been happy that he’d responded so kindly, and she foolishly believed that he was starting to show her who he really was…but the next day, he was back to being the Redtube he was to everyone else.

She didn’t want to get to know the man he portrayed to his 100 thousand followers, she wanted to knowhim. The real Redtube—or, as he was known back then, @RedDevilDog.

It had taken more than a month of back-and-forth chats where he flirted outrageously, and she tempered that with goofiness and lots of heavy sigh emojis. Back and forth. For a month. She was despairing that she was ever going to break through the façade of being just one of the hundreds of thousands.

Eventually, their conversations became less about flirtations and more about interests, like movies, music, favorite local foods. And, finally, they had a breakthrough when she mentioned she’d graduated from the University of Scranton with a master’s in software engineering and a bachelors in cybercrime and Homeland Security. He’d been floored thatshe’d accomplished so much in only four years. Then…he’d admitted to her that he was a computer geek himself, but he'd gained his knowledge and experience from Uncle Sam while serving in the Marine Corps.

And from then on, a sort of true friendship was born. But they didn’t stay “friends” for long.

Within another week, they’d taken their online chats into a video chat room she’d designed. It was so secure that not even the NSA could crack into it. She and Redtube could login and turn on their cameras to chat with one another. Well,hecould turn his camera on, revealing his real face, the one he hid behind is mask in all his videos. And, goddamn, when she’d seen his unmasked face for the first time, she’d nearly come on the spot. Sharp angles, golden skin, dark scruff, and lips that desperately needed to be nibbled…by her. That reaction had been one of the reasons she’d refused to reveal anything more than her voice.

Because she was a coward.

A fat, ugly, scarred coward.

And he said he understood her fear, her self-consciousness, even though he was the direct opposite of her, having no issue, whatsoever, with revealing himself—in all his glory—to strangers. She was literally the opposite of him—he loved to perform for the cameras, showing the thirsty ladies nearly every inch of his gorgeous body. But her…she only ever left her house to go to work, the store, and Cool Hands—and only ever while covered from neck to toes, a ridiculous attempt to disguise her size and all the lumps and bumps that came with being a bigger girl. Thankfully, her physical scars were easily covered by her shirts, but they did nothing to hide her big tits and belly rolls.

People stared plenty at her size 18 body, with her wide ass, her big,unperky tits, her thick thighs that rubbed holes in her jeans when she walked, and at her belly that no amount of carb-cutting and belly toning exercises could diminish. She wasself-conscious, self-deprecating, and nurtured a tad bit of self-loathing.

But…over the last forty-eight days, with encouragement from Redtube, and his promise to wait growing a garden of hope in her chest, she finally got the nerve to suck it up, put on some bravery, and be this close to him.

And she was determined to get closer—at least closer than she already was.

The man she was focused on as he sat nursing a whiskey with two of his club brothers in the booth just behind hers. The booth was high enough to keep conversations private, but she’d discovered—completely by accident—that this one had a sliver of space between the booth and the wall that allowed conversation to carry through to the booth she was sitting in, her ear pressed to the crack like a total skeeze.

She listened, as they spoke, not recognizing the other two voices, but she could recognize Redtube’s voice in a summer storm.

“…it was like it a Hoover and a Dyson had a threesome with a hurricane—seriously, that chick sucked me so good, I came back for seconds,” the one man said, making Val curl her nose in disgust. Was this really what men talked about in bars?

“Thirds?” the other unknown man asked, snickering.

She heard a snort, and she could guess there was an eyeroll in there, too. “Nah, man. You know my rule—Cluster hits it once then bounces. The only reason I went in for seconds was because of that mouth. Gawtdamn, that mouth.”

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