Page 44 of Cognac Secrets

“Talk about what?” I asked and he smiled faintly, teasing some of my hair out of my eyes with his middle fingertip along my forehead.

“What is it, baby? Don’t lie to me…”

I felt my face crumble a bit.

“True says you’re being cagey because I’m your side chick and you’re hooking up with me behind someone’s back and I feel like I’ve explained a million times already that we aren’t exclusive or anything and?—”

He put a fingertip to my lips, his playing into a devilish smile, and his dark eyes roved my face, patient and sweet.

“I’m actuallynotfucking anyone but you right now… I haven’t had the time the last couple of weeks. If you’ll get on the bike, I’ll take you to see why.”

He was nodding ‘yes’ slowly and his smile grew when I unconsciously started doing it too and he took his fingertip away from my lips.

“True sounds like she’s being a real bitch,” he said as I got on behind him.

I sniffed and got on, and he waited for me to put my helmet on.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s never really been like this before.”

“Think she’s jealous?” he asked, turning to put his hands back on the handlebars.

“What?” I asked. I mean, I hadn’t even considered the notion.Jealous? Why?

“We’ve been spending a lot of time together,” he said and he wasn’t wrong. I mean, he’d actually been keeping up thefriends’part of the bargain the last couple of times we’d seen each other. We’d gone out to eat one night, and dancing another. In fact, we had seen each other something like three or four times since our night in the hotel room and had spent hours one of those times walking and talking, sitting along the river cuddling and sharing things. But no more sex – which was fine. I mean, I liked that this wasn’t all about the P in the V to the jay, jay.

It was now the third weekend since our little… I didn’t know what you’d call it. Tryst seemed trite, hormone and attraction fueled passion-plosion wasn’t super accurate either. The sex we’d had was too gentle for that. It was hard to remember that this wasn’t arelationship, nor was it asituationship. It was and would always befriends with benefits.

Right?

Just a couple of friends who occasionally had sex together when the urge and the opportunity presented itself.

Right?

I held onto Bennie and giggled as he swept through a turn just a little more sharply than he needed to, probably checking to make sure I was still with him and not a million miles away in my thoughts. Which was easy to do when you fell into the rhythm of the bike and the wind and the road beneath the tires.

I loved riding with him. We’d gone on a long ride just last weekend – just him and me and the bayous sweeping past before finishing our night in a little dive bar with some wild zydeco.

God, it’d been one of the best nights of my life, and I’d been sad to see it end when he’d dropped me off in front of Gerard’s. I swear my lips tingled for two whole days afterward from the kissing and reluctant goodbye of that night.

“Where are we going?” I called over the loud music coming from one of those weird spider looking cars next to us.

“We’re almost there!” he called back and made the turn I’d half expected and half dreaded into the old ninth ward… an area hit hardest by Katrina and one that to this day bore the scars harder than almost any other affected by the storm.

For the longest time, I thought the saddest reminder of that week was the old defunct amusement park just outside of the city. I thought it’d stay that way forever, but then developers bought the land and there was a buzz about baseball of all things, and sure enough – it’d been redeveloped into a storm proof and fully sustainable baseball stadium that was supposedly set up to flood if it needed to and only require some power washing and general cleanup to be right as rain all over again.

I didn’t know how it all worked or how it was all possible, but now the city had its first baseball team and it seemed to be going strong out there – even though I had yet to see it other than on the news or in pictures.

We wound through streets with empty lots and boarded-up houses, and finally turned down past a row of dilapidated shotgun houses that would have been so pretty were they fixed up like the one on the end.

Still, we took two more turns and the street opened up almost appearing industrial in nature, a three- or four-story old-style brick apartment building on one corner, the slatted fence and squat, split level cinderblock building across from it, imposing.

Bennie turned us through the gate and gave my knee a couple of taps just inside.

I got off the bike, and he backed it into a line of them off to the side.

Several guys stood around a picnic table passing a joint, and I smiled politely, recognizing Saint from that first night, and Hex from the crating operation at theMystic’s Dream.

The bald, heavily tattooed man stared at me with an intensity that made me want to shudder. He was huge, for one. For two, something was very wrong with his eyes. Like he wore Hollywood special effects contacts or something. They were wall to wall black, and I just didn’t understand what I was seeing there.

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