Page 62 of Cognac Secrets

He found women attractive, I knew that much… it was just like with all the childhood sexual abuse and damage, he could really just do without sex when it came to any kind of relationship. Not that, he was like, born asexual, but more that he was just more comfortable with it than the idea of sex.

Couldn’t blame him, but at the same time what it really boiled down to was the man needed therapy. His issues werewayfucking beyond anybody in the club’s paygrade. We just accepted him for who he was and stayed off his dick when it came to anything sex. Nothing beyond a little surface razzing since the night that he lost his shit as a prospect and the whole fucking sordid mess came pouring out of him in a cascading failure of violence that smashed the fuck out of the club’s barroom and left the furniture held together with duct and electric tape.

He'd ended up on the floor among the glittering shards of broken glass from the bottles and the windows and the glassware, sobbing into Hex’s cut, the mix of booze soaking into the seat of his jeans letting us all ignore that he’d fuckin’ pissed himself amid the storm of chaos.

He’d broken cleanly in two that night and we’d all been there at one time or another in our lives. Most of us had had to weather that storm alone… I was glad that Louie didn’t. He’d gone through enough shit alone as a kid and a teen. He was one of us now. He wouldn’t ever have to go through anything alone ever again. That was the whole fucking point, after all.

We were a family of black sheep. A place to belong when and where we’d never belonged before.

Me to Louie: That’s fucking great, man. You still with them?

Louie: Yeah!

Me to Louie: Think you can get them to the club for the BBQ tonight?

Louie: Fuck yeah! That’s a great idea!

I smirked and leaned back in my seat, my phone buzzing in my hand just before I could toss it back onto my desk. I felt my smirk turn into a dark smile as Sandrine’s notification tone sounded.

Sandrine: You clever devil, you. I saw Louie’s phone. I see what you did there.

Me: You mad about it?

Sandrine: Not at all. Can’t wait to see you.

Me: Looking forward to it. Back to the data mines. See you tonight.

I chuckled and when nothing came through after a few seconds, I put my phone back down and heaving a sigh, cracked my knuckles and went back to this fuckin’ spreadsheet, determined to make the numbers reconcile despite their best efforts to not want to.

When I looked back at the clock, I blinked in surprise. I’d magic made the fuckin’ thing reconcile, but it was a half an hour past quitting time and my stomach was wrapped around my backbone trying to shake some sense into me to feed the fuckin’ thing.

“Alright, alright!” I grumbled under my breath and checked my phone. No messages. That rose an eyebrow, but I knew the girls were hanging with Louie and I was jealous as shit of the motherfucker. The fear of missing out on time with my woman was real.

It’d been four days too long since she’d spent the night at my place and I’d dropped her off at hers the next morning.

I missed her with a fierce ache and a tearing sensation within my psyche that justfucked with me, like a sore tooth or an old wound when it was about to rain.

This overriding screaming warning signal in my brain that legit was sounding the alarm that this was a bad fucking idea – butfuck. Her siren’s call of soothing positivity despite her own hidden pains was louder, and the woman was an inspiration. If she could give of herself so damn fully and selflessly, then the least I could fucking do was match her energy. I didn’t want to be another taker in her life. She’d had enough of those.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, if it was good for me or not, but shit… what I’d asked for clearly wasn’t good for her. She couldn’t ask for more. I could see that. I could see everything on her face. Didn’t have to guess. Didn’t have to wonder.

That was worlds apart from Mia. She’d been a real regular ice princess. Hard to read. Impossible. She’d had to be with a family like hers.

I didn’t know much about Sandrine’s family other than I’d kill them all if they ever touched her against her will again. Hurt her. I closed my eyes and heaved a sigh, the tactile sensation of the scars on her back coming unbidden to my fingertips.

She loved having her back touched. Would cuddle into my side as though she couldn’t get enough of the careless patterns I traced lightly over her skin, and something about touching her like that did something for me. Calmed the mind and soothed the soul. My fingers bumping lightly over the slick flat yet slightly raised at the edges ridges of scar tissue was like she was a living, breathing, worry stone, or something. I loved touching her as much, if not more than she loved being touched and I couldn’t wait to touch her again. To hold her, to breathe in her sweet and slightly salty scent from whatever shampoo and body products she used.

I couldn’t wait for her to come to me and mold her curves against my body, the way her arms elegantly twined around me, the way she fit against me like the other piece of my puzzle finally come home.

I craved her the way plants craved sunlight and I wasn’t getting any nearer to her fucking around in my office with cold and lifeless, impersonal fucking spreadsheets and clinical numbers.

I liked precision. I liked accuracy. I liked the cold details and breaking everything down into fucking ones and zeros… I liked bringing order to chaos despite how well I lived within it – but for some reason her wild and organic way of living just fuckingdid it for me.She breathed life where I was lifeless, warmth where I was cold, put heart back into a heart I’d thought had gone heartless a long time ago and while I still wasn’t sure what to do with a lot of these feelings, I did know I wanted to feel more – and the only way to do that was in her presence.

Before it’d only been on the back of my bike going mach fucking Jesus, or in the middle of a gunfight where my adrenaline got pumping and I could feel life hanging on that razor’s edge of a precipice over the yawning abyss. That final plunge into the yawning black chasm of death imminent was the only thing to make me feel alive foryears…

Until her.

…and now I couldn’t get enough of her.

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