Page 9 of Mechanic Next Door
Yeah. I’m seeing red. I put my hand on the frame of window and look down, my eyes sealed tight. In my deepest thoughts she’s biting her lip while still giving me that big, gorgeous smile. She’s got a hand on the pole and she walks around it slowly, wearing sky-high fuck-me pumps, and when her ass swings into view she bends over to give me an eye-full of that sweet, smooth skin on the back of her legs and leading up to a heart-shaped, thick ass with her black thong pulled up between her cheeks and giving me a hot slice of pussy along withit.
She looks over her shoulder at me and flips her long, wavy blonde hair, inching one hand up the back of her scalp, and when she rakes her hand down her front and takes one pert, perky breast in her hand, that’s what doesit.
I tear out of my seat, run onto the stage, and throw her over my shoulder. I beat my chest, which makes me laugh at myself a little. I’m like a fuckingcaveman.
I don’t want nobody else looking at her,I growl.She’s mine. She’s fuckingmine.
Fuck. I turn around and plow a hand through my hair, only to see her looking through the window with an infuriatingly casual smile on her face. She wiggles her fingers and gives me a breathless look through her eyelashes. She looks like she’s about to put her finger in her mouth andgiggle.
Nothing’s funny about this, though. I put the paper back into the bag covertly and return to the house, my feet feeling heavier than they didbefore.
“Here’s your bag,” I say, dropping it on the coffee table, deciding not to say anything right now. She isn’t hanging off a pole at an actual strip club. If she were, I’d know. Someone would have brought it to my attention. I know she’d never do that. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong withit.
It just isn’ther.
I’ve told her enough times before that she can’t be wearing her cut-off shorts. I’ve told her that she needs to keep herself covered up. But it’s not right for me to be so controlling, and there’s going to come a point when she starts dating men who are going to ask certain things of her. There’s also going to come a point when she’s going to find a nice man to settle down, and whether he asks things of her or not, she’s going to settle down with someone some time. Get her life started. Start afamily.
I push it away. This is all a discussion for some other time. I don’t want to focus on anything other than getting her well as soon as Ican.
And that meansnotprying into her business. As much as I want to. As much as her business really is my business, too, because that’s how it works when you care about someone. When that someone comes into your life by luck or by happenstance and changes everything aboutyou.
When she moved in with her grandfather three years ago, she was just a rising senior in high school. She’d had the tragedy of losing both parents, and she needed a place to live. I think back on how her grandfather was so thankful to have her come live withhim.
Imagine that - an old man, who hadn’t had a good relationship with his own daughter, got a second chance to be a parental figure. It makes my heart break and smile at the same damntime.
“Hey,” I say as I take a seat next to Peach. “What do you say we go down to the lake again as soon as your ankle is all heeledup?”
“I’d love that,” she says before taking a long pull of herbeer.
She didn’t just give her grandfather a renewed sense of purpose, though. She also gave me a renewed sense ofpurpose.
There was something so sweet about her. She made me change my behaviors in little ways, ways that I barely even noticed, ways that were so imperceptible and subtle that I didn’t realize they were happened as they happened. I only realized how much she’d made me change when Ray brought it to my attention one night in the shop over a few coldbeers.
He told me I wasn’t going out with as many women as I used to. He said he hadn’t heard from any more of his sister’s girlfriends that I went out with them and didn’tcall.
Okay, that one wasn’t my fault. We were only together one time, and I was clear with her that I didn’t want anything more. She seemed to agree with my approach at the time, but apparently she thought she’d be able to break me down if she kept showing up at the garage. I let her down as easily as I could. I don’t like to see a woman upset, and of course I don’t like it when I know it’s my fault, and despite all my best intentions, she was upset whether I liked it ornot.
And Ray’s observation did get me to thinking. And when I thought about it, I realized that I wanted to be better because Peach was watching me. She looked up to me. Then I stumbled upon a different realization, one that made me a little nervous: what if I was cleaning up my act not to be a good example for Peach, but because I wanted Peach formyself?
I dismissed the thought then, but now, as I watch her take a sip of her beer from across the little living room with the white curtains and the old flooring and the picture frames filled with memories, I wonder if she’s really been the woman for me allalong.
I don’t know if it matters, though. She’s too damn good for me. Too young. Too pure. Too young, too good and too pure for the things I’d do if I got my hands onher.
