Page 42 of Church Girl
God, where’s the waitress with that drink? Or bottle. I think I’ll need the whole bottle.
“Aye, I know you heard me. What’s wrong with you?” He nudges me in the side with his elbow before stretching his arm along the back of the couch.
I lean forward, trying not to be obvious about avoiding touching him. Shoot, I can still feel the print of his hand on my behind from when he grabbed and squeezed it.
Sweet Lamb,alcohol.
“What’re you doing here?” I ask in return, evading his question like the high school gym dodgeball champion that I am. “I’m assuming Gia isn’t with you.”
He studies me for several long seconds, rubbing a hand down his mouth and beard. From personal experience, I know his facial hair is both soft and coarse. It added another sensory detail to obsess over when I lay in bed last night.
“I’ma let you make it, ma,” he says, his gray eyes glinting like molten silver in the low lighting. I maintain a straight face as if I don’t understand what he means by telling me he’s very much aware I’m deflecting. He snorts. “I’m here with a few of my employees. I don’t usually hang out, but Gia’s with her mom so...”
He trails off as he slowly scans me from my half-up, half-down hairstyle over the strapless, black bodycon dress that hits me just below the knee and down to the black ankle boots with the highest heel I’ve ever walked on. His gaze retraces its path, lingering on the slit that has most of my thigh spilling out of it, before returning to my face.
“Gotta admit, ma. Wouldn’t have ever expected to see you here at the strip club. I didn’t think good lil’ church girls did things like that.” He cocks his head. “If that part of what you said to G’s principal was true anyway, and you really are a PK.”
Good lil’ church girls.
Usually, that kind of condescension would’ve pissed me off. And, usually, I would’ve had a nice-nasty response that women of the South are famous for along with sweet tea and “bless your heart.”
But it isn’t irritation that stirs behind my breastbone.
Just as it isn’t disdain that colors his words.
It’s a heated insinuation, a raw suggestion. It’s the same lust that drenched his voice when he told me I didn’t kiss like a virgin.
And like last night, I’m caught between fleeing from the onslaught of need and staying right where I am, prepared to beg him to finish what he started.
Clearing my throat, I nod, and because I need something,anything, to do with my fingers, I pick up my phone, clutch it in my hand.
“My father is a pastor back in Alabama. A bishop actually.” Both his eyebrows arch high, and I huff out a small chuckle. “Yeah, he’s a big deal at home.”
“Damn, lil’ mama.”
I squint up at him, trying my very best not to let my gaze drift down to his lips. “What?”
“Some things make a little more sense now, but then others...” He shakes his head. “I’m more confused.”
I wait for him to expound on that, but when he doesn’t, I frown. “So are you going to leave me hanging? What are these ‘some things’?”
“That innocence, for one.”
My head rears back, almost bumping the couch behind me. “Innocent? Why would you call me that?” Before I can control it, my body recoils, an instinctive, physical reaction to that word. Ihatethat word. Hate more that only Von sees me that way. I inhale, breathing past the sudden tightness in my chest. “Contrary to how you speak to me at times, I’m not a child, but a full-grown adult.”
Von studies me, and for a second, panic swirls inside me that his sharp gaze caught the flinch I’d tried to hide. Or that my face somehow betrayed my thoughts. But when he doesn’t speak—doesn’t poke in that blunt way of his—I deliberately release a breath.
The relief doesn’t last long, though. As his unwavering gaze remains on me, the spacious VIP section seems to shrink, the loud music from beyond the glass dulls. Just like in his kitchen last night, I want to scramble backward. But I don’t. Because there’s a need in me that’s desperate to be in his space, breathe in his earthy, intoxicating scent.
When I was younger, on Communion Sundays, Daddy used to let us kids eat and drink all the remaining crackers and grape juice after service. Right now, I want to gorge on Von—the sight of him, the sound of him, the scent of him...the flavor of him—just as I once did all the communion elements. Unlike those crackers and juice, Von’s taste wouldn’t be for my salvation. Only my destruction.
“So what you’re saying is you don’t kiss like a virgin because you’re not one.”
I snort, waving him off even as my heart throws itself against my rib cage at the reminder of how he’d rocked my world with just his mouth and a hand on my butt. “That’s not a question an employer should be asking his employee.”
“You’re not on the clock. And if we’re going to keep it real, we crossed the line of what we should and shouldn’t be doing when I sucked on your tongue and your nails dug in my back because you loved it. At least, if that little sound you made as you pressed against my dick is any indication.”
Shock ripples through me. I should be used to the things that fly out of his mouth by now. But not...this. Not words this bluntly sexual. No one has ever spoken to me like that. No one would dare. Not even my own fiancé.Ex-fiancé.
