Coletrane by Rie Warren

else in on that, precious.”
    “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
    And I hoped to keep it that way with all the secrets I was really hiding.
    “Let me ask you something,” I pinned her arms beside her head, doing a little bump and grind of my own.
    “Shoot.”
    “Are you an only child?” I snuck my tongue to the dip of her collarbone.
    “ Ohhh . Yes.”
    “Oh, yes, you’re an only child, or oh, yes, keeping doing this?” Coiling above her, I sucked on the sweet spot again.
    “Both!” Her body writhed beneath me.
    I let her go and scooted back. “Figures.” I smirked.
    “You miserable son of a bitch!” She tossed a cushion at my face.
    One I effortlessly batted away.
    With a renewed grin, I attacked, tickling her sides, working my hands up her ribs. “Spoiled. Rich . . .”
    Sin fought right back, her platinum blonde hair shivering in my face when she leaped into my lap and hooked her arms around my neck. “And also a very successful businesswoman, don’t forget.”
    My palms skimmed up her thighs. “Couldn’t forget that. The whole package.”
    “What about you? What happened to your sister? Where are your parents? You don’t talk about them.”
    And this was when I usually shut down and closed off.
    I wanted to be serious about Sin. I wanted to be with her like no other woman.
    Maybe I could tell her some truths. Things even my Retribution brethren didn’t know.
    Crashing my head back against the couch, I closed my eyes, the never-diminishing guilt eating at me from the inside out.
    “I’m sorry.” Sin’s fingertips lightly slid down my chest. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’d imagine it’s a sore spot.”
    She gathered my hands in hers.
    “Yeah.” My lips twisted. My voice curdled. “You could say that.”
    All the breath knocked out my chest, a chest so suddenly, so tightly squeezed I had to take a few seconds. “You’re not gonna like this about me, precious.”
    “What is it?” She kissed my knuckles and eased off my lap.
    I scooted forward, cushioning my head in my hands. “My mom brought us up, me and my sis, Brooke. We never lived the high life, but she did her best. She was a good mom.”
    One of the best. Man, she’d worked hard to do things right for us. She made every outing fun, didn’t matter if it was just a trip to the grocery store when she let us choose—once in a while—the package filled with small boxes of sugary cereal because that was the only way she could afford spoiling us.
    “We had it hard, but we didn’t dwell on it. The best times were spent on the creek. Shrimping with a net when the sky turned from blue to yellow to the softest pink. We’d haul up the net, take our catch home, fry it up out back, behind the trailer.”
    Sitting here, spilling my guts to Sin, I was reminded of the difference in our backgrounds, hell, even in our futures.
    “Brooke was two years older than me. And I guess we got started when we realized how rough life was for our mom. The long hours, cleaning houses and offices, so she could take care of us. Then she got hurt, bad, on a job. Couldn’t work. There was this insurance payout they promised, always in the future. She called it her windfall from falling . But it took too long.” I sniffed, not surprised my eyes were wet. “Brooke was seventeen, I was fifteen. We hooked up with some bad kids. Street kids.”
    “Those guys at Inksanity?”
    “Yeah. Those guys.” I stood up and began pacing. “At first it was about looting, grifting. Stealing shit so we could sell it off. I can’t believe I’d ever felt proud about that, slapping a wad of cash on the kitchen table.
    “We told Mom the money came from odd jobs. Odd jobs all right.” I pressed my fingers against my temples. “Then the drugs came into it. Meth. I told Brooke not to do it, but she wouldn’t listen . . . life was too hard . . . Curtis convinced her to give it a shot.”
    “Jesus Christ, Cole!”
    My head whipped around, my face a