Grey (Storm's Soldiers MC Book 2) by Paige Notaro Page A

last.”
    He nodded at me once, then opened the door and slunk out into the night.
    I sat down on the piano stool. My body still lay bare but for my lingerie, but I couldn’t stand the idea of tugging back into that tight white dress.
    “Fuck,” Darryl patted my head. “You ok?”
    “No Darryl, I’m not freaking ok.”
    I shoved his stomach with both hands. It did nothing, but he obliged me and took a step back.
    “Easy girl, don’t unleash that anger on me.”
    “I’ll do whatever I damn well please.”
    He crouched down into my view again, managing to look pissed and concerned all at once. “Are you really fucking mad at me?”
    I was mad at everything. Vaughn, myself, him. Tara for not being here. The door for not locking itself when Vaughn had come in. “Why do you just pop by without calling?”
    “Well, shit, cause you seemed to be fond of my visits before. Didn’t think I’d catch my baby sister with a racist dick in her mouth.”
    “Oh, god. Why’d you have to go mention that?” I could almost taste Vaughn, still hear the content sounds I made as his peach flesh thrust into me. I wanted to retch.
    “It ain’t something I’m likely to forget.”
    He shivered and popped back to his feet. His hand landed on my head. “Listen, I’m sorry it happened like that, but fuck, I ain’t sorry that it happened. Did you want to go on seeing a skinhead?”
    His light touch soothed the self-loathing out of me. I shook my head.
    I did not want to date a racist.
    But sitting there, I couldn’t quite understand why that meant I could no longer see Vaughn.
    *****
    The night passed in tears and ice cream. Darryl took off after bringing me a vat of mint chocolate-chip and giving another gentle brush of my forehead. There was nothing more he could do but save me from the memories his presence brought back.
    I woke in a sweat several times that night. Even after light started to hit my tired eyes, I didn’t actually get up until it was noon. Lucky thing I had no class. Then again, it would have given me something else to think about.
    I muddled through a lunch of canned soup, taking my sweet time and mostly feeding uneaten spoonfuls back into the bowl. The annoying part was I couldn’t really understand why I felt so glum.
    There were the obvious reasons: the shame of being caught, the embarrassment of dating a racist when it was right in my face, the memories of all the countless times I’d let him take me in the past.
    But that sort of darkness I knew not to hold onto. We’d grown up poor. I’d tucked my head down through plenty of name calling at school and done plenty of things that I wasn’t terribly proud of later.
    The feeling running through me now was something I had little experience with. It felt an awful lot like loss. Like a piece of me had fallen out and left a gap where a future had been building itself.
    It was insane.
    Vaughn and I had done little more than have sex. Intense, sweaty sex that left our bodies lingering on each other, but still, there was nothing else there. We weren’t dating. This wasn’t even a breakup.
    So why did it feel as bad as any I’d had?
    I let the spoon plop in the mostly full bowl and lounged in front of the TV. The screen blared in front of me, and I put on my favorite comedies but the words ran through my head without much meaning. I flipped stations aimlessly until I finally landed on the History channel. It was black and white and about Hitler, of course. That era wasn’t anywhere near my focus at school, but it was enough to capture my attention.
    This was Vaughn’s spiritual forefather. His tattoos directly sang praise to the monster screaming in German on screen. This was a guy who had gassed eleven million and started a war that led to many million more deaths on top of that. Why should I mourn for a guy who wanted to be associated in any part with that?
    The sadness churned to bile in my mouth for a while, but eventually it sank back into a general