branded (phantoms mc #2)

five: in which she is frozen in time

"You only hit up my phone when you hate being alone " -Shaun Frank & DYSON, No Future

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"I won't wait around forever," he said, looking at me with stormy slate eyes.

I chewed on my lower lip, not wanting to speak, but knowing I had to. "I don't expect you to."

His eyes were pensive, like he was trying to figure out what made me tick. As if he found the answer he was looking for, he lowered his head once more to my center, slowly licking his way up my slit.

***

I was fucκed.

"Cat," said Maya, "where's your tiara, at least? If I have to look this ridiculous, so do you."

The Ford house had been decorated entirely in a Frozen theme—fake snow everywhere, fake ice dangling from the ceilings like frozen daggers, and fake princesses and snowmen everywhere.

The princesses and snowmen just happened to be the adults.

Maya stood in front of me, hand on one hip, dressed from head to toe as Princess Some-Other-Shit. The pale blue shift dress she wore swept the floor, and she had to keep lifting it up as she ran about the house making sure little kids weren't doing what little kids liked doing—fucκing ѕhit up, then fucκing each other up. It was chaos. A nightmare. Toddlers scampering about our feet like little cake-stuffed mice. I'd almost crushed a little redhead girl rolling around the kitchen floor in a snowman's outfit. If she hadn't suddenly burst out into a squeaky rendition of Let It Go, I would've gone to jail for manslaughter, no doubt.

All in all, this wasn't a good start to my Saturday afternoon.

"Cat?" Maya was saying. "Tiara?"

She was wearing one herself, a huge one that announced to anyone who looked that she was the queen of this household. It was doing a pretty ѕhitty job of holding back her springy dark curls out of her face.

"Can't I just wear one of those fake carrot thingies Ripper got all the guys?" I pouted at her, batting my eyelashes super-fast like a little girl.

Maya let out an audible sigh. "Fine. Can you do me a favor and go find Ripper? He was supposed to go out and get ice."

"I can do that," I volunteered, maybe a little too eagerly.

Maya squinted at me. "This wouldn't have anything to do with you hating kids, would it?"

"Nah," I told her, turning away. "Honest."

I was out of the house before she could protest, my chest aching. There were so many kids in there, and it tore at my chest that I would never have that. Never have anyone call me mommy.

"Snap the fucκ out of it," I muttered to myself, filled with disgust.

I went out into the backyard, wrinkling my nose at the sight of even more kids out here than in the house. Michael was turning two, for fucκ's sake, and sure as hell didn't know all these kids from Adam, but hey, Ford parties were notoriously over the top.

I found Ripper with a beer in his hand grilling burger patties, looking like he wasn't bothered by these little roaches making a mess of his backyard and screaming like there was a fire on the mountain.

"Pusѕy," he greeted, raising his bottle, "what's good?"

"Came out here to see that you don't fucκ the meat up."