Page 23 of Her Age Gap Match

Stood beside him and looked into the pot.

He glanced over at me, reminding me of the height difference—he had to be over six feet, I was 5’4.

“Just boxed pasta,” he said. “I’m not that fancy.”

“I know how pasta is made,” I said, biting my lip.

I caught his shoulder and stood on my tip-toes to kiss him.

His hand found my waist, forgetting about the pasta completely—kissing me deep and slow…then pulling back just enough to look at me, his thumb tracing a slow circle on my hip through my sweater.

"You're distracting me," he said.

"You were doing fine," I said.

"The pasta's going to be terrible."

"I'll survive."

He kissed me again anyway—shorter this time, decisive–then both his hands were on my waist and he was lifting me up. He placed me on the counter top beside the stove, putting me at eye level with him.

“You stay right there,” he said. “Gotta focus.”

Yeah, of course. Understood.

But I didn’t really care about dinner. I wanted him to fuck me. Very, very badly.

I watched him salt the water, watched his hands—big hands, the rings he always wore, the edge of the tattoo barely visible. I'd been looking at those hands across my desk for two years and now they were eight inches away and I was having a lot of feelings about it.

"What's the tattoo?" I asked.

He glanced down at his forearm. Then back at the stove.

"Old," he said.

"I can see that."

He waited a moment…then he reached over and pushed his sleeve up without making a thing of it, just—showed me. A skull, faded with time, gothic lettering wrapped around it.

Born to Burn.

I frowned. “That’s…kind of sad.”

“The tattoo?” he shrugged. “Yeah, it’s shitty. Got it when I was eighteen and running with the Burned Saints. It’s faded as hell, but that’s the next best thing after getting it removed completely.”

I furrowed my brow to look at it more closely, leaning in. “I was talking about the words, actually.” I reached out to run my fingers over the old ink. “A little nihilistic.”

“That was the whole culture,” he said. “Living fast, not giving a damn about the future because it wasn’t something you planned for.” He stirred the pasta casually, like he was talking about someone else’s life. “The Saints were a Detroit MC—not the worst of them, not the best. We rode together, got into trouble together. It felt like family when you were in it.”

“What happened?”

He glanced at me. “That’s not in my file?”

I shook my head.

“Well…” He paused. “I was twenty-three and already starting to pull back, promised my friend Harlan I’d help him out with one last job. Armed robbery…check cashing place on the east side. I helped him plan it, but I backed out at the last minute, and he got caught as a result.” He turned the heat down under the sauce. “But he had a wife and two little boys, newborn twins, so I told the cops it was all my idea, that I was there, that I supplied the guns and the intel. Because…well, it was my fault, in a way. My plan.”

I exhaled. “Johnny⁠—”