AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
I released her. “Let’s go talk in the office.”
The office was about thirty feet away, but about eighteen people stopped me to say how sorry they were, and they’d be praying, et cetera, et cetera. They all worked for me, and they were trying to be nice, but I just wanted to close myself in a quiet place where the words thoughts and prayers couldn’t penetrate.
Melanie threw her arms around me again as soon as we were in the office. She stretched to embrace me around the neck and pressed her body close. “I won’t ask again how I can help,” she whispered in my ear. Her breath was hot and sweet. “God, how I hated it when people asked me that after my parents died. I’m here, though, Dom. I’m here for you.”
I didn’t know if she was expecting me to fall apart or not. On one hand it sounded like a nice idea to lay my head in her lap and have a solid cry. The earth had lost a bright and loving spirit today, and we were all a little poorer. It was okay to cry about it.
But a basic part of me responded in a different way. Melanie’s full breasts were against my chest, and by now I knew them well. I knew how they felt in my mouth and under my hands. I knew how they bounced when I pushed her to ride me hard and fast. True, I still halfway felt like crying, but there were other options besides tears, and I suddenly wanted them instead. She was wearing a skirt today, the black bohemian-style one that loosely fell past her knees. Melanie and her damn skirts, they’d always driven me nuts.
“Dom,” she gasped when I abruptly reached beneath the hem of that stupid skirt and cupped her ass in my hands, pushing my way into satin panties.
Melanie craned her neck so she could see my face. Her eyes were wide, and those pink rosebud lips that I’d seen doing my filthy bidding were parted slightly. I tightened my grip and ground my hips on her body in a slow rolling motion. I was hard, burning for her, and I wanted her to feel it. And she did. She breathed hard and answered back with a rhythm of her own.
I grabbed her hair in one fist and kissed her. I was sloppy about it, sliding my tongue in there roughly. I’d use her right here, for no other reason than I needed to think about something else for a few minutes. I’d rip those panties right the fuck off, spread her wide on top of the desk, and have her however I pleased. It would be quick and dirty, and she’d love to let me do it. And why the hell not? It was a sad day, but we were here, we were alive. There were never enough moments on this earth. We should do the best we could with them.
Except it was a cheap and selfish way to deal with my own pain. And I didn’t want to use her that way.
“What’s wrong?” she asked a moment later when I set her down and backed away.
“Got carried away,” I said with a sigh. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
Her face was flushed, her hair tangled. She smoothed her skirt out, looking awkward and embarrassed. “You mean today?” she asked. “Or ever?”
“Huh?” I was having trouble concentrating. My dick was still getting used to the idea that it wasn’t going to be getting anything right now.
“I can only get so far with you,” she said miserably. “You didn’t even want me to come to the hospital. You never even mentioned the fact that you told Gio about us. Why, Dom?” Before I could even respond, she winced and buried her face in her hands. “Oh god, I’m so sorry. You’ve had a horrible day, a truly terrible day, losing someone you love. I’m terrible for making it worse.”
Shit, she thought this was her fault. It wasn’t her fault. I just couldn’t keep taking from her until I gave something back. Melanie meant too much to me to do that.
“You’re not making it worse,” I said earnestly. I wanted her to understand how I felt about her. “Mel, look—”
The sharp knock at the door interrupted me.
“What?” Melanie yelled.
“Fire in the kitchen!” Tim shouted.
I leaped across the room in two strides and flung the door open. Tim blinked at me, startled.
“I’m sorry, Dom. It’s just that a bunch of pies got burned, and there’s thick smoke in the kitchen.”
I pushed past him and ran straight for the kitchen. “What the fuck happened?” I bellowed.
Isaiah was tossing some charred pies in the trash. “It’s my fault,” he said, and his lower lip quivered. “I was supposed to set the timer for this batch and—”
“It’s actually my fault,” Tim said right at my back. “We’ve been a little shorthanded, so I pulled Isaiah from dish duty and pushed him into helping out.”
I sighed. I closed my eyes for a second because the bitter smoke of the fire stung. “It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “We’re a team here, and you guys have had to do more than your fair share lately. Now open up all the windows and tell Patsy over there to prop open the front door before the Phoenix Fire Department busts in here.”
The smoke had traveled to the dining room, and some of the customers had decided to leave. Melanie stepped in and started handing out coupons for free pizzas so that hopefully they would want to return at some point. The smoke cleared out pretty quickly, but from that moment on, I was a pizza tornado as we tried to catch up in light of the ruined pies and lost time. I kept thinking that I needed to find time to corner Melanie for a minute, but one thing after another kept coming up. By the time I finally got her alone in the office, the front door was shut, and she was packing up for the night.
“We got interrupted before,” I said.
“It’s okay.” She shrugged. “Work comes first with you. Always.”
I thought I detected a note of bitterness.
“Is that what you think?” I asked her.
She cocked her head to the side. “Isn’t it true?”
“No,” I said, but even as I did, I started to wonder. I’d grown up thinking of work and family as being indivisible. Ever since Gio and I had opened a place of our own, I’d been driven to the exclusion of everything else, and it felt natural to me. I’d never learned how to create boundaries, how to balance it all out like my brother had.
Melanie was gazing at me sadly. “Dom, again I’m so sorry about Donna. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” She kissed me on the cheek as she passed.
She was offering me space, and I didn’t even want it. I wanted her. Yet I didn’t follow her outside when she walked through the door.
It was only later, when the lights were off, the doors were locked, and I was climbing back into the driver’s seat of my truck that I realized I hadn’t had a chance to give her the cookbook.
