“Not my story to tell.” She raises her hands in a surrendering gesture.
“Leila!” I growl.
She just smiles. “What are you doing here, by the way?” I level her with a stare, and she laughs. “Right. Well,” her little fist bumps my shoulder again, “good luck!”
With that, she departs toward her party. I’ve been keeping Josie in my periphery the whole time while she was walking from the bar back to her dancing buddies. And while I was talking to Leila, one of her buddies somehow grew a foot taller. And that fucking buddy is holding her waist, pulling her closer to him.
When he presses his thigh between her legs, I’m on my feet.
I can’t see what’s happening from behind the people, but I’m there in two seconds flat. It’s enough time for her to show real struggle, trying to get rid of him. No one from her party is suddenly in sight.
His hands move lower toward her butt when she tries pushing on his chest. Her face is pinched with anger and determination.
Without thinking, I grab him by the back of his neck and pry him away from her. He stumbles back and blinks at me.
“What the fuck, man?”
I step into his space, my face in front of his. “Get the fuck outta here,” I hiss.
“The hell?” He looks confused. “I was here first.”
I move even closer. Finding his eyes, I hold them with a meaning he can’t misinterpret. “Get. The fuck. Out.”
“But she was—”
I grab the front of his shirt. “One more word out of your mouth.”
“She’s here for what we all are!” he cries out, not getting the clue.
I feel something clicking at the back of my head. My vision clouds, and I release his shirt, take a step backward so I can have a longer range when two small hands wrap around my bicep.
“Yep, we’re leaving.”
I turn toward the sound and find Josie holding me in her iron grip, surprisingly strong for such a small creature.
“We are not,” I hiss back.
“He’s right. Everyone comes here to hook up. Not a big deal.” She pulls on my arm, but I hold still. The fucker clearly has zero self-preservation because he starts talking.
“Yes, man. We all know what we are here for. She’s been shaking her ass for hours in front of my face.”
I lunge at him, but Josie throws all her weight, trying to hold me in place. A large body forms in front of me.
“Chill, Ken.” Mark carefully places both his hands on my shoulders and slightly pushes back. Carefully. He knows not to aggravate. But I struggle nonetheless to remove Josie’s grip and go for the asshole who’s still standing without a clue what he did wrong. Fuckers like him need a lesson.
“Ken, look at me,” Mark’s voice calls out to me again, and I finally focus on his face. “I know you want to kill him right now buttrust me,” he accentuates the words, reminding me about why he is here with Alicia, “this is not the situation where you want to get really dirty.”
“I’ll just teach him a lesson,” I try reasoning quietly for only him to hear.
He shakes his head. “You chose the wrong dude to bullshit to. I know what you want to do, and I’m telling you, if I knew you’d react like that, I’d have been here first. But I gave you the courtesy to deal with your woman’s trouble.”
Your woman,he said.Mywoman.
I meet his eyes head-on, seeing the fucking meddling of everyone around me. A tiny guilty wince is everything I need to know.
A tug on my arm brings me back from smashing my fist into Mark’s face. Turning toward it, I find Josie still holding me in her iron grip. Her forehead is sweaty. Her eyes are big and confused. With mascara smudges under them, she still looks so freaking beautiful.
Her painted red lips are perfect though, not a single smudge.Good, no one got there yet.
