I Couldn't Pay My Three Landlords, So I Gave Them a Baby novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Back Stairs

I took both coffees out of Joey's hands and set them on the top step, and he let me, and that was how it started.

"I don't talk well," he said.

"You're talking fine."

"I wrote it down. On the back of a run sheet. I left it in my locker."

He was six foot four and sitting on a landing built for a woman half his size, with his boots too big for the step.

His uniform shirt was open at the throat, and I could see his pulse jumping in it.

"Joey," I said. "What was on the run sheet?"

He looked at his hands.

"At the funeral lunch you made pozole for forty people," he said.

"In Pop's kitchen, in your mother's pot. Your mother was dying, and you were feeding his whole family."

He swallowed.

"I ate three bowls. I never said anything. I've been thinking about those three bowls for a year."

I stood very still on the landing.

"That's the best thing anyone has said to me in a long time," I said.

"It's not even good."

"It's the best."

I stepped between his knees and took his face in both hands.

He had a clean jaw and a wide, careful mouth, and a small white scar through one eyebrow.

He looked up at me and did not move.

I kissed him.

He made a sound in his throat, a startled and hungry one.

Then his hands came up and spread across my back, huge, and he pulled me onto his lap and kissed me back.

He kissed carefully at first, so gently that I laughed against his mouth.

"I'm not going to break," I said.

"I know. I know you're not."

"Then stop holding back."

His next kiss was not careful at all.

He opened my mouth with his, deep and slow, and one hand slid up into my braid.

The other gripped my thigh through my uniform pants.

I felt how hard he was.

It pressed against my hip through two layers of cloth, and I rolled my hips against it, and his whole body shuddered.

"Ren," he said into my mouth. "Please."

"Please what?"

"Please let me..."

"Joey." I slid off his lap and onto my knees on the landing. "I want to."

He stared down at me.

I undid his belt with steady hands, opened his pants, and freed him.

He was the biggest of the three.

I should have guessed from the rest of him: long, thick, pale, flushed dark at the head, and already wet.

I wrapped my fingers around the base.

I could not close my hand all the way.

"Oh," I said softly.

"Is it too much?"

"No." I looked up at him through my lashes. "It's exactly what I wanted."

I took the head in my mouth.

He let out a ragged sound, and his hand came down on the back of my head and stopped.

It did not push or guide. It hovered there and shook.

"You can," I said around him, and I felt the hand settle in my hair.

I took him deeper.

I licked the underside slowly, the heavy vein, and he tasted clean and salty and warm.

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