Free How to Misbehave (Short Story) by Ruthie Knox Page B

up?”
    “Power’s out, doofus.” She shoved his shoulder, an excuse to get her hand back on the solid bulk of him.
    She loved his shoulders and arms. They were even sexier now that she’d seen them braced over her, bearing his weight as he thrust inside her and—
    “You did not just call me a doofus.”
    “I have a teenage sister. Sue me.”
    The phone fell silent.
    “Is your mom coming over here now?”
    “Almost definitely.”
    “You want me to meet her like this?”
    “Not particularly.”
    He pushed one big hand under her shoulder, the other under her hip, and shoved her all the way over to the edge of the mattress. She had to grab on tight to keep from falling off the bed. “Go get on the phone, then, sunshine.”
    “I’m not sure my legs still work.”
    “No time like the present to find out.”
    She let them drop off the side of the bed, and when she put weight on them, she was surprised by how lovely they felt. Her quads twitched as if she’d just finished a seven-mile run on the trail. Replete in the best possible way.
    She grabbed her robe from its hook in the closet and kicked her scattered clothes into a pile on her way to the phone in the living room. As she dialed, she heard Tony moving around in the bedroom, and then the bathroom door closed behind him.
    “Hey, Mom,” she said when her mother picked up.
    “I just called you.”
    “I know, sorry. I’m home. Everything’s fine.”
    “What took you so long? What’s going on?”
    “Nothing.” Then Amber remembered her car. “Actually, there
is
something. My car is dead.”
    “Dead? What do you mean ‘dead’?”
    “That big oak tree fell on it.”
    “You just paid it off!”
    “I know. It stinks.”
    “You should’ve called your father to come and look at it.”
    “No, Mom, it’s really dead. I’m going to have to get it towed.”
    “So how did you get back here?”
    “Tony gave me a ride.”
    A long pause. Amber could practically hear the wheels whirring in her mother’s mind. The construction worker. The basement. All those unanswered rings. Then a faint metallic scrape in the background as the curtain rings slid along the bar and her mother looked out the front window of her apartment. “He drives a blue truck,” she said.
    Oh, the disapproval in those words.
    Amber knew she was supposed to be feeling something. Shame. Dismay. A twinge of what-have-you-done-young-lady? She’d just had sex with a man whose house she’d never seen, whose parents and siblings she’d never met.
Bad, bad Amber
.
    She felt marvelous.
    “He sure does,” she said.
    “You invited him up?”
    The bathroom door opened, and Tony came out, buck naked and completely unconcerned.
    It didn’t look so much like a cudgel when it wasn’t standing at attention. It looked almost domesticated in its nest of black curls. Lovable.
    Or maybe that was just Tony.
    “Yep,” she said cheerfully. “I invited him up.”
    “Amber, you need to be more careful. A man like that … those Mazzaras aren’t the best family, and—”
    “Bye, Mom.”
    She hung up the phone, knelt down, and extracted the cord from the wall.
    When she turned around, he was grinning at her in that way he had, and her heart somersaulted backward off a cliff.
    Too late to be careful
, she thought.
Way too late
.
    She stepped into his body and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her, and then he kissed her some more, and then she kissed him back and he grunted, and his … his
cock
rose where it pressed against her hip.
    He would go. Later tonight, or in the morning, he would go, and he might not ever come back.
    But he wasn’t gone yet.
    In the meantime, she would steal every intimacy she could get. Transgress every boundary. Take every stupid, doe-eyed risk, and hand him her heart and her body.
    He couldn’t break her. She could only do that to herself, and she’d rather get broken this way than spend her life safe and afraid.
    “I think you had more perversions to teach