I lied in bed with my back facing the door. My body was exhausted from all the work I had to do at the store today. My mind was wrecked from all the unnecessary grocery store drama. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I couldn’t. Politely, I had asked the kids to go outside so I could get some rest, but unfortunately I could still hear them. Every so often I could hear Trystan calling someone a ‘faggatron’ or I could hear Lauren ranting about some topic that no one truly cared about. Therefore, I just stared at the wall. I stared at the wall and thought about anything that my tired mind could achieve to think of. At first, dreading having to go back to the hell, also known as Sammy’s Market, was on my mind, but then I thought about dragons and dinosaurs. I know it’s weird, but it popped up since I was bored out of my mind. I thought about if dinosaurs were real, then dragons had to be, too, right? After dragons, somehow Kai popped up in my mind. I thought about her dark hair, her neutral intimidating facial expression, how adorable she looked when she actually smiled and laughed, and about those forest green eyes of hers. She was definitely a woman like no other. She was beautiful, and dangerous and I admit that I was all for it. It was weird how attached I had gotten to her in a span of a couple of days. Most would say it was just lust, but her looks weren’t the only thing that appealed to me. Her personality was also something worth thinking about. At one moment she could be stern and authoritative, and then she could be the flirty and seductive. One moment she could be fuming with jealousy, but then begin to sing karaoke like nothing had ever happened. She was weird, and I liked that about her.
There was a light knock on my door and I turned to my side to face it. The chipped white door opened slowly and revealed the person standing behind it. I was surprised to see that it wasn’t one of the kids, but it was actually the person who I was thinking about. Kai stood there, looking amazing as usual. She was wearing a leather jacket over a white Henley shirt, and dark jeans with stylish, combat boots. When I saw her, I sat up and she walked in fully and shut the door behind her. I don’t know why, but when she closed the door my heart skipped a beat. I was all alone with Kai in my bedroom. The girl was as seductive as a sex goddess. There’s no telling what would go down in a matter of minutes. “Hi,” Kai said with a small smile spread across her lips. “I was-I was thinking about you,” she said as her eyes bore deep into mine. She was standing a couple of feet from the bed but her eyes were still intensifying. She held her hands behind her back and glanced over at the lamp that was by the bed. I couldn’t believe Kai actually was thinking about me. Surely she had more important things to think about like that bitch Michaela or drug deals. Kai bit her lower lip and pointed towards the door, “You know what? I don’t know what I was thinking. I should just go.”
Shit, I hadn’t even said a thing to her. She probably thought I was being bothered or something, but really I so infatuated by her that I couldn’t utter a word. “Wait, Kai,” I said softly. She had her back turned to me by this point and her hand was on the door knob. “I was just thinking about you, too,” I admitted sheepishly, even when she wasn’t looking at me I blushed like I was a middle-schooler. “Well, I thought about you after I thought about dragons and dinosaurs,” I blurted stupidly. I heard Kai let out a sexy, raspy chuckle. She turned back towards with me with her perfectly arched eyebrows raised. I looked down at the bed sheets and began playing with the strings of the worn out fabric. I heard the sound of her heavy boots walk closer to the bed, and then the bed sunk at a new pressure. I looked towards her to see her sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“Dinosaurs, huh,” she asked with an amused smirk. “You thought about dragons and dinosaurs and then you thought about me,” she asked giddily. I don’t know why she was so amused by this, but it was adorably. Those green eyes of her got lighter and so did the brightness of her skin. It was like she was glowing. She kicked off her boots, and moved so her feet were on the bed and she lied down on her back comfortably. I sat there with my legs crisscrossed as I stared at the girl who was lying in my bed like it was her own. “Are you three years old,” she finally asked with a taunting smirk. I frowned at her and crossed my eyes.
“No, I’m 23.”
“Ooo, you definitely showed me, Athena,” she replied sarcastically. I stuck out my tongue at her and in response, she replied, “Don’t stick your tongue out unless you’re going to use it.” I sighed as I laid back on the bed just like she was. We were both lying beside each other and staring up at the ceiling. I glanced over at Kai to see her smirking stupidly. “So, what exactly were thinking about? Like what made you think about dragons and dinosaurs? Are you scared they’re going to come back to life and kill us all?”
“One, dragons are mythological creatures. Two, I’m not afraid of dinosaurs coming back to life because I know it won’t happen. I was just thinking what if dragons were actually real,” I replied a bit sassily. I could feel her eyes burning into my skin and I gulped a little. I dared to glance at her, just to see her biting her lower lip. “Does dragons and dinosaurs turn you on,” I asked jokingly as I wiggled my eyebrows.
“When you talk about them, they do,” she replied before wiggling her eyebrows back. I giggled and she smiled. “Seriously though, how do you know that dinosaurs won’t come back to life? Maybe instead of a human-zombie apocalypse, there’s a dinosaur-zombie apocalypse. Just picture it, right now a T-Rex kicks down the wall of your room and eats you alive.” I shivered at the thought and Kai cackled at the frightened look on my face. “Damn, did that scare you? You get scared easily,” she said with a soft smile.
“I just don’t enjoy the thought of getting swallowed down a dinosaur’s throat, that’s all,” I answered back. Kai nodded and she furrowed her eyebrows at me. “What?”
“So, how did you get on the topic of me?”
“I don’t know. You just popped up.”
“So, what were you thinking about? Were you thinking about how much of an amazing kisser that I am,” she asked as she raised an eyebrow.
I laughed and shook my head at her. “You tell me first. What were you thinking about when you were thinking about me? It must’ve been good since you decided to come and see me off a thought,” I countered. Kai put her hands behind her head and she stared up at the ceiling. She was quiet and I could tell she was debating on whether to tell me what she was thinking about. She sucked in her bottom lip and bit it softly. Her eyes then looked down into mine and she gave me a sweet smile.
“You really want to know,” she asked rather quietly. It was almost a whisper. I gave her nod and she motioned for me to cuddle with her by patting her shoulder. Hesitantly, I moved closer to the girl and rested my head on her comfy shoulder and slung my arm around her waist. She reached in front of her and lifted up her shirt a bit. The familiar weapon sat there in the waistband of her boxers. “It’s on safety. I just don’t like lying down with it,” she commented before putting it down on the dresser beside the bed. I guess she kept protection with her at all times. I mean she was a pretty big deal. Kai cleared her throat and then I felt her warm lips on my forehead. I tried to hold back a smile, but of course I let it take over my facial features. “You’re adorable,” she replied lowly and sweetly. “Last night, I was thinking about you in a sexual way. I was thinking about the things I would do to you and how I would do them and also how you would react.” I looked up at Kai, but she was staring up at the ceiling. “Today, well, you haven’t stopped running across my mind. My thoughts haven’t been sexual like last night. I guess you could say they were thoughts of longing, but not of sexual desire but of happiness. Athena, when I first saw you in that restaurant, in your waitress outfit, I knew you were different. Your generosity and how compliant you were of Michaela’s bitchiness was remarkable. I’m used to girls having attitudes, yelling at each other over me or anything else. You just have a good aura about you. You have seven kids to look after, you’re struggling to pay bills, you have to deal with your drunk of a father and you still seem ten times happier than girls that seem to have it all. I’ve only known you for a couple of days, but damn, you already have such an effect of me. You make me want to do better. I’ve done some horrible shit in my past, things that I want to block out and not even think about. I hurt people physically, emotionally and even financially, but you make me want to just…be nicer. Another thing about you is that you’re independent. That time I tried to offer you five hundred bucks for cleaning my home, you settled for a hundred. You wanted to get what you worked for and I understand that. I like that. Athena, I like you. You’re so gotdamn beautiful personality-wise and body-wise. I’ve been cold for a while now because of my ex. She betrayed me, but I don’t know…fuck it. I’m getting sentimental.” I stared at Kai with awe I didn’t know she could actually be that sensitive .The things she said about me were sweet and flattering. She actually listed things that she liked about me as a person and not my looks. I wasn’t used to anything like that. My ex, Tess, would compliment me about my personality but never that passionately. I dated her for years and I’ve known Kai for days, and here she was talking about me as if she had known me for decades.
“That’s very sweet, Kai. I think that might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. When I first laid eyes on you, I thought you were pretty…hot, I guess. I told my friends at work and they all told me how dangerous you was, but it still didn’t faze me. From then and until now, I’m still interested about you. I want to know about you. I want to learn what your favorite food is. I want to know how you like your coffee in morning. I just want to know all about you.” Kai smiled and looked down into my eyes. “So, with that said, just promise that you won’t go ghost on me. The kids like you and so do I and I’d love to know every single detail about you.”
“I’d like to know the same about you, Athena.” Kai’s hand rubbed up and down my arm gently. “We can start now,” she said with an adorable smile. “Ask me any question and I’ll answer it for you.”
“Well, you said that your girlfriend betrayed you. How’d that happened,” I asked as I glanced up at her. She stopped rubbing my arm and her smile faded. I was about to tell her that she didn’t have to answer, but she opened her mouth before I could say anything.
“To tell you the story correctly, I guess I should start from the beginning. When I was only fifteen, I start selling drugs for Franco. I never met my parents, and the only person I had was my grandmother. She was retired but those retirement checks weren’t paying the bills. We were struggling so I heard from one of my friends that selling drugs was the new thing. Franco adored me from the get-go. He loved my ambition and my ‘badass exterior.’ By the time I was seventeen, he gained enough trust in me to actually let me work alongside of him as a drug lord. I was basically doing the same thing he did, which wasn’t much. As a drug lord all you do is make sure everyone is doing their job. We keep in contact with informants and make sure shipments of supplies get in. We make sure someone gets those supplies and distributes them to the right people. The right people has their people sell the drugs. The drug dealers sell and the consumers enjoy. I really don’t have to touch the stuff, but I like the personal approach. It’s more edgy. Anyways, when I was eighteen, Franco basically left everything up to me and I’ve been controlling things since. I met Emily a couple of weeks after I began really operating things. She was beautiful. She had blonde hair but greyish like eyes. We got attached almost immediately. She loved the danger, it seemed. She was with me all the time, through every phone conversation that I had with my informants and everything. I shouldn’t have been so stupid. Anyways, when I was nineteen, that’s when I found out she was basically just an informant for a rival gang. One night she lost it and said she couldn’t fake loving me anymore. She explained the whole thing and I just lost it. I began breaking shit and it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t hit her, but I think I broke just about everything in my bedroom. I told my people and they killed the leader and his top informants. With them dead, everyone else weren’t a threat, but most of them were killed too, except for a few. Everything went back to normal over a span of two weeks, but then one day when I was home alone, someone broke into my house. It was a man with a gun. He was the brother of the leader of the gang that I had wiped out. He wasn’t affiliated and didn’t even know Emily. He just wanted vengeance. I didn’t have a gun on me so I put my hands up. That didn’t stop him though. He made me get on my knees and he stood behind me. He pressed the gun against the back of my head. He didn’t even say anything. There was a long silence and then I heard a bang. I was unharmed. Before he could even get the shot off, one of my dealers, James, walked in the front door and put some shells in him. He died right there. I almost puked. James had shot him in the head a couple of times and his brains were all over the place. I nearly ran out of the house and began walking down the street. I walked for a while and I thought about everything from Emily to seeing pieces of that man’s brains on my carpet. When I got back to my place, the living room was clean of all the blood, puke and brains like nothing happened but I still moved from the house I was living in. It didn’t feel right, you know?” I stared at Kai for a while. “None of that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t let a girl I barely knew in. Now, here I am doing it once again. Except this time, I know that I trust you, Athena. I trust that you’ll keep my deepest and darkest confessions.”
I kissed Kai’s cheek softly. “You can trust me. The only friend I have to tell things to is Noa, or maybe Kat but I’m 100% sure that their not in a gang,” I joked. That serious expression of hers was wiped off of her face and a smile appeared. I smiled also and played with the buttons on the top of her shirt. “I would never betray you like that, Kai.”
“I believe you, Athena.”