Dead Mans Hand – Astra Rose (1)

No trace of the anger we had to work through at the cottage. Right now it’s nothing but heat and need. And so help me, I want him. I want him as badly as I ever did before it all went to shit. I swallow, turn back to Ryder one more time. “Okay,” I say quietly. “Then I know what I want to do.” I push myself to my feet and, before I go anywhere else, I bend and kiss him gently on the mouth, a soft brush of gratitude and warning all at once.

“Sure?” I murmur against his lips. He nods, so I move away from him and over to Jake near his knee. I wonder if I’m going too far. Maybe it’s all the whiskey coursing through my veins. But I straddle Jake just the way I had straddled Ryder, one knee on either side of his thighs, arms around his neck, and he looks up at me completely awestruck, half gone, the smile on his lips almost dopey. Sitting on Jake’s lap is much different than sitting on Ryder’s lap because he’s completely naked—save the towel draped loosely over his groin.

But when I settle in against him, my knee presses one end into the mattress, shifting it aside so that I can feel the full length of his erection jerk against me. My reaction is pure liquid heat, starting in my center and radiating outwards. I close my arms tighter around him and kiss him hungrily. He groans, wraps his arms around my back and moves his hips as he kisses me back, his cock rubbing against me, the friction immediately igniting.

My breath hitches and I rock my hips back in response. It feels so good. After kissing three of them my nerves are already on fire. He pulls me in tight, kissing me like he’s making up for all the lost time, and moving against me—oh God. Stroke after stroke after stroke of his hard cock rubbing through the thin cotton of my clothing, right where I need him.

I could actually come like this. The thought startles me. I almost break the kiss, but he pulls me in tighter, moving against me like he senses that I’m losing control. I can hardly breathe, but now I can’t stop moving, grinding against that hard ridge that feels so good, chasing what I need. “Well, holy shit,” I hear Damian say. But I can’t stop. I don’t stop.

I’m staring at the blood soaking through the bandage on my hand. It’s seeped along the fold of my palm, tracing the lifeline beneath the wrap, black in the desert light that strips everything of its color. It’s from a deep slice where the blade slipped while cutting paracord an hour ago.

It should throb, but I feel nothing except this tremendous, terrifying calm. “She’s dead,” my uncle is saying, his voice cutting in and out on the sat phone, stuttering with delays. Across the room, my platoon sergeant watches me, shoulders square but eyes soft with a pity that tells me he already knows what this call is about. “You need to come home, son. For the funeral.” My mother is resting, my uncle Rob tells me. It’s been a shock for her.

I stare at my hand, noticing the fine shimmer of sand sticking to the edges of the dried blood. “Home?” I repeat. The platoon’s running lean. Half our guys are sick, two are on rotation out at the wire, and the idea of getting on a plane while they stay here feels backward and obscene. People die here. I look up at the platoon sergeant, and he nods. “The funeral is on Sunday,” Rob says, ignoring my question.

The funeral. But she’s just a kid. “She was fine,” I hear myself say, although she wasn’t, really. I just don’t know how to come to terms with this. Mom had been telling me that she was worried. Late nights, the boyfriend with the bike, dropping out of school. I said I’d talk to her, but Samantha was never home when I called.

Rob clears his throat and keeps talking, but I can barely hear him over the pressure building behind my eyes, the wordless scream that’s whistling between my ears. “The Sunset Motel…overdose…” What would a kid be doing at a motel? Pictures of Samantha run through my head like a carousel, spinning faster and faster: riding her pink Huffy with the streamers, knees scabbed from crawling on the grass; stormy nights when she crawled into my bed because Mom was working late; the county-fair goldfish she made me eulogize when it died.

The last image is of a scrawny teenager in a hoodie waving at the bus, pretending she wasn’t crying. The pictures keep looping, the colors bleaching out until there’s nothing left but white. Sunlight so bright it hurts. No—moonlight.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 652d20a04dbba09f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,221,998 bytes (2.119 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 208
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 357.49 minutes
• Total Words: 71,498
• Total Characters: 390,025
• Average Words per Page: 343.74
• Average Characters per Page: 1875.12

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