Chapter Six

A little less than three weeks later, I was home. Mia, too. It was strange, with just the two of us in the house. Not in a bad way, just different. I don’t think either one of us quite knew how to act at first. We just weren’t very comfortable around each other anymore, which was disappointing because we’d always gotten along pretty well. But I didn’t have too much time to worry about Mia. My first priority was finding Letty and getting her away from Sly.

Leon had told me his place was just around the corner from my dad’s garage. I was supposed to meet him there Friday afternoon so we could talk some more about the whole situation with Sly, figure out how we were gonna take care of it. I got completely lost on the way there, though. Funny, how you can forget the little things about a place in only two years. I must’ve walked around that block at least five times, looking for Leon’s street. But every time, instead of finding Magnolia Street and the little yellow house with an old white van in the driveway, I would end up at this little park. Any direction I turned I would, soon enough, find myself passing that fucking park again. Worse, I didn’t even remember it being there at all before. Eventually I got so frustrated I almost just turned around to go home and call Leon, tell him something had come up and I couldn’t meet him that day after all. But, I always have been a stubborn son of a bitch, and jail only made me more so. I figured I’d try to find Leon’s house one last time, and if I couldn’t do it, I’d take that as a sign that I wasn’t meant to get involved. Well, I got a sign, all right. One of the kind that accidentally smacks you in the face and instead of apologizing says ‘fuck you’. One of the kind also known as Letty.

I ended up at the park again, but sometime in that last walk around the block, I’d changed my mind about this being my last effort of the day to find Leon. Like I said, I was stubborn. Besides, I had promised Leon my help, and I wasn’t going to give up just because two years in jail had fucked up my sense of direction so much that I couldn’t even find a house around the corner from where I’d spent half of my life.

I wasn’t ready to give in and go home, but I still didn’t really know how to get where I wanted to go. So, I sat on a bench underneath a tree and waited. There were a lot of people in that park; young mothers with their babies, scrawny boys trying to look tough as they smoked cigarettes in a corner over by the swings and huddled in their jackets despite the hundred degree weather, grandmothers feeding breadcrumbs to the birds. That’s one of the things I missed most when I was in prison - just the luxury of sitting in one place for a while, completely still, watching the world go past.

After I’d been sitting there for about twenty minutes, so comfortable that I’d almost fallen asleep, something startled me awake. “Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Here I’m not even out of jail a week and I’m already letting my guard down. Yeah, I’m gonna be a lot of help protecting Letty from Sly….”

Then I noticed what had woken me up. Well, actually, who. The sweetest piece of ass I’d seen in a long time had just walked by. Hips swaying just a little, black pants practically a second skin. I was mesmerized; I could have watched her walk all day, as long as her ass kept moving back and forth like that. Slowly, I let my gaze drift upward, taking in the small patch of skin exposed between the waist of her pants and the bottom of her tank top. I almost growled aloud, and had to laugh at myself. I guess it had been longer than I’d realized since I’d seen a beautiful woman. Not many of those at Lompoc, and I wasn’t at all interested in the men there. Her hair hung just past her shoulders and I didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Suddenly I wanted nothing more in the world than for her to just turn around and let me get a look at her front.

She slowed down a little as she got close to the corner, and for a second I thought she had noticed me watching her. But then I saw the guy standing there, leaning against an old Cadillac Seville, apparently waiting for her. His hair was dark and greasy, he wore a tan polyester suit that looked like it had been inherited from an uncle who was about twenty pounds lighter and hadn’t bought any new clothes since 1973. I thought she hesitated for a second, shied away from him almost, but then she kept walking so I decided it had to have been my imagination. I could hear the murmur of their voices as she came up next to him, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying to each other. He reached out suddenly and grabbed her arm, spun her around so she faced the street, and I finally got that view of her front that I’d been praying so hard for earlier. And it did not disappoint. Her tits were just the way I like them - enough to grab onto and have some left over, but not so much that I’d suffocate in her chest.

I could have looked at her all day, just enjoying the view, but then she did something that made my heart stop cold. She stepped back from the guy, crossing her arms over her chest. At first, I was just mildly annoyed, because there went my chance to get a good look at her. But then…there was something familiar about that stance, I just couldn’t place it. Then, I looked up at her face and saw a glare I knew almost as well as my own face. The first time I’d seen it was a few months after Letty started hanging out at my house all the time. She and I were in the garage by ourselves, working on one of the cars. Somehow we got started talking about our dream cars, she said hers was a Nissan 240 SX. I remember laughing, saying it was a piece of shit car that only a girl who didn’t know any better would want to drive. She calmly stepped back, crossed her arms over her chest, glared at me for several seconds and then proceeded to list about a hundred reasons why me and all of my opinions on cars were a crock of shit, ending with since it was a proven fact that girls are smarter than boys, she was obviously right and I was just crazy and would eventually learn the error of my ways, probably when I’d been dumb enough to bet slips with someone running a 240 SX and lost. Anytime I tried to talk to her for the rest of that afternoon, all I got was that silent glare. I think that’s when I actually started to respect Letty and not just think of her as an annoying little brat, even though I made sure not to let her know that. And after that day, anytime anyone even mentioned the word Nissan around the two of us, let alone a 240 SX, I wouldn’t be able to keep the smile off of my face, especially when I turned to her to catch a glimpse of the look I knew she would be giving me. The same look on the face of the girl I’d just spent the past five minutes checking out.

I just sat there in shock for almost a minute, thinking to myself over and over, “Oh, shit. Oh my fucking God, that’s Letty.” After all the trouble I’d had finding Leon’s place, she’d come right to me. Still to this day, I swear it must’ve been fate. I might’ve sat there on that bench for the rest of the afternoon, in complete shock that this chick I’d been mentally undressing was Letty, little Letty, who used to practically live at my house. Damn, she was just a kid! Or, she was the last time I saw her. She definitely wasn’t just a kid anymore.

“Leave me the fuck alone, Sly,” I heard her yell, and suddenly, without even thinking about what I was doing, I was off the bench and across the ten feet that separated us.

I walked up behind the guy, grabbed him in a chokehold. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Didn’t you hear her, she wants to be left alone.”

“Hey man,” Sly drawled calmly, even as he was gasping for air, “this ain’t none of your concern. She ain’t for sale yet, but come back to me in a week or two if you’re interested. I guarantee she’ll be available by then, we just have some issues we need to work out.”

Keeping him in the chokehold, I picked Sly off the ground. “Oh, you sure about that? ‘Cause, I don’t think this girl is ever going to be for sale. I think she’s already mine. And, I don’t think you want to fuck with what’s mine. The last guy who did that, well, he’s blind in one eye now, face all scarred. Can’t even drive, has to take the fucking bus to work. I don’t think you want to end up like him. Of course, this girl is very special to me. I probably wouldn’t be content to let you live if you hurt her. Actually, I think you’ve already hurt her. So this is your warning. From now on, you might want to steer clear of me and my people. And we might be anywhere, so you probably want to leave the city completely, maybe even the state. I don’t think you’d want to try me. Do you?”

I put him back on the ground, lessened the grip on his neck a bit so he could reply. “N-no,” he stuttered in a whisper, shaking in my grasp.

Sly turned around and scurried away, glancing over his shoulder every so often to see if I was going to follow. I never saw him again myself, but I heard he moved to New York, made himself known as Silent Sly. He never spoke normally again, and no one ever took him seriously.

With Sly out of the way, I turned to Letty.

“You didn’t have to do that. I can take care of myself, you know,” she snapped at me, still giving me that Letty glare.

“Oh yeah, it really looked like you were taking care of him,” I sneered at her. “He looked like he was terrified of you.”

She made that pfft-ing noise that Mia always did so well, turned and started walking away from me. I didn’t have any choice but to follow her.

“Come on, Letty,” I pleaded, reaching out to grab her shoulder. “Is that any way to greet an old friend, especially after he saves your ass?”

She stopped, looked at me for a second, cocked her head to the side, then took a step back.

“Dom,” she squealed, in the highest pitched tone I have ever heard her use in my entire life, “you fucking son of a bitch! When the fuck did they let you out?”

Almost before I realized what she was doing, Letty had thrown herself at me, reached up to wrap her arms around my neck and was hugging me as hard as she could. I just stood there for a second, but it felt good to be pressed up against a woman, against her. One of my hands naturally settled around her waist, the other rested in the middle of her back, confirming that she wasn’t wearing a bra. As if I needed a reminder. As close as we were standing, her shirt was so thin it was practically see-through. Finally I let myself relax into the moment, hugged her back. Damn, but her body felt good against mine.

“So I’m yours, huh?” she asked, hitting my arm playfully.

“Looks that way,” I replied, smiling at her. “So, you gonna stick by me?”

“Maybe…if you’re lucky!”

“Looks like you’ve grown up a bit, little girl,” I said, a little surprised at the husky desire in my voice. She didn’t seem to notice, though.

“Yeah,” she laughed, leaning back a bit and smiling up at me before reaching up to hug me harder. “I haven’t been a little girl for a long time, Dom.”

“No, not a little girl anymore at all,” I thought to myself, leaning down to pull her closer to me. I tightened my grip on her, one hand moving to cup her shoulder blade as the other slid further up her back, somehow ending up underneath her shirt, rubbing small circles into her skin. As she sank even more into me, until our entire bodies were touching, my hand moved around to her side to keep her steady. “So soft,” I remember thinking. I might have said that aloud, even, but I doubt she heard me since my face was buried in her neck by that point. Her scent was intoxicating; she just smelled clean, but I hadn’t been around anything clean for so long I couldn’t get enough of it. I pressed my face closer to her and she sighed, her breath lightly tickling my neck. Suddenly I realized that I’d still been rubbing circles into her skin, but since my hand had moved, I’d been massaging the side of her tit.

Realizing that I was starting to get a massive hard-on, I pulled back from her slightly, and as I turned my face to get some air, saw an older woman glaring at us. “Hey, why don’t you two just go and get yourselves a room?” she asked, scowling. “The Mar-Ray Motel’s right down the street you know, and they only charge $10 an hour. There are little kids around here, you know.”

Little kids. The words slammed into me, and suddenly all I could think of were all the times I had complained to my dad about Letty hanging around, saying I didn’t want a little kid following me all over the place. Forget about the little kids at the park seeing us, Letty was still a little kid herself.

I pulled away from her quickly, not even responding to her shy, questioning smile. I didn’t say a word to her, just grabbed her hand and started walking back to the old garage, pulling her along with me.

“Damn you, Dom,” I thought to myself. “This is Letty. Letty, who’s like your little sister. Letty, who’s only fifteen years old, no matter how good she looks. And you promised Leon you’d protect her, not spend all your free time trying to figure out how to fuck her as soon as possible. You are not going to take advantage of her. She is not going to need protection from you. So just…stop thinking about her like that!”

Over the next few months, it turned out to be harder than I thought it would to keep myself from wanting Letty. Actually, it was impossible.