Chapter Thirty-One

“You gonna stick by me?”

“Maybe…”

**

It almost hurt, to have someone other than Letty in my arms. Amber just felt wrong…her body didn’t fit easily against my own, she didn’t taste or smell or touch right. Her mouth was salty against mine…not the tangy lemon of the candy Letty was always sucking on. She smelled like perfume instead of soap. She didn’t know to wrap her arms around my neck as we kissed, she was too tall for me to pick up easily and cradle against my chest. She was beautiful…but she wasn’t Letty.

For the first time in my life, I actually wanted to see cops. Wanted to see anything that would make the crowd around us scatter and disappear as soon as possible after the race. Didn’t happen, though. I had to stand there, next to my car, my arm wrapped around Amber’s shoulder, my hand grazing the side of her tit every time either one of us moved, while every single person at the race came up to congratulate me. Well, almost every single person. The one I wanted to see most was nowhere to be found.

We must’ve stood there next to my car for at least an hour. It was funny…I’d never really noticed before how all the girls threw themselves at me. Even with Amber standing right next to me, my arm around her, half of the chicks insisted on getting a kiss, or at least a hug, before they would leave me alone. I guess they figured that since Letty wasn’t around, I was up for grabs. Which was good, but I damn near got my ass kicked ‘cause of some of those girls…

It was harder than normal to pay even a little bit of attention to them…I kept wondering where Letty was, trying to find her in the crowd. I was just out of it…couldn’t concentrate on anything. But then Hector came up to me, and we got to talking about the Super Bowl. For some reason, Hector’s a total freak about the Cowboys. He’s almost more into them than he’s into cars… He’d made the trip down to Tempe that year to watch the game, and every time we saw each other we ended up talking about it again.

“Man, you shoulda been there, Dom,” Hector said, his entire face lighting up. “It was a kick ass game.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “if by ‘kick ass’ you mean that your boys almost got their asses kicked.”

“Oh, man, that’s just fucked up,” Hector laughed. “They weren’t ever behind during that whole game and you know it.”

“They got lucky…”

Hector and I went back and forth for prolly twenty minutes or so… He never gets tired of trying to convince me that the Cowboys are the best team in NFL history. I could feel Letty fidgeting next to me, knew she was getting sick of all this talk about football… She likes the game well enough…sits and screams at the television along with me and Leon during Monday Night Football. But when we’re still talking about the Superbowl nearly two months later, she gets annoyed.

Trying to distract Letty, keep her from bitching at Hector, I moved my arm from her shoulder down to the hood of the car. Slowly, I started brushing my fingers along her thigh, subtly tracing my way up underneath her skirt.

Suddenly, I could barely breathe. I looked over at Letty, trying to figure out why the fuck she’d just elbowed me in the gut, and nearly had a heart attack.

“Well…looks like you’re ready to head home,” Hector said, laughing at us. I could only hope he was buying the act and thought I really was wanting to throw Amber down on the hood of the car and fuck her…hoped he couldn’t see that I was surprised as hell to realize it wasn’t Letty standing next to me.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding back at him, “I think we’re gonna take off… See ya at the house later?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Hector said as he walked off, turning to add, “And Dom, face it, man…the Cowboys are the team of the 90s…”

“Whatever,” I laughed, rolling my eyes as I got into the car, wondering how much Amber was gonna bitch at me.

“Fuck, Dom!” she started in as soon as the car doors were both closed. “I thought I told you to watch the hands! What the fuck is wrong with you? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kick your ass…”