Read Online Thunderland by Brandon Massey - Free Book Online Page A

him like haunting spirits, making it nearly impossible for him to concentrate on work or anything else. He told himself to put them out of his mind, to dismiss them as yet another example of Big George’s dementia, but he could not expel them from his thoughts. Because he secretly worried that Big George might be right.
    He took a draw from his cigarette. He had been chain-smoking for the past several hours. It was unusual for him. He had not tasted nicotine in years.
    He heard the bedroom door open behind him. Footsteps whispered across the plush carpet. Then two slender, copper-colored arms slipped around his waist, embracing him from behind.
    “I didn’t know you smoked,” Rose Mason said in a whisper, her lips near his ear.
    “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He took a final draw from the Kool and extinguished it in a glass ashtray.
    Rose dropped her hand to his groin, rubbed gently. “Maybe so. But I know the most important things about you.”
    He took away her hand and turned to face her. She was nude. She had a beautiful body: lithe, shapely, full in all the right places, her caramel skin as smooth as a peach. Ordinarily, the sight of her set his hormones aflame. But he could not summon any desire.
    “Rose, I might have to disappoint you tonight,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”
    “I’ll get you in the mood. You don’t have to do a thing. Lie down, and I’lltake care of everything.”
    She would, too, if he allowed her. He could lie down and let her fuck his brains out, then get dressed and leave, and both of them would have got exactly what they sought from this one-dimensional relationship. She got fantastic sex with a virile man whose stamina matched hers. He got to slip out of the demanding role of Thomas Brooks, hardworking entrepreneur, devoted son, inept husband and father, and assume the position of a man whose sole responsibility was to get it up. Rose required only great sex and trite conversation, and that was all he delivered. Their relationship was almost sinfully superficial—and relaxing. Whenever he left her apartment, he always left with the belief that he had released air from a stress balloon that often seemed dangerously close to exploding.
    Nevertheless, as therapeutic as sex with Rose might have been, it was wrong. He was married and deeply in love with his wife. He had no business being in this woman’s bedroom.
    That is, unless he was really the womanizing dog Big George claimed both of them were.
    Like father, like son.
    Those damned words again. Mocking him. Challenging him. Daring him to prove them wrong.
    Like father, like son.
    He resolved that he had to break this cycle. Right here. Right now. Rose had unbuttoned his shirt. She started to slip it off his shoulders. He stopped her.
    “Hold on,” he said. “We have to talk.”
    “Can it wait?”
    “No. We have to talk now.”
    “Come on, baby. You haven’t been here all week.”
    “It’s only Tuesday.”
    “It feels like Friday to me.”
    “Damn, girl. Is sex all you think about?”
    “I have needs, Thomas. I’m not gonna hide the fact that I need a man a few times a week. A female can’t be shy these days, or she won’t get shit.”
    “I guess so.” He walked past her and sat on the bed. “You’re honest.”
    “Damn right, I am.” She sat beside him. She stroked his chest, kissed his neck.
    He gently pushed her away. “But it’s time for me to be honest, too.”
    She drew back. “What do you mean?”
    “You probably don’t care, but I have to tell this to someone. I talked to my dad today. Like usual, he chewed my ass out over anything that came to mind. But he said something I’ve never heard him say before, and it bothered me. It still bothers me.”
    “What did he say?” she said, watching him but, judging from her expression, not earnestly interested in his confession. She wasn’t interested in anything if it wasn’t about her. Her conceit was one of several unpleasant