All You Touch, page 1
ALL YOU TOUCH
LOVE STARTS HERE
BOOK TWO
E.M. LINDSEY
All You Touch
E.M. Lindsey
Copyright © 2022
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any events, places, or people portrayed in the book have been used in a manner of fiction and are not intended to represent reality. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Cover: Natasha Snow Designs
Editing: One Love Editing
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato
1
“You goddamn, motherfucking, useless, disgusting piece of shit!” West dragged a hand over his brow, fury pooling in every atom of his body. If it was possible according to physics, he would have transcended into a biblical pillar of fire and consumed everything in the building without a single second of remorse.
Instead, he threw the wrench down on the ground and stared at the showerhead, which was still dripping a pathetic little drop, drop, drop into the stained, cracked porcelain tub with the stubborn, endless mildew winking at him from the corners. He’d lived in bad digs before, but never like this. At least, he’d never had to exist in a place this run-down and be subjected to a corporate monster who likely fapped to the idea of his tenants crying on their bathroom floors after not being able to shower for a month.
Then again, West had never met Karl Larsen face-to-face before. Most of the time, he was a signature at the bottom of some notice or another stuck unkindly to the tenants’ doors. West had seen the fucker on TV accepting some humanitarian award once though. He was thin, a little jowly, his hair so pale grey, West could see the age spots on his scalp. He looked like a stiff breeze would knock him over, and West couldn’t help but wonder what things might be like if that old bastard finally died.
“You know there’s probably some dickhead son even worse than him waiting to take over, right?” his neighbor, Hannah, said when they’d gotten wine-drunk over the winter’s last boiler disaster. “Some trussed-up asshole with Gucci butt plugs he likes to wear to his staff meetings.”
West gave her a flat look. “Hey, don’t knock the sex toys, man. I’d wear a cheap ten-dollar butt plug to a staff meeting if I could get away with it.” Not that he had staff meetings at his little deli, which was surviving on himself as the single employee, the good graces of London Enterprise, and the few neighbors who could afford to splurge on more than a sandwich and chips once a week.
Of course, barely scraping by meant that a ten-dollar butt plug might as well be Gucci according to his budget.
And maybe things would be different if West wasn’t entirely on his own—not just for work, but for every tragic mishap and depression cycle—but he was. And with good reason. West’s universal luck was absolute shit, and the only way he ever got things done his way was by creating his own.
West had tried the whole dating thing once, two years after he arrived in St. James, but it hadn’t worked out the way he imagined it was supposed to. The guy was nice, but he’d been so far out of his league, it wasn’t even ironically funny.
Bennett had been sweet, and really into him, but West realized very quickly that would never be enough to bridge the financial gap between him and the “other side” of St. James. Bennett was a lawyer who wanted nothing more than to tuck West into his pocket and make sure he never suffered again. But it was suffocating, and by the end of six months, West dumped him because it was that or fling himself off a cliff, and he wasn’t ready to be that dramatic.
Yet.
He just wanted to be able to take care of himself and know that someone wanted to be with him for him, not because he was some project to fix, which he was certain was how Bennett saw him. And that was all fine and good, except it didn’t solve his lack of money problem. He was too damn broke to live.
Which also meant he was too damn broke to date.
Hell, he was too damn broke for the three-dollar bottle of wine on his coffee table, but Hannah had been feeling generous, and she’d gotten a new table of regulars at the bar who came in Friday nights, so she was a little more flush than him on weekends.
In spite of being tipsy that night, West knew she was probably right about Karl’s successor, and he found himself wondering about it now as he scratched his nails through his greasy hair and wondered if he could get away with boiling another pot of water and taking a standing shower before work.
He couldn’t exactly look like he’d rolled out from under a bar dumpster and get customers to want to come back to Abraham’s, but that was his livelihood. He’d dropped out of school to take over when his uncle had died—not that he’d been doing a great job living large back home or anything.
West had been running the deli for three years now though, and he wasn’t exactly having regrets about taking over the shop, but not being able to afford to live in the shithole apartment block that was falling apart week by week with no hope of repair was starting to weigh on him. He was tired, and he was feeling more hopeless, and there was a sort of empty ache because maybe the struggle would have been tolerable if he had someone to come home to.
Hannah was great and all. Hell, he was closer to her than he was to his own sister most of the time. She was maybe the best friend he’d had in years, and a dream neighbor, but even she’d been making noise about doing something else with her life outside of St. James. He couldn’t really blame her. The town had a strange dichotomy of being a port on the North Coast, and it was almost like someone had run a line of chalk down one of the neighborhoods and made all the poor people cluster in a handful of streets. And, of course, they’d show up for their jobs at posh boutiques and five-star restaurants, then they’d putter home in their little beater cars and endure the sneers as they tried to stretch a twenty-dollar-a-week grocery budget at the high-end grocery stores since there was nowhere else to shop.
Once, when he was tipsy and bored, he let himself think about the town’s reaction if someone opened up a Dollar Bin on the corner of Cherry, and he’d laughed himself almost sick at the protests they’d set up. He could see them all in their Armani and polished shoes, hiring buskers and panhandlers to wave signs so they didn’t have to risk scuffing a nail.
And okay, sure, he knew people like Rhys London were trying to make St. James livable for everyone—assuming that was actually possible. And maybe it once was.
When his uncle was alive, he had seemed to do okay. He’d found a few of Abraham’s old bills in a box once, and none of them had been piles of utility shut-off notices or anything. And honestly, when West first took over the lease, it was actually a nice place to live. At least, it was a hell of a lot nicer than the little shared apartment with six other kids who were kind-of-sort-of working their way through community college while getting high and working at Pizza Hut. And there were times he missed it, but it was nice not to get flooded with weed smoke at two in the morning anymore while he was cramming in last-minute homework for his two classes he was taking between the deli’s operating hours.
But the empty apartment was starting to actually feel empty, just like the rest of his life.
It wasn’t like West had come from some depressing shell of a childhood though. He’d been given all the love and resources a person should be given in order to make their adulthood a success. His parents had loved the hell out of him, even when he was at his most rebellious, teenage dickhead phase. They didn’t give a shit if he was queer or if he didn’t want to go to college to be a doctor or a lawyer. Back home, they cared more that he was starting to sink into this pit of despair, but they didn’t have the money or the connections to help him do anything about his life.
In the end, Abraham’s will and deli had seemed almost like a sign from God or the Universe. It had fallen in his lap on the night of a breakup with his mostly exclusive friend with benefits, who showed up at his door at three a.m. on a Tuesday of all nights, telling West they had to break it off.
The guy’s name was Jackson, and he was tall and he was blond. He was the kind of guy who would have shoved West into a trash can in front of the whole high school but would happily get on his knees and suck West’s balls and let him come on his face so long as no one important was watching.
He was also, apparently, the sort of guy who felt comfortable holding West by the face, kissing him, jerking him off, then leaving him in a puddle of his own come with a casual “I think I’m going to propose to this girl I’ve been seeing for a while, so this needs to be the last time we hook up.”
He didn’t even give West a chance to respond. And, like the emotional masochist he was, West found the guts to call him three days later, only to find out Jackson had changed his number.
It was a particularly low moment, and finding out his uncle had quietly passed a month before and left him the shop was kind of the kick in the gut that told him maybe it was time to do something with his life.
His parents told him to sell the deli, to take the money and do something else with his life. Maybe find another place to live, maybe pay tuition to the four-year university and start on the path to a career. But the moment West set foot in the shop with its checkered vinyl tablecloths and the wobbly chairs and the smell of fresh pickled cabbage and baked rye that he knew would probably never come out of the walls, he felt…maybe not right, but he felt something. A fresh start.
Sure, he was still alone. Sure, he was the guy good for a quick hand-job before the man moved on to his happily ever after. Sure, he could be some arm candy for a pretentious lawyer who cringed at getting dirt under his nails.
But in spite of all those cringe-worthy details about his current life, he couldn’t shake the feeling like he was right where he was supposed to be.
Though, maybe not on this grungy tiled floor, staring at a shower that refused to produce water.
With a sigh, West pushed to his feet and stumbled out of the bathroom, trying to remember what it felt like to stand under a warm spray. It was a small indulgence he had taken for granted, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. But the tension at work, and the tension with losing yet another case against Larsen Property Management, and the tension with knowing that not only were things bad, but they were going to get worse, was weighing on him. He needed a massage, and maybe a goddamn hug.
Standing over the kitchen sink, filling a large pot of water, he wondered if maybe he could talk Carter into giving him one. The man came into Abraham’s at least three times a week, which was more than he had done when he was working as Rhys’ assistant. And West might have once looked askance at a guy like Carter for choosing to fall in love with his multi-millionaire boss—but he honest to god liked those two, and he wanted both Carter and Rhys to have nice things.
Besides, Rhys was one of the few people in St. James who actually stuck his neck out for West. He knew Rhys had tried to buy their apartment building out from under LPM, and he knew Rhys had failed. He knew some shit had gone down because there was tension in both Carter and Rhys—and Rhys’ new assistant, who showed up a couple of weeks later—but no one wanted to talk about it.
Hell, maybe they could use a hug too.
With a small sigh, West pushed the pot of water onto the stove and began to heat it. The gas clicked once, then twice, then over and over, but it never caught. And it didn’t smell either. Which meant yet another fucking thing was wrong with the utility lines.
Storming out, he marched across the hall and banged on Hannah’s door, leaning back against the wall as he heard her footsteps. She answered wearing a towel wrap, her hair in a messy bun, a sheet mask making her look like the Ghost of Christmas Self-Care, but she was scowling as hard as he was.
“It’s all of us,” she said without waiting for him to ask.
West dragged fingers through his hair, then thumped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “They can’t keep doing this. This is fucking illegal.”
“Not when the judges holding up the laws have their heads up his ass,” she reminded him. He didn’t open his eyes when she sighed, but he knew what was coming. “We should just fucking move. You should have stayed with Bennett and let him move you into his stupid mansion so you don’t have to put up with this shit every day. I would have done it,” she added, because Hannah was sweet, but she never hesitated to point out that he’d lost an opportunity. Which, of course he knew that. He just didn’t know how to make her understand he couldn’t have survived that way—as Bennett’s kept pet.
West’s jaw clenched tight. He knew the easiest solution was calling his stupid ex—or even just moving out. Everyone else was leaving. But he also knew that abandoning the building wasn’t going to hurt LPM, because they wanted them to leave, and he didn’t want to give Karl Larsen the satisfaction.
LPM had been trying to get them all to break their leases and bail on this shithole so they could collect broken lease agreement fees, and then they’d turn this place into something else. Like high-end condos, which would drive up the property taxes, which would make St. James even more unlivable as a bunch of rich assholes bought units to use as vacation rentals.
It was a goddamn mess, and he didn’t want to be the man contributing to it. He couldn’t fucking let them win.
“We should protest,” he told her. He finally opened his eyes and saw her brow quirked up over the edge of the mask.
“Protest?” Her tone was unenthused and flat, but he didn’t care.
“Yes. If they’re going to keep pulling this shit in court, we should start, you know, protesting or something. We need petitions, we need signs and chants. We need to be loud,” he said, folding his arms over his chest as his voice rose. “We need to start attracting attention or something, otherwise, he’s just going to do this shit forever.”
“That’s—” she started.
He held his hand up before she could say anything more. “I know, okay. It’s a lot, and most people won’t give a shit, and I know neither of us have actual time to march in some picket line. But goddamn it, people are losing their homes over this crap. And I want a goddamn, motherfucking shower.”
She offered him a sad smile. “You’re not the only one who thinks this sucks, but you know what’ll happen if we push back too hard.”
He did. He was just really damn tired of letting the fear of what might be dictate his life. They deserved better than this.
“Just give me a weekend, okay?” he pressed, and he saw it in her eyes when she started to break. He leaned closer and gave her his best puppy dog eyes. “Just a weekend. We’ll get a bunch of water and ice to keep cool, we’ll wear something cute and slutty, and if we can get enough signatures, I promise I’ll take care of the rest.”
Never mind that he didn’t know what the rest was, but he could ask Carter for help, or Rhys. If he could just get enough proof that people weren’t going to sit there and take Karl Larsen’s bullshit anymore, he might be able to actually make a difference.
After a beat, Hannah sighed and banged the side of her head on her doorframe. “Fine. One weekend, and you have to bring me lunch from the deli. And wine,” she added.
He grimaced, but he could eat cheap for a couple of days if it meant he wouldn’t have to do this alone. Sticking out his hand, he nodded. “Deal. Now I’m going to go take a freezing-cold standing bath so I look like a person who sort of has his shit together.”
She offered him a sympathetic look. “Want me to bring over that half bottle of rum I have after my shift?”
He grinned at her and leaned in, pressing a kiss to her temple, grimacing at the bitter taste of mask goo. “I love you. You know that, right?”
“Yep,” she told him, then gave him a shove backward. “Now fuck off. I’m watching Property Brothers and dreaming about what my life will be like once I meet my millionaire.”
She shut the door in his face, and he grinned to himself as he went back to his place. He did hope it happened for her someday. Her dreams were nothing like his own—not that he had any idea what his were—but this felt good. It felt productive, and for the first time in a long time, holding his smile didn’t take any effort.
2
A small part of West wondered how his uncle had done this every single day of his life for the past…well, god only knew how many years. Abraham had been sort of estranged from the family by virtue of packing up one day, wandering a couple thousand miles, and landing on the Pacific Coast with a bank full of some grandparent inheritance and the dream to open up a deli.
