“Mr. Hoffa?” She glanced at her bag. “Right. Jimmy. I’ll ask him if he’s willing to share.”
I grinned while half of her crawled inside. “I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
“Okay. Here’s one he didn’t pee on.” She handed me an oatmeal raisin granola bar that was squashed on one side.
Not my favorite, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially if it didn’t have turtle pee on it. I scarfed it down while Nicole gave me sidelong glances that made me feel like I was eating a puppy. The girl was strangely possessive over everything she owned, which for some reason sparked a sense of protectiveness toward her.
Charlotte and three other interns came trailing up the sidewalk toward us. She wore a different pair of black boots today with several buckles up to the knees, a simple black skirt, and a plaid cap-sleeved shirt. The ends of her glossy black hair had turned a bright shade of purple that matched the eyeliner curling toward her temples. Yesterday, Janice had pulled her to the side to privately discuss toning her wardrobe down to blend in, to not make a spectacle, to fit inside a box. This must be Charlotte doing the exact opposite. I envied her courage.
“Lunch is on me today,” I said to reassure Nicole, then waved at Charlotte. “And ten o’clock snacks.”
Nicole finally looked away, the look of horror on her face fading, along with the oranges striping the sky. “We get paid our first check at the end of this week.”
A paid internship, here of all places, was a really sweet deal, even if it was just a couple hundred a week. “We should celebrate on Friday. Go out or something.”
“We most definitely should go out,” Charlotte said, her boots clunking up the steps toward us.
Nicole traced a few of the numbers scrawled across her hand in the center of her palm with a gentle caress. “Maybe.”
“What she means is definitely,” Charlotte said, sliding in next to Nicole. “There’s a great country bar I’ve been dying to check out.”
I screwed up my face into what must’ve been a giant question mark. She didn’t seem the type. “As in country music?”
“As in cowboys,” Charlotte said with a wink.
Nicole smoothed the handles of her bag with a sigh. “Does it bother you guys that we’re being pitted against each other for a job?”
“Honestly? It takes some of the enjoyment out of it,” I said. “But this internship isn’t exactly what I expected. It’s only the second day and I shouldn’t complain, but I thought we would be knee-deep in historical documents and books, not practicing the proper way to put on rubber gloves and hold a pair of tweezers for three hours. I already know that from graduate school.”
Charlotte held up her hands as if to ward off any judgement. “And I’m sorry, but Janice’s mustache is ridiculously distracting.”
Nicole laughed. “I’ve read that mustaches are one of the many things to look forward to the older we get.”
“Awesome,” I said, wadding up the granola bar wrapper in my fist. “I’m going to start carrying around razor blades, one in each hand, to shave everything in sight. I’ll just explain to security that I have a deep-seated fear of anything hairy sprouting from my upper lip, and William will totally pass them through security, no problem.”
True, I did like the feel of the silky ends of my hair curled over my lip while I read, but a real one on my face? Nope, nope, and nope.
At the mention of William, a flush scattered between Nicole’s freckles.
“That’s why William was totally checking you out the other day,” I said and grinned. “You stood out because you don’t have a mustache.”
“Yet.” Nicole shook her head at the sky. “I don’t have one yet. But it could be that the longer we intern here, the bushier our mustaches will eventually be.”
“Yep.” Charlotte hauled herself to her feet as other interns assembled on the stairs. “You’re both as nuts as I am. Let’s be friends.”
I looped my arm through Nicole’s, and with a shared smile, we pushed ourselves up for day two of Battle Royale, library edition.
When Janice opened the staff entrance door for us, Rick slid past her to hold it open. Rick. Here. Again. His mouth stretched in a wide grin that highlighted the scars on his chin, and he’d color coordinated his gray eyes with his tie and pants. His dress shirt sleeves were rolled up to his forearms as if in preparation to don a pair of tweezers like the rest of us, but his presence tainted the magical building he stood in and instantly darkened the rest of my day. Why was he here?
When his gaze met mine, I blanked my face even though my pulse roared in my ears.
“A word, Paige?” he said as I filed past him inside.
I couldn’t contain my sigh, which caught Charlotte’s eagle eyes in front of me.
“Are you two old friends?” she asked.
“We go way back,” Rick said, as soon as the last intern shuffled inside.
Charlotte tipped up her chin, as if deciding whether or not to believe him. “See you in the cloakroom, Paige.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice tight.
We were alone in the entryway, far enough away for anyone to hear the warning alarms blaring inside my skull. Why did he insist on ruining my internship when it had barely begun?
“Have you found anything?” he murmured.
“I don’t know what you want me to find,” I hissed.
“I already told you. Anything incriminating against any of the Clearys.” He sauntered closer, and I backed against the wall. “And just to make sure you actually look, I have pictures,” he said, voice low and full of malice. “Of you.”
I recoiled away from him as if he’d just slapped me. “You...you were supposed to get rid of them,” I croaked, and I hated how weak I sounded.
Just one more picture, baby, he’d said.
You’ll burn them after?
Only if you keep your word.
Okay, I’d said, unbuttoning my shorts. I won’t tell a soul.
He smiled, and the arrogance inside it fisted my hands at my sides. He’d never mentioned he was married all those years ago. What could’ve possibly made me think he’d been telling the truth about disposing the pictures, too?
“I wonder what Janice would think of them.” He pulled a flash drive from his pants pocket. “Do you want to see them?”
Rage funneled through my veins, hot and fast, burning the backs of my eyes, but I refused to cry in front of him. Why was he doing this to me?
He leaned his head back as if to soak in the library’s history, his eyes closed in peaceful enjoyment because he thought he’d won. Maybe he had, but I couldn’t stand to hear another word pour out of his despicable face.
“This is blackmail,” I spat.
He nodded. “Welcome back to D.C.”
15
Sam
IF HILL WAS GOING TO keep sending me to the corner of 131st and Chestnut, maybe I should think about renting a cardboard box with the words Drugz Mony Hear spray-painted in neon. Would the cops even notice? I’d been standing here for close to forty minutes and hadn’t seen a single cop car. Maybe they were at Alex the ladyman’s favorite donut shop standing in line for a pink tiara and sprinkles.
I half expected to see Alex, but the only thing keeping me company was the flickering streetlight over my head and some guy down the street yelling for Reggie. Even the flies had buzzed off because of the recent rain.
City lights reflected inside the puddles on the streets and sidewalks. Every time cars drove through them, the rippling effect hypnotized me into thinking about Paige. The way her stomach shuddered when I kissed my way down south, her sighs, her moans, the need in her eyes while I fucked her with my tongue. Just thinking about it made me hard. But she’d pulled away that morning and kept her distance the rest of the week as if she felt guilty about it. What could she possibly feel guilty about, though? We were just two people who wanted to bang each other under the same roof as my dick-knuckle brother. Where was the harm in that?
Okay, maybe it was more than just two people wanting to bang. Paige wasn’t just a person; she was Paige fucking Sullivan.
But I needed to focus on why I was here. If it wasn’t for Hill, I could be home with her now, up against a wall while I made her come over and over again.
Jesus H., focus.
A thick, heavy brown paper bag was tucked to my side under my hooded sweatshirt and leather jacket. The money had been delivered maybe fifteen minutes ago, not by a rich-looking woman, but by a gap-toothed, silver-haired man driving a Chevy pickup. Hill was never specific about who I was supposed to meet, but the people who showed up seemed to know who I was. Or what I was—Hill’s peon drug money whore.
My cell vibrated inside my pocket. I fished it out to see a text from Rose.
SamRam?
I closed my eyes for a second, not quite sure I was ready to have this conversation, or any conversation with her, especially right then when I was in the middle of paying off her debt. But she was my sister, my little sister whose picture at the top of the screen was her with duck lips and her forehead bunched up in a series of old lady lines for the camera. Seriously, what made girls think that stupid-ass pose would make a good picture? I smacked the end of the phone against the top of my head, then texted her back.
Rose?
Are you dead? she asked.
A couple of cars drove past the guy shouting for Reggie toward my corner, but none of them slowed. The house where those two kids had escaped last time I was here was dark, so killer tricycles hopefully wouldn’t be on the agenda tonight. For now, I was alive.
Are you? I pressed send and instantly regretted it.
One of the last times I’d seen her was when we’d delivered her to the drug rehab center. She’d been a hollowed out copy of my baby sister with empty eyes and an even emptier soul. She just sat in the backseat of Dad’s car, not humming a tuneless song like she always did, not smiling out the window and waving at strangers. Just staring straight ahead. Gone. It was like an old science fiction movie where aliens invaded humans’ bodies and walked around in what might as well be corpses. That person I’d seen hadn’t been my sister. I never wanted to see that version again.
It took a long time for her to reply back. I almost thought she’d run out of her five minutes a week rehab restricted cell use. I’d probably pissed her off by just existing, which was something she often reminded me through silence. She would usually crack, though, because she wouldn’t stay mad at me for long. Never could.
I just wondered why you haven’t come to visit me.
No no no no no. I so wanted to rage call her and scream all the reasons into her fucking ear. Because I don’t know who you are. Because you snorted so much heroin, you flat-lined. Because I’m paying off your debt to Hill without you even knowing what’s happening. I smashed the phone to my forehead and sawed my teeth together so I wouldn’t toss the phone into traffic and shout my lungs out.
Obviously, I couldn’t tell her any of that because our family was built on an unstable foundation of lies. I didn’t text her back, but she sent me one more:
Come soon, ok? Love you.
Love you. She had a funny way of showing it, but out of everything she’d ever said in all of her seventeen years, I knew that was true. Just as I’d been glued to Riley as a kid, she’d been glued to me. She copied the speed I shoveled cereal into my mouth while watching Saturday morning cartoons. She ran around the entire house like a hysterical puppy looking for me with a flashlight to convince me to play hide and seek with her. She would do random attacks on my skin with an ink pen, then hand me a bar of soap and say, “I’m soap barry”, which translates to “I’m so sorry.” Pretty sure I bruised a rib laughing at that one.
So yeah, that was what I grew up with. I could easily forgive her for walking on my heels and bothering me since that was written in her little sister guide book, but the drugs and the intensity with which she threw her life away... No way. And forgiving myself for turning my back on her for the second it took for the drugs to wrap her up and make her theirs? Never.
I deleted her texts so her stupid picture would disappear from the top and stuffed the phone into my pocket. The rain-soaked air tasted like battery acid. It burned all the way down. I stared off into the night, not really seeing the traffic or hearing the guy’s continued quest to get Reggie’s attention. All of it faded behind Rose and her wish to see me soon.
A single click brought reality rushing back.
“Give it to me, or I blow out your brain,” a deep voice from behind me said.
I froze. My throat clenched and unclenched with the thousands of thoughts sprinting through my head. I’d been so lost with Rose’s texts, I hadn’t even heard footsteps.
A car passed. Through the darkened windows, the driver didn’t even notice me or the man with a gun to my head. I could imagine him standing behind me, all casual so no one would detect him, as if he’d done this many times before.
“Are...” I cleared my throat. “Are you—?”
“Don’t talk. Just move,” he hissed.
Cold metal pressed against the base of my skull. I braced myself for the sound of a gunshot, for the bullet to rip through skin and bone.
Shit. I had to do it. He knew I had exactly what he wanted, had probably been watching me the whole time I’d been here. I wouldn’t be able to work off a debt if I had another hole in my head. I had to give him the money.
But hesitation shook through my hands. Based on the one time I’d done this before on the corner of 131st and Chestnut, it wasn’t supposed to go down like this. At least, I didn’t think so because this didn’t feel right. At all. The money was supposed to go to someone who would drive up in a car. If I didn’t have any money to hand them, then I would be screwed. And Hill would be the one doing the screwing.
“Did Hill send you?” I asked.
“I don’t know any Hills,” he growled.
So, this was just an old-fashioned mugging. Shit. Shit, shit, shiiiiit.
“Dude,” I started, my mind spinning with a way out of this. “I don’t have anything you want. I’m just a bum on the street.”
“A bum with a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. I know what you have inside it. Give it to me.”
“Here.” I lifted the collar as it to take the jacket off, my elbow digging into my side to keep Hill’s package from dropping at my feet in case my pouring sweat didn’t permanently glue it to my side. “Take the jacket.”
“I don’t want your mother fucking jacket. Give me the money or I’ll splatter the street with your head.”
I shut my eyes as the seconds ticked past and instantly saw my brain as sidewalk art behind my eyelids if I didn’t do something fast. Sweat rolled down my sides and drenched Hill’s package.
I couldn’t give him the money. But I didn’t feel like dying today, either. I worked my hand under my sweatshirt and jacket. As soon as I did, the barrel of the gun pushed harder. A threat. If I tried anything, I was dead. I was unarmed, though, and that made everything so much fucking better.
My fingers touched the bottom of the sweat-soaked bag. I eased it out, slow, controlled, unlike the rest of me. As soon as the paper crinkled out in the open, a gloved hand snatched the bag away, and the guy ran up Chestnut with probably about three hundred grand. Every last bill of Hill’s money.
Fuck.
I scrambled for my phone, but to do what? Call Hill? Explain the situation? Yeah, he was about as understanding as a skinned cat. I worked at Auto Tech for fuck’s sake. I didn’t have that kind of money. I could call Riley, beg him to skim money off the top of Dad’s campaign funds. He’d probably do it, too. When he wasn’t too busy being an asshat, he looked out for me in his own special, what’s-in-it-for-me kind of way.
But if Riley did get the money, by the time he delivered it, it would probably be too late. I could try to explain to the fine folks in the car who hadn’t pulled up yet that I got mugged by some punk, but that scenario ended with the dr
iver aiming the gun in his lap at me. Because they did have guns. I found that out last time.
Another car sped down the street, splashing up puddles and kicking my heartbeat between my ears. Was that the car coming to collect what I didn’t have? Black with silver trim, it reminded of the cars from the other night.
I clicked the undone buttons on my jacket sleeves while I considered all my options. But really, I didn’t have any. Hill would make me pay for this in more ways than one, and I had a feeling I wouldn’t like any of them. Hill would probably make me pay in fingers and toes and teeth. My molars ached at the thought of being ripped from my head.
The car slowed, whether for the red light or for me, I didn’t know. I didn’t wait around to find out.
Like a pussy, I strode down Chestnut in the direction of my car, the same direction the punk had run. Maybe I would see him. If I did, I would use my wit and charm to get the money back because that had worked out so well for me with him before.
Until then, I was thoroughly screwed with a capital fuck.
16
Paige
SAM DIDN’T CHARGE AT me like a wild animal since two weeks ago when I walked out of the kitchen on him. He was giving me space, which I appreciated, because I needed to work out in my mind this thing called blackmail.
I had no idea what I was even looking for. Rick didn’t appear to know, either. Even if I did find something incriminating, I wasn’t so sure handing it over to someone like Rick would be easy, even with the threat of the pictures of me. I’d grown up with the Clearys, and to stab them in the back like this wasn’t something I could do without it weighing heavily on my conscience, dream library job or not.
And then there was Sam, sweet, always half-naked Sam who had seeped under my skin and sexified my whole damn world. The guy who made breakfast for me every morning, most of which was bacon-related and probably had already taken two years off my lifespan. The guy who read my Lisa Montgomery books without reducing them to book porn. I didn’t want to hurt him, and that wasn’t just the lust talking, either. He was a good person, and I enjoyed his company even when his head wasn’t buried between my thighs, fucking me senseless with the skill of that tongue.
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