Looking around the kitchen, I noticed it was getting messier each time I visited. There used to be a time when there wasn’t a speck of dust in the whole house. I used to come home from school to be greeted by the smell of fresh laundry and a scented candle. Now it just smelled like stale beer and tobacco. Mom would’ve hated what had become of her home.
“Nah. No celebration tonight,” I said. “I was gonna go home and surprise Bridget with the news. Thought I’d take her out to dinner.”
“You mean you haven’t told her?”
“Haven’t told anyone but you,” I replied, and he shot me a warm smile.
As soon as I heard the news about my promotion, he was the first person I’d thought to tell. I raced right over here as soon as I left the office. And I was glad I had. It had been a few weeks since I’d made it over to his house, and it was looking worse than ever.
“Well, I think we should have our own little celebration,” said Dad, wandering back to the fridge. “Another beer?”
“Actually, I better get going.”
Looking over the pile of dirty dishes out the window, I saw the sky begin to darken as twilight approached. A little bit of rain was starting to fall across the abandoned flower garden, settling on the tall weeds and making them shine.
“Really?” asked Dad with a frown. “You can’t stay for one more?”
The look on his face told me he didn’t just want me to stay to celebrate; he needed me for more than that. I wondered when he had friends over last. Did he even still have friends? Every weekend when I was younger, the house was always filled with the sound of music and tipsy voices. I used to go to sleep to the sound of my parents and their friends laughing and playing cards as they fought over which radio station to listen to.
But that was when Mom was still alive. When she died, she took most of the life and joy from this house. Well, from Dad anyway. I never expected him to fully recover after she went. Grief like his could last a lifetime. But I never expected him to sink lower and lower every year. If she could see him now she’d give him a piece of her mind. She’d tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself, and to do something more productive.
“I guess I can stay for one more,” I relented, taking another icy beer from his hand. “But I really do have to go soon. I thought I’d take Bridget out for dinner and tell her. And I wanted to stop and see Mom before it gets too dark.”
Dad smiled weakly and slumped into his seat.
“I didn’t know you still went to visit her.”
“Whenever I can.”
“You’re a good son, Logan.” He reached across the table and patted my arm. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I saw him today, Mom,” I said, kneeling down with the daisies I brought whenever I visited her.
She didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t expecting one. As I knelt in front of her headstone, I felt a warm rustle through my hair. The months were growing hotter and it wouldn’t be long until the heat of the swamp made every inch of my clothing stick to my skin.
“He’s looking real bad, Mom . . . like he hasn’t slept in months. And the house? You should see it. Well, actually, you shouldn’t see it. It’s such a mess. You would have hated it.”
I didn’t know why I was spilling my guts to her. It wasn’t like she could hear me, and it wasn’t normally something I did. But for some reason, as I knelt there in the dark and contemplated two huge milestones in my life, I felt full of nervous, excited energy.
“Anyway, you don’t wanna hear me complain,” I said to the wind. “I wanted to tell you that I got the job. How crazy is that? Never thought I’d get it this fast, but here I am. You’re looking at the FBI’s newest senior special agent.”
I suddenly felt ridiculous, talking out loud to a grave like this. I stood up, brushing the dew from the wet grass off my knees.
The breeze picked up around me, moving through the trees like it was whispering secrets in their leaves. I looked around and saw nothing but lonely headstones surrounding me. Some were old and weatherbeaten, others were new. Some were neglected, some were well-maintained, but none were as pristine and well cared for as Mom’s.
“Seems like I just saw you this morning,” I said. “It’s hard to remember that it’s been fifteen years since you went. Fifteen years . . . That’s half my life.”
The realization weighed me down as it came to me. She’d missed out on half my life. Hadn’t seen me graduate high school or college. Hadn’t watched me play football in high school. She hadn’t even met Bridget, the girl I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
“Anyway,” I said, turning away. “I better go. I haven’t told Bridget about the job yet. She’ll go nuts when she finds out.”
I paused for a second, not wanting to leave just yet.
“You know, you’d like her so much. She’s the sweetest girl I’ve ever met.”
Taking another step away from the gravesite, I looked back towards my car. It was getting darker, and it wouldn’t be long until I wouldn’t be able to see the path back to the parking lot. But I still felt the need to stay a moment longer. I knew Mom had been lying here for years, and that it was just her bones down there, but I still couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her out in this lonely, dark place.
“Maybe you’ll see Bridget at our wedding,” I said as I walked away. “I’m sure you’ll be watching us from wherever you are.”
By the time I arrived at Bridget’s condo, I was completely soaked through. It wasn’t until the elevator doors shut that I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection. I looked like a half-drowned rat. Bridget was going to throw a fit if I tracked any mud on her white carpet.
My stomach growled, and I knew it was close to dinner time. Usually Bridget texted to see how my day had gone, but I hadn’t heard anything from her all day. My small handful of texts had also gone unanswered.
Weird, I thought, looking at my phone. The background wallpaper was a picture of her taken on the beach in Mexico last summer. She was sipping on a fruity drink with her blonde hair dancing in the sea breeze. I laughed to myself, thinking about how many dozens of pictures she’d told me to take until she got the perfect one for her Instagram feed. I couldn’t care less if that snapshot had over a thousand likes. All that mattered was that she was engaged to me.
The first time I saw her was at a frat party back in college. She’d walked into the room with a group of sorority sisters, but all I saw was her. I’d never been shy with girls before, but with her, it felt like I’d never spoken to a woman in my whole life. She was a trust fund kid from a wealthy family. I was nobody. Like a chicken shit, I’d admired her from a distance until the end of the night. Just as I was about to leave, she tapped me on the shoulder and smiled.
“Aren’t you going to talk to me?” she asked. “You’ve been staring at me all night.”
And just like that, I was sucked into her orbit. A week later we went on our first date. A year after that we graduated from college and she gave me a key to her condo. A few years later, I got down on one knee at her favorite restaurant and proposed. She wanted a long engagement. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with her. Sometimes it didn’t feel real. And at moments like this, when I looked at her picture, things felt too good to be true.
“Bridget?”
I entered the hallway, making sure to take my shoes off at the door. My jacket shed droplets of rain onto the carpet as I hung it up, and I shook the rain from my hair. I decided to keep my holster on.
“Bridget? Are you home?”
Her place was completely dark and eerily silent. That was the weirdest thing of all. Bridget didn’t have many faults, although she was one of the noisiest people I’d ever met. There was always a television blaring, or a blow dryer running, or music playing with the bass thumping until the walls shook.
Ascending the stairs softly, I listened out for any signs that she was in, but there were none. Intrusive thoughts ran through my mind.
Is she hurt?
>
Is she sick?
Did she fall in the shower and knock herself out?
I tried to stop the nonsense in my head, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling the something wasn’t right. When you’re with someone long enough, you just know when something feels different. And right now, every cell in my body was screaming that something was wrong.
“Hey, Bridget!”
Reaching the landing, I looked down the hall towards our bedroom. The door was closed when it was normally left open. Then I noticed something else. A black shape lay in the shadows to the side of the hallway floor. Flicking on the light switch, I saw it was a strip of black lace. Bridget’s panties. All the hairs on my body rose to attention. Now there was another feeling mingled with my anxiety.
Suspicion.
Marching towards the bedroom door, I pushed it open so hard it smacked off the wall with a bang, leaving a hole in the drywall. Bridget gave out a startled scream as I stormed in.
“What’s going on?”
But then I saw her lying naked, stretched out on the bed. On the bedside cabinet, candles were lit. Their flickering flames dancing across her spray-tanned skin. Beside them, I noticed two wine glasses beside a freshly opened bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape.
“Hi honey . . . ” she purred. “What’s got you so worked up?”
“I was worried,” I said. “I haven’t heard from you all day.”
She slipped her tongue out along her bottom lip and stretched out even further to accentuate the curve of her waist.
“That’s because I was here, waiting for you,” she said, parting her legs ever so slightly.
In an instant, the worry drained from my body as all my blood rushed below my belt. I crawled onto the bed and gazed down at her.
“Why didn’t you answer my texts?” I asked. “It’s not like you to not call all day.”
“Maybe I was playing hard to get.”
Raising her hand to my chest, she began popping open the buttons on my shirt one by one until her warm hand was sliding across my cold skin.
“You’re freezing,” she said, scratching her nails down the center of my pecs. “Come here, baby. I’ll warm you up.”
She pulled me close and I tried to relax into the feel of her body. But I couldn’t help but notice a peculiar, strained quality to her voice. I looked into her eyes, but she glanced away nervously. Again, the feeling that something was wrong entered my mind and I began to tense up.
“What’s wrong, baby?” she asked, rising to kiss me. “Just relax.”
As her lips met mine, I noticed there was a different taste to her kiss. A different feel.
And it wasn’t the wine.
Pulling away, I tried to figure out what was going on.
You’re just paranoid, I told myself. You’re exhausted. You’re imagining things.
But at the same time, I knew this wasn’t just some woo woo sense of intuition. I was trained to be observant, and although I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me, I knew something was wrong.
“Come lie down, baby,” Bridget breathed, grabbing my tie to lower me down beside her.
There was an urgency to her voice I didn’t like. I looked at the two glasses of wine, searching for smudges from fingers or lips. And that’s when I heard it. A sneeze came from under the bed. Springing to my feet, I dove onto the floor, hand on my gun and heart in my mouth.
“Logan!” screamed Bridget. “Wait!”
But my stomach was already against the floor.
“Who’s under here?”
I didn’t need to wait long to get my answer. Through the darkness came the whites of two eyes peering right at me. Drawing my gun, I pointed it at him, and that’s when all hell broke loose.
Bridget jumped on my back with such force my chin smacked against the floor. And her momentary distraction let whoever was under the bed make their escape. I pushed Bridget off me just in time to see a naked figure fleeing with their clothes bundled in their arms.
“Freeze or I’ll shoot!”
The figure froze in the doorway.
“Logan, don’t do anything stupid!” cried Bridget.
Her voice was background noise. My eyes were pinned on the naked man cowering in front of me. I took in the salt and pepper hair, the stunned expression on his face, the wrinkles around his eyes. Then I saw his body; flabby and pale with a trail of hair that traveled from a barrel chest down to where his dick was hidden behind the balled-up pants in his hands.
Fuck. He was old. Like, in his seventies.
Raising his hands in a panic, he stumbled and dropped his clothes at his feet to reveal a still hard cock, albeit a small one, pointed right at me.
“Please don’t shoot!” he begged. “I have a wife and kids!”
“Get the fuck out of here,” I snarled. I put away my gun and waited until he’d left before I turned to Bridget.
“Who the fuck is he?”
She looked down into her lap which was now covered in her thin, satin robe.
“One of Daddy’s business partners,” she said. “You didn’t have to be so mean to him. He has a bad heart. You could have killed him!”
“He has a bad heart?” I raged. “Then what the fuck was he doing taking these?”
I grabbed the pack of Viagra I’d found in the bathroom and hurled it at her. It landed on her lap and she just stared at it.
“And you’ve got some fucking nerve. I was being mean to him? Mean? If that’s your definition of being mean, what the fuck were you doing to me?”
Her eyes remained shamefully planted on her thighs.
“Hey! Look at me!”
She sniffed and wiped the tears away from her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, baby!” she wailed.
“Don’t bother apologizing. You think your apology means shit?”
She sniffed again and mumbled something into the palm of her hand as she wiped her face.
“I just don’t fucking believe it, Bridget!”
Falling into the nearest chair, I buried my head in my hands.
“How could you do this? And with him? Why?”
She shrugged, tears tumbling down her cheeks onto her satin robe.
“I just don’t understand. I thought you and I had it made.”
“We do! I love you, Logan! We can work through this.”
“Doesn’t look that fucking way to me.” Unable to hold back my rage-filled energy, I jumped out of the chair and began pacing up and down the living room. I didn’t know what I wanted to do more, punch the wall or burst into tears. “Why him? What’s he got that I haven’t?”
Bridget swallowed hard and rubbed at her eyes. It annoyed me that even though I’d never been angrier with her, I still thought she looked beautiful. Even though her face was red and swollen from crying. Even though she’d clearly broken my heart.
“He’s retired,” she replied in barely more than a breath. “He wants to take care of me.”
At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. Was this about money? Could she be so shallow?
She began to sob, and pinched the bridge of her nose as though she’d been attacked by a migraine.
“You know how I’ve always wanted to open a lingerie boutique?”
I said nothing. I just stared right through her waiting for her to give me some sort of explanation where this would all make sense.
“Well, he said he’d bankroll me to open it and the more time we spent together . . . ” She started to cry harder, picking up one of her half dozen pillows and pressed her face into it. “I love you so much, Logan. I fucked up. I really fucked up!”
Lifting the pillow slightly to reveal a wet face print on the fabric, she looked into my face pleadingly. But the more I looked around the room, the more I realized I’d been missing the signs for months, if not longer. All the expensive designer shoes, the Birkin bags, the long weekends in the Hamptons with ‘the girls.’ Add to that the fact that we still hadn’t set a wedding date, and n
ow I knew we never would. The more I thought about it, the more glaringly obvious it was that Bridget and her retired, wealthy sugar daddy had been carrying on a lot longer than I’d realized.
“Do you think you could ever forgive me? We can make this work—I know we can! Daddy knows all sorts of counselors we could talk to, because every couple has problems, and . . . ”
“No.”
Her mouth dropped open slightly in shock. I’m not sure that I’d ever said that word to her before. Maybe no one had.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I’m not sure how I could be more clear. We’re done.”
Using a couple Whole Foods grocery bags for luggage, I began collecting what little I kept in Bridget’s apartment. Electric toothbrush, a few pairs of socks and underwear, a pair of wireless headphones, and a few shirts and pants.
It wasn’t until I reached the inside of my car and closed the door that I let the emotional floodgates open.
“Fuck!” I screamed, hitting my hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t think it was possible to feel such anger. To feel as though my blood was boiling in my veins. I was so angry I was dizzy, although it could’ve been low blood sugar. I was hungry when I’d arrived, even if I wasn’t anymore. Beneath all the turmoil was another sensation starting to eclipse the rage. Sadness. As I drove away from the condo, it began to fill me up and consume me with its darkness.
Bridget and I were over. The perfect life that I thought would last forever had come to an end. As I turned left at the end of the road, I began to feel tears burn at the corners of my eyes.
“Don’t fucking cry,” I told myself. “Don’t you dare fucking cry over that bitch.”
But I couldn’t help it. The last few years of my life had all been a lie.
3
Logan
I was still bleary-eyed and yawning continuously when I arrived at the office the next morning. I’d gone through the motions of showering and shaving, of ironing my clothes and straightening my tie, but I somehow still felt like complete shit.
“Argh, fuck,” I grumbled as I entered the elevator and saw my reflection.
Wiretaps & Whiskers (The Faerie Files Book 1) Page 3
