THE DIRTY ONES

by JA Huss

“Well, you look lost.”

  I turn around to see the real version of Connor Arlington and realize… none of this is how it’s supposed to happen. “Why did you come here?”

  He averts his eyes. Like he’s ashamed. But he’s also very used to being put on the spot, so he recovers an instant later. A career in politics does that to you. Makes you bolder, I guess. Better able to handle the tough questions. I picture him practicing his speeches. All his various handlers surrounding him, throwing out questions he’s not expecting so when it happens with strangers he’s got all the right answers on the tip of his tongue. He rattles them off instantaneously. Like shooting stars across the dark night sky.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to accuse you. I mean, I did.” He smiles. It’s one of those winning politician smiles. Bright white teeth and a secret hidden chin dimple. He’s got this election in the bag for sure. Every housewife in New York state will be dreaming about that smile between their legs one year from now. “But it was wrong,” he continues. “I shouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion just because…”

  “Just because I write dirty books for a living?”

  He nods. “Yeah. I didn’t know Sofia and Camille were writing that stuff too.”

  “If you did, you’d suspect one of them first instead of me?”

  He sighs. He’s sighing a lot tonight. “No,” he admits. “No. I’d still have accused you first.”

  I nod. One of those “I get it” nods. I’m everybody’s natural first choice when it comes to that nagging question titled, Who wrote the anonymous, dirty, secret book without telling us first?

  I shrug. It’s a long one. The kind that where your shoulders get stuck up by your ears because you’re just not sure what to do with that information but deep down you know you can’t deny it’s the right conclusion.

  Admission, I realize. It’s a shrug of admission.

  “If you’re tired, I can just… hang out in the living room and… shit. You don’t even have a TV.”

  “I’m not tired,” I say. “It’s not even seven o’clock.”

  This makes him laugh. “God, what a long fuckin’ day.”

  I raise my eyebrows. Because it didn’t feel like a long day at all. I wrote a bunch of words this morning. A cool, dark erotic story I’ve been working on the past few weeks. Then I put some music on and drank half a bottle of wine. Kinda drifted off and when I forced myself to get up the music was still playing and Connor Arlington was cursing his way down my snow-packed driveway.

  “Do you… eat?” he asks.

  And I huff out a laugh that is probably more genuine than any other laugh I’ve laughed in the last several years. “Yes.”

  “Well, I could cook something if you’re hungry.”

  “I have Totino’s Pizza Rolls,” I offer.

  His laugh sounds so nice, I forget about the book, and the past, and the problem. “Sure,” he says. “Sounds great.”

  I inhale and hold my breath. Because I don’t know what else to do with it.

  And then Connor is up next to me, his hand on my shoulder. And even though that bullet-hole scar stopped hurting years ago, when his fingertips brush past it, I feel the pain of that night so clear…

  “Come on, Kiera. Come out of the closet and I’ll make you some pizza rolls.”

  “You were always good at that,” I say. “And I never thanked you for it.”

  “Good at what?” he asks.

  “Keeping my insanity in check.”

  “It’s not insanity if it’s real. We’ve talked about this before.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m thanking you, dumbass.”

  He smiles, unleashing that chin dimple on me. Oh, lonely, sex-deprived-housewives of New York, you better get in line now, bitches. Because by the time you discover what a catch Connor Arlington is, it’ll be too late. “You’re one of a kind,” he says. “And I always knew that.”

  “Yeah,” I say, blowing a stray piece of still-damp hair out of my eyes. “That was always my problem. ‘Kiera has trouble fitting in.’ Do you know every teacher in grade school put that on my report card?”

  “It’s a compliment if you ask me. Who wants to be like everyone else, anyway?”

  “Not me,” I say.

  But on the inside that’s not what I say at all. Because I stood in front of every single birthday cake from the time I was six and blew out those candles internally chanting the same wish year after year.

  Make me like them. Make me like them. Make me like them.

  But I learned that lesson early.

  Wishes are bullshit and dreams aren’t the future.

  Dreams are just… fucked-up versions of your own sad reality.

  I sit on the couch and watch him in my tiny kitchen. You’d think a competent guy like this wannabe US senator would have a handle on this whole frozen junk food thing by the time he was thirty, but then you’d have to assume he’s just like us.

  And he’s not.

  I’ve been to his family home. It’s one of those historic mansions off the North Shore of Long Island where it takes almost no imagination at all to picture yourself at one of Gatsby’s opulent parties. Drinking, and laughing, and dancing like a maniac. Drunk on money, and pretty people, and the idea that mortality is for the commoners outside the lavish garden walls.

  It was his parents’ thirtieth anniversary and all of the Dirty Ones went because the buddy system was in full force by then. We went nowhere alone. I slept in Sofia’s room, or Sofia slept in Camille’s room, or Sofia slept in my room, or Camille slept with both of us. And the guys were sharing a house on campus already, so they were all set. But by the time that anniversary party rolled around in the early spring of senior year things were… bad.

  Or, if I’m being honest, good. I mean, no, they were bad—but I got good things out of that year and Connor Arlington’s friendship was one of them.

  We went nowhere alone and I liked that. My six-year-old self who had no friends really, really liked that. And we all know that adults are just six-year-olds in grown-ups’ bodies. You carry that shit with you for life.

  I met his mom and dad that year. All his siblings. Jack, Olivia, Stenton, and Baby Beatrice, who was seventeen at the time, but everyone still called her Baby.

  This was no tent garden party with a string quartet. No. That’s not how the Arlingtons do things. This was a first-floor mansion kind of event. In the ballroom kind of event. With a chamber orchestra kind of event.

  There was a seven-course sit-down dinner for more than two hundred guests in the grand dining hall, an eight-tier champagne fountain in the foyer, and more than fifty parking attendants taking special care of Bentleys, and Porsches, and Jaguars, and of course, the Rolls.

  There were balloons. So many lavender balloons. Maybe thousands of them. And they flew in lepidopterists from Central America with hundreds of glass-wing butterfly caterpillars, which were timed to hatch inside the atrium the day of the party.

  It was the most magical evening. A dream party, really. Which is stupid because everyone knows that there’s a nightmare behind every dream.

  Right?

  “OK,” Connor says, wiping his hands on one of my flour-sack dish towels. “Thirteen to seventeen minutes from now we can eat.”

  He grins at me and just for a moment I see him that night of his parents’ party. Fresh-faced and clean-shaven for the first time in months. His tuxedo the blackest of blacks and his lavender tie the color of the balloons. We were in the atrium just staring up at the reflective transparent butterflies as they floated in the night air like creatures of some dream world yet imagined. One landed on his tie, gently flapping its wings. And then there was a swarm of them surrounding him. Surrounding us. All six of us, because Louise wasn’t there. She was never there for stuff like that. We were the chosen ones. Like this party was for us and everyone knew it.

  “Is this all of them?” Connor asks.

  He wandered over to my bookshelf while I wa
s daydreaming and is plucking a book from my stack.

  “Most of them,” I say. “I lost track a long time ago. The novelty of collecting my own books on my own shelf wore off after… oh, book thirty-two, I suppose.”

  He shakes his head at me, but walks over to the couch, still holding the paperback, and plops down just a mere foot away.

  He’s got no shirt on. Just a pair of cut-off sweat shorts. He apologized for that over and over again, but he didn’t figure he’d be spending the night at my house tonight, and if I have a t-shirt that will fit him, he’ll gladly put it on.

  I don’t. Have a t-shirt for him, that is. No men have been staying over and leaving garments behind. So he’s shirtless.

  “What’s this one about?” he asks, holding up my book.

  “Sex,” I say.

  “Come on. I know you better than that. There’s a great story in here. What is it?”

  “Read it and find out.”

  “I’m gonna read it out loud if you don’t tell me.”

  I smile at him. Because that brings up some of the good times. When he used to read to us. Me and Sofia, mostly. Camille was never into that, but that’s her loss. Connor is a fantastic narrator. I could listen to him read a grocery list. Or the dictionary. And sometimes, if I was in a mood, he’d do that to make me smile. Just pull out whatever. A philosophy textbook, an essay I wrote for lit class. A poem from my notebook.

  Not that notebook. The ones I used to always carry around. The pretty ones.

  And he read a book once too. I just can’t think of which one at the moment.

  But if I ever get the chance to have him read to me again, it’s not going to be one of my books. “It’s about a girl and a guy. Two guys, actually.”

  “Two?” He laughs.

  “Yeah,” I say, blushing a little. “My girls like two at a time.”

  “OK. Go on.”

  “And she is… broken.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  I squint my eyes at him.

  “I mean, in these books, right? Dark romance. The girl is always broken.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yes. They are. They have to be to do the crazy shit I make them do, right?”

  He nods. “So why is she broken?”

  “Oh, you know. The usual. She was kidnapped and sold to human traffickers—” He laughs. “It’s not funny. Shit like that really happens.”

  “I know. Sorry. Go on.”

  “And of course, there’s gotta be some good old Stockholm syndrome to make the story sexy. Everyone knows Stockholm syndrome is sexy, right?”

  “Naturally.”

  “So she falls for her kidnappers and they have lots and lots of dirty sex and then they save her and have a HEA.”

  “HEA?”

  “Happily ever after,” I say. “Duh.”

  “Right, right.” He stares at me for several eternal seconds, smiling that gonna-charm-the-housewife-yoga-pants-right-off-you smile. “Anything else? Like… is there romance? Or it’s just dirty sex in a slave dungeon?”

  “No, they have to have a date. Every romance has like… a date night, you know. Where everything’s perfect. But of course that’s right before that big, black moment when it all falls apart and looks hopeless. So all that happens too.”

  His charming smile fades. Slowly, like those butterflies must’ve after his parents’ party. “Sounds a lot like real life to me.”

  I nod. “I guess that’s why people like it.”

  “Is that why you write it?”

  “It’s my job, Connor.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Somehow I don’t buy that excuse. I mean, you could write mysteries, or thrillers, or poetry. But you write this.”

  “I guess… I was just groomed for it.”

  “Don’t do that,” he says.

  “Do what?”

  “Let them tell you who you are. Because that’s not who you are.”

  I smile. Breathe out a small huff of contempt. “That is who I am. They knew that when they chose me to be in this little gang we’re both a part of.”

  But he’s shaking his head the whole time I’m talking. “No. That’s not why. They didn’t just pluck you out of obscurity one day and say, ‘I think she’ll do.’”

  “Then why me, Con? What did I ever do to deserve that year?”

  “You were just born, Kiera. Just like me. Just like Sofia. Just like Bennett. Just like all of us. You were just born.”

  He’s had that theory forever, it seems. But we didn’t have all the pieces back then. I still don’t have the pieces, but something tells me that now… he might have more than he’s letting on.

  So I say, “Why now, Connor? Why did this happen now? And don’t tell me it’s about your upcoming campaign. That’s not it. You’ve had campaigns in the past.”

  “But I didn’t win them, right? I lost those other campaigns. This is a message telling me in no uncertain terms that if I want to win, I’ll have to opt in.”

  “Opt in to what?”

  “The puppet show.”

  “So why do it? Why run at all?”

  “Because we all have a destiny and this one is mine.”

  “So that’s how this works, huh? You get to tell me to be strong and resist, but if I spit your words right back at you, you just give up?” We stare at each other for several long moments. “Way to disappoint a girl, Connor Arlington. Good job.”

  CHAPTER FIVE - CONNOR

  I’m used to seeing that look in the eyes of women. Hell, my parents, my friends—pretty much everyone is disappointed by me eventually.

  But I always thought Kiera kinda respected me. At least half as much as I respected her that year. And yes, I’m a dick for shutting her out since then, but I was just following her lead. She left early, not us. She cut ties, not us.

  We would’ve made a place for her in the city. We would’ve surrounded her. The buddy system, right? And she’s not poor. Not by any means. Not even by New York City standards. This cottage is sitting on a very nice-sized estate.

  “Why don’t you live in the main house?” I ask.

  “It’s not mine anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, when my mother died four years ago she left me the cottage and the house went to the estate.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just lawyer talk for tax breaks, Kiera. You are the estate.”

  “No,” she says. “I’m not. It’s some kind of endowment.”

  I squint my eyes at her. “To you,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “To Essex.”

  “The fucking college owns your estate?”

  “I don’t really know. Like I said, it’s complicated. All I know is that I got this cottage and the five acres surrounding it.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  She shrugs. “I’m satisfied with it. No mortgage, no never-ending upkeep costs.”

  “So who lives there?”

  “No one, as far as I know. I don’t go down that way much but I don’t think anyone’s been in there since my mom died.”

  “Something’s not right here. Where’s the will?”

  “I dunno. Boxes in the attic, probably.”

  “You should have Bennett look at it. There’s no way your mom would just rip your family estate away from you and leave you with this cottage. Was it even fixed up when she died?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Yeah, no. I’m calling bullshit. Didn’t your estate lawyer explain this shit to you?”

  “Honestly, Connor, who cares?”

  “I fucking care. It’s like she cut you out or something. It’s so fucked up and your mother wasn’t fucked up like that. I mean, my family—hell, yeah, I could see them doing something like this to me, or Jack, or Stenton. But not Olivia or Baby, for Christ’s sake. Never.”

  “That’s kinda sexist.”

  “So? No one cuts their daughters off. Not unless they’re huge fuckups. And you
are not the definition of huge fuckup.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like my books?”

  I just laugh. And then she laughs too. Because Antoinette Bonnaire was always Kiera’s biggest cheerleader. I didn’t know her well, but I knew that much from the moment we first met. She was one of those parents who were invested in their kid, and not for the wrong reasons like mine. “I don’t think that’s it.” Antoinette was the mom everyone wanted to fuck too. It’s rude, I get that. But it’s still true.

  Hayes, and Bennett, and I had the other kind of mom. The kind who stays home with the kids and throws lavish charity parties. The kind who wears tailored designer suit sets with two-inch heels. The kind who are invested in their kids because they are an extension of themselves and not because they have maternal instincts.

  Kiera’s mom wore… romantic things. Lacy things with ruffles and low-cut necklines. She smelled good too. Not the way our moms smelled good, but the way sexy women smell. Her hair was always long and unruly, like Kiera’s. And even though she was going gray when I first met her, you couldn’t tell through the multi-colored strands of blonde unless you really looked.

  No one was looking at her hair, I’ll tell you that right now. You couldn’t just look at one thing when you caught a glimpse of Antoinette. You had to see the whole package.

  Kiera is so much her mother. And I mean that in a good way. All the good ways.

  “Who cares, anyway?” Kiera says, still in the conversation. “I don’t. I don’t need that house.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you need it. It’s just… yours.”

  “We have bigger problems right now. So just drop it.”

  “I want to look at the will. You think it’s in the attic?” I stand up, but she grabs my hand and tugs me back down.

  “We’re not looking for that will tonight. Just…” But she stops talking. And I’m dying to know what she wants me to just do.

  “Just what?” I ask.

  She tugs her legs up to her chest, wraps her arms around them, and plants her chin on her knees, staring at me. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  The timer dings on the oven. We both look over at the small kitchen, then look at each other. She smiles at me. “Pizza rolls, Connor. If you go up into my attic you’re gonna miss pizza rolls.”