Unlovable

by Sherry Gammon

  “Let’s go see what Booker found out,” Dwayne said.

  “No, I don’t want to.” Dwayne seemed oblivious to that fact I'd planted my feet firmly on the ground as he dragged me across the small patch of grass separating us from the car.

  I wasn’t prepared for who got out of the car with Booker.

  27

  Seth! What was left of my bravado and determination from the weekend disappeared instantly. Seth stopped dead, his eyes flashed to me, then to Dwayne. I twisted around so only Dwayne could see my face and mouthed, “Don’t tell them now, please.”

  “Seth’s going to hear about it as soon as he walks into the school,” he whispered back.

  “Pleeease?” I begged silently.

  “Fine,” he growled aloud.

  “Hey, guys, did you find out anything?” Dwayne asked as we approached.

  “Yes.” Booker looked to me. “Are you sure you want to hear this, Jailbait? It has to do with the undercover agents and lots of secrets,” he taunted.

  “I can handle it.” Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Seth’s head snap in my direction.

  “As you know, those two men that were in your home were the Dreser brothers.”

  Finally Seth spoke. “I’m not so sure this is a good idea.”

  “She’s been given clearance.” Booker gave him a stern look. Seth didn’t answer, instead he folded his arms across his chest, and leaned against the hood of Booker’s car, signaling for him to continue.

  “As I was saying, the Dreser brothers are younger brothers to the dealer Seth and I killed several months ago. Dwayne, put your arm around Maggie before she faints.”

  “I’m not going to faint,” I said, resting heavily against Dwayne. I already knew all this and had no idea why I was letting it affect me.

  “Maggie, their older brother Jeffery was a murderer. His favorite MO, method of operation, was to hang out around the local elementary school and entice young children into buying his dope. He’d offer free samples of drug-laced goodies, pretending to be a friend to the friendless, you know, a fun, generous guy. He did whatever it took as long as they kept coming back to him until he had them hooked.

  “In the end, he was responsible for the deaths of nine children. One was only ten years old,” he said. “We had orders to find him and bring him in.”

  Seth began fidgeting, plainly, this was the part of the story he didn’t want me hearing.

  “One evening we got a tip he was at a local pool hall. When we got there, it was clear he didn't intend on coming along peacefully. He drew out a sawed-off AK 47 from under one of the tables and began using my men as target practice.

  “Jeffery ended up with three bullet holes, a couple of which were in his chest. If you ask me, we saved the taxpayers a hefty sum in court fees and housing costs,” Booker said dryly.

  “We had no idea who Jeffery was at the time, not until his brothers broke into your house… for whatever reason,” he added uncomfortably.

  “You didn’t find anything at my house, Seth told me so,” I said bravely.

  “No, you’re right, and I’m holding off any assumptions until we have evidence. Innocent till proven guilty.” He looked at me sincerely.

  “I picked Seth up from school Friday, and we flew out to Arizona on a lead. Harry Dreser was supposed to be there, and we hoped to arrest him for countless reasons, but our main goal was to try to flush out his son Alan. However, when we got to his home he was gone. It appears he’d been tipped off right before we arrived. All he took with him were some clothes, the contents of a small safe and his jeep.

  “We found a large amount of heroin with a street value of over $500,000. We were also able to retrieve a few emails from his computer, one of which was a confidential police report he’d somehow gotten his hands on about Jeffery’s shootout. He had emailed a copy to Alan, with a note reiterating his desire to have Seth, myself, and our loved ones, murdered. Regrettably, Maggie, all this puts you in danger.

  “And you may be able to lie to yourself about your feelings for the kid here,” he tipped his head toward Seth, “but everyone else knows otherwise. I just hope you snap out of it before you push it too far and lose everything. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The bell rang and saved me from having to answer. “I have to go.” Booker let out a frustrated groan.

  I’d only gone a few steps when Dwayne called out after me. “Maggie, how did you get the bruises on your face?”

  I flinched. Traitor!

  Seth was immediately at my side, timidly scooping my face into his hands, and tilting it to examine the bruises on my cheeks. His face darkened with outrage.

  But I hardly noticed. I was too busy noticing how soft his mouth looked, how beautiful his eyes were, and how incredible he smelled. When he looked directly into my eyes, self-control was tossed aside, I kissed him.

  Somewhere in the distance Booker muttered, “It’s about time,” after that I heard nothing except Seth. His soft intake of air as he pulled me in close, his lips as they moved passionately against mine, and his sigh as I forced my mouth more fully onto his. His arms wrapped tightly around my waist and this time I sighed, not caring how loud it was. It felt wonderful to be back in his arms. It didn’t matter who was after me, as long as Seth wanted me back.

  The sweet urgency of his kiss told me that he loved me still, even after I’d hurt him. My heart pounded away violently as my mouth moved with determination against his. He responded in kind. Completely engrossed in his kiss, I hadn’t realized my hands had tangled themselves up in his hair, something I dearly missed doing the past two weeks. I didn’t want there to be any doubts about my feelings. I forced my mouth a fraction from his. “I love you,” I said breathlessly.

  I actually said the words, it was liberating. He pulled me back to his mouth, kissing me with even more abandonment. My head began spinning and my heart exploded inside me. Every cell in my body ached for his kiss. There couldn’t possibly be anything in the entire world that felt this wonderful.

  All too soon he pulled away, taking deep breaths to steady himself. I looked around for Booker and Dwayne, they were gone.

  “I thought I had ruined us.” He ran his hands over my hair, resting his forehead on mine.

  “I’m sorry for all the horrible things I said, and for the stupid way I acted. You’ve done nothing but help and protect me. And love me. I acted like a fool, I’m so sorry.”

  He caressed my jaw softly with his thumbs, slipping his hands around to the back of my neck. “I can’t swear there’ll be no more secrets, Maggie, it’s the nature of the job. However, I do promise to tell you everything I can, but you need to be more open with me too, deal?”

  “I promise.” I leaned up and kissed him again.

  With my lips still on his, he asked, “Good. Tell me how you got these bruises.”

  “You set me up!”

  “Maggie, I just want to know who I have to… talk to about this, as if I don’t already have a pretty good guess.”

  “Fine, except not here. I’ll tell you later.” I tried to kiss him again, instead he took my hand and led me toward the parking lot.

  “Where are we going?” I ran to keep pace.

  “To my car. We’re going to my house.”

  “I can’t afford to skip school again.” Oh, shoot, TMI.

  He stopped dead and turned. “Why did you skip school?”

  I smiled. “I’ll tell you when we get to your house.” His lips pinched into a thin line, he took my hand and continued toward his car, murmuring the entire way.

  He also drove way too fast. “You should slow down, it’s beginning to rain. Besides, you’re going to get a ticket if you keep driving this fast.”

  “I know a cop.”

  The rain was teeming down by the time we arrived at his house. He lifted me out of his car and straight into his arms, carrying me inside, our lips never parted. He held me next to him in the kitchen, still kissing me, neither of us wanting to m
ove for a long time. He eventually set me down, keeping his arms around my waist.

  “Do you have any idea how much I missed this?” I stroked the raindrops off his face.

  He chuckled. “I have a pretty good idea.”

  I tried slipping my arms around his waist, instead bumping into a gun holster strapped to his shoulder. I instinctively stepped back.

  “I’ll put this away.” He quickly removed the gun and walked toward the kitchen cabinet beside the stove. He opened the small drawer and pressed down on the bottom. A piece of the cabinet popped up.

  “False bottom,” he said, pointing to the drawer. “It’s a great hiding place for my guns.”

  He had more than one? I didn’t ask, there were some things I wasn’t ready to deal with yet.

  “Can I see it before you put it away?” In my mind, the thing was huge. I wondered how much my fear had exaggerated the size.

  “Sure,” he said cautiously. He handed me a towel to dry my face and hair off with, setting the gun down on the counter next to me.

  “Don’t worry, I unloaded it,” he pointed out. I carefully picked it up off the counter with my thumb and index finger. “Every night, well, every morning the past couple weeks, I come home, clean and empty it.”

  “What do you mean every morning these past couple weeks?” I said, gently setting it back down.

  “I’ve been sleeping in my car,” he shrugged. My mouth dropped open. “Did you think I was going to just walk away and let those goons come after you? When I said I loved you, I didn’t mean for a week, or maybe a year, I meant always, in the good times and the bad, through thick and thin. I’m playing for keeps here, Mags. I hoped, given some time, you’d feel the same way and take me back.”

  Humbled, I wrapped myself up in his arms and laid my head on his chest. “Someone up there must truly love me to have sent you into my life. I guess you’d better tell me about your job,” I said bravely. “If I’m going to love an MET agent, I should probably know more about it. As long as it doesn’t involve math,” I warned.

  He laughed. “No promises.”

  “I’ll start from the beginning to give you a total picture. My dad was a Chaplin in the military, and he was also an undercover agent.”

  “A spy?” I said with intrigue.

  “Yes. He and Booker’s dad, Clifford, were in the same unit. Clifford was my dad’s commanding officer and his best friend. I guess you could say Booker and my friendship is a family tradition. He’s like a brother to me.”

  “Do you have any other siblings?”

  “No, my parents had a difficult time getting pregnant, so when I finally arrived they were ecstatic. My dad started training me as soon as I could walk.”

  “Training you?”

  “He wanted me to be involved in espionage too, you know, sort of a father and son team. It used to drive my mother nuts,” he laughed. “She’d come home from shopping and find her kitchen booby-trapped.”

  “I take it she didn’t want you to be a spy.”

  “No, she thought a doctor was a safer profession. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a spy, like every little boy.

  “My dad would spread out the pots and pans around the kitchen floor, and I had to walk around them without touching them. As I got older and my skills improved, he’d push the pans closer together.

  “When I turned 12, he started placing bubble wrap on the floor. Do you have any idea how hard bubble wrap is to walk on and not make a sound?” He shook his head. “It took me two and a half years before I could cross it quickly and quietly, or Poof, as you put it, and not break any bubbles. We used to sneak up on my mom and scare the heck out of her!”

  I laughed. “Did you have to move around a lot being in the military?”

  “Yes. It made schooling hard so I was homeschooled. My mom liked it because she could have her influence over me instead of my dad’s all the time. She taught me to cook, and we took a cooking class together in France.”

  As he spoke, I noticed he had a tiny freckle on his left ear lobe. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I stretched up to kiss it.

  He shivered. “Are you listening?”

  “You took a cooking class in France,” I parroted back.

  “I graduated from high school at 16, and went straight to college. I was able to get my bachelor’s degree by the time I was 19.”

  I pulled back. “How old are you?”

  “21.”

  “You’re 21?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No, I guess not. So that’s why Booker keeps calling me Jailbait.”

  He laughed. “That’s Booker. He must really like you if he gave you a nickname already.”

  “What’s your degree in?”

  “Mathematics,” he said reluctantly.

  “The way you love math is wrong on so many levels,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Come on, let’s go sit on the couch.” He took my hand and led us into the living room.

  “Good, my feet are killing me.” Not to mention the fact that my knees were still a little sore from being tossed around. We sat down, and he guided my feet into his lap.

  “I’ll massage them.” He pulled off my shoes and began rubbing my feet.

  “You and Booker must have spent a lot of time together growing up.” I sighed when he rubbed an especially sweet spot on my foot.

  “Yes, our families were tight. Booker’s dad died of cancer when he was only ten, and his mom and sister were killed when he was 16.”

  “How?” I was mortified.

  “Home invasion robbery. The robbers thought they’d killed Booker too. My dad happened to stop by and found him, he was barely alive. If he hadn’t gone over when he did, Booker would have died.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “It was touch and go with him for a while. He eventually pulled through and moved in with us. I was only nine at the time. To me, he has always been my big brother.

  “When he turned 18, my dad pulled some strings and Booker joined the military under my dad’s command. He took to the spy world like a duck to water. My dad once told me he’d never seen anyone as talented as Book. He said the only thing that scared him was Booker’s “save the world” mentality, and the danger he put himself in trying to rescue someone.

  “Booker was with me when I found out my parents died in the plane crash. I was 19, and had just graduated from college, he did for me what my parents had done for him.

  “He’d finished his tour of duty a couple years earlier, and had gotten involved with the DEA, convincing me to join him, and we both ended up working with the local MET. We’re still under the DEA, but we focus on drug enforcement in urban areas throughout western New York, like here in Port Fare.

  “I didn’t know there was a serious drug problem here. I mean, I know kids who do drugs, I just didn’t realize it was enough to merit the MET.” I remember Zack trying to get me to smoke pot with him. As far as I knew, he never dipped into the hard stuff.

  “When the three heroin deaths hit here last summer, we both wanted to work the case.”

  “Do you still think my mom and I are involved?” I looked him straight in the eyes to watch his reaction.

  “No, not you,” he said carefully. “When Booker first asked me to get close to you and see what I could find out, I told him he was wrong about your involvement. He felt that physically you fit the profile, and he wanted me to find out for sure. Plus, there was strong evidence that your mom was involved.”

  “She’s not. I searched the house from top to bottom. There are no drugs anywhere. And Cole did a drug screen on her, it came up negative.”

  “Maybe she and Hoffman are just friends then.”

  “He’s a heroin dealer?” That was why they suspected my mom. The phone rang interrupting our makeup session.

  “Hold on.” He looked down at his cell phone. “It’s Booker, I better answer.”

  “Hey, Book. No, not yet. Oh, really,” he said, his expression
grew dark. “I see. Anything else?” There was a long pause, and his eyes flared more than once. “Thanks for letting me know, I’ll take care—No, Booker, I want to. Fine.” Whatever was going on, it wasn’t good. “I see your point. Make sure you do it right. Thanks,” he said, snapping the phone shut firmly.

  “Is everything alright? Did he find out more about the Dreser brothers?”

  “No, nothing new.”

  I decided now was a good time to start being supportive and didn’t press him for more information.

  “So do you have a code name?” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Kid. Booker’s called me it my whole life. It doesn’t help that I have a baby face too.”

  “What about Booker?” Maybe I could get some ammunition for the next time he called me Jailbait.

  “He had several different names he used for missions. He liked to switch it up. His last name, Gatto, literally means cat in both Spanish and Italian, so he was partial to powerful cat names like panther, or black tiger. The guys used to tease him about it. They’d call him things like Miss Kitty, or Garfield, pretending they had forgotten his real code name. He didn’t think it was that funny.”

  “Hmmm, that’s good to know,” I said, already making a mental list of all the cat names I was going to use on him.

  “Don’t push him too hard, Maggie,” Seth said, reading my expression. “He can be one mean little kitty.” I can hardly wait to see Booker again!

  “I’m glad there are no secrets between us, Maggie. Let’s promise never again to keep anything important from each other, anything personal anyway.”

  “I promise.” I held out my little finger and wiggled it. “Come on, pinky swear.” He rolled his eyes as we intertwined our little fingers. “These are eternally binding, ya know.” He nodded, kissing our little fingers as if to seal the deal.

  “Alright, let’s test this little pinky swear. How did you get those bruises?”

  “You set me up again. You forgot to mention MET agents are devious.” He threw his head back and laughed, and the sound filled my heart.

  “It happened Thursday after the pep rally.” He began rubbing my calves, it felt even more amazing than the foot rub, and I almost forgot what we were talking about. “Focus, Maggie,” I mumbled aloud. “Hillary and Zack planned it so I’d show up at his locker as she started kissing you. Hillary thought one kiss from her, and the two of you’d fall madly in love, forgetting I ever existed.”