I was trying so hard to fit the puzzle pieces together so I could exonerate Jesse that I drove the correct key home and turned it before I even realized the door was open.
17
“THANK YOU,” BRIDGET gasped. She elbowed me aside and took off toward the cross-section of the Illinois River. I caught my breath and lunged after her, but the plastic wrap on my shoe snagged the corner of the steel fire door. I staggered, pulled, and felt the plastic wrap stretch—and finally, tear.
Hopping on one foot, I unwound the remainder of the wrap. Might as well lose it. I was under no illusions that there’d be any hope of Alex and me getting away with our private field trip.
Bridget’s shoe rubber was squalling toward the atrium stairs—good. She would run right into the...wait a minute. If the cops went outside to secure the door, then the stairwell would be clear now. Damn it.
I took off after her. My footfalls sounded stupid, one foot wrapped, the other regular. Spiff-tap, spiff-tap, spiff-tap. I tried to ignore it and kept going.
When I rounded the top of the atrium stairway, my double shifts, late pill and lack of sleep caught up with me in a wave of vertigo. As public buildings go, the Faris Natural Sciences Center might be on the puny side. Still, I wasn’t eager to take a header down a three-story atrium. I grabbed the handrail, felt my latex glove pull at the burnished wood, and hurried my way down the stairs as fast as I could manage.
It occurred to me, as I absorbed the step-by-step dismay of falling farther and farther behind Bridget, that I should probably be thankful George hadn’t taken over during our ludicrous chase. Who knew where I’d wake up if he decided to cut in? And maybe “where” wasn’t even the issue; maybe it was “if.”
How was it possible she could outrun me—and where the heck did she think she could even go? “Bridget, wait!” I called out, but my voice sounded small in the vast open space. She was a whole flight ahead of me. Through the sycamore branches, I saw her pass the second floor and keep running toward the first. Good, that was good. There were cops down there. Cops who weren’t tired and wobbly and fighting with a tumor.
Except I didn’t really register that relief, even for a second. Bridget might be lots of things—stingy, high-strung, controlling—but she sure as hell wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t be heading for the front door. But where?
Loading dock? Rear fire exit? Basement?
I really hauled ass on the stretch between the second-floor stairs and the first. A wall of arrowheads blurred by. I gained some distance on her, and rounded the final flight of stairs soon enough to see she wasn’t going for the front door. Instead, she took a sharp turn into the old food court.
My feet pounded across the grating that surrounded the sycamore, the mesh where kids dropped pennies—where Bridget had dropped that golf club. It had to have been her, because why would she need to cover up the smell of the pepper spray unless she’d been the one to spray it? And once she’d done that much, blasting her colleague in the face, there were only so many ways the encounter could end.
She could have left Luke rolling around on the floor, called the EMT, and claimed the stress had caused her mental breakdown.
Or, she could grab that damn golf club off the wall and finish Luke before he had a chance to ruin her career in museum administration.
Old Faris, New Faris loomed to my right. Isaac Faris held up his nugget of lead and regarded it with his creepy, glassy-eyed stare. Beyond that, on the wall behind a scale model of Main Street, the five framed newspapers documenting the tornado’s destruction lurked, and in the center paper, Alex held me while both of us bawled. The fucking tornado display was big enough as it was—it didn’t need to be expanded.
And then I realized—as much as I wanted my family off that wall, Bridget wanted hers to stay. But Luke had been negotiating with MAHPS to ditch the Isaac Faris diorama to keep some Native American scandal quiet. “Bridget!”
A door slammed behind the Middle School science project display, and a Play-Doh model of a molecule popped off its foamcore board and shattered on the floor.
I’d never ventured into the old food court restaurants—I didn’t even know if I had a key that fit. But when I grabbed the doorknob and pulled, the door swung open so fast it wrenched my shoulder, and I ducked into a cramped kitchen that had a bunch of daily special signs from 1998 stacked against the wall, and cobwebs as thick as party streamers draped from the ceilings. It also had a door on the far wall that led outside.
The lock wasn’t even a museum quality lock. It was a deadbolt. The work of a fast food manager who hadn’t fried fries back there for a dozen years or more? I dunno, but somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised. The real shocker would’ve been if something in that building were actually up to code.
Bridget lunged for the door and turned the deadbolt—and it didn’t move. Stuck, and good. “Help me,” she hissed.
“Bridget....”
She motioned impatiently. “Open the door.”
I stayed right where I was, beside a rack of dusty warming lights, grabbed my phone out of my pocket and hit my cousin’s number. “It’s not about you.” Shit. I’d meant to act like I was on her side—or at least as neutral as tap water—but I was frayed so thin I couldn’t stifle myself. “If you were the only one affected by this whole mess, I probably wouldn’t care. I don’t know what that says about me. But this isn’t just about you anymore.”
“Web, please—”
“I can’t let Jesse take the fall for you. I won’t.”
Alex answered his phone and yelled, “Where are you?” into it.
“I found her in the food court. And there’s a door on the north side of the building, an old service entrance. Send the cops there.”
Bridget cast around for something to free herself with. She came up with a whole lot of nothing, until she spotted an old fire extinguisher—and ripped it right off the wall. I strongly suspected it no longer held a charge, but I backed up and shielded my eyes anyway. She didn’t aim it at me, though. She started pounding the deadbolt latch with it, as if a hard enough whack might unstick it.
Considering how much damage she’d been able to do with a golf club, I decided I’d better make sure I stayed well out of range of that fire extinguisher. After the fourth or fifth hit, there was a pronounced change of pitch in the sound of the canister striking the lock. Bridget dropped the fire extinguisher, twisted the latch and flung the door open.
And there was Alex, arms outstretched, in full tackle mode. Bridget went into a half-crouch as if she thought she could give him the slip—hell, maybe she could—but then a cruiser screeched around the corner. Bobby swung out of the driver’s seat, and another big cop, Paul Sutter, from the passenger’s. Bridget sagged against the doorframe and shook her head.
There was yelling, all kinds of yelling, jumbled up and chaotic. Bobby was hollering, “Don’t move!” while Paul bellowed, “Keep your hands where we can see ’em!” They didn’t even sound like themselves to me. The worst I’d ever heard from Paul was, “Stop messing with that donut.”
But Bridget didn’t look very surprised. Maybe she remembered Bobby and Paul as horny high school sophomores. Or maybe she was in shock. Whatever the reason, her eyes were dead calm when she ignored their hollering, turned back to me, and said, “Isaac Faris did not keep slaves.”
So...it was the thing with the Kickapoo Nation after all. In a way, it made sense. For Bridget, the forward-thinking, hybrid-driving, gay-tolerant intellectual, one of the only labels she wouldn’t be able to live with was “descendent of a slave owner.”
18
ALEX MADE THE PLASTIC wrap and latex gloves quietly disappear, we followed the squad car to the station, and so far no one had thought to ask us what the hell we were doing poking around at a crime scene. Because I worked there? Because Alex was married to a police officer? Or maybe because we’d backed Bridget into a corner and she had no other choice but to tell her side of the story?
Norma
lly, the slavery claims would have been substantiated or dismissed by digging up a few records. In Faris, though, most public records only went back fifteen years. The spot where the old courthouse used to be was now Pat’s Diner. It looked like the slavery thing was going to be the least of Bridget’s worries...though I suspected maybe that label still felt more repulsive to her than “murderer.”
If I’d been expecting Jesse to roll out of the meeting room bruised and tattered and blinking against the light, I was disappointed. He ambled out with his hands jammed in his jeans pockets and gave me a shy smile. Dimples. Oh man.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
He sidled up next to me and spoke low so that only I could hear. “I’m fine. They didn’t get to the waterboarding yet.”
I needed to touch Jesse to make sure he was real. I had to make sure that his trip over the Illinois border hadn’t spiraled totally out of control and gone from a super-intense four day job to a lawsuit to a murder charge. And maybe I wanted to prove to myself that I hadn’t just dreamt him up while I was sleepwalking.
He drove us back to my place. His thigh felt solid under my palm, warm. His jeans had that velvety washed-a-million-times texture, with a couple of bumps where the fabric was starting to fray but hadn’t quite formed a hole yet. “Careful,” he said. “You might distract someone.”
“Now you know what it’s been like for me all week.”
We made it as far as the driveway. Before he could even unfasten his seatbelt, I grabbed his face and kissed him by the light of the motion-sensor floodlamp on the side of the garage. He groped for me, and got an arm almost around my waist before his seatbelt snapped him back against the seat. Fumble, release. Then hands on me again, pulling me close, crushing my mouth to his.
I grabbed harder, found a handful of hair. He slid his fingers down the back of my khakis. I moaned into his mouth.
He turned his head, and with his mouth against my cheek, said, “We should go upstairs.”
I dragged my hand down his chest, over his belt buckle. “No. Now.” I couldn’t squeeze my hand down his pants, not from the angle we were sitting at, but I could feel everything through that threadbare denim. A brush of my fingertips and he started to get hard.
His breath hissed in. “You’re gonna get me in trouble yet.”
“Nah. This is private property.” Was it in bad taste to allude to his rap sheet? He gave a breathy laugh. evidently not.
It’s such a turn-on when someone really gets you.
I ran my hand back up, slipped it under his jean jacket and flannel shirts so that the only thing between us was that T-shirt of mine he’d borrowed. My fingers brushed his nipple. It was already stiff. I played my fingertips over it again.
Jesse shoved the T-shirt up so I could touch him skin to skin—smooth. Hot. I rolled his nipple, pinched it, and he threw his head back and gasped. I ran my tongue down his neck. It tasted faintly like salt.
He jammed his hand between the seat and the door and cranked the seat back a few inches. His knees fell open, and then I found an even better angle. I stroked him through his jeans, and felt the length, the shape of his dick, right through the fabric. I bent lower and mouthed his nipple while I stroked him off, and the rasp of Jesse’s breathing filled the cab. His belt buckle was tricky to undo in the cramped space, but I managed.
The front of his jeans felt steamy when I wedged my hand inside and pulled out his hard-on. I jockeyed for position to get my mouth around it, but he moved too. He pulled a crinkly plastic thing out of his pocket.
“For a blowjob?” I said. “C’mon.”
“Don’t worry. It’s cherry flavored. Kinda like red licorice.”
I dipped my head down and got a lick in before he could put it on. Salt and pickup truck and pre-come and dick. He jostled me back. “Play fair, now.”
“You don’t need to wear a condom for a blowjob. Really.”
For a second there I thought he’d cite best practices, but instead he said, “A promise is a promise, and once my old man wrapped his head around the fact that I was gonna get my kicks with guys—with strangers—he made me swear to him I’d always use protection. Besides, it’s the right thing to do. For now. Later on...we’ll figure it out.”
Later on? Like later on tonight, or what? I hated to torture myself by thinking he was willing to have a try at a committed relationship that involved an eight-hour round trip commute, especially when there were plenty of married truckers who were perfectly happy to keep him company a lot closer to home—but I had to admit, that was what it sounded like. Or maybe I was just giddy from Alex calling him my boyfriend.
I kissed him while he rolled on the condom, and wondered if he could taste himself in my kiss—and if he did, whether he realized what we were missing out on. See, I like dick. I like it to taste like dick, not cherry licorice. My guess was, if he was all about sinewy arms, gas station attendants, baseball caps and truck stop flings, he liked dick, too. Unfortunately, he didn’t like it enough to break his promise and let me get any more than that first initial taste. He kept his elbow in my solar plexus, and didn’t let up until the condom was firmly in place.
Fine. If he insisted on wearing a rubber, we’d do it his way. After all, he had said, “For now.” I supposed I could put up with an oral condom until we got around to more detailed negotiations.
I wet that stupid pink condom up and down then took it deep to show off my cocksucking skills even through the sheath, deep enough that I could tease his balls with the tip of my tongue while his latex-wrapped dick was down my throat. Jesse threaded his fingers through my hair, and he breathed. Every flick, every suck—every trick I had up my sleeve—was rewarded with a breathy gasp. The sound of him getting all hot and bothered had me straining against my underwear, and I jammed a hand down my own pants to adjust. “Yeah,” he whispered, “do that.” He was more of a sexy breather than a dirty talker, so I figured he must really want me to jack it for him while I sucked him off.
I shoved my pants down and exposed myself, and suddenly the tawdriness of what we were doing out there really hit home. I hadn’t realized how vulnerable it would feel, doing it like that in a truck, and totally sober. The motion sensor lamp had turned itself back off. It was dark, well after midnight. We were all the way up the driveway. No one would see.
But what if my next door neighbor decided to take out his trash and wondered why the truck was rocking? What if Alex needed his toolbox from the garage? Or what if...?
Crap. I forgot her name. My cousin’s wife. The cop. Shit.
What if she saw?
Jesse’s fingertips worked my scalp. He traced the shape of my ear like it was something precious; he learned the line of my jaw. I felt his thighs clench under my chest, and then the tremble of him holding his muscles taut while sweet release beckoned.
I slowed down. I admit it—I can be a real piece of work sometimes.
He let out his breath carefully. It shook.
I whacked myself off a little harder, and hummed against his shaft. Jesse sighed and stroked my face. Was there enough space, I wondered, to maneuver around and ride him? Probably not face to face, but if I straddled his lap with my back to him.... I’d need lube, of course. He probably had some—he seemed prepared.
Then I could talk to him, without having to look him in the eye. I could say whatever dirty, filthy things George wanted me to say, all the nasty things I wanted to do with him, that I’d been thinking about from one end of the museum to the other. Make him come really, really hard. Blow his mind.
His fingers grazed my throat, and he sighed again and said, “This is beautiful. I wish we could stay like this forever.”
Romance?
Whoa. That was the last thing I expected. It stabbed me square in the chest, and then I was racing to the finish. I sucked hard, jacked hard, and wedged my free hand between his legs so I could give his balls a good going-over.
Jesse’s hips started bucking up to meet my mouth. He breathed
one word, “Web,” and then his back arched, and he went rigid.
I’d been climbing, and the sound of my name in that single desperate breath did it for me. My balls clenched up and I came—one pulse, then another, and a third, shooting my nut on the dashboard, the console. Maybe the windshield.
When I’d shot all I could shoot, I lay my head in his lap, and now it was both of us breathing deep. In a couple of minutes our panting ebbed, started to even out. He kept on stroking my cheek, switching from his fingertips to his knuckles, and back again.
The motion sensor light flicked on. I sat up quickly. The yard looked empty, but after a few seconds, a raccoon on the neighbor’s garbage can got sick of holding still and went back to trying to pry off the lid.
I gave a nervous laugh. Jesse smiled. He took a wad of paper napkins out of the glove box, handed a couple to me, and wiped himself off. “Now can we go upstairs?”
Upstairs. Where I lived...above Alex and...Goddamn it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He followed me upstairs and hung his coat on the back of my kitchen chair. His posture was awkward, as if now that we weren’t under pressure to be anywhere but together, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.
I flipped open my notebook. The last page I’d written on was missing. I went back a few sheets. Pick up Kathy’s dry cleaning. Kathy. Right. I pulled off the pen cap with my teeth and wrote, Me—Jesse—driveway.
“For someone who’s not in school, you sure do consult that homework pad a lot.”
“It’s just...notes.”
“Uh huh. You keeping track of how many times we do the deed?”
I felt my cheeks get hot. “No.”
He pulled out a chair and straddled it backward, then rested his elbows on the back. “C’mon. You can tell me. I might even be flattered.”
Sleepwalker Page 12
