Lucky Between the Sheets: An Anthology of Stories that Get to the Point

by L. A. Boruff

  So instead, I breathe, and wait for Riley to catch up with me.

  “Wasting daylight?” he teases, and I look at him. The light bathing his skin accentuates his features, and in it he looks like a romance cover model. My eyes trace his jawline and move back to his lips. I want to kiss him, but doing so in front of the plane would be bad news.

  I shake my head. “Not wasting,” I say, “but you’re right. We should get going. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.” I pick my pack back off the ground, slinging it over my shoulders, and wave good-bye at our pilot as we set off into the woods.

  It’s not a long walk to our cabin, and we move through the trees at a leisurely pace. I’m sure Riley also feels the way the magic vibrates off everything around us. In that moment I understand the ancient Irish tendency toward animism. The trees certainly have souls here, as do the rocks, and that’s not even getting into the animals. I expect to feel jumpy, on edge, or paranoid. It doesn’t.

  It makes me feel alive and a little bit reckless.

  “Riley!” I yell just loudly enough to alarm him once I’m sure we’re out of sight of the transpo team. He turns to me, visibly tense, then relaxes as I turn my mouth into a smile and approach him.

  “Fucking hell, you scared me,” he says, but there’s no actual admonishment in his tone. I bat my eyelashes at him anyway and move against him, coming chest to chest, and tilt my face up to look into his eyes. “We have to keep moving,” he says, but there’s no conviction in his voice and less in his expression. When his next move is to close the gap between our lips, it doesn’t take me by surprise.

  We move in tandem, feeling through the familiar motions and spaces: his hands on my sides, mine on his chest and shoulders. The magic of the land moves up through my feet, my legs, and then, finally, my chest. As it hits my lips it ignites a symphony between us unlike anything I’ve felt since our first time. I sink further into him until he pulls away.

  He looks at me, eyes lidded, a huge smile on his face.

  “I love you,” he tells me. His words sound like poetry, and they scare me.

  I take a deep breath, and my lungs hum with magic. I can’t find the words I want to use. “We have to keep moving,” I say, “we’re wasting daylight.” With that, I turn from him, and walk deeper into the woods.

  * * *

  The cabin is the kind of structure that was clearly built before people felt the need to put electricity in everything, but it’s cozy and well-maintained. There’s a fireplace with already-chopped wood beside it, a combined kitchen/living room, an outhouse, and a bedroom. It isn’t glamorous by any means, but as a place to crash it’s cute and way nicer than some of our previous accommodations have been, so I’m not complaining.

  I take a few minutes to look around it, take stock of any actual or potential weapons, locate strong and weak points, and root out any beings who may have decided to hang out here in the absence of human tenants. There’s a shotgun and some knives, but it’s otherwise clear of anything that would be alarming, so I throw my bags on the bed without further ado.

  Riley sends a quick message to our bosses to let them know we’ve arrived, then we sit down and stare at each other for a long moment.

  “It’s time, isn’t it?” I ask.

  He nods. “That’s the downside of our line of work, isn't it?" Riley says, his eyes watching me. I can tell there are other questions in his gaze, but I don't bring them out into the daylight. I can't, not until we retire. That's the deal.

  This career is the only thing that I'm built for. I imagine, at the dawn of time, as the gods were plotting out the fate of the world, they built me to track down the fae. I, Molly Maeve, exist to make them pay their debt—with either money or penance.

  And I'm damn good at my job.

  Without Riley, I'd still be damn good at it, but there's something incomparable about having a partner who can, at least almost, keep up with me. Riley doesn't come from the kind of splintered, painful past that may as well be part of my DNA. Nah, he was a trust fund boy who found himself on the wrong side of town at the wrong time.

  So, yeah, he's seen some shit. You have to, or you probably freeze up on your first outing, even if they do try to take it slow and just have new recruits go chat with an elderly brownie.

  He's not me, though.

  Yet he's still miles above most of the other agents that work for ASBH—the Association of Supernatural Bounty Hunters. I don't want to give him up.

  He'll retire young, probably. This gig pays exceptionally well. It has to, 'cause the only people who would do this without a solid paycheck are... well, people like me.

  I don’t need much. As it stands, I use most of my paycheck for whiskey.

  And I'll never retire. I've never mentioned it to Riley, but I have every intention of doing what the people who don't retire usually do: die in the field. On quiet days I like to daydream about what will finish me off in the end. Perhaps a troll, a sphinx, maybe some forgotten species of merfolk will ultimately be my demise.

  Riley's staring at me. "That's the downside to our line of work, isn't it?" he repeats. My head is spinning and all I can do is stare back. I try to fixate on his eyes rather than his mouth or torso. Sex so soon after he'd tried to have the love conversation again wouldn’t be fair to either of us.

  He sighs and shakes his head. I sense the sadness there. It’s no magic thing, just the knowledge of a person's rhythms that comes from being with them day in and day out. Really, what it comes down to is that I'm selfish. I don't want to spend more time apart from him than necessary, and the confession of love can do nothing but drive us apart. "We need to call him," he says, instead of whatever's on his mind.

  "Fuck, you're right," I say. "Guess we do."

  I dial the phone number on our satellite phone and put it on speaker. It rings, and I imagine Keelan bumbling about his home. That we can convince the ancient druid to even use a telephone is frankly a miracle. I snuggle into Riley, an action we can both write off as a way to make it easier to be heard.`

  We finally connect, and Keelan's voice comes over the speaker, scratchy. "About time," he says, and I roll my eyes at his customary irritability. "I understand you're supposed to be going after a leprechaun," he says. "Who did you piss off enough to get that gig?"

  Riley and I both pointedly ignore the attempted jab at our professional reputation. We hold great pride in its near spotlessness, but Keelan is the kind of person who revels in holding up our one supposed failure as an example of our inadequacy.

  I pretty much hate him. But I'll do anything to fulfill my destiny, and he didn't get his title among druids for no reason.

  Also, I'm fucking his son. That’s another can of worms altogether, though.

  Riley clears his throat. "What can you tell us about them?" he asks. "I assume they're not little laborers running around below knee height smiling and constantly talking about their lucky charms."

  "Their size doesn't matter," Keelan says. I imagine him shrugging and widening his mouth into a large smile as he prepares to tell us of the doom we've gotten ourselves into this time. "What matters is that you proceed with caution, never make a promise you're not prepared to keep, and do your best to avoid making any kind of promise at all. What I want to know is, what exactly did this leprechaun do?"

  "He murdered someone," I say, "or so the story goes. I was told he took something… A family heirloom, I think? Maybe a piece of jewelry. He made them enact their worst nightmares until they'd give it up. They wouldn't, so he killed them."

  "How did he kill them?"

  The question hangs in the air. The answer is that I have no idea. Riley and I exchange looks. "We aren't sure," I say, honestly.

  "You aren't sure?"

  I shrug, but of course he can't see me, so I will myself to explain further. "We weren't given an exact cause of death in the file. The results were inconclusive."

  "How am I supposed to help you fight the thing if you can't tell me how the thing fights?"


  "Aren't you supposed to be the expert on this?" Riley's voice cuts in. "We have the same info you have on this case and more field experience. If we were trying to put together a plan based on what we know about this individual, we could do it without you."

  "Hit a nerve, did I?" Keelan asks, then chuckles. "You're right, though. So, here's what you should know. He's smart. Leprechauns are known for being one of the more clever fae around these parts. Like the other fae, they can’t lie. He'll grant you three wishes if you take him alive, and I recommend you do so if you're able. Those wishes are themselves enough to have inspired a lot of the lore around them. I also suggest you talk to me and one or other advisers before actually using them, because you have to word things very specifically or a vindictive leprechaun can use them as a way to massively harm you. There's no specific fighting style they use, which is why it's such a damn shame we don't know more about the way he killed those people, but they're masters of illusions. The closer you are to him, the more wary you need to be. He’ll make you hallucinate smells, sounds, scenery..."

  "Trust not our eyes, nor our ears, nor our tongues, nor our noses, nor our skin," I say, a phrase from the people I was sure I'd been separated from shortly after birth. My people, if I could call the kinds of people who'd leave a child on the side of an interstate my kin. I'd avoided a DNA test; knowing I was one of them or knowing I was not would torment me equally. But I looked in the mirror and saw them, and saw myself in photographs of them in groups.

  Riley catches what I'm doing and looks at me with his own sense of forlorn longing. I long for a home I've never known; he longs for a home in me. It's all too much these days.

  "Yes," Keelan says, oblivious, "exactly."

  "Any idea on where to find the guy?" I ask, "Any particular locations they tend to hang around? Rock formations, weather they prefer, that sort of thing?"

  "Why, you follow the rainbow, of course," he says like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Like there aren't a million and a half reasons we shouldn't trust the pop culture depictions of these things to tell us how the fuck to handle them.

  I roll my eyes, thanking whoever made our go-to expert on these so-called "mythical" and "legendary" beings a technophobe.

  Riley responds this time. "Just... any rainbow?"

  "Any rainbow," Keelan confirms. "Any rainbow will take you to any leprechaun, but you gotta know enough about who you're looking for to get there, and enough not to get discouraged if you don't see them right away at the end."

  "What's the trick to it?" I ask. There's gotta be one. Nothing is ever this simple.

  "You've gotta be honest about who you are and what you feel."

  Shit.

  * * *

  In order for us to follow the rainbow, there has to be a rainbow, which means there has to be... if not rain, then enough moisture in the atmosphere for the light to refract. There isn't, so instead we spend the rest of the daylight prepping our gear for our outing and meditating on who we are and how we feel.

  I feel entirely unprepared to have this conversation with Riley and do my best to avoid thinking about it. Meanwhile, it's clear he's more than taken it to heart, and throughout the day he keeps trying to tell me he loves me. Again. My heart breaks a little more each time, and I can't face him.

  It's not until after we're watching the sun set over the Irish shore that he finally, no holds barred, calls me on my bullshit.

  "Molly," he says, "you've been avoiding this conversation for as long as I've been trying to have it with you."

  "You'd think that'd be enough to convince you to drop the subject." It’s sarcastic, and I regret the statement as soon as it leaves my mouth.

  "I tried to," he tells me, "and was going to after my attempt today, except that now I need to be honest with you for us to do our jobs, so would you please stop?" He sighs, and his gaze is dejected, but he continues on. "Just let me get what I need to say done with. Then you can work out how you're going to come to terms with being honest, even if that's just to yourself and not to me. Good?"

  "Why can't you just be honest inside your head if it's that easy? Why do you gotta drag me into it?"

  He shakes his head. "It's not that easy. Not by a mile. I just think if there's anyone stubborn enough to do it in a vacuum just to avoid doing it with another person, it's you."

  Well, he has that right. "Carry on," I tell him.

  "So, I love you. I am in love with you, with all the corniness that entails. By all indications you do not return my affections, but you like my body. That's cool. I don't begrudge you. But," he sighs, searching for words, measuring them carefully as he speaks, "it's too much to see you like this every day, to have what feels like a secret romance, and yet not have you return my feelings. So, after this mission, after it's all out in the open, for better or worse... I'm going to be putting in a request for a different partner."

  My jaw drops. There's a million things I want to say to him. "You're going to fuck up my career?" is the first, but I know in my heart that it isn't about that. Not for him.

  Not for me, either.

  I meet his gaze, dead on, my mouth still ajar. The truth is that I love him, have loved him, and that I am nothing but a cyclone that's already started its path of destruction through his life.

  I say nothing. There are no words to describe the chaos in my brain. Instead, I stand, and move to the suitcase I left my whiskey in.

  I pull out two shot glasses and set them on the table where we've been sitting, then pour into them until they threaten to overfill.

  "You know I don't like this stuff," he says, eyeing it.

  "I know," I say. I down one shot, then the other, then refill them. He's silent. I'm silent. There's the dim humming of the lights and the energy of the land moving between us, and that seems like more noise than I want to handle.

  I sip the third shot, letting the harshness of the alcohol swirl over my tongue and slide down my throat like liquid fire. I thought I'd be over it long ago. I've never gotten over it. I will never quite get over it, I don't think. I search for words that are true.

  "You don't actually have to tell me anything," Riley reminds me. "Keelan never said anything about us having to be honest about who we are or what we feel aloud."

  "It's harder to do it with just myself," I tell him, "and I don't want to hurt you."

  But I already have. It's plain on his face. This time, he says nothing.

  "I support you doing whatever you feel you need to do in order to be happy," I start. "And I do not want you to fear that I am hurt or angry with you because of your decision."

  He nods and waits for me to continue. I sigh, trying to figure out exactly what to say. And what not to.

  "You know I don't know who my parents were. Are? Whichever. They could be dead. I don't know where I'm from. I know that if I stay in one place too long bad things find me there, and they hurt those around me. That's before we get into all my other issues."

  "Like using sarcasm to put off difficult conversations?"

  "Something like that." I smile, the corner of my mouth lifting against my will. "Refusing to get too honest with people. I can only tell you this now and trust you'll be okay because you already told me you're transferring. Catching the leprechaun isn't worth opening the door to the shit that's after me going after you."

  "I thought your job meant everything to you?" He turns his head slightly in order to side-eye me, and I stifle the urge to giggle at him.

  "Yes and no. The only thing I have it in me to be good at is this job. No friends, no family, no lovers? Check. The constant urge to keep moving? Check. Enjoying the opportunity to get my frustration out on beings that actually deserve it? Check, check, check. I like being good at something and getting paid well to do it."

  "So what's the catch?"

  "Sometimes I wish I had it in me to be good at something else, too," I say. "I wish I could be good at loving you."

  "But you don't," he said, simply, like tha
t settled it.

  I shook my head. "You don't understand. I do. I love you. I love you with every piece of my heart that's still capable of love. But I will never be good at it, and you will hurt as long as you love me too."

  "Teague?" There's no admonishment or hurt in the question: "how does the other guy you’re fucking fit into all of this?"

  I shrug. "Same deal. I didn't wanna tell you I love you when I can't even decide who to love."

  "But you did decide," he said, "and you chose both of us."

  "See? I really am the worst at this."

  "No, Molly, this is where you're wrong," he says.

  "How so?"

  "I assumed you fucked me because you couldn't have Teague there and I was an attractive body."

  "Damn," I say, but my heart sinks. Yeah, I definitely fucked up big time somewhere. "And this is better how?"

  He smiles, and he's so damn handsome I feel my body reacting to him, emotions and distance and my fucked up self be damned. He stands, takes a step toward me, and my breath catches. He's standing over me now, and I tilt my head back to see him. He closes the distance, his hands moving to either side of my chair, his face inches from mine. His smile widens. I'm being too obvious and he's so proud of himself.

  "Because," he says, "I'd much rather have you love me, and share you, than for you to not give a shit about me."

  "You know I care about you, c'mon."

  He shakes his head. "I knew I was somewhere on your list," he says, and leans to whisper into my ear. "But now I know I'm near the top."

  "That doesn't change anything," I say.

  He backs up just far enough to look me in the eyes. "Don't lie. You know we have to be honest if you want to complete this assignment."

  I blink up at him and swallow. I can smell him and feel his body heat. The closeness makes me want to undress him. But there’s an unspoken condition to it this time, and for once, I want to meet that condition.