by Reiss, CD
“I’m not a career criminal.”
“Is that so?”
With three words, he shut me right up. My point was meant to land like a hammer but fizzled like a fuse without a firecracker at the end. I’d told him about my years of training in the arts of the long and short confidence game, and I was sure he hadn’t forgotten the incident that ended with me sliding his wallet across a dinner table.
My ideas about who I am and who I was raised to be intersect where Keaton Bridge and I connect.
“Point in fact.” I hold up a finger. “You’re hiding something from me. I can’t tell what it is, but there’s something going on with you and that database. You’re withholding. Omitting. Both. You can tell me now. Or I can figure it out. If I have to figure it out, I’m going to be really pissed off.”
He turns toward me at a traffic light. Are his pupils dilated because it’s getting darker? Or have I said something that causes a physical reaction? My skin tingles at the tips of my fingers and in the crevices between my legs. It’s that dangerous side. The side I’ve challenged to speak truthfully. The side I’ve threatened with my anger. I fear this, and I like it. I want to scoop it up like a palmful of fresh water and drink from the heels of my hands as sheets of him spill down my forearms.
“Do not threaten me, my artful dodger.” His voice is a little lower and as serious as a gunshot wound.
I am not afraid.
“You think you can take me in a fight?” I’m only half joking. I can take down bigger and better trained men. But I know he’s not talking about hand-to-hand combat.
“If there is ever a time I don’t tell you something, the omission is for your own good.”
“What’s that code you made me remember?”
“What code?”
I rattle it off.
“That code is everything you need to know,” he says.
“Keaton!”
“Let’s make a deal, love. You tell me everything that you have failed to mention. And I will tell you things you have no business knowing.”
“You know I can’t talk freely about my job.”
“I can’t talk freely about mine either. You know what you’re involved with here.” He taps his middle finger on his sternum. “And I’m pretty clear about what I’m involved with.” He reaches for me, glancing over so he can place his fingers on my sternum.
The touch isn’t sexual. It is unexpectedly tender. The startling nature of it makes my own hand react by joining his over my heart.
I’m in this too deep already. I slid down a muddy ravine into a surging river before my brain even registered that the dirt was loose. I don’t even know if I ever had time to hold my breath before I was pulled away in it.
He puts his hands back on the wheel. “I have a list of things I want to do your body this weekend, and if I don’t start ticking them off soon, we’re going to be fucking deep into Tuesday.”
His words seem heartening, but they’re not. They suck. I’m not a “live for now” kind of girl. He knows that. If he doesn’t, he’s going to find out, because I can’t visualize walking away from him, and I can’t strategize a way to make it work unless he’s fully forthcoming.
“Is there something wrong with fucking on a Tuesday?”
“I have a separate list for then.” He winks.
I hate it when guys wink. Winks are ways to assure me that I’m not seeing the whole picture and everything’s taken care of. But he’s different in this too. His wink is a devilish hint, not a way to shut me up.
When Keaton Bridge promises mischief, there’s a good chance mischief will occur.
I’m satisfied for the moment that I’m not going to have to walk away from him after Vegas. I’m also confident that I can chip away at his secrecy if he gives me enough time to do it. Maybe enough time to figure out if he’s been in the FBI database out of more than curiosity.
As a woman—not a federal agent—I want to know where his interest in me lies. I don’t know if I can ever make him believe that painful truth.
Chapter 29
keaton
The commercial airport is one hundred sixty miles away. We’ll get into Vegas late.
We’re almost on the highway when she plugs her phone into my dashboard. I stiffen as if she’s pulled a gun on me, then I try to hide it. I never plug my devices into anyone else’s without the explicit intention of stealing information from it. I want to scold her for being so careless, but I don’t want to start the trip on a bad foot. I also wouldn’t mind acting like a normal person for a change. I wouldn’t mind trusting someone. With her phone plugged in as she flicks her hands along the glass of her phone, this feels more intimate than what we did in a bungalow in the woods, or the time she threw me against the side of the car because I tried to kiss her.
What about that time she picked your pocket?
The connection between her phone and my stereo is like a mosquito bite I can’t scratch. It’s against every protocol I’ve ever set for myself out of necessity, but an equally urgent necessity drives me to shut the fuck up about it.
“I made a playlist of driving music,” she says. “Actually, two playlists. One with old stuff and one with new stuff. Which would you prefer?”
I admit to being a little enchanted about the idea of driving music. Of course, I went to high school in New Jersey, where one takes long, short, and intermediate drives to Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. It’s not a foreign concept. But I’ve never actually taken a long drive to actual driving music.
The stereo is controlled by a pane of glass in the center of the dashboard. She taps it.
“Which ever one your lovely hand is stroking right now.”
“You’re a scoundrel, my good sir!” She says it with probably the worst accent I have ever heard in my life. No one would confuse her for British. “You get the new stuff. Cheerio!”
An anthem of guitar and vocals get the star treatment from my speakers. With the playlist going, she should be leaning back and looking out the window or making small talk. But she’s not. She’s playing with the screen on my stereo. What the hell is she looking for? The nuclear codes? My bank account number? At seventy miles an hour, I glance at her and she glances back for a second before I put my eyes back on the road.
“What do you think you’re looking at?” I ask as casually as I can.
“I have never heard of any of this music. Is it music? You listening to books or something? Spoken word poetry? What the hell? Is this even English?” She mangles the pronunciation of an Icelandic band, and I know, just know for certain, she isn’t trying to hack my car.
“I’ll have you know most of the music produced and released in the world is not in English.”
“Well, fancy that!” Her British accent, if at all possible, has gotten worse in the past minute. She gobbles up her vowels like a multisyllabic glutton, sticking her Ts as if there’s glue on her tongue and flattening the tones with an aural steamroller.
Yet I am more than charmed. I don’t want to hear her British accent ever again, as long as I live. But having heard her hideous rendition, I appreciate her natural American steamroller-vowel-gobble. I want her to talk more. I want to hear her history in her voice. All the words, but not the words. I want to hear the fingerprint of who she is inside of what she says and how she says it.
“Have you ever been to London?” I ask, stopping myself before I tell her I want to take her there. I can’t guarantee her anything, but I want to promise everything.
“Nope. I haven’t been much of anywhere. Virginia, Quantico for training. Ann Arbor. Dipped into Canada twice… uuh…Washington, D.C. I’m pretty boring.”
“Do you want me to tell you that you’re not boring? I don’t usually invite boring women out for more than an hour for a quick shag.”
She runs her hands along her thigh, smoothing out her jeans. I grab it and squeeze. She runs her thumb along the ridges of my fingers. This feels nice. This companionship with her on a drive.
“Anywhere?” She looks out the window. “Like as a tourist?”
“Sure.”
“I read about this place in Edinburgh. It’s a whole city under the city.”
“Mary King’s Close?”
“That’s it! I’ve seen pictures, and it’s like a parallel universe, right under the streets. Have you been?”
“No.”
She twists in her seat, forgetting about the stereo. “It’s got huge rooms with stone arches and little rooms with beds where people died of plague, and a room full of dolls people leave for this little girl who’s a ghost.”
“You believe in ghosts?”
“Of course not.” She sits straight. “But the idea of a room full of dolls underground is kind of cool. I loved dolls when I was a kid. That would have been heaven.”
“I bet you were very cute with a dolly under your arm.” I rest my hand in her lap and she takes it.
“When I was a baby, my mother used me to distract people while she robbed them.”
“You must have been quite an adorable child.”
“Yep. People literally paid money to coo at me. I was that cute.”
I bet she was, and I wonder what her children will look like. A dangerous path, because there was a good chance they won’t be mine.
Chapter 30
cassie
I start by telling him the safest stories, and slide into the things I don’t normally talk about. The years away from Nana were the hardest because she kept Mom honest, watching me while Mom was “working.” She made sure I went to school, did my homework, ate and slept at regular times. But between the ages of seven and eleven, my grandmother lived on the other side of town. This was by design. She and my mother weren’t speaking for reasons that had to do with an old boyfriend, my grandmother’s unwillingness to reveal my mother’s paternity past the name “Barry the Motherfucker,” and probably plain old daily personality conflicts over the breakfast nook.
I don’t often talk about those Nana-less years. My mother didn’t abuse me in ways that were discernible. I never had a bruise, I was never raped by one of her boyfriends, she never neglected my basic needs. But there was one winter the furnace broke and she couldn’t afford to fix it, so we slept in our coats. Another Christmas when she kicked her current boyfriend out for the way he looked at me in my pajamas. He tried to beat her, but she got lucky and cut his face open with a letter opener.
She’s the reason I never assumed women were weak, but she’s also the reason I want to fold between moments and disappear. She’s the reason I came into adulthood with sins to expunge.
I try to make it all sound funny and interesting. I sprinkle in funny adjectives and make faces Keaton can’t turn around to see. He doesn’t judge or expect me to be ashamed when I tell him how a nine-year-old goes about picking a pocket or leading a mark to a con. He seems to appreciate that there are things my mother taught me that I never would have learned in a normal household. How to read people. How to understand the criminal mind. How to find backdoors and loopholes.
No, he doesn’t “seem” to understand. He’s a master at backdoors and loopholes. He’s the king of not getting caught. He’s a ninja at cleaning up his messes and covering his tracks. He doesn’t have to tell me that, but I know it and it’s more than an assumption. It’s a common thread between us.
Two thirds of the way to the airport, he pulls into the rest stop to go to the “loo.” It’s not a bad idea. We meet on the outside of the convenience store attached to the gas station. He cracks open a fresh bottle of water and hands it to me.
The lights flood the parking lot. Everything looks yellow-green, and Keaton’s eyes are a clearer shade of blue in this light. They move down my body as I drink and back up when I finish the bottle.
“Never seen a woman drink a bottle of water before?” I ask as I hand it back.
He chucks it in the recycling. “Not with such purpose.”
He puts his hand on my lower back as we walk. I usually find this gesture infuriating, but I like the feel of him, the weight of his hand on me. Is this what chivalry really is? All the things that I can’t stand, but from the right person? That doesn’t seem quite fair, but if I tell him that I don’t need to be guided across the parking lot, he’ll move his hand, and I’ll lose the warm security I feel when it’s there.
I want to give him something for listening to me, for not judging me, for taking care of me in these small ways. I want to give him a gift.
When we’re in the car, he locks the doors before kissing me. Together, we taste like water. Fresh, cold, new. He slides a hand under my shirt and I put mine between his legs. He’s rock hard, sucking in a breath when I put pressure on it.
“This can’t be comfortable,” I say, pulling his belt through the buckle.
“It’s not a big deal.”
“I bet I can suck you off so quick we still make the plane.”
“I don’t—”
“Have to do a thing.”
I have his dick in my hands. Thick, ridged with veins, so hard the skin is tight around the core.
“Suck it then,” he moans, shifting low in his seat.
I bend over his cock, licking the salty drop of pre-cum away, replacing it with moisture from my tongue, sucking the end. He gathers my hair away while I work my way down him, opening my throat on the way in, giving him my tongue on the way out.
He whispers my name. “My God.”
His pleasure inspires me to suck harder, picking up speed. I give my breathing a break, sliding my tongue along the length of his shaft, then with a sudden move, I take him as deep as I can. He releases a sharp uh, pushing down my throat.
Having him under my control, being solely responsible for his pleasure, drives me wild, and my consciousness drives to my own pleasure, where the seam in my jeans meets my core. A groan vibrates my throat.
I take his shaft in one hand and use my saliva to move it up and down with my mouth.
“Cassie.” He’s shuddering. His hands have stilled and now just press down. “I’m going to come.”
I groan onto his cock again and come down on it, sucking on the way out.
“Wait. I’m. Going. To.”
He’s trying to be a gentleman, but I got this. I’m going to suck it right out of him.
“Fuck.” His surrender has a beautiful sound. The sound of the wind in your ears during a freefall. The sound of jumping off a cliff with no guarantee of a net.
The base of his cock pulses under my hand as his balls empty into my throat. I taste him, bitter and sharp, sticky at the back of my tongue. I swallow and take more. All of it. All of him.
When his last drop is spent, I pick up my head. He strokes my hair reverently, pulling a single strand from the corner of my mouth.
“That was lovely,” he says.
“Thank you.” I sit straight.
He fishes a napkin from the glove compartment and wipes my mouth.
“Do you kiss a girl after she’s had your dick in her mouth?”
He takes me by the back of the neck and kisses me deeply.
Chapter 31
keaton
As we drive from the airport to the center of Las Vegas, I feel Cassie’s excitement in the seat next to me. She squirms a little, leans forward as if she wants to see a little farther over the horizon.
Here’s something we do not have in common. She’s excited by this mess. Well, I can see that’s not going to work. I can hang on that. I can engrave it into a plaque and nail it on the wall. Quote: “She likes Las Vegas.” There we have it.
“I hear there’s a fake Eiffel Tower,” she exclaims. “And a big, fake Statue of Liberty.”
“Yes. All that. And they’re building a Big Ben.”
“Oh! We can pretend we’re in your hometown.”
That is absolutely the last thing I want to do. Nothing feels less like London than Las Vegas.
<
br /> “I should take you down to the shops under the Bellagio,” I find myself saying. “They’re quite nice. Quite posh.”
What the hell am I doing? Las Vegas is hell, yet I want to give her tour. I want to show her all of the abominable sites and watch her find whatever happiness in it that she can. I just want to see her happy, full stop.
“Well, you can show me, but I’m not buying anything.”
Maybe she won’t, but I make no such promise.
Chapter 32
cassie
The Strip is amazing. I’ve seen crowded places and cities, but though I’ve seen pictures and videos, I’m totally unprepared for Las Vegas. I can barely keep in my seat. Everywhere I look, I see something I want to point at. The big stuff, sure. But it’s the little things that are the most fun. The little bits of lights, the little details in the façades, the way people dress as if they’re all on a permanent red carpet.
I can tell Keaton thinks I’m just adorable, and normally I’d want to punch him in the face for his knowing little smile. But he’s driving, and also? The way he smiles isn’t condescending. He’s smiling because he can’t help it. I’ve always tried to impress people with what I know, but here I am, charming somebody with what I’ve never seen.
He makes a right into a long circular driveway. Over a line of trees, an arc of water lifts into the sky as if borne by angels. Lights from underneath it renders it into a sparkling silver, and another one joins it, then another. They fall back under the tree line, surrendering to gravity.
I tap on my window. “Can we go there?”
“The fountain?”
“Yes.”
“Your wish is my command.”
