Wrong (A Bad Boy Romance)(142)
Finally I was free. Sighing, I tossed the condom into the trashcan near the bed. As carefully as I could, I peeled my blankets back. Guess she's staying the night, I thought, bemused.
Naked as she was, my room—weak to the December temperatures—proved to be too much. Her shivers were subtle, but I felt them through the mattress. Frowning, I tugged the blankets back, amazed she didn't wake up.
I'm getting all of my good deeds for the year out of the way. That was what I told myself as I covered her up, tucking the blankets firmly around her chin. Lying under them beside her, I kept watching the side of her face.
This bold woman... brave enough to stand up against a muscled brute, to protect an unknown person, and to insist the right thing be done in the aftermath.
A woman who had proved to be just as eager, as hungry, as I was.
The buzzing at the stem of my brain kept trying to tell me this was special. That she, this stranger, was special.
No.
She's like every other woman I've hooked up with.
That didn't sound true. But it was.
It had to be.
No one in this world was special. Everyone was out for themselves. People were selfish to their core, they always proved it in the end.
She's nobody.
With that on my mind, I drifted off to sleep.
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Blackbird
By Abigail Graham
Chapter One
Victor
I live in a studio apartment over a massage parlor in the Old City. It’s a six block walk to the liberty bell. It’s two flights of wrought iron stairs down to the parlor on the first floor. The scents of Korean cooking waft up to my apartment, a two hundred square foot studio with one tall narrow window that looks out over the alleyway. If I stand there I can watch a steady stream of men walk in and out of the parlor. Young and old, plump and thin, chubby boys and stooped graybeards, they all have one thing in common. Slumped shoulders and a faraway look. They know what they’re about to do and when they come out they know what they’ve done. I drink whiskey from a chipped coffee mug and watch. I don’t know how the mug came to be in my box of personal effects, the one they gave back when I was paroled. It was my father’s, though. It’s all that I have of him. For now.
I have a business meeting this afternoon in New York. I’ll be catching a private jet in a few hours. I’m not sure if I’ll be violating my parole or not. I’m allowed to travel for business.
First, I need to steal my car back.
This ‘apartment’ is about the size of my closet in the suite of rooms where I grew up.
Suits hanging on a rack, a cart like the use at a dry cleaner’s, socks and underwear in a rubber tub, and a mattress covered in a plain white sheet. A refrigerator rattling away as it cools a block of Velveeta, a pack of imported ham, eight beers and a jar of peanut butter.
I don’t even know why I keep the peanut butter in the fridge.
This is my life.
For now.
As I descend the rickety cast iron staircase I check my watch. It’s a Timex I picked up at K-Mart after I stepped off the bus. I have to be on the flight in eight hours. It’s now two thirty-three in the morning. The parlor closes at three, I think. That’s when the in-and-out stream stops, or maybe the patrons are too scared to brave the mean streets at four in the morning. I don’t know or care.
A stoop-shouldered man emerges and doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. I check my watch again and walk in the rain. It’s a light drizzle that covers everything, makes the world glow. Water slides down my face and clings to my eyebrows. I glance at a shop window. The lights are shut off inside, and I see myself in a glass darkly. For a startling moment I’m walking side by side with my father’s ghost, but I see the tattoos running down both arms to stop just above the wrist and it’s just me. Dad never wore his hair this long and he never visited a tattoo parlor.
He had one tattoo, a crudely incised PETER in blue ink on his right shoulder. When he was a kid he and some boys he knew gave themselves tattoos with pins and a ballpoint pen. His was buried so deep in the flesh that all his attempts to remove it failed, and so he had his own name tattooed on his meaty shoulder until he died.
I should probably be wearing a jacket. November, and rain, but it’s unseasonably warm, almost fifty. I’ve had enough of being confined. I want to swing my arms.
The car is parked in a lot. I stop to pay a bleary-eyed attendant and walk over. It’s an unremarkable Toyota. I’ve been ordered to keep a low profile.
I hate driving this thing. The old city is dead at night. Last call was over an hour ago and the tourists get scared of the dark. It’s one of the safer areas but all cities are the same. I fucking hate cities. Too much chain link and concrete and neon, not enough trees. I don’t belong here.