Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  She cocked her head and then her expression cleared. “Oh. You’re making sure I didn’t go back to my old place for my stuff. On my own.”

  He nodded.

  She gave him a small half smile. “I went shopping today. Dropped a whopping thirty bucks.”

  Her tone was self deprecating enough that, for the first time, Atlas wondered if maybe at one point she’d had money. He knew so little about Bex, and even less about what she was running from. He knew that she had nice teeth. Clean, straight, and white. Her hair was shiny even though she’d been suffering from a lack of food. She was recovering from the bruising very quickly. All of those things implied that, at least for a long time, she’d been taken care of. He’d put money on her having had health insurance for most of her life. But had she been rich at one point? Had she been born into it? Had she had a benefactor of some kind?

  “I brought Chinese.” He held up the food and, as it always did, the presence of food made Bex’s eyes drop from their intense scrutiny of his face. He could always count on food to distract her from whirring thoughts.

  “Kitchen or living room?” she asked him, and it warmed him that even after only a week, she was starting to learn his rhythms. That he either liked to inhale his food while sitting on the kitchen counter or take a nice long time with his meal while he relaxed on his couch.

  “Living room, I think. It’s been a long day.”

  Ten minutes later they were settled with their TV trays on opposite ends of the couch while he fiddled with the smart TV. The damn thing had started freezing and starting at random moments.

  “Shit,” Atlas muttered as he tried to pull up the Netflix app and instead pulled up a camera app. He tried to exit and instead took a picture of the two of them on the couch, displayed for all to see on the television screen.

  Bex shifted uncomfortably. “God.”

  “What?” he asked, looking over to see her squinting at the TV.

  “We need haircuts,” she said, surprising him into laughter. He hadn’t expected her to say that.

  He studied the picture as well. Sure, Bex’s hair was shaggy and short at the same time. It didn’t have a particular style. But the color was shiny and pretty. He hadn’t thought too much about it.

  For himself though, yeah. The picture was not particularly pretty. He looked like a bushman. No wonder she was afraid of him.

  “I guess I could use a few inches off the top,” he agreed.

  “Off the top? I was thinking a few inches off your sideburns. Jeez.”

  Atlas snorted into the beer he was sipping from and tipped his head to look at her. He liked it when she razzed him. It showed she was comfortable with him.

  “Don’t you know better than to poke the bear?”

  She smirked. “Is this the way you’re choosing to tell me about your parentage? Half man-half bear?”

  He crossed his feet on the coffee table. “Lay off me, I already agreed to the haircut. We’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” He could almost see the moment that she reverted back into herself. “That’s okay. I probably can’t afford—”

  “No, I’ve got a guy down the block. A barbershop. He charges 20 bucks for a cut and you get a Budweiser and a nudie mag while you wait. You’re gonna love it.”

  Now she was the one laughing in surprise. “If you say so.”

  ***

  Rebecca was surprised to find that she did actually love the barbershop experience. She was definitely the only woman in there, but she was too distracted by watching Atlas get manhandled to care too much. Richie, one of the barbers, seemed to have known Atlas for a long time and could not stop making fun of his beard.

  “Look at this boy, thinking he’s Father Time or some shit. He says to me, No Richie. Not the beard. I don’t wanna shave the beard. But now here he is, crawling back. Asking me to fix this mess.”

  “We’re not shaving the beard, Richie,” Atlas insisted. “Just fix it up. And trim me up here, too.”

  Atlas eyed himself in the mirror from side to side and patted the sides of his head, as if he could push the hair into whatever style he wanted.

  He had green eyes, Rebecca realized, watching him through the mirrors as she sat on the other side of the barbershop. She hadn’t particularly noticed before. But maybe that was because it was hard to notice much of anything when Atlas had his eyes on her. He had this spotlighting way of making the world disappear when he looked at her. But with his eyes on himself in the mirror, suddenly the green just sort of jumped out at her.

  “What are we thinking here, honey?” A kind, older man asked her as he walked up to her barber chair, wiping his hands on a towel that he tossed over his shoulder. “Nothing too fancy, I hope. I don’t usually find myself trimming a pretty lady’s hair.”

  Normally, a comment like that would have turned Rebecca’s blood to ice. In a former life, she’d been a pretty lady, a very pretty lady. And she’d almost been destroyed over it. Since then, she’d been relishing the boyish appearance she’d stumbled upon over the last few months. It lent her an anonymity, an invisibility that she’d never experienced before. She didn’t want a glamorous haircut that would suddenly make her hot again. She just wanted less hair in her eyes.

  “I’m not looking for anything too crazy. Just shorter, I guess. And a little less ugly than this. But it doesn’t have to be too feminine either. Whatever twenty bucks buys me, I guess.”

  He chuckled. “I hear you. All right.”

  Apparently, twenty bucks didn’t buy her a wash, but she didn’t mind. He turned her face this way and that, touching her with a clinical impersonality that she found extremely soothing. The last time she’d been intentionally touched by another person was when she’d gotten the hell beaten out of her.

  And before that? She didn’t even want to think about her time in Atlantic City. It turned her stomach. And besides, she told herself, that was someone else’s life.

  The woman she used to be had had long chocolate hair to her waist, she’d oozed sensuality, she’d made men lose their minds. This woman, staring back at her from the mirror, couldn’t be more different.

  This woman was quiet and competent and practically invisible. This woman could hide in plain sight. She was no one’s sex object.

  Rebecca sat very still in the chair and didn’t resist the urge to pull her fingers inside the sleeves of the loose, blue sweater she’d bought the day before. She watched the barber’s old, arthritic hands as he took a razor to the sides of her hair, giving her a fade, not too tight though. The top, he kept long, but lopped off a choppy inch or two. It fell, chocolatey and shiny, over her forehead but not into her eyes. The style was oddly flattering on her angular face. Her eyes appeared even bigger than normal.

  She turned her face this way and that and decided that she still looked like a boy. And she couldn’t have been happier about it. Plus, when the barber pulled the cape off of her, all the loose trimmings falling away, she was still swallowed whole in that sweater. She could still disappear from sight. She breathed a sigh of relief and then turned to find Atlas watching her through the mirror.

  His expression was oddly tight, nothing like his usual open, creased, grin. He was staring at her like he was trying to see her across a great distance. But when he realized that she was looking back, his face went easy and soft again. She wondered about that moment for just a second but then her eyes traveled over him and his haircut registered.

  His beard had been trimmed down to a manageable inch and faded in on the sides. His hair, though long still, was trimmed into a much more attractive style. It fell into his eyes on one side, but in a nice way, not a clumpy way like before.

  He looked… hot.

  And that was unfortunate.

  Rebecca didn’t trust hot men. Actually, she couldn’t stand being around them. Hot men expected the world to bend to accommodate them. And she’d had enough of that to last her a lifetime.

  Over the last few days, she and Atlas had started jokin
g together, just a little bit, but Rebecca could feel the door closing on that easiness between them. She felt an odd sense of betrayal at seeing his bone structure revealed. At the high angle of his forehead, the newly discovered green of his eyes. She’d thought that he was safe and sweet and strange looking. But underneath was a hottie just waiting to reveal himself.

  She felt a wave of sudden skepticism roll over her. Why would a man who looked like Atlas take in a woman who looked like her?

  She asked herself all the same questions she’d asked herself a week ago. What the hell could his motivations be?

  Atlas joined her at the cash register, where she was handing over her crisp 20 for the haircut and a five for tip. He did the same, reaching over her shoulder. She couldn’t help but flinch away.

  Atlas’s eyes followed her movement but he didn’t comment on it. His eyes bounced over her newly shorn hair. “Looking good, Bex.”

  She said nothing.

  She also said nothing on the walk back to the apartment. Though she couldn’t help but notice that every woman they passed followed Atlas with their eyes. Some of them looked turned on, others looked curious, but literally every single one of them watched him.

  Of course they would. He was beautiful. She could see it now, clear as day. Even though he wore an orange tee with the words Georgia Peach emblazoned across the chest and a pair of tattered, brown corduroys, he was filling his clothes out with smooth, tattooed muscle. And his grace! She hadn’t noticed that before. That he moved with a fluid, sinuous ease. Like a man who was constantly in the exact right place at the exact right time.

  Once they finally got up to the apartment, she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. She locked herself into her room, threw herself into the shower and scrubbed at her new haircut, trying to erase the friendly touch of the barber and trying to erase the memory of Atlas’s eyes on her when he hadn’t thought she was looking.

  ***

  Something had gone wrong. And Atlas had no idea what the hell it was. He sat in the living room trying not to stare at Bex’s closed door.

  Had the barber done or said something to her? Had she gotten bad news while they were there? He had no idea why she would have suddenly gone so icy on him. But he’d never forget the way she’d looked at him after seeing his haircut. Cold, distrustful, hateful even.

  He wracked his brain for any reason why that might have happened.

  Sure, seeing someone with a haircut was sometimes a shock. He knew he looked different than he had when he’d first walked in. Case in point, her haircut. Five minutes in the barber chair and his little cleaning elf had been transformed into a Euro runway model.

  He’d almost blown a gasket when he’d looked up from his own reflection to see her standing there, swimming in a men’s sweater that hid her shape completely. The blue color was nice on her, he’d noticed that before they’d left the apartment. It made her green eyes even greener.

  But with her hair all trimmed on the sides, it choppily falling on her forehead, those green eyes were suddenly the size of doubloons. Her sharp nose and angular face took on a more intentional look. As if she’d just put on makeup to achieve that appearance, even though he knew she hadn’t. God help him if she ever decided to add makeup to her look. He’d probably have a heart attack.

  With the styled hair, her lips had appeared plumper, her chin rounder. And, yup, her ears had stuck out just the tiniest little bit. Prior to seeing her in the mirror, Atlas wouldn’t have said that he’d be attracted to that in a woman. But apparently he was majorly attracted to that.

  The sweater she was wearing was big enough that Atlas could have pretended that it was his sweater she was wearing. And didn’t that just complete the fantasy?

  Suddenly, Bex was Bex and right there in the barber shop, he’d been nearly overcome with the urge to zip her into a sleeping bag alongside him. He wanted cool air on their cheeks, a mosaic of stars overhead. He wanted a campfire crackling nearby and all sorts of warm skin under his palms.

  And all that just from a haircut.

  Jeez. He dragged a hand over his face. He was fucked. She was skittish enough around him when all he’d wanted was her friendship. If she caught one whiff of him being attracted to her, she was gone like Donkey Kong.

  He’d never, ever been good at hiding his feelings. Or keeping a lid on secrets. But if he wanted her to stick around, he was going to have to figure out how to toss these new feelings into a sarcophagus and bury them alive. He was positive that the one sure way to lose Bex forever was to start giving her the Hey, Girl eyes.

  Maybe he just needed to get laid. Two or three times a month he usually headed down to the bar on the corner and rustled up some company for the evening. Getting Bex settled at the apartment had interrupted his rotation a little bit. Yeah. Maybe that explained it. He was just in a dry spell.

  Atlas’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he cursed when he read the text. He was twenty minutes late for dinner at his brother’s house. And he was supposed to be bringing Bex.

  He put his odds at slim to none at getting her out of her room in the mood she was in.

  Like a man on the walk to the gallows, Atlas plodded to her door, leaning his forehead against it. He lightly knocked.

  “Bex?”

  Nothing.

  “Hey, Bex. You in there?” Of course she was in there. Unless she was Harry Houdini in disguise, there was no other way out of her room.

  “Bex.” He made her name three syllables, rising his voice an octave in the middle.

  If she was ignoring him, maybe he could annoy her into talking to him.

  “Oh, Be-X-y.”

  “Yeah?” she asked, a very irritated note in her voice. He’d known that calling her Bexy would do the trick.

  “You about ready for dinner?”

  There was silence on the other side of the door and he could practically feel the wheels turning in her head. He’d bet his next paycheck that she was trying to figure out how to have dinner and avoid him at the same time. Well, maybe it made him an asshole, but he wasn’t going to make that easy for her.

  “My brother, who’s a really good cook by the way, made dinner next door and invited us over.”

  No response.

  “You can meet Naomi, his wife, and their daughter, Brookie the Cookie. It’ll be fun.”

  Still no response.

  “He’s making homemade chicken pot pie and homemade ice cream for dessert.”

  The door suddenly opened and Atlas stumbled forward, trying to catch his weight.

  Bex jumped back, eyeing him suspiciously.

  Atlas righted himself, like the super cool guy he was, and leaned against the doorjamb, one hand over his head. God, he was such a dork. When had he turned into such a dork around her? Oh yeah. Probably when she’d gotten this super cute haircut that alerted him to all that sneaky hotness he hadn’t quite noticed before.

  “I don’t have to change, do I?” she asked. Her hair was wet and she smelled all clean and showery. She wore another oversized sweater, gray-green this time, and a pair of skinny jeans underneath. Her feet were bare.

  He looked at her bare feet. And then he looked at his own bare feet just a few inches away from hers. He fought the urge to press their big toes together and make a kissing sound.

  “Atlas?”

  She was still waiting for an answer to her question.

  “What? Ah. No. You don’t have to change. It’s casual. Super casual. Just dinner. Pot pie. Casual pot pie.”

  Her brow lowered little by little the more he kept talking. By the time he was done talking she was looking at him like he was a crazy person and to be honest, he felt like a crazy person.

  Her haircut had thrown him for a loop and now he was off in no-man’s land, loop-de-looping and trying to figure out which way was up.

  Crushes were no big deal, he reminded himself. He handled them with aplomb all the time.

  Only he’d never had to live in the same house as a crush. And
pretend that he didn’t have that crush.

  And he’d never had a crush on a girl whose ears stuck out the tiniest bit. He’d never wanted to press his crush’s ears against his cheek before.

  “Atlas! Are you even listening?”

  She had both hands on her hips now, looking up at him angrily. Like a little angry elf. Like a hot little elf.

  “What? Sorry.”

  “I asked if we’re headed over there now or not.”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah. Yes. Let’s go.”

  He followed behind her to the door, trying to shake the cotton out of his head.

  Fucked. He was so fucked.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rebecca wasn’t sure what she was expecting in Atlas’s twin, but it definitely wasn’t this scowly, silent, broody statue.

  Atlas and Rebecca came in through the front door of the apartment across the hall. It was the exact copy of Atlas’s apartment but in reverse. It was decorated very differently though. Atlas’s apartment was homey and lived-in, but it was still a little haphazard. As if all of his furniture and decorations were things that other people had given to him at one point or another.

  This apartment however, was decorated with vision. Every wall was painted a startling white and there were colorful prints framed on the wall. Each piece of minimalist furniture was a deep, saturated color and in every window, prisms danced, catching the early evening sunset.

  Also, there was a toy explosion covering half the floor of the living room and on into the kitchen.

  As soon as they came in through the front door, a baby in a little, rolling contraption squealed at top volume and started rolling her way over toward Atlas, her hands opening and closing in the air as if she were asking the universe to get her uncle closer to her.

  “Don’t rile her up so close to bedtime,” Atlas’s voice said from the kitchen doorway.

  Rebecca looked up in surprise and saw that it wasn’t Atlas who’d spoken, it was his identical twin, Sequence. If Atlas had shaved down to stubble, trimmed his hair into a military style, erased all his smile and laugh lines, and scowled at the world, then he would have been indistinguishable from Sequence.