by Callie Hart
“I’m not saying I’d judge you if you were. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen you this...bouncy.”
On the front lawn of the academy, I stop bouncing on the balls of my feet, poking my tongue out at her. “I just forgot how good vitamin D is. Don’t you feel alive? Like you could take on the world?”
“I have to fly to New York this afternoon to get two filings. No, I do not feel like I could take on the world,” she says dryly. “I mean, my mother’s so fucking weird. She knows there are perfectly good dentists close by, but no. I have to go see her dentist.”
“Yeah. But Andre’s going with you. And you’re gonna go out for a romantic dinner, and he got you tickets to see Hamilton. Once the dentist part’s out of the way, you’re gonna have an amazing time in the city and you know it.”
She harrumphs. “I hate the fucking dentist. I can’t stand the smell or the sound of the drill. Dentists get away with all kinds of fucked up things, y’know. The amount of women who get sexually assaulted by dentists is—” she puffs out her cheeks. “The number’s frighteningly high. If you ever need to be put out for a procedure, always make sure you have someone come in and sit with you. Otherwise, you’ll never know who’s been touching you.”
“A cheery thought to start Saturday off right,” I say, beaming at her. “It’s gonna be fine. You’ll be in and out, and then you can enjoy your time with Andre.”
“Mmm.” She smiles, but she doesn’t seem too convinced. “What are you gonna do today? Sorry I’m bailing on you again.”
“Oh, y’know. I’m gonna sink my teeth into this.” I hold up the book in my hands. “Harcourt delivered my new laptop and a bunch of other stuff last night. I can catch up on my Netflix to-watch list if I want a distraction.”
“Okay, well. Next weekend, we’ll do something cool, I promise.”
When Andre’s black Ford F150 pulls up into the turning circle, she groans like he’s about to cart her off to hell instead of on a romantic weekend away. I smile at the retreating truck until my cheeks hurt, waving until it’s out of sight, and then I’m up and running, heading down the driveway toward my own weekend getaway.
The car’s set back from the road, parked down a narrow gravel track that obscures it from sight. Black, sleek and shining, the ’66 Mustang Fastback looks brand new, even though it’s well over forty years old. Wren leans against the driver’s door, head down, hair hiding his face. The faded grey t-shirt he’s wearing pulls taut over his arms and across his back, his low-slung jeans hanging off his hips. His scruffy, worn boots are missing, replaced by a pair of black Chuck Taylor high tops. A slow smile spreads across his face when he hears my feet crunching on the gravel.
“I was beginning to think you were gonna bail on me,” he says.
He still hasn’t looked at me. He does this a lot—refraining from lifting his head and making eye contact with me until the very last second, until I’m standing right in front of him. He finally looks up at me from under those expressive, dark eyebrows, and my toes curl in my shoes. “How do you even know it’s me?”
“You’re five-foot-four, Little E,” he says, smirking. “You have a very short stride.”
“Rude.”
“True,” he counters, hooking his fingers through the belt loops of my jeans, pulling me toward him. He brings his mouth down on mine, and the birds stop singing in the trees. The air stills. The sun burns a little brighter. When he releases me, he slides his hands up inside my shirt, drawing small circles over my skin with the tips of his fingers. “You’re late,” he rumbles. “I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
I give him a look. One that he smiles at, running his tongue over his bottom lip, wetting it. We trade these silent exchanges often now—my wordless chiding in return for his entertained, half-felt apologies. “You’re not the boss of me,” I remind him.
“Aren’t I?”
He ducks down for another kiss, but I scoot back, out of reach. “Most definitely not.”
Fire ignites in his eyes. “If I tell you to do something, don’t you do it? If I ask you for something, don’t I get it?” he muses.
“Only because I deign to do or give you what you want, Jacobi. There’ll come a day when I won’t feel so accommodating.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to live in fear of that day, then,” he purrs, prowling after me. I shriek, running around the car, but it’s no use. He was right, I’m five four, and my legs are much shorter than his. He catches me with ease, locking his arms around my waist and lifting me off the floor. “In the car with you,” he growls into my ear. “We’ve got places to be.”
He holds me against his side with one arm, freeing up a hand so that he can open the passenger door of the car and bundle me inside. I land with a soft uffff on the leather bench seat. He slams the door behind me before I can play at making a run for it. Two seconds later, he’s sliding himself into the car beside me and turning the key in the ignition.
There’s something pretty fucking spectacular about Wren behind the wheel of a car. I’ve never seen him drive before; Pax always runs the Riot House boys up to the academy whenever the weather’s bad enough to warrant the short drive. Seeing him like this now, his actions sure and confident as he throws the Mustang into gear and hits the gas, turns me on in the weirdest way. The strangest things tend to turn me on now. The act of watching him fix his coffee, popping the lid off his to-go cup, licking the foam off of it before sprinkling the tiniest bit of sugar across the top of his latte and snapping the plastic back on the cup again. The way his eyes flit quickly and surely over the pages of a book when he’s reading something he finds fascinating. The way he absent-mindedly pulls his lip through his teeth when he’s thinking deeply. Fuck, the way he looks in his clothes, and the sight of his bare feet, and the way my whole being vibrates with satisfaction whenever I’m lucky enough to earn a burst of laughter out of him.
All of it makes me want to rip my clothes off and fuck him stupid.
“Did you bring the stuff?” he asks, giving me a quick sidelong look as he pulls out onto the road.
I pat the bag I brought with me, raising my eyebrows. “Yes. Though why the hell you told me to bring a swimsuit, I do not know. The sun might be out, but there’s no way you’re getting me in a lake. The water’s gonna be freezing.”
The corner of his mouth lifts up. “Don’t you worry that pretty little head of yours. I’m not gonna have you freeze to death, Elodie Stillwater.”
We burn down the mountain in record time. He drives even faster than Carina, but I don’t feel the same lurching in my stomach when he takes a corner. Wren handles his car like a pro, braking ahead of the turns and speeding out of them with so much control that I have to press my knees together to stop the heavy, hot ache between my thighs. God, I am such a fucking loser. In town, Wren takes a series of turns through residential streets, avoiding the main roads as he navigates us toward our destination.
“You’re really not gonna tell me where we’re going?” I ask.
He gives his head an exaggerated shake, biting back a smile. “Not on your life. We’re nearly at our first port of call anyway.”
Mere minutes later, we’re pulling into the parking lot of a ramshackle-looking building that looks like a rundown western saloon. The name ‘Cosgrove’s’ is scrawled in peeling once-white, now-grey paint down the side of the heavily weathered lap-siding. Wren pulls up next to a rusting old Buick and kills the engine, looking at me with a weird expression on his face. Takes me a second to recognize it as nerves. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look nervous before.
“Uhh...” He trails off, still deciding what he’s going to say.
“Uhh?”
“This place is mine,” he says.
I jerk my thumb behind me, out of the Mustangs’s rear window. “The bar?”
“Yeah. The bar.”
“What do you mean, it’s yours?”
“I bought it. Last year.”
“How? You were a minor?<
br />
“I have a guy. Edward. He manages my affairs for me. Just signs off on the legal stuff I can’t do. At least he did, but I’m eighteen now, so…”
I shake my head, blinking at him. “With what money?”
He laughs bitterly, scrubbing his hands through his hair and then down over his face. “Urrrrrghhhh. With some of my annual stipend.” He doesn’t sound happy when he says this. He seems frustrated and pretty fucking miserable, actually. “My grandparents were very wealthy people, Elodie. They gave Mercy and me an annual allowance to survive on. January first, every year without fail, an obscene amount of money’s deposited in my checking account, and every year I do my best to burn through the lot before spring.”
Holy hell. I figured, since his father’s just as high up in the military as my own, that his family had money. I didn’t think for a second that he has his own. “And do you manage it? Do you fritter away all of your money by April?” I ask.
He gives me a tight, sharp smile. “Never. I’d probably have to buy a small nation with a massive national debt to clear out my bank account at this point.”
Fuck.
“I have houses in Europe and Australia. I’ve got more stocks and shares than you can imagine. And when investing my money became far too responsible, I just started wasting it. Ridiculous vacations. Boats. Drugs. Lots of drugs,” he says. “And then I got bored of that, too, so I started buying failing businesses that would never make any money and sat back to watch the fireworks when my father found out. Cosgroves’ had the added benefit of being a licensed bar, where I could come and get fucked up whenever I wanted to, so...”
“Right. Makes sense.” I laugh a little nervously. I live so carefully, watching the balance on the American Express my father loads up for me. It’s one of the ways that he likes to remind me that he owns me, and I’ve never been able to forget it. Fall out of his good graces, and that’s it, I’m scraping by on next to nothing until he decides I’ve redeemed myself. Turns out, Wren’s never had to worry about money. He leans forward, resting his chin in his hands, staring out of the windshield into the empty road on the other side of the lot.
“I’d give it all away,” he says morosely. “Only my father would find out and send more. For the Jacobis, money’s an infinite resource, springing from a well that will never run dry. Mercy loves it. And I hate it more than I can say. Ungrateful, right? There are so many people out there struggling to make ends meet, and I’m bitching that I have too much fucking money. God, I even make myself sick. Come on, let’s go.” He explodes from the car, jumping out so quickly that his door’s slammed closed and he’s already opening mine before I register that he’s gone.
The inside of Cosgrove’s is a confusion of mismatched paraphernalia. There are quirky, at-odds items everywhere, ranging from stuffed moose heads to Native American wall tapestries. From old black and white photographs of construction workers sitting on the ledges of half-built skyscrapers in the 1920s, to an English telephone box, sitting in the corner like it just inexplicably fell out of the fucking sky and landed there all by itself. The bar smells of stale beer and sawdust, but it’s a reassuring smell, and even the sticky film that covers the chairs, the tabletops, the bar’s worn counter, and pretty much everything else inside the building doesn’t detract from its weird, otherworldly charm.
Wren stands in the center of the quiet bar with his hands in his pockets, looking around like he just doesn’t know what to do with the place.
“There are customers,” he observes. “We don’t usually have those.”
A short, squat man bullies his way through a set of swinging saloon doors that presumably lead out back, his expression darkening when he sees Wren. “No text,” he grumbles, clattering behind the bar. “I thought we agreed you’d text before you showed up. Can’t just go showing up out of the blue, spyin’ on me,” he grouses.
“I agreed to no such thing,” Wren sighs wearily. “It’s my bar. I can show up whenever I feel like it. And I’m not spying on you, Patterson. We want breakfast. That’s all.”
Patterson squints at him. “We?”
Wren tips his head in my direction, where I’m leaning against the bar. Patterson sees me and lets out a sigh of relief. “Well, at least you didn’t bring those animals down here with you. That’s a small mercy.” He’s talking about Dashiell and Pax, I’m sure. Walking down the length of the bar, the old man stops in front of me, looking me up and down. “Got all your own teeth?” he asks.
I try not to let out a surprised laugh. “Yes, sir.”
“Then you ain’t from town. You got more money than sense and think the world still owes you?”
I shake my head gravely. “No, sir.”
“Then you probably ain’t from that school, either. I don’t know where he found you, pretty girl, but you look too nice for him. My advice? Get out now while you still can.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. I don’t tell him that I am a student at Wolf Hall, though. I feel like he’ll be less enamored with me if I correct his assumption. Wren stands behind me, growling under his breath. “She is too nice for me, but that’s none of your damn business, old man.”
We order a disgusting amount of food and eat it out back on a picnic bench, away from the prying eyes of the four customers in the bar. Once we’re done, Wren ushers me back into the car and tells me we’re leaving Mountain Lakes altogether. For the first time since I arrived at Wolf Hall, I leave the town, and I don’t look back.
30
WREN
Pre-Elodie, my best behavior looked very different to this. I would have reamed Patterson out for his sass, and I would have probably kicked everyone out of the bar, too. There have been so many times since Elodie became my girlfriend that I’ve curbed my anger and not lashed out. It’s gotten to the point that I’m even doing it when she’s not around, plagued by a conscience that I’ve paid little heed to up until now. Behind every action, every thought, and every word lies the nagging question: what would Elodie think of me if she could see me now?
It’s a burden, this shift in attitude. It doesn’t come naturally; it requires constant work, and the new restrictions I’ve placed upon myself chafe like nothing else.
She didn’t ask me to change.
She hasn’t really asked anything of me, but this gnawing desire to make her happy, to make her proud of me, is ever constant. For her, I want to be better than my soiled, rotten soul has ever been before.
The drive is long enough to require music. I turn on the radio, and Elodie immediately changes the station from the grinding hardcore metal I usually opt for to something more mainstream and folky. I hate the hipster craze and all of the Americana crap that came along with it, but for the first time I don’t feel like I’m going to smash my fist into the dashboard when I hear the strummed guitars and the pretentious lilting lyrics. She seems to like it, so I like it, too.
I try not to react when she starts singing, her voice sweet and bright, always a second offbeat or very slightly out of tune, but my insides are rioting. She doesn’t care if she doesn’t hit every single note. She sings for the sheer enjoyment of it, laughing at me giddily when she catches me looking at her out of the corner of my eye. She’s everything good and light in this world and being in her presence is like emerging from a prison cell after so many long, dark years and finally feeling the sun on my face.
I’m so broken and corrupted that it’s always felt like the rough, jagged-edged pieces of me would never fit back together again. I never even dared think such a thought. But somehow, over the past few weeks, Elodie’s been putting me back together and she hasn’t even been trying.
We arrive at the estate just after midday. We’re two short hours from the academy, but we might as well be half a world away. The day feels full of possibility, bursting at the seams with potential. Elodie’s brow furrows with confusion as I drive us through the high metal gates and down the long, sweeping driveway toward the imposing structure up ahead.
>
“Monmouth House?” she says quizzically. “That’s what that plaque just said.”
“Plaque?” I pretend I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Yes. The one that was mounted on that giant sign in front of the gates. Wren, what the hell are we doing here? Are we about to get arrested for trespassing? I can’t get a criminal record. Colonel Stillwater will kill me.”
She can be so melodramatic sometimes. I throw off the jolt of nerves that attacks me when I see the white G-Wagon parked in front of the house, giving myself a stern talking to.
Keep your fucking cool, man.
Since when have you ever been worried about what these fucks think anyway?
I am tense as hell, though. Denying it serves no point whatsoever. This is something very new for me, untrodden ground, and I have no fucking clue how any of this is gonna play out. I pull up alongside the G-Wagon, steeling myself for what’s to come.
“Wren, seriously. This looks like private property. Shouldn’t we—” She looks around, worry in her beautiful blue eyes. “Shouldn’t we find a hotel or something? I don’t think this place rents out rooms.”
“Not by the hour, anyway,” I say, smirking.
I twist the key in the ignition, cutting the engine. Right on cue, Calvin appears in the open front doorway, dressed impeccably as always in Armani. Elodie scoots down in her seat, doing her best to become invisible.
“Wren,” she hisses.
I wind down the window, offering a curt smile to the tall, grey-haired man who approaches the car. “Master Wren!” His greetings have always been warm, his smile always genuine.
I lean my arm on the door, grinning at him. “Hey, Cal. What’s up?”
I’ve known Calvin since I was five years old. He was there when my grandparents died. My mother’s parents. He was the one who consoled me when I skinned my knees. He was the one who used to sneak me cookies after dinner when I was sent to bed without dessert for not finishing my meals.