No, I’ll exult in his touch.
I am in a world of trouble.
Well…more trouble, as if I didn’t already have enough.
* * *
I’m in my car, the radio turned up too loud, as if Bruno Mars could make sense of my imbroglio. Now that I’m away from Carson, reality is catching up to me.
My father has expectations of me, and I know he’ll be sending people after me. There is a limit to his indulgence; he as much as told me so the last time I spoke to him. He sees me living on my own in Detroit as a slap in the face, an insult to his Old World sensibilities. He has no problem with the idea of dragging me back to Chicago and forcing me to play his game. He believes it is my duty to return to Chicago and succumb to their will, my needs and dreams and desires be damned.
Duty is everything to my family; I know that all too well. I did my duty to them all growing up. I wore the hijab. I maintained good grades. I didn’t talk to boys. I attended mosque with Mother. I was obedient and subservient and did everything I was ever told.
And then Father pulled me into his study when I was sixteen and informed me that he had betrothed me to Hassan al-Jabiri.
Betrothed. As in, promised me in marriage to a man I’d never met, to a man whose clan had a long history of feuding with mine. To a criminal. A butcher. A maniac.
Marry Hassan? No way. Not in a million years. That’s what I told Father, that day in his study. I don’t care how rich or powerful he is. I don’t care that he’s the heir to the al-Jabiri clan’s patriarchy. None of that matters to me. He’s a pig, an arrogant, selfish, vicious criminal, and the thought of being his wife…I want to vomit just thinking about it.
I remember Father’s words verbatim: Vomit if you wish, Leila, but when the time comes, you will marry Hassan.
Father never asked me what I want. He never said a word about what he was planning, he just arranged it as if he had the right to marry me off to whomever he wished, as if this was the twelfth century or something. Even Mother knew there was nothing she could do, for she had been betrothed to a man many years her senior whom she neither knew nor loved, and I grew up witnessing the cold and brittle nature of their relationship.
The day we met, Hassan had looked at me with greed and calculation, knowing exactly what he stood to gain when we married. If it had been mere lust in his eyes, I could have dealt with it better, oddly enough. If he had just wanted me for my body, for the sexual consummation of the marriage, I could have understood it, as much as he repulsed me. What made me burn with rage was his greed and cupidity. He didn’t—and doesn’t—just want me for my body, or for who I am. No, he wants me for my inheritance, for my familial name, and for the fact that Father is the patriarch of one of our race’s oldest and most powerful clans.
Then there’s Carson. Handsome, sweet Carson, who knows none of this.
Carson is the last person I should be thinking about, yet he is all that I can see in my mind. His eyes, his body, his hands…they’re hooked into me, and I can’t get them out. I don’t want to. I want them there, and that’s what really worries me.
I pull into my apartment parking lot, thinking of Carson and his lips on mine.
I should have seen the black Mercedes in the parking lot, but I didn’t.
Chapter 3: The Gathering Storm
Carson
Except for a few vivid details, my memory is almost a complete blank. Nothing. Nada. I remember the sweet taste of her lips, cherries, and the feel of something cold, cold like a winter wind. I remember the feel of her body under my hands…soft and warm. I remember talking to her, kissing her, and then there’s an impression of brief, sharp pain, followed by darkness and silence.
My next memory was waking up in a hospital bed, wearing a tiny hospital gown, my mind in overdrive with questions.
How did I get here? What had happened to me?
As soon as I woke up I called the nurse to try to get some answers, asking after Leila, and I was assured I had been admitted alone last night—there was no patient in the hospital named Leila. I was brought in alone, the nurse repeated. Dropped off at the door of the ER, and no, no one remembers who brought me. That’s the kind of detail a busy metropolitan emergency room nurse has no hope of remembering. She asked me if I wanted her to call a friend or family member, but I shut that down—I have no one to call. Then she told me about my injuries and strongly recommended I get some rest.
I’ve already spoken to Captain Archer and explained the best I can, and she told me to take whatever time I need to recover, as well as assuring me she would personally look into what happened last night. I need to know what happened at The Old Shillelagh.
I’ve been going to The Old Shillelagh to drink and think about difficult cases my entire career. It’s quiet, out of the way and I never meet anyone I know, so there’s never anyone to distract me from my thoughts. I get some of my best thinking done in that place.
And then one day, a few months ago, I was there after work when I looked up and there she was. Five-eight and curvy as sin, thick black hair tied back in a neat ponytail, bright brown eyes glittering with intelligence and curiosity, a hint of a smile on her lips that said she knew something she wasn’t telling. Busy hands with short, red-painted nails, no wedding or engagement rings. She was graceful when she moved, light on her feet, drifting, almost as if blown across the room by a secret wind.
She floats, she dances, she twists and flutters.
She’s…ethereal. That’s the word for her. Ethereal.
I was attracted to her from that moment when I first laid eyes on her. Before that, even. I’d heard her voice before I saw her, and something in the way she spoke had resonated within me. It was as if some note in her voice struck a chord in my soul, and that note continues to reverberate every time I look at her.
But mere physical attraction doesn’t explain everything. I’ve been drinking at The Old Shillelagh for years, and there have been plenty other attractive bartenders and waitresses. But none of them have ever made the lasting impression that Leila has. Sure, she makes great conversation, and has this way of making sense of my tangled thoughts. Sure, she’s insanely gorgeous and seems to like me as much as I do her. And sure, she’s kissed me back, not just once, but twice. She even twisted her fingers in my hair and pulled me close to deepen the kiss.
But it’s more than that. More than a physical attraction. More than chemistry. It’s something deeper.
I’m drawn to her. There’s a mystery about her. Her eyes hold secrets that I’m compelled to unearth. Mysteries in the playful winds that always seem to follow her, hidden truths behind the lies she’s told even as her eyes and frayed nerves betrayed her.
My fingers are cramping, and I glance down to see I’m twisting the blanket in my hands, squeezing and bunching the fabric until my knuckles turn white. I force myself to release the thin cotton blanket and try to calm myself.
Every time I try to make sense of what happened in the bar my mind is pulled away to Leila, which only deepens the mystery. Every time I close my eyes I see Leila. I see her hips swaying as she dances behind the bar, making the dull closing ritual into a ballet of beautiful motion. I try to think of something else, but my mind keeps coming back to the moment of our first kiss, my hands on her knees and inching toward her hips, an electric tingle running through me at the feel of her body under my palms, the way her hands brush my skin, lighting some long-banked fire in my gut.
I’m trying to categorize what I feel for her, and I can’t. I’ve had more than a few flings, mostly with badge-chasers who warmed my bed for a night or two or three before we both moved on in mutual, unspoken agreement. I’d been attracted to those women on a superficial level, but I hadn’t really known them. They were just bodies, nothing but flesh and warmth, scratching the proverbial itch. And I haven’t been with a woman like that in quite a while. Something about the one-night-stands left me more and more unsatisfied. I felt pissed off with myself and just generally discontent
with the way my life was going.
If I’m being honest with myself—and when are you more honest with yourself than when you’re stuck in a hospital bed? —those quick sexual encounters never satisfied me. They didn’t even completely satisfy the physical urges. And even the couple of fairly serious girlfriends I’ve had—women I knew fairly well, nice, interesting, good-looking girls from good families—those didn’t satisfy either, and never lasted more than six months, a year at most. The job always put an end to those relationships, for one thing. They’d get tired of being stood up, annoyed with the last-minute phone calls canceling dates. Basically, I think they got tired of playing second fiddle to my career.
And…in truth I was never very invested in those relationships. I hadn’t opened up, hadn’t let them see the real Carson Hale. They didn’t know much about my job—they hadn’t asked and I hadn’t told them anything. If I’m being brutally honest, they had been little more than long-term booty calls.
Which may make me a prick, but I never pretended to feel emotions I didn’t have, and I was always clear that my career would come first.
What am I trying to say? What do I want to tell myself? I feel myself circling around a core truth that I’ve been avoiding.
I’m lonely.
There it is.
No amount of casual sex can chase away the loneliness. When they’re getting dressed, shrugging their bras back on and sitting on the edge of the bed strapping on fancy heels, that’s when I feel the loneliness even more. Sometimes they’d sneak away in the middle of the night, and when I woke up to find them gone I’d feel a combination of relief and guilt…along with a whole lot of emptiness.
Casual sex is like eating Pringles when you’re hungry; no matter how many you eat or how tasty they may be, you’re never satisfied with the empty calories.
Eventually, I stopped bothering, stopped making the effort. I ignored the advances, flirtatious glances, and the bold invitations. I threw myself into work, taking one case after the other and working each of them with relentless ferocity. Work distracted me, sure, but it never filled the underlying emptiness.
Then I met Leila, and without even trying she managed to fill that black hole, somehow. I don’t really know much about her, but she makes me feel less alone, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom. It’s ridiculous and absurd that I should feel this way about someone I barely know, but it’s true. I’ve been trying to convince myself that I’m only physically attracted to her, but I know it’s more than that.
For one thing, I can tell she’s not like the women who just want a guy in a uniform. Those girls are happy to let me take them out and wine-and-dine them, but the dates always end up being little more than an excuse to get into bed as quickly as possible. They were after empty sex as much as I was. At least, that’s how it used to be.
Leila isn’t the kind of woman to be tumbling onto her back after the first date. That much I do know, and I appreciate it about her, and not just for the challenge. I like the fact that it’s not all about the sex. I want her to make me wait. I want the sex to mean something.
* * *
I must have drifted off because the next thing I know the captain is entering my hospital room.
Brushing aside the curtain, Captain Archer takes one look at the darkened room and huffs in amusement. “Brooding again, Carson?” She sets a pair of disposable coffee cups on the moveable table, along with a bag of Einstein Brothers bagels.
“Me? Brooding? Never,” I say with a grin, reaching for the coffee and a chocolate chip bagel.
Archer laughs and pops the lid off her coffee, taking a careful sip and wincing at the scalding heat. “Carson, I’ve known you for six years. I know when you’re brooding.”
I nod. “Yeah, I guess I am,” I admit, between bites. “So, what can you tell me? How the hell did I end up here?”
Archer won’t meet my eyes, and that’s when I know something is amiss. “Well, I’m afraid what little I do know won’t answer too many questions.”
“I figured.” I finished one bagel and reached for another. “Well, out with it already.”
Captain Lisa Archer is the closest thing I have to a family. She’s a complicated woman, tough as nails yet still feminine, a black woman born and raised in inner-city Detroit. She started her police career at the bottom, as a patrol officer, and clawed her way to the top, fighting sexism, racism, corruption, and fraternalism every step of the way, but she’s never forgotten her roots, no matter how high up the ranks she goes.
She sets a manila file folder on my lap and points at a series of photographs. They show what had been a building and was now merely rubble, a pile of toppled brick and twisted metal, charred wood and smashed glass. I flip through the photos quickly at first, then again more slowly, looking for details. One photograph shows an intact brick wall with what looks like a broken length of rebar sticking out from the brickwork. The rebar is embedded into the brick, looking a lot like a steel javelin thrown by a giant. The whole scene looks like the aftermath of a tornado.
“I can’t make sense of this, Captain,” I grumble. “There’s fire damage in a few of these shots, but then it also looks like a tornado hit the building. What is this I’m looking at?”
“That’s what’s left of The Old Shillelagh,” she says. “We can’t figure out what the hell happened either. It doesn’t make any sense. It does look like a tornado hit it, but there’s no damage to any other buildings in the area, and the weather last night was clear and calm. It was a totally quiet July night. No wind, no rain, no thunder, nothing but clear skies. There’s a lot of fire and water damage and, thank god, no reported casualties. No other buildings touched. Like, not even a speck of mortar out of place. Yet the Shillelagh? Well, you see the photos. It’s totalled. Leveled down to rubble. But then there’s you, whacked on the back of the head, and looking like the building fell on top of you.”
“What about Leila?”
“Who?”
“The bartender? The one I was—the bartender working when all this happened.”
Archer catches my slip. “The one you were what?”
I try to cover, “The one I was talking to, just before whatever happened, happened.”
Archer rolls her eyes. “Yeah, ’cause that’s what you were gonna say.” She shakes her head and waves the subject away with a sweep of her long fingers. “Anyway, we spoke to her, but she claims not to know anything. Says she has no idea how the building was destroyed.”
“Do you believe her?” I ask. Connections are forming in the back of my mind, but I refuse to examine them.
Not yet, least.
“Not really,” Archer says with a shrug. “But there’s no evidence of any kind of a crime. You were with her, and she says it must have been a robbery, but the building is so damaged that it’s impossible to tell if anything was stolen. I personally think she’s hiding something, but I don’t know what, and I got no proof of anything at all, regardless of my feelings. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for. This is one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever encountered.”
I can only nod and sip my coffee. It’s all too strange. Too much like the al-Mansur case in far too many ways, and I have no intention of getting caught up in another case like that one.
Captain Archer is staring at me intently, examining me. “You like her, don’t you? The bartender?”
I shrug, not wanting to talk about her.
“Look, Hale,” she said. “You’re allowed to like her. Something weird happened, sure, but there’s no conflict of interest that I can see. God knows you need a girlfriend. You’re working too hard, you need something to look forward to ’sides one case after another. If you like her, go after her. That’s my motherly advice for today.”
I wish it were that simple. I’ve got a feeling it will be anything but.
With instructions to take it easy and to come back to work only when I’m ready, the captain leaves.
Not even an hour after Captain Archer le
aves, Leila shows up, looking as toned and fit and sexy as ever. We talk, I resist asking questions, and she avoids providing any answers. The whole time she’s here I feel a thousand questions boiling in the back of my head, demanding I ask her about what happened. But before I can do that, through flirting banter, we talk about our first kiss in the bar, and Leila seems to think she kissed me first, when I know for a fact it was the other way around. Her tongue flicks out to lick her lips, and I can’t help but remember how her tongue had tentatively touched mine in that first kiss.
All my questions are buried by her proximity. Her lips are only centimeters from mine now, and I feel a sense of reckless abandon wash through me. I can’t help what comes next, and I don’t try to stop it. Resistance is pointless. Her lips are so close, her eyes huge and dark and waiting, and her hand is in mine, and it’s just a matter of tilting my head just so, and our lips will touch, in the briefest of caresses.
She tastes of cherry lip balm again, and something else now, a slushy maybe, frozen Coke. Her hand drifts up to the back of my head, and there’s something so tender, so affectionate and familiar about the gesture. It sets me on fire, makes me crazy with desire for her. Her tongue brushes against mine, a questing touch, and the fire becomes a blaze.
I forget everything except Leila, except her lips and her hands, the silk-soft skin of her face beneath my fingers. Wrapping my arms around her body, I touch her back and the nape of her neck, and she arches into my touch.
And then she tenses and pulls away, although I can tell it took some effort. Her eyes are deep and dark, full of secrets and mysteries. There’s so much hidden behind her gaze.
I have trouble tearing my eyes from hers, but the questions about the explosion—or whatever it was that happened and why I am here, in the hospital—are boiling up inside me, and I know I won’t be able to contain them for long. The cop in me is just too strong.
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