Prince Charming

by CD Reiss

  “I get him.”

  “I like that answer.”

  “Thank you.”

  Why isn’t he worried? Why isn’t he reticent in the slightest? Why isn’t he denying who he is or anything he has done? He seems delighted.

  “You’re going to go far in Cyber Crime, dodger.” He squeezes my cheeks until my lips part. “Again. Say ah.”

  My mouth is barely all the way open before he has the head of his dick in it. I take it, groaning deep in my throat when I can, breathing every few strokes. His skin is slick and soft, throbbing underneath. The lollipop is jammed into the side of his mouth, teeth tight on the stick. When he jerks away with a gasp, I know he’s close.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “What?”

  He plucks out the lolly and bends to give me a strawberry-and-sugar kiss.

  “You almost had me,” he says, pulling me up. We’re both standing, looking onto each other’s eyes. “I’d love to come in your mouth, on your body. I want to mark you with me, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?” I sound like a petulant child because I feel like one. I desperately want to be marked with him, by him. Yet I know what’s stopping him. “You’re legit now. Right? That’s what you said.”

  He drops his gaze, pressing his lips together. I can sense he’s keeping himself from saying the first words that come to mind.

  “I know you,” he says finally. “Better than you think and more than is fair. I know what I am to you. I’m a thrill for a woman who forgot how to seek thrills. But you’re not that to me. I don’t just fancy your ass in a tight skirt. I want you to have everything you ever dreamed, and you can’t if you’re with me. You understand that, right? I’ll sabotage everything you’re doing. I won’t mean to do it, but I will. How can I live with myself? How can you live with it?”

  He takes my chin and tilts my face up to his. I can smell the strawberry sweet on his breath. It matches my own. “You think you can because we’re in a bloody pantry with our trousers down. How long will it be before I’m a liability? You’ll be asked to hunt me down or I’ll be your informant. Or someone I know will feel you breathing down their neck. And here’s the rub, darling. I’ll do whatever I need to to make you happy or to protect you, and they’re not always going to be the same thing.”

  “What if I didn’t take the promotion?”

  Did I really mean what I was saying? Would I really refuse the transfer to stay in Doverton? I hadn’t thought about it enough to know for sure, but it was a very real possibility.

  For me, it was an option. The idea made him chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You think I’d allow that?”

  “I can wait for a spot in CID.”

  He kisses me, but it’s a consolation prize.

  I gently push him away. “Don’t you do this. Don’t you use this as an excuse to run away from me. If you don’t want me, then just say so.”

  His expression flares into anger and his grip on my jaw gets tight. “You think I’m standing here with my balls out to fuck with you? I want to fill your mouth and your tight little cunt with me like I want nothing else, but I can’t lie to you. I can’t fuck you now and listen to you talk about quitting afterward.”

  “I’ll do as I like, Alpha.”

  He’s as much as admitted to being Alpha Wolf, but I’ve never acknowledged it by using the name, and we both stiffen as if I dropped a bomb.

  Clarity is a powerful thing. Clarity put into words is a sawed-off shotgun two inches from a target. It blows resistance away. It turns barriers into hot shrapnel.

  “I want you to fuck me, Alpha Wolf. I want you to fuck me like you’ve wanted to kill every fed that ever got close. Fuck me like I’m reading you your rights.”

  He yanks my hair so hard, my lungs empty in a single breath. “That’s a lot of saucy talk from a special agent.”

  “You have the right to remain silent.” It’s hard to say that without a smile, but I manage.

  He indulges in what I deny myself, letting an evil grin spread across his face. “I have the right to fuck you unconscious.”

  He pushes me into the shelves. Two cans of beans clop to the floor as our hips meet. His cock is pushed up against my belly. I wrap a leg around his waist, and he holds it there with one hand while he guides himself into me with the other. I stretch, angle myself, push into him until he’s buried inside me. He pulls out halfway and thrusts forward with a grunt. More cans fall. Pumpkin pie. Artichokes. Pitted black olives. The cabinets shake as he pounds me. Paper towels fall. I’m pinned against a shelf of pasta and crackers, his fingers digging in my ass cheeks. It hurts. God, it all hurts and feels so good.

  “This what you want?” he growls.

  “You have the right to fuck me harder.”

  He obliges, wrapping my other leg around him and thrusts slower and harder. Another stack of cans rattles, falls, rolls off the shelf. I’m too blind to see what they are. My body swells around him, hungry for more, more, more. I want him deeper than physically possible. So deep he wipes me into the ether, into invisibility, into nonexistence.

  When I come, he covers my mouth. I scream into his palm, shaking over and over, completely lost. Invisible.

  I’m made of jelly. My limbs have lost the will to function. My tears fall over my cheeks and onto his hand. He slides it away.

  “Hang on to me.”

  I wrap my arms around shoulders, sharing the weight between them and the legs I have curled around his waist. He pulls out and with one hand, he fists his throbbing cock; with the other, he lifts my shirt. In three strokes, he’s exploding all over my belly, and I think this is me. I’ve done this. He’s so beautiful when he comes that I feel like an artist stepping back to see a finished masterwork.

  He breathes his last orgasmic breath and kisses me, putting his arms around my lower back to hold me up.

  I reach behind him, grabbing a horizontal roll of paper towels that’s half hanging off the edge of the shelf. He sets me down, snaps the paper towels away, and unspools a few sheets.

  “Thank you,” I say as he cleans me off.

  “The pleasure is all mine.”

  When I’m clean I let my shirt drop, and we both pick up our pants. The floor is littered with groceries, like flowers in a nonperishable garden. I pick up a can of beans in each hand.

  “You knew,” I say.

  He slides a box of pasta back onto the shelf. “Knew what?”

  “Don’t play coy.”

  He doesn’t play coy. He plays silent. He plays with a knowing smile. He plays a long pause punctuated with the sounds of shelf-stocking like a musical instrument.

  “Keaton.”

  “Cassie.”

  He looks down at me, lit by the street light coming through the tiny window. It’s a little blue in the depths, a little yellow at the highlights, cutting to black at his dimples and the ridges under his eyebrows, tilting a box of Cheerios against the edge of the shelf. He knew. He fucking knew.

  “You knew I was going to be sent to Cyber Crime.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I trust you. But I don’t believe you.”

  “I came here to tell you I’ll be away for a few days. Maybe a week.” He slides the box on the shelf until it pops against the back wall and bounces back a quarter of an inch, then he picks up crackers and a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips. The plastic crunches at a billion decibels. “There’s nothing else going on.”

  I take the chips and put them on a low shelf. He puts the crackers where they go with a flawless sense of order. I scan the floor. There’s nothing left to pick up. There’s nothing left to do in this tiny room but leave it.

  He puts his arms around me, and I sink into the warmth and solidness of him. I shouldn’t. I know that. But he fits into me, and I fit into him so easily that it must be law of physics that draws me close to him.

  39

  keaton

  I said I was going to be away for a few da
ys as if it was nothing. As if I had some easy business to manage, not that I was going to Salton Sea to track down Keyser Kaos. Not that the success of this mission would determine whether I could stay with her or not. Not that I could be killed.

  All I want her to know is I won’t be around, not that I’m leaving in the hopes that I’m protecting her and whatever we have together.

  This woman means more to me than the goals I’ve been reaching for, and after the lie of omission in the pantry, the lies about her promotion won’t stand. I have to relieve the pressure.

  She’s walking me to my car as this unravels. It’s like a net coming loose. Or ropes that bound me suddenly unwinding themselves until I can move, then breathe. Soon they’ll be so loose I can walk away.

  Which is why I can’t continue the lie.

  “About the promotion.” But I can’t finish so fast. I’ve stuck my foot in it now. It’s the truth, or nothing.

  She is calm when she responds, closing her jacket around her, waiting a full two seconds before opening her mouth. “What about it?”

  “They weren’t going to put you in criminal. They weren’t going to put you anywhere. And before you ask me how I know, trust me, I know because I know people. You deserve to be where you are, and you need to go where you’re going. And don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like it’s cheating. Because it’s not. This is the way the world works for everybody. Everybody.”

  She opens her mouth to say something, then snaps it closed, waiting another two seconds before speaking.

  “What exactly did you do?” Her breath makes clouds in front of her face, giving me the impression that she’s breathing fire.

  I have to answer. I’m trapped now. Trapped on this street, trapped in her gaze, and trapped in the truth.

  “I know you think that you never got caught lifting wallets and being bait for your mother’s con jobs. And it’s true, you don’t have a record. But they know. They know about your mother, and they assume that you’ve inherited some of her art. Criminal justice and counterterrorism is full of Boy Scouts. You’d never get in. Cyber Crime is a totally different game. All I did was move your application from a place where it was toxic, to a place where it would be seen by people who would appreciate it.”

  The air has gone from heavy, to heavy and wet. Cold dewdrops collect on her cheeks as she looks at the ground with wet lashes, thinks a good long time as the mist gathers on the ends of her raven hair.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Someday I’ll tell you.”

  “You just hacked it and moved the application over?”

  “More or less. There were other steps. You got the job based on your qualifications.”

  “I’m uncomfortable with this.”

  “You said you trusted me, but you didn’t believe me.” She turns away, billowing a breath, then turns back so I can look her in the eye when I answer. “I want you to believe me, but it’s your trust I treasure.”

  Her sigh is long and profound, with a deep, sad resignation. “Will you be back before I move to California?”

  “Will you be here for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll be back before you know it.”

  I expressed my hope rather than my certainty.

  40

  cassie

  Nana took the news quite well. She seemed more excited than I was, opening her closet as if she was throwing open French doors after a month of rain.

  “Everyone was moving to California.” She throws clothes on her double bed and tells the same story I’ve heard a hundred times. “All the girls. They thought they’d find nice boys in California, and maybe they did. I had Barry the motherfucker and your mother in my belly. So we went where the jobs were. Detroit, Michigan.” The story took on a new, never-heard-before emphasis on the Golden State. “All the other girls were moving to Los Angeles, but me? If I had my druthers, it definitely would’ve been San Francisco.”

  Whatever druthers are, they must’ve been in short supply back then, and I must have plenty. I may not always be happy and I may not always get what I want, but taking her to California with me gives my life meaning.

  She starts packing almost immediately and backwardly, putting the mementos away first, piling unidentifiable knick-knacks into the middle of the room.

  I almost trip on a box of old bills. “We can hire movers, you know.”

  “Why would you do that? Something wrong with your arms?”

  Midwesterners. Defining do-it-yourself for four generations.

  “I don’t want you straining yourself.” I try to get a box out of her arms, but she won’t let it go.

  “It’s heavy.”

  “Fine if you want,” she says. “Put it over there and grab that red box on the top shelf if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. That’s the problem. Are these boxes of puzzles?” I hold up a box with a bowl of fruit. “Are you bringing boxes of puzzles you’ve already done to California?”

  “That one’s important.” She snatches it away. “It’s the one I was doing when you got into the academy. It goes in the keep pile.”

  “You moved puzzles from Flint to Doverton? How did I not notice this?”

  “You used to not question me this much.”

  She puts the fruit bowl puzzle in the stack under the window, then attacks the pile of puzzles in the corner and slides one out of the middle with enough dexterity to keep the tower from falling.

  “This one too.” She hands it to me, running her finger down the stack.

  I take it. It’s a generic mountain landscape. “Why?” I’m practically whining.

  “That’s the one I was doing when you broke up with that idiot. Mark the idiot.” She pulls out a slim box and hands it back. “This was the day you fractured your elbow playing volleyball.”

  I take it. Wild horses running over the plains. I worked on it with one arm in silence with her, passing the time I wanted to be out with my friends on small victories.

  “Junior year.” I run my fingers over it. Every piece snapping together made me a little less miserable.

  Grandma’s stacking them in my arms now. Pumpkins. Orange leaves. A cold blue Autumn sky.

  “What’s this one?”

  “That time you weren’t pregnant.”

  “Jesus, Nana, I was eighteen.”

  “And you almost killed me.” She hands back a swirling mandala. “The last time we visited your mother.”

  As I take the mandala puzzle, my sinuses fill and my lungs squeeze tight and release, forcing out a sob. I say something I didn’t know I believed, but it exits me with the same uncontrolled velocity as the sobs. “I miss her.”

  Grandma lays a family of bunnies on top of the pile in my arms. “I know, sweetheart. I do too. But I have you and you have me. So we have her.”

  She squeezes my shoulder and looks me in the eye. Hers are clear, grey-blue, darker than mine and lighter than Keaton’s. They’re clear. I think of her as old, but she’s not. She’s just got years on me.

  “She taught me so much.”

  “She did.”

  “She was teaching me how to survive without her. She was doing her best.”

  The puzzles aren’t heavy, so I let Grandma take the stack from me and lay it next to the keepers.

  She hugs me as I cry. I hold her as tightly as I can, putting my head on her bony shoulder. She understands me. She believes in me. There’s no replacing her in my life.

  “All right,” she says when I pull away and wipe my eyes with my wrists. “Let me get to work here.”

  “Keep them all,” I say. “Every one of them.”

  She picks up a puzzle of the White House. “This is the one that nice man did with me.”

  “He’s not so nice.” Correcting her is completely counterproductive. Why shouldn’t she think he’s a nice man? The fact that she’s completely wrong notwithstanding, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, except it feels as if she’s ste
aling from me what I find most attractive about him.

  “I’m sure you’re right, not such a nice boy. I was a young woman once. I understand the appeal. But I’ll tell you the same thing I told your mother.”

  I move all the puzzles to one place. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her not to get knocked up. Fat lot of good that did.”

  I laugh. She loves me. I’m the product of my mother not listening to a word Nana ever said, and I know she’s glad of it. We both are.

  41

  keaton

  The trailer stinks of men. Three of us in an enclosed space, the processor tower set inside the shower stall. We’re in the deserts of the Salton Sea in January, home of survivalists, meth cookers, and fugitives. We got lucky when we found Keyser in this little trailer park, but the conditions are terrible. No wireless for miles. Below freezing at night. Fuckhot in the day. Cassie’s a thousand miles and a week away. I’m tired and dirty. We haven’t left this tin can in six days. With Keyser and a handful of cronies in the next trailer over, we don’t risk being seen in the daylight.

  “I don’t think we’re close enough,” Hodgekins grumbles, crouched at the base of the four-foot-wide, five-foot-high antenna, twisting two wires together. He’s the antenna guy. Jackson’s managing the satellite connection. I’m the one who knows how tempest emissions work.

  I’m not here for my comfort. I’m here for my life and Cassie’s. But my God, we just took the cabinets out to get the antenna closer to the trailer wall.

  “We could just put it outside,” I say without looking away from the monitor. Tempest emission decoders pick up delicate signals from machines in range and feed the contents of a neighbor’s screen onto the hacker’s, no matter the encryption or security. They’re always wonky, and this setup is no different.

  “Or knock on Keyser’s fucking door and ask him what’s on his screens.” Jackson’s monitoring the satellite connection, which is shite. His voice is muffled past the headphones I’m wearing to catch the aural peaks and valleys of the emissions.