The Way We Burn

by M. Leighton

“She’s a lot like that actually. Only she’s allergic to cats.”

  “Charming.”

  “She really is. You’ll like her. I promise. Don’t pay annny attention to what I just told you. She’s pretty hard to resist. You’ll see.”

  All I can think is that I hope to God I won’t see. The last thing I need is to get between Poppy and Simone, to cause friction there.

  “Well,” I begin, rolling over to pin Poppy’s body between the mattress and me. I pause longer than I intended, loving the feel of her beneath me, every curve and soft place pressed against me just where it should be. “What shall we do now?”

  Her grin makes my groin tighten. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had sex in the last eighteen hours or so. No too bad for a thirty-six year old.

  Later, we order pizza, Poppy’s second favorite food, she explains. We sit on the couch—me with my legs on the coffee table, Poppy with her legs draped over mine—and we eat straight from the box, halfway watching Casablanca again, which I bought for her right after I took back the one I rented for her. We make love on the couch. Then on the floor. Then we shower together and make love in bed before falling into a fitfully fatigued sleep.

  Some time in the night, I’m awakened by the dull vibration of my phone. It takes me a minute to find it. It’s wedged under my pillow. I flick open the screen and see a text from Winston, letting me know he’s found another link on the dating service page we’re looking at and the link does, in fact, lead to a site located deeper in the web. As deep as it can go—the dark web.

  Hazily, I think to myself that I hope we’re on the right track toward finding out what’s happening to the shallow pool of serial killers and rapists we’ve been trying to track down. More importantly for me, however, is the possibility of uncovering information that might lead me to Carter Finch. That is the real case I’m working. It’s just that I’m the only one who knows that.

  I close out of his message and see that I’ve missed some texts, too. All from an unknown number. I swipe across the first one with my thumb. Unknown number or not, I instantly realize the identity of the sender.

  Simone.

  Three still images dominate my screen. One is of Simone standing in front of the bed, her fingertips pressed to my bare chest. One is of her straddling me, nude. And one is zoomed in to her red lips closed over the head of my dick.

  I raise my head and glance left, wondering where she’d set up the phone to film us. Probably the vanity. It’s positioned about right, and it would’ve been so easy for her to come in and set that up while I was sleeping. When I came to my senses, I left so abruptly that she probably just waltzed right over there and grabbed her phone, smiling the whole way.

  I can almost picture that smile. Damn it.

  I delete the photos quickly, glancing at Poppy sleeping in the bed beside me. I debate for the second time whether or not to tell her, to get it over with and get it out in the open. But, again, I reject the notion. I don’t want to call down that kind of trouble, don’t want to ask for it. Bring it on when there’s a chance it could come to nothing. Because it will mean trouble. I’m certain of it.

  No, I have to wait it out, see what Simone’s game is. If she keeps this just between us, I can ride it out. No harm, no foul. Just some aggravation on my part. At least it wouldn’t hurt Poppy, though.

  If she doesn’t keep it between us…

  I swallow a growl. That doesn’t even bear thinking about. But it would be on her. Hopefully she cares more about Poppy than to purposely hurt her. Of course, she did come to me in Poppy’s bed, so I may be giving her too much credit.

  Still, I’d just hate to open up a can of worms that would’ve stayed closed if I hadn’t given in. So I won’t. I’m going to bide my time, see what happens. Deal with it later.

  With that thought racing through my head on a loop, I try to find my way back to sleep.

  The same concerns are still with me when I wake nearly four hours later. I check my phone the instant I open my eyes, praying for nothing more from Simone.

  Thank God the screen is blank. Blissfully blank.

  Poppy is gone, but there’s a note by the bed reminding me of her early shift today and promising me she’ll see me this evening. I stretch my arms over my head, grinning at the pleasant soreness around the muscles of my chest. We’ve had a lot of sex. A lot. In that short period of time, I’m sure I’ve used muscles that I haven’t used in quite a while.

  And it feels good.

  A shadow falls across the room. Not from outside, but from within, within me . I allow myself a minute or two to miss my old bed, the place I called home for so many years, the wife who made it so. My Carly…

  I don’t allow myself much time to wallow. Instead, I give one deep sigh, fling off the covers, and make my way to the bathroom. I emerge a few minutes later, dressed and ready to head back to my apartment. It’s as I pass Simone’s open bedroom door and see her laptop, open but shut off, resting on the corner of her bed, that I decide to be nosey. Maybe I can get some dirt on her that will encourage her to keep her photos to herself. Or at least delete any copies she might’ve downloaded to her computer.

  I walk into the space, taking a moment to appreciate how different it is from Poppy’s room. Poppy’s room is decorated in a blend of dusty purples and golds, while Simone’s is painted black and gray with bright jewel-tone accents everywhere. I note the scent of her perfume, something dark and musky, when I sit on the edge of the bed and take up her laptop.

  It’s password protected, but not too hard to crack. I browse through the more obvious things, like her Internet search history and her most recently viewed documents. Lots of clothes and wigs sites (which explains the perfectly purple hair), a few innocuous diary entries about dreams. Nothing really noteworthy.

  A blog is open, but minimized to the task bar. When I pull it up, it’s like a naughty woman’s diary, something hokey and predictable. The graphics are similar to caricatures, the main one being what looks like a dominatrix. I look into some general information about the site, more out of curiosity than suspicion. That’s when I see how cleverly and effectively Simone is protecting her identity, right down to cloaking her server and routing searches through multiple modems all across the world.

  That’s a lot of protection.

  For a blog.

  Pretty sophisticated stuff for a stripper.

  I go back to the site’s main page, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I mean, what guy hasn’t visited some hot, sexy dominatrix sites in his life? We all have, and at first glance, this appears to be nothing more than all the other ones out there.

  Until I happen to roll my mouse across the dominatrix’s throat and notice a momentary dimming of the screen. If I were just a regular visitor to the site, I doubt I would’ve thought anything of it.

  But I’m not.

  I’m an FBI agent. I know what’s out there. I know what kinds of monsters lie beneath the surface of the World Wide Web. I know what lurks in the deep waters of the dark web.

  I retrace the action and click when the screen dims. For an instant, I see another screen pop up then disappear. I click again. Same thing happens. Most people would probably think it was a glitch in the programming, a ghost in the code, something innocuous.

  But, again, I’m not most people. I know better. I’ve seen this type of thing before.

  This is a portal.

  I’ve worked for the FBI for a lot of years and a big portion of crime has taken to the dark web these days. For that reason, most of us are at least minimally versed in the broad aspects of it.

  But this…this is something far beyond broad. Simone is into something sophisticated. And private. And illegal. No one does innocent business on the dark web. There would be no reason to. No, this deepest layer is for those who have something to hide. And who deal with others who have something to hide.

  I take the laptop into the living room where I can apply myself to at least getting to the p
assword screen. When I finally do, I realize that the encryption to get me beyond it is far outside anything I’ll be able to crack on my own. I take out my phone and note the particulars of the site and the address, then I forward it all over to Winston. If anyone can get me in there, it’s him.

  I return the laptop to the exact condition in which I found it—same screens up, same ones minimized—and I replace it, right down to the angle it was sitting at on the corner of Simone’s bed. I take a quick look through her closet and her drawers, not surprised when I find nothing suspicious. No, she’s obviously smart enough not to keep anything incriminating in visible places. Or maybe not here at all. If she’s skillful enough to cover her tracks that well online, in an age where most virtual things are exceptionally hackable, she’s skillful enough to do the same in her real life. The question is: What the hell is she doing?

  What the hell is she hiding ?

  15

  Poppy

  I rake my fingers up Noah’s bare chest and back down again, my knuckles skimming the sheets that are balled up around his hips. I worked my normal evening shift, but we were slammed so I was almost an hour late getting home. Noah came straight over and dove into me like a burning man diving into a pool.

  Not that I’m complaining. I just wish I knew more about what he was thinking and feeling, especially during a time like this—when he seems almost desperate for me. Sometimes I get the impression he’s afraid I’ll disappear. Thoughts like that always take me back to his past, to what’s happened to him to make him the way he is. Who he lost and how it happened.

  For me, I’m always desperate for him. He feels like the missing piece of my heart, of my soul. Of my life . Like the whole thing has just been a cardboard cutout of an existence until he showed up to make it real, make it three dimensional. Make it a life worth living.

  I don’t tell him that, of course. What little I know about men seem to be the universal truths, such as don’t suffocate them and never let them know how much you care. At least not until they go first.

  I’ve failed in at least one of those areas already, but I’m trying to course correct, if that’s possible.

  So I give Noah his space. I don’t cling and I try not to gush and gaze lovingly at him too often. It’s hard, though. I’d like nothing better than to tell him at every opportunity that I adore him and that I can’t picture my life without him now. That I don’t want to.

  “What’s going through that beautiful head of yours?” he asks, his voice a sleepy rumble.

  I glance up to find him looking down at me, a small smile curving his perfect, manly mouth. “Not a lot.”

  Lie.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  I give that some thought. My answer isn’t as cut and dried as the one I give him. “Yeah, I am.”

  “Let’s get some sleep then.”

  Noah, kisses my forehead and then leans over to snap off the bedside lamp. Within seconds his breathing is deep and even. That’s another universal truth: Men can go right to sleep after sex. It’s better than any sleeping pill that researchers can create in a lab. Us women, on the other hand, sometimes it works in the exact opposite way.

  Especially when it involves matters of the heart.

  That’s why I’m still awake when he starts to toss and turn, to mumble in his sleep. I can’t make out the first parts, but he seems in pain. Then I hear a word. A name. Plain as day. And it makes my heart sink.

  “Carly,” he moans, his voice a window into his heartbreak. It’s so clear, so obvious it makes me hurt for him.

  And for myself.

  “Please come back to me, baby. Please. I can’t…I can’t…” His words recede into unintelligible mumbling again except for one phrase that he utters just before he settles back into a calmer state. “I can’t do this without you.”

  I don’t have to know who Carly is, or was, to know that he loved her. That he probably still does. I can hear it in his voice. That’s when it becomes apparent to me that I’m going to have to ask him about her. The time has come. If there’s no hope for me, for us, I need to know before I’m in so deep I can’t recover.

  Chances are, though, I already am.

  16

  Noah

  M y sleep is becoming more and more fitful, my dreams more and more bothersome.

  Disturbing.

  Haunting.

  I come awake with a start, confused for a few seconds about where I am. It’s harder to orient myself in the dark, but I finally make it to coherency. I’m in Poppy’s room, at her apartment, and she’s sleeping in the curve of my body.

  I move to turn onto my back, shifting my feet beneath the covers. Something scratchy, gritty almost, crunches and grinds against my skin.

  “What the hell?” I mutter, sitting up and tossing back the covers.

  I slide out of bed, trying to move quietly so I don’t disturb Poppy. I keep pushing the sheet down until I find the offending substance. What I discover doesn’t give me answers. It gives me more questions.

  I can see the dark particles. They stand out in sharp relief against the pale yellow of the sheet. There’s dirt in the bed.

  But why?

  I think back to the previous evening. Poppy was clean when she came in. She took her shoes off in the living room, so I know it wasn’t something like that. Mine were off, too.

  Curious, I ease back the covers and follow the dirt. There isn’t much on my side. Just enough to wake me, evidently. But as I work my way toward Poppy, I find more.

  I walk around to her side of the bed and pull the top sheet off her as gently as I can. The pale skin of her legs is dotted with what looks like dried mud. It gets thicker as it goes down, ending with her feet being practically covered in the stuff. There’s dirt all over the bottom sheet and at the foot of the bed, just like there is on my side.

  What the hell?

  As I’m replacing the sheet over her legs, Poppy stirs. I go perfectly still, hoping she won’t wake up. But she does.

  She rubs sleepily at her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  I pull the covers up quickly and turn like I’m heading toward the bathroom. It’s too late, though. She’s awake.

  “What were you doing?” she asks, stopping me in my tracks.

  I pivot to face her, cornered now. There’s no point in beating around the bush now, so I go with being blunt. “There’s dirt in the bed. It woke me up. There’s some on your side, too. Any idea where it came from?”

  Poppy sits up and yanks back the sheet, flicking at a dried droplet on her knee. She starts to brush the debris off her skin and out of the bed, finally getting up and tearing the sheet all the way back. “Damn it, Simone.”

  I stand silently and wait for her to go on.

  “What a shitty prank!” she calls loudly, as though she’s hoping Simone will hear her.

  “A prank?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” She grumbles as she moves. “She does stuff like this sometimes. She thinks it’s funny. I do not.” She keeps sweeping her hand over the sheets, pushing dirt off into the floor. “Because it’s not! It’s not fun-ay ,” she says, raising her voice again so Simone can hear her.

  “Why would she do something like this?”

  “With Simone, it’s hard to tell. Maybe she thought it would be hilarious to humiliate me in front of you. She knows how much it would—” She stops herself midsentence. “Never mind. It’s just Simone. What can I say?”

  Poppy starts to pull the sheets from the mattress, angrily stripping the bed. I move to help her, putting the comforter on top of the dresser until we can get some clean sheets back in place. When she goes for a new set, I ask, “Where’s the vacuum? I’ll get this dirt out of the floor.”

  “It’s with the sheets in the linen closet. I’ll bring it.”

  She does, and I vacuum as she puts sheets on the bed. I’m just finishing up when she announces she’s going to take a shower. Her tone is flat and her expr
ession is glum. She seems embarrassed and angry about the situation, as well she should be, and I feel the need to make her feel better, to do something to cheer her up.

  “Wait,” I say, reaching out to grab her wrist before she can escape into the bathroom. “You have two choices here. Either you let me come and help get you clean, my own dirty way, or I’m going out to get us waffles and we can eat when you get out.”

  “Waffles? In the middle of the night?”

  “Is there a better time for them?”

  She shrugs. “Good point. And waffles do sound good, but…”

  During her pause, with her eyes cast down and her bottom lip pulled between her teeth, I ease up closer to her. “But are waffles better than the things I could do to you in the shower? That’s the question,” I tease, nipping at her chin with my teeth, trying my damnedest to make her feel better.

  “I don’t know. I mean waffles have syrup .”

  “If that’s all that’s holding you back, give me thirty seconds. I can give you syrup, too. In fact, I’d be happy to feed it to you, lick it off you, let you lick it off me. Choose one or choose all of the above.” Still she hesitates, so I add, “Where else can you find so many tantalizing options?”

  Her lips begin to curve. “Where indeed?”

  “So deal?”

  She pretends to ponder for another few seconds, narrowing her eyes and rolling them from side to side. “Deal!” she finally pronounces, pulling my mouth down to hers for a kiss that almost makes me forget about the dirt.

  Almost.

  17

  Poppy

  I miss Noah coming in to the diner. I miss seeing him in that back booth. I miss knowing he’s watching me as I work.

  But.

  I understand why he doesn’t. After what he did with those robbers a few weeks ago, he’s still a bit of a celebrity around Bud’s, albeit a reluctant one. He doesn’t really like the attention, which actually makes him even more wonderful in my eyes.