by Geneva Lee
“Yes, and that’s where things went wrong.”
She frowns, carefully setting down her wine glass. “How?”
“Remember the guy at the hotel?” I ask.
She nods, licking her lips. It’s what she’s been waiting for, and I can only hope she looks at me the same way after she knows.
“He was also in my unit. He was our fourth. As close a friend as Jack and Luca. His name’s Noah Porter.”
“And you aren’t friends anymore,” she guesses.
“That would be an understatement. Noah’s FBI now.”
There’s a long pause. She knew this was coming. Adair is too smart not to see the truth that’s sitting in front of her. That I’m a bad guy. That my money came stained with blood. She might not know the details, but she gets the big picture. That’s not going to stop her from making me paint it for her, though.
“And why is that a problem? Why did you hide from him? Call Luca?”
“Because the FBI, or rather Noah, has been trying to nail our asses to the wall since Afghanistan, and he’s come damn close a few times. It’s his version of payback.” I search her eyes for a sign of how she’s taking all this.
“Why would he want revenge?”
“Because the other three of us got him hauled in front of a disciplinary committee. He probably would have been discharged like the rest of us if we hadn’t sworn he wasn’t involved.”
“Involved in what?” she asks slowly.
“We’d been there a couple of months, trying to avoid getting blown up, but getting no closer to figuring out where the guns were coming from. Every lead went nowhere. Then Jack overheard something, and we did a little digging. We kept it to ourselves and eventually brought Luca in on it.”
“What about Noah?”
“Let’s just say that Noah’s always been better at taking orders than thinking for himself. We knew that until we could prove anything, he wouldn’t believe us.”
“Prove what?”
“Jack discovered that our lieutenant was smuggling the guns, even running drugs.”
She stares at me, mouth wide. “Wait, what?”
“Yep, so we had a dilemma. We could try to turn him in and hope someone higher up believed us. But we also knew he couldn’t be doing it alone, so we had no clue who to tell. You have no idea how seriously the military takes breaking the chain of command, on any pretext. Plus, it’s not exactly easy to get messages past your commanding officer when you’re in the middle of a war theater.”
“So what did you do?”
“We decided to steal the next shipment,” I say with a shrug. Adair gasps, and I can tell what she thinks of this plan already. “It would be proof, and then we would have leverage. Of course Noah was onto us, but he got the wrong idea. He turned us in—and that’s how the lieutenant knew. So he hauls us in for a chat along with Noah and that’s when we realize who’s helping him.”
“Who?”
“Everyone. Turns out the rest of the section is crooked, too, and they plan to kill the new guys to keep it quiet. They have to make it look right, of course. But the lieutenant gets mixed up on why Noah turned us in. He thinks Noah wants in, and, for once, Noah is smart enough to play along. He makes a big deal about his loyalty and they drag us off to a cell. That night, Noah breaks us out and tells us to run.”
“Did you?”
“Where the fuck are we going to run in the desert? We told him that and before he could stop us, we took care of the situation.”
The silence that falls between us is deafening. She’s doing the math, putting two and two together. “Oh,” she finally says.
“I didn’t have a choice, Lucky.” Can she see that? Does it matter?
“You killed them.” She says the words aloud like she’s trying them on.
“We didn’t have a lot of options.” I wait for some sign that she understands that, but she doesn’t speak. She just stares fixedly at her glass. “They were going to kill us. We would have been killed by the Taliban if we tried to run. We couldn’t exactly make a phone call and get anyone to help us out.”
“How many?” she asks softly. “How many people did you kill?”
“Does it matter?” It’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. How much blood is on my hands from that night? Did I make the right call? There is one thing I know. One thing I have to confess to her before she gets any idea that I made an impossible, but noble choice. “Once you kill a man, it’s easier to kill another one and another. It’s still easy.”
“You’ve…” she trails away.
“Yes,” I admit. “That’s not the last time I’ve killed a man. I didn’t make it a profession or anything, but I’ve had to make some shitty choices. Me or them choices.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, when she finally looks up she studies me for a second. Does she still see the same man? “What happened after that? How did you explain it? Why does Noah hate you?”
“We’re getting to that part,” I say grimly.
I take it as a good sign that she is still listening after what she learned so far.
“So, everyone was dead,” I continue, “and an entire new platoon arrived to investigate and to take us into custody. They start looking into matters and thankfully, our lieutenant was a real piece of shit, because they found plenty of evidence against him.”
“So you weren’t charged?” She’s biting on her nails and I gently take her hand away from her mouth.
“They found we acted in our own defense. Noah corroborated our story, but we took the fall for killing everyone.”
She shakes her head, confusion shining in her eyes. “Then why were you discharged?”
“Believe me, the Marines don’t want to keep around a bunch of guys who’d kill their own unit, even if it’s in self-defense. I guess we were supposed to die to prove our loyalty. Noah would have if we hadn’t knocked him out before the gunfire began.” I pause, knowing that’s not the whole story but knowing she’ll accept it.
“And that’s why he hates you.” Her lips twist into a grimace. “You saved his life.”
“Don’t tell him that,” I advise her. “As far as Noah is concerned, we ruined his life by putting a mark on his pristine record.”
“But why come after you?” she presses.
I draw my hand away and take a sip of my sparkling water, which is warm and flat from the summer heat. “The team investigating the incident found evidence that the lieutenant was planning to unload a large shipment of contraband. At that point, the date set for the delivery was still in the future. They couldn’t find any weapons. No drugs. But there was no evidence that the deal had taken place early. So suspicion turned on us. We all swore we didn’t know anything, but Noah suspected we were lying and told them that. In the end, they couldn’t find any proof, so they discharged me, Jack, and Luca, slapped Noah on the wrist and transferred him to some hellhole, and that was it.”
“And Noah still thinks you had something to do with the missing contraband?” she guesses. “Why didn’t he believe you?”
“We used to play poker. There’s not much else to do at night in the desert. According to Noah, I have a tell when I bluff,” I admit to her with a bemused grin. She’s not going to find this funny. “He swears I was bluffing to the investigation unit.”
“And Jack and Luca, what do they think?” There’s a softness in her voice that says she already knows the answer. It’s not accusatory or judgmental. She’s giving me a choice. I can lie to her and she won’t push it, but I have no doubt I’ll lose her. Or I can tell her the truth and probably lose her anyway. There’s no way to win.
I turn my head away from her just long enough to reconsider what I’m about to say. In the end, it’s not really a choice. “They know I was lying, Lucky.”
“What did you do?” she asks, her words turning to stone.
“We had a couple days before anyone reached us. I waited until the others were asleep and I was on watch and I hid it.”
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“You hid…the guns?”
“I knew we were facing discharge. I knew no one was going to give two shits what happened to us.” I suck my lower lip into my teeth, wondering if I made the wrong call. It’s not the first time I’ve considered that.
“How could you do that?”
I expected this response. It’s not as though I could ask her to look past my crimes. “For a long time, it didn’t seem to matter. I had nothing to lose. Then Sutton showed up on my door and everything changed.”
“You had a family,” she says distantly. “What about Francie? Does she know?”
“I told myself I was doing it for her—that I’d be able to take care of her—” there’s something thick swelling in my throat that makes it hard to speak “—like she took care of me. But she didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“What?” Adair shakes her head like she can’t believe this. “She loves you like a son.”
“Maybe she did,” I say, “but when I showed trying to buy her a new place, get her a new car, she had a lot of questions.”
Adair sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “Let me guess. You didn’t answer her questions.”
“What was I going to tell her? I told her I got discharged because my commander was a piece of dirt and that they gave me my enlistment bonus anyway.”
“An enlistment bonus doesn’t buy you an Aston Martin and a penthouse,” Adair says dryly. “She knew that.”
“Neither did one shipment of small arms. Francie might have believed me. She told me to keep the money and set myself up. She didn’t expect me to go back to the Middle East. I think that’s what tipped her off that there was more to this story.”
“You went back?” She seems genuinely shocked.
“I’ve been all over the world for the last three years. Jack and Luca, too. We had our own little operation. With Luca’s connections it was easy to stay under the radar. Plus, we had a plan. Once we hit a certain amount, we’d pull out, go in our own directions, and let the chips fall where they may.”
“But they’re all here,” she says, blinking, “so that means you’re still doing whatever you were doing.”
“Not exactly. Jack wanted to open a blues bar. Always has. Luca tends to come and go as he pleases in our lives. We’re all doing our own things now except one last mission.”
“What on earth could you be doing in Nashville?”
It’s a charmingly naïve thing to say. If Adair knew half the organized criminal activity that went on down the street from her privileged enclave, she’d never see the city the same way. “I had a list,” I tell her, realizing the only chance I have at keeping her is to be painfully honest. It’s the only way to prove to her that I’m all in.
“What kind of list?” She sits back on her heels, shifting the smallest bit away from me. Maybe it’s a coincidence. I doubt it.
“A blacklist of people who ruined my life,” I confess. “A list of people I wanted to hurt, and every name on that list lived in Tennessee.”
There’s a pause so heavy I swear it brings the night crashing down on us. Maybe I hadn’t noticed the sky fading to midnight blue, or the stars coming out overhead. Or maybe darkness finally caught up with me. She doesn’t speak. She only studies me, her face as blank as fresh paper. When she finally opens her mouth, her voice hitches on her question. “Was I on that list?”
I tell myself it’s the only way to keep her, but I know it’s not true. There’s nothing I can say that won’t cost me Adair MacLaine’s love, so I choose the path I should have taken years ago. “You were on the very top of it.”
21
Sterling
The Past
The rest of the week is spent in my dorm room, failing to watch any movies. We put them on, but we’re distracted before the opening scene. We pause for bathroom breaks and food delivery, which Adair keeps ordering behind my back.
“You need your stamina,” she tells me.
And I never want it to end. I don’t know where her family thinks she is, but no one has checked on her. That only proves she belongs here with me, instead of there with them. When Friday rolls around, I’m dreading the Christmas party at Windfall for two reasons. The first is that it involves getting dressed, and I’ve grown pretty attached to Adair’s naked body. I’d rather she never put clothes on again, actually. The second is that the party marks our last night together. I leave on a redeye for New York in the morning.
Adair manages to pry herself away early that afternoon, to return home to get ready.
“It will not take you six hours to get ready,” I say, grabbing her around the waist and dropping her on the bed. I pounce on top of her, pinning her to the spot.
“I need to run an errand, if you must know.” She cranes to kiss me, and the next thing I know her pants are off and I’m buried inside her.
The girl is a serious over-achiever, because she can’t keep her hands off me. When I suggested it would take time for her body to adjust to sex, she initiated it every second she could. Crawling on top of me in the night and waking me up with her pretty mouth on me. Refusing to wear a stitch of clothing for entire days. I have to give it to her. By day three, we fit together like our bodies were carved from the same block of marble.
Her head lolls back against the pillow, her breathing coming in shallow pants, small whimpers escaping her lips until she cries out, her legs snapping around me like a spring. I don’t make it long after that—I never do.
She seizes the opportunity to grab her clothes while I pull off the spent condom and toss it in the trash. A quick look in my bedside drawer shows me I only have one of the bounty provided by Campus Health Services left. Apparently, I need to run an errand, too.
“You’ll be there at seven?” she asks, pulling on the clothes she wore over here last Friday. It’s the first time she’s bothered to pick them up off the floor since then.
“Cy is picking me up at six-thirty.” My roommate did us the courtesy of staying away for the week to apologize for the mistake at the hotel. I’m pretty sure that I got the better end of the deal.
Adair pauses, her hand on the door knob. “I love you.”
I start toward her and she squeaks. We both know she’ll never leave if I kiss her goodbye. She already tried leaving twice this week and somehow wound up right back in my bed. She even went as far as to have new sheets delivered to the room, so we didn’t have to go out for them.
“I love you,” I say, stopping at a safe distance.
The door closes, and the room feels empty without her. For the first time in a week, I have a moment to process what has happened between us. Adair MacLaine loves me. Impossible, but true.
I’m still mulling that over when I pull out the old suit Francie brought me during her trip. I’d left it in my closet in New York. The truth is, I hate the thing. It’s a hand-me-down from her brother-in-law. He gave it to me so I could attend a parole hearing for my father. I testified against him in this suit. May he rot in prison. But I don’t have anything else appropriate for the spectacle of a MacLaine Christmas party.
I put it on at six and stay away from a mirror. When Cyrus walks in, I know I was right to worry. His look says it all.
“That all you got, Sterling?” Cyrus says, taking one look at my polyester navy suit before going to check his closet.
I check my watch. We need to leave in a few minutes, and it’s not like I have options. Even if I had his money, I doubt there’s a place to pick up a tailored tuxedo that’s open at this time of night, even in Nashville.
“That bad, huh?” It must be if he’s saying something. Cyrus usually tries to massage my ego where money is concerned.
“Trust me, you’ll want to make a good impression with these people.”
“It’s this or jeans, man.” I wait for his response. “Which will her dad prefer?”
“A tuxedo.” He emerges from his closet holding a gray garment bag. Cyrus might be better than most of his clique of Valmont t
rust-funders, but he isn’t immune to obsessing over appearance. Naturally, he stashed a tux here.
I’m not sure why? In case of a black-tie emergency? “Really?”
“It should fit you. We’re about the same size. Just be sure to get it dry-cleaned before you give it back. In fact, remind me to have my maid clean this whole room.” He shoots me a knowing grin. “Poppy says she hasn’t seen either of you all week. Did you two ever come up for air?”
I ignore him. Most guys want to chat about their conquests. I can’t even claim that I’ve never bragged in a locker room. But Adair is different. I’m not sharing her. Not even with my words. I slide down the zipper of the garment bag to discover a black tuxedo radiating the smell of mothballs. “You sure this will fit me? It smells like an attic.”
“Yeah, well, I haven’t actually worn it before,” he admits sheepishly. “It was my dad’s, and my mom had it tailored to me before I left for college. In her mind, there might have been a scenario in which I desperately needed one, but didn’t have the 30 minutes needed to drive over to where they live.”
Wait, are there actually black-tie emergencies?
“Naturally.” The truth is, I would do almost anything to stop having this conversation. Men don’t talk about clothes, or keeping up appearances. And part of me wishes I could just go as I am, that I truly didn’t care what these rich people think of me.
“Adair will prefer the tuxedo,” he says, eerily up on where my head is at.
He’s got a point. I know she’s nervous about me meeting her family. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s worried I’ll embarrass her or vice versa, but I’m not going to give anyone an easy excuse to look down on me.
I change as quickly as I can, dreading that there will be some button or cinch or component that is entirely alien to me, and will therefore require asking for help. But in the end it’s all simple enough, just a standard cummerbund tux, black-on-white, with a bowtie which I have no idea how to tie. I shove it in my jacket pocket, resolving to call Adair on the way. Something tells me she will be able to help.