by Zahra Girard
I pick up a pen and then a blank sheet of paper.
Then, the two of us talk.
I get deeper with Connor than any interview ever could. I get into him in a way that is deep, personal, and profound.
He tells me about his childhood, about his memories, about the house he grew up in, the trouble he got into in school, about the time he and his dad first shared a beer and talked as men, about the time his mother tried to show him how to cook and how he failed so spectacularly — scorching pots and pans and nearly setting the kitchen on fire — that he swore off cooking all together.
I write it all down. I put him on the page. His memories, his feelings.
Then, I hand it over. Two pages, front and back.
He reads it over, and then looks at me, his eyes and voice both earnest. “Thank you.”
I beam. “You’re welcome.”
He checks his phone, then lets out a great big sigh. “It’s late, but I want to get this copied down — your handwriting is way too neat to pass as mine — and in the mail now. You mind waiting a minute?”
“Take your time, Connor,” I say.
He sits down beside me and copies the letter. It doesn’t take him long, his handwriting isn’t great but it’s mostly legible. At least it’s the thought that counts.
“Wait one second,” he says, standing, slipping the papers in an envelope. He practically runs out of the room. It’s a short while before he’s back.
“This means a lot to me, Evelyn,” he says, his voice vibrating with warmth and affection. It wraps around me, lulling me into this state of comfort and pride.
There’s good in this man.
“We should get to bed,” he says.
I stand up, thinking it’ll be the couch again. Which isn’t too bad; I’m exhausted, and it’s a comfortable couch, like sleeping on leather-encased clouds.
We step out of Connors office and I start to the couch, stopping short as he reaches out and takes my hand.
His voice is husky, heated. “You don’t have to sleep out here, lass,” he says. “There’s plenty of room in my bed.”
I turn, and, smiling, let him lead me into the bedroom.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Evelyn
We’re both so exhausted when we finally hit the sheets, that I’ve barely set my head on his chest before I’m out.
We sleep together.
Just sleep.
Wrapped up in each other.
I can hear the air fill his lungs, I can hear his heartbeat. A deep, steady thud in his chest that’s all the music I need to drift off peacefully.
I wake up the next morning to the sound of him snoring. I disentangle myself from his arms and get up.
He’s a sight. Power at peace, muscles relaxed, and a faint smile on his face.
I feel so fortunate.
I don’t know what kind of a future we’re going to have together — or if we can even have a future — but for right now, I have a present with a man who’s woken up an intensity of feelings inside me that is beyond description.
I lust for him. But it’s more than that — lust is just too basic of a word. It’s deeper. I want every part of him as close to me as humanly possible.
The further into Connor Halloran that I get, the more I like him. I might dislike the things that the man does, but I think I might love the man who does them.
I’m the type of person to question everything. It’s what I do, it’s why I’m good at my job, even if my bosses have yet to recognize it. But being with Connor makes me stop questioning things. I don’t ask myself the hard questions about our future. I don’t want to.
I just enjoy the moment.
Leaving him to sleep, I head to his kitchen and help myself to some leftover takeout and make some coffee.
It’s not long until I have to leave. Karen’s bachelorette party starts in a few hours.
I dress. I kiss Connor goodbye, many times, and catch a cab home.
He doesn’t have to remind me to come back here after the party. We both know that’s what I’ll do.
* * * * *
“Look out,” Karen screams.
I duck, rolling behind the rusted hulk of a car as someone wearing a ski-mask and a thick, camo hunting coat fires right at the spot where I was standing a split-second before.
“Eat paint, asshole,” I reply, coming up to my knees and firing back.
Red splatters all over the person in the hunting jacket and they go down.
“Behind you,” I yell to Karen.
She whirls, gun firing, and another person goes down.
“How many are left?”
She shrugs. “Two, maybe three.”
“Is Alex still alive?”
Karen shakes her head. “She went down right at the start. Her shoes came untied, she tripped, and my mom blew her brains out.”
“That bitch.”
I let out a heavy sigh.
Karen nods. “She’s ruthless. I can’t wait to take her out.”
Karen’s mom is one of the final two on the other team. She might be in her mid-sixties, but she could give Connor a run for his money. She’s taken out half the team by herself.
The other person left is Kambria.
We don’t know where Kambria’s at. Don’t really care, either.
She didn’t want to play paintball to begin with, and, though neither of us has said anything, both Karen and I know she’s probably off hiding somewhere, double-fisting wine coolers.
All we want to do right now is shoot Karen’s mom in the face.
“So how are we going to kill your mom? She’s been up in that watchtower sniping for like the last twenty minutes.”
Karen fixes me with a cold-eyed stare. “I’ll take that bitch out myself. Can you cover me?”
She’s the most ruthless ER nurse I know. Especially after a few hours of day-drinking.
I nod. “Of course. What are you planning?”
She clicks down the visor on her safety helmet. “Just what needs to be done. I’m through saving lives. It’s time to end one.”
I raise my fist and we bump it.
Adrenaline courses through my body and I’ve got an itchy trigger finger. “Ready when you are.”
I step out from behind the rusted old hulk of a car and start firing towards the watchtower that dominates the center of this paintball course.
“Eat shit and die, mother,” Karen screams as she sprints full-speed towards the tower.
A few stray paintballs spray towards us, but I do my job right and manage to keep Karen’s mom mostly on lockdown.
Still screaming like she’s Braveheart about to face the English, Karen climbs the ladder several rungs at a time and vaults her way into the tower.
There’s a yell. Enough cursing to make my ears turn red.
I never thought a mother could say such things about her daughter.
Then a whoop of triumph, loud and ululating like a conquering nomad.
Karen and her mom, Denise, both stand up and come to one of the windows of the watchtower. Karen’s spotless. And her mom is covered head-to-toe in paint.
“Best bachelorette party, ever,” Karen says, raising her fist victoriously.
* * * * *
Music pulses through my body. Beating a steady, sexual, intoxicating, rhythm that echoes through my bones.
“Isn’t he just delicious? He’s like a buffet of sexiness.”
I roll my eyes at Denise.
She has a never-ending supply of singles and an appetite to match.
The whole time we’ve been at this club, I think Karen’s gotten one, maybe two, lap dances.
The rest?
Denise, Denise, Denise.
Not that any of us mind. Here in this dingy male revue called “Down Under Thunder”, where all the dancers are either Aussie studs or at least fake a passable Australian accent, we’re all just focused on having a good time.
Karen’s at that point where she’s so drunk that sh
e just wants to hug everyone.
Denise is half-octopus and twice as grabby with the strippers. Kambria disappeared — we never did find her after paintball, but Karen got a few drunk-texts from her that said she was ok and had just won a Tokyo-style drifting competition.
“What’s wrong?” Karen says, sliding up tome in the booth, Mojito in one hand and some bills in the other.
I shrug and pull my gaze away from looking at the rafters to looking at my friend.
“What do you mean?” I say.
Karen sets her drink down and slides her arm over my shoulder.
“Either there’s something really interesting painted on the ceiling, or there’s something else on your mind. So, what’s keeping you from enjoying the show that Diesel and Rico are working so hard to put on?”
They are trying, I have to give them that. I’m willing to bet that only half the moisture that’s blanketing their hard bodies and making them glisten is Vaseline.
“I mean, come on, Evie, look at that,” she says, pointing. “How can you not just stare when that is right in your face?”
That is Diesel, his six pack, and his sock-ensconced Little Diesel, which is not little at all and currently gyrating right in front of Denise’s smiling face.
“I’ve just got a lot on my mind, that’s all,” I say.
“Good or bad?”
I sip my drink.
It’s a cosmopolitan, which I don’t normally order, but then, this place didn’t have any good whiskey.
“Both?” I venture. “It’s about a guy.”
“Oh? What about?” She says. “There’s got to be something good if he’s enough to distract you from the show.”
Denise belts out “Work it, honey,” and smacks Diesel across the ass with a handful of bills.
She’s one step away from making it rain.
“Not that my mom’s interested in sharing much of the dancer’s attention with us,” Karen adds.
“Yeah, does your dad know about her?”
Karen nods. “How do you think they met?”
Again, I shrug. “I’m going to bet it involved a strip club.”
“Dad used to work at Caesar’s Palace back in college. He and mom both went to UNLV. He was one of those centurions who stood around all bare-chested. He was built, too. Had an eight-pack. Mom was partying on the strip one day, saw him, wanted a lap dance, and, as you can see, she would not take ‘no’ for an answer.”
As long as I’ve known Karen, her parents have always seemed like the straight-laced, almost-boring type. I’ve been to a few holiday parties at their place, and the most exciting thing that’s happened was the time Denise served a seven-layer bean dip.
“Karen, I’m seeing this guy who is a little bit dangerous.”
Karen’s eyes flicker. “Good dangerous or bad dangerous?”
I think for a second.
I love Karen, but I can’t come out and just tell her what Connor does for a living. “A bit of both. It’s exciting, and there’s so much about him that I really, really like, but thinking about some of the stuff he’s mixed up in scares me.”
She sighs and gives me a side-armed squeeze. “I haven’t told anyone this — and you have to promise to keep this to yourself — but, early on when we were dating, I had some of the same doubts about Mark.”
“Really?”
I’ve never known Karen to be anything but crazy over her soon-to-be-husband.
“We’d only been on a couple dates, and we made plans to meet up after our shifts to get some drinks. His ambulance brought in two different gunshot victims to the ER that night, so we both were pretty stressed. We get to this dive and there are just these two big guys who would not leave me alone.”
Karen downs her glass and there’s a fond smile on her face as she goes on with her story. “Mark lost it. Knocked them both out. Hard. I was worried for those two guys — even though they were assholes — because he really let them have it.”
“So, what happened?” I lean in. I’ve never heard, or even imagined, that Mark had a side like this.
“We got back to his place, and I asked him what the fuck just happened. He said there was no way in hell he was going to let someone treat me like that, and he didn’t care what happened to him, he was going to make them stop. It was… hot.”
Karen pauses and looks at me expectantly and I realize I’m being prompted. “And after that?”
She grins, wide and blushing. “We had some serious, messy, dirty sex. The kind that I still think about sometimes when… anyways. It was just primal. All this grunting and sweat and growling and I clawed the shit out of his back and I had to call out part of my shift the next day because it hurt to walk.”
“You’re saying I need to take my possible-boyfriend out and get him into a bar fight and then have sex with him?”
Doesn’t sound like a bad idea.
But I just don’t see how it’ll help my conscience get over the fact that he’s a killer. There’s a nagging part of me that keeps asking questions. And as much as I want him, and as alive as he makes me feel, I’m so scared of how this could end.
What if I have to identify his body at the morgue?
What if I wind up in jail?
What if people I love get hurt?
“I mean, that could be fun. But that’s not what I’m saying. This new guy of yours is a good guy, right?”
I think about Connor at Ryan’s birthday party, and his group of older sisters. I nod my head.
“Of course he is. You wouldn’t be dating him if he was a creep,” she says. “What I’m saying is, you should treat the danger as a bit of excitement in your relationship. As some spice. You don’t want a bland, boring man where the most exciting that might happen between the two of you is whether you decide to go to a Moroccan restaurant instead of your usual haunt for your once-a-week date night. As long as he’s a good person, as long as he’s not mixed up in really bad shit, enjoy what he brings to the table.”
Now I’m thinking about the elevator, about him kneeling between my legs, about him bending me over the couch, about the way it felt like firecrackers were going off inside my skull when he made me orgasm.
Yeah, I don’t think Connor’s capable of living a dull life.
Karen grins. “Looks to me like he’s got some good qualities. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you blush like that.”
“I’m not blushing.”
Yeah, actually, I am.
She rolls her eyes. “Please. I’ve known you for how long? You can’t pull anything over on me, Evie. I was your lookout when you got your first kiss from that schlub Jake Nelson.”
I smile. Not at the memory of Jake — he did turn out to be a total schlub — but because Karen has a way of seeing right through me that really makes her such a great friend.
“Fine. He does have a few, very considerable good qualities.”
More than a few. There’s his tongue, his lips, his oral abilities, his abs, his biceps, his rolling Boston-Irish accent, his chiseled features, and his… Well, when it comes to that, considerable is an understatement.
I’m starting to feel a bit better about my relationship with Connor. It’s not perfect, it’s not normal, but it just might work out.
Karen hugs me, and then waves for our waiter to bring us another round. “Then, Evie, considering recent developments, I want to propose a little toast to the two of us. May the men in our lives always be exciting and just a little bit bad.”
She clinks her glass to mine and takes a long drink, her eyes drift over towards her mom. There’s a new stripper gyrating away. Bruce, I think his name is. The guy is not impressive. When they did the lineup introducing tonights dancers, we’d all thought they must’ve been short a regular dancer and grabbed a janitor to fill in.
Karen frowns and makes a little gagging noise. Her mom is making it rain on Bruce and his dad-bod.
“And may the men in our lives never be truly awful. Like flabby, blotchy male strippers or
, I don’t know, ruthless murderers.”
I tap glasses with Karen again and stare into my drink. With just a few words, she’s tied my stomach back in knots and thrown whatever hope I had about my relationship with Connor straight onto the sticky vinyl floor of this strip club.
And I swear to god, if Bruce comes to my table, I will vomit.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Connor
“Kill them.”
I can hardly believe the words spilling out at me through my phone.
“Are those your father’s orders?” I say.
I hear the wet, splattering sound of phlegm being spat out.
“Those are my orders. I’ll be running this family before long, and you’re on thin enough ice as it is.”
“Thin ice, Liam? Jesus. Since when have I ever fucked up? I’ve been your dad’s number one killer for years.”
I don’t expect a reasonable answer from Liam. Even though he’s the eldest son, and unquestionably will be running the MacCailin family once Lochlan decides he’s had enough with kicking Father Time’s ass and decides to retire, he doesn’t play well with others.
And he most definitely does not share.
Even if I were a MacCailin by blood, I’d still be getting shit from him. There’s a reason Davin MacCailin is a violent drunk and Riley spends as much time away from home as he does.
“I don’t give a flying fuck, Connor. They might’ve seen something, and I wont have my family brought down because you chose to get into a pissing contest with a bunch of fucking track-suited cocksuckers.”
I’m pacing, my feet cutting a path back and forth across my apartment and my hand brushing the pistol I’ve got holstered at my waist.
I wish my Whiskey Gal were here.
Not that I could really talk with her about this shit, but just having her around calms me down. Makes me realize I have someone in my life that I’d do anything for — that I’d kill for — but that would never ask me to. Someone who’s out of this whole business. Who makes me feel like there’s some good inside me.
I never knew I wanted that.
Until I found her.