He goes to hold my hand but pulls back. “I know it’s worse for you. But I’d like to share a story with you. Something that might help you understand my relationship with my father. I don’t expect absolution, but I owe you the explanation.”
My hands are cold. I wrap them around my coffee cup.
“I should’ve come clean to you sooner. I shouldn’t have let you find out the way you did. But I didn’t know how to. Especially after…” He pauses.
“Especially after what?” I snap. “After you fucked me?”
An older woman hears me swear and raises her eyebrows before returning to popping donut holes in her mouth.
He blinks. “After I realized I had feelings for you.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I say, folding my arms under my breasts. “I’m just another conquest, Finn. Someone you needed something from. And I let myself be seduced like the ignorant trash you thought I was.”
“You’re not trash. And you’re not ignorant. I never thought that. I knew from the second we met that you were bright and driven.” He reaches for my hands again but thinks better of it. “Don’t blame yourself for my mistakes.”
He takes in a deep breath. “I do have feelings for you, Sasha. And it’s because of your integrity. Your loyalty to people and your sense of justice. Your goodness and kindness. Your passion is inspiring, and I wanted to be with you. I was just afraid to admit it, even to myself.”
I play with my coffee cup, unsure of how to respond. Unsure of what I’m feeling.
“I wish you knew how special you are. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to my father like that before.”
“Not even you?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t call what I do standing up to him. It’s more passive-aggressive needling than anything. I have a plan, but it’s long term so I can’t do what you did, not yet. Then he’ll finally have a good reason to hate me. But I can’t let you or Benjamin be collateral damage. I won’t let it happen.” He holds his hands as if in prayer and presses his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t understand why he hates you.”
Finn stares at the stained ceiling. “He thinks he has a good reason.”
His voice catches in his throat. He’s going to tell me something very personal now, isn’t he?
In the same way that he didn’t want me to lose my virginity on a desk, I don’t want him to share this story in a Dunkin Donuts—no matter how special it is to me.
“Wait,” I say. “Not here. Let’s go for a walk.” I don’t bother finishing the coffee and toss it in the bin on our way out.
We wander down a side street toward the river. When we get to the Mystic, we stand in front of it, leaning against a railing. It’s one of those gorgeous, sparkling January days that makes you believe winter isn’t all horrible. The Mystic is frozen, so the smell is contained.
“When is your family finally having the river dredged?” I ask. “It still smells like a garbage fire in the summer.”
“It’s going to happen in the spring. Lots of red tape since it crosses city lines.”
“I bet there are so many bodies in there.”
It’s gallows humor, but Finn laughs anyway. “None of ours. Don’t worry.”
I’d made a comment about ending up in there to him earlier. It hangs between us for a minute. But I want to give him space to tell his story.
“When I was younger,” he says, staring out at the casino across the river, “my father had a very particular vision for me.”
“Politician.” I remember him mentioning this.
“Yes. I was bright and picked up skills very easily. I knew how to charm people.”
“Not much has changed there,” I deadpan.
He smiles almost gratefully at me. It makes me uncomfortable.
“I didn’t want to go into politics. I didn’t know what I did want, but my senior year, I got into every school I applied to. All the prestigious ones my father drooled over. But he didn’t care. I wasn’t going to major in what he thought I should, so all of that meant nothing to him. But there was another way he could use me.”
His voice is heavy with pain, even after all these years. I think back to the letters in the secret compartment and understand better why they’re there. Why they’re his greatest treasure.
“I was a good-looking kid. Women liked me, and I seemed older than I was. Once I turned seventeen, my father basically pimped me out to any woman he needed a favor from. If they didn’t come through, he’d reveal my age and blackmail them.”
“Jesus, that’s awful, Finn.” I lightly touch his arm.
He shrugs. “I could’ve said no, I suppose, but I liked the attention. I enjoyed the sex—I was a horny teenage boy, anyway. And my father was proud of me for once.”
His casual words don’t disguise the sadness etched on his face.
“You were underage. That’s not okay. What he did to you was not okay.”
“There was this one girl he wanted me to date. We were both seniors in high school. She was a nice enough girl. Not particularly pretty or interesting, but that never seemed to matter to my father. Her parents were rich, even richer than us. Old school Boston Brahmin, like my father pretends to be.”
A cold wind picks up, shaking the bare branches of the trees lining the river. He continues to stare across its frozen expanse.
“He wanted me to get her pregnant,” he says with a bitter laugh. “Can you imagine? He wanted me to trap this poor girl.”
“And you too,” I remind him.
“I decided then I was done being his puppet. I’d fuck every woman I wanted, whenever I wanted, but he’d get nothing from it. I wanted to ruin his chances with this family. They were very well connected to investors my father was chasing. I found the sharpest knife I could and gave myself this.” He points to the scar through his eyebrow. “Dragged it right through my skin. It took seven stitches to close it up. I told the girl my father did it to me but made her promise not to say anything to her folks because he’d hurt me worse if she did.”
“Finn, he was hurting you. Maybe not in a way people could see, but it was just as bad.”
He ignores my comment.
“I knew she’d say something. I shouldn’t have used her like that, but it was the start of a glorious career for me. Her father confronted mine, who denied it, but the other man didn’t believe him.”
“Why your face, Finn?” I think I know the answer, but I wonder if it’d help him to say it.
“Two reasons. One, because he was using my appearance as leverage. Two, because every time he looks at me, I want him to be reminded that I took something from him. I ruined any possibility of his profiting from this family, and he’s hated me ever since. I went to Dartmouth and majored in History. And that was it.”
“Did your mother know?” I ask softly.
“She did.”
“Jesus. What about your siblings?”
“No. They think I was in a fencing accident. Patrick was off at school and everyone else was too young to understand what was going on.”
“That includes you. No wonder you’re so angry.”
And no wonder he has so many issues with women. How could he not?
“I got so caught up in not being what he wanted that I turned into someone I’m not exactly proud of. I have nothing to show for myself other than spite. What kind of a life is that? What kind of person does what I did to someone like you? At least at seventeen I had the integrity not to drag some poor girl into my family’s cesspit.”
I don’t know exactly what to say here. I’m feeling so many things. I’m sad for Finn, but still angry at him and his despicable father. I’m sad for myself, too, and unsure of how Finn will be able to keep his father from hurting me or my brother.
Even if he is willing to give up whatever his long-term plan is.
And do I want him to give that up if it means losing an opportunity to take James Carney down? We watch the Orange Line train rumble across the Mystic
in the distance.
“Pain does terrible things to people if they don’t find ways to resolve it,” I say, finally. “And sometimes circumstances force us to make choices that turn us into someone we don’t recognize. And eventually we believe it’s our truth, and that there’s nothing we could or should do to change it.”
I’m talking about him, but about me too.
Then I move tentatively closer to him. After that story, I don’t want to just grab onto him.
He wraps his big arm around my shoulders, a wry smile on his face. “You’re the first person I’ve told this to,” he says. “So I guess we’re each other’s firsts in some kind of way.”
As I laugh, my breath hangs in front of me, frozen.
“Thank you for meeting me,” he says.
I rest my head against his chest. “I’ll carry the aftermath of my assault with me for a long time, Finn. I need you to understand how deeply you hurt me. I’ve got my own scars now.”
“Don’t compare your scars to mine. Yours are a testament to your bravery. Mine is a legacy of spite.”
“I’m doing what I’m doing to help your employees, Finn. That’s my big goal. But don’t think that I’m not partially driven by spite. I want your father to pay for what he did to me. To Jamilah. And for threatening my brother.”
“I never wanted to be like him,” Finn muses, “but it’s exactly what happened. It shouldn’t have taken me this long to feel ashamed.”
“What’s next, then?” I ask, looking up at him.
The tenderness in his eyes frightens me. I don’t know what to do with that information. I don’t know if I can forgive him. I don’t want to hurt him further, but I need more time to process all this.
He gives my shoulders a squeeze and tells me about his plan to divest his father from his properties.
“Finn, unionizing won’t bankrupt the casino. If your father manages to not fuck up other operations, it won’t impact his ability to pay off those loans.”
He nods. “I know. I was foolish to buy into his narrative. It’s funny—I hate him as much as he hates me. Maybe more. But there’s still a part of me that believes all the things he says.”
“I believe what my father says about me too, sometimes.”
He scowls. “I hate how he treats you.”
I feel his anger toward my father more than I hear it.
“If you ever want me to intervene I will,” he says.
Oh god, no.
“He’ll be the means to his own end,” I say softly. “He doesn’t need anyone else to intervene.”
Finn fixes me with those blue-black eyes.
“He doesn’t deserve you.” He looks back over the Mystic. “And neither do I. I know it’ll be disruptive for your brother, but after the election we should move him to a safer place. Out of town.” His breath catches. “And you too, Sasha. I don’t want to tip him off yet—he’ll lash out against the staff and I know you don’t want that. But after the election, if things go well, they’ll have protection and if they don’t go well, my brother and I can convince him it’s bad for business to hurt you, and his pride will be assuaged enough by your defeat to let it go.”
I have some other ideas, but I don’t need to share them. Not yet.
“It’d be a shame to waste a perfectly good Saturday,” I say. “Do you want to take a longer walk?”
He strokes my hair gently.
“I’d love that.”
18
Finn
I expected to feel like shit after revealing that terrible story to Sasha, but I should’ve known better. Even after everything she’s been through, after everything I’d put her through, she extended her gentle kindness even to me.
Even though I’m far from deserving.
And I’ll do whatever it takes to protect her from my father.
She lets me hold her hand as we walk along the river. It’s honestly not a place I’ve explored very much, and I’m happy to follow her wherever she wants to go. She takes us to a little park behind a shopping center. It’s a marshland that acts as drainage for the river, and I bet it’s beautiful in the spring.
Or it will be when we clean up the river.
“Was your father always like that?” I ask. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer.”
“He’s been like this since I’ve known him,” she says. “My mother said he changed after his injury. He didn’t want to do anything other than play hockey. He couldn’t let go of that identity and just got more bitter as the years went on. I think he was devastated when my mother died but didn’t see his part in it at all.”
“That’d be a hard thing to face,” I say.
“Yeah. I don’t expect him to change for the better, but sometimes I wish he’d at least recognize what a good kid Benjamin is.”
“He is a good kid,” I say. “And you’re a wonderful woman. I’d say he should be proud except he doesn’t deserve any credit for the person you are.”
She smiles at me and I point to a rusty old swing set. The swings are still in place.
“It’ll probably scream like a banshee,” she says.
“Well if I sit on it, sure. But not you.”
The chains creak when she sits on the u-shaped plastic seat but don’t give more than the usual groan as I push her gently a few times.
“My father wanted to marry another woman,” I say. “My sister Siobhan told me. She found out over the summer.”
Sasha digs the heels of her boots into the crusty snow under the swing and turns to look at me.
“What?”
“He was in love with a woman named Kathleen, but she didn’t feel the same way. Married another man and my father hated him and his family ever since. He convinced my brothers and I to hate his family too. And I did. I still do in some ways. It’s hard to lose that programming.”
“Is that why he’s such a dick?” she asks.
Jesus. I let out a loud laugh. “No. He’s always been a dick. That’s probably why Kathleen married Murphy Doyle instead. Knew she’d have kinder children. Siobhan’s dating their son Kieran.”
“Are your parents okay with that?” she asks.
“They don’t love it, but as much as my father hates Murphy Doyle for beating him, the Doyles are a very powerful family in their own right. And he loves my sister. He knows she’ll be happy with Kieran.”
I hate to admit it. All of it.
“And his family?”
“Mother’s long gone. Father’s on his way out too.”
“I see.”
Does she understand why I’m telling her this? I care about this woman. But even if she gives me a chance and things work out between us, it’ll be a difficult road. I won’t ask her yet, though. She needs more time. And I have a lot to prove by her.
She moves off the swing and takes my hand. We walk back toward the river. She stops me at the edge of the playground.
“Finn. I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth. Do you promise to do that?”
“I’ll never lie to you again, Sasha. Not directly, not by omission, not at all.”
What could be on her mind? A million possibilities run through mine.
“Did you honestly have sex with me because you wanted me, or because you wanted something from me?”
The vulnerability in her eyes. I want to be someone worthy of this woman.
“I wanted you,” I say, honestly. “Did I go into this thinking I’d use my masculine charms on you to get my way? Yes.”
She rolls her eyes at that and I love her for it.
“But it turns out I was seduced by your kindness and your beauty. I don’t know how you can’t see how beautiful you are, Sasha. I wanted you so much it scares me. I haven’t really had the connection between sex and the feelings part since, well, what happened when I was younger. But something’s different with you, and I honestly am terrified by it. Sex has always been casual for me until now.”
Fear is not something that’s easy fo
r a man like me to admit. But I owe this to Sasha.
Her fingertips are on the front of my jacket and she’s staring up at me, trying to assess whether I’m being honest or not.
“I know it must sound pathetic to you,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound overly sentimental. But I didn’t want my first time to be a transaction.”
“Mine was,” I say. She cringes and starts to apologize.
“No,” I say. “Don’t apologize. I’m saying I didn’t want that for you. It’s not what happened. I promise.”
I wish I could say I’d been as kind to some of the other women I’d slept with, but I hadn’t. And many of them hadn’t been kind to me. I’d had a lot of transactional sex, and I didn’t want that anymore.
“Was it okay?” she asks, her cheeks flushing.
My stomach tightens.
“It was incredible. I’m not just saying that.”
Was it incredible because it meant something, or because of how beautiful this woman in front of me is? It’s probably a combination.
I lean down and kiss her. The tip of her nose is cold. I pull her closer.
“Do you think maybe we could go back to your place?”
I’m taken aback by the offer. Hell yes we can.
“Are you sure?” I ask. I don’t want to think with just my dick here, though I very much want this woman in my bed, this time with me in it too.
She nods, that shy smile gracing her lips. “I’m sure.”
I take her home, and we’re barely through the door before she’s tugging at the zipper on my pants. I pull off her shirt, desperate to have her gorgeous breasts in my hands again. I’m stronger than her by far, so while I have her clothes off in seconds, she’s still struggling with my belt.
“Goddamnit,” she hisses, yanking at the stubborn buckle.
It’s so fucking hot. I should take her to my bedroom, but I want to have her in my office this time. Want to make some incredible memories. I pick her up and she wraps her legs around my waist. I get her where I want her and help her strip off the rest of my clothes. She pushes me back into an armchair and the hunger in her eyes makes me rock-hard. I like that she’s not afraid to do what feels good this time.
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