by M. O’Keefe
He nodded, like he understood and put his arm over my shoulder, and we ran out into the lane. It felt like years, but it was probably only a few minutes before we heard the sirens.
“Poppy,” Zilla said. She stood in front of me with red-rimmed eyes and wild hair. “I swear to you, I put out the fire.”
Some things are worth the consequences. She said that earlier tonight. As well as all the shit about Caroline and how the house was a prison.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked, and she didn’t sound angry. She sounded hurt. She looked hurt.
“I don’t know what to believe,” I told her honestly. Tears from the smoke and from my baffled heart and our bruised past welled up in my eyes.
Zilla licked her lips, tears in her eyes too. “I know . . . I mean, I guess I understand that I deserve that in some capacity. But you know I’m good right now. I’m on my meds. I’m stable. I’m going to fucking nursing school, Pops. I’m not a person who burns down houses anymore.”
The sirens were no longer in the distance. They were deafening as the trucks made their way into my little cul-de-sac. Theo herded us out of the way.
“They’ll have questions for you,” he said to me.
“I don’t have any answers.”
Over my shoulder his arm tightened. A strange hug, and I leaned into him. A strange hug back. And then he stepped forward to go talk to the firefighters pouring out of the trucks, and I was so grateful that he was going to answer questions, because I was terrified of the answers I had.
“Poppy?” Ronan’s accent pulled me away from my sister. I took a step to the side to find him standing in the shadows. His face all pale angles in the gloom.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, astounded to see him. He was dressed in a dark overcoat with black gloves on his hands. He smelled of smoke, though I imagine the whole neighborhood did.
“I heard the sirens.”
“It’s four in the morning.”
He didn’t answer. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. I’m—” I stepped towards him, and he eased deeper into the shadows, his eyes flicking over my shoulder. I turned and saw Theo standing there. Nondescript but steady Theo with all the worry in his eyes.
What was wrong with me that my internal compass led me constantly to the cruel man in the shadows instead of the steadfast man right there in front of me?
“Poppy,” Theo said. “The fire chief has some questions for you.”
“Yeah. I’m coming.” I turned but Ronan was gone.
But his words from earlier remained.
Don’t trust anyone.
And why was he here? So conveniently at 4 am?
The sun was coming up over the hill behind me when the fire was finally out. It had spread to the kitchen, and the investigators were combing through the wreckage.
“Do you have some place to go?” The fire chief asked me. “We won’t have answers until later today, and you’ve been standing out here for hours.”
“We can go to my apartment,” Zilla said.
“That’s so far away.” And frankly that it was exactly what Zilla wanted me to do earlier in the night did nothing to ease my fear that she’d had something to do with this fire as a means to the end she craved. As long as her scales of justice were balanced, damn the consequences.
“You can stay at the cottage,” Theo said. “I’ll leave.”
“I’m not kicking you out of your house.”
“Then where will you go?” Zilla asked.
“A hotel in town,” I said. “I need to be close in case the fire chief has more questions.”
“That’s why god created cell phones,” Zilla said.
“Please, Zilla,” I said in a low murmur.
“I’ll go with you—”
I shook my head, and she didn’t fight me. Which actually only made me more worried she had a guilty conscience.
Why would she keep the fire going and then go to sleep? She’s homicidal. Not suicidal. And, I really didn’t think she wanted me hurt in any way. She just wanted me free of the senator and his world.
But when Zilla was in justice mode she didn’t always connect the dots. She acted on instinct and maybe . . . maybe her instincts just led her to this outrageous and dangerous action.
“Just go,” I told her. “Go home. I’ll be in touch.”
“Pops?” she breathed, and I heard all her regret. All her sorrow. But I could not manage it on top of my own.
Her car was in the long driveway, and I stood in the road until she drove by, her hand lifted and pressed to the glass.
“Poppy?” It was Theo.
“You’ve been so good to me tonight, Theo. Head on home, would you?”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I’m going to stay at a hotel.”
“I’ll drive you.”
I shook my head. “I think I need the walk.”
And after giving my cell phone information to absolutely everyone who needed it, I turned and walked to the end of my cul de sac, onto the small trail through the woods, up over the hill. On the other side, I broke through the treeline into the tall grass, and to my shock, I saw someone coming down the hill from the Constantine Compound. A woman. And when she saw me, she started running.
The sob I’d been holding in burst out of my chest, and I went running to meet her.
Caroline threw her arms around me and absorbed my impact.
“Ronan just told me,” she said. She was in silk pajamas with an overcoat thrown over her shoulders. Her feet were stuffed into Hunter boots. I saw in my mind what must have happened. She came downstairs for coffee and the newspaper only to find Ronan there, unreadable with news of the fire.
And she came running.
This was the part of Caroline that Zilla never understood. Never got to see.
“Are you all right?” she asked, cupping my face.
“Fine. We got out before the fire spread to the house.”
“We?”
“Zilla was there.”
“Where is she now?”
“I sent her back to the city. She . . .” I wasn’t going to put my suspicion into words. And with one look at Caroline’s face I saw that she understood.
“Do you know that for sure?”
“No,” I said quickly. And even managing to laugh, like – oh my god, how silly we are to even be talking about this.
“But it does feel like . . . something she might do?”
To that I had no answer, and the weight of the evening rested on my neck and on my heart. I hung my head.
“Okay. You’re here.” She turned us towards the compound, and together we started walking across the grass. “You’re safe. For as long as you need.”
There was coffee and scrambled eggs. Granola and fresh fruit, but I couldn’t sit down.
“I smell like smoke,” I said, sniffing my hair.
“Of course. Denise will show you to your room,” Caroline said, squeezing me one last time. She’d had her arm around my shoulder the whole walk up the hill to the house, and she’d kept it there through the house. The support was wonderful.
But I hadn’t had so much in so long, it was almost too much.
I followed Denise through the house upstairs to the wing of guest rooms. She stopped in front of the furthest door. “This one is the most private,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“There are towels and a robe in the bathroom. Would you like me to send someone to get clothes?”
Everything at my house smelled like smoke. Or was ruined by the water from the hoses. I shook my head. “I’ll handle everything later.” That seemed like a good answer even though it was pure bullshit. Denise nodded and walked back down the hallway. Morning sunlight came in through the bay windows, illuminating everything.
The bedroom was cream and pale blue, the bed a raft of comforters and pillows. A monument to sleep. I pulled the blinds and the room went dark, and the exhaustion filled me up from
my toes to the top of my head.
Shower. Shower and then sleep and then . . . well, whatever comes next, I suppose.
I washed my hair three times and scrubbed the top layer of skin off my body in a hope that I could get the smell off and the fear. The fear that my sister was coming unhinged again. Fear that Ronan had done this to scare me away. Fear. Fear. Fear.
What in the world would vanquish this fear? What mantra could I recite? What research could I do? How could I pluck this like a cancer right out of my head, so I could sleep? So I could plan and think of what to do next?
Part of me wanted to let Caroline handle this, the way she’d handled my life when it fell apart last time. But as soon as I thought it, put it into concrete terms, I recoiled.
I’d spent the last two years letting fear rule my life. Letting it shove me in corners and walk in the shadows hoping to be unnoticed. Not again. Not ever again.
If anyone was going to save me this time, it was me. It had to be.
Wrapped in a pink silk robe, my hair in a towel, I walked into the dark bedroom comforted slightly by my determination. I wasn’t sure how I would do any of this, but believing was half the battle. Or so I’d been told.
Perhaps it would all be easier once I got some sleep.
There was a quiet knock on the door and expecting Denise, I said, “Come in.”
Only to have the door slide open and reveal the one thing, the one person who could put a pin in all my bravery and who, at the same time, made me ache for the things I wanted to be brave enough for.
Ronan.
15
“Are you all right?” he asked, stepping into the room. He shut the door behind him, and a liquid thrill and a liquid fear seeped through all my exhaustion, and I was suddenly wide awake.
Suddenly very aware of this thin robe clinging to my damp skin.
“Fine. What are you doing here?” There was no way Caroline would approve of her pet fixer being in this room with me.
He glanced away at the dim window, his hands in the pockets of his dark pants. His silence was deafening, and I realized he wasn’t entirely sure.
“Did you start that fire?”
His eyes met mine, and I saw deep . . . fear. For me. And I was small and tired and he’d crushed me every time we were together, so I had no reason to feel emboldened by that look in his eye, but I did.
“No,” he said. “But the investigator said it wasn’t an accident.”
“What? How do you know that before me?”
“Because I had something he wanted enough that he broke the rules and gave me what I wanted. That’s how it works, Princess.”
“What did you have?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How can you say that? Of course—”
“His throat, Poppy. I had his throat in my hand, and if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know I was going to kill him.”
I shut my mouth so fast my teeth clicked.
He stepped closer to me. “What matters is that the fire in the fire pit had been put out. It didn’t spread. They found accelerant all over the outside of the house. It was intentional. The fire was supposed to scare you or kill you.”
I sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Between the comforter and my robe, I nearly slid right off, but Ronan reached out and caught me.
“My sister wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“Well, maybe the fire was supposed to kill your sister.”
“Why? None of this makes sense.”
“I know.” He sat down beside me.
There was a long simple moment of silence between us as we sat shoulder to shoulder on that bed. And I was exhausted and scared and really what I wanted in that moment more than anything was comfort. From him. Which was like hoping a knife would wrap its arms around you, but I was somewhere near rock bottom when it came to my mental and emotional reserves.
“Why did you kiss me?” I asked. “In my office. You said you wouldn’t kiss me and then—”
“I break all my rules around you, Poppy. Every single one.”
“No kissing is a rule?”
He nodded, staring down at his hands.
“What other rules do you break?”
He sighed, rubbed at his face. The silence stretched and stretched, and I was sure he was never going to answer me. And if he couldn’t answer even one of my questions then what was the point of him? Us. I opened my mouth to tell him to go, to let me rest. To leave me alone.
But then he started to talk. “When I was a kid, Da got us a place in social housing. A shit bag flat. Leaky roof. Gangs, fucking everywhere. Every corner,” he said.
And I sat so still. So quiet. Terrified if I moved or said something, he might walk away.
“School was miles away, like. And I was saving up money running errands for some of the old folks around so I could get a skateboard.” He took a deep breath and let it out real slow. “Just so I could get to school. But my Da kept finding the money, and I’d have to start all over. And then this family moves in next door. And there’s a kid my age and I’m like . . . crazy with happiness. I’m like on his step at dawn looking for this kid.”
His smile broke my heart. Broke it right in half.
“And his family wasn’t too happy with him hanging out with the likes of me, but we got on all right. And then it’s the boy’s birthday, and he gets a new skateboard and he gives me his old one. And I reckon I lose my mind I’m so happy and I . . . show it to my Da. Which, I honestly, don’t know what I was thinking. But he grabs the skateboard, and it was just cheap plywood over some shit wheels but he smashes it over my shoulder. Breaks it into two pieces, dislocates my shoulder, and then he grabs me and the two skateboard pieces and we go outside where my friend is playing with his new board in the street, and my Da pushes the kid off the board, picks it up and smashes his skateboard on the ground.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would he do that?”
“Well. The best I could figure being just a kid and with a dislocated shoulder and all, was that I couldn’t be happy. I couldn’t have the skateboard, and I couldn’t have a friend. The boy never talked to me again.”
“Ronan,” I sighed, aching with sympathy.
“If I gave my Da even the slightest idea that I liked something, he’d ruin it. And I thought for awhile, I could hide it. Hide what I wanted. So he’d never know.” He shook his head. “But I wasn’t very good at hiding anything.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“You were just a boy.”
“Well, I was boy who learned that the best way to not have the things he wanted broken or stolen or thrown in the trash was to not want anything.”
“And that . . . that was a rule?”
“I’m twenty-seven years old, Poppy. I’ve lived by that rule for almost twenty years. And then you came along with your fucking eyes, that spirit I watched get put away and then start to come back out again, it was like watching—” he shook his head, “—spring. It was like watching those little stupid flowers that put their heads up through the frost.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“So fucking stupid.”
“Ronan—”
“But not as fucking stupid as me. Because you’re going to get hurt, I know you are. I know it. And the only thing that can save you is you leaving.”
“Did you set the fire?” I asked. “To scare me off?”
“No. I mean, I thought it, but I didn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t—” He stopped shook his head and got to his feet, like he was going to leave.
I grabbed his hand, his fingers curled into a hard fist, like armor against me. “You don’t what?”
“Want you to leave.”
I stood up, his hand still in mine. My thumb traced the scar on his wrist. “I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Cos you’re a fucking fool.”
“Probably. But there’s something
here I want too.”
He was shaking his head. He yanked his hands free of mine and grabbed my shoulders, lifting me off my feet so I was nearly eye to eye with him. It hurt, his grip on my body. But when everything hurt, you took the pain that had the greatest chance of turning into pleasure.
“You don’t want me. You want the way I make you feel.”
“I want all of it.”
“I haven’t even fucked you,” he said, like I was pathetic. And I knew what he was doing. Maybe I’d always known. But he was trying to hurt me so I’d stay away.
“We could change that,” I whispered. “Right now. You could put your cock—”
“Shut up,” he said.
“Inside of me.”
He was rigid. His eyes someplace over my head, and I felt every ounce of control he was using to keep himself from doing what he wanted. I stepped back, away. Pulling the tie of my robe as I went. It slid open, revealing my body. My skin soft and pink from the shower. “It’s never felt good before. But it would with you, wouldn’t it? With us?”
“You think I won’t hurt you?”
“You will. But you’ll make it feel so good, too. That’s what you do to me.”
His eyes on me burned. Like the hottest part of the flame, and it hurt. Everything about him hurt. But god, I loved this pain.
“You could fuck me,” I said, lying back on the bed. My heels on the edge of the mattress. I parted my legs, slipped my hand down over my pussy. “Right here.” I jumped at the brush of my finger over my clitoris. How, I wondered, could I be so tired? So scared? And still want him so much? The world could be coming down around me, and I would still want him. “I could make you feel good, too. The way it’s supposed to be.”
He came to stand at the foot of the bed between my legs. I held my breath waiting for his touch. And when it came, his hand on my knee, I flinched with the pleasure.
“When did you get so bold?” he asked.
“You made me this way.” I dipped a finger deeper inside myself, and he made a sound from his throat, a groan that made me catch my breath. This was some kind of magic between us. We were combustible, and the other held the match.
“You . . . make me want things I can’t have, Poppy.” His voice sounded final. Cold. Like he was halfway out the door. “I won’t fuck you. But I’ll make you feel good.”