14
Liam
Out of immediate danger and settled into our temporary base, I was able to relax somewhat through dinner. Of course, what felt relaxing for me would have been a panic-inducing, crippling fear for others, but I’d learned to adjust to this constant worry and paranoia in my line of work.
However, there was something else I was experiencing too.
Since I’d had to open up to Ty about the danger he was in, and about my life—my real life—there was a certain relief I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I felt a sort of freedom with him, one I wished I could have felt when we chatted before, but that I assumed would never be possible. It was a weight off my shoulders.
As Ty and I chatted, I participated more than I had previously, feeling at ease, simply because that constant need to shield myself from him had faded. Not entirely, but there was a huge difference.
After we finished dinner, we hand-washed the dishes together. “You play cards?” I asked him as he handed me a plate and I started to dry it with a towel.
“I can play Five-Card Draw and Texas Hold’Em. Why?”
“I picked up a deck at the store. Thought we could work our way through a few games to pass the time.”
Passing the time with Ty Winslow. If there was a way to spend confinement, that was it.
When the dishes were finished, we slipped away into the living room. I made a fire in the fireplace, and we settled on the floor in front of it to keep warm, even though I had a few other ideas about the best ways to keep warm with him.
We made it through a few rounds of Texas Hold’Em before he asked, “So…I imagine a lot of your job is about waiting.”
“Waitingismy job. There are plenty more adventurous parts—”
“—the James Bond moments,” he teased as he dealt.
“Yes, those.” I couldn’t help but enjoy a chuckle at the reference, because my work was anything but glamorous. “Those moments are anomalies. The hit or the sting is orchestrated over weeks, sometimes months of waiting, and maybe you get to kick some ass for a night, maybe within a half hour’s time, but before the actual mission, it’s research, making friends, infiltrating circles. The quiet before the storm.”
I surveyed the hand he’d passed me, checking out my options.
“So how does someone wind up in a job like yours? I don’t imagine there were any applications.”
“Guys ends up in a job like this the way anyone ends up in any career…typically by having very different plans in life.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“I guess I had this idea of a kid sitting around, dreaming about being an international spy. Or what did you call it—international monster hunter?”
He smiled as he said it, though he couldn’t have understood how apt the term was.
“I didn’t have many dreams, really. I’d given up on education. I didn’t have a good home life, and then the shelter was even worse, which was how I wound up on the streets, doing what I could to survive.”
Ty’s expression, wide-eyed as he listened with eagerness to me talk about my past, shifted to something more somber.
“I was a prostitute, Ty. Don’t see a reason to dress it up in anything other than that. Be nicer to say I was an escort or a gigolo, but the reality is, I wasn’t working for premium clientele, and I’d suck a dick for probably less than you’d spend on a meal at McDonald’s. Word got around that I was pretty good at sucking a dick and that I was fine with guys who wanted things a little rougher or nastier, so I was approached by a scummy pimp willing to take a bit of jailbait in.”
“Thirteen-year-old jailbait?”
“Yeah. Far too young.” I left it there. “Maybe I was looking for a father figure, or just someone who would deal with day-to-day shit and give me a place to live, but this guy Ira, whom I knew through some other guys on the streets, approached me. Asked me to show him what I could do, and I did just that. He took me in, let me stay in his house of guys. For the first time, I didn’t have to go to some hourly motel or suck a guy off behind a dumpster. He provided meals and clothes. Even let me pick out the clothes, which made me feel like I’d fucking married a millionaire.”
I couldn’t help but snicker at the naive kid who’d so foolishly bought into the seductive lure of food, clothing, and shelter in exchange for so very much.
“But it made living easier…at least when I got started. He’d line the guys up for me, and all he asked for in exchange was my freedom, and my soul, I guess, but I didn’t have any qualms about giving that up. Hell, I didn’t have much use for any of that when he was offering food and shelter and taking the hard part of my work away from me, keeping me off the cold New York streets. —Flush.”
I showed my hand to his two queens. We’d been playing throughout my chat, acting as if this were a totally normal conversation to be having over poker.
