“I’d rather not drop you back in the parking lot at this hour.”
“Take me back to my damn car,” she said. “I don’t want to arrange a ride later. I don’t need my car sitting in the parking lot all night, where people can draw conclusions.”
“You didn’t mind that earlier.”
“Well, earlier I didn’t feel bad or ashamed about my choices, but you’ve gone and made that... It’s different now. It’s different.”
If he had a conscience, he would have felt guilt over that. But it wasn’t guilt that wracked his body now. It was rage.
Rage that the monster had won.
The rage had nothing to do with her. Nothing about the way it might impact her life. It was about him.
Maybe that was selfish. He didn’t really know. Didn’t really care, either.
“If you’d like to withdraw from the job, I understand,” he said when they pulled back into the parking lot of Ace’s bar.
“Hell, no,” she said, her tone defiant. “I’m not losing this job. You don’t get to ruin that, too.”
“I wouldn’t figure you’d want to work with me anymore.”
“You think you know a lot about me. For a man who knows basically nothing. The whole...intimacy-of-sex thing is a farce. You have no idea who I am. You have no idea what I want, what I need. I will finish this job because I took it on. And when I said that I wanted you, when I said I wanted this, I knew we were going to continue working together.”
“Suit yourself.”
“None of this suits me.”
She tumbled out of the truck and went to her car, and he waited until she was inside, until she got it started and began to pull out of the space, before he started heading back toward his place.
But it wasn’t until he parked in front of his house that he realized she had left her bra and panties behind.
The two scraps of fabric seemed to represent the final shreds of his humanity.
He reached out and touched her bra, ran his thumb over the lace.
And he asked himself why the hell he was bothering to pull away now. She had been...a revelation. Soft and perfect and everything he’d ever wanted.
He wondered why the hell he was pretending he cared about being a man, when being a monster was so much easier.
Eight
One thought kept rolling through Faith’s mind as she sat at her desk and tried to attend to her work.
She wasn’t a virgin anymore.
She had lost her virginity. In a pickup truck.
Of all the unexpected turns of events that had occurred in her life, this was inarguably themostunexpected. She surely had not thought she would do that, ever.
Not the virginity thing. She had been rather sanguine about that. She had known sex would happen eventually, and there was no point in worrying about it.
But the pickup truck. She had really not seen herself as a do-it-in-a-pickup-truck kind of girl.
With a man like that.
If she actually sat and broke down her thoughts on what kind of man she had imagined she might be with, it wasn’t him. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
She had imagined she would find a man quite a bit like herself. Someone who was young, maybe. And understood what it was like to be ambitious at an early age. Someone who could relate to her. Her particular struggles.
