Some men are scary because they have a gun or a knife. Sean O’Harra was terrifying because he didn’t need either. They say that a lot of guys just drop their weapons and run, when they see him marching towards them.
It was a sledgehammer and it suited him. The wooden shaft—almost half my height—was worn and smoothly strong. The metal head was dull gray, chipped and scratched. Brutal...and yet strangely beautiful.
Sean O’Harra scared people. That was a fact and it was also his job: he scared people for a living. The local drug gangs hired him when they wanted a meth lab put out of business or a stolen package of coke retrieved. Sometimes, smashing the place up was the point and sometimes it was a byproduct of scaring people, but it always happened, one way or another. Everyone on our block knew someone who knew someone who’d been there when Sean smashedup the local biker bar because they’d started dealing where they shouldn’t, or when he hammered a guy’s Mercedes into a steel pancake because he owed money, or when he tore through a slimy politician’s house like a hurricane, reducing every stick of furniture to pieces smaller than your fist, because the guy had been hiring underage prostitutes. They said he’d done that last one just for fun.
There were other stories, too, different kinds of stories. Ones told by the glamorous sort of women I’m not, with their perfect hair and make-up. The ones who were too well off to live in our apartment block, but liked to slum it and be alldaringby hanging out at the local bars. They’d giggle and tease each other about Sean O’Harra and joke about how they were going to jiggle their perfect tits in front of him that night. I’d glimpse them coming home with him, all sass and confidence, delighted at having landed a real-life bad boy. The next morning, I’d see them stumbling out of the elevator, clothes half-on and eyes glazed, all their giggles gone.
It scared me but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t excite me a little, too. Sean lived one floor below me and sometimes I’d lie awake in the early hours listening to the thumps and the groans and the breathless female cries that climbed higher and higher and always ended in wailing, frantic pleas.
But now, looking at that hammer, I was reminded of what he really was. Not just someone who worked for the drug gangs but someone they were scared of. He didn’t even have that slim vestige of loyalty and honor that came from belonging to one of them: people said he was loyal to whoever was paying him, and then only for as long as the money lasted. I wasn’t sure if that made him worse than the rest of them, or better because he didn’t believe in all that bullshit aboutrespectthat the dealers thought was so important. To him, it seemed to be just a job. But what sort of man chooses to earn his living scaring people?
Someone very, very different from me. Sean’s world was one utterly outside my own, a world of breaking rules and laws, of waking up to the cops banging on your door—everything I’d been raised to be terrified of. I’ve never even gotten a parking ticket. I might have tolive surrounded by the gangs, but I keep as far away from it all as possible. Maybe that’s why I could feel that thread of heat pulsing and twisting like a glowing wire inside me. I’m sogood—I’ve always been so good—that the idea of a guy like Sean O’Harra taking me and—
Stripping me.
Spreading me.
Destroyingme. Taking all my goodness and making me as dark and dirty as him—
I pressed my thighs together. I didn’t dare look at him again. What if he was looking at me? What if he couldtell?
I focused on the feel of the elevator clunking its way down through the floors.God, I could feel the heat of him, so close in the little metal box. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed his hand finally descending...but, as it swung down, it came almost within touching range of my breast...then my hip...then my thigh. And I realized my whole body was tense, waiting for the brush of his fingers. I didn’t dare look up but, when I glanced carefully sideways, I could see the hazy reflection of him in the polished steel between the graffiti. And it looked as if he was staring down at me with such intensity every inch of my skin should have been bursting into flame. Sean O’Harra was looking atme.
Stop it.Like I’m the sort of woman he’d be into. I couldn’t be moreunlikeone of his conquests. They’re always blonde and tanned. I have hair the color of copper wire and my skin refuses to tan, even after years of living in California. I can stay out of the sun or I can burn. And my boobs are on the big side, making me awkwardly top-heavy and I don’t have time to wear anything but jeans and t-shirts or to spend hours on fancy make-up. I’m just a—
Well, basically I’m a mom. In every sense apart from the literal, genetic one. A sex-starved, slowly-going-insane mom who can’t go out on dates or bring guys back to my apartment.That’swhy I was having crazy, fleeting fantasies about Sean O’Harra: because this brief interlude in the elevator was the closest I’d been to a man in months. That was the only reason.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
The elevator stopped. I heard the doors slide open behind me and I backed out, wheeled around, andranbefore I could do anything stupid.
And I tried to ignore the itching between my shoulder blades, the feeling that he was watching me go.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting at an intersection, strumming my fingers on the wheel and willing the red light to change to green. There was nothing coming in either direction but I’m the sort of person who never,everruns a red. I just know there’ll be a cop somewhere, hiding behind a billboard, ready to leap out and haul me off to jail.
Why was he in the elevator?
It had been niggling at me ever since I got into my car. The elevator had been on the way down and Sean lived on the ninth floor, one below me. So why had he been passing the tenth? There were only two more floors above mine...had he been visiting someone? I’d never heard of him making social calls before. Unless he’d been all the way up on the roof.
What would he be doing on the roof?
The light finally changed and I roared across the silent intersection. I was going to be late and I knew it. I shouldn’t have run home to change after finishing my shift at the garden store, but I hadn’t wanted to show up at the school in a dirt-covered apron.
The view didn’t do anything to improve my stress levels: nothing but concrete, bleached sickly white by the sun. It was only April but the temperature was already in the seventies. I was really,reallygoing to have to find the money to get the car’s air conditioning fixed before summer.
I hate Los Angeles. When my folks first moved us here, they seduced us with stories of beaches and palm trees, movie stars and endless sunshine. But that wasbefore. Before I had to move us fromthe modest but comfortable house to the crappy apartment we now inhabit, with its graffiti and cracking plaster and people like Sean O’Harra as our neighbors. Before it all went wrong.
Before it was just the two of us.
I pulled up in front of Kayley’s school, swinging around manicured flower beds and slotting my wreck of a car between the gleaming SUVs the other parents drove. It’s a public school but it’s one of the best and the sole reason I chose our crappy apartment—it was the only place I could afford that qualified Kayley to keep going to this school. I like the place, even if I feel like a charity case next to the other parents. I like the fact it doesn’t feel like a fortress and the fact it has flowers outside. It’s a paltry amount of greenery, really, but it’s better than the endless concrete I see everywhere else. Sometimes, when I’m picking up Kayley from school and the wind blows the scent of the flowers just right, I can kid myself that I’m back in Vermont.
I raced up the steps and straight over to the reception window. I could see Kayley through the glass, sitting swinging her legs, and tapping out messages to her classmates on her phone. “Hi,” I said breathlessly. “I’m here for Kayley. Kayley Willowby.”
The woman peered at me owlishly. “You’re her...mom?” she asked uncertainly. Kayley is fourteen. I’m twenty-two.
“Her sister. Louise.”
“Give me a minute.”
