I do need it.
His fingers work me steady, two of them inside, his thumb circling my clit. I’m rocking against his hand, my face buried in his shoulder, making sounds I’d be embarrassed about if I had any pride left. He’s murmuring things against my hair, filthy, sweet things. “That’s it, baby.”
I come fast. Faster than I expect. It rolls through me, hot, sharp, my whole body clenching around his fingers while he holds me with his other arm. I bite his shoulder to keep from being loud and he makes a satisfied sound.
“Fast,” he says. “Told you.”
“Shut up.” I’m breathing hard and my face is still in his shoulder. He smells good. He always smells good. “What about you?”
“I’ll live.” He pulls his hand out of my jeans, buttons me back up, and kisses the top of my head.
“You’re too nice.”
“Don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
I climb off his lap. He stands, adjusts himself with zero shame, and grins at me one more time. “Don’t give up on us,” he says and then he’s gone.
I sit on the bed feeling loose and warm and a little less like the world is ending. That’s what Rogue does. He reminds me I’m alive. He reminds me that not everything has to be a crisis.
Ten minutes later, Mara walks in.
She’s got that look. The one she gets when she’s been thinking about something and needs to talk it through. She sits on her side of the bed, cross-legged, and starts fiddling with her hair.
“So Tommy asked about your papers again,” she says.
My stomach drops. “Oh? What did he ask?” I ask casually.
“We were just talking. He asked how you were doing and I said fine, you know, keeping busy. And then he said something about how it must be hard, not having the full picture. Like, not knowing how the story ends. And I was like, what do you mean? And he said, you know, Vi’s dad’s papers. The missing pieces.”
Missing pieces. The full picture. How the story ends.
I didn’t tell Mara about missing pieces. I told her something was off, a while back. Before I shut her out. She doesn’t know about the six-week gap. She doesn’t know about the last dated entry. She doesn’t know that Dad’s papers end clean in the middle of an investigation with no final page.
So she couldn’t have told Tommy about missing pieces because she doesn’t know there are missing pieces.
“What did you tell him?” I ask, careful, keeping my voice level.
“Nothing, really. I told him I didn’t know much about it. But, Vi…” She stops fiddling with her hair and looks at me. “It was kind of weird, how said it. Like he already knew the answer and was checking to see if I knew too.”
My blood goes cold.
“That is weird,” I say. Neutral. Calm. The opposite of what’s happening inside me.
“Right? I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. He’s probably just being nosy. Some people are like that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”
She shrugs and moves on to something about the work-hub schedule. I nod in the right places and make the right sounds, my face doing a good impression of a person having a normal conversation. But inside, my brain is moving fast.
Tommy knows about the gaps. He knows there are missing pieces. He framed it as “how the story ends,” which is a very specific way to describe an investigation that stopped midstream. That’s not gossip, that’s not Mara paraphrasing, that’s a man who has independent knowledge of what’s in those papers, or at least what’s not in them. Two conversations and two slips. Once could be loose phrasing, but twice is a pattern.
I don’t tell Mara what I’m thinking. She’d panic and feel guilty and possibly go straight to Tommy and confront him, which is the worst possible move right now. I need Mara to keep being Mara. Normal, open, and unsuspecting. If Tommy continues to believe his cover is solid, he’ll keep talking. And the more he talks, the more he’ll give away.
I’m thinking the way Sting thinks, now. The irony is not lost on me.
I smile at Mara, ask about her day, pour her some water, and act like nothing has changed.
58
