“What?”
“Fucking,” he mouthed.
“Why are you whispering?”
“What if my mother is listening?”
I laughed and for the first time, didn’t feel the tightness in my chest when I recalled how we’d first met. “She’s not,” I assured him.
“But what if she is? She already has to deal with me sixty-nining and swallowing my boyfriend’s mega load.”
Mega load?I barked out a laugh. He was too much sometimes. “She doesn’t know about all that. As far as she knows, you’re still her perfect little angel. My angel now.”
He smiled and burrowed against me so that I might continue to caress him. His eyelids grew heavy and his breathing evened out, signs that he was about to pass all the way out.
“Say it again,” he said softly.
“Say what again?”
“Call me a good boy.”
“You’re averygood boy, Kitten, the best boy in the whole world, and you’re all mine.”
I heard the smile in his voice when he responded with, “I like that.”
“Yeah, I like that too.”
* * *
We napped.With the rain falling steadily outside our windows and Kitten warm and sated in my embrace, I was able to slip away too, enough that the loud banging on our front door went off like a shotgun in my mind. I startled into awareness while simultaneously reaching for the machete I kept at our bedside. Kitten stirred, murmuring in his sleep.
“Sit tight,” I said to him. “I’ll go see who it is.”
“Mmmnnn,” he mumbled and buried his face in the pillow.
Pulling on my jeans and slinging my machete, now holstered, over one shoulder, I descended the stairs to a fresh round of banging, which sounded suspiciously cop-like in nature. The peephole revealed three men standing on the other side of the door, huddled under the roof of the front stoop to stay out of the rain, wearing matching red collared shirts. Each of them carried an axe and looked decidedly put out by the delay.
“Yeah?” I asked once I’d opened the door because it was a lot more polite than,Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?
“We’re with the Fire Prevention Committee. These locks are against fire code.”
I recognized the man who was speaking from the game night where I’d handed him his own ass repeatedly in foosball. His name was Justin and he had a wide face with pinched features and terrible hand-eye coordination.
“Isn’t that why you all carry axes? To pry open doors and smash windows?” I asked.
“Locks of any kind are against the Promised Land town charter. You need to remove these in the next twenty-four hours or you’ll have to go before the Council. May we come inside to inspect the premises?”
“How often do you conduct these raids?” I asked.
He narrowed his eyes and said with a frown, “This isn’t a raid, Brother Cipher, it’s a routine fire safety inspection. They happen once a month.”
“Without notice?”
“We want to make sure residents are following the fire safety code.”
“What if I hadn’t been here?”
“We would have conducted the inspection without anyone present.”
