Chapter 17 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Oh, the less I know the better”
— “The Less I Know the Better” by Tame Impala
“You need to leave,” I say.
The Masked Man doesn’t move. His hands remain on the table, fingers laced, as he watches me like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be.
“I mean it,” I insist. You can’t just—you can’t keep showing up here.”
Nothing. Not a word. Not a shift in his posture. Those gray eyes remain blank and still through the holes in the black mask.
I drop my keys on the counter with a loud clatter. I cross my arms, then uncross them, then don’t know what to do with my hands so I shove them in my coat pockets.
“Why did you come back?” I start to get angry when he still doesn’t answer.
“Seriously. Why? What is this? What are you doing? Because last night was—” I stop and try again in a more level voice.
“Last night can’t happen again. You understand that, right?
It was a mistake. A huge, massive, colossal mistake that I made because I was scared and exhausted and not thinking clearly, and you—you’re—”
I’m pacing now. Back and forth between the counter and the fridge, talking at the floor, at the ceiling, at anything that isn’t him.
“Do you need reminders, huh? Do you have the memory of a goldfish? Okay, fine. Happy to oblige.” I start to rattle things off on my fingers.
“You broke into my apartment. Multiple times. You beat my neighbor unconscious. You wrote on my wall in his blood. You told me you were sent to kill me. And I—what, I just—on the kitchen floor—” I press my palm over my eyes.
“That’s not okay. This isn’t some fucked-up fairy tale where the girl falls for the—the—whatever you are.
This is real life. My real life. And in my real life, I don’t do this a second time. ”
I stop pacing. I’m standing maybe six feet from the table. He still hasn’t spoken or moved an inch.
“Say something!” I demand.
He pushes the chair back and stands up. He’s so tall that the overhead light catches the top of his head and throws his masked face into partial shadow.
He walks toward me. It’s a horror movie monster pace—one step after another, unhurried, closing the distance between us.
“Don’t,” I warn. My back touches the counter. “I just told you—”
He stops right in front of me. His cinnamon and sandalwood heat tempts me and I find myself inhaling deeply before I realize it and stop.
The Masked Man’s hand comes up. He hooks one finger under my chin and tilts my face toward his.
“I told you to leave,” I whisper. “Didn’t I? Didn’t…?”
He pulls the mask up above his mouth. I see his jaw for the first time. It’s sharp, clean-shaven, with a faint scar near the corner of his lip. I don’t get to catalog anything else because then he kisses me.
I don’t meet him halfway.
I meet him all the way.
My hands find the front of his jacket and I pull him into me and kiss him back.
He lifts me onto the counter. I wrap my legs around his waist and urge him closer.
The mask is bunched up above his mouth but still covering his nose and eyes, and when I feel the fabric brush against my cheek, reality punches through.
I pull back. “Wait.”
He freezes. His chest is heaving against mine. “What?”
“The mask,” I breathe. “Pull it back down.”
He looks at me. Or I think he does—I can’t actually see his eyes with the fabric pushed up like that.
I can only see his mouth, and I need to stop seeing it, because a mouth is too personal.
A mouth has expressions. A mouth can smile and frown and belong to a real human being who has a name and a history and thoughts and feelings.
I can’t fuck a person. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Pull it back down,” I repeat. “Please.”
The Masked Man doesn’t argue. He reaches up and tugs the fabric into place, and his jaw and lips and that tiny scar all disappear behind black fabric. He’s no one again.
The relief is instant and enormous. My whole body unclenches.
“Better?” he asks.
“Much.”
He pulls my hips to the edge of the counter and steps between my thighs. His hands go to the buttons of my blouse and he works them open, one by one. When it’s open, his palms skim up my stomach and over the lace of my bra. He unclasps it from the front and pushes both layers off my shoulders.
“Arms up,” he says, and I raise them, and he pulls my undershirt over my head and drops it on the floor.
When that’s done, he drags my trousers and underwear down together. I lift my hips to help until those items are also discarded without a second thought.
Then his hands go to his own waist. His belt clinks.
His zipper rasps. He frees himself and he’s hard, and huge, and then he’s in me, and I’m gasping and clinging.
The stretch is less shocking tonight. My body remembers him from before and opens easily, pulling him deeper, and the fullness is so intense that my eyes roll shut.
He’s nobody. He’s nobody. He has no face and no name and no story. He’s just warmth and pressure and the smell of cinnamon and the sound of our breathing tangled together in the too-bright kitchen. That’s all he is. That’s all I need him to be.
His hips snap forward and I cry out and tighten around him. He groans through the mask. One hand braces on the cabinet behind me. The other grips my hip, pulling me onto him with every thrust.
I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face against his collar and breathe him in. Cinnamon. Sandalwood.
Nobody.
Safe.
As long as he’s nobody, it’s safe.
He fucks me fast and rough. This time doesn’t come with any of the build-up or the dirty monologues. It’s just a body and a body meeting. It has all the frenetic feel of a guilty quickie, probably because that’s exactly what it is.
It’s over in minutes for both of us. I cum first, biting down on his collar to muffle the sound, and he’s right on my heels, pulling out at the last second and spilling hot across my inner thigh.
I stare at the ceiling and wait for the guilt to arrive. Right on schedule, there it is: a slow, sick churn in my stomach that spreads outward until my whole body feels wrong.
I just did it again. What’s to blame this time? I’m sober and clear-headed, perfectly in charge of myself—and yet I walked in, saw him sitting at my table, and chose this.
I don’t know what that makes me. More to the point, I don’t think I want to know.
All I know is that (1) I don’t trust myself to say no to this again, and so, therefore, (2) we need to set some rules to keep this from flying off the rails. Well, more off the rails than it already is.
I look up at him. He’s tucking himself back in, buckling his belt. “We need rules,” I blurt.
He stops and looks at me.
“If this is going to— If you’re going to keep coming here, and I’m going to keep letting you, then there have to be rules. That’s non-negotiable.”
He inclines his head. “I’m listening.”
I hold up one finger. “First off, no names. I don’t want to know yours. The less of a person you are to me, the better.” I lift a second finger. “Two, no faces. The mask stays on, every time. I don’t want to see you and you don’t get to show me.”
“And third?”
“No falling in love,” I say as flatly as I can. “This is just... what it is. Bodies. That’s it. Nobody catches feelings, nobody gets attached, nobody starts thinking this is something it isn’t. The second that changes, it’s over.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then he nods once. “Deal.”
He buttons his jacket and moves toward the window. I stay on the counter, bare-assed and sticky, watching him unlatch it and push it open. The night air rolls in, cold enough to raise goosebumps across my naked skin.
He pauses with one hand on the sill. “I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
My cheeks go hot. I’m grateful he’s facing the window and not me. “Sure. Whatever. Fine,” I say, aiming for casual and landing somewhere much closer to breathless and flushed with excitement.
With one more nod, he slips through the window and disappears.
I stay on the counter for another minute after he’s gone. Then I hop down, clean myself up with a paper towel, and gather my clothes off the floor in a messy bundle.
No names. No faces. No falling in love. It’s only three rules.
Simple enough, right? People follow rules all the time.
There are rules for driving and rules for taxes and rules for how close you can stand to someone on the subway without it being weird.
This is no different. Just another set of guidelines for an activity that so happens to involve a masked intruder who makes me feel things I haven’t felt in years.
Everything is fine.
I pull on an old t-shirt and boxers and crawl into bed. The sheets are cold, clean, and smell like detergent, which is a welcome change from cinnamon, sweat, and bad decisions. I pull the comforter up to my chin and roll onto my side.
Problem is, my brain won’t shut off.
The Lazarev story keeps nudging its way back in, the way it always does when I’m trying not to think about something else.
Ochoa is a ghost. Doug gave me until end of year.
The shell companies are a maze with no exit.
And the man who was sent to kill me for digging into this story just left through my window with my taste still on his mouth.
That last part should probably factor into my reporting strategy somehow, but I have no idea how.
I grab my phone off the nightstand. It’s 11:14 P.M., the day before Thanksgiving. I open my text thread with Doug and type:
What if I stop waiting for sources to come to me and go directly to Lazarev Global? Kir Lazarev just took over as CEO eighteen months ago. He’s still fresh enough that I might have a chance. If I can get in front of him, I might be able to shake something loose.
I hit send and set the phone on my chest, but I’ve barely put it down before it buzzes. Doug is responding faster than expected for almost midnight on a Wednesday.
DOUG HOFFMAN
Good instinct. But Pierce, it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow. Go eat some turkey, watch football, do something normal for once. The Lazarevs will still be there on Monday.
Since when do you care about my work-life balance?
Take the day off. That’s an order.
I drop the phone on the nightstand and roll over. He’s right, but that doesn’t mean anything—I’m not going to relax. Doug has to know that. He’s worked with me long enough to know that telling me to take a day off is about as effective as telling the tide not to come in.
I’m going to find what the Lazarevs are hiding.
And then I’m going to put in on the front page of the New York fucking Times.