Chapter Thirty-Eight
Rocky
“First time you had sex during a horror movie?” Phoebe asks while we rewind A Nightmare on Elm Street again and watch on her bed. Sweaty sheets are tangled around our equally sweaty, naked bodies, and her bare legs are intertwined with mine. Her question is more curious than taunting.
“Yes, actually.” I unwrap an Almond Joy, a giant-sized bag of assorted Halloween candy between us.
“Hmm,” she muses.
I look over at her, wondering what the hell that hmm means. She smooths her lips to hide a burgeoning smile. She likes that I’m doing new things with her.
I begin to smile into a bite of coconut and chocolate. Finally having sex with Phoebe blew every image I’d constructed into a thousand smithereens. It was inconceivably better. Greater. A) Because it was real, and B) because the depth of how compatible we are stunned me. We just fit. I could’ve predicted how much I’d completely, undeniably love being that close to Phoebe, but the raw, overwhelming emotion and power that came with detonating years of volatile, built-up tension—that was unpredictable.
Phoebe munches on an M&M, her smile fading as I reach over and brush candy wrappers off the bed. She asks, “When did I do that?”
“Do what?”
“That.” She points at my forearms.
I barely glance down, knowing the sore reddened fingerprints exist, and they’ll likely turn black-and-blue tomorrow. Her nails also cut into my skin, and I wish she didn’t ask about it because I’m afraid to darken her happiness.
“Earlier,” I say vaguely.
Her frown bunches her thick brows. “I don’t remember...”
Fuck. I just look right at her, the answer in my serious expression.
“Oh.” She goes still. “When I was telling you about... right.” Carlsbad. She shakes her head, wincing. “So I emotionally and physically hurt you. Great. Awesome.”
“I wanted it.” I slide my arm across her bare shoulder and place a kiss on her temple. “I’m glad you did.” I press another kiss.
Phoebe looks up at me, seeing how gravely serious I am, and she eases with a big exhale, then burrows more against my chest.
We relax into the normalcy of this time together. Naked after the best sex of my life. Watching one of her favorite movies.
I like horror okay, but definitely not as much as Phoebe.
“Freddy, no!” Phoebe chastises Freddy Krueger a half hour through. She tears open her fourth bag of mini M&M’s. “Just one more,” she tells me, or maybe she’s convincing herself. “We’ll still have enough for the little kids next week.”
“Or here’s an idea. We don’t pass out candy.” I eat another Almond Joy.
“Halloween Scrooge,” she combats, dumping the M&M’s into her palm.
“You shouldn’t insult the guy who just made you come four times.” I crunch on the fun-sized candy bar.
She lets out a long breath, blushing and slightly glaring. Her body is splayed a little over me right now, and she’s gorgeous. Flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous. But I fell in love with so much more than her tits and ass and the curve of her hips. Though, God, I love her wide hips. They’re the perfect crook for my hands to rest while I take her.
I raise my brows. “I only speak the truth.”
“I’m not denying it,” she says hotly, then sits up more against the headboard. Her blue hair cascades along her collarbone. “I was just thinking...”
She takes forever to finish that.
It’s killing me.
“Was there a thought there?” I retort.
“Now who’s impatient?” she snaps back.
Me. I take a frustrated bite of Almond Joy. I’m on edge while she withholds her tortured thought. I say tortured because her face contorts and brows wrinkle.
“Can I help you?” I ask her. “You want me to guess?”
“No, no,” she says, more softly. “I was just thinking that sex makes things more complicated. Are we... what is...?” She trails off.
Okay.
I pick up the remote to pause the movie. I’ve been waiting for this talk. Phoebe rotates fully to face me and hugs a pillow to her bare chest. I’m only thankful because her breasts would be incredibly fucking distracting right now.
“What are we?” I clarify what she tried to ask. “We’re together. Fuck everything else. I want to be with you, Phoebe. I told you I wouldn’t have sex with you for any other reason than because I love you.” I watch her contemplate this with a short breath, and my muscles tense. “Isn’t that what you want?”
Am I wrong to think this? Are we not on the same page?
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I want that.” Her eyes lift to mine. “To be together outside of a con, I’ve always wanted that, Rocky.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
Phoebe is quiet in thought.
“Our parents?” I question.
“?‘Fuck everything’ means fuck them, right?” she asks. And when I nod, she says, “Then fuck them.” She picks at a feather poking out of the pillow. “I mean, of course I’m still nervous how involved my mom will be if we tell her. I can’t just shut that off.” She looks to me. “We are telling our parents, right?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t planning on keeping this a secret from them.”
I knew that once I crossed the line and slept with Phoebe—that was it. I’d be opening the door to have our relationship manipulated and used by them. But I’d rather roll those dice and find ways to come out on top than stay in the hellhole I’ve been living in.
She smiles a little bit, but it fades in another thought.
Phoebe. I wish I could read her mind right now. “You’re not just hung up on our parents?”
“There are so many messy parts to this.” She sighs, but quickly adds, “It’s worth it.” Her eyes say: you’re worth it. My chest rises in a deeper breath, and I nod her on. She tucks hair behind her other ear. “How do I tell Hailey? She doesn’t even know I like you like this.” Phoebe gesticulates to my naked body.
“Why is that?” I wonder. “Afraid she’d run and tell me?”
“No, I was afraid she’d want us together.”
That surprises me. “Really?”
“I didn’t... I didn’t want her to be like my mom and hope for another Tinrock-Graves union. Now I’m actually more afraid she’d hate us together.” Phoebe’s neck reddens. “She’s adamant we’d be terrible for each other, and I have agreed with her. A lot.”
“Yeah,” I say with understanding. What we’ve been to each other has always been complicated, and I can’t foresee whether my sister will get it. Let alone Phoebe’s brothers. “Your brothers are more of my concern,” I admit, “but it’s not going to stop me. I’d rather tell all of them than have to sneak around.”
“Me, too.” Her voice is quieter. “How do we break the news that we’re together? Because in each version in my head, it feels so preplanned, like another con.” Her face breaks. “I want this to be real. But I don’t even know how to announce it without it sounding fake.”
“So we don’t plan anything,” I tell her. “We just let them figure it out or tell them casually when it feels right. We don’t need some elaborate setup, Phebs.”
She thinks this over, popping another M&M into her mouth. “Okay.”
“Okay.” I hold out my hand. She pours three candies into my palm, and I toss two back, crunching. “You’re forgetting another messy part to all this.”
She frowns.
“You’re fake dating Jake Waterford.”
She winces. “Shit.” Apologies fill her eyes. “Sorry.”
“No apology necessary,” I say. “The fact that he’s a forgettable piece of your life makes me rock-hard.”
Her eyes dip to my crotch. Hidden by a sliver of the white sheet. She bites down on the chocolate. “I’ll break up with him.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“Obviously,” she combats roughly like that word was unneeded. The heat in her eyes makes me want to take her again, but I’ve delayed too many conversations already.
I throw back the last M&M, crunching harder. “I can’t do this without your permission, but if you’ll let me, I’m going to tell my mother to give you a larger cut of the Fiddle Game earnings.”
“Don’t,” Phoebe immediately says. “I know it might piss you off that I didn’t see the money—”
“Four hundred grand, Phoebe,” I say with heat in my chest. “What’d you get?”
“It was always supposed to set up Seattle,” she refutes. “It was going toward reestablishing our lives in a new city. That’s what every big payout at the end of a job does.”
“We didn’t go to Seattle,” I remind her. “Which is exactly why you and Hailey deserve more—”
“I don’t want it,” Phoebe snaps. “That con wasn’t about the money for me. It was about not failing the team, and if I take more cash, then it just makes me feel like I prostituted myself that night more than I guess I did.”
I put my hand on her knee, intaking a boiling breath, and I nod a few times, respecting her decision and dropping it. She’s tense, and I reach out and bring her closer.
Phoebe lies against my chest, and once her pulse slows, I breathe, “Speaking of money. I bought a horse.”
“What?” She shoots back up and spins to face me, knocking over the bag of Halloween candy. “You? The guy who curls his lip at Seabiscuit and Black Beauty and Flicka—”
“We get it—”
“—bought a horse?”
“Jake’s horse,” I clarify.
Realization widens her eyes. “The horse stables.” What I haven’t told her about since I’ve been gone for two weeks.
“Actually, it was his sister’s horse.”
Her mouth keeps dropping. “What?” Her eyes grow again. “That’s why you needed a big chunk of change. To buy his sister’s horse?”
“A hundred grand.” Could I have swung that without leaving? Eh, it’d put me closer to a financial hole, and I hate even stepping toward one. It was smarter to leave town and make the cash the immoral way.
Phoebe straightens up in anticipation. “So what’d you find out?”
“?‘Chiquitita.’ He wasn’t calling a broker.”
She gasps. “I knew it.”
“He was calling his little sister.”
She goes still. “The one that died? How...?”
“She’s not dead.”
I tell her everything I know about Jake. How his sister is still alive and how he staged her death. How I’m the proud new owner of a warmblood named Bowie. She snorts when I say proud, which makes me grin, truthfully.
I end by saying, “It’s weird. Jake’s the first guy I’ve ever known that I don’t want to con—but he’s primed for conning.”
She frowns. “Is it because you like him?”
I glower. “I don’t like him.”
“Not sexually.” She glares back. “But I guess I’m just thinking it’d be easy to like him now that you know he’s capable of deception. That’s a trait most people scorn, but you’ve always seen it as a sign of capability.”
Maybe.
“I do envy him,” I say. That admission feels good.
Her brows shoot up. “Really?”
“Yeah, he was able to deceive his own parents, and there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever be able to do the same.” I unwrap another Almond Joy, a tension winding its way through the room. Just because we’re together now doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly joined sides on the issue about our parents.
We can agree to disagree and still love one another. She doesn’t need to believe in everything that I believe in. It won’t make me care any less about her.
She takes a deep breath. “I still really love my mom, Rocky.”
“I know,” I say into a rougher sigh and then smile dryly at her. “We all have our flaws.”
She tosses an M&M at my face. I catch the candy in my mouth. Crunching on the chocolate, I say, “As long as we’re on the same page with us, I don’t really care if we disagree about them.”
“Same,” she says.
I look her over. “Have you decided if you’re going to stick with this ‘honest’ lifestyle?” Hailey put the ball in her court.
She shakes her head. “I’m just taking it day by day.”
I nod slowly.
Day by day.
That’s all we can do at this point in our fucked-up lives.
She tells me, “First order of business: break up with Jake.”
That—I’m going to love to watch.