Chapter 8
HARLOW
"So, what's your origin story?" I trailed my finger across the cracked linoleum. Clean, but the surface had seen better decades.
"What's the hurry, love?" Boner pulled two cups out of the cabinet and turned on the electric kettle. It started to gurgle loudly. I waited for his neighbor to bang on the wall, but if he was disturbed by the noise, he didn't let us know.
"Didn't you know curiosity killed the cat?" He spooned sugar into the cups.
"Lucky my name isn't Cat," I said, turning to look around the rest of the space. I hadn't been paying attention to it the last time I was here. It was cozy, with midcentury modern furniture, the couch and a narrow bookcase taking up most of the space.
"There's that sense of humor again." He pointed the spoon at me.
"Yeah, I'm a comedian." I walked over to the bookcase to peer at the titles. "Murder mysteries and Stephen King. Why am I not surprised? Is this your inspiration?"
He laughed. "Nah, that's what I read for fun. They keep me grounded."
I turned around and pressed my lips together as if I didn't quite buy it.
"Why do you do it?" I tried again. Most people didn't wake up in the morning and decide to sneak into someone else's place to kill them. The decision to do that was gradual. We weren't opportunists. We planned. Chose our targets. Justified what we were about to do, to ourselves.
Then we did it.
Boner closed his eyes and exhaled, his jovial mask dropping away.
"My father used to get rough with my mother. She always made excuses for him, but the only excuse was that he was a stone cold asshole." He opened his eyes and looked down at the floor. "She always had bruises. Then, one day he died."
"You killed him?" I guessed.
He looked up at me and laughed humorlessly. "No. Dickhead got into a fight at the pub. Copped a punch right to the face. Fell and hit his head on the footpath. Sidewalk, whatever. Died in a puddle of blood. But my mother? It was like she came to life when he fucked off. She mourned him."
He shook his head, clearly not understanding why. "She grieved, then she blossomed. Like she deserved to, you know? I decided then and there I wouldn't let anyone bully a woman if I could help it."
"How old were you?" I asked.
"Fifteen." He glanced over to the kettle which was almost ready to whistle. "When I was seventeen, I was walking home late one night. Saw a guy trying to rape a woman. Threw him off a bridge."
He shook his head just slightly. "There was remorse, yeah, but there was something else too. Relief. Asshole couldn't hurt anyone else. And the woman, she could go on with her life without being broken the way he would have broken her."
"The first one is always the most difficult," I said. I understood why he did what he did. Not only that, I would have done it too.
"See, I didn't find it difficult," he said. "I guess I was six ways of fucked up already. I hate to admit I might be just like my old man."
"Bullshit," I said. "There's a big difference between someone who hurts an innocent person to make themselves feel better, and someone who hurts guilty people to make the world better."
"Is there?" he asked. "I could have called the coppers. I could have punched the bloke instead of hurling him off a bridge. I could have fought him off her and taken her out of there."
"You also could have walked past and done nothing," I argued. "Plenty of people would have."
"Plenty of people suck," he grumbled.
I laughed bitterly. "Those are some facts you're speaking there. But there's also lots of good people in the world. People who need other people looking out for them."
"People like us," he said. When the kettle clicked off, he poured hot water into both cups and added milk before handing one to me.
"People like us," I agreed as if he'd offered that as a toast. "So you graduated from throwing assholes off bridges to hiding on fire escapes."
"Huh, I must have missed the part where I get a cap and gown. And my pretty degree from Vigilante University." He gestured toward an empty space on the wall with his cup.
"At least you don't have to pay back the tuition," I pointed out. "How long have you been here?"
"Here in the states, or here in this shit hole? Actually, the answer to that is two years. My mother remarried and I figured I could use a change of scenery."
"Is she happy now?" I asked.
He smiled as he said, "Yeah. Alan is a good bloke. He treats her like she's a queen. Which she is, if you ask me."
He clearly adored his mother. Which I had to admit was cute as hell.
"I'm happy for her," I said honestly. "Every woman deserves to be treated like a queen."
"Even badass vigilantes." He nodded toward me. "Especially beautiful ones with red hair and mean knife skills."
"I don't know about that," I said, sipping my coffee.
"I do." He finished off his drink and put the cup down beside the sink. "I don't think I've met anyone who deserves as many orgasms as you do."
"That's very specific," I said, trying not to think too much about our night together. It was good. Very good. A repeat performance wouldn't be a hardship. What it would be though, was a complication. Those scared me more than anything.
"It's very accurate," he said. He took my empty cup from my hand and placed it beside the other one. "You're a gorgeous woman, Harlow St. James." He ran his knuckles down my cheek, across my neck to my throat.
"So fucking pretty." He leaned in and kissed me lightly, barely more than a brush of lips over lips. "Go out with me."
"On a date?" I frowned at him, but my heart was thumping away in my chest.
"Yeah. Dinner, movie, a walk through the park. The works. You are allowed to eat at other restaurants, right?”
"They usually don't object to me walking through the door," I said, pretending to misunderstand what he was asking. "And I don't mind eating other people's cooking either. I'm always curious about the way other chefs use flavor. Once in a while, I learn something new."
"Huh, I never thought of that," he said. "I can understand though. Like an artist is always open to appreciating new art forms. New ways to work with light or new materials. Like animal bone versus plaster."
"Life is a learning experience," I said. Right now, I was learning about my body's response to being so close to him. Remembering the way his piercing felt inside me didn't hurt either.
He cocked his head and smiled. "See, that's what I keep saying. The moment we stop learning is the moment we might as well curl up in a sad ball in the corner, because we've essentially given up. And no one ever said Edward Douglas Bonegard was a quitter. I bet they never said you were one either."
He hesitated for a beat and a frown before asking, "How did you come to own your own restaurant at the tender age of…" He gestured at me to fill in the implied blank.
"Twenty-eight," I said. "Family money. Inheritance, to be specific. It's given me a lot of freedom to do the things I wanted to do."
"So it's true what they say, money is the root of all evil." But he was grinning as he said it.
"Money is the key to a lot of things, including freedom and, to some extent, evil," I agreed. "Rich people get away with a lot of things." Now I was thinking back to Gary and Carl. Both rich men. Both who used their wealth to do abhorrent things.
"Sometimes they don't get away with them," Boner pointed out.
"Eventually," I said, letting my frustration show. They'd gotten away with plenty before I caught up with them. Others were doing the same thing as we stood here talking.
"Better eventually than never," he said. "So, about our date. When are you free?" He looked certain I'd make the time.
I remembered I was having lunch with Cass on Monday. I didn't want to string either of them along, but I hadn't made any promises. Why shouldn't I go out and enjoy myself with two different, attractive men? It wasn't as though anything was going to come of it anyway.
We'd have a nice time and then go our separate ways. Maybe we'd be friends afterward, maybe we wouldn't. Maybe we'd fuck, maybe we wouldn't do that either.
"I'm free Tuesday night," I said finally. "Let me know where and I'll meet you. Unless you want me to pick a restaurant?"
I knew the restaurant scene of the city pretty well by now.
Especially those within a three or four block radius of mine.
Between us, we covered every kind of cuisine you could imagine.
And some you couldn't. Some were about creative presentation as much as they were about feeding diners.
That wasn't my thing, but I appreciated the artistry.
How could I not, when their food looked so elegant?
"I know a place," he said. "It might not be up to your standards, but it's pretty good. And I'm almost certain they don't serve asshole."
"Only almost certain?" I asked, arching an eyebrow at him.
"I'd like to be one hundred percent, but you never know." He grinned, clearly sure the restaurant didn't source meat the same way I did. He was probably right. I'd like to think I was an exception.
"I'm going to need your number so I can text you the address," he said.
I considered refusing, but he already knew where my restaurant was. If he couldn't text me, he'd turn up in person, possibly at the wrong time.
I held out my hand for his phone and put my number into it.
Before I handed it back, I called myself so I'd have his too.
Otherwise, when he called or texted, it would come up as a unknown number, and I didn't answer those.
Did anyone, these days? It's almost as though the 'phone' part of telephones had become redundant.
Now we used them for anything but making phone calls.
"Good girl," he said, taking the phone back and tucking it away in his pocket. He cupped my cheek and smiled down at me. "Now, you were going to tell me your origin story."
"Was I?" I asked. "I'm not sure you're ready for mine." I'd never confided any of it to anyone. I wasn't sure how I felt about doing it now. It might help, getting it off my chest, but it might also bring back a world of demons. Demons I thought I'd put behind me. Now I wasn't so sure.
After all, they were the reason why I did everything I did.
"Sweetheart, if you haven't noticed, I'm always ready for anything." One side of his mouth tugged up, along with both of his eyebrows.
"You don't think I could catch you off-guard?” I asked. "That sounds like a challenge to me."
"I always like a challenge," he said. "You can try. Why don't you start at the beginning. See if you can shock me."
"Do you mind if we sit down?" Without waiting for an answer, I lowered myself down to his couch. I waited until he was sitting beside me before I started to tell him the whole, sordid story.