42. Lilah
42
LILAH
We moved from the sauna to the hot tub. This time, I didn’t bother with my bathing suit, and I sighed with delight as I sank naked into the warm water. Other than the bath or shower, I’d never been naked in water before, and the sensuality of it sent a shock through my system.
Fresh off sex with Nolan and Jude — at the same time no less — I felt a little like Alice in a perverse kind of Wonderland. While I’d been on my knees saying prayers in my mom’s closet an entire world of pleasure had been waiting for me to discover it.
Did everyone else know it was there? Did they swim naked and sleep with people they liked without thinking about whether they were going to hell? Did they look at themselves naked and feel free to like what they saw?
It was hard to imagine, but I knew it was true. I knew it because even in high school I’d known I was different.
I mean, the religious stuff was obvious, but I hadn’t understood how that part of my life had trickled into literally everything, I hadn’t fully understood I was missing out on fun and dating and sex, because even though I’d wondered about those things — even though some of them had sounded fun, or at least worth exploring — I’d also thought they meant damnation, and no amount of fun seemed worth that.
I’d also thought they meant disappointing my mom. Or worse, God.
I thought about what I’d said to Matt, about how I believed God loved us the way we were, however we were, and I realized I really believed it. I’d felt sick and scared when I’d lived with my mom, forced to hide the things I felt, the things I wanted, even when those things wouldn’t have hurt anyone.
Now I was living with the three men I’d spent the last six years hating, having sex with two of them and fantasies about the third, sitting unashamedly naked in the hot tub with them, and I felt good .
I felt whole and seen.
I felt real .
I was doing all the things — feeling all the things — I’d been told were sinful, things I’d been told would make God wrathful, and all I felt was love. Maybe it wasn’t God the way my mom thought of it, but whatever it was — whatever creator or creative force that existed — it was real too.
“Something on your mind, boss?”
I looked up to find Jude studying me from across the hot tub. He and Nolan had both given me space when we’d gotten in the water and I wondered if they’d done it on purpose, if they’d known I needed room to process what had happened between us.
I moved the water with my hands. “Lots of things.”
“Want to talk about it?” Nolan asked.
I thought about my mom and the closet, the endless praying, the fear. Did I want to talk about that with Nolan and Jude? Did I want to tell them?
Not really. Not yet.
I didn’t want them to look at me differently, to see me as some kind of freak, some kind of charity case, but there were also other things, more important things to talk about.
“I’m good,” I said. “But I was doing some research earlier, on the thing that happened at Aventine and those men who were murdered at the top of the falls a few months ago?”
“That’s quite a topic change,” Nolan said.
“I know,” I said. “Sorry. I’ve just been thinking about it. It has to be connected right? The girls who were kidnapped before and the one I saw being taken behind the Dive?”
“Hard to say for sure,” Nolan said, “but it would be one hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t.”
“So what are you doing?” I asked.
Jude lifted an eyebrow. “About?”
“About the girls.” Why were they being so cavalier about it all? “About the website, Imperium Fratrum. You said you were looking into it. How are you looking into it?”
Jude leaned back in the hot tub and my eyes strayed to the water dripping down his inked chest. “We have contacts in all kinds of places, boss.”
“Contacts? You mean clients.” I was still getting my head around the fact that some of the things the Bastards did for a living were, let’s just say, less than legal.
And that could only mean their clients were shady too.
“Some of them are clients,” Jude said.
“You don’t…” My stomach turned as I thought of another possibility. “You don’t do work in trafficking ?”
They looked like they’d been slapped.
“Fuck no.” Nolan frowned. “Is that what you think of us?”
“I don’t…” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. This is all really confusing.”
And by “this” I didn’t just mean the missing girls and the weird website and what had happened behind the Dive. I’d just fucked two guys at once, two of the guys who’d ruined my life in high school.
I needed a minute.
Nolan’s expression softened. “We’ve done a couple rescues.”
“Trafficking rescues?”
He nodded. “We take work like that for free. Our contacts are on the other side of the equation — people and organizations working to shut down trafficking rings — but we’ve put the word out anyway.”
I took a deep breath. “I didn’t know…”
“We’re just trying to protect you,” Jude said. “The less you know about our work, the better.”
“So these contacts, they haven’t told you anything yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Nolan said, “but they’re pretty far-flung, and our contacts have to be careful. It takes a while for word to move in those circles.”
I held on to the edge of the hot tub and let my legs float out in front of me. “What if there were answers closer to home?”
“Closer to home?” Jude’s eyes were glued to my tits, which had risen up out of the water.
I hesitated, second-guessing whether I really wanted to go there, then decided to forge ahead. “Do you know Daisy Hammond and those guys who killed Piers Cantwell?”