Chapter Forty-Three
BARRETT
"I thought you said you were off your case," Sawyer's voice rumbled across the table from me.
"I am," I told him, a little annoyed that I had wrapped it up this morning—billing and all—and couldn't use it as an excuse to get out of this torture: lunch with my brother, Brock, and Tig. With their expectant faces, wanting all the dirt. Dirt I would have to make up since it didn't really exist.
I wasn't even sure why I felt compelled to lie, to make up some story about Clarke just to appease them. My singleness had been a small issue to all of them for a while now. I had never felt the need to lie about it before. Let alone rope someone else into the lie with me.
But here we were.
"Then why are you so distracted?" he shot back, making me realize the appetizers had shown up while my gaze had been angled up at the TV screen, though I had been looking through it rather than at it.
"Didn't you hear?" Brock asked, smile teasing. "His girl has been out of town with her friends."
That had been the lie I had told him when he showed up at my office a week ago.
It seemed the most plausible reason for her to be away: a girls’ trip.
I figured women did that sort of thing. If Hollywood movies were anything to go by.
Then again, maybe I had miscalculated. Hollywood movies also made espionage seem like an action-packed adventure when, in reality, it was a lot of waiting around doing nothing.
"Yeah?" Sawyer asked, looking at me, then back at Brock, seeming to know he would get more answers there. "For how long?"
"Well, it was a week ago when I heard about it, and it had been a week then."
"She must have some serious vacation time to take off for two weeks. Or did she just want to get as far away from you as possible?" Sawyer asked, lips twitching.
It wasn't a long time. In the grand scheme of things. Two weeks was a blip on most people's radar. But it felt torturously slow to me.
I tried to convince myself that all the time I caught myself wondering about her, about what she was up to, about whether she was alright, was because I knew who she had herself tangled up with, because I knew they were dangerous, because she was a person in my life, and I didn't want anything to happen to her.
There was that.
But there was also the fact that, well, I wanted her back.
I didn't understand it. It didn't make sense.
But it was the truth. I liked having her around.
Even when we weren't talking, just coexisting in the same space doing our separate tasks.
I liked the way she hummed when she cleaned, something that couldn't have been a song, or must have been a mashup of several songs because there was no steady beat to it.
I liked the way that when she left, there was a trace of peony and vanilla left over.
I liked the way that she rambled off in circles before getting back to the main topic even when you asked her about the most basic of things.
I liked her there.
In my space.
Space I generally so carefully protected, kept everyone out of.
I just wanted her back in that space, doing her sweeping and mopping and dusting, grumbling something about how I would never get dementia thanks to the inhuman amounts of coffee I drank.
There was just some sort of comfort in her presence.
It wasn't really something I had ever known before.
Generally, people put me on edge, made me feel like everything I did or said was wrong or against some unspoken moral code or just plain rude or hurtful at times.
Even people who were used to me, who knew me well weren't immune to the cut of a sharp word or poorly thought out comment.
So it was easier just not to be around them, not to subject them to hurt I genuinely didn't mean to inflict, but also couldn't seem to control at times.
I just didn't tick the same way they did.
My mind didn't work in their linear fashion.
It was all tangled up in circles and triangles and figure eights.
It was why Clarke's tendency toward disorganized thinking appealed to me.
Sometimes I would catch myself snapping, being rude.
Literally right after the fact, my head whipping around to watch the impact of the wound.
Only to find her lips quirked up or her brow raised.
Almost like she found it amusing or interesting. But never hurt. Never offended.
In fact, when she thought I was being a dick, she said so.
"Wow, that was the dickiest thing I've heard you say today," was what she had told me once with an eye roll and a head shake. But she wasn't looking for an apology or for me to regret what was said. She just wanted me to know that I was being an asshole.
Don't get me wrong, Sawyer was the first one to call me a dick when he thought the word fit, but I don't know... it was different. Maybe because Sawyer was family, because he sort of had to deal with me.
Then again, Clarke did too, didn't she?
Because that was the deal we made.
For all I knew, the comfort and the camaraderie I felt were entirely one-sided. It was possible she rushed through her cleaning, left, and bitched about me the whole way home to one of her friends.
That idea made a slow, churning sensation move through my stomach, hard and strong enough for my hand to go there.
"I think he misses her," Brock added fuel to Sawyer's already crackling fire.
"Is it serious? Or just a fuck thing?" he asked. But his tone implied that either option would be considered equally alien.
"Kenz invited her over to dinner the next time we all get together," Tig chimed in oh-so-helpfully. "Clarke said she'd come."
"Clarke," Sawyer said, rolling the name around on his tongue in a way that immediately made me straighten, stiffen.
Because he didn't know. No one had thought to clue him in on the details.
Or they had simply assumed he knew already.
And, knowing Sawyer, he might have acted like he did just to save face.
"That's an odd name for a woman. I think I only know of one.
.." he trailed off, lips parting ever so slightly as his gaze moved from me to Brock then Tig, then back to me again.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me, right?
Clarke Collings? Of all the women on this planet, you shacked up with Clarke Collings?
With all the shady, not quite legal shit you do with your work? "
"He's not a detective anymore," Brock reminded him, jumping to my defense.
"Besides, the way I heard it," Tig chimed in, "is Collings hired Barrett here to find his daughter when he thought she was missing."
"And I'm sure he didn't expect you to fuck her when he found her. Does he even know?"
"No," I admitted, since there was not actually anything to tell him.
"Christ," Sawyer sighed, shaking his head, but losing some of the tension in his shoulders.
Sometimes, if you paid close enough attention, you could see him remembering Riya lecturing him about letting me live my life on my own terms, about how it wasn't his place to micromanage me, try to steer me in any particular direction, that I was a grown man, not just his little brother. "Leave it to you to pick her."
"What's the issue? Every woman is someone's daughter," I reminded him.
"This town... we respect Collings. He had a tough job to do dealing with all these criminal organizations.
Or even with people like us who tiptoe over the lines of the law.
He could have easily been a dick who just saw shit in black and white.
But he understood that there is a hierarchy of criminals.
He knows there are organizations that can control themselves and their own people and that there are brutal gangs whose internal wars spill out into the streets, killing innocents.
He knew that a dickhead who beat his wife or touched on his kids was far worse than the biker who sells guns or the vigilante who takes out the scum of the earth.
He was fair when he worked here. And for that, he has the respect of the citizens and organizations alike.
And I don't like the idea of my brother dicking his only kid around. "
"Who says I am dicking her around?"
"Barrett, man, come on," he said, shaking his head a little. "I mean... you don't do relationships, right? That's not your thing. You don't like someone up your ass, in your way."
"She's not in my way. I like having her around." The truth of that spilled over into my words, dripping sincerity all over the place.
To that, Sawyer pressed back into his chair, gaze holding mine for a long minute before his air hissed out from between his teeth. "Well, shit," he said, shaking his head. "I guess there's something about her, huh?" he asked, tone full of some sort of implication that went right over my head.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Then maybe I can meet her when she gets back," he suggested. "Don't worry. I'll bring Riya so she can remind me not to be an asshole."
"I'll talk to her about it," I agreed, digging this hole ever deeper. So deep that I had no idea how I was going to climb the fuck back out of it when I needed to.
"Shit, you know he's got it bad when he hasn't touched his food," Brock added, drawing everyone's attention to my loaded down plate that I hadn't even touched.
Brock wasn't exactly wrong.
Something was definitely different.
Usually, I had no patience for even waiting for my mozzarella sticks to cool, just shoveling them in then sucking cool air in like a fish until they were an edible temperature, ignoring the second-degree burns on the roof of my mouth.
And this plate was not only loaded down with the best appetizer known to mankind, but deep-fried macaroni and cheese, spinach and artichoke dip, steak-cut fries, and loaded baked potatoes.
I should have been halfway to obesity by now.
But I hadn't even taken a bite.
And, come to think of it, last night was the first time ever that I ordered Chinese... and didn't finish it all. I had leftovers in my fridge at home. Leftovers.
What the actual fuck was going on?
I wasn't eating like usual because, what, I was missing having Clarke around?
Of all the asinine ideas.
And yet... what could the other explanation be?
I had her agree when she'd left to send me a text every now and again to let me know she hadn't been kidnapped, strung up, tortured, then fitted for cement shoes.
It had been a while.
Maybe that was it.
I was subconsciously anxious about her not checking in. About having to break the news to Collings that she was missing, that he could just presume she was dead, that she had been involved with the Turkish mob, and I had kept that from him.
Yeah, that had to be it.
I would text her as soon as prying eyes weren't around.
And then, maybe, it was time to open a new case.
A pro bono one.
I had to figure out what the hell Clarke was doing staking out the mob. Before she got herself killed.
But even as I bit into a lukewarm cheese stick, a stray, unwanted thought crossed my mind.
I had to figure out what the hell Clarke was doing stalking the mob. Before she got killed. And taken away from me.