Chapter Sixty-Seven #2
“Yeah, a little, uhm, overheated,” I said, going toward the sink to turn on the tap with one hand and grab some paper towels with the other. I soaked the paper towel and pressed it to the back of my neck.
Only then did I look up at my reflection.
Anyone who looked closely would see a woman freshly fucked.
There was no other way around it.
My cheeks and chest were flushed.
There was a slight beard burn across my skin.
My hair was messy.
My lipstick was smudged.
“You know,” Elsie said, shooting me a smirk as she went to the door, “I got… overheated at this event last year,” she told me with a smirk before disappearing.
Alone, I took a few, deep breaths, knowing I needed to get it together before I went back to the hall.
It wasn’t until, a few moments later, when I was making my way toward the door that I realized something.
My panties were missing.
“Shit,” I hissed as I pulled the door open, ready to rush back to the room to find them.
“Looking for these?” Brock’s voice asked, making me jolt hard to find him leaning against the wall near the door, twirling my panties on his finger.
“Brock!” I hissed, trying to reach out, but he was faster than I was, grabbing them, and shoving them into his breast pocket.
“Don’t worry. No one else saw,” he assured me, reaching for my hand, and placing it on his arm. “I believe we are about to miss the horrible first course,” he said.
And that was it.
He didn’t mention it.
He didn’t shoot me scandalous looks at the table.
We just… ate.
And talked.
Like we hadn’t just snuck away and had sex in some hidden room in the back of the building.
Insecurity, ugly and uncomfortable, wrapped its cold, slimy hand around my throat, squeezing until I felt like there was no air in the room.
It was right then that Brock stood beside my chair, holding out a hand.
When I glanced up, I couldn’t read his face.
But I placed my hand in his and let him pull me up, then lead me to the dance floor as I tried to tell myself it was to keep up appearances. When the truth was that I needed the assurance that he wasn’t immediately over me after we’d gotten intimate.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he pulled me to his chest and started to lead.
“Nothing,” I insisted. But it was too fast. Too telling.
“Liar,” he whispered down by my ear.
“I’m hungry,” I insisted, giving him half the truth in the hopes that he would take it as all of it and let it drop.
“Me too. But that’s not what has your eyes looking like that.”
“My eyes are fine,” I said, even as I kept my gaze averted.
“If you’re worried about the well-being of your panties, don’t worry,” he said, and I could hear the smirk in his voice. “They’re safe. Right here by my heart,” he said, guiding my hand there.
“You’re ridiculous,” I told him, but he accomplished his goal.
He got me to smile.
He got me to look up at him.
“You love it,” he shot back, leaning down to press his forehead to mine for a second. “So, what is it, another forty minutes or so of stuffy nonsense before we can make a run for it?”
“Sounds about right,” I agreed, and found myself suddenly torn. Between the urge to run off with him to get fast food in our formal wear and the desire to have the night stretch as long as possible.
Whether it was long enough or not, though, about forty-five minutes later, we were making our way out the front doors and down the steps toward my waiting car.
And there on my seat in the back was something that hadn’t been there before.
A white envelope.
“What’s that?” Brock asked as he slid in beside me, looking down at the envelope I was holding.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t here before,” I told him. “Should I open it?”
“Not yet,” he said, carefully taking it by the very edge and setting it down in the door pocket. “We’re going to use some caution. And tweezers,” he said, reaching out to squeeze my knee. “We’re not going to obsess over it,” he said. “And we will ask Mitchell if he saw anyone near the car.”
“He probably didn’t. On nights that are going to stretch on, I tell him that he’s free to go get food or run errands, so long as he is back by the time the event is coming to an end. So if we was in a restaurant, he wouldn’t have seen anything.”
“Still, we’ll ask.”
And so he did.
Making Mitchell look almost guilty for not having seen anything.
But we tried not to obsess over that as we walked into the fluorescent-lighted fast food place, standing in line behind a bunch of teens who openly stared at us when we walked in.
“It’s a sad day when a fast food meal that cost a couple bucks tastes better than a meal that was, what, eight hundred a plate?”
“It went up a hundred this year,” I told him, dipping my fry in honey mustard.
“Interesting choice,” he said as he used the barbecue sauce.
“Almost as interesting as your choice to mix orange soda with the lemon-lime,” I sited shaking my head at him.
“Don’t knock it until you try it,” he said, reaching across the table to snag one of my nuggets.
“Hey,” I grumbled.
“You ate half of my onion rings,” he reminded me.
And it was just so… normal.
More normal than most things in my life.
Because, despite the outfit, this moment had nothing at all to do with the life I’d built. There was no image to uphold, no need to try to prove myself worthy of anything.
It was just me. And my preferences. And a man I was a little worried that I was starting to fall for.
Worried because it had an expiration date.
When he figured out who was out to get me.
Then he would be gone.
And I would be acutely aware of the sudden emptiness of my life.
“Uh oh. Where’d you go?” Brock asked, making my gaze shoot up to him.
Caught, I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth.
So I came up with a lie.
“Sorry. Just had a little hospital flashback,” I told him. “The light in here…”
“Yeah,” Brock said, nodding. “I remember.”
“You… remember?” I asked, brows furrowing.
Brock put down a fry he’d just picked up.
“You’re not the only one who had to spend some time on a 5150, sweetheart. Though, in my case, it was warranted.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I told him, reaching across the table to put my hand over his.
He ignored the out I offered him, though.
“I got booted from the service,” he said, glancing at me. “I can’t talk too much about that time, but let’s just say that I was recruited to do some dark shit. And I did it. Dark shit. For years. Until, inevitably, it fucked things up, up here,” he said, tapping his temple.
“I can’t imagine.”
“Out, with no direction, I floundered. I couldn’t hold down a job.
Pretty soon, I stopped trying. I drank, I slept around, I laid around and didn’t do a fucking thing.
Eventually, without any therapy to work through the shit going on up in my head, some dark thoughts started creeping in.
Then the thoughts, yeah, they turned into actions,” he said.
“Oh, Brock,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.
“First time was, technically, an accident. Self-medicating gone awry,” he told me, shrugging. “But the almost dying thing meant that I had to take a trip in an ambulance, and have a little vacation where I wore slipper socks and did group therapy.”
“I couldn’t wait to take off those slipper socks,” I said.
“They somehow managed to do nothing to stave off the cold in that place,” he agreed.
“How long were you there?” I asked.
“Just the mandatory hold. I hadn’t intended to try to kill myself, so they let me go, and advised me to seek therapy and medication for my PTSD. Spoiler alert, I didn’t.”
“You weren’t ready yet.”
“No,” he agreed, nodding. “It seems like you can’t force someone to be ready to accept their own mental illness.
Sometimes you just have to spiral through it for a while.
After I got back, I was careful for a while.
But then the bad dreams came back. So did the ways of distracting and numbing myself.
Then one night, maybe a year later, I had a real bad day followed by a real bad night.
And then another. And another. Then I took some extra meds again, and got myself my own scar,” he said, reaching up to pull down his bowtie to reveal a scar on his neck that I’d overlooked before.
“Oh,” I exhaled, feeling my heart crack a bit for him, for the man he’d been, one without hope, without a way out of his own misery.
“Yeah, so when I woke up that time, I was ready for my hold, ready to milk it for all it was worth. When I got out, I sought out the therapy and the meds they suggested. Then, not long after that, Sawyer had a job offer for me. The rest…” he said, waving outward.
“You’ve never… you know… since then?”
“No. I won’t say there haven’t been low moments. Meds and therapy help, but they aren’t a cure-all. But my lows never got that low again. I’ve really tried to dedicate my life to staying out of the dark.”
“Does it make it difficult when you have to work dark cases? Or cases like mine that remind you of all that stuff?”
“Some cases can be difficult, but I try as much as I can not to take it on personally. But if you mean was it hard for me to be here for you after your hold, then no. I was the only person on the team who could possibly understand what you’ve been through.
I think having that knowledge has been an asset. ”
“It did help to feel understood,” I agreed, thinking of the talk in his bedroom.
“So, now the question remains…” he said, making me ask.
“What question?”
“Are you an apple pie kind of girl, or a chocolate sundae kind of girl?”
“Is that really a question?” I asked. “If the machine is even working,” I said, glancing back at it.
It was just… such a perfect time that I’d actually forgotten all about the damn envelope until we were nestled in the car again.
“Don’t let it ruin the night,” Brock suggested, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
But as we walked through the lobby and rode up to my apartment, it was all I could seem to focus on.
“Tweezers, right?” I asked as Brock set it down on the table.
“Yes. And do you have gloves?” he asked.
Supplies gathered, I met him back on the table.
The apartment was painfully silent, so quiet that I could hear the ticking of a clock I’d never noticed before.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
It matched the beat of my heart, making me suddenly acutely aware of that as well.
I took a long, deep breath as Brock used his gloved finger to hold down the envelope as he ripped the edge with the tip of the tweezer.
I swear the world froze in that moment.
Or, at the very least, my heartbeat and breathing did.
Then Brock was opening the card inside.
To reveal… an invitation?
The laugh that bubbled up and burst out of Brock was a mix of shocked, amused, and relieved.
“What is it?” I asked, feeling so wound up that I couldn’t relax even after seeing the weight fall from Brock’s shoulders.
“An invitation from Bellamy for the two of us to stay at his Italian villa.”
“What?” I asked, voice breathless.
“I’m not shitting you,” Brock said, holding it out to me.
“What? Does he drive around with these things in his car?” I asked, turning it over to see a hand-drawn image of the villa we were discussing.
I won’t lie.
I would love to spend a week there.
I didn’t even remember the last time I took a vacation.
“You mull on that,” Brock said. “I have to take this,” he added, reaching for his phone that must have been vibrating in his pocket.
Taking it out, he moved onto the balcony.
And despite thinking he’d been a bit of a loon for all the worry about it, I couldn’t help but worry about all the ways Brock could be attacked out there, thanks to Lennon’s words.
I didn’t think anything of the call seeing as I wasn’t the only client that his work had, and they likely needed to give each other advice here and there, but when Brock’s head whipped over to look at me, I had a feeling things had just taken a worrying turn.