Chapter 4
LUCIEN
Irode like the wind and got back to the club before any missing-prospect alerts went off. Thank God for that. I didn't want to get on the wrong side of Blackheart.
I parked the bike and checked my phone. Nine forty-five. Four hours and change until I'd see her again. I hadn't thought about time like that in a long while.
"Invoice done?" Blackheart asked from the doorway.
"Done. Signed and stamped."
He nodded and went back inside. That was as close to praise as you got from Blackheart.
I spent the morning doing what prospects did. Swept the bay. Cleaned parts. Stayed useful and stayed quiet. But my head was on one word. Date. It sounded good coming from her pretty pink lips. A cemetery date she called spooky and then made a joke about it anyway.
Josie
I walked back to the hotel with the sun warming my shoulders and the first good mood in a month.
The door to the room changed that.
Casey's bag was still there. Mine too, right where I'd left it. His jacket was gone but his phone charger was still plugged into the wall.
He hadn't left.
My chest tightened. He could be anywhere. Down in the lobby. At the bar across the street. Around the next corner.
I grabbed what I needed from my bag and got out. I didn't even sit down.
I walked with no direction or plan other than remaining invisible. Past Jackson Square where a kid was playing trumpet for coins. Past a woman reading tarot under an umbrella. Past a man selling pralines out of a cart who called me darlin' and almost made me cry because he said it like he meant it.
I found a bench near the river and sat there watching the water move and trying not to count the hours until two o'clock.
I counted them anyway.
Lucien
Blackheart cut me loose at one.
"You going somewhere?" River asked, watching me pull a clean shirt from my bag.
"Out."
"Out where?"
"Out."
He grinned. "Must be a girl."
I didn't answer, which was an answer, and he knew it.
I showered and changed and stood in front of the mirror longer than I had in weeks. I looked at the ink covering my arms and chest and wondered what she saw when she looked at me. Casey had called me a joker. Most people saw the tattoos and decided who I was before I opened my mouth.
She looked at me like she was trying to read something written underneath all of it.
I pulled on my vest and headed for St. Louis.
Josie
At quarter to two I started walking toward the cemetery. At every corner I stopped and looked behind me. Old habit. Casey had followed me before. To the store, to my mother's, to a friend's house I wasn't supposed to go to. He called it checking in. I called it what it was.
No sign of him. I checked again at the next block. And again at the one after that.
The streets thinned out as I got closer. Fewer tourists, fewer voices. By the time I reached the gate, the noise of the Quarter had faded to something distant, like a radio left on in another room.
He was already there. Leaning against the wall with his arms folded, one boot crossed over the other. When our eyes met he straightened up and smiled.
Fuck he was gorgeous.
"You came," he said.
"You sound surprised."
“Maybe. Just a little.”
The caretaker Blackheart had called was waiting at the gate. He unlocked it, waved us through, and closed it behind us. Within a few steps, the noise from Basin Street had faded.
The cemetery was nothing like I expected.
It was beautiful. Row after row of whitewashed tombs standing in the sun like a small stone village, crumbling at the edges but still proud.
Some had fresh flowers. Some had beads draped over them.
The air smelled like jasmine drifting over the old brick walls.
It was quiet. Not empty quiet, or eerie quiet. Settled quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when a place has heard so many prayers it doesn't need any more words.
We walked side by side without speaking for a while, and it didn't feel awkward. It felt like the first silence I'd shared with someone that wasn't loaded with something about to go wrong.
"I've never been anywhere like this," I said.
"Most people come for the ghost tours," he said. "They miss the whole point."
"What's the point?"
He stopped in front of a tomb with a carved angel on top, her wings chipped but still reaching. "That somebody loved somebody enough to build this."
I looked at the angel and then at him and thought, who the hell are you, Lucien Baptiste?
After walking in relative silence we left through the main gates and headed toward Louis Armstrong Park, eventually finding a bench away from people under the shade of an oak tree.
We watched the ducks on the water for a while, then Lucien said, "This city…"
I looked at him. He was somewhere else. Somewhere that made him sad.
"It's below sea level. So the dead have to live above it."
My hand found his thigh and rested there. He looked down at it and placed his over the top.
"Most people spend their lives drowning in something and it's not until they're entombed that they finally get their heads above water."
Did I ever fucking know that.
The afternoon disappeared the way good ones do. Too fast.
When the light started to change he asked me the question I'd been avoiding in my own head.
"Where are you going tonight?"
I looked at my phone. No missed calls. No messages. Somehow that was worse than a dozen of either.
"Back to the room, I guess."
"You don't sound sure."
“I was before but now I'm not sure he's gone."
Lucien was quiet for a moment. "I'll come with you."
I thought about what that would look like. Lucien walking into that hotel room with me. Casey's bag still on the floor, Casey maybe still in the bar downstairs, Casey putting two and two together and getting five. It would go from bad to gasoline.
"No," I said. "That'll make it worse."
He didn't argue. He just nodded, then said, “Come back with me."
"To the club?"
“Sure. It's safe." I took too long to reply. “I’m safe,” he added.
I laughed. Safe wasn't exactly the word that came to mind.
What the hell.
"You sure that's okay?"
“Of course.”
"Okay.”
He stood and held out his hand and I took it and we walked back through the park to where his bike was parked on the street. A black and chrome Harley that looked as dangerous as the rider.
"You ever ridden?" he asked.
"Never."
He handed me his helmet. I looked at it, then at him.
"What about you?"
"I'll be fine. Put it on."
I twisted my hair into a bun for padding, and pulled it over my head and the world went quieter. He climbed on first and held out his hand for me to get on behind him. When he started the engine I felt it in my teeth.
"Hold on to me," he said. "Tight. Lean when I lean. Don't fight it."
I wrapped my arms around his waist and my thighs pressed against his and I could feel the solid warmth of him.
He pulled out into the street and I had never felt anything like it.
The wind and the noise and the vibration running through my whole body and this man between my arms who I'd known for less than a day.
My stray hairs whipped behind me and my eyes watered and I pressed my face against his back and held on.
I was laughing. Mouth open, tears streaming, laughing like I hadn't laughed in years.
I doubted he could hear me over the engine, and that was fine. That laugh wasn't for him.
It was for me.
The Jokers' clubhouse was so foreign to me I didn't even have a name for what it was. It wasn't a bar. It wasn't a house. It wasn't a hangout. It was something else entirely, something I'd never walked into before.
And the minute I walked through the doors I felt like I fit.
I had never fit anywhere. Not in years. Maybe not ever. But here, surrounded by leather and loud music and people who looked like they'd been chewed up by the world and decided to chew back, something clicked.
I could see why people like Lucien — like me — felt the pull of a place like this. It filled the gaps you always knew were there but never knew where to find the pieces for. They weren't a bunch of misfits. That was Casey talking. That was the outside looking in and not understanding a damn thing.
This was what it looked like when people stopped drowning.
I met so many people who felt like family from their first words. I couldn't even remember most of their names if not for the words stitched on their vests. Maybe that was the point. They wore their names for the world to see so you'd never forget who your people were.
I was laughing, smiling, drinking — just a little. Eating and dancing with women I'd met five minutes ago like I'd known them my whole life. I was so happy I could have cried, and one kind word probably would have done it.
But one thing stood out above all of it. The one thing I would never miss because I'd lived without it for so long.
They looked at me. Men and women alike. Their eyes held mine when they spoke. They saw me for who I was. Not what I was.
It felt so fucking good to be more than a body.
I stayed the night. Not in the way most people would assume.
We lay on top of the bed, fully clothed, and he held me and I held him and neither of us tried to make it into anything more than what it was. Which was already more than I'd had in a long time.
We talked for hours. The kind of talking you do in the dark when you can't see each other's faces properly and the truth comes easier because of it.
He came from money. I would never have guessed. It didn't define him.
I had baggage, but so did he.
The kind other people laid across your shoulders.
He was too black for his father's family and too white for his mother's. Caught in a middle ground where people couldn't find a label so they found the door instead.
At least I only had one side of that line to walk. Poverty was the whole of my childhood and it left me with a poor mindset to match. The kind that believed a man like Casey could make things better. The kind that let itself be molded into something he could own.
By the time I realized what I'd given away, I didn't know how to take it back.
I told Lucien that. Not all of it. But enough.
He didn't try to fix me. He just held me a little tighter.
I wasn’t sure what time I eventually drifted off. But just before I did…
We kissed.
Shit… this wasn’t the Royal Sonesta.
I rubbed my eyes and looked around. Then it came back in pieces. The bike ride, the clubhouse, the dark room, the talking, the way his arms felt around me while I fell asleep.
And the kiss.
I licked my lips as if I could taste it again.
It was soft and slow. The kind of kiss that lingers long after and leaves your lips tingling.
He didn’t push for more and neither did I.
I wanted to. Oh, how I had wanted to. I felt it right down to my curled toes.
But I savored what he gave me and fell asleep with him in my dreams. How could I feel this way this quickly?
I was hexed by him. I knew that already.
His side of the bed was empty but still warm. I could hear voices down the hall. Laughter, and music and the clink of plates. I sat up and caught sight of myself in a small mirror nailed to the wall. I was wearing his shirt. My hair a mess. I looked like a wreck.
A very happy wreck.
I padded down the narrow hallway in bare feet.
The walls were covered in framed photos and patches and a dartboard with what I hoped were joke scores because nobody should be that bad at darts.
The hallway opened into the big space where we partied last night and I followed my nose to the kitchen where Lucien was standing at a griddle with a spatula in his hand.
He had flour on his forearm and something was popping in a cast iron skillet and the whole room smelled like my childhood would have if my childhood had been kind.
He could cook. Holy fuck, this guy just kept getting better and better.
"Sit down," he said without turning around. "They're almost done."
A woman I vaguely remembered from last night, dark hair, tattoo sleeve, and a laugh that could crack glass, set a cup of coffee in front of me without being asked. Black. Strong enough to wake the dead.
"He's been up since six practicing how to cook,” she said.
"Shut up, Marley," Lucien said. “Everyone knows I'm a Michelin star chef.”
“Michelin tires maybe.”
He laughed.
She winked at me and walked away and I wrapped my hands around the mug as I watched him cook and felt like a cat finding a patch of sun.
He brought over a plate stacked high. Golden brown buttermilk pancakes, edges crisp and laced, the kind you don't get from a box.
A pile of scrambled eggs with cheese melting through them.
Thick-cut bacon and a little bowl of grits with butter pooling in the center.
And a jar of cane syrup that looked like it had been in that kitchen longer than the building.
“Now, this is what I call a breakfast," I said.
He sat down across from me and smiled and I thought about the kiss again and my stomach flipped.
"Eat up,” he said. “We’ve got a big day.”
I didn’t know what he had planned but I planned to make the most of every minute.