Chapter 20
Julia
For fuck’s sake. They’re like babes in the wild.
I woke up wondering if we should go to the Newport Beach guest house of Bellefonte Cooper, or try to disappear into Los Angeles. Stay or hide? Fight or run?
Now that I know Caspian’s lockscreen password, I think it has to be the latter. The last time these men were competent, Bill Clinton was in his first term. They can’t survive now with those skills.
I let the phone lock itself again. It’s not as if I’ll forget how to open it. 123 fucking 4. If there are any pictures, I can get them after sunrise, which is about an hour away.
Caspian is as bold as ever, putting his hand on my knee, uncrossing my legs and making a command. “Open up for us.”
Tony speeds the process by pulling the knee on his side toward him.
“You guys.” Two words become a groan of pleasure.
Caspian’s picked my shirt up over my tits. He’s making my nipples harder than they already were, while Tony pushes my shorts to the side so he can get his fingers on me.
My hands reach for both of their dicks, but Tony moves it away, whispering, “This is for you,” and slides two fingers along the length of my seam.
Caspian tastes my tongue. Tony flicks my clit.
Caspian gets two fingers inside me. Tony bites a nipple.
Caspian puts his pussy-soaked fingers in my mouth.
Tony spreads my lower lips apart and teases every ridge and bump between them.
I let go of the idea that I can please them by doing anything aside from letting them please me.
“We’re going to come up with better passwords,” Tony promises. “We’ll catch up, I swear. You won’t have to do a thing. You understand?”
“Yes.” They’ll try. I don’t have the mental space to believe otherwise.
“I think she’s going to come for us,” Caspian says. “Are you going to come?”
“If you keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“All of it.”
“We’ll never give you less,” Tony says, then with a few finger circles, he brings me to the edge of oblivion and pushes me right over.
When Tony and Caspian lay their heads on each of my thighs, they fall asleep. I’ve already slept. I stay awake, stroking their hair with a symmetry Tony would appreciate.
What are these guys?
They have their own bodies. Their own thoughts.
Personalities unique to them. They have skills, but a guy who changes the access code on a phone to 1234 cannot be trusted to run his own life.
They watched me from the toolbox, but they didn’t experience the world.
There’s too much they don’t know, and I have enough going on. I don’t have time to teach them.
But damn, as the first sliver of sun illuminates their faces, a valve in my mind opens and all my anxiety pours out. They’re good men. Smart men. Also? Hot men. All of this, and their only desire is to make sure I’m happy.
I just hope they don’t think I know how to fulfill that desire. I don’t. All I want is a business to call my own. I want to build and fix stuff. Make old things new. Make them as perfect as I can. That seemed easy until recently.
The light in the galley comes on. Tonya looks out the window. From her point of view, I look as if I’m sitting at the table alone.
She calls over the windowsill, “My dad’s sending a car to the docks for you.”
“What are you going to do?”
Cups rattle and the faucet hisses. “I’m going to Catalina with Dan. We have things to discuss.”
“Then you’ll come back?”
“Yeah.” She pauses to fill the coffee pot. “I think we should just pay him.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t think we can win two fights at the same time. And I really want to shove that golf cart up Jaeger Duke’s ass.”
I get it. I really do. But these guys on my lap are either going to kill someone or get killed. Maybe they’ll wind up in jail, or as tools again. I don’t feel like I really, fully understand what breaks the curse. I definitely don’t know how to break it permanently.
“You don’t have to go,” she says. “You can do what you want. I know my dad’s place is in Newport Beach, but I think you’ll be safe from Gerry until I’m back.”
“In two weeks.”
“Plans changed, am I right?”
“No hotel?”
“I can change my own sheets.”
“I hate this for you.”
Pausing, she sips her drink. “Two business days, tops. Then we can talk about it.”
“I think I want to fight.”
“Him and Duke? You’ve got to be choosier with your battles.”
“Can I decide at the dock?”
“Yes, you can decide at the dock.” She adds a little music to the sentence to hide exasperation, or patience, or the fact that she already knows what I’m going to do.
A few minutes go by. The coffee must be dripping.
She uses her elbow to push the latch down while her hands hold coffee and laptop. She comes out, giving all her attention to something on her shoe. “I know what battles I want to fight. You decide your own, and let me know.”
The door slaps shut and she finally looks up, getting a first-time full view of who’s with me. She manages to not drop her cup.
“Two?” she says.
I shrug as if I just couldn’t help myself.
Dan seemed unfazed by Caspian’s return. They hug as if my screwdriver went on a weeklong trip to Tijuana and returned without the clap. Nice to see you. Congratulations on making it back.
He’s so laid back. It’s making me really wonder what Dan’s witch mother is like.
Sitting in the front of the boat, Tonya and I decide that the tool cart is going to the guest house whether I join it or not. It’s on land and accessible to both of us. The red metal toolbox is coming with me. Obviously, since there are two grown men inside it.
“But you haven’t decided yet?” she asks when the piers are close enough to discern the few people on the docks at this hour.
“I have to talk to the guys.”
“I thought they left it up to you?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need to be their mother. I’m not the only adult in the room.”
“They’re trying to be nice.”
“I don’t want nice. I want a man who’s a partner. Two men who don’t contribute are just twice the dead weight.”
“You better go talk to them then. And don’t throw them overboard, okay?”
When I go to the back deck, where my two men are huddled over the table like coaches deciding on the big play, they stop talking. Tony pats the seat between them.
I sit in the chair. They have a hard time keeping their hands off me, which is usually not a problem. Right now though, I need to be able to think.
“Well?” I ask.
Caspian leans back and stretches his arms over the edge of the boat, behind the couch. “You need to tell us your vote.”
“Stay and fight. Don’t pay Gerry’s stupid finder’s fee. Let him come for us.”
Caspian nods. “I don’t think so.”
Tony bends his head to meet his hand and pats his hair down. “Yeah, that’s not the plan.” The wind blows it back out of place.
I’ve worked with Tonya long enough to lose a few arguments. This is what it means to be a partner, I guess. Sometimes there are disagreements.
Not sure how I feel about losing this one. Tonya and I can split up to get our own shit done. I can’t split from these guys. They’re going to have sell it though. I’m not just taking a vote against two guys who can’t live on their own yet.
“You don’t think so?” I say.
“Yeah.” Caspian gets up and leans on the edge of the boat with his arms crossed. They’re tanned and ropey, the way I like. “We’re not positioned to our advantage. We just have your money from the Goddess job.”
“Half is Tonya’s,” I remind him, because the free roof over our head is a big deal.
“Exactly,” Tony says. “And what Gerry’s asking will make us insolvent.”
As if I’m paying that fucker a dime. Him, or Duke.
I have to be choosier about my battles. I can’t die on every hill, and there are too many hills.
“And,” Caspian adds, “there are three of us. We can all sleep in one bed, but we eat with three mouths. I can go without. Tony already looks like a starving sewer rat. You’re perfect, and we want you to stay that way.
We… both of us… can’t stand eating off of your plate.
So here’s what I’m proposing.” He glances at Tony.
Tony nods. “We go find the key to Tony’s deposit box. ”
“I thought that was gone?”
“I did too,” Tony says. “But we may know where it is.”
“Seriously? What’s in it?”
“Whatever,” Caspian says. “A few business licenses. Some property deeds.”
“They’ll have liens against them,” Tony mutters.
“Cash. A piece, right?” The last sentence is a question for Tony.
“Yeah. And some ammo. Not enough to take out the entire precinct. But enough to scare off a dipshit who says capeesh.” Tony scoffs and turns to Caspian. “You shoulda fucking heard this asshole.”
“Let’s assume you’re even right about the key,” I say. “I get how all of that secures our position, but so what? It doesn’t change enough. It’s not solving anything. And it’s still running. We tried running. Things only got worse.”
“We’re not running,” Caspian says. “If we get the key, we get the money. We get the iron. Then we get the muscle.”
“We go to the gym?” I pretend I don’t know what they’re talking about. A part of me does though. The part that’s been around this block before.
“Enzo,” Caspian says.
“Lorenzo,” Tony says at the same time.
“The hammer.” I sound incredulous because I am.
“We figured out this guy.” Caspian jerks his thumb toward Tony. “A hammer’s a piece of cake.”
I put my heels on the seat and wrap my arms around my knees. Caspian sits back down. Pitch over.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s so much that can go wrong.”
“We’re not going to force you into anything you don’t want,” Tony says. “But this is the plan we came up with.”
“Ahoy!” Dan shouts from above. “Land-ho!”
I have approximately ten minutes to figure out what I want to do. Turns out, having two men with minds of their own doesn’t make things twice as easy.