12. Dirty
TWELVE
Dirty
A “DIRTY” DRINK WILL HAVE A SLIGHT TWIST IN COLOR AND TASTE BY CHANGING A CORE INGREDIENT
“I know what this looks like, but we’re totally not going to fuck!”
Maggie waved to Cady Bloomquist by way of greeting as McGarvey marched her down the block across the street from Nevermore Bookstore.
The busty blonde bookseller and an alarming number of Water Street’s other shop owners and assorted patrons had spilled out of their respective boutiques to gawk at the sight of Deputy McGarvey marching her down the street with a hand on the back of her neck.
His fingers flexed ever so slightly against her skin every time she got to the word fuck in the phrase she’d been tossing out to the gawkers like so many Mardi Gras beads. Served the fucker right for refusing to speak to her.
“Uh…okay?” Cady called back, lifting a hand whose index finger was still sandwiched between the pages of the book she’d been selling to the woman beside her, who looked confused, if not exactly upset, to have her purchase interrupted for this local spectacle.
“Hey, Maggie!” Parked on the sidewalk in front of Bazaar Girls was Gemma, something with a lot of pink and red unspooling from her rapidly clicking knitting needles.
“Hey, Gemma,” Maggie shouted back. “Just so you know, I’m very aware that since I’m being steered down the street toward Deputy Trent McGarvey’s place of residence by Deputy Trent McGarvey, I’m technically subject to the local ordinance that states that it must be assumed that we’re about to fuck?—”
Flex.
“But I just wanted to clarify that I will not, in fact, be fucking Deputy Trent McGarvey, if that’s something you’d like to incorporate into the city council’s next meeting minutes.”
“Duly noted!” the petite brunette called back, her thumb jutting up from fingerless gloves in the same shade of apple green as her plaid skirt.
So it continued for the remainder of the block, Maggie’s recitation repeated in forms customized to the various Water Street business owners and their patrons, punctuated with the occasional tinkle of storefront bells as more onlookers emerged to gape.
And also to openly discuss Myrtle’s crap-tastic coup and subsequent shituation with Mayor Stewart.
Both of which, Maggie gathered by his air of general cold-blooded contempt, McGarvey had the distinct displeasure of resolving.
“Really, you should be thanking me,” Maggie muttered out the side of her mouth as they approached the entrance to his building. “I’m over preserving your sterling reputation while you march down the block like that menacing, mercury-looking motherfucker from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. ”
McGarvey at last released his grip on her neck, the evening-chilled air cool where his fingers had been as he unlocked the building’s main door and held it open for her.
Maggie hesitated, clutching the purse that Darby had rushed over to give her before McGarvey herded her toward the pub’s exit.
“I could bolt right now, you know,” she pointed out, parking a hand on her hip as she looked up at him. “So technically, the fact that I’m not bolting right now would make me a good girl , wouldn’t it?”
McGarvey’s gaze remained implacably calm and maddeningly neutral.
“Too soon?” she suggested, giving him a nudge with her elbow.
Apparently so.
With a sigh, Maggie began to climb the stairs, moving aside when she hit the landing so he could unlock his front door.
“You know it makes not one lick of sense for you to be gentlemanly about making me go first when you’re being all assholey about not speaking to me,” she said, hanging back on the threshold.
McGarvey only blinked at her.
“You really are a butthead, you know that?” she huffed, marching past him.
No sooner had she crested the top of the stairs and stepped out of her work shoes, McGarvey relieved her of her purse and began unbuttoning her coat with businesslike and brusque efficiency that for some damn reason made her nipples pucker within her bra.
“Okay, the butthead thing was uncalled for,” she said as he shucked her coat from her shoulders and transferred it to a hanger with a flourish. “Especially considering the ample provocation you suffered. By the way, I definitely need you to know that I had no earthly fucking idea what Myrtle was planning.”
She glanced at McGarvey, whose raised eyebrow managed to communicate an especially astonishingly large volume of fuck you .
“All right, yes, I did technically ask her to create a diversion so Vee and I could sneak back into the Palace Hotel, but I didn’t steal anything, break anything, or even get caught this time!” Maggie reported, uncomfortably aware of the chirpy, cheerleader-esque edge her goth-lite high school self would have hissed at her in the hall for. “And dude . You won’t even believe what I found.”
McGarvey’s fingers grazed her waist as he began to untuck her Sirens-issue t-shirt from the elastic waistband of her skirt, and, for some damn reason, she found her arms lifting. “Wait, rewind. First, you need to know about the letter ,” she said, dipping her voice into the salaciously sultry purr that always had her podcast listeners pumping eggplant pixels into the comments of her TikTok clips.
So McGarvey was, of course, totally fucking immune.
“Okay, TLDR version, Ethan Townsend’s great-great-great-great-grandfather apparently had some sort of joint shipping venture going on with some distant relative of Mayor Stewart’s, only it sounds like they may have actually been dealing in human cargo, if you get what I’m sayin’.”
Feeling a draft, Maggie glanced down and was more than a little surprised to note that her corduroy skirt was puddled around her painted toes like the skirt of a Christmas tree. She stepped out of it and followed McGarvey down the hallway, talking as they walked.
“ Anyway , Ethan was kind enough to dig through his family’s correspondence archive—like, what family even has that? I mean, the closest thing my family has would be that one drawer in the kitchen with all the old phone chargers and Chinese takeout menus where my mom would stuff letters from bill collectors she didn’t want my dad to find.”
Maggie’s spiky laugh had been meant to hook McGarvey with the relatability of the anecdote.
So why did she feel pierced?
“Whatever,” she said, wiggling away from the pinprick of darkness in her chest threatening to spread. “So Darby brings me this letter from Ethan’s great-great-great-great— Fuck it. Can we just call him Graddy? Or maybe Grandzaddy? I’m assuming he was probably also dashing in a non-verbal but meticulous Montana farm boy meets Marlboro Man meets John Wick meets Mad Max meets Mr. Rogers kind of— Holy fuck .”
Her train of thought abruptly derailed, Maggie drifted forward to pet the gleaming chrome masterpiece whose front-facing porthole McGarvey had heaved her dust- and flying-rodent-dropping-soiled clothing into.
“I’m pretty sure this thing has more tech than Fawkes.”
McGarvey punched some buttons that made the machine chirp to life with a merry ping, his fingers deft in their selection of what she suspected was the needs the Lord cycle.
“Fawkes was my Fiat,” Maggie said, deciding his hesitation over the start button counted as curiosity. “As in the burning Harry Potter bird. Not that fucker that tried to do the same damn thing to the Houses of Parliament.”
The ache widened, deepened as the image of the cherry-red, snub-nosed sparkplug of a car sitting on the curb outside their Boston row house on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday invaded her mind.
Oversized purple bow and all.
It had been such a her car that she’d burst into tears, even ignored the joke about worker’s comp claims Charlie had made when she leapt into his arms.
Because, for just that split second, she’d believed that Charlie knew .
Knew her .
Got her .
Loved her.
Of course, if she’d known that he and Fast Eddie had boosted it from an eighteen-wheeler hauling repossessed vehicles from Jersey to Ohio, she probably wouldn’t have given him a thank-you blowie on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to Atlantic City that weekend.
The washer’s cycle was so quiet, Maggie wasn’t even aware it had started filling until Trent moved to slide the closet doors closed.
“Where was I?” she asked, tapping a nail against her lips. “Oh, right. The letter from Grandzaddy Townsend to Mayor Stewart’s incestor .”
If McGarvey picked up on the joke, he made no acknowledgment. Maggie padded after him as he made his way into the kitchen, where he bent to consult the cleaning supplies arranged on tiered shelves beneath the sink like an angelic choir.
“He used this super-weird cat metaphor, but basically, as far as I can tell, Grandzaddy Townsend somehow nabbed Madame Katz and yeeted her over the side of one of their Shanghai ships so she’d quit cockblocking their human capital. Oh! And he gave ol’ Spewart Senior the shakedown.”
The cool granite countertop felt delicious on Maggie’s forearms as she leaned against it and watched McGarvey evaluate his options.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked. “Madame Katz might actually have been working against them. That because she owned buildings that were ideally situated between the docks, she might have been using a brothel to help people escape .”
Goosebumps rose on Maggie’s exposed skin, infecting her with the same sweet rush of adrenaline she’d felt when she first seized this possibility.
She stared at McGarvey’s broad back through the fabric of his t-shirt, willing him to feel this. To understand not just what it meant, but what it meant to her .
Instead, he pulled out a neatly folded rag and a bottle of something so potent it could very well be the chemical cousin of napalm before walking back through the living room to the foyer. There, he began liberally spritzing the general area of her arrival in addition to just about every surface she’d touched.
Which was just…just…
“Fucking rude ,” she huffed, crossing her arms defensively over her chest.
Which was rapidly turning a blotchy pink as her Irish shot up faster than the unfortunately named urchin Charlie and his deadbeat Grandpa Joe in the also unfortunately named Wonkavator.
Way past give-a-shit, Maggie parked her hands on her hips and stepped out to block McGarvey’s path.
Which was when she accidentally caught her reflection in the elegant mirror on the entryway wall.
And oh, how it did her dirty.
Shreds of cobweb still clung to her fiery curls like so much Silly String. Gray streaks of dust streaked her face, neck, arms, and knees. Something that looked suspiciously like motor oil—if she was lucky—streaked the forearm she’d rested on McGarvey’s surgically clean countertops. And was that— oh dear God —fucking guano in her hair?
Not to mention the absolutely uncalled-for assault on her general person the cool overhead canned lighting was currently perpetrating.
Looking at her reflection in McGarvey’s mirror, she was confronted with the same version of herself that had once caused her to skip meals when she found that she could live on compliments and control instead. Every pucker and fold, every silvery pink scar an indictment of what other people saw when they looked at her.
Someone whose body—whose life—they were quietly relieved not to have.
Somebody whose presence made them feel superior by comparison.
Never before had that comparison been starker that in this perfect man’s perfect palace of solitude.
Maggie barked a laugh that hit her a shade too hard and too low in the chest. “I look like a trash gremlin chimney sweep,” she said, quickly biting the inside of her cheek when her throat began to close. “An unemployed trash gremlin chimney sweep,” she added. “Because whose chimney could I fit down? Right?”
Wonder of wonders, it was this sentence that finally extracted a growled word from McGarvey’s throat.
“Shower.”
She found she couldn’t move until he did, almost like she needed to mirror his steps as she would if following footprints in the snow, disturbing as little as possible.
Stepping over the threshold into the spa-like expanse of marble tile, Maggie did her level best to keep her eyes averted from any reflective surface.
Which was super fucking easy, given how the man cleaned.
Standing there, vulnerable and half-naked, Maggie hugged her arms beneath her breasts as Trent turned knobs and flipped levers. Once he’d conjured a magical waterfall from the ceiling, he turned to her.
“Get in,” he rumbled.
“Oh wow,” Maggie muttered, releasing the econo-sized clasp of her bra and peeling it from her breasts. “Two whole words this time.” Flinging it over the towel rack, she slipped her panties down her hips and kicked them toward the vanity. “I’ll have to think of something really humiliating so you might manage a whole sentence.”
His nostrils flared as she stepped into the cobalt-tiled glass stall, gingerly easing herself beneath the downpour.
Which felt…delicious.
Maggie closed her eyes and stepped fully into it, wishing the water could wash away the concentrated muck she felt lodged somewhere deep in her middle. A core of cheapness…of wrongness she couldn’t shake.
So immersed was she in her thoughts, she jumped when a heated sluice began dumping down her back.
She glanced over her shoulder, surprised to find McGarvey there, disappointed to note that the even, dispassionate expression on his face hadn’t shifted.
Nor had any other parts of his body, for that matter.
With the shower hose attachment, he began rinsing her off, his movements tender yet calculated.
She shivered as the warm water cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, and she tried to focus on the comforting sensation instead of the storm brewing in the air between them.
“You know, this not-talking thing really doesn’t help either of us,” she pointed out.
Feeling a slight, cool pressure on her scalp, Maggie bunched her shoulders toward her ears before the weight of his hands followed, working through her locks, massaging her scalp with a firm yet gentle efficiency.
Wouldn’t you fucking know it, her body began to respond to his ministrations, her skin tingling with pleasure that hummed through her like a live wire. She fought the urge to let out a contented sigh, not wanting to give him any more ammunition against her.
And the better her body felt, the more volatile her feelings became.
“Look, if you’re going to insist on inflicting your fastidious, clean-freaky shit on me, you could at least tell me what the hell it’s about.”
His hands lifted from her scalp and were replaced with the handheld spray’s tingling touch.
“If you won’t tell me, I’ll just have to guess,” she said, glancing at him over her shoulder. “And if my instincts are correct, I’m going to say…daddy issues.”
In her peripheral vision, Maggie noted the subtle flex of his jaw.
Bingo.
He picked up a loofah and began scrubbing her body. The rough texture tickled her skin, sending goosebumps up her arms and legs. She bit her lip to hold back a moan, determined not to let her body betray her.
Maggie studied the steam drifting lazily toward the ceiling, attempting to fill the silence between them. “You know, my Uncle Conny had a strange habit,” she began, lathering her hands with soap, knowing he could see them slowly playing over her breasts. “Whenever the Celtics were playing, he’d count his jar of toenail clippings. Said if he didn’t, they wouldn’t win. I used to think it was ridiculous until they lost that one game when he forgot.” She chuckled at the memory, making circles over her nipples in the frothy foam before turning around to face him.
Because fuck it. If he was going to keep up this emotionally stunted silent treatment, she could energy-match that shit in a heartbeat.
“People create those rituals for all kinds of reasons,” she said, stepping back to let the water run in rivulets down her breast and belly. “But mostly, it comes down to control. When you’re in an environment where you don’t have much of it, you take it where you can. Sometimes, you take it where it earns you the most social currency. From a parent, say. From a father.”
Noticing the furrow between his brows, Maggie continued.
“Say your father is an especially regimented guy. And nothing you do quite seems to measure up. Except when it comes to getting straight As. Or maybe…cleaning your room to military precision?”
“Don’t.” The tendons beneath the smooth brown skin of McGarvey’s neck rose like bridge cables.
“You’re always so composed, so in control of everything around you.” She glanced sideways at him, allowing a playful smirk to grace her lips. “It’s kind of…compulsive, almost.”
His fingers flexed against the sloping muscle of his thigh.
“Maybe,” Maggie mused, tracing a soapy finger along the curve of her collarbone, “you just need someone to show you how good it can feel to let go.” She drew the tip of her finger down between her breasts and across her stomach, leaving a trail of suds behind. “Someone who’s not afraid of getting a little dirty in order to make you come…undone.”
Her words hung heavy in the humid air, and she could practically feel the weight of McGarvey’s gaze as it flicked to her—a brief, heated moment before he looked away again. But she’d caught the spark of desire in his eyes, and that was enough.
“Have you ever really let go, Trent?” she asked, her voice low and sultry as the water continued to pour over them. “Or are you too afraid of what you might find when you do?”
The silence stretched on, the only sound the steady roar of the shower.
The moment hung in the air like an electric charge, anticipation building between them amidst the steamy shower. Maggie traced slow circles around her nipple with her fingers, teasing it into a hard peak. She locked eyes with McGarvey, challenging him to break his stoic silence. The rush of power she felt when she noticed the unmistakable bulge growing in his pants was intoxicating.
“Mmm,” she purred, sliding one hand down her body to rest between her legs. Her fingertips danced over her sensitive folds, sending a shudder through her. “Imagine,” she whispered, moving the shower attachment lower, directing the stream of water between her legs. The sensation made her gasp, and her hips bucked forward involuntarily. “Imagine how good it would feel to just take what you wanted right this second.”
McGarvey’s eyes were hooded and dark, his breath coming in short, ragged pants.
“Please, Trent,” she urged softly, her own body trembling with need. “Let me see you.”
The hot water cascaded over her body as the shower attachment pulsed against her most sensitive spots, the sensation becoming almost unbearable. Her breath hitched in her throat as she moaned Trent’s name, her eyes never leaving his.
“I’m imagining you right now,” she gasped, her voice thick with desire. “Your hands on me, your lips trailing down my neck, your teeth grazing my collarbone. The feel of your hard, throbbing cock pressing against my thigh. Then slipping between my legs.”
She paused, holding still through another shudder.
“Picture yourself inside me, filling me completely. Your fingers digging into my hips as you give yourself to me as hard and fast as you want to. Because I know you want to.”
As the pleasure built within her, Maggie felt her legs begin to tremble, her body teetering on the edge.
Opening her eyes, she met the angry animal need in his.
“I’m going to come, Trent,” she whimpered. “Oh, God, I’m going to?—”
McGarvey lunged forward, wrapping one hand around her throat and pinning her against the shower wall, fastening the other over her wrist and jerking the shower attachment away mere seconds before she lost herself.
“Enough, Maggie,” he growled, his eyes dark and stormy with conflicting emotions.
Her pulse thundered in her ears, her chest heaving as she fought to catch her breath. The taste of power still lingered on her tongue, mingling with the bittersweet frustration of being denied release. She stared defiantly into McGarvey’s eyes, a wicked grin spreading across her lips.
“Scared you might actually enjoy it?” she taunted him, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“Damn it, Maggie,” he muttered, the struggle between desire and restraint playing out on his face like the world’s most erotic tug-of-war.
His grip on her throat tightened ever so slightly, a silent warning that they were dancing dangerously close to a line neither of them had ever crossed before.
A bead of water raced down the curve of Maggie’s breast, catching the light like a tiny diamond before disappearing into the depths of her flushed cleavage. The moment hung suspended in time, a precarious balance between past and present.
“Trust me,” McGarvey said, his voice a low rasp filled with warning and frustration, “you don’t want to see this side of me.”
For a heartbeat, Maggie hesitated, staring into the turbulent sea of emotion swirling behind his eyes.
“You’re right, Trent,” she replied, her voice steady despite the heat coursing through her veins. “I don’t just want to see this part of you. I want to taste it. Breathe it. I want to feel it.”
His eyelids lowered as she lightly grazed his thickening cock before wrapping her hand around it and beginning to move.
“This…isn’t a good part…of me,” he panted in time with her ministrations.
“I don’t just want part of you, Trent McGarvey,” she said, brushing her slick palm over his swelling head. “I want the whole fucking thing.”
“Fuuck,” he groaned, his eyes darkening with desire.
“I want every last drop, Trent,” she whispered, leaning in closer. “And I want it messy. And hot. And hard .”
A primal growl reverberated through his chest as he yanked Maggie toward him, their lips, teeth, and tongues tangling together in a raw, hungry sweep. McGarvey wrenched his mouth away, gazing down at her with a heat that threatened to melt her knees.
“Don’t say I didn’t fucking warn you.”