17. Orion
Orion
Ishould have taken my bike out for the night.
I turn over again, seeking a cool place in the sheets, and close my eyes firmly, demanding that my brain turn off and let me go the fuck to sleep.
It doesn’t work.
I open my eyes and grab my phone just to see what time it is, and see that it’s 2:11 in the morning. Nothing good happens after 2, I think, and apparently sleep doesn’t, either.
I sit up throw the sheets off, frustrated in that way that happens when it’s 2 in the morning and you can’t slow down enough to sleep, and finally just climb out of bed. If I’m not going to be sleeping, I might as well get up and do something. Starting with something to drink.
Water would be good.
Whiskey would be better.
I leave my room without turning on any lights and creep down the hallway toward the main body of the house, avoiding the boards that make too much noise in this house.
The world around me is pitch black and silent, everyone else in town no doubt sound asleep the way they should be.
I’m partially jealous of them... and partially not.
Night is my favorite part of the day. It’s the only time when the world around me actually gets quiet.
And no, I don’t want to be awake right now.
But there are worse things than being awake in the middle of the night with nothing but a glass of whiskey to keep you company.
I’m reveling in the darkness of the night, soaking it into my soul, until I turn the corner into the kitchen and find it brightly lit. And occupied.
Arden’s at the stove boiling something, a spoon in her hand and her hair mussed from sleep.
She’s still in pajama pants and a t-shirt big enough to be a dress, and she looks both slightly scruffy and incredibly charming at the same time.
Bare feet and no makeup, lips slightly puffy and caught completely off-guard.
My heart lurches in my chest and I pause, trying to clock the problem. She’s not dangerous, at least not in the way that the heart palpitations usually mean, but that doesn’t slow my heartbeat at all.
Evidently discovering my favorite girl in the kitchen in bare feet and oversized clothes is a kink I didn’t realize I had.
I huff a laugh at that and she looks up suddenly, her eyes big and the spoon out in front of her like some sort of weapon. I glance at it, one eyebrow lifted, and then turn my eyes back to her.
“Am I supposed to be scared of that or...?”
She gives me a lopsided grin and goes back to stirring.
“Not unless you’re lactose intolerant, I guess.”
I slide onto one of the bar stools behind her. “Which I’m not, as you already know.” But then I pause. “Unless you didn’t know, and gave me that hot chocolate the other night thinking that I might be. Oh, Arden, were you trying to hurt me?”
She doesn’t respond, pouring the milk into two mugs instead and then dumping cocoa powder into each one. When she turns around, she’s wearing that expression she gets when she thinks I’m being annoying.
I love that expression.
She slides the mugs onto the countertop and produces a bottle of whiskey from some magical hiding place.
“If I wanted to kill you, Orion, milk would not be my preferred weapon.”
“Interesting. What would be?”
She turns her eyes up to mine, and they’re shining and golden and beautiful. “Poison. Obviously.”
This... is not what I expected.
“Wouldn’t it be safe to say, Arden, that lactose is poison to a man who’s lactose intolerant? Gets to the same point, no?”
She tips generous pours of whiskey into each cup, then slides one my way. “No. Lactose intolerance might upset your stomach and leave you the worse for wear, but it won’t kill you. Orion.”
I take a sip of the drink, and it’s surprisingly good. Better this time than it was the first time, though that might be because I’m actually expecting the alcohol now, rather than getting surprised by it when it tries to choke me. “Fair. So why poison, then?”
She sips her own drink and shrugs. “Easy. There’s no immediate outcome, so I’ll have plenty of time to get away.
Can’t be traced back to me, because there are no fingerprints.
No shell casings to be matched to my gun.
No gun at all. No evidence.” She pauses, tipping her head back and forth as she thinks.
“And you can make it yourself, so it’s not like there will be a purchase record.
If that sort of thing even exists for purveyors of poisons. ”
She watches me take all of this in and leans forward, elbows on the counter and eyes laughing. “Why? What’s your preferred weapon? Your mouth is hanging open, by the way.”
I snap it shut, not having realized that it was, and stare at the girl in front of me.
A girl I would have sworn had never considered the merits of murdering with poison rather than a gun.
“You’ve put a lot of thought into that,” I finally say.
She shrugs. “A girl’s gotta be prepared. How’s the cocoa?”
“Good,” I croak, wondering if we’re accidentally harboring a murderess under our roof.
Honestly, the thought makes her even sexier.
I turn away from that thought immediately and focus on less dangerous topics. “So is this a thing now? The whiskey in the cocoa?”
She smiles. “I guess so. Is that a problem?”
I smile back. “Not at all. Hot chocolate and whiskey is my favorite thing to do at 2 in the morning.”
Her smile gets even bigger. “Well you know what they say. The best things happen at 2 in the morning.”
She moves her mug toward mine and toasts me at this statement, like we’ve just made some sort of deal.
“That’s not actually what they say,” I reply. “They say nothing good happens after 2 in the morning.”
She thinks about this for a moment, then shakes her head. “I think they’re wrong. I’m changing it. Only good things. I mean whiskey and chocolate are good things. And it’s after 2. Obviously they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
I stare at the girl who has appeared twice now after 2 in the morning, hot chocolate and secrets in hand... and I have to agree with her.
And if we’re making a deal the way I thought earlier, then I’m all in.
“Porch?” she asks, one eyebrow lifted.
I glance at the window next to her and see that the summer storm is still in effect, rain pouring down outside. “Looks like it’s still raining out there.”
“Yeah but not on the porch,” she notes. “There’s that whole roof thing keeping it dry. Unless you’re scared of a little rain...”
Her expression tells me that I will never hear the end of it if I tell her I don’t want to go out there and subject myself to a little rain.
Which is lucky, because I wasn’t going to say that, anyhow.
“Last one in their seat has to get refills,” I whisper.
Then I dash through the house, running as quickly as I can while avoiding furniture and doors and not spilling hot chocolate all over my hand.
The little minx still beats me, and I have no idea how.
“That wasn’t fair,” I huff, dropping into my seat.
“Not fair?” she scoffs. “You set the rules and took off without giving me any warning, and you think it wasn’t fair? It’s not my fault I’m faster than you.”
“You’re not faster than me. You can just fit through smaller spaces.”
She gives me a pointed look. “Yes, because I managed to get through a very tiny tunnel to get here before you arrived. How did you know?”
I start laughing at this, and once I start, I can’t seem to stop.
Rain is sheeting off the roof in front of us and the night is black with the storm.
The porch is sheltered, yes, but sitting out here feels both dangerous and cozy, sheltered and exposed, and the whole picture is so ridiculous that it’s sent something shooting through my veins.
Something that feels a whole lot like giddiness.
I try to remember how much whiskey she poured in my mug, and put my mood down to that. Because it certainly isn’t due to yet another nighttime date with Arden.
She of the mysterious fainting episode.
“This town looks different when it rains,” she says suddenly, like she’s heading me off from saying anything about that thought.
“All towns look different in the rain,” I note.
“Yeah but not all towns look better,” she argues. “New York looks grimy and sad in the rain. Hawke’s Wood looks... sparkly.”
“Sparkly?” I ask. I look out at the town doubtfully, trying to understand the label, but it’s no good; we can’t see the town from here.
She’s talking more about New York than Wood, I think.
“The city looks bad at the best of times,” I say quietly. “I’ve always hated that place.”
“You’re from New York?” This is a surprise to her, evidently, and I realize that I haven’t talked to her about my history. She doesn’t know where I’m from or what I did there.
For her, I’m a blank slate. A story waiting to be written.
And gods, I didn’t realize how much I needed that to be the case until right now.
“Born and raised there,” I say. “Until I was nineteen, when Mars found and brought me back.”
She skips over the dangerous parts of that, like asking why I didn’t want to stay with my real family, and asks the most Arden question ever. “He found you? Like you find a stray dog?”
“Exactly like a stray dog.”
She sips at her cocoa. “Can I start calling you Rover?”
This hits me in a place that’s both funny and tragic, this idea of an entirely different name, and I wonder again if she knows more about me than she’s letting on.
But she can’t. There’s no way.
“So why don’t you like the city?” she asks.
This... is harder to explain than it should be. “Because no one looks at anyone else. Everyone just walks past each other, always in a hurry. No one notices anything. No one would notice if you disappeared. If you needed help.”
“I noticed.”
The answer is so quiet, so firm, that I almost miss it, and I look at her, trying to figure out what she means. If she was in New York up until she was kidnapped, that would mean we might have been there at the same time. Did we cross paths somehow? Did she actually know of me there?
Impossible. She must mean something else.
“You noticed what?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
“I noticed you. I notice when you disappear. And I’m from the city.”
“You’re not like anyone else there, though.”
She laughs at that, and tells me she’s exactly like other people from the city. This is when I learn that she’s more like me than I realized. She’s from the criminal world, too. We may have known some of the same people.
We may have existed in the same space.
But we were on different sides of the road. She’s a Rossi. Mafia royalty. A princess.
And I’m just a beggar.
And yet here we are in the middle of the night, our arms pressed together as she tells me her secrets like she’s been holding them for too long and is desperate for someone to listen.
And fuck, I’m in trouble.
Because no one has ever trusted me the way she’s trusting me right now.
And I’ve never been so tempted to trust anyone in return, fueled by cocoa and whiskey and laughter.
Whispers at 2AM and deals made in nighttime kitchens.
Fainting spells and twenty blocks of running; bare feet and messy hair and pajamas and bets made in the spur of the moment.
Hell, no one has even looked at me long enough to offer half of that.
“I don’t miss New York,” I say quietly. “I didn’t feel like I belonged to that world. Didn’t belong until I got here.”
Didn’t belong until right now, I don’t add.
And then I realize what I just admitted–if not to her, then at least to myself.
I finish my drink, swallowing the pain as it burns on the way down, and then hand her the empty mug. “Goodnight.”
I know it’s not fair. I know she’s handing me midnight stories and vulnerabilities, and I’m paying her back by walking away from her without explanation.
Again.
But she’s a princess and I’m a pauper and that is a road that I cannot cross.
And I can’t keep letting her think I will.