TEN
The prince came to a chamber of gold, where he saw upon a bed the fairest sight one ever beheld—a young princess who looked as if she had just fallen asleep.
Jessica
This was the part where I should leave. Where I should tell this man, who’s clearly good down to his bones, that I’m bad news. Where I ignore everything but survival, because that’s the only way I’ve survived this long. Instead he asks me to stay, and I do.
If Stefano were to find me here, if Finn were to confront him…
Regardless of what I want or wish for, the only thing I can do is run. The only thing I can trust is isolation. But what happens when people are together, really together, when they become intimate in a way beyond bodies hurting one another? I never knew, even though I should, and like a dense fog, it kept me apart.
But drunk on sleeplessness and a shimmering sense of wonder, I see things clearly. If I’m wrong, if I make a fool of myself with him, it would be okay. He would make it okay.
So there’s no way I can ignore his raw request for my company or the tremor in my own body that whispered—yes, I want that too, stay with me. No way I can leave now, not until morning.
“I’ll stay,” I say softly.
He curses softly. “No, you should go. I’m still half-asleep right now and my self-control isn’t what it should be. I’m about two seconds from acting inappropriately. I mean, really inappropriately.”
My nose scrunches. That would normally be enough to send me running, but the truth is that I wouldn’t mind inappropriate behavior right now.
Being desired feels a lot better than being afraid.
He blows out a breath, sitting up in the cot. “And I think most of all, the Town Council would really mind the dirty thoughts the Sheriff is currently having about his prisoner. Yeah, they would not appreciate that at all.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t under arrest.”
“I’m hereby placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Now go back to bed.”
Instead of listening I climb onto the cot beside him. “This is exactly my problem, every time. You’re just like every other guy. You ask me on a date and then you just… you just arrest me.”
His lips quirked. “Happens to you often, does it?”
All the time. All the time I’m left with the dark shame of being not good enough, of being the girl with a man banging on her apartment door, drunk and angry, instead of a man who loved her. I swallow hard, turning away so he can’t see my tears.
“Hey.” This time when he catches my wrist, it’s light, tentative, barely a touch. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, really. If it’s any consolation, I know I am.”
“Why would that console me?”
“We don’t need to talk about me. Let’s talk about you. You can tell me why you were driving like a bat out of hell out of Tanglewood. It’ll be better than not sleeping on these damn cots, especially when the night is so…”
The night was so very something, I know exactly what he means, and lying on a hard cot in a lonely jail cell by myself is too depressing. Sitting on a hard cot beside a self-confessed ass is marginally better. Even if he is a cop.
I settle in, connected to him only by the felt blanket we share.
“He’s a cop,” I say, though that short sentence can’t possibly express everything.
He seems to understand anyway, his body stiffening beside me. “Jesus.”
“A dirty cop. I’m sure you’re shocked about that. I’m sure you thought a man scared me bad enough to fly out of the city like a bat out of hell is just a nice upstanding law enforcement officer.” I meant to sound relaxed, but my voice got high pitched at the end—then broke.
“That’s terrible,” he says, his voice low.
“We were together. I lived with him. It wasn’t exactly…” Consensual. “But I just couldn’t see a way out. Then I missed my period. And another one.”
I glance at him, but he already knows where it’s going. The proof of that is five feet away, sleeping soundly. Deep breath. “Stefano didn’t want anything to do with a baby. I thought he would do something drastic. Beat me until I lost the baby. Maybe drug me and take me to a clinic. In the end he threw me out. It was such… God, it was such a relief.”
Fury flashes in those brown eyes, so different from the soft way he looked at me a few minutes ago, different even from the careful casualness on the road. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t have any money, but I had a few friends leftover from school. People who understood why I couldn’t keep in contact, why I had to drop out—”
“Wait. How old were you when this Stefano fucker took you?”
The word fucker startles me, but not as much as the word took. There are other ways he could have said it, ways other people would have said it. How old was I when we started dating? How old was I when I moved in with him?
Finn seems to understand the subtext, but then he did recognize the tattoo.
That’s exactly what happened. I was gifted by my father. Taken by Stefano.
“Fourteen.”
Finn sucks in a breath. “Jessica, how old are you now?”
“I’m eighteen now, okay? So don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry. You want me not to worry about you, when you’re admitting that you were essentially trafficked as a girl, that you were abused and battered and—”
“Stop please,” I say, wincing at those words. They land like stones on my skin. “I’m not excusing what happened. I’m not saying it was okay, only that I survived.”
“Yes,” he says, the admission coming gravely. “You did.”
“And I want to stay that way.”
“I’m going to help you, Jessica.”
“You don’t understand. Stefano, the people he knows, they’re dangerous.”
He makes a small sound. “Do you know what I did before I became a cop?”
“You were a boy scout?”
“I told drugs. Occasionally I helped run guns.”
My insides turn cold. I scoot away from him on the thin mattress. “You’re a dirty cop.”
“No, beautiful. That was before. Before the accident.”
By degrees I feel myself relax. “What happened?”
“I was driving on this road, the same one where I found you. Running guns for this asshole who paid a lot of money not to ask questions. I had a woman in the car with me. It was only…” He looks almost ashamed. “Only sex between us. Only money. I picked her up in a bar in Tanglewood, determined to have a good time.”
My stomach clenches. Stefano’s work is incredibly dangerous, so much so that it became my dream. That he would one day wind up dead. That he would never come home.
“Did someone take the guns?”
A humorless laugh. “No. That would have made sense, at least. Instead it was a drunk driver. He hit us from the side. Of course I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, so I flew through the windshield, landed on pavement.”
“Oh my God.”
“That ended up saving my life. The woman was trapped inside. Unconscious, I can only hope. Because all those guns—they caught fire. Exploded. The whole car, gone. Right there in the street.”
The pain in his voice draws grooves inside me, a kind of shared memory I won’t ever forget. Not his fear or his injuries in that moment, but for the woman.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says sharply. “I don’t deserve a damn thing.”
“You didn’t mean for her to be hurt.”
“I didn’t even know her name.”
There’s a hollow in my chest, whether from what I hoped this man would be or from his own shame. “I’m still sorry,” I say softly.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice rough. “I’m sorry too.”
“And then you became a cop?”
“Took a while. Woke up in a hospital outside the city, the cops asking a lot of questions. There was a time it looked like I wouldn’t walk again, definitely not run far and run fast enough to pass the physical. But I had to do something with my life, something useful, or I couldn’t see any point to living it.”
The difference struck me, then. How Stefano had become a cop to have power, so that he could live above the law. And how Finn had become a cop for the opposite reasons.
“Is that why you’re alone?” I ask.
I don’t just mean whether he’s in a relationship. There’s an air of loneliness around him. I recognize it because it’s the same one I carry with me.
He makes a rough sound. “I like people just fine. I just don’t want to get too close.”
“I don’t know how to be close,” I admit.
He’s quiet a moment, looking pensive. “We make quite a pair, you and I.”
“But we’re okay. We’re going to be okay.” Optimism. I would have to find enough for both of us. “We don’t need to get close to enjoy each other’s company.”
“We don’t?” He sounded skeptical, but also slightly interested.
“No sex either,” I add quickly.
He gives me that faint smile, the one I recognize from the road. “Of course not.”
“We can play a game.”
“Unfortunately I left my monopoly board at home.”
“Something without a board or any parts. Like I Spy.” It’s something I play with Ky, even though I have to play both parts. Mostly it’s just me pointing out things and naming them. Having a grown up to play the game with actually does sound fun.
He raises his eyebrows. “I spy something dark.”
The whole cell is dark. “You were the kid in class who heckled the teacher, weren’t you? Okay, smarty pants, you name a game we can play.”
“Truth or dare.” He says it like a challenge, like we’re already playing.
“No dares. The only point of that is to get naked, and we already decided not to do that.”
“Did we decide that?”
“I’m deciding it now.”
“Fine,” he says. “Only truth.”
“And I get to ask first, since I already told you everything about my life.”
He inclines his head in a gracious nod. “Go ahead. I’m an open book.”
“Ha! I very much doubt that.”
Finn seems casual enough when he pulls you over on the side of a deserted country road, with his quips and his detached amusement, but I’ve seen him pant in a nightmare, heard the desolation in his voice when he spoke of the things he no longer let himself do.
I want to know so many things about him, everything really. Each new bit of information I learn about him feels like a bead, one strung after the other. He’s a good man, but you know, ever since the accident, he’s had a stick is so far up his—
I know why he became a cop, but not why he became a criminal.
“Who was your father?”
First there’s surprise. It flashes in his eyes, lightning quick. Then thunder rolls across his face, dark and ominous. “You’re a smart little thing, aren’t you?”
I close my mouth, feeling guilty and defensive all at once. The question sprang half-formed from my lips, spurred by a growing curiosity about this man. I never meant to anger him—or hurt him.
“Never mind,” I say quickly. “It’s none of my business.”
The storm cleared as quickly as it came, smoothed out into nonchalance so pure it couldn’t be real. “No, it’s okay. Fair question.”
“Hey.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m serious. We can play something else. The quiet game. That’s a good one. I play it sometimes with Ky, but fair warning, I’m pretty good at it. He always loses. Possibly because he doesn’t understand the rules.”
Plus there’s less chance of me putting my foot in my mouth that way.
The corner of his mouth kicks up. “My father did the same thing I did. Only with less hesitation about killing if someone got in the way. Here’s the truly ridiculous part, I actually felt like a pretty decent guy, that I only ran drugs instead of people, that I mostly paid the girls I took with me and made them come when we had sex. Yeah, I’m a great fucking guy.”
My stomach clenches. He has so much remorse inside him, it’s impossible for me to hate him. Or maybe it’s because I grew up on the same streets as he did. I know that he actually was a great guy by those standards. And then he made himself even better.
“I’m sorry.” Sorry I brought it up. Sorry I had brought all this back for him with my middle-of-the-night escape from the city.
He continues as if he didn’t hear her. “The people of Provence. They didn’t trust me at first, which was smart of them. And then after a while, they did trust me. Bridget, she’s always trying to set me up. She says it’s time for me to stop punishing myself, but that’s the thing. I have moved on. This is what it looks like, steady, quiet.”
Bleak. And lonely. And heartbreaking. “I think it’s for you to decide. What you want, what makes you happy.”
“What makes you happy, Jessica?”
Unaccountably, this. Sitting in the dark with a kind stranger, spilling secrets I don’t even want to remember. The warmth of his arm under my hand, the solidness of his body beside mine.
He sounded a bit lost when he asked the question, looked a bit forlorn there in the shadows, and that seemed all wrong. I don’t know how to console him, but I can give him my company. He doesn’t have to be lonely tonight. And I don’t either.
I pat his shoulder. “Come on.”
He stares blankly but allows me to tug him down on the cot. I lay at his side, my arm slung over his chest to keep me from rolling backwards. Heat lingers in my body, leftover desire, but our touch is pure comfort.
“I’m afraid,” I whisper in the dark.
“Go to sleep, beautiful. I’ll watch over you.”
The determination in his voice is proof enough that we’ll be safe. If only for these few precious hours in a jail in the middle of nowhere—safe. A precious gift. Relief from a curse placed a long time ago.
Now I know what intimacy would be like, deeper than physical. Our worry, our sadness wells together, and we hold one another, adrift. There’s no cure for shame or for grief but time, nothing to do but wait, and for tonight we would float together.