TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAD PASSED, AND I still had no idea what to make of yesterday.
Hell, I was starting to question everything that had occurred over the past two weeks—meeting Matt, getting un-evicted and moved in to a kick-ass apartment in downtown LA, being introduced into the world that was everything Wonderland, Inc., and working at swanky, sophisticated parties whose attendees comprised some of Hollywood’s elite. And then, witnessing those very attendees blur the lines of good and bad with charitable functions being used as some sort of cover to delve into a classy kind of dirty where prostitutes were called pleasure girls and drugs and alcohol were passed around like hors d’oeuvres.
It was a mindfuck.
And the icing on the cake?
Mike, my fucking landlord, instructing me to go to the eighteenth floor, into an apartment owned by none other than Matt Hadder. My fucking boss.
And not only that, but like a complete moron, I’d walked around his place until I found him in the shower, naked and stroking his dick.
I hated how much I loved the visuals the mere thought of his oh so very perfect cock spurred. I shouldn’t have been fantasizing about what he tasted like or felt like or, holy hell, what he’d feel like inside of me.
I definitely shouldn’t have been fantasizing about those things.
Shouldn’t being the operative word my mind kept forgetting.
Matt fully dressed was a fantastic sight, one that any woman in the world would drool over. But remove the clothes and add his hard cock into the deal? Mind-blowing. Provocative. So fucking erotic and arousing it should’ve qualified as the eighth deadly sin. I couldn’t remove those images from my brain even if I wanted to.
Christ, I’d be a liar if I said I wanted to remove them. Like a little ravenous scavenger, I’d been stockpiling each and every image into the recesses of my brain so I could obsess over them for the rest of time.
I was a pervert and starting to wonder if I needed therapy. Or sex. Hell, maybe both.
Sex? Cripes. How long has it been?
I knew it had been at least a year. My last sex being my ex-boyfriend Randy. And sadly enough, it wasn’t even good sex. It was just…sex. In and out, in and out until he climaxed and fell asleep.
Which, normally, I wouldn’t think twice about. I’d never really considered myself a sexual person per se. I found men attractive, and I did enjoy the benefits a good orgasm could give, but sex wasn’t something that had ever really been on my daily radar.
Until Matt and his sexy naked body and perfect cock in the shower.
That visual, well, it had fucked up my normal thought processes. Short-circuited my brain’s usual neurotransmitter path and rerouted my mind’s inclinations toward fixating on fantasies and obsessing over tanned, flexing muscles and intense eyes that rotated hues of honey and amber and gold depending on their mood.
It didn’t make sense.
Before Matt, I’d had boyfriends. I’d seen men naked. I’d had sex…not a lot, but enough to know the gist of it. But nothing, not even sex itself, had ever turned me on as much as seeing Matt stroke his perfect cock. It was like that man and his fuck-hot body held the key to my secret garden of horny.
And right on cue, the visuals started rolling in again.
Naked Matt.
Matt’s biceps flexing and his intense eyes on me and his hand wrapped around himself, moving, stroking, up and down, up and down, until my brain felt buzzed.
Sheesh. This is crazy.
I blinked several times to find my equilibrium.
Fuck, I had to get out of this apartment. Take a walk. Get some fresh air. Basically, do anything but sit around in my underwear and fixate.
After a short trip to my walk-in closet, I’d switched out of my sleep shirt into a little black cotton dress and decided that a quick stroll to the market to grab a few things wasn’t a half-bad idea.
Five blocks south and another two toward the right, I stepped into Ralph’s, the nearest grocery store within walking distance, grabbed a basket, and kept my brain busy with the short list I’d jotted down before I left my apartment.
-Coffee
-Milk
-Turkey
-Don’t think about Matt
-Oranges
-Oreos
-Don’t think about Matt!
-Bananas
-Ice cream
-Stop thinking about him!
-Toilet paper
-Eggs
-Stop thinking about him, you pervert!
-Ugh. You’re pathetic.
Forty minutes later, I walked toward my building with both hands full of grocery bags and my mind not thinking about Matt naked or the one million things it probably should have been analyzing.
Such as, how did my landlord know Matt?
And why did he send me up to Matt’s apartment?
There were a lot of things I didn’t know about Matt Hadder, but I definitely knew he wasn’t a fucking maintenance guy.
I’d even attempted to call Mike three different times, but every time, I’d lost my nerve and hung up before the second ring.
I mean, how did someone even broach a conversation like that?
“Oh, hey, Mike. It’s Alex. I’m just wondering why you sent me to Matt’s apartment so I could watch him jerk off in the shower. Also, please ignore the fact that I took it upon myself to just stand there like a pervert and watch him finish…”
See what I mean? It wasn’t an easy situation any way I looked at it.
And the more I thought about the entire clusterfuck of confusing circumstances, I wondered if it really was just by chance that I’d been relocated into the same building as Matt? I mean, what were the fucking odds?
Surely, they weren’t good. I probably would’ve had a better shot at winning the lottery.
Okay, so maybe I was a bit of a liar.
My mind was thinking about Matt. He was all I could focus on. Not only my insane attraction toward him, but all of the strange coincidences and odd situations that had led me to my current confusing set of circumstances.
As I rounded the last block toward my building, I passed by an empty bus stop, and my eyes locked on to a newspaper sitting discarded on a distressed, wooden bench.
Aha! I smiled, but it wasn’t the newspaper that had caught my eye. It was the back of a playing card peeking out between its pages. Without hesitation, I snatched the newspaper off the bench and finished the short walk toward the entrance of my building.
Collecting playing cards found in the street was a bit of a pastime for Aunt Delores and me. We’d been doing it for years, since I was probably around eight or nine, and it was our game, with our rules. We had to find the cards on the streets of San Diego, any neighborhood, and we could only take two cards at a time. Every year, on January 1st, we’d start the yearlong search to collect an entire deck in a year’s time.
I’d loved our game. Still did, actually.
We’d bring our cards home, organize them by numerical order and suit, and eventually, for the years we’d get a whole deck, we’d put them in a scrapbook with little notes about when and where we had found them.
When I was fifteen, Aunt Delores had made a chart that consisted of what each card meant. Considering she’d gotten their descriptions from Ms. Gypsy—a part-time psychic who gave readings inside of her garage—I hadn’t really put much stock into their meanings.
And when I was eighteen, my then-boyfriend Randy and a few of my friends had asked me why I was doing it, collecting discarded playing cards in the streets. I think their question stemmed from annoyance more than anything else. But I hadn’t really known the answer. It had always been just something fun that I’d done with Aunt Delores.
Until right now.
The instant I spotted that card, I’d finally connected the dots.
I walked into my apartment and dropped my grocery bags onto the counter, too excited to look at the playing card to waste time putting the cold items in the fridge. And with a giant smile on my face, I flipped open the newspaper and slid the playing card out from between the pages.
The six of hearts.
According to Ms. Gypsy, it stood for love.
According to me, it stood for rediscovering the pastime that had brought me so much joy in my childhood—and finding it at a time when I really needed it.
See, as humans, we always want an explanation. A reason. A solution. For everything. We do this in every aspect of our lives. Always searching for things that are useful, that make sense. Always needing to know the answer to Why?
But this, finding random playing cards on the street, it didn’t necessarily make sense. It didn’t necessarily hold a specific reason. And it wasn’t exactly useful.
It just is.
This game was Aunt Delores’s and my way of rebelling against the mind-set of society where everything should be useful and make sense. Sometimes, you just needed something mysterious in your life that couldn’t be easily explained. Something that you didn’t feel the need to try to explain.
And right now, with all of these unknowns swirling around inside my head, I needed this six of hearts.
As I reached to grab my phone off the counter, to make a quick call to my aunt, I spotted a familiar name splashed across the opened newspaper. I stopped in my tracks and scanned the article with narrowed eyes.
Boyle Heights’ Police Update: Man found dead in Boyle Heights has been identified as Vinnie Pat
Police say they’ve identified the dead body of a man found earlier this week sitting inside of a stolen vehicle parked in a Boyle Heights’ alleyway. They say the body was that of 45-year-old Vincenzo Patterelli, known to most as Vinnie Pat.
Vinnie Pat had been suspected of having deep ties to the Mexican drug cartel, as well as involvement in a string of robberies that had occurred in the Bel Air area.
After his death, it was also discovered he had several rental properties in the Boyle Heights area that had been purchased under a different alias.
The California Office of the Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death.
Since Patterelli did not have any identification on him, police say he was identified by fingerprints.
A woman, who was taking out trash to a bin in the alley at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, noticed the man sitting in the parked vehicle and called police. The woman thought the man had passed out, but police say he was dead at the scene.
Vinnie Pat was dead? Not to mention I’d been living in an apartment building owned by a landlord who had ties to the Mexican drug cartel?
What in the ever-loving fuck was going on here?
Between Wonderland and my new landlord Mike, and Vinnie Pat dying not even twenty-four hours after I’d told Matt that I was getting evicted, there were too many coincidences and not enough explanations.
There was more to this story, and I’d be a moron if I didn’t follow what my gut was telling me. This is all connected.
Before I lost my nerve, I grabbed the newspaper off the counter and strode out of my apartment and rode the elevator up thirteen floors until it dinged my arrival on Matt’s floor. The same man sat outside his door, watching me closely as I strode toward him.
“Is Matt home?”
He nodded.
“Can you tell him Alex really needs to talk to him?”
He nodded again and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He typed across the screen a few times, and once his phone buzzed with a response, he slid it back into his pocket and opened the door. “He’s in the kitchen.”
I walked through the long entry, and once I reached the kitchen, I found Matt, standing behind the island, drinking a cup of coffee.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and pushed the words out of my mouth before I lost my nerve. “I’ve got questions.” I slammed the newspaper down beside his mug, the article with Vinnie Pat’s name front and center.
Matt glanced down at the newspaper and then back up at me. “Questions?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I’ve got questions.”
He didn’t falter at my words, merely leaning his back against the counter and staring at me with neutral eyes. “I don’t think you really want to ask those questions, sweetheart,” he warned, but his voice never swayed from the powerful combination of calm and in control.
Uncertainty, maybe even fear, started to seep into my nerves, but I tamped it down. I wasn’t going to let myself back down from this.
“I think I do.”
“I already know your questions, and I can tell you, you knowing the answers to those questions isn’t in your best interest.”
My eyes went wide. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what you think it means.”
“Is this one of those ‘if I tell you, I might have to kill you’ kind of things?”
Matt didn’t humor me with a response, merely staring back at me with an irritatingly and slightly terrifying middle-of-the-road expression.
“Holy hell,” I muttered to myself and averted my eyes from the strength of his gaze. I looked out the big kitchen windows that faced the terrace. The California sun shone bright and blinding, but gave no insight into how I should proceed.
To know or not to know, that was the question.
But eerily, it felt like it might be more like stay alive or end up ten feet under the ground.
“It’s up to you,” he said, and my gaze slowly moved back to his. “I’ll answer any questions you have. But you just need to be aware of the risk knowing those answers holds.”
I stared at him, and he stared at me.
The options were simple. Yes or no. But internally, I felt like I was one clip away from either dismantling a bomb or blowing myself up. Thrumming wildly and fueled by adrenaline, my heart pounded.
Holy hell, think, Alex.
This was some deep and dirty kind of shit. I knew that much. But for some unknown reason, my curiosity was still front and center, demanding attention, asking questions, needing answers.
Red wire.
Blue wire.
An overwhelming sense of unceasing and ravenous curiosity had become front and center in my mind. Uncertainty, fucking explosions, be damned, I had to know the truth. I’d never let it go, I knew myself, and I didn’t think Matt would ever give me the chance again.
Maybe I was being impulsive and rash.
Maybe I wasn’t really understanding the gravity of the situation.
But when it came down to it, only one word sat on my lips, waiting to be said.
“Yes,” I answered. One word. Decisive. Determined. “I want to know everything.”