When she hangs up, I go into the wardrobe on the other side of the room. Adams dead, the club at war, Shotgun a phantom watching me lead the club . . . All of this can weigh heavy on a man. I just want to forget for a little while. I’ll play the gentleman with Simone, I decide. I have a suit stored in here from when we went to Adams’ funeral. Taking it out, I lock my office door and then get changed. A few minutes later I’m no longer Rocco the president. I’m Rocco the gentleman. At least, that’s what I hope I look like.
I leave my office, nodding to the men in the bar. Beast is near the door. “I might be gone all night. You’re in charge.”
“Boss.” He nods. If any of them think it’s strange that I’m wearing a suit, they keep it to themselves.
I climb onto my bike and kick it into gear, making for Simone’s house. I feel excitement swelling inside of me like I haven’t felt in a long time, probably ever since that night in the booth. These past few months have been murder, blood, red water swirling down the plughole. Now I have a chance at something else, even if it is only for a night. I have to try and make her forget why she pushed me away. I think back to how she pretended not to know about our sex in the booth. I hope she isn’t in that mood anymore.
I stop outside her apartment building, parking my bike in an alleyway. Then I call a cab. I reckon gentleman don’t take their ladies on dates on motorbikes. The street is quiet except for a few people walking up and down, one old lady struggling with a bag of groceries heading for the apartment building next to Simone’s. She gives me a look, and then makes to look away. I feel a stab of guilt and go and help her. She’s calling me a sweet young man and trying to give me a dollar when Simone comes outside.
She looks gorgeous with her long hair hanging down around her butt, shiny and freshly washed. Her face is artfully sculpted by her makeup, her eyes dark and piercing, her lips red. She wears a blue dress the same shade as her eyes, with blue heels giving her an extra two and a half inches. For a second, I just look at her.
She raises her eyebrows at me as I reluctantly take the dollar from the old woman. “Please don’t tell me you arranged this,” she says.
“No,” I reply, waving the dollar like that proves anything. “I just . . . she was giving me puppy dog eyes, Simone.”
“Relax, I was joking.” She offers me the tiniest flicker of a smile, and it means the world to me. Months of not talking to women, of not touching them . . . I feel my old self waking up, the man I was before Shotgun was gutted with a bullet.
I sweep over to her, bowing slightly. “It’s good to see you, Simone.” On an impulse—and not letting myself think about if she’ll reject me—I take her hand and kiss it.
She looks up at me, the tiny smile growing larger. “Wow,” she says. “You really know how to make a lady feel special.” She softly takes her hand away.
“That’s because you are special.”
Looking around the street, she comments, “I don’t see your bike.”
“I ordered us a—”
Behind me, the cab beeps its horn.
“I can see that,” she says, walking by me.
“Where to, pal?” the driver asks.
I give him the name of an Italian restaurant. We sit in near silence all the way there, as we pass casinos and hotels, stopping just short of the Strip. I pay the driver and then climb from the car, help Simone out after me, and then lead her toward the restaurant. It’s a fancy type of place, with a suited doorman out front and a line of fancy-looking people waiting to get in. I see Simone anxiously watching the line.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
She hesitates, and then her face hardens. She stands up straighter. “I was worried about my parents seeing me,” she says. “But screw them. That’s my attitude tonight. Screw them!”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m better than all right. Let’s get inside.”
There’s a line of people, but I’m the president of the Seven Sinners, and the owner of this particular fancy-pants restaurant owes the Sinners a favor. I explain this to the doorman, who doesn’t give me any shit because he has to look up at me when he talks and he seems aware of that fact, and then the doorman talks into his walkie-talkie to verify the truth. The owner snaps back, “Let him in, right this second!”
The waiter guides us to a table against the wall with a view of the Strip, the lights twinkling against the glass.
“Any drinks?” he asks.
“Just beer,” I say.
“Water for me,” Simone says.
“Water?” I smile at her. “Since when do you just drink water?”
“Since now,” she says. “I don’t want to be drunk, or even tipsy, tonight.”
“Okay.” I turn to the waiter. “Two waters, please.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Simone says. “You can have beer if you want.”
“I’m not having one of us sober and one of us drunk—or even tipsy. So water it is.”
The waiter brings our waters and then takes out food orders. We get a pizza to share and some sides, and then we’re alone again.
“This is a nice place,” Simone says, looking around.
“Yeah,” I agree, “it is.”
“So,” she says. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Apart from sitting at a rainy window and daydreaming about you, you mean?”
I look intently at her.
Her cheeks turn red. She meets my eye, and then looks down at the table, and then meets my eye again. “There hasn’t been much rain.”
“I had a window installed in my office,” I tell her. “It’s always raining.”
She pauses, watching me, and then the sound I’ve been dreaming about since we last spoke rises in the air. She giggles. She giggles shortly, and then giggles for almost half a minute. She sips her water, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Have I ruined my makeup?” she asks, dabbing under her eyes with the napkin.
“Not even slightly,” I say.
“It’s just the image of you sitting at a rainy window and it’s not even a real window and . . .”
“What’s so funny about that? I’m a sensitive sort of guy.”
“It’s odd. I know you mean that as a joke. But something tells me you really are more sensitive than you look.”
“Is that your way of saying I don’t look very sensitive?”
“You, look sensitive? No, Rocco, just no.”
Our food arrives, a giant pizza which almost fills our table, with our sides scattered around. Simone giggles again. “Where do we start?”
“Anywhere we want.” I grab a slice and munch on it, only after remembering I’m meant to be a gentleman tonight. Do gentlemen eat pizza with their hands? But it’s too late now and the pizza tastes too damn good. I keep munching.
Simone picks up a slice and then looks at me. “I did remember, obviously,” she says.
“What?” I ask between mouthfuls.
“Back at the funeral, when you asked me about the booth and our . . . and the time we spent together. I remembered.”
“Then why did you lie?” I finish the slice.
“Why did I lie . . . I’ve asked myself that quite a few times, Rocco. I’ve also asked myself why I’m attracted to you—”
“Wait a second.” I hold my hand up. “Wait a goddamn second.” I push my chair back and stand up. I walk away from the table with my hand on my forehead, and then return to the table. A few people watch me in confusion. “Wait a second, Simone. You’re attracted to me?”
She giggles so hard she almost spits her pizza out. When she’s recovered, she says, “That was cruel and mean and cruel. But yes, I’m attracted to you. All right? Why do you think I’m talking to your tie right now?”
It’s true. She’s staring at my collar. “To be fair, I can’t really blame you for anything you did that day. It was a fucked-up time.”
“It was,” she agrees. “And now what?”
“What do you mean—now what?”
“What’s happening?”
I quickly fill her in about the war, talking quietly. “We haven’t found Shotgun’s killer yet. I don’t know if we’ll ever find the specific man. The person who really killed Shotgun is this Gerald fella, the leader of the Demons. He’s the one who ordered the Demons there that night.”
“Okay, so have you found Gerald?”
“No, he sends his pups to do his work for him.”
Simone chews her lip. “It sounds dangerous,” she says.
“Getting shot at with high-powered rifles?” I laugh gruffly. “Yeah, it can be dangerous.”
“What if you get hurt?” She sounds worried now, her eyebrows furrowed. She looks at her glass of water like she wishes it was wine.
“If I get hurt,” I say, “I get hurt.”
“Well, that’s all very nice and macho, but if you got hurt I wouldn’t be happy about it. I wouldn’t be happy about it at all. So promise me you’ll be careful, okay?”
“I’m shocked,” I say, only half-joking. “I honest didn’t think you’d care.”
“I shouldn’t,” she whispers. “I don’t understand it . . . it’s like—oh, we can’t talk about this. It’s too awkward. My cringes are cringing.”
“You don’t think I’d understand? You’re the only woman I’ve talked about this type of shit with, ever.”
“Really?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“No awkward nighttime conversations with casual hookups?”
“Here’s what happens in those situations, Simone. They start yapping about feelings. I get up and leave. It’s a simple process.” Even with Angela, I reflect. It was that way even with the woman who was supposed to be my fiancée. She was never really my fiancée, I realize. We hardly knew each other. I was never honest with her. I was always shielded. Foster homes’ll do that to you.
“Then let me turn it around on you!” She gestures with a slice of pizza. “Why me? Why do you care about me?” She’s blushing like crazy now, unwilling to meet my eye. I’m glad for that. She’s right about the awkwardness.
I feel the urge to get up and walk away, a reflex I’d usually trust. I force it down. I need to sit here, with this woman I’ve been dreaming about every night for what feels like forever. “Because you’re beautiful,” I say.
She rolls her eyes, smiling. “That’s nice of you to say, but I’m sure you’ve been with a beautiful woman before—not that I’m agreeing with you here.”
“You should agree with me.”
“Fine, fine. But that can’t be the reason for this . . . for whatever this is.”
I think about it, truly think about it, trying to get to the root of it all. Maybe there is some simple concise reason I could offer up, but I can’t find it. All I can think is . . . “You’re Simone. I don’t know. Maybe it’s crazy. I really don’t fucking know. All I know for sure is that I’ve been thinking about you like a madman, and not just the sex. Not even mostly the sex.”
“I’ve been thinking about you, too,” she says, still not looking at me. “And it hasn’t been mostly the sex, either.”
I hold up a slice of pizza. “A toast, then. Here’s to not knowing what the fuck’s going on inside of us.”
She nudges her pizza slice against mine, and we eat.
After we’ve paid up she shyly interlocks her fingers with mine, looking up at me with the same red face, nervous and cute as hell.
“Let me take you somewhere,” I say, gripping her hand firmly, not wanting to let go. “It’s not too far away. You up for a walk?”
“Sure,” she says. “Sounds good.”
Hand in hand, we walk away from the restaurant and toward the Strip. The sun is slowly setting, making the sky orange-red. I have a strange feeling in my chest. It takes me a second to pinpoint it as happiness. Nervous happiness, happiness which I know will soon be taken away when I have to go back to the war. But happiness all the same.
After walking through the city for half an hour, Simone looks up at me. “I don’t want to sound like a little kid,” she says. “But are we there yet?”
“Almost,” I say. “Five more minutes.”
“You’re a tease.” She nudges me in the arm. “You’re an unforgivable, monstrous tease.”
“A tease,” I repeat. “That sounds like a word used to describe a woman.”
“And you’re a sexist!” She laughs, nudging me again. “Tease, tease, tease!”
“Here we are.” I stop outside the building: a tall, skinny structure with the door boarded up.
“Um.” She tilts her head at me. “I said I really did remember the booth, Rocco. I get it if you’re mad, but I don’t know if killing me and hiding me here is the best solution.”
“Ha, ha, ha. This building was sold and then the city found a sewage problem underneath it, so it’s just sitting here.”
“Sewage? We’re here to look at sewage?”
“Simone Ericson, stop asking questions and follow me.”
She snaps a mock salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”
I pull aside the board and lead her up the stairs. It’s dark except for the dim sunlight which shafts through the staircase windows. She hugs close to me as we climb the stairs. Soon we’re at the top, both of us breathing lightly. I open the roof door and take her onto the roof, propping the door open with a brick. The view here is spectacular. From up here, the entire city of Las Vegas looks like nothing more than the tips of glittering fingers, with the desert yawning off in the other direction.
“Wow,” Simone says, standing at the edge of the roof.
“Was the walk worth it?”
“The stars are coming out. I never noticed that before.” She points into the near-dark sky.
“I come here sometimes to think,” I tell her. “Being the president . . . I always feel so big. They’re always people coming to me with problems and questions. Standing up here I feel like just a man. Small and not so important, you know?”
“I know,” she says, turning to me. “I understand completely.” She hops up onto the edge of the roof, sitting down.
I dart forward, wrapping my arms around her. “What’re you doing? Be careful!”
She lays her forehead against my chest. “This,” she says. “Getting you over here.”
I hold her tighter, pulling her close to me. “You’re a fuckin’ devil.”
“This is why I didn’t want any wine,” she says. “I needed to know . . .”
“Know what?”
“If it felt as good sober.”
I lift her up, driving my groin into hers, the soft fabric of my suit pants showing clearly how badly I want her. My cock aches, my balls throbbing with desire. She grinds up and down against my cock, her dress riding up to her hips. “It does,” she moans. “It really, really does.”
“I’ve wanted you for months now,” I growl, setting her down on the floor and moving my hand up her bare leg, her thigh getting warmer the higher up I go, the promise that her pussy will be the warmest of all. “If I start, I won’t be able to stop. You’re too damn perfect.”
She grabs my cock through my pants. “I won’t be able to stop either.”
As I yank down her underwear, the stars come out.