Zico and I met regularly over the next few weeks. Almost every one of our meetings, whether originally for business or pleasure, ended in pleasure. As much as I wanted to distance myself from him, keep myself emotionally detached, I couldn’t resist him.
For so much of my life, people had refused to take me seriously. I was nothing more than a hot blonde, who almost everyone assumed was dumb. Because of that, I took myself too seriously. I rarely allowed myself to relax. Every moment was spent thinking about how to advance, how to become the best, how to gain people’s respect. With Zico, though, I didn’t think about any of that. I wasn’t striving or trying to earn his respect. I simply was. He was like my human Xanax pill.
Plus, despite how our “relationship” had started, I began to think Zico actually liked me. At first, I had felt like little more than a way for him to reach a sexual release. However, as time went on, Zico stopped demanding sex. He stopped mentioning blackmail and using threats. And, more than that, he opened up to me.
He told me things he almost certainly should not have about the inner workings of the Brancati operation. Things that Joey would have likely killed him over. He told me about the pressure he’d felt his entire life to be as good a leader as his father was. To be as obedient as his brother always was.
While we laid in bed together—because more and more of our sexual escapades began taking place in actual beds rather than the floor or the kitchen table or the back room of a cigar shop—naked and lazy, he would confide in me that perhaps, if he’d been born in a different family, he would have become an engineer. He liked figuring out how things worked and solving problems.
And the more he opened up to me, the more it was hard to resist him.
Much of my trepidation, in the beginning, had been my belief that I was sleeping with a monster. I mean, he had coerced me into sex and blackmailed me and been vaguely threatening. However, I now knew that wasn’t the case. Zico had done monstrous things, but he was far from a monster.
In many ways, Gary was more of a monster than Zico. Gary was deceptive, whereas Zico was upfront about who he was and what he wanted. Despite this rather large revelation, though, the fact remained that Zico and I lived in two entirely different worlds. He lived in one controlled by violence and money, and I lived in one controlled by laws and order.
When our plan was put into place, and Gary was finally arrested and taken down, Zico and I would cease to be anything to one another but hot, steamy memories. Our relationship wouldn’t survive the real world, and I couldn’t let myself grow attached. However, I planned to enjoy the fantasy of us for as long as I possibly could.
Not least of all because my regular trysts with Zico were doing wonders for my work life. I found myself much more laid-back. Fellow officers in the precinct began to treat me as one of the team, rather than the “new girl.” Plus, it became easier to be less critical of Gary and his temper, which opened the door for Gary to feel more and more comfortable revealing his illicit activities to me.
Perhaps he interpreted my new attitude as acceptance of his dirty dealings, or perhaps he just assumed that if I were going to turn him in, I would have already done it. He never spoke about it out loud or in any kind of detail, but he began taking me along on all of his stops again, even though he knew I understood what he was really doing there. While he went in, I would wait in the car, seemingly disinterested, but I’d mark down the date and locations on the spreadsheet in my phone.
Even though I didn’t know who Gary was meeting with at every stop, the locations were typically all Zico needed to figure it out. An important part of being one of the biggest crime rings in the city was knowing about all of the other crime rings. He knew who ran which parts of town, which businesses they operated out of, and at least three different ways he could shut them down if he needed to.
It was a shame he hadn’t been able to become an engineer. With a brain like his, he could have done a lot of good in the world. If the whole affair hadn’t been so criminal, I would have been impressed with him.
“I may be a criminal, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still a businessman,” he’d said when I expressed surprise at his level of information. “If you want to be good in business, you have to know the competition.”
To really sell my commitment to Gary and the force, I actually tagged along to a baseball game with Detective Johnson, his wife, and Gary. Johnson had come into Gary and I’s office every day for almost a week asking whether we would like to “catch a game,” and I convinced Gary that going was the only way to get him to stop asking.
Johnson’s wife loaned me a jersey to wear, and I drank overpriced beer and got a sunburn on my nose while my three companions booed the umpires, slammed chests when the Yankees scored, and grew increasingly drunker. Even though Gary had been hesitant to attend, he’d clearly had a great time, and I felt confident there was no way he’d expect me of ever betraying him.
“The game wasn’t half bad last night, eh Grasso?” Gary said the next morning when he walked into the office, eyes bloodshot and bleary with a hangover.
This was probably the nicest thing Gary had ever said to me, and for a moment, I forgot we were trying to capture him. I forgot he was a criminal. I was just glad to have finally, on some small level, earned his approval.
“Not bad at all,” I replied. “I’m not a baseball fan, but I had a good time.”
Eventually, through my keen observation of Gary’s movements over several weeks and Zico’s knowledge of the local crime rings, we had enough information to finally catch Gary dealing with criminals red-handed. He made small stops quite frequently, but I didn’t want him to get busted for a petty crime, one that would see him temporarily suspended from the force, but reinstated a month later.
I wanted him to get caught in the middle of a huge deal, something that would be large enough to get him removed permanently from the force and, potentially, imprisoned. As harsh as it seemed, justice was justice. Gary deserved to be punished.
Based on what I could remember from Gary’s black notebook, he had regular meetings on the far side of the city once every ten days. When I told Zico about it, he immediately knew without a doubt that Gary was meeting with a small gang who worked that part of the city. They weren’t a huge operation, but they had been steadily expanding their territory outwards, trying to become one of the big players.
“They are nobodies, but they are trying to play with the big boys. This will be perfect. We’ll get rid of Gary and put the punks encroaching on Brancati territory in their place,” Zico said.
“So, they’re like your rivals or something?” I asked, pulling the comforter up to cover my bare chest. “Are you guys like the Sharks and the Jets?”
Zico laid back, his hands behind his head, elbows wide. “No way. They are not our rivals. And this is not West Side Story. They are, though, a rather serious nuisance. Joey has been wanting to knock them down a peg or two anyway so this will be perfect.”
“You’ve seen West Side Story?” My mouth hung open in shock.
“Tell anyone, and I’ll punish you,” he said, grabbing my chin and bringing my face to his, kissing me roughly. The kiss sent a surge of warmth through my body, and I felt it in my toes.
“This is actually going to work,” I said, extracting myself from his lips.
It was still hard to believe that after months of planning and spying and snooping, we were finally going to catch Gary. I almost felt guilty about it. I knew Gary was a dirty cop, but he had also become something of a friend. Not a friend I talked to very often or would ever hang out with outside of work, but we shared a small space.
It was hard to not get to know him, to not sympathize with him. Every time these doubts rose up in my mind, I squashed them by reminding myself that I was simply following my sworn duty as an officer of the law. Gary was committing crimes, and I was going to catch him. That was how the law worked.
I looked over at Zico, tan and smooth against my white sheets, and wondered where he fit into my moral compass of right and wrong. If Gary deserved to be brought to justice, then God knows Zico did, but would I ever do that? Could I ever do that? Could I ever turn on Zico?
He’d provided me with enough information to bring down his operation if I wanted, but I couldn’t imagine doing it. I couldn’t imagine what Zico would look like in prison, behind bars. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not see his lopsided smile, to not feel his fingers running down my spine or his breath hot against my skin. What kind of cop did that make me? Wasn’t I just as dirty as Gary?
“What’s wrong?” Zico asked, rolling on his side, his fingers pinching my chin and tilting my head to him. “You aren’t having second thoughts, right?”
“No.” I shook my head more furiously than was necessary. “No, I’m not. I was just thinking.”
“About?” he asked, his eyes probing me.
I shook my head again and smiled. “Nothing important.”
Zico crawled to his knees and straddled my hips, drawing the comforter up over his shoulders until we were in a kind of blanket cave. “I can tell when you’re lying, you know?”
“Oh, can you?” I said, rolling my eyes.
“What’s with the eye roll? I can totally tell. I know you well enough. Plus, half of my job is knowing when people are lying. I’m good at noticing the ticks.”
I lifted a finger to his bottom lip and played with it, loving the way his body responded to me, the way his mouth opened, the way his breathing became heavier, the way his eyelids fluttered at my touch.
“Well, you couldn’t tell I was lying earlier,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“When?”
I stood up slightly until my bare chest touched his, until my lips were pressed against the pulse in his neck, and then I added, “I was faking it.”
He jerked back, sitting upright and looking down at me. “You liar,” he said in mock outrage. “If I can tell when people are lying to me, I can sure as hell tell when a woman is faking an orgasm, and you, madam, were not faking.”
“Madam?”
I shrugged my shoulders and laughed. “Fine, believe what you want.”
Suddenly, a wickedness washed over his face. His eyes brightened, and he disappeared beneath the covers, becoming nothing more than a lump in the middle of the bed. I was about to protest, claiming I was too tired for a round two, but then his tongue plunged inside of me, and I writhed against his face, all resistance entirely forgotten. He penetrated me over and over again, and I grabbed fistfuls of the blankets, pulling the fitted sheet entirely off of the top corners of the bed as I moaned.
“Alright, alright,” I panted out, feeling spent after another release. I reached down to grab the back of his head, lifting him up and pulling him towards my face. “I lied. I wasn’t faking it.”
He reappeared from under the covers, his face broken with another smile. “I know that.”
He kissed the soft skin beneath my belly button and then ran his tongue in a straight line up my body and between my breasts. I leaned my head back, burying my face in my pillow, and Zico carried on licking and kissing me—across my collarbone, up my neck. He occasionally stopped to suck playfully at my skin, his lips making soft smacking noises.
“If you believed me, then what are you trying to prove by making me orgasm again?” I asked, so delirious with pleasure I felt drunk.
“This isn’t for your pleasure, love,” he said, running his hands down my arms until his fingers were wrapped around each of my wrists. “This is for mine.”
Then, before I could even resist, Zico whipped both of my arms above my head, using one of his hands to hold them in place by the wrists, and thrust himself inside of me. As always, I gasped at the size of him. No matter how many times we slept together, my body was always surprised by how big he was.
This time, though, Zico didn’t give me time to adjust. He hammered into me so hard that a dull pain mingled with the pleasure. As he filled me again and again, he bit my shoulder, and I felt his teeth leaving indentions in my skin, but I didn’t care. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and hugged him to me, arching my back so I could grind against him with each thrust. Before long, I wasn’t the only one breathing heavily.
Zico did things to me I’d never experienced before. Things that, even a few months prior, would have unnerved me, scared me. With him, though, I felt safe. Despite everything I knew about him, I trusted him. I let him use my body however he liked because, as much as I’d always been a control freak, I liked how it felt to be dominated. How it felt to have someone bigger and stronger force pleasure from me.
His grip loosened on my wrists as he came closer and closer to climax, but still, I left them there. I leaned forward, so my face was buried in his neck, and I kissed the underside of his jawbone.
“Come,” I whispered.
Zico’s entire body tensed, and then he let loose in a torrent of thrusting and groaning and grinding. Our bodies slammed together, my headboard banging against the wall. I tried to free my arms so I could grab onto him, wrap myself around him completely, but Zico tightened his hold.
He grunted with every movement, redness creeping up his chest and into his neck, his eyes squeezed shut. Even in the throes of passion, Zico was hot. He looked like every bad boy type in every movie I’d ever loved. Strong jaw, dark shiny hair, tan skin.
As I was admiring him, he released my arms, and in one powerful thrust, he finished. I felt him twitching inside of me. With my arms now free, I wrapped my hands around his neck, pulling him down to me. We kissed, our tongues tangled in sloppy kisses, until finally, he collapsed on top of me, his chest heaving into mine.
“That oughta teach you not to lie,” he said, his face buried in my neck, his breath heavy.
I laughed. “Yeah. I plan to lie a lot more often from here on out.”
He didn’t say anything, but I felt his chest hitching with quiet laughter as he planted a kiss on my shoulder.