Finding the date on the delivery company didn’t reveal the identity of the delivery man right away. Or even a few days later. Getting in touch with the company was a game of phone tag that was quickly going to turn into a game of Roarke showing up, bashing a door in, and demanding information. Name, address, Social Security Number, blood type, and any other thing they could give him that would lead him to finding this elusive fucker that he was convinced was now solely responsible for the disappearance of his sister.
It wasn’t smart to think that way, he knew. He wasn’t getting much sleep and Hanna had taken to watching him closely with a highly critical eye. On the one hand, it irritated him to be watched so much. On the other hand, he liked the idea of her watching him, caring about what she saw, wanting him to not have a mental breakdown. It was a strange sort of turn on. He wasn’t used that.
Though, it wasn’t like his eyes still didn’t wander when he was around her, either. Compassion was hot and it got him red in the face, but her tight fitting clothes and toned body didn’t hurt and it was a sure welcome sight on days when he was working off a fourty-five minute nap.
“We lost a couple girls that way,” said Antonio. He was the leader of the Vampires, just outside of town. “We’re still looking. Some of us never stopped. But hope is slim.”
“Well, that’s not super promising,” Hanna sighed.
“We’d be happy to give you all the stuff we know. We’ve got some guys we can lend over too, good bikers, they can be on lookout.”
“That’d be incredible.”
“We’re brothers in tragedy my friend. I’m happy to help,” he said.
They shook hands firmly and the promised bikers appeared that night to patrol the streets. It gave Roarke a chance to catch up on some sleep. That turned into a full blown sleep regiment when Hanna started showing up at his house nightly to make sure he actually did fall asleep.
“The fuck you doing here?” he asked, the first night she was at his door.
“Clearly I’m here for the lovely sight of bong water and candy wrappers,” she said, pushing past him with a scoff.
“I’ll watch the phones, you sleep,” she said.
“Thanks, mom.”
“Seriously,” she said. “Apart from how dangerous it is for you to be a functioning person throughout the day on almost no sleep, it can actually kill you. You won’t be much help to anyone then.”
“You give me until midnight, and then I’m up.”
“Yes sir.”
“I mean it.”
“You got it.”
Predictably, she let him sleep until sunrise and he hated himself for falling for it and for actually staying asleep that long. It didn’t seem to magically make his sluggish mind speed up, but Hanna rattled off all sorts of scientific facts about losing sleep and how long it took to recover and not being able to regain it and yada, yada.
She made a habit of showing up at his apartment at night, there to make sure he got sleep and to watch for any signs that a break had come in the case. On the third night, he woke up in the middle of the night and, through cracked eyes, found her watching him.
He pretended to still be asleep, careful not to let his breathing give him away as he shut the slit of his eyes and continued to feel her watching him. While he liked the idea of her watching him throughout the day, this was practically ready to get him hard. Her gaze, for the brief moment he saw it, had been intense and unbroken. She wasn’t zoning out or idly giving her eyes a direction to point. She was studying him with that same intelligence that got him to cross the street weeks ago. He loved the way she wore her mind on those blue eyes. He gave her the smallest show by twitching, just slightly, in his sleep, as if in a dream. The effect was a tightening of his biceps, exposed by his cut off shirt.
She placed a blanket over him and he felt his insides soften just a bit as he fell back into a real sleep and woke up ignoring the feelings that still lingered.
He had to get very good at hiding his morning wood with her constantly there. But he also knew there was no way she didn’t notice, at least a few times. In a way it made him even harder. He had several good showers in the morning to relieve himself of all that pent up tension. In a way, that was actually the most enjoyable part about all this. He got to see her body, watch her watch him and then he had the chance to do something about it every morning before going out.
It improved his mood a great deal. Maybe it was what actually had him sleeping better at night.
“Nothing, boss,” Rick said, coming back from a ride with the loaned riders from the Vampires.
“You and your lady should probably call it an early night, no need to exhaust yourselves,” one of the riders said.
“She’s not my girl,” he said evenly.
“Could have fooled me.”
“Watch your mouth,” Rick said sharply.
The rider shrugged and bid them farewell for the night. It was like in high school when the guy who wanted to ask the girl out to prom got told by everyone how much she secretly liked him. Except here it was more about getting her out of those tight fitting clothes she seemed to like so much, as soon as possible. He ignored it, however. She was all business, very serious. She was making up for some nasty comments that came flying out of her mouth during a stressful time, and that was that.
He’d find some stripper or girl at a bar to take his mind off of her. Though he hated the idea of spending a night off from trying to find his sister to get laid or give himself something to thinking about while he masturbated.
“Everyone deserves a night off,” Rick said as they sat in the dim, flashing lights of the strip club.
“I should be spending it smoking a bowl on my couch and watching crappy television, waiting for the phone to ring,” he said grimly, taking a sip of beer.
“We both know that’s not you, and Isabelle knows it too,” he said.
What really made him feel guilty was the way he compared every body he saw to the one he was sure was hiding under Hanna’s clothes. He was here to take his mind off another woman, that added a whole new layer to the equation. Somehow the blur of the club wasn’t doing the job he hoped in getting him to stop thinking about her.
“I’m calling it a night,” he said and walked out, not waiting for Rick to come back at him with a snippy comment about how he was letting a girl get in the way of his own fun.
Rick was smart. He knew exactly what Roarke was doing. They’d been friends since they were kids, he’d seen him go through every possible form of coping mechanism you could imagine. This one was no different. But he was thankful Rick let him walk out without too many comments.
***
At night, when Roarke was asleep, that was the one time Hanna would let herself indulge in watching him, studying his muscles, the way the rifts and cuts across the expanse of his exposed skin created beautiful shadows, showing off almost no body fat. She’d watch his stomach fall and rise as he breathed evenly into the night, occasionally moving around in his sleep or reacting to a dream.
It was probably creepy. Well, it was definitely creepy. And if her uncle knew she was using her cover to ogle a member of the gang, he’d not only fire her, but find a way to ground her, despite her age. That made it all the more tempting, though. Thinking about all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this and how wrong it was made it desirable. She liked it. And she liked the possibility that, at any minute, he might wake up and catch her staring.
So she kept doing it. It served the purpose of her letting out whatever strange tension she was carrying and she got to make sure he was sleeping through the night. It was functional and rewarding.
However, not everyone was so cagey with their thoughts.
“Have you two been fucking?” Amber asked as she dried a glass behind the bar.
“What?” Hanna said, nearly dropping her drink.
“I know my brother. If you two aren’t fucking, he’s certainly thinking about it every time he’s in the shower or home alone long enough to yank one off,” she said bluntly and Hanna tried not to choke on the handful of peanuts she was eating.
“No,” she said evenly and quickly.
“So it’s the shower thing then.”
Hanna wanted to retort, defend herself in some way, but the longer they talked about it, the worse it would get. It was best to just leave it be and move on. But being silent about it didn’t mean it left her brain at all. For the rest of the night she thought about what Amber said and, that night, when she was alone in the guest room of Roarke’s house, trying to actually sleep herself, she couldn’t keep herself from imagining what he did, imagining her. She ended up relieving quite a bit of tension of her own before finally drifting off to sleep.
It was the best she slept in a long time, though.