Scarlet
“So we’re just going to drive,” Cormac says on the first day. “And then what?”
“You’re thinking of it all wrong. You’re thinking of it like a criminal. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Think about what Mickey is doing, and the FBI, if your theory is right. They’re scouring the city for us, right? Which means that, when they don’t find us, they’ll assume we’ve run away.”
“Which we are doing.”
He grins at me when I roll my eyes. We’re cruising down the highway, past New Jersey, toward Maryland. It’s the summer holidays and the highway is choked with families driving out of the city, some of them with bicycles fastened to the roofs of their cars.
“Yes, but then, when we come back, as long as we’re careful, they don’t need to know we’re in the city, which means—”
“We can do some ol’ fashion FBI investigating without getting on anybody’s radar. I got it, boss.”
“You’re such a jerk,” I tell him on the third day. We’re cruising around the Virginia-Maryland border. Since we haven’t got a specific destination, we’re not rushing. Cormac has some cash so we don’t have to use our credit cards. Our days are mostly spent driving between payphones so I can call my contacts back in New York and see what’s going on. Mostly, they just sound confused, but I do have one or two I can meet once I return, and they even agree to meet me in secret. So our plan seems to be working, at least.
“A jerk?” Cormac pulls the car to a stop outside a diner. Three trucks are parked outside, and a woman in red heels like the sort I wore at The Leprechaun clops past us. I’ve long since changed out of my heels. I’m wearing a shirt, jeans, and black boots now. “How’d you work that one out, Scar?”
“You’re stopping for lunch and it’s only eleven AM, for one thing.”
Cormac laughs. I love his laugh, though I’ve promised myself I won’t tell him things like that. It’s deep and carefree. Even if there’s sadness and anger in him, he’s still able to laugh. Perhaps it’s all a front, but I don’t think people are as simple as that. I think people can be more than one thing at one time. Cormac might be putting up a front, but he might also still enjoy laughing even though his father is dead. This confused me for the first day—how he was still able to crack jokes and banter—before I thought back to when Tess died. My first response wasn’t tears. They came later. My first response was to run into the garden, to her swing set, and rock back and forth whilst giggling, just like we’d done together countless times.
“Scar?” Cormac is standing on the tarmac, the sun shining directly onto his face. His beard has grown out, bushy and wild. Three day’s growth and he looks like a caveman. I feel a stirring within myself at that thought and swiftly kill it. “Are you coming, or would you prefer to wait in the car?”
“I’d wait in the car if you didn’t stink it out so much.”
I pace toward the diner.
“Stink it out?” Cormac’s at my shoulder. “How’d you work that one out?”
“You just smell like such a—such a—such a man. Deodorant and sweat and—it’s disgusting.”
I’m lying through my teeth. The truth is I love the way Cormac smells. It’s manly—what people call musky—the sort of smell I can imagine being wrapped around my body. The sort of smell I could dive into and disappear. We sit in a booth in the diner. The place is almost empty, apart from a few truckers at the bar and four teenagers in the corner booth, laughing loudly. I get coffee and some toast. Cormac just gets coffee.
“Why bother stopping if all you want is coffee?” I ask.
“You niggle a lot, don’t you, Scar? I never knew that about you before.”
“Niggle. Niggle how? Since when do hardened criminals use words like niggle, anyway?”
“See!” He grins at me. “Niggling me about using the word niggle, goddamn.”
A smiling waitress brings our order, interrupting our conversation, and then I blurt out: “How do I niggle?”
“You know full well that we haven’t got shit to do, that we’re both running out of people to call, and that we’re just killing time. But you still want to get on my case about stopping for coffee at eleven AM. Come on, Scar. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”
“I do enjoy myself. When we stop at a motel, and I’m in my own room, and there’s TV and a shower and alone time. I enjoy myself then.”
Cormac takes a slow sip of his coffee, then places his hands on his lap and stares at me frankly. It’s like he’s staring into me. I’m reminded of Max Smithson and the way he’ll sometimes stare at me. But with Cormac, I don’t feel uncomfortable. I feel excited. I feel expectant. I feel like it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he stared at me like that a whole lot longer. “You keep trying to pretend like you hate me,” Cormac says. “Every chance you get, you go in on me. But I see you sometimes, Scar. And I hear you. Most of all I hear you. Like yesterday, when I leaned over and put your seatbelt on for you. You told me to get away, but I heard your breathing. Panting, I’d call it. Panting like crazy.”
My throat seizes when he reaches under the table and places his hand on my knee. His touch is firm and unyielding. I imagine his hand sliding up, up, all the way to my pussy. His finger on my clit ... and then I hear it—the sound of my own panting. I slide off the chair and stand up. He’s right, the perceptive prick.
“I’m going to wait in the car. Maybe I’ll do some panting in there.”
We don’t talk much for the rest of the day as we make our rounds to the payphones, but Cormac keeps watching me. I see him out of the corner of my eye, his gaze roaming over my body. I want to slap him across the face. No, that’s not right. I want to want to slap him across the face, but the fact is that I like when he looks at me like that. The fact is it makes me warm deep inside, warm and tingly.
Later that day, I’m sitting in the car waiting for him outside a motel. It’s one of those cheap, one-night places, with a broken sign and a swimming pool with a condom floating across its surface. But in my experience these kinds of places have decent cleaning staff for inside the rooms, and they rarely ask unnecessary questions. I’m tapping my fingers against the dashboard, wondering how a routine meeting with Cormac got me here. I wonder, for the thousandth time, if I’m crazy and paranoid or if my instincts are wrong. But then I just remind myself of all the times my instincts have been right.
“Self-doubt kills agents,” I whisper, something a teacher told me in the academy. “Once your instincts are honed, trust them.”
Mine are honed. Mine are knife-sharp. At least where work is concerned ...
Cormac comes swaggering across the parking lot with a wry grin on his face.
“What is it?” I ask.
“They only have one room left,” he tells me. “It’s got two single beds, but only one room.”
“You really expect me to believe that?” I lick my lips. And then I feel guilty for licking my lips. What am I, a teenager? How can Cormac make me question everything?
He shrugs. “Go and check if you like.”
We hold gazes for a long moment. If I go and check and find out he’s lying, I’ll have to get a room of my own. I don’t want a room of my own.
“Let’s just go. I can’t be bothered to check.”
A few hours later, after watching TV from our separate beds, when the sun is setting and both of us are tired, with takeout containers resting on the bedside table, I stand up and slowly take my clothes off, unbuttoning my shirt and sliding down my jeans. Goose pimples prick my skin as I feel Cormac’s eyes move from the TV to my flesh—my bared flesh, flesh I have bared for him. I let my jeans slide to the floor, then climb onto bed, but not into bed. I lie there, in my underwear, horny but not sure what I’m doing.
“Scar.”
I turn over and see him standing over me, his eyes locked to my breasts and legs, moving from one piece of sex to another. Now he’s the one panting, his chest rising and falling in huge movements.
“Cormac.”
He falls to his knees beside the bed, breathing so loudly now the commercials on the TV seem a million miles away. When he kisses me, I lose myself for a long time. I can’t think. I can only feel. I feel his beard tickling my face, his lips buried within it, surprisingly soft. I feel our tongues brush together and my teeth biting his lips. Then I feel his hand sliding up my bare leg. Fear grips me, as well as desire—fear that if I let this continue, I won’t be Agent O’Bannon anymore, fear that if I go through with this, I’ll have let some vital part of myself slip away. But the desire is strong, the strongest desire I have ever felt in my life. The men I’ve been with before now seem like cruel jokes. The desire I once thought the peak of my sexual life now seems like the desire of a jaded old spinster. I open my legs for him, welcoming his hand into my pussy, hungry for it.
When he presses his palm against my panties, I gasp, breathing in our kiss. His hand is so firm he crushes my clit against my pussy, achingly, painfully pleasurable, the sort of pleasure I’ve only ever read about. It’s real, I tell myself. It’s real. It’s happening now. My pussy is on fire as he brushes my panties aside and slides in two fingers, two hard, criminal fingers sliding deep inside of me. He strokes my sensitive spot as we kiss, his fingers working in circles, the heat spreading outward from his fingertips. I turn my hips, left and right, searching for the one perfect angle. After around half a minute, I find it. If I come, I reflect, I have let a criminal make me come. If I come, I reflect, I have crossed a line.
Even if it is wrong, the orgasm is building, the heat is getting more intense, and my knees are starting to tremble. I can’t kiss him anymore because I’m panting, panting just like he said I was back in the diner. I’m panting with my lips pressed into his beard, breathing in the musky scent of him, the scent that has been driving me mad for three days. I claw my hands down his back, feeling his bulging muscles through the fabric of his shirt. He’s so big, so dangerous, and this is so, so wrong. This is not me; I never knew being somebody else, something else, could be so fun. I never knew.
He keeps rubbing. He’s moaning now, too, both of our voices combining to make a song of pleasure: one singer giving, the other taking. But then thoughts start to creep into my head, thoughts not about Scar, Cormac’s Scar, the woman on the bed. Thoughts about Agent O’Bannon. I see myself on the first day of academy, my hair scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail and my eyes narrowed as I’m making conscientious notes. I see myself at target practice and roaming the streets, tailing a lead. And I see myself making arrests and getting accolades. All through my career, I have kept a veil of professionalism around me. It’s how I survive. It’s how I separate the Scarlet who sits at a table during Christmas with mom and dad, all of us struggling to find something to say, and the Scarlet who points her gun at a murderer’s head. The mood declines; the heat evaporates.
But I want it back. I desperately want it back. I push his hand away and wriggle out of my panties, hungry to be hungry again. How can horniness be so elusive? How can you want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything one minute and not want it at all the next? I kick my panties off and lay my head back, eyes closed, afraid that if I open my eyes Agent O’Bannon will be standing over the bed. “Is this how you stay professional?” she’d ask, shaking her head sadly. “If I knew I was going to become you, I never would’ve bothered. What a joke.”
Cormac is on top of me now, kissing my neck, and I’m moaning. Part of me must like it, otherwise I wouldn’t be moaning, and his lips wouldn’t send tingles down my chest, curling around my nipples. But if my body is enjoying it, my mind is stunted.
Something snaps in me when I hear him take his jeans off and feel him leaning over me. He’s going to be inside of me, and I want him to be inside of me. God help me, I want it. But I can’t let that happen. I can’t let either of us cross that line. He’s a criminal, and I’m FBI, goddamn it. Opening my eyes, I lurch sideways, half hanging down the bed, and pick up my gun from my handbag.
“Cormac,” I say, making sure the safety’s on when I point it in his general direction. “Just—just get off of me, Cormac.”
He pauses for a moment, looking like a man who’s just been slapped in the face. Then he says, “Scar, what the fuck? I’m not trying to rape you.”
“Then stop that ...”
He has his hand on my clit, massaging softly. I try and make my face calm and steady, but the pleasure—the physical pleasure, at least—is too strong. But behind him, something terrible happens. It’s not Agent O’Bannon who appears. It’s Tess. She has her arms folded and her stumpy legs are covered in mud. “You didn’t save me and now you’re having sex with a bad man. That’s not very good, is it?”
“Just get the fuck off me!” I roar, pointing the gun at Cormac’s face now.
He backs away, chuckling. “Jesus Christ, Scar. Jesus fucking Christ. Are you crazy or what?”
“I—” They weren’t really there. Of course I know that. But I felt like they were. If they weren’t real, their judgment was. “I just don’t want to go any further with this.”
I put my gun in the bag and quickly get dressed, pulling up my pants the same way I pull on a Kevlar vest. Cormac watches me from his bed, lips curled wryly.
“Is this funny?” I ask, lying on bed and turning away from him.
“I always knew you were on the wild side, Scar. Our meetings were enough to tell me that. But these few days travelling together ... I feel like I’m getting to know the real you.”
“This isn’t the real me,” I mutter. “The real me wears a suit and a holster and chases bad guys. This isn’t the real me at all.”
“Sure, Scar. Sure.”
Neither of us feels like talking after that, so there’s nothing for it but to lie there and listen to the commercials and then the game show. As the night darkens and the silence between us continues, as Cormac begins to snore, I reflect on what I just did: pulling my gun on him—pulling my sidearm without reasonable cause. I think of the other men I’ve been with over the years. I never had to pull my gun on any of them.
Maybe it has something to do with how those men were just men, just flesh and blood and nothing much else, and how Cormac has this disconcerting way of seeing past my veil into the real me. Where other men clumsily paw, Cormac skillfully caresses. Where other men freeze in fear, Cormac laughs.
Closing my eyes tightly, I imagine a world in which Cormac was an FBI agent, just like me, and the two of us were out here on a case, not running from one. I imagine we are sharing a motel room just like we are now, except he is wearing a suit and his badge is on the nightstand. I wonder if I would pulled the gun on him then. The answer is no, I’m sure, but another revelation follows this one. I wouldn’t pulled my gun on him, but I wouldn’t be half as attracted to him, either.