CHAPTER TWLEVE - FINN
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying myself. Issy is pounding on the door screaming every obscenity she can think of. Every threat too. But I just lean back on the hood of the car and smile.
Teach her to zip-tie me. Teach her to kick my ass.
Not that she kicked my ass. She didn’t. She just caught me off guard, that’s all. I look at my watch and start timing her. “Stop screaming and calm down,” I yell.
“The hell I will!”
“Stop screaming for five minutes and I’ll let you out. But I’m not letting you out until you calm down. And it’s a scientific fact that it takes five minutes to calm down.”
She says something back to that, but I don’t catch it. And then she stops.
I wait, clocking her.
We’re at a little over four minutes and I’m feeling pretty proud of myself when the fire alarm goes off inside.
“I bet that’s coded to the fire department, isn’t it?” she yells on the other side of the door.
I close my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose, then walk over to the door, punch in the code and cancel the alarm. But that unlocks the door, and she’s got it open before I realize what just happened.
We stand there, not eye to eye because she’s tiny and I’m tall, but close enough. Glaring at each other. Daring each other. Planning seven different ways to kill each other.
After almost a minute of silent, mutual hate, she sucks air in through her teeth and says, “Now you may take me home.”
“I should leave your ass here on principle.”
“I should zip-tie you back up.” She waves a fistful of zip ties at me.
“Go ahead and try. You only get the element of surprise once.”
“I love to be underestimated.”
More mutual hatred.
And then I say, “Fuck it. Get in the car.”
I turn my back on her and decide I’m done. If she gets in, I’ll drop her ass off at her house and go find Declan. If she wants to stay out here in the goddamned forest, fine by me.
We get in at the same time. Slam our doors at the same time. I start the car and she pushes herself up against her door, like she doesn’t want to turn her back on me, not even a little bit.
I back up, spinning the tires in the dirt, and head back out the way we came.
“Well, that was fucking stupid.”
“Which part? The part where you turn into a batshit crazy person?”
“No, the part where I waste my night with a stupid FBI agent.”
“Well,” I say, reaching the end of the driveway and turning onto the highway. “I did fuck you pretty good.”
“Shut up.”
“Admit it, it was the best part of your night.”
“Shut. Up.”
“I mean, you came hard, right?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”
I laugh. “Is there a protocol for this I’m missing?”
“Yes, it’s called shut the fuck up.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to pretend it never happened.”
“You don’t need to pretend,” she says. “It was… what do they call it? Oh, I know, entrapment.”
I roll my eyes. “Jesus. For a smart person, you sure don’t know very much about the legalities of things. Like your dumb NDA. If he really did set all this up and used the FBI to play this stupid sex game with you—”
“I’m not playing with him, I told you that.”
“—then you have every right to report him. He can’t touch you. Really. I’m not lying. This is my job.”
She turns her head away and stares out into the passing night.
“And if you weren’t playing with him, then who?”
“I thought it was you, dumbass.”
“How do you not know who is supposed to be fucking you, Issy? How does that even make sense?”
“It just does. You’ll have to trust me.”
“Well, I don’t trust you. Not after you went insane back there.”
She breathes out through her nose.
Silence.
“Just fuckin’ tell me what’s going on. I can help you. Will help you. And he won’t touch you. I promise.”
“It’s not him I’m worried about, OK? He’s a stand-up guy. He’s not gonna—”
But my laugh is so loud, she stops mid sentence. “Stand-up guy? Are you kidding me?”
“He runs… he runs a sex fantasy fulfillment business, OK? It’s all legal.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is.”
“It is. He’s a lawyer, for fuck’s sake. A very fucking successful one. He wouldn’t cross any lines.”
“Nope,” I say. “He didn’t cross any lines at all tonight.”
“You don’t know it’s him, OK?”
“You seem to think it’s him.”
“That’s because none of it made sense.”
“You thought you were gonna be taken to a sex club to be fucked in front of—”
“Just never mind that part, OK? My friend set this up for me as a Valentine’s Day gift. To make me do something outside of work. So I went over to the tea shop to talk about it, Jordan was there, and I told him what I wanted, and then he closed my file and said…” She sighs. Loudly.
“Said what?”
Silence.
“Goddammit, Issy. What did he say?”
“He said… he said no, OK? He said no, I wasn’t right for his game, and he closed my file and walked out. There, are you happy now?”
I want to laugh, but it doesn’t seem appropriate. So I hold it in and try to be professional. “So if he said no, then why did you think you were supposed to let me fuck you tonight?”
“Jesus, could you be any more vulgar?”
“Answer the question. God, I’m gonna get it out of you eventually, why do you insist on making this so difficult?”
“I thought it was part of the game, OK? Like… he’s supposed to be this master sex game planner. So I figured none of this FBI stuff made much sense, so it must be the game. That’s all it was. A stupid misunderstanding. I assumed something, I was wrong, now let’s drop it.”
“Master sex game planner. I really need to meet this guy.”
“Why?” She laughs. “You gonna buy a game from him?”
“Me? No. I don’t need a game to get fucked.”
“I’m sure you don’t, playboy.”
I think through her comments for a while. She stays silent. Just leaning her head up against the window, looking outside like she’s wishing she could be anywhere but here.
I want to tell her things. Things like, Well, I had fun. Hope you did too. Or Maybe we can do it again tomorrow? And this time I can zip-tie you up, wink wink, if you know what I mean.
But I don’t.
Because she said none of the FBI stuff made much sense.
“Not any sense,” I say.
“What?” she says, dragging her gaze from the window.
“You said none of this FBI stuff made much sense. Not any sense. Which means it made a little sense.”
“You’re really reaching now.”
“Am I?”
“You are.”
I’m not, but I drop it. Because I knew she was hiding something back at the office. I knew. Felt it in my bones.
And now I’m gonna make it my mission to figure out what it is.