Cora
The living room was a mess, and so was Cora. It wasn’t the first time, just the most recent. She felt like she had stuck her foot in her mouth somehow, but she also felt like she had been right. It was a strange mix of emotions she couldn’t quite work out. Instead of working on that, she had put on her less attractive pajamas and started to clean. It began in her bedroom, fixing the mattress, the bed sheets. She’d tucked the money he’d been too damn proud to take back into her emergency stores and came out into the living room.
Maybe she should have gone to sleep. There was every chance that she would have woken up with the ability to really formulate a plan for handling the social fallout of sleeping with the wrong someone, but it seemed pointless. Oliver would be up in a little while, and she didn’t want him to see any remnants of her night of bad decisions.
Yes, she thought to herself, that’s exactly what it had been. A bad decision driven by stress and a mild interest in a physically attractive, but ultimately inappropriate, man. Nothing more. He wanted to call it more than sex. He was just being foolish. It hadn’t been anything special. Good sex didn’t need to have emotions attached to it. If he was so used to drunk college girls and uptight housewives that he couldn’t handle a woman who knew how to govern herself…well, that was all his fault. There was absolutely nothing she could do with any of that.
Cora was just beginning to calm down when she spotted a tank top against the wall. The image of his body being revealed as that scrap of fabric swept up the line of gloriously tanned abs was vivid enough to bring a flush to her cheeks. What had she been thinking? She hadn’t, that was the problem. Her own clothes were a pile of useless fabric puddled on the floor. It was embarrassing to know she had let him do that when Oliver had been just down the hall.
“Stupid Cora,” she said to herself, picking everything up with more ferocity than was necessary.
The shirt smelled of him, that particular mix of Finn and the work he did. An enforcer, he had called himself. She knew what that was. They could fight. It was strange, he didn’t seem like that kind of man. Then again, she had never been a great judge when it came to bad boys.
She paused in the middle of the living room with the tattered remnants of her clothes in her hand. For the first time in a very long time, she let her memories take her back to those months, so many years ago, when she had hit the very lowest point in her life.
The guy had been cute, but they usually were at that age, a little older than she was and a lot dangerous. The patch on his leather vest had been “Prospect” and the rocker on the back had read “Violent Spawn.” It wasn’t like Finn’s kutte. There was no Carson, Nevada, or the big white-and-black tiger ripping its way through flames. He hadn’t been nearly high enough in the ranks to be anything like that. He’d been low rung…but it had been enough for Cora and her teenage lust.
“Stupid Cora,” she repeated.
With a growl of frustration and the inability to fix her own past, Cora threw the clothes into her bedroom and slammed the door, as if by putting that piece of plywood in place it would keep all her past, and everything that came with it, at bay.
Oliver opened his door and she whirled, her heart surging into her ears. He was standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of loose black jeans and the same oversized hoodie that she was pretty sure had grafted itself to him. His book bag was already slung over one shoulder as if he were ready to walk out the door.
“Oliver?” She snapped the question with enough force to make him frown at her. She wondered if he could actually hear her heart hammering inside of her chest or if that was fallout from her cleaning fit. She took a slow breath and tried again. “Sorry, you startled me. Let’s try that again. Good morning, Oliver. Did you sleep all right?”
He looked blank-faced and weary. His eyes had a brightness to them that she didn’t particularly like. She wondered if he had even slept at all.
“Hey,” he answered.
“Everything okay?”
He glanced at her bedroom door. “I was just about to ask you that. You were stomping around and slamming things.”
She felt her cheeks go warm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…I just…bad dreams.”
It was a bold lie, and she hated herself for saying it. She hated Finn for being the reason she had to lie to her little brother. Cora didn’t like being dishonest. It never helped anyone in the long run.
“Hungry?” she asked. “If you hurry I can take you to the diner by the school. We can grab some breakfast.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Sure. Is Finn still here?”
She felt her heart hammer inside of her chest. “What? No. Why?”
His gaze darted from one spot behind her to another, but he didn’t directly at her. He shifted back and forth on his feet. “No reason. Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
He cleared his throat and readjusted his backpack on his shoulder. His eyes danced around her again. “There’s this concert I want to go to. Britt got tickets.”
Britt. Britt the blonde. Britt the girl her brother didn’t want to talk about. Cora wasn’t sure what she ought to feel about any of that. Did she have any right? Probably not. “When is it?”
He hesitated before saying, “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow meant it was a Thursday. A concert on a school night?
“Where is it?”
“Henderson.”
She blinked at him, almost sure he had gotten it wrong. Henderson was across the state, on the other end of route 50, otherwise known as the loneliest road. Just over three hours away. It did not sound like a great combination to her.
“I don’t know, Oliver.”
“Come on. You low-jacked my phone. You’ll be able to know where I’m going and when I’ll be back. Please? I really want to do this.”
“Do you want to do this?” she asked. “Or does Britt want you to do this?”
“What, it can’t be both?”
It could, but she didn’t think so. Oliver hadn’t told her about the band. Or tried to tell her how awesome they were. All he’d said was Britt was involved and Cora gathered that meant the pretty blonde was the real reason he wanted to go. That was what mattered. “It can be,” she admitted, “but I don’t think it is.”
“Really?” He tugged his backpack closer. His eyes, so very much like her own, were bright and angry. “Well, I don’t really care what you think. I’m going. Track me all you want.”
He tried to move past her, but she stepped in his way. “Oliver, don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” he demanded. “It’s just a stupid concert. Why are you trying to make this into a big deal?”
“Oliver, it is a big deal. You are supposed to be showing me you are ready and willing to make your life into something else. That you aren’t wandering around at night joyriding and tagging overpasses.”
His mouth twisted into an angry snarl. “I’m going and you can’t stop me.”
“I can, actually,” she said as flatly as she could manage. “You aren’t allowed to travel without me until the court date. It’s part of this whole setup. If you aren’t there when I am at the school to pick you up tomorrow, guess what? I will bring in the police.”
“That’s a bitch move.”
“Well,” she said, crossing her arms. “I am a bitch.”
“I know Finn was here all night. I know what you two were doing.”
She felt an angry flush rise to her cheeks. “That’s very rude, Oliver.”
“I even have pictures.”
Her anger took a sharp turn toward embarrassment with a brief stop in disgust. “You…what?”
“I came out to get some water, and there you two were, on the couch fawning all over one another.”
He jerked his phone out of his pocket and opened up the photos. He tilted the screen in her direction, and there she was, straddling Finn with her mouth plastered against his. She reached for the phone, but Oliver jerked it away from her.
“Oliver, this is absolutely not okay.”
“You trying to walk in and rule my life isn’t okay either. It’s just a concert. Don’t make a big deal out of this. Otherwise I’ll e-mail the pictures to everyone.”
“Oliver!” she snapped. “That’s illegal.”
He shrugged and gave her a cool look. “As you pointed out, I am a criminal. I break the law all the time.”
“I didn’t call you that.”
He shrugged again. “You say it every day by bringing up all the crap that I’ve done. You say it by not letting me have a little freedom.”
“This isn’t you going out for a couple of hours. This is you driving across the state with kids I don’t know and you won’t tell me about, and trying to use blackmail to make it happen.”
“I’ve got school,” he said, pushing past her. “I’ll be back sometime tonight.”
“What do you mean sometime?”
He jerked one shoulder into the air. “Whenever I feel like being back.”