There'd been other girls over the years, plenty of them, but they were hookups, not people with whom I shared my living space.
I didn't seriously believe that Rory could uncover anything new about Hadley's disappearance. I didn't like cops, but I gave them their due—they'd done a decent investigation. Gathered all the threads and followed all the angles. The case was ice cold now that almost a year had passed. Rory could poke through it all again, but what was she going to learn? Nothing, nada, zip.
I knew the only reason I hadn't taken Rory by the scruff of her neck and forced her out my front door was that my dick was starting to do my thinking for me. Ever since I'd come home from work and found her back, I'd been extra-aware of her movements, her voice, her faintly feminine smell.
I liked the way her thick brown hair bounced on her shoulders when she shifted her weight or turned her head. I liked her legs, which were long in proportion to the rest of her body, and her feet, which were dainty and small and always visible because she padded around barefoot. She was wearing chipped black polish on her fingers, but her toenails were unpainted. I wondered how she'd look in a pair of crazy-high heels.
The game was a blowout. During a commercial break, I muted the sound. Rory took this as a signal to restart the interrogation. She pushed the desk chair back from the computer table and whirled it around so she could look at me. She had pulled one leg up with her heel resting on the front of the seat and her chin leaning on her bent knee.
She gave me her big irresistible smile again, and this time it had a deja vu quality about it. For a moment she reminded me of someone else with a smile like that, although I couldn't fathom who.
“So what's this job you have to go to, Griff? What kind of work do you do?”
“Construction.”
I could feel her checking me out again. “Guys who work construction usually have good bods.” I couldn't tell from her tone whether she thought I fell into this group or not. Probably not. I used to work out regularly with weights and run cross-country, but it had been a while since I'd done either. Work kept me in shape, but I was no longer in tiptop condition.
“At least I don't sit in front of a computer screen all day.”
“True,” she said cheerfully. “I'll probably be toting lard by the time I'm your age.”
“I'm not that much older than you.”
She laughed. “I know exactly how old you are.”
Yeah, and how much I had in my bank account, too. Not to mention what kind of porn I liked.
“What I don't get is, how come you have so many textbooks?” She nodded to a couple of bookcases up against the far wall. “You've even got some literary classics along with all the science fiction and fantasy stuff.”
“I can fucking read,” I snarled. I loved to read, in fact.
“If I didn't know better, I'd figure you were in college yourself. You're obviously not stupid.”
“Gee, thanks. We can't all have an IQ of 204.”
She waved a hand as if that were insignificant. “Those tests aren't that accurate, anyway.”
“Don't worry. I'm not threatened by intelligent women.” This was actually true. I had a lot of hang-ups about women, but brains wasn't one of them. I'd gone to a good high school and I'd known plenty of smart girls. Hadley had been an honors student.
Rory glowed when she heard this. When she lit up like that, it was as if she were channeling sunshine. She seemed to be remarkably cheerful considering her friends were prostitutes and their boyfriends were gun-toting wackos.
“Are you working construction because of some fallout from your girlfriend's disappearance? Is that why you dropped out of college?”
Yeah, and she knew that, no doubt, because she had access to my whole fucking life. Sunshine or no sunshine, I was starting to get irritated.
“Maybe you could think about finishing school? So you're not stuck in a dead-end job for the next forty years?”
“You know what? Fuck you. I've been grilled by professionals, baby, and I'm not gonna sit here and listen to you try to dissect my life.”
I needed some exercise, so I slammed out the door and set out to run. Running made me feel better when I was stressed. My calves were tight, though, and the first mile was painful. Shit, I needed to work out more. I wasn't getting winded, but my muscles complained for a while before they calmed down. The run became easy after that, and I settled into a comfortable pace and took one of my longer routes.
Rory wasn't the first person who'd given me shit about not finishing college. My mom went on about it so often that I'd been avoiding her. “Your brother was so proud of your good grades,” she would say, working the guilt angle. “Sean was determined that you would get your degree. Have you forgotten the money he used to send for your college fund? He said you were smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer someday, and that if anything ever happened to him, I should make sure you finished your education.”
Yeah yeah. Sean had been a pain in the butt when he'd been my perfect big brother, but he was even more of a pain now that he was dead.
I told myself that a lot. What a shit Sean had been to me at times. Bigger, stronger, more athletic, more handsome. Kind to puppies and prone to helping old ladies cross the street. Volunteering to go fight terrorists and protect the homeland. Getting himself killed, and all for what?
Shit. I couldn't let myself think about Sean. The hole in my heart deepened into a black, bottomless well when I thought about Sean. Fuck. Sometimes I missed him so damn much.
Rory
Maybe I just should've left on the train.
This was messed up no matter how I looked at it. I didn't have anything in common with this guy who’d picked me up in the rain, and I wasn't sure why he intrigued me. All we seemed to do is squabble.
It wasn’t up to me to ride his ass about why he hadn’t finished college. Anyway, why was I being snobby about it? There was nothing wrong with working construction.
I pictured him, shirt off, muscles sliding under his skin as he lifted a wooden beam and hefted it up over his head. Working outside, in the fresh air, the sun beating down on his perfect body. Oh yeah. I could lie back and watch that all day.
Damn. Was that why I’d stayed?
I’d been telling myself that since Griff had helped me out of a tricky situation, I oughta do something to return the favor. I owed him. If the townsfolk who’d turn their backs on him had all been wrong, he deserved the chance to hold his head up high again. Maybe I could help with that? At least maybe I could make him understand that someone cared enough to try to clear his name?
I guess that makes me sound more altruistic than I actually am.
Truth was, I wanted him. Yeah, I was attracted to this beautiful man who’d given me a ride in the pouring rain.
He was the kind of rough, tough, smoking hot bad boy who probably got girls with a crook of his finger. If I've been a little less sleepy last night, that finger crook thing would have probably gotten him me.
I hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.
Even though I wasn't inclined to think of him as a killer, I’d found a few worrisome things on his computer. I knew from all the hacking I’d done that people looked at all kinds of weird shit on the Internet.
Examining somebody’s files was a little like looking inside their minds—there are good reasons why people didn't just spew out every random thought that flashed across their neurons. Everybody thought things they didn’t say and fantasized about stuff they would never do.
Besides, Griff knew I was invading his privacy. If he'd had anything to hide, wouldn’t he have stopped me?
I wandered into the kitchen and started cleaning up the dishes from dinner. Maybe I was weird but I actually like cleaning. Putting things in order. Making everything neat and tidy around me. You couldn’t create order out of the confusion of people’s inner lives, but you could brighten up the outward appearance.
When his game ended, I randomly started flipping the channels. As usual, there wasn’t much on. I was about to switch it off when I came upon a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies. I curled up on his comfy sofa and started to watch.
Griff
Rory was in front of the TV when I finally returned to the house. She had cleaned up. The dishes we'd used must be in the dishwasher, since I could hear it running. The kitchen table and counters were spotless.
The exercise had boiled off my head of steam. As I considered how neat the place was, I started thinking again that maybe it wasn't so bad to have a woman around. If I could only get her interested in something other than solving the mystery of Hadley's disappearance. Like how it would be to go down on her knees on my spotless kitchen floor and slide her wet tongue all over my cock.
“Hey,” I said, walking into the living room and throwing myself down beside her on the sofa. I glared at the screen. “Where’s my game?”
“It’s over.”
She barely looked at me. She was deep into some old black and white movie. It didn’t take long for me to recognize which one. Humphrey Bogart was standing on the tarmac telling Ingrid Bergman to get her ass on that plane because their silly romantic problems didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this fucked up world.
Or words to that effect.
Rory, amazingly, was sniffling. Just a little bit. I was sure I’d heard a sniffle.
“I wanna see the game wrap-up,” I said, still feeling dickish. I reached for the remote to change back to the sports channel. She was clutching it, holding it away from me.
“Just a couple more minutes. It’s
Casablanca
.”
“I know what it is,” I growled. “Damn chick flick.”
She ignored me while the big goodbye scene ran its course. I rolled my eyes. I sure as hell wasn’t gonna admit that I thought it was a pretty good movie or that I’d seen it more than once and knew the plot cold. I could even recite some of the dialogue.
Ilsa had boarded the plane with her husband. Bogart and the French police dude strolled off together, talking about their beautiful friendship as the film faded out. Rory turned to face me.
“It’s not a chick flick. It’s got all this male honor crap and stuff. No happy ending because the usually-cynical Rick has to do the right thing. The
noble
thing.” She put a disdainful emphasis on the word “noble.” She seemed to be getting steamed for some reason. “If it were a chick flick, it’d have a happy ending. She doesn’t love her husband. They were hardly ever together. She loves Rick and he loves her. But he lets her leave. It can’t have a romantic ending because the script was probably written by a man!”
“Whoa, I’m amazed you care about shit like that.” Seriously, I was learning new stuff about Ms. Hotshit Hacker all the time. I removed the remote from her tight-clenched fist and clicked back to the sports channel, but both my game and the wrap-up segment had ended.
I shut the TV down.
“Are you crying?” I taunted her.
“Shut up. I’m not crying.”
“These wet patches,” I poked the traces her cheek, “are known as tears, Smarty-Pants.”
She twisted away from me. “I have a cold. Allergies. Haven’t you ever seen allergic tears before?”
I laughed at her. “Not as big of a hard-ass as you pretend to be, are you?”
“You’re such a jerk.” She got up and marched off to the bathroom. But just before shutting the door, she looked back at me over her shoulder. Her tears had stopped and she was kinda smiling now. Then she winked at me before shutting the bathroom door.
She winked? What the fuck was that? Maybe she hadn’t winked…maybe one of her eyes was just messed up from crying over a sappy movie.
But what if she had?
I wondered if she was gonna sulk in there for hours just to irritate me, but she was out again in a couple minutes, her face all shining and clean. She came back into the living room and sat down at the far end of the sofa. Not winking or smiling at me now. Just looking at me with an indecipherable expression on her face.
Her hair was in her eyes, as usual, but it looked silky. I wanted to stroke it. Fist a handful of it and drag her face close to mine. I noticed her lips for maybe the first time. Before I'd been struck by the whole effect of her smile, but now I saw her lips as an individual feature. They were wide and plump, the bottom one especially. Soft. Kissable.
I didn’t know how to tell her I thought so, though. Or how such a statement would be received. Instead, I said, “Are you a germaphobe or something? This place hasn't been so clean in months.”
“You're welcome.” She hesitated, and then said, “Why are you so damn touchy?”
“Why are you so damn inquisitive?”
“I'm just trying to help.”
“I still can't figure out why.”
She shrugged. “It must suck to have people think you’re a killer.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not your business.”
“I like puzzles.”
“It could be less of a puzzle than you think.”
She cocked her head, looking intrigued. “How so?”
“Maybe I'm guilty. Have you considered that?”
She made a gesture as if to flick the idea away. “Would I have come back if I thought you were guilty?”
“Maybe you're not as smart as you think you are.”
To my surprise, she nodded and said, “I'm not that smart about people. I mean, I don't have great people skills, as I'm sure you've noticed. I'm better with computers.”
I snorted a laugh.
“Computers are logical. People aren't.”
“How logical is it to crash in the same house with a guy who maybe murdered his last girlfriend?”
She was looking uncomfortable now. Even a little nervous. God, I'm such a dick. I was enjoying tormenting this cocky little stray who had flung herself, unwanted, into my life.
“Well, I'm not your girlfriend.”
“There is that. If I only murder my girlfriends, I guess you've got nothing to worry about.”
Her looking so uncomfortable was getting me hard. Or maybe it was just her being here, all soft and vulnerable. I loved the thought of kick-ass hacker Rory being submissive to me. Was there any chance she could get into that? Should I make a move and find out?