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"What have you heard?" McCoy asked, voice as tight as his posture.
"Arty says the other Ukrainian families seem to be going on, business as usual. We didn't get eight of the Chechens. But from what we can tell, they are low-level guys. They might try to regroup eventually, but I don't know if we have anything to worry about from them in the near future."
"Well, that's one thing, at least," McCoy said. "Do you think they'd talk to the cops?"
"You never know these days," Huck said. "But what do they have to go on? We have to keep up with the plan. I need you guys at the coffee place for a while. We will keep Arty and Booker on the cops. I think by the end of the month, all this shit will be over. Well," he said, looking over at me. "Some of this shit will be over by then."
A month.
I'd already been in this one spot longer than I was in almost any other place.
Another month would be unheard of.
The idea of staying put was, at once, both anxiety-inducing and exciting.
The former because I had no experience being somewhere so long, especially around other people.
Would I get bored?
Would they get sick of me being around, in their space?
But the latter because, well, there was one person I knew I wasn't going to get bored of.
Would he get tired of me, though?
I couldn't claim to be good at any sort of relationships—casual or otherwise—since any interactions with men over the past decade had been of the one-night or weekender variety. I barely got to see men for a meal, so there was no way they would reach a point where they'd heard all my stories, and didn't want to hear me repeat them.
"We will keep you occupied," Che said, misreading my face. "I'll keep you busy," he clarified, giving me a smoldering look that made most of those concerns—in fact, most rational thoughts in general—disappear. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was get him back into bed.
"Gee, however will you do that?" I asked, making my eyes round, my tone as high and innocent as I could make it.
"In case anyone missed it," Huck said, interrupting, "those two are clearly fucking now," he said, making my eyes go round for real, my face feeling heated.
"Hey, congrats on the sex," Remy said, slapping Che on the back. "Ten years. That's quite the long game," he said, shaking his head.
My gaze shifted to McCoy, finding him looking at me. "You'll get used to us," he told me, tone sounding encouraging. Like he expected me to stick around. Like, maybe, he wanted me to. And not just because Che might want me around.
"I think I would like that," I told him, and I realized I meant it.
Chapter Thirteen
Che
"Now you're getting it," I said, swinging Sass outward as we danced around the kitchen while waiting for the practice cupcakes to bake, since Sass insisted on doing a trial batch before she had to make the ones for the shower.
Dancing her around had become my new favorite pastime. Not only because it was nice to hear music from my homeland, or because it was nice to share the dances that I'd been practicing since I was young, but because it was one of the few times when you could see Saskia with her guards fully down.
Sleep, sex, and dancing.
All the other times, you could almost invariably find her starting to enjoy herself, then get caught up in her own thoughts, killing her own joy.
I didn't understand why that was. And when I tried to ask her about it, she brushed it off, claiming she didn't know what I was talking about.
I kept reminding myself to give her time to adjust. It was clear to just about everyone that she'd been alone a really long time. She'd developed fierce independence because of it, which made her borderline stunned when she found out someone had done something for her.
She'd once looked almost glassy-eyed when Harmon had remembered her Chinese food order, and brought it home for her on one of her trips out to get used to being in the car. True, she'd done it for the rest of us as well, but we were used to small gestures of kindness. Saskia wasn't.
My heart hurt for her a bit every time I remembered that, realizing just how alone she'd been for most of her life. I'd been luckier than I realized that I'd found my crew, that we all clicked, that we took care of one another in small—and big—ways.
She was still adjusting to that.
And all that newness had put her on edge, made her second-guess herself a lot more than she needed to.
But when I turned on the music, grabbed her hand, and started moving her around the kitchen? All that other shit fell away, leaving just the happiness underneath.
