Page 54

I don’t fucking like it. I keep looking over at her. She keeps looking at the dark.

She doesn’t say a thing when we pull through my gate. Or when the house comes up out of the fog, all stone and glass on the edge of the cliff, every light on. Or when I walk her up the stairs and into my bedroom, where no woman’s ever slept. Not one. Not ever.

She just stands at the window looking at the fog.

“This is where you live,” she says finally.

“Yes.”

“For real live. Not the hotel. Not the Bel Air house you bought in a day.”

“Yes.”

She turns around and looks at the room. My bed. My books. My gun on the nightstand. The hole in the wall by the door I never fixed.

“You punch that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Somebody pissed me off.”

She looks at the hole. Then at me. Then she climbs into my bed in her hoodie and her dirty-ass Vans and falls asleep in thirty seconds flat.

In my bed. With her shoes on.

I stand at the window and watch her do it, hard as a fucking rock, and I let her sleep.

I’ve got plans for five a.m.

* * *

I put the ring on her at five in the morning.

I haven’t slept. Forty-two years old, and I’ve been lying here since midnight with my eyes wide open like a fucking kid on Christmas Eve.

She’s asleep on her stomach in the middle of my bed. My real bed. I took her shoes off at one. Her braids are all over my pillow. Her ass is under my sheet. Her left hand’s curled up next to her face on the mattress.

The ring’s been in my pocket for five weeks. Six carats. Oval. I had it made. I looked at a thousand diamonds, and every one of them was too small. This one’s almost too big for her hand. That’s what I wanted. I want men to see it from across the street. I want them to look at her hand before they look at her face and understand they’re already dead.

I pick up her hand. She doesn’t wake up. Her fingers are warm and soft and limp in mine. I can feel her pulse in her wrist, slow and steady against my thumb.

I slide it on.

It catches on her knuckle. I push. It goes over tight. Real tight. Her finger’s soft and warm, and the platinum’s cold, and I feel the ring bite down into her skin as it settles.

I had it made a half-size small.

It’s not coming off.

My chest’s pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears. My hands are hot. My cock’s so hard it’s pressing into the mattress. I lie there and look at that diamond on her hand in the dark for an hour, flashing at me like it’s showing off, and I can’t stop.

Mine. Mine. Fucking mine.

* * *

At six, I go down to the harbor.