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“I didn’t think she was the gardening type,” she said.
“Niamh is full of surprises,” I said. The city was buzzing beneath us. A thousand lives going on as they should. The mundane and the ordinary.
“So are you,” she said quietly, coming to stand next to me. I shifted away. Childish but I was clinging to control. I’d been missing her and here she was, darling and fucking stubborn.
“Caroline told me you killed the senator.”
Fuck. This reckoning. I knew what she would do, how she’d turn me killing a man who hurt her into a love song.
“So?”
“It wasn’t her order. You did it on your own.”
I’d known this was coming, from the second I’d told the lie, I’d known she’d find out somehow. And I’d written a script in my head.
“Why did you do it?”
A dog barked. A car door slammed. I thought of the first man I’d killed, the taste of good whiskey over bad vomit. All the ugly shit I’d done.
“Ronan?”
The script was simple. Deny it. If she pressed, lie and tell her I didn’t give a shit about what the senator did to her. Hurt her until she backed away. It wasn’t a sophisticated script but it was all I fucking had.
Her hand touched mine, small and cold and I couldn’t hold on to the ugly shit or the script I’d written. She brushed it all aside with those chilly fingers. And I’d be damned for this in ways I couldn’t even see yet, but I couldn’t lie to her. Not to brave Poppy.
“Because he hurt you. Because he would keep hurting you. Because you deserved better.”
If she would have smiled, I could have walked away. If she’d looked at me like a girl with foolish love in her eyes, I could have found it in me to snarl and destroy her.
But she looked at me with calm and steady eyes. Eyes that had seen some ugly shit. And wasn’t scared of it. Didn’t judge it.
“She also said she didn’t order you to seduce me. You did that on your own, too.”
“Aye.” I didn’t know where all this truth was coming from. It would only cause problems.
“Why?”
“Because you so clearly needed to be seduced.”
“Why did you lie about it?”
“So you wouldn’t go reading into it, lass. Like you’re doing. I’m a killer and the senator was a man who needed killing. That’s all.”
Now, she smiled at me. “And you touched me, because I needed it. You broke all your rules just because I needed to learn how to be fucked. How to come. How to suck cock and—”
I grabbed her by the shoulders because it wasn’t like that. “I touched you because I couldn’t help myself.”
She nodded, the smile gone. “I feel the same way, Ronan.”
“It doesn’t change anything. I can’t be what you want.”
“I don’t know, you did all right a little bit ago.”
Now it was me smiling, like some lovesick fool. She sighed, like she was just so happy to see me smiling and I wiped the expression from my face. I stepped back. And then again.
“Come on, lass,” I said, walking for the door. “We have some work to do.”
* * *
Poppy
The boy from the college library, the one I’d fooled around with but never went all the way with, knew all these German words. His grandfather had been German or something. Anyway, the Germans have the perfect word for so many complicated, mixed emotions. Like weltschmerz—which means the pain we feel when the world doesn’t live up to our expectations.
I understood that particular feeling down to my bones years and years before I was introduced to the word. I thought, maybe, Ronan just didn’t know the word for what he was feeling. And I wasn’t saying it was love, what he was feeling. No. But it was something. And maybe if he just knew the word, it wouldn’t be so terrifying. Affection. Care. Lust. All those words I would take. I would take and water and grow and have faith that at some point they’d be love. How could they not? He killed the senator for me.
I followed him down from that surprising rooftop garden, back to our apartment.
It was midnight or after and the first thing Ronan did was make coffee.
“You should get some sleep,” he said. “You must be tired.”
“No,” I lied. “You’re right, we have work to do. What happened with Bryant Morelli?” “Who told you I went to the Morellis?”
“Niamh.”
“That’s why you went to Caroline?”
“Divide and conquer.”
“You’re not to do that again, Poppy.”
My ass was still sore and probably would be for days. “Lesson learned, Ronan. So? What happened?”
He rubbed his hand over his face and I knew, looking at him, what some of the conversation must have been.
You’re not like him, I wanted to tell him.
Just because you have the same last name doesn’t make you one of them.
