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My best bud, my brother from another goddamn mother, and one of my closest confidants, smirked at me. “I didn’t doubt it, Finn. You’re a mean motherfucker when you want to be.”
Seemed like the two of us were both shit with compliments.
***
Aoife
Three weeks later
I wokeup to find Finn watching me.
Because I was surprised to see him, I blinked a few times before rubbing my eyes. When he didn’t disappear, I whispered, “Hey.”
He reached over and trailed a finger along the curve of my jaw. “Hey.”
I hadn’t seen him for a day or two. He slept here most nights, but he was in and out of bed while I carried on sleeping.
“You look exhausted.”
And he did. His skin was pale, not the usual glorious creamy gold that spoke of his Black Irish heritage. He had shadows under his eyes, and from the divots in his cheeks, I wasn’t the only one who’d lost weight.
“Iamtired,” he admitted, closing his eyes as he rested his head against the pillow.
Just watching him for a handful of seconds had a sense of peace settling deep inside me, and knowing he was resting, I let myself sleep too.
I’d never felt this way before. Like my happiness, while not exactly dependent on someone else, had a kind of checks and balance system. It mattered to me if he was stressed or discontent. It affected me if he lost weight or didn’t sleep.
Having never been in a long-term relationship before, it was strange to have my life so affected by someone else.
Sure, my mom and I had been close and had lived together. But we were two separate people. Of course I cared if she lost weight or was stressed, but when Finn climbed into bed with me, slept with me—I laid next to him, sensed his emotions, and they affectedme.
I thought, to a point, that was what surprised me the most.
Call me dumb or a noob, I just wasn’t used to my moods correlating with someone else’s, and Finn? I didn’t want to say he was moody, but he was often pensive. And with no sex to ease his tension, I felt like I was floundering with no means of connecting.
For hours he’d lay behind me in silence, one hand on my leg, his thumb moving back and forth as he gently caressed me. Not to entice or excite, just to touch me.
With no sex on the table, I guess I should have been scared, but I didn’t really believe he’d cheat on me. Lena, Aidan’s wife, had warned me he would, and maybe I was stupid, but I felt like Finn wouldn’t. Still, he wasn’t getting his rocks off with me, and a man like him, with a high sex drive? Celibacy didn’t seem as though it was high on his checklist.
Days had passed, morphing into weeks. The situation never seemed to improve, the only thing that did? My health.
I had a hole in my abdomen that had to ‘fuse’ back together. I’d lost my spleen. I needed to take prophylactic antibiotics for the rest of my life, would have health issues forever, and I realized this was one of the true costs of a life in the mafia—people got hurt. They bled. It was a world forged on loss and greed and all the sins that Aidan’s Church preached were enough to send you to hell.
Weird then, that he was one of the most devout men I’d ever met—and I was Irish. Being religious was like loving Guinness and celebrating St Patrick’s Day—they all went hand in hand.
As I thought back to that morning when I’d blinked awake and found Finn had disappeared on me again, Lena murmured, “Your head’s in the clouds.”
Her words broke into my thoughts. I wasn’t down, I had to admit. I was like Finn—pensive. It was like getting married, being shot, and not being able to have access to one another had put us in a philosophical state of mind.
“Not exactly,” I countered, grimacing as I turned to face her at the stove.
The compound, as Finn called it, wasn’t as rough around the edges as it seemed. It was actually like a large hotel with eleven floors. There were no rooms, but small apartments, and the higher up the building you went, the higher the rank your man had. Because, yup, it was like that here.
I hadn’t met many women I liked except for Lena, and she wasn’t exactly someone I could relax around. She was the nearest thing I had to a mother-in-law and I felt that although she approved of me, she was monitoring me too. For Aidan and for Finn. It wasn’t the most pleasant of sensations, and I really missed my best friend Jenny as well as my dad. Neither of whom I’d seen in weeks.
My last visit with Jenny had been in the hospital before I’d been moved here—it was too dangerous for her to come to the compound, or so Finn had said when I’d asked about the possibility. With my dad? It had been longer. A week before my wedding.
We texted, but it wasn’t the same as seeing him, and we were always cautious anyway with things that could be tracked and traced.
