AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There are so many secrets I could fill the ocean with them. I will keep all of them from you. I will lie by omission, and sometimes, I might have to lie to you for real. But if I can help it, I won’t. If I can tell you even a little of what’s going on, I will. That’s likely to be rare. The one thing I can promise is I won’t lie to you about us. I won’t lie about how I feel or what I want. I won’t lie about why I’m hiding things. That’s the easiest thing to explain. When I don’t tell you the truth, it’s not because I enjoy being deceptive. It’s because I’m protecting you, my family, and the people who depend upon us. What I can give you, I will give you completely. But you’ll never have all of me.”
She sits there, digesting what I’ve just vomited at her. It’s a lot to unpack, so I won’t rush her. She’s staring at the table while I watch her. It has to be at least five minutes before she turns and faces me.
“You weren’t guarding someone this weekend, were you?”
“No.”
“But you let me think you were.”
“A lie of omission.”
“And there will be a lot of those.”
“Those are the ones you’ll probably figure out. I hope you know that when I speak them, it’s because I’m protecting you.”
“It’ll be when you’re committing a crime.”
I say nothing to that. She observes me for a moment before she nods.
“There will be times when I’m away and won’t know how long I’ll be gone. I didn’t get your text until Sunday night just before I went to Auntie Paola’s to see you. There’s a reason for that. I need a promise from you.”
“All right. Normally, I wouldn’t promise something without knowing what it is. But I trust you, Gabe.”
“There’s somewhere we go to take care of things. Somewhere completely under our control. When I’m there, I never have my phone on. If it’s a true emergency, you contact someone in my family, and they contact me. I need you to promise you will never look for this place. You won’t find it in the city records, but I know you’re resourceful. Don’t do it. I can’t say what the outcome would be because I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be good. Don’t think torture or death. I don’t mean that. But it just wouldn’t be good.”
I hope she gets the gravity of this. That’s why I repeated myself.
She scrubs her hands over her face.
“I already know all this, Gabe.”
Her voice is little more than a whisper. I don’t get the feeling it’s because she saw it in some movie. She runs her hand through her hair before our gazes meet. She inhales so deeply I can hear it.
“I don’t consider myself an O’Rourke, but I am distantly related. Dillan O'Rourke's great-grandfather was a distant cousin of my great-grandfather on my mother's side. Second cousins a couple times removed, I think. Before our family even moved to America, my great-grandfather was an enforcer. My maternal grandfather got away from all that when he left to fight in Vietnam. He came home injured. He had a TBI. The O’Rourkes let him off the hook, and he no longer had to work for them. But he told me stories. I didn’t know until I was a teenager that he shouldn’t have. I think some of it was the brain injury, but I think some of it was a warning to stay far, far away from them. I asked my dad about it, and he told me to never repeat a thing I heard. My parents met because both of my grandfathers were being trained to be mobsters before they left for the Vietnam War. My dad’s dad didn’t come home.”
She bites her top lip before continuing.
“I also spent time with the O’Rourkes and another family, the O’Tooles, when I was really young, and we’d come down for Christmas and over the summer. I know they have a fake storefront somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens. I don’t remember. I know they do shit there, and it sounds like you’re describing the same thing. What you told me is hard to hear. The part about the lies is the worst. I know it shouldn’t be. But it is. I get it, though. I knew this when I accepted the case. Marta knows my family history. It’s why they assigned me to you. She figured I’d know which questions not to ask. At least, that’s what I figured until another managing partner told me Salvatore and Massimo insisted they hire me.”
“Can you accept lies between us in our private life?”
My chest aches. Depending on her answer, there may be no going forward once the case is over.
“Yes. I know it’s not the same by any stretch, but I won’t be able to tell you things about the cases I represent. It hurts to know that I can give you all of me, but I’ll— at best —get half of you. I don’t know that I’ll get even that much.”
“I’ll give you as much as I can. If I ever tell you to stay away, that I can’t see you, it’s not because I don’t want to. It’ll be because something happened. Something went wrong. I may need to calm down or get cleaned up. Please don’t offer to help because I won’t accept. I don’t want to reject you that way, but you can’t get involved. Whether or not you were a lawyer, I would shelter you from that.”
Maybe one day it’ll get to where we’re living together. That would make it harder, but I believe she’ll understand this part and respect it.
“I can do that, Gabe.”
“Good. Does that mean you can still see a future for us?”
“Yes.”
I glance out the conference room windows and see no one paying attention to us. I take her hands in mine and give them a squeeze. There’s nothing left to say about this, so we turn our attention to the evidence we now have more time to review since the Cohenour case fell apart.
We’re sitting close enough for our legs to press against each other. Knowing she’s willing to give us a try got me hard in an instant. I test the waters and place my hand on her thigh. She does nothing, so I start to pull away. Her legs snap shut, capturing my hand. We continue to talk as though nothing is going on beneath the table. I pull just enough for her to know I want to slide my hand up her legs. She wheels the chair closer, and I angle my body to appear like I’m intently reading something. I can feel the heat coming from her pussy. When I slip a finger into her panties, I feel how wet she is for me.
