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His fingers shift inside me, curling into a fist. The heat and the hardness and the size of his hand… His knuckles press a secret place somewhere deep inside me, somewhere no one has ever touched before. And he forms a single word, fierce and proud and impossible to deny: “Come.”
I fold.
I shatter.
I collapse around him and over him and somehow, impossibly, through him.
He waits until I stop sobbing before he eases his hand free. He kisses my damp eyelids as he retrieves the key from the cupholder. He supports my arms as he opens the cuffs, first the right and then, when I can bear it, the left. His arms fold over me. His ruined shirt tucks around me. He cradles me forever in the darkness of the car.
But I finally find the strength to move again. I push off his shoulders. I navigate the ridiculous console between our luxurious bucket seats. I collapse on the passenger side, realizing for the first time that I’ve lost both shoes; they must be somewhere near the gas and brake pedals.
Trap raises his seat. He strips off his shirt. He passes it to me with a rueful laugh. It takes all my meager energy to push my arms through his sleeves, to gather the pleated shirt close across my pearl-dusted breasts. He retrieves my bra from somewhere near his toes, along with a few damp hundred-dollar bills.
“Well,” Trap says as he passes it all to me. “I think we’ll both remember enough details to satisfy the cops.”
We’re still laughing when he pulls out of the alley and turns toward home.
18
TRAP
* * *
Ilook up from my phone as Alix enters the kitchen. “I just got an email,” I say. “Three boxes of books have shipped from Oxford University Press.”
“Great,” she says.
I have to admit, I expected her to be a little more excited. It’s only three fucking boxes, but it’s the start of the best goddamn private art history collection in the United States.
But then it hits me. She’s probably worried about space. About where she’s going to put all those books.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say. “We’ve got those three conference rooms on the ground floor of the office tower. With all the online meetings we have these days, we hardly ever use them. What if we have the architect draw up plans to convert two into a library?”
“Good idea.”
Then why does she sound like I just suggested she design her own fucking tomb? I know the books mean a lot to her. I understand they’re replacements for the originals, for the ones that burned in the fire at Herzog’s house. But I want them to be more than that. I want them to be the core of the library she builds for herself.
I try again. “You’ll need to store them until everything’s arrived, or almost everything. Will it work, to keep them in your gallery in the warehouse?”
“Sure.”
That’s the first time I’ve mentioned the goddamn gallery since I had Leo dragged out and put in the hospital. We haven’t talked about the table I had carted off to the junkyard. About the fucking cart I sent down to maintenance, along with all its tools.
I should have told her I was having the floor replaced before I did it. That I had the gallery painted. But I wanted to make it easy for her. I wanted to give her a chance to forget her whole fucked-up plan.
I wanted to make her happy.Wantto make her happy. Now.
So I try one last thing. “You know you can hire someone to help, right? If you want to bring in a librarian, someone who can give you ideas about the best way to organize the books, maybe do the grunt work. We can make it a permanent position. The collection’s going to grow.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Maybe she’s just tired.
I get her what she needs. A cup of fucking coffee.
When she reaches out to take it, I see the bruises on her wrists. They’re angry and dark, with ugly little scabs tracing the places my handcuffs broke her skin.
I’m a fucking monster.
