Bang Page 3

  Mari nods. “Wish Sarge had given us a heads-up,” she mumbles. She’s in jeans too, plus those tall boots that look like she’s about to get up on a horse. “Would have done laundry.”

  That’s Jackson’s opening. He could say, Yeah, sorry I didn’t tell you we’d be working this op, turns out I’m terrified of teenagers, and they could move on like grown-ups. But he doesn’t. He thinks of the past four months and bites his lip.

  “How you want to play it?” he says instead, tossing her the keys to the crappy green Taurus that is the department’s one and only unmarked car. “Should we try to buy together, or…?”

  He’s headed around to the passenger side, so he can’t see her face when she says, “Well, we should probably get a room first, right?”

  Jack jerks his head up to gape at her over the roof of the sedan. “What, at the motel?” His voice cracks on the last syllable, like he’s fifteen years old and not thirty-fucking-three. He just—that is not what he was expecting. “I—okay, yeah. What’s the cover?”

  Mari settles herself in the driver’s seat, pulling her seatbelt across the front of her body. “It’s the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, Jack, I don’t know.” She still isn’t looking at him. “Affair, I guess.”

  Jackson swallows. “Affair.” The word tastes sour. “Sure, why not.”

  The Super 8 is Great Barrington’s only true chain motel, standing alone in a sea of bed-and-breakfasts. Any closer to the town center and it would have been torn down and paved over with a public park or a coffee shop. As it is, it’s been allowed to continue on its dilapidated way, a testament to capitalism and the mid-eighties, all tied up in a squat, U-shaped bow.

  Mari leads the way inside, the slightest sway to her generous hips as she opens the door to the lobby. She let her hair down for the occasion, a fact Jackson would have gotten a kick out of any other day; he can see the wave where her ponytail holder was, a smooth dip all the way around. It’s so short, this new haircut. When she lowers her head at the front desk, her nape shows.

  “One room, please,” she tells the clerk. Jackson stays quiet, taking stock of the guy. White, twenty-five and five eight, five nine tops, with greasy black hair and a painful-looking breakout speckling his chin. Jack commits it all to memory in case he needs to ID the man later out of a photo array. He passed the time at the hospital that way, memorizing the features of everybody walking in and out of his room. Making up for the fact that he’d never be able to ID the shooter, maybe. Neither him nor Mari ever got a good look at the guy’s face.

  “Thanks.” Mari takes the flimsy key ring with a plastic jingle and slips her hands into Jack’s, towing him back out toward the parking lot. Jackson bets the guy he’s pretending to be right now—a developer, maybe, one of those pseudo-macho jobs where you can wear dark jeans into work and still make bank—Jackson bets that guy wouldn’t let himself be towed.

  Jackson does nothing.

  “That’s our guy, right?” Mari murmurs, tilting her face into his shoulder. A hank of her flyaway hair gets into his mouth as he nods.

  The room’s about as grimy as he expected, chipboard nightstands and a shiny coverlet patterned with a faded pastel swirl. But it’s on the second floor, and when Jackson looks out the window he sees they have a clear view of the office across the litter-strewn blacktop. “We’re in business,” he tells Mari, squinting into the sun.

  “I guess we wait awhile, then one of us goes down?” She sits on the bed. “Uses the vending machine in the lobby, then tries to buy? Or—” She breaks off, frowning.

  Jackson shrugs. An airtight plan for conviction it isn’t, but it’s not like they’re trying to bring down a drug kingpin here. “Sure,” he says, flipping on the TV set. “Sounds fine.” This was really a job for two of the rookies, in all honesty. He and Mari are getting a bit old for weed buys.

  “Okay.” Mari sighs. “You wanna do it, or should I?”

  Jackson doesn’t looks up from flipping channels. There’s a lot of weather on, some infomercials. “Don’t care.” He flops down in the grimy-looking armchair. “I can, I guess.” He hasn’t done a fake buy in a while. He tries to calculate the largest amount of pot two people can get away with needing. He could always say they were re-upping their supply. He’s torn between leaving immediately, spending as little time in this room as possible, and waiting it out so it’s less suspicious.

  “Seriously?” When he turns to look, Mari’s staring at him from the bed, those midnight-dark eyes incredulous. “Fine,” she says, in her crisp voice that means things are actually the opposite. Then, “You won’t even sit next to me anymore, is that the message you’re trying to communicate here?”

  That catches him off guard, both the question and how wounded she sounds as she asks it. “Do you want me to sit next to you?” he asks. He’s so surprised it almost doesn’t come out sounding mean.

  “I want—” Mari draws her spine up tight then collapses it back down, breasts swaying with the movement. They bunch in this bra, Jackson can see now, a line across the tops where the fabric cuts into her flesh. Perversely, he’s reminded of how they looked when she was nursing her daughter.

  “You want what?” he asks, not bothering to check the irritation in his voice. This is bullshit; he’s tired of it. They were partners, sure. They were whatever the hell they used to be, and now they’re not. “Huh? You want what, Mari, just spit it out so we can—”

  “I want it not to be like this!” Mari explodes. “Jesus, Jack. Do you? Is this really how you want to work together?”

  Jackson had been softening, was ready to say no, of course it wasn’t, but— “Work together? How I want to work together, Mari? Seriously?”

  He can tell from her face she knows exactly what he’s getting at. For an entire second, she looks stricken. Then her mouth firms back up into its stubborn frown. “This is our job,” she says, getting up off the bed. “We’re at work, we’re working. And Leo obviously wants to partner us again, so we’d better figure something out.”

  Jackson laughs. That’s so Mari, down to her core. Of course that would be her first priority. Suddenly he’s on his feet too. “Well, there’s an easy enough way to fix that, isn’t there?” he hears himself say. He feels nasty and out of control, but also oddly calm. He and Mari are yellers from way back. “Working together.”

  Mari pulls up like he slapped her. “For real? You want a new partner, Jack?”

  Which—fuck. Of course that’s not what he wants. That’s the last thing he wants, he fucking loves her, some days it feels like he’s hasn’t taken a goddamn breath in the last ten years without checking to see if she was breathing too. But he’s said it now, and it’s out there, and he doesn’t know how in the hell he’s going to—

  That’s when Mari launches herself at him.

  For one insane second, Jack actually thinks she wants to fight, some twisted version of the hand-to-hand exercises they had to do at the Academy a hundred years ago. He puts his hands up to catch her wrists mid-air just as Mari’s mouth crash-lands on his at a rough, artless angle, more like a head-butt than an actual kiss. Their teeth clink together hard enough that Jackson can feel it in the root.

  He kisses back.

  Right away Mari takes a step backwards toward the mattress, using his hands around her wrists as leverage to pull him on top of her on the bed. She tastes like coffee and Chapstick. Jackson swears. Mari does too but it’s a different sort of swearing, an oof as her knee comes up to push at him. Jackson lets go of her wrists right away.

  “Mari,” he grunts, scrambling to cup her face and get his weight on his elbows at the same time. She’s hot underneath him, a squirming mass. “Mari, hey. Hey, talk to me here.”

  But Mari isn’t interested in talking. She’s biting at his mouth like an extension of the argument, sucking sloppily when she manages to capture his bottom lip, wriggling all over the place so
he can’t get a grip on her. Jackson swears again, trying to position himself so he isn’t lying on her spleen. Finally he gives up and reaches down to rearrange her churning limbs himself, yanking her left knee up. His full weight ends up on her crotch for half a second, and Mari moans. Jackson freezes.

  Last time she was silent as a stone the whole way through, like fucking a blow-up doll. She only whimpered once. Jackson remembers because that’s what ended him.

  “Mari,” he murmurs.

  This time, when she bites, Jackson tastes blood.

  “Easy,” he says, getting a hand on her chin and licking into her mouth in a way that could conceivably pass for an actual kiss and not some kind of last-ditch guerrilla warfare. Mari makes another sound. Then she’s reaching back and yanking at the coverlet, the sheets white and reasonably clean-looking underneath. Jack’s heart does a traitorous, hopeful thing inside his chest. This is really happening again, then, this thing he’s spent more than four months convincing himself definitely wouldn’t. This thing he’s wanted and wanted and wanted since he doesn’t even really remember when.

  “Off,” Mari orders breathlessly, both fists bunching in the starchy fabric of his shirt. Jackson lets her pull it over his head, his undershirt coming off along with it.

  “Watch it?” he mutters as she catches an ear. But Mari’s not listening. When he turns back to face her, her eyes are locked on his naked, scarred-up chest.

  For one long, horrible second, Jackson thinks she’s about to cry.

  “Hey,” he says, smoothing her hair back off her forehead, tugging at the short, wavy ends. “Mari. Hey. It’s me, look at me.”

  Mari does. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She looks cracked open all of a sudden, runny like an egg. “Oh God, Jack, I’m so sorry.”

  It sounds like she wants to say more, finally hash everything out in this shitty motel room, the shooting and the sex and the silence, how they blew up their partnership with ruthless efficiency. In all the years he’s known her, Jackson’s only seen Mari cry a handful of times.

  I’m sorry too, he thinks about telling her. Or even, It’s okay, it wasn’t your fault.

  But.

  He was shot in three places, is the truth of it, stomach, chest and collarbone, and every single one them aches when he moves. He had a collapsed lung, he pissed through a tube for four painful days and hauled himself through physical therapy so grueling that one time he passed out on the table. The nurses kept asking him about next of kin going into surgery. Jackson had them call his parents because he assumed Mari was already waiting.

  “Don’t,” he mutters quietly, and covers her mouth with his.

  Jack kisses like he does everything else in this life, Mari thinks. Focused and purposeful, like somebody who knows what he wants and has a plan for how to get it. It’s how he got to the top of their class at the Academy, it’s how he convinced his sister to do the inpatient clinic four years ago when she starved herself down to ninety pounds. It’s how he healed himself too, Mari imagines, though she guesses he’d be the first person to tell you she wasn’t there to watch.

  She tips her head back, letting Jack suck at her collarbone. She doesn’t realize she’s worrying the puckered scar on his chest until he reaches up and pulls her hand away.

  “Sorry,” she mouths at the ceiling. Something stops her from saying it out loud.

  Things go faster after that, Jackson’s hands suddenly under her shirt, rolling up the cheap, pilling fabric. It’s old, the sweater, bought a million years ago when Marisol was in her twenties and still going out to bars. There’s a staticky whoosh as he drags it over her head and then his mouth is back on hers, biting like she did to him, quick and punishing. He takes her tongue between his teeth and she just lets it happen, lips slack, panting. Someone is shaking, but Mari’s not sure who.

  “Jack,” she starts to say. But Jack’s hands are on his belt, and she stops.

  Just like that, he stops too, his body tensing when Mari’s does. “Are we—” He touches the plasticky join between her bra cups, hesitating. “Mari.”

  Marisol got a divorce because Jackson’s face had become more familiar than her husband’s, more familiar even than her baby girl’s. But she can’t for the life of her tell what he’s thinking right now.

  “Mari,” he says, more urgently.

  Mari’s stomach growls underneath his hand, nothing in her belly but coffee. God, they should stop. This got them nowhere last time, and it’ll get them nowhere now. Mari told herself for years that it was familiarity, not love.

  “Yeah,” she tells him. Then, “Hurry.”

  She lets him yank her bra up around her armpits without undoing the clasp, the underwire cutting into her flesh unflatteringly. He’s a full two clicks rougher than he was the last time. He was so terribly, terribly gentle that night in his apartment, like he’d never met her before, like she was someone who couldn’t be trusted not to fall apart.

  That’s not how he’s acting right now.

  Mari arches as he sucks at her nipple, then noses down to the soft underside of her breast and bites like he’s aiming to leave a mark. She’s got stretch marks there, and on her stomach too, from carrying Sonya. Over the past few months when she was feeling particularly small and sorry for herself, she used to wonder if that was part of what went wrong last time—if Jack had pictured her one way for so long that her real, actual body was a disappointment, something other than what was advertised on the label.

  Mari had pictured Jack pretty much exactly the way he is.

  Now he’s reaching for the button on her jeans while Mari toes off her boots, both of them caught up in the mechanics of it for a second. But when she glances up and catches how he’s staring, she swallows hard enough to choke.

  “Hi,” she says. There was a moment like this the last time too. It stopped being something that was happening and became something they were doing, actively, a choice. If you ask Mari, that’s when they should have stopped.

  “Hi,” Jackson answers.

  Then he ducks his head and puts his face between her legs.

  Mari blushes. That was part of the problem last time too, how her body wasn’t ready, the slippery condom helping but not quite enough. She guesses Jackson remembers.

  It is—yeah. It is not so much going to be a problem this time.

  Jack must notice, because after a few hard licks he’s crawling back up her body, nosing at her belly and breasts. Mari fights the urge to cover herself and grabs for his belt instead, trying to ignore the way her stomach crumples up into rolls when she reaches. Jackson helps, and then suddenly there they both are, naked as jaybirds. Just like last time, Mari is embarrassed to look.

  “Jesus.” Apparently Jackson isn’t.

  “Come here,” Mari gasps, holding out her arms. She’s warm all over, exposed and flustered and not really sure if she likes either. She wants him in, suddenly, on top and covering her. “Come on, come here.”

  Jack shakes his head, adamant. “No,” he says, then immediately shakes again. “Just—let me look a sec, okay? Can you just—” She’s caught him by the wrist and he twists his hand until their fingers are laced together, his knuckles warm and rough. Mari makes herself breathe. His gaze is slipping down over her body, breasts and belly and hair at the V of her thighs, this hungry expression on his face like he’s never seen her this way before—which he hasn’t, Mari guesses, not really. Last time they fumbled their way through in the dark. “Fuck, Mari.”

  “Don’t,” Mari says, wanting to cover her eyes like Sonya does when they’re playing hide-and-seek, like if she can’t see him then the reverse is true also. Mari’s not shy, hand to God she isn’t, but it’s Jack, it’s Jackson, and even with her head tipped away, nothing about him is lost on her: not the bunched muscle of his shoulders or the low-slung freckles near his waistline, cock curving up against his stomach.

/>   “I want to see you,” he tells her, so quiet Mari isn’t even sure he knows he’s saying it. “I always want to, I want—”

  “Jack.” It sounds like a sob. She wrestles her fingers free of his and reaches for his neck, his head with that unfamiliar buzz cut, no hair for her to cling to. “Don’t, can we just—” Her gaze bounces down between his legs without quite meaning to and suddenly she’s staring at him directly, unable to look away.

  “No,” Jackson is saying, arguing semantics like they’re working a case. “Just let me.” He unhooks her arms from around his neck, pinning her wrists against the motel pillows. Then, even quieter than before, “You’re beautiful, Mari.”

  Mari’s still staring. Jack’s cock, Jesus Christ, it was inside her before but she’s never looked like this. It’s feels out of context and wrong, like seeing your teacher in a supermarket.

  It jumps, and Mari feels her mouth fill with saliva.

  “Please.” Jackson is reaching down between her legs slowly, like he expects her to spook. “Let me do it properly this time, okay?”

  Mari licks her lips. “Okay.”

  She’s so slick her body makes an actual sound when he opens her up, wet and thick and embarrassing. Mari can hear it and smell it, how completely ready she is.

  Jack stares at her. “Mari.”

  It’s pretty much over with then, properly or otherwise, both of them scrambling to put him inside her, a graceless tangle of elbows and skin. “But what about a—” Jackson starts, and Mari hisses, “I don’t care,” and in that second, hand to God, she really doesn’t. Then he’s inside and moving almost inhumanly fast, pornographic thrusts that make Mari bounce on the mattress, teeth and spit and sweat. Two strokes in, Mari’s so close she’s biting her tongue. He’s big, she remembers that much from that night in his apartment. This isn’t good—Jesus Christ, this is terrible, this is the worst thing she could possibly be doing right now—but fuck if it isn’t working for her almost criminally well.