Bang Page 8

  “I do, I know.” Mari cups his face in two cool hands. Jackson has never seen her look at him quite the way she is now. “I just don’t understand why.”

  She leans down and kisses him before he can answer, soft, wet mouth and those gentle hands sliding back to hold his head in place. Her palms cover his ears and the world goes quiet. It reminds Jackson so strongly of the shooting—the weird deafness that comes after gunshots, his heartbeat in his ears—that he almost forgets her question.

  “Okay, stop,” he says, sitting up fast and snatching her wrists away. Mari’s mouth drops open in surprise. “Do you want to be here, though?” he asks, jiggling her lightly. The shot of adrenaline he just got is making him bold. “Here, with me, right now?”

  Mari nods, then swallows and nods again. “I—yes. Yes.” Her hips open against him the slightest bit. “Of course I do.”

  “Just tonight?” Jackson presses. The weight of her in his lap is distracting, heavy and hot. “Or more than that?”

  “More.” She’s just letting him hold her there now, her wrists gone slack. “More.”

  Jackson licks his lips, finally cluing in to the fact that she’s paying less attention to his words than his hands. Slowly, he pulls her arms up over her head. Mari lets him yank until her elbows are locked, completely docile.

  Jackson watches her. “Is this it?” he asks quietly. He’s so hard he’s aching. “Is this what you like?”

  Mari swallows again, sharp enough that Jackson sees her throat move. Then she nods.

  Fuck. Jack feels his cock twitch dangerously, so violent he knows she must be able to feel it too. “Yeah?” He can’t entirely keep the wonder out of his voice. It feels like a total surprise but also something he knew about her somehow, something he sensed before they started doing this. “You gonna let me do this to you?”

  “Yes,” Mari says, gasping as Jack flips her over, pressing her wrists down into the pillow. The bed hits the wall with a noisy thunk, and both of them wince. “Please,” she says again, tipping her face up so he’ll kiss her. “I want, I want—”

  The rest of it gets muffled with his mouth on hers and Jackson is sorry even as he’s biting at the soft edges of her tongue—wants to know everything she’s thinking, wants to open her head up and walk around inside until he’s sussed out every secret she’s kept since the first day they were partners. Her knees open up wide so he’ll rock. Jack grinds himself against her, gathering both wrists into one hand and reaching for the button on her jeans even as he’s realizing they’re right back where they were a week ago in the motel room, no condom and nowhere to go.

  Mari’s realizing too. “I don’t,” she starts, then breaks off in frustration, pushing her hot self up at him as he pulls down her zipper. The bones of her wrists grind together in his grip. “Shit. We are not smart about this.”

  “Dumb cops,” Jackson agrees, sliding his hand into her jeans. She’s so hot it nearly kills him, what feels like a cotton thong gone tissue-thin and damp. He squeezes before he can completely think it through. Mari gasps.

  For a second, Jackson looks at her.

  Then he pushes her wrists back into the pillow with one hand and squeezes between her legs again with his other. Hard.

  “Fuck,” Mari whines, bucking under his hold. He’s got her pinned in two places now, above and below. “Oh, Jackson, fuck.” She sounds shocked.

  “Mine?” he asks, squeezing again. He can feel her heartbeat under his palm, his fingers biting deep into soft skin. Then, so softly, “This mine?”

  Mari’s teeth are chattering. “Jackson,” she repeats, twisting in his grip. “Fuck, fuck, Jackson.”

  Jack feels like the top of his head is about to come off. He can’t believe this is what she actually—that she’s letting him— “Gotta tell me,” he commands, tightening both of his holds. His cock is leaking in his pants. “Gotta let me know.”

  “Yes,” Mari spits, tossing her head against the pillow, short dark hair tangling into a crazy halo. “Yours, yours, wanna be all…” Then, “Oh God, Jack, I’m—”

  Jackson feels the pulse under his hand before he fully understands what she’s trying to tell him, an odd butterfly flutter that feels like nothing else in the world. He’s gripping so hard it feels like he’s holding her orgasm in the palm of his hand. “Fuck, Mari.” He’d be worried about hurting her if the pleasure on her face wasn’t so totally, mind-bendingly overt. His whole palm is wet.

  “There,” he says as she relaxes. “That’s a girl.” He wants to tell her how insanely hot she is, to lick his fingers clean or get her to do it for him, but before he’s got two words to rub together she’s pulling his shirt off and working his belt buckle, yanking his jeans over his hips.

  “Say what you want,” she murmurs in his ear, this quiet begging. “Jack. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Get on the floor,” Jackson blurts.

  For a second Mari just stares at him and Jackson panics, terror making it feel like all the water in his body draining out at once. Fuck, she’s his work partner. Just because she maybe likes it a little rougher than he would have guessed doesn’t mean he can—that she wants—shit. “Only if you want,” he adds immediately.

  Mari smiles.

  She reaches up to pull a spare elastic off her elegant wrist, gathering her hair into a ponytail.

  Then she drops to her knees on his rug.

  The silence in the bedroom is so complete Mari can hear her own breathing. She scoots closer until she’s kneeling in the blue-black shadow of the bed, trying to get a better look at Jack’s face. Her heartbeat is in her throat and between her legs.

  “Shit, Mari.” He reaches down and touches her cheek gently, tracing the shape of her mouth. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed where Mari left him, jeans around his hips and boxers still in place. When Mari opens her mouth to suck at his thumb, he swears.

  “Shit yourself,” Mari murmurs, scraping her teeth over his knuckle. Then, as Jackson’s knees start to part expectantly on either side of her, she pulls off and sits back primly on her heels. “Show me.”

  Jack’s brow furrows. “Mari. What do you—” It takes a minute, but then she can practically see the lightbulb clicking. “Christ, girl, really?” Jackson swears. “Okay.”

  He stands, shucking his jeans and boxers. Then one heavy hand is on her head, making a loose fist around the base of her ponytail. “This what you mean?” His other hand is on his cock, pumping lightly. Marisol clutches her own hands together in her lap to keep from reaching for him.

  “I think it’s what you meant,” she says. All her limbs feel noodle-loose, neck included. She wants to rest her forehead on his thigh. She wants to lean up and kiss the bullet scar on his stomach. Instead she squeezes his thighs, letting her mouth fall open just a touch.

  “Fuck.” The fist in her hair gets tighter. And then Jackson, her partner Jackson, who she’s known for ten years, is feeding his cock into her mouth.

  “Marisol.”

  Mari hums quietly, sucking until her lips are up against the ring made by his fist. Jack lets go with a quiet fuck, the hand around her ponytail loosening for a second as he fumbles with something on the nightstand. Then there’s a click, and the room floods with light.

  “I just want—” he starts. Mari looks up and he’s staring down at her, face flushed and twisted. The bedside lamp is orangey-yellow. “I gotta see.”

  Mari likes seeing too. Everything about him is beautiful, the soap-sweat smell of his body and how he’s just barely thrusting, the memory of that big hand squeezing between her legs like he was staking a claim. He’s tall. Taller still when she’s down here on her knees. She wants him to keep going, to pull her hair, wants him to use her a little. She’s trying to prove something, maybe, but also it just feels good. Jack’s not this aggressive, not normally. At least, Mari didn’t think he was.

 
Did you do this to any of those skinny white girls? she thinks.

  She breathes through her nose and takes him deeper than is totally comfortable, concentrating. It works. “Fuck,” Jack says helplessly. There’s a half second where Mari can tell he’s totally at her mercy before he recovers, wrapping his hand around the base of her ponytail just as his cock bumps the back of her throat. Mari lifts her lashes with some effort, watching him watching her.

  It’s worth it. In the end she thinks it’s the eye contact as much as anything else that does it for him, though she guesses her wet slippery mouth doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t ask if it’s okay first, and she’s glad. The permission is implicit and Mari likes that he knows it, likes knowing him this way on top of everything else.

  “Mari.” He pulls her up with two hot hands on her face, sitting down with a thunk on the edge of the bed as she stands. Now Mari is the one towering over him. “Shit. Hi.”

  “Hi yourself.” Mari steps between his knees and takes stock, his buzzed head and the sun-bleached hair on his arms. His beard always grows in reddish. Now Mari knows the hair between his legs does too. “So hey,” she starts, swallowing. His scars pucker strangely when his stomach ripples like this. “That was probably the most action this bed’s ever seen, huh?”

  Jackson doesn’t smile. “I meant it, you know,” he says, staring up at her. “What I said.”

  Mari feels that squeeze between her legs again, as visceral as if he’d actually reached down. Mine. “Oh yeah?”

  Jackson nods. His hands are curled around her hips, thumbs petting gently. His skin always looks whitest when it’s touching hers. “Yeah.”

  Mari licks her dry lips and climbs into his lap, pushing gently at his shoulders until he’s flat on his back on the mattress. He looks so good sprawled out that she follows the motion, settling herself on top. “Okay,” she mumbles into his shoulder, feeling shy and greedy. She wonders what happens next. It feels far away, like the consequences aren’t really hers but something she’s watching from the outside. They can’t stay partners and fuck each other at the same time. “Set an alarm,” she commands, curling herself around him like a barnacle. “I don’t want your parents to catch me up here in the morning.”

  “I’m a grown-ass man, Mari,” Jack says, but he does what she tells him, reaching down and pulling his phone out of his jeans on the floor. “Happy?”

  “Yes,” Mari says, and if someone interrogated her for a full day and night she couldn’t tell them what it is that makes her add, “I love you.” She has for years, one way or another. It doesn’t feel particularly climactic.

  She feels Jack freeze for a moment then, all the muscles in his body going rigid and taut. Then he exhales into the dark. “Love you back,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

  So. That’s how it happens, pretty much. They doze until the alarm goes off the next morning, then eat coffee cake with Bruce and Barb in the kitchen and drive back to Great Barrington with their fingers laced together resting on Jackson’s knee. Mari feels like she’s in the Twilight Zone.

  “So,” Jack says, pulling into her driveway. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow, huh.”

  Mari nods. Yesterday’s underwear is in her purse along with the empty wafer Tupperware, her jeans scratchy and rough against her bare skin. She feels like she broke curfew. “Uh-huh,” she tells him. She checks the front window before leaning in for a kiss.

  Inside, Patricia is sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Sonya’s Frosted Flakes and reading the paper. “Morning, mi vida,” she says without looking up. When Mari called last night with the news she was staying over, Patricia remarked mildly that the Fords were suddenly very hospitable again. The way dinner invites dried up after Mari got pregnant was clearly not lost on her.

  “Morning,” Mari says tiredly. “Is there coffee?”

  “Should be.” And although Mari would not swear to this, Patricia sounds almost gleeful when she adds, “Andre called. He should be dropping Sonya off in ten minutes or so.”

  Shit. Mari runs a hand through her greasy hair. “Great, perfect, thanks. Um, I’m just gonna shower, though, so can you—”

  But Patricia shakes her head. “I’m busy,” she announces, shaking out the business section. “He’s your ex-husband, Mari. You can say hello yourself.”

  Mari sighs. Patricia made no secret of the fact that she disliked living under the same roof as her daughter’s failing marriage. She used to take Sonya out on day trips so Mari and Andre could fight.

  “Right.” Mari runs her tongue along the back of her fuzzy teeth. This morning she had to make do with her finger and some filched toothpaste from the Fords’ upstairs bath. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “I know I am.” Patricia gestures at the coffeemaker. “There’s still some in the pot.”

  But when Andre arrives a few minutes later, Patricia comes to the door too, a wide, benign chaperone. Mari is infinitely grateful.

  “Hi, Pat,” Andre says, helping Sonya out of her Dora the Explorer backpack. He starts out in Spanish right away. He was always better about that, and about teaching it to Sonya. “Hey, Mari.”

  “Hi, stranger,” Patricia coos, giving him a hug. “How you been? We miss you.”

  Mari tries to ignore the we. Andre has always been good to Patricia, like the son she never had—even if you are Mexicano, mi hijo, Patricia would tell him. When Mari’s father died and Mari’s first priority had been moving her mother out of the big, empty house they used to share, Andre had understood immediately and instinctively. She still remembers turning to him as they were leaving the gravesite and saying, We need to buy a place. He had a realtor lined up within a week.

  It’s strange to think about that time in her life now, how fast it all happened, her father and the house and Andre down on one knee in the dining room at the fancy inn in Stockbridge, the sense that things were spinning out in unexpected directions without her explicit consent. And through it all there was Jackson waiting for her in the parade room and the cruiser, gone quiet for the first time since Mari had known him. He and Andre didn’t like each other, though neither one of them ever said it outright. Jackson certainly never said anything to Mari on the subject except congratulations. At the time, he was dating a tall blonde physical therapist named Cat.

  “Did you work last night?” Andre asks now, once Patricia’s retreated into the kitchen and Sonya’s scurried upstairs to visit the toys she missed in her absence. “That where you were?”

  It’s not really your business where I was, Mari thinks and doesn’t tell him. Isn’t sure if her knee-jerk defensiveness is from guilt or something else. “Nope,” she says evenly after a moment, eyes on Andre’s. “Thanks for dropping her off.”

  Andre blinks. He’s a surgical technician over at Fairview, working to save up for medical school. The first thing Mari loved about him was his hands. “Sure,” he says, nodding slowly. “No problem.”

  After he leaves, Mari takes a long bath, her back aching from Jack’s creaky old bed, her neck from sleeping curled up around someone new. She’s gotten used to sleeping alone these past few months. Sonya’s toys are littered around the rim of the tub, the standard all-American duckie and a few water markers that wipe right off the tile. Mari picks one up and writes her name. Then she erases it and pulls the plug.

  Chapter Six

  Jack’s not totally sure what it’s going to be like to work with her on Monday, that murmured I love you thumping around in his head like a pair of sneakers in a washing machine, but when Mari slides into the seat beside his at roll and smirks at him, he feels like it’s probably going to be fine. Zales and Gordy are arguing about last night’s Pats game. Sara Piper’s cracking her back. He can feel heat radiating right through Mari’s uniform and wonders if everyone else can see the lines, like in a cartoon.

  “Here,” he says when Leo calls his name, trying not to look at her too much. Ev
erything they’re doing is against regs.

  Their first call of the day is a domestic in one of the row houses on the far end of town, unraked lawns the size of postage stamps surrounded by rusting chain link. “Neighbor who called it in says they’re a couple of tweakers,” radios Punch, who’s working dispatch today. “Was a call down there last week too.”

  “Nice,” Jackson mutters with a grimace, but when he glances over at Mari he finds she’s already looking at him, this tiny cat-smile on her face. At the eye contact, it spreads into a grin.

  “What?” he asks.

  “I just—this is so weird.” She bites her lip. She has her short hair pinned back in braids and it makes her look young today, like the almost-teenager he started out riding with. “Are you my boyfriend now?” she asks him finally, laughing.

  Jack laughs too. It takes a minute to figure out that what he’s feeling is relief. “Yeah, de la Espada. I’m your boyfriend now.” He raises his eyebrows. “Why, you want me to hold your gun while you go to the bathroom?”

  “Screw you,” Mari says amiably. Then, “Can buy me a beer after shift, if you want.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jack has heard her use that tone before on other men, come and get me and bossy all at once. He knows how she flirts, even if it’s not from personal experience. She’s right, this is weird. “I want,” he says, pulling the cruiser up to the end of the gravel driveway. “It’s a date.”

  The house they’ve been called to is even more dilapidated than its neighbors, practically listing to one side. The chain link in front of it has been cut open. “Looks quiet,” he remarks, whooping the siren once. Hello, here we are.

  Mari peers out the dashboard window, her expression sliding back into business mode. Jack loves her bad-cop face. She does something with her eyes and forehead and mouth, and suddenly it’s like you’re looking at a mask. “Let’s hope whatever it was blew over,” she says, unbuckling her seatbelt. Then she pauses, hand on the door handle. “You aren’t my boyfriend out there, though, okay? We do our jobs?”