Later that afternoon when I woke up, it was to the soft sound of Ben snoring. One arm was folded beneath his head while the other rested on my arm. No longer caught up in the past, I found our closeness more than mildly uncomfortable. I carefully shrugged out of his unconsciously innocent hold, slowly scooting down until I could safely slide over the arm of the couch without waking him. Almost immediately after I got off he rolled over onto his side.
I tiptoed out of the living room and down the hall to the bedroom so I could change. Swiping my keys, I snuck out the back door and circled around to the garage so I wouldn’t accidentally wake him up. Old Faithful started with a bang and I groaned knowing that Vitor would probably tell me to junk her. The only thing was that I didn’t want to because she was just so… faithful.
Though the reason for my visit was vehicle related, I couldn’t keep my mind off of the rapidly worsening mess that was my life. I’d broken the number one rule: Don’t shit where you sleep. On a scale of one to ten, one being minimal poo and ten being enough poo to fertilize a field, I’d rate myself an eleven. It was to the point where I wasn’t even sure if Vitor would tell me to get the hell off of his property because I was a big part of his sister’s unhappiness with Alex.
With that thought in mind, I sat in front of Vitor’s place for a good ten minutes before I decided I should either crap on the pot or get off it. He was to my disappointment, the first person I encountered upon getting out of my truck.
“Hey Adrienne.”
His voice held no anger, no spite or any other variation of hostility and I sighed in relief.
“Hey Vitor.”
“I hope you’re here because you heard about our latest job and not because you want me to work on that piece of scrap metal.”
I frowned for two reasons, the first being that I hadn’t heard about the job and second because I knew he would give me a hard time about Old Faithful.
“Is the rest of the crew inside?”
“Well Tasha and Alex aren’t here yet, but I imagine they’ll get here soon. You know how they are.” He winked at me suggestively and my stomach turned. Vitor obviously wasn’t up to speed on the latest development, and instead of fixing it, I took the coward’s way out and ignored his last sentence.
“Okay, I’ll be hanging out in the living room until then.”
He waived me away as he took my keys from me and I strode past him to walk through the open door that connected his garage to his house. I didn’t even make it past the bedroom that served as an office before I ran into the man that I’d been avoiding like the plague: Daniel.
When he only looked surprised instead of angry when he saw me, I planned to greet him, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to try and salvage as many of my friendships as I could. Just because I planned to swear off men for the next great while didn’t mean I couldn’t remain friends with them.
He cut off my attempt at greeting him with, “Can we talk? In private?”
Glancing around the empty room, I laughed. It couldn’t get any emptier. I continued to chuckle right up until he kissed me. His hands moved up and down my body before finally settling on either side of my face. At first I was too shocked to do anything other than let him, but the shock quickly faded to give way to a very mild case of lust. His tongue lacked the urgency it usually had, but overall it was a very satisfying kiss. He eventually pulled away to look into my eyes while his hands gently held my face.
“Well hello to you too. If I’d known you meant that kind of talking, I wouldn’t have laughed at your request for privacy in an already empty room.”
He smiled at my greeting before making me completely uncomfortable by hugging me. I wasn’t exactly against hugging, but there are different types of hugs. There are the friendly haven’t-seen-you-in-a-long-time hugs and hugs filled with the sensuality of a lover. His hug was neither and it didn’t feel right.
“Hey Midget. Daniel.”
I stiffened in Daniel’s embrace at the smooth, but indifferent sound of Alex’s voice.
“Hey Alex,” Daniel returned without loosening his hold on me.
With my discomfort increasing by the moment, I shimmied out of Daniel’s arms. I turned around to greet Alex, but he was already leaving the office to go into the living room. Daniel pulled on my hand when I went to go after Alex saying, “I still need to talk to you.”
Judging by look on his face, I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
“Maybe we could talk later?” I suggested. “Or never,” I added, but only to myself.
“It won’t take long mi amor.”
“Don’t call me that,” I replied coldly, completely confident that I would not like where the conversation was headed.
“But that’s just it. You are.”
“No, no, no,” I chanted.
“Adrienne,” he breathed.
“Daniel, please,” I pleaded.
“I love you. I couldn’t figure out why I was so pissed off whenever I couldn’t have you, and when I tried to hook up with some random girl at the club I realized I didn’t want the random girl. I wanted you.”
My stomach was starting to turn again and at the rate that I seemed to upset it lately, I’d be admitted to the hospital for an ulcer.
“Tell me you don’t feel it. That your stomach doesn’t clench when I touch you like this.”
His hands trailed down my back and back up my side until they rested lightly on my neck. He kissed my jaw and the side of my mouth before I backed away.
“Daniel,” I hedged, “You don’t love me. You think you love me, but you don’t.”
He frowned at me like I had just replied to him in another language.
“But I do.”
“But you don’t.”
“Not all men are bad Adrienne.” His voice had taken on a sincere tone that made my head hurt. “I can prove it to you.”
“Daniel, can we finish this later? I just need time to think about all this.”
He gave me a happy smile that said he didn’t realize that the only reason I needed time to think was because I was trying to come up with a decent way to turn him down despite his persistence.
“Okay,” he nodded.
I made a bee line for the living room and spotted Alex sitting on the couch with his eyes closed. He was sitting on the right side with very little room between him and the armrest, but I didn’t care. I practically sat on top of him in my attempt to fit between him and the armrest, because I’d have rather been in his bubble than sitting next to Daniel.
“Is this the part where you tell me the ‘good news’ and I give you an insincere congratulations?” He asked drily. Alex finally opened his eyes to look at me and changed his mind. “Nevermind. I see you balk at commitment even when it’s not me.”
My stomach and head were already hurting from Daniel’s horrifying confession, but Alex’s cutting tone stole my breath away and not in a good way. He looked like he regretted it the moment he said it and it was on the tip of my tongue to say, “That makes two of us.”
“Scoot over,” I commanded, “unless you want my bony butt on your leg for the entire meeting.”
Alex scoffed, but complied. He was pushing me off of him when Natasha came in. The look on her face said she was none too pleased, but she sat down on the other side of Alex any way. Daniel, clearly not wanting to be left out, sat on the armrest next to me and officially made my life a disaster. I didn’t think Natasha would take too kindly to me if I opted to sit between them to escape the current thorn in my side, so I just gritted my teeth together and stayed silent. Alex, to my annoyance, had the nerve to laugh at our predicament.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel at least a little satisfied when I elbowed him and saw him wince.
“And with that the gang is all here,” Jose announced as he and Vitor walked through the door I, myself, had walked through only moments ago.
“Before we discuss the job, anyone have any announcements?”
“Adrienne’s truck is a POS?” Vitor interjected with a laugh.
“Hey!” I protested. “I asked you to fix it, not mock it.”
“I’m sorry mi amor, but your truck is offensive.” Daniel replied, deciding to add his two cents.
Everyone other than Alex looked between Daniel and I stunned by his term of endearment. It pissed me off that he put me on the spot, but at the end of the day, I blamed myself. The entire horrid situation was penance for thinking I could act on the impulse without consequence. I’d slept with Daniel for the past couple of years, knowing it would eventually lead to disaster. And because I was stupid, things weren’t much better with Alex. Regardless of whose fault all this originally was, Daniel was the current idiot. He was in the running for the “Biggest Idiot” Award, and at the rate he was going he’d win it hands down.
With my self-control spent on not withholding my sarcasm, I didn’t have any left to keep me from pushing him off of the armrest. He fell onto his butt with a loud thud and I smiled in satisfaction. I heard Alex chuckle under his breath, but otherwise the only response I saw was Jose and Vitor’s. They shook their heads at me before Jose took over.
“Alright this job that we have is a different kind of job. We need to break into the courthouse and the police station to steal some files. Most of what’s there is stored electronically, but they have some files in storage that never got input, because they were back in our younger days. The District Attorney that we’ve been paying off has decided that he wants to blackmail us with our records and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say FTP.”
Alex and I exchanged a look at the news. We’d been booked for a bunch of reasons, but we’d gotten off scott-free for a bunch more.
“How is he going to use our records against us? What’s done is done, no?” Natasha asked uneasily.
“No,” I replied, “since none of us were ever tried for half the shit we’ve done, it’s not double jeopardy. He could easily go through the paperwork at breakfast, claim that ‘new evidence’ had emerged at lunchtime and have the cops at our door before dinner.”
Her tanned skin went white as she began to comprehend the weight of what could happen if we had landed on the bad side of a dirty D.A.
“What the hell happened for him to, forgive the music reference, but drop us like we’re hot?”
Jose shrugged, “No clue. He just called me up, said some messed up shit, threatened me and then hung up. Vitor and I have been working on what to do since then.”
“When’d he call?” Daniel asked this time.
“Last night.”
We all let out a string of curses. “Then how do we know he hasn’t already accessed the files?”
“Leave that to me. While you guys are breaking into the courthouse and the police station, I’ll be breaking into his house to wipe his hard drive and to confiscate any evidence of our association.”
The others continued to discuss logistics and the risks of splitting up, along with the hazards of doing a job of such huge magnitude with little to no planning. I knew I should be giving the discussion my undivided attention, so that I could donate to the idea pool, but I couldn’t. Most of their discussion was white noise and I wasn’t feeling so hot.
Despite the open floor plan that gave the living room the appearance that it was bigger than it was, I felt almost claustrophobic. Was this the event that Vincent was referring to? If it was, then what was I supposed to do? If I suggested that we just wait out the D.A, we could end up in prison for a very long time. If I suggested that we do each job separately, the D.A might catch on and bring in the cops. And if I said nothing at all and we split up to do each job at the same time, we might not have enough coverage to destroy the incriminating files before the cops got on site.
“I need to use the restroom,” I blurted out.
The room went silent as I jumped off of the couch, but I didn’t stop until I reached the bathroom. I needed five minutes, just five minutes, to think without their voices penetrating my thoughts.
What was I supposed to say? The people sitting in the living room were my friends. Even on our worst drama filled day, which today could easily be classified, they were more than just friends. They were almost family. I couldn’t imagine the world without them in it and I didn’t want to. None of them deserved to die.
For all I knew our impending job wasn’t even what Vincent meant, but even as I thought that, I was aware that I couldn’t afford to think like that. It was better to be safe than sorry and the potential weight of my decisions loomed over me like the Grim Reaper.
A knock on the bathroom door made me jump.
“You okay in there Midget?”
“Yeah, I’m just dropping a load.”
“You are so obscene,” he chuckled. “Let me in. I know you’re lying.”
“Go away,” I groaned. All I wanted was a moment to be left alone with my thoughts.
“Let me in or I’ll send Daniel to come get you.”
“No!” I exclaimed scrambling for the bathroom door.
He smirked down at me as I practically threw open the door. “So easy,” he taunted, stepping past me.
Alex went to stand by the bathroom counter and I warred with myself whether or not to close the door.
“Close it.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I closed it and rested my back against it.
“Ven aqui mi amor,” he mocked.
“Come here my love,” I parroted back in English. “You’re a douche. You know I hated when he said that. It was beyond uncomfortable.”
Granted, it sounded way better coming from Alex, but I would never tell him that because it appealed to me in ways it shouldn’t.
“Fine,” he grinned, “Come here Midget. We need to talk, you and I.”
“No,” I drawled, “I think I’m comfortable right where I am.”
“Why are you so difficult?” he sighed, coming to me when it became apparent that I had no intention of going to him.
He held me to him and I closed my eyes, absorbing his warmth. It felt the same as Daniel’s hug, but a million times better. He rested his chin on the top of my head, refusing to let go as he said, “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
I wanted to tell him so badly, but Vincent’s warning rang in my head yet again.
‘The decisions you make and even the ones you help make will determine if people live or die and you can count yourself as one of the people who might not make it.’
“No,” I shook my head.
He pulled away from me and I could tell my response hurt him. His face was carefully blank, but if I knew anyone like the back of my hand, it was Alex.
“Look, I said I was sorry and that I’d work to make things go back to the way they were.”
“Alex, I still want things to go back to the way they were, but I can’t tell you this. Trust me, okay? It’s not you, it’s-”
“Don’t finish that,” he warned, stepping away from me. “Be fake with Daniel, but never be fake with me.”
“I just… I can’t Alex. Not right now.”
His jaw clenched and unclenched in frustration as he struggled to understand without much help from me. “Tell me this then: Does Ben know?”
I looked away, because even though he didn’t know everything, he knew more than Alex.
He sighed loudly while I decided how best to answer him.
“It’s fine Adrienne. As long as you’re not dealing with whatever is going on by yourself that’s all that matters.”
The back of his fingers ran down my cheek, his face more than a little sad.
“We’ve got to get back to the discussion since we’ve got to get it done sooner than later. If you change your mind and want to talk later, you’ve got the key to our place.”
He kissed my cheek softly and left the bathroom without another word.
//A POS=piece of shit and FTP= F*ck that Puto. I won't translate that for you. Just know it's not nice and not to say it. lol What do you think of the most recent developments? The dirty D.A? Daniel's confession? Etc. Let me know in the comments!