Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Cinna

“Would it have killed the bastard to eat a couple salads in his lifetime?” I grumbled as we dropped the tub down inside of the elevator.

We were all dressed for the cold, jackets, hats, and gloves. But sweat was already beading up on my skin beneath from the weight of the damn tub.

“How inconsiderate of him not to make his dietary choices based on how heavy his corpse would be?” Dav shot back, a smirk toying at his lips.

This was dangerous, I knew. Having him there. Having him help. I should have kicked him out as soon as he came into my apartment.

But then, I reminded myself, who would have taught me to breathe again? Would have held me until the panic passed? Would have held me when I needed it? Without seeming to lose any respect for me?

I didn’t understand what was going on with me, why I was suddenly feeling so fragile and unsure of myself. I just knew that there was no one else in the world I would feel comfortable displaying it in front of aside from Dav.

So I was letting him tag along.

Even if it meant it was going to get even easier for me to melt into him, to give in to my feelings for him.

“The car is right out front,” Dav said. “It’s the lifting it in that is going to be a bitch.”

The doors opened then, and all three of us sucked in a deep breath before grabbing the tote and moving out.

We all acted like our arms weren’t turning to jelly as we made our way out of the building, down the steps, and to the car.

Luckily, the local crew was occupied by some kind of disagreement going on at the corner, so we didn’t have to act like lifting the tote up into the SUV wasn’t killing all of us.

“Christ,” Dav said, slamming the trunk door and huffing out a breath.

As much as I hated to admit it, he’d been shouldering more of the weight than myself and Joel combined.

“Okay. Now, you get your ass back upstairs and pretend tonight never happened, okay? I will come and talk to you when we’re done.”

“Got it,” Joel said, nodding.

“Hey, kid,” I called when he turned to walk away.

“Yeah?” he asked, turning back.

“Thank you. Dunno if I’d be standing here right now if you hadn’t come in,” I admitted, even though it hurt my pride to do it.

“No problem,” he said, shuffling his feet, looking uncomfortable. After a lifetime of getting screamed at, I imagined kindness was foreign and uncomfortable to him.

We watched to make sure he got back in the building before Dav and I silently climbed in the SUV.

“What’s the plan?” I asked. “Probably too cold to dig a grave.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, pulling away from the curb with one hand as he reached to fiddle with some buttons with the other. A second later, the seat started to warm up, chasing the chill out of my bones. “A body of water is likely the best bet this time of year.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “If we anchor it, might never come back up.”

“And even if it did, it would be after a frost and thaw. Not much would be left of it.”

“So I guess the question is… salt or fresh water?” he asked.

“I think anywhere salt will have cameras to worry about.”

“Fresh it is then,” he agreed.

“There’s no fresh water in the city. Central Park aside. And that’s never gonna work.”

“Looks like we’re taking a little road trip, love,” Dav said. “Should we stop for snacks?”

“Coffee maybe,” I said, feeling the exhaustion of the day starting to leech into my bones.

“You could sleep,” Dav said as if he was reading my mind.

“No, not yet,” I said. And when his hand moved out, landing on my thigh, I didn’t push it away.

Just one more night, I would let him be close.

Then, then I had to push him away again.

No matter how hard that would be.

How much it might hurt.

“Mood is getting all sorts of dark in here,” Dav said, glancing over at me.

“We do have a corpse in the trunk,” I reminded him.

“Does that mean it would be wholly inappropriate to put the music on?” he asked.

“Probably,” I agreed, but I reached for the volume myself, wanting something to distract me from the thoughts racing around in my mind.

It only took about an hour and a half of abiding all of the speed limits and traffic lights to reach Jersey. But another couple of hours to get from the built-up part of the Garden State to an area that actually had natural water features.

They were all closed for the year, but the legality of that wasn’t exactly a concern when we were, you know, carting the corpse of the man I’d murdered.

“Shouldn’t you have turned down the last street?” I asked, getting a raised brow from Dav.

“No.”

“I’m pretty sure the arrow said it was that way.”

“Didn’t we agree that your job was to control the radio?” he asked, raising a brow at me.

“Fine. Don’t blame me when we have to backtrack then.”

“You could get your license, and the next time we have to hide a body, you could drive.”

See, the thing is, when you’re doing something illegal, you couldn’t have your phone on you, let alone use GPS to direct you where you were going.

So, yeah, there’d been some snipping at each other during this little road trip.

Fine.

I’d been the only one doing the snipping.

Dav had been all affability, singing with the radio, stopping to get me coffee, taking my surly attitude with a grain of salt.

“So, is your objection to long car rides in general, or not being in control?” he asked, pointing out the dashboard to the sign for the stupid lake I’d just insisted was in the other direction.

“I just want this done,” I said, anxious now that we were close to being finished.

We’d stopped three times on the road.

To get fuel.

To get coffee.

And to get some rope and weights at an all-night box store.

“We should leave the car here,” Dav said, cutting off the lights and the engine on the stone road that cut off not far ahead of us. “No tracks,” he added.

“Ugh,” I grumbled, gauging the distance to the pond. With a heavy dead man. And weights to sink him in the pond with.

“I’ll do the heavy pulling,” he offered.

“You do realize the weights are a solid hundred pounds all together too, right?” I asked.

“So we get to skip the gym this week,” he said, grabbing more rubber gloves, slipping them on, cutting the engine, then climbing out.

Suppressing a grumble, I followed suit, slipping the rope over my arm, grabbing the stack of weights, then following behind Dav as he dragged the tub toward the pond.

“What are you looking at?” I asked when he paused a few feet from the edge of the lake.

“Sign,” he said, moving out of the way, so I could check it out for myself thanks to the way the moon was peeking through the clouds.

“What is red algae?”

“Never watch the news, huh?”

“New Jersey news? No. Why?”

“Red algae means no swimming. This sign looks of the permanent sort. Figure this has been going on for a few years. No one swimming… not much of a chance of ever knocking our little anchor loose.”

“Huh. Good,” I said, nodding.

Contrary to what popular movies suggest, it wasn’t exactly easy for the mafia to hide bodies. At least not in the city. Sure, sometimes we got lucky with groundbreaking on new construction sites. And, yeah, the ocean was always an option if you were careful.

I heard one of the other Five Families, the Costas, actually had a guy on the payroll whose only job was to clean up crime scenes and bury bodies.

Us Lombardis, though, we all handled our own bodies. Which wasn’t always easy. Especially when you didn’t drive.

As Dav opened the tub, then dragged out the body, I had to admit that I was really thankful for his help this time. I’m sure, if I tried hard enough, I would get the job done by myself. But every moment of it would suck.

Dav was as chipper as ever, though, as he took the weights, then began tying them to the arms and legs of the corpse.

“What in the Boy Scouts?” I asked at his effortless rope tying.

“Handy skill to learn,” he said, shrugging it off. “So, what do you think? Weights good enough, or should we slice open the stomach, so it doesn’t bloat up? What?” he asked, looking up at me from his squatted position, head cocked to the side.

“Just… every once in a while, one of us will say something that reminds me how fucking insane our lives are,” I admitted. “This is one of those moments. But, ah, I think he might have enough holes in him.”

“Fair enough,” Dav said, looking at the body. “Alright. If you can carry two of the weights down the dock, I can take him and the other two.”

So that’s what we did, grunting and grumbling and sweating through our coats and gloves.

In the end, the body flew over. Half a second later, all the weights were in too, and we stood there at the end of the dock, panting for breath and watching him disappear.

Dav lowered down onto the dock, exhaling hard.

“Fuck,” he sighed, slipping off his rubber gloves, and shoving them into his coat jacket, then taking off said jacket to rest it on the dock and lay back on top of it.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a nice night. Trees. Sky. Fresh air.”

“Pesky, rotting corpse just underneath us…”

“Get your pretty ass down here and enjoy it for five minutes,” he demanded. When I didn’t immediately move to do just that, he reached up, snagged my wrist, and pulled me down next to him.

I shrugged out of my jacket, spreading it beside Dav, then moved to lie flat as well, reminding myself that I was allowed to have this one last night before I pushed him away again.

“Okay. It is pretty. Corpse aside,” I agreed, looking up at the moody night sky, the clouds moving across the moon, giving it a spooky look as the wind kicked up, surrounding us with scents of dirt and leaves and water. Things the city didn’t really have to offer.

“Ever want to move out of the city?” he asked.

“No,” I said immediately. “But to be fair, I’ve spent almost no time outside of it.”

“I don’t really ever either. But that one summer in rural Pennsylvania had me wishing for a change of pace for a while. Sun, long days out by the pond, riding bikes, four-wheelers, local wildlife that wasn’t rats the size of your average cat…”

“When you were a teen, right?” I asked, remembering his story about his cousins and the porn.

“Yeah. Just the one summer.”

“Why?”

“Because my old man was locked up for knocking around my mom. And my mom was in the mental institution for trying to kill herself for the third time. Either my aunt had to step up, or I was going to go into foster care. And since next to no one wants a teenage boy, I would have been in a group home.”

“I didn’t realize your mom…”

“Had a habit of taking handfuls of pills to escape reality?” he filled in. “Yeah, no one does.”

“Did you get to go back with her?”

“Fucked up part is my ma was locked away longer than my father was,” he said, shaking his head. “He came to get me, dragged me back to the city, then beat on me while he waited for my mom to be released.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Figure you have a similar story,” he said, shrugging it off.

“I didn’t have a dad,” I admitted, surprised the words were coming out of me. “I mean, there was a man who fucked my mom and made me, but he was never in the picture. No name on the birth certificate either. Figure my mom didn’t even know who it was.

“She was always too strung out to pay attention to pesky details like someone’s name. Or what they were trying to do to her daughter…”

“Cin…” Dav said, voice horrified as he reached for my hand, fingers slipping between mine, and squeezing hard.

“I was good at hiding when I was little. Then better at sleeping with a knife when I was older.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling my hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to the back of it.

“I survived.”

“You shouldn’t have needed to survive that.”

“I made it,” I said, shrugging. “Though I think you came out of your shitty childhood better than I did.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, his voice soft. “I like how you turned out.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, rolling my eyes as I looked back at the moon.

“Hey,” he said, voice demanding my attention, so I turned. “I have no reason to lie about that.”

“Except for to get in my pants again,” I said, trying to brush it away.

“Love, I wouldn’t have to lie to get that,” he said, his other hand sliding down my belly, heading lower, making my breath catch. But he paused just before he could touch me where I needed him most. Before I could stop it, a grumble escaped me. “See?” he asked, turning on his side, his warm breath on my ear.

“Dav…”

“Yeah?” he asked, teeth snagging my earlobe. “ Dav , what? Slide my hand between your thighs, and touch your sweet pussy?” he asked, dragging a little whimper out of me as he toyed with my button, but didn’t work it free.

“Yes,” I sighed when his hand refused to move without an answer.

“Are you wet for me?” he asked, lips going to my neck, making a little shiver course through me.

“Yes.” There was no use denying it. I swear I was turned on anytime he was near. Hell, I was turned on just by the idea of him anymore.

“Hmm. Maybe I should check,” he said, pushing the button through, then sliding down the zipper.

My breath felt tight in my chest, anticipation sizzling across my nerve endings, as the backs of his chilled fingers teased across my bare skin.

That rumbling sound escaped him as his fingers slipped suddenly under my panties, teasing up my slick cleft.

“Fuck,” Dav groaned. “I love how much your pussy is always so wet for me,” he said, fingers sliding up my cleft to tease over my sensitive clit.

My back arched at the touch as a little moan escaped me.

“So sensitive,” he said, working me in slow circles.

I could feel him, his hardness pressing against my thigh, making my sex ache at the idea of him inside of me again.

My hand was moving before I even realized I was intending to do so, closing over his cock, and working my hand around it with my palm.

A groan escaped Dav, and his fingers slipped down, sliding inside of me as his thumb worked my clit and his hips rocked against my touch, needing more.

And I wanted to give it to him.

My palm left him, so I could work his pants free, reaching inside, and closing around his length without the barrier.

A growl escaped Dav as I worked him.

“Fuck,” he groaned, breathing hard.

“Dav, fuck me,” I moaned, my hips rocking against his hand, needing more. Needing him.

“I’ll never get tired of hearing you say that,” he said, finding a condom with one hand, then sliding his other out of my pants to protect us as I kicked out of my boots, then yanked off my pants and panties, feeling the cold night air bite at my overheated skin.

Dav moved in at my feet, his hands sliding down my legs to sink into my hips, pulling me up onto his lap. Then, with his gaze fixed on mine, he surged inside of me.

“Fuck,” we both groaned in unison, our bodies tensing, our breaths catching.

My hands reached out, grabbing his on my hips as he started to fuck me.

Fast and desperate as we were both feeling in the moment, too needy for each other to think of anything but oblivion, we rose together, breath going ragged, bodies tensing and writhing.

“That’s it,” Dav said as my walls tightened around him. “Come for me.”

Just like that, I did, crying out into the open night air.

“Fuck, again,” he said between gritted teeth, trying to hold out, to make it last, as he kept slamming inside of me.

I was still gasping for breath when I grabbed for him, using him for leverage to move up onto his lap, riding him as his lips crashed down on mine.

I melted into him as his arms wrapped me up, holding me close as my hips did little rocking movements, stoking the need, but doing nothing to satisfy it.

Not that it mattered.

I was too focused on his lips, in the deep intensity of them, in the way I felt those same warm, confusing feelings for him move across over me, sink into me, fill up all the dark places inside.

It was all well and good until my heart felt like it was swelling, filling up with him.

The exact thing I couldn’t let happen.

I broke the kiss, then pushed him until he moved to lie flat on the dock, the space breaking the spell, but reigniting my desire as he looked up at me with hungry eyes.

His hands slid up my thighs, then under my shirt, reaching to cover my breasts through my bra.

Frustrated, needing more, I reached down, yanking off my shirt, ignoring the way goosebumps spread across my skin.

The rumbling sound that escaped him made my pussy tighten around his hard length.

Reaching behind my back, I yanked at my clasps until they freed, then pulled off my bra.

My nipples tightened in the cold, and the shock of his warm hands on my breasts dragged a ragged moan out of me as I started to ride him, the need a clawing thing as he touched me.

His hips started to rock up into me as I moved in fast circles, driving us both up, our ragged breaths and groans filling the air.

“You look so fucking good riding me,” Dav moaned, his gaze vacillating from my face, my chest, and where we were joined, then back again.

“Fuck,” I moaned, head falling back as the orgasm started to crest.

Dav thrust up into me harder, faster, driving me right through the orgasm that had me crying out over and over, my body shaky as I took him with me as while called out my name.

I was still straddling him, sucking deep, greedy breaths, when, suddenly, one caught on a bubble of laughter that only spread until it was a full, rolling laugh.

“What is it?” Dav asked, giving me a strange smile as his fingers moved up and down my thighs.

“This is insane,” I said, shaking my head. “We just fucked over the sinking corpse of a guy I just killed.”

A chuckle moved through him as I lifted off, trying to gather all of my clothes and slip back into them.

“Hey, if ever there was a night when we deserved a little stress relief, this was it,” he reasoned.

“There’s a trash can back there,” I said as he removed the condom. “We can take the bag with us,” I added. “Drop it off somewhere on the way back to Brooklyn.”

With that, he walked off, leaving me to complete the unglamorous job of getting my boobs back into a bra in private.

“What’s the matter?” Dav asked as he walked back, finding me standing there, fully dressed aside from my jacket that was still on the dock beside his.

“My boot is missing.”

His gaze immediately went to the water, dread filling his eyes. “Do you think the algae is dead in the winter?” he asked, grimacing at the idea of going in.

“This is when I would normally insist on getting it myself,” I said, looking at the water too. “But I am going to play the role of damsel in distress and let you go get whatever flesh-eating bacteria that water has to offer.”

Another laugh burst out of Dav at that, his gaze sliding to me, something on his stupidly handsome face that had my chest feeling all gooey.

“Damn,” I said when my gaze slid away, liking that sensation too much, and knowing I needed to tamp it down.

“What?”

“It’s right there,” I said, waving toward where it had fallen off the dock into the dirt. “I was really rooting for the flesh-eating bacteria.”

That got another chuckle as he fetched the boot, then knelt down in front of me, offering it like a prince in a silly fairy tale.

Except I was nobody’s princess.

I shoved my foot in and was quick to walk around Dav, wanting to put more distance between us again.

The ride back through New Jersey didn’t have as much of the ease as riding into it had. We stopped for more coffee and fuel, dropped off the trash bag we’d taken, and got something quick to eat in the car.

By the time we were idling outside my apartment, the sun was up, blinding to my tired eyes.

“Go home and get some sleep,” I said when he moved to put the car in park.

“I need to help clean—“

“I’ve got it,” I cut him off. “You figure out something to do with that tote for me.”

“Cin…”

“Thanks, Dav,” I said, rushing out before he could say whatever he was about to.

I knew I was too delicate right then.

Too willing to let myself want things I couldn’t have.

It was better this way.

Even if each step up into my building ached.