“I am waiting for a few people to get back to me,” I said.
“So we wait?” I was not comfortable with waiting. Action felt better.
“You want to play cards?” she asked.
“What?”
“A game? Charades?”
“The fuck are you talking about, Poppy.”
She smiled at me, a creature of light and dark. Constantly surprising. “Trying to give you some options for killing time while we wait.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“Clearly, I’m not very good at it. We could go get lunch?”
“It’s too dangerous,” I told her.
“Then whatever will we do?” she asked, batting her eyelashes at me.
“I’ll show you,” I said and threw her and her pretty yellow sundress over my shoulder.
In the bedroom I kissed her sweetly. Tenderly.
A new kind of kiss. A different taste.
An antidote to the last time. To the violence and the rage.
Our clothes fell off and we collapsed back onto the bed.
“Like this,” she whispered, and rolled on top of me. I put my hands on her hips as she fucked me. But it was obvious she hadn’t done this before. I imagined the senator hadn’t given her any power in the bedroom and at the thought wanted to kill him all over again.
She got the rhythm all wrong and I slipped out and she winced, coming down on me strange.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, embarrassed. She shifted her weight to roll off of me, but I held her hips. Held her there.
“It’s all right, Poppy,” I said. “Give yourself a second.”
“I don’t…I haven’t done this.”
I knew. And I loved it. Her innocence, no matter how fumbling, was delicious to me. As delicious as when she smacked me in the bathroom.
I knew she was not made for war. That what she’d thought yesterday would fade and she’d remember how she didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Her heart would return to softness and she’d let go of her dreams of revenge.
I was made for war. Sweet Poppy was not.
I showed her the rhythm she would like, gently. Quietly. It was slow at first, finding the friction and the angle. Shallow and short, not fucking me so much as grinding on me.
I wasn’t going to come this way. But she was. And never in my life had that been enough for me.
But Poppy’s pleasure was mine for as long as she would share it with me. And it was more than enough.
* * *
We lay in the dark afterward, exhausted but wired. Every time I fucked her, I felt like I was getting away with something.
She rolled onto her side, our skin sticking together and then pulling apart.
“Watch it, lass,” I hissed.
“What did you want to be when you were young?” she asked.
I laughed. “Alive.”
“Come on, before St. Brigid’s when you were a boy. When you were young enough to have that kind of daydream. What did you want to be?”
“Poppy—”
“It’s just a question.” She smiled at me. I scowled at her.
“Professional footballer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you any good?”
“No. Total shite.”
“Are you joking? I can never tell when you’re joking.”
“A kid I went to school with, his da worked on a ferry between Belfast and Liverpool. I thought… I liked the idea of working on a ferry. Being outside. Coming and going all the time. Being on the water. The birds and shit.”
“The birds and shit?”
“You asked, what are you getting cheeky for?”
“I wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “I used to line up all my stuffed animals and pretend I was teaching them to read. The penguin was dyslexic. He needed extra help.”
Oh my god, she was going to kill me with her sweetness.
“What would you do if you weren’t doing…” she struggled with the words.
“Killing people?” I asked her.
“That’s what Bryant will want you to do, isn’t it? If you work for him.”
I pushed the hair off her face, traced the edge of her ear with my finger. She was so soft. Seriously, the softest thing I’d touched.
“You could do anything,” she whispered. “Be anything.”
I thought of Jacob in my hallway, saying he didn’t want to kill anyone anymore and how, at the moment, I’d thought he was a fool. Believing he could be something else. But I realized now he didn’t believe. He was wishing. He was wishing he could be different. And with Eden gone, he saw a way to make the wish real.
I wasn’t so lucky.
“I’m a soldier, lass. A killer. War is what I know.”
“But it could be different,” she whispered and rolled over my body. She was wet and warm between her legs and the weight of her, the thought of her made me hard.
She kissed me, sliding down my body to take my cock in her mouth and I tangled my hands in her hair and I let myself wish.
* * *
Poppy
“We can only have sex so many times,” I said.
“That’s not true,” Ronan said. He was feeding me again. Pasta with basil and tomatoes and spicy little peppers. A ton of cheese. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten.