He leaned over, gave me a sweet, soft, careful kiss to the lips and gave me an almost whispered, "Happy New Year, honey."
"Happy New Year," I agreed, giving him a smile I felt down to my soul as he raised his glass.
"Progress?" he asked.
And I nodded. "Progress."
Perfect.
It was all so perfect it hurt.
You know, until the next day when it all got ruined.ELEVENRyanI never really gave a shit about New Years Eve. Most of the time, I was in bed and half asleep while answering work emails at midnight. It just wasn't my thing. I wasn't a party guy and I hadn't had a serious girlfriend to give a shit about a midnight kiss since I was probably in my early twenties.
But putting a little effort in, staying awake, and watching Dusty get fucking bombed in the goddamn cutest way possible then getting a kiss at midnight?
Yeah, totally worth it.
Getting to feel her come around my fingers as she cried out my name into my neck?
Fucking perfect.
Getting to understand how she came to be how she was? That was incredibly important. I needed to know. I needed to see how to look out for her in the future.
The story about her mother was fucked. Having come from a family that, while their methods of parenting weren't exactly traditional, they were all done in love, in the interest of raising good, strong, respectful men, I couldn't imagine what it was like to not have that. To be treated like a pest, to be put in potentially dangerous situations.
If what Bry said was true, I was glad she wasn't in touch with that piece of work. She was probably better off without her.
Speaking of Bry, I had heard from him twice, just updates saying he hadn't made any headway yet. Which, frankly, meant he probably never would. The product was likely gone and he and Dusty and therefore me, were all likely fucked.
My phone rang, Mark's name flashing on the screen. "What's up, Mark?" I asked, grabbing my keys, giving Dusty a quick kiss to the temple, having already told her as I dressed that I needed to run into Chaz's to check the log for the night before, and headed into the hall.
"So, couldn't find shit out myself so I reached out to Sawyer's little brother..."
"Barrett?" I asked, having a vague memory of him back from when we used to hang with Sawyer in high school. Barrett hadn't been the shit-starting, rough and tumble type like me and my brothers and Sawyer were so we didn't see him much, always glued to his computers, video games, or books. I'd heard that he had a knack with some investigating shit and that Sawyer used him occasionally on cases, but didn't realize he did anything for himself.
"Yeah, he's a whiz at this shit now apparently. Anyway, he did some digging and traced Bry to some guy in Camden named Dom Donovan."
He paused at that and I knew him well enough to know that that was a bad thing. Mark never had an issue talking your fucking ear off when he felt like it, which was most of the fucking time. "Not getting any younger here, Mark."
"He's bad. The kind of bad we don't fuck with. The kind of bad that no one fucks with. He's got a rap sheet that makes Atlas Shrugged seem short," he said with real disgust in his tone. He'd needed to read that book in his final year of high school and got sick of it all of three pages in and decided to charm one of the cute nerdy girls in class to write his paper for him. Which she did, happily. And he got an A without ever having read the book I found him using as a doorstop in his apartment.
"For?"
"Mostly violent shit. Aggravated assault, guns charges, drunk and disorderly."
"Not possession?" I asked, bleeping the locks to my car.
"Never been caught with even a joint on him. He keeps himself clean of that, only dirtying himself up, it seems, to protect his rep. And aside from the shit that's on the books, there is a lot that's not that he has attributed to him. Including six rapes and nine murders."
Fucking wonderful.
"And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the shit his men have gotten away with either."
I stiffened in the seat of my car, not bothering to turn it over because something occurred to me right then, something I really didn't want to consider, something that meant a world of bad.
"What is it?" he asked, obviously picking up on the heaviness even across the line.
"Ever stop to consider that maybe this was an inside thing. Maybe Dom got a whiff of something he doesn't like about Bry and took his shit back?" Which would make sense why they were so merciless with Dusty. If Dom and his men were big on rape, then it was a fucking miracle I got there in time."