The Hunter (Boston Belles 1)

Maybe that’s why he said what he said. He thought I was asleep, not just resting.

“Agnes,” he whispered. “The nanny’s name was Agnes.”

Mood song: “Zombie” by Jamie T.

The next week sucked worse than the previous two.

My life had seemed to shift from a theme park of orgasms, designer clothes, and eternal sunshine to an ongoing, cloudy, celibate catastrophe.

First, I had to explain why I looked like my face had been chewed by severely diseased pit bulls at the office. Luckily—and I use that term very fucking loosely—Captain Save-a-Bro, AKA Sailor, promised she wouldn’t snitch on my ass in her weekly report to Da, which made me feel like a teacher’s pet, sans the fun part, where I got rewarded with a blowie (or was that only in porn?).

Sailor and I had agreed to give Da an altered version of how things went down at the pub. Basically, we confessed that I did get into a fistfight, but only because the guy grabbed her. That story was received with icy skepticism by Da and Cillian, and warm endorsement by Syllie, who’d sat in Da’s office when I told them about it.

Ultimately, nobody complained about how I looked like a jacked-up Thirteen Reasons Why character—all cut, bruised, and limping. If someone harassed a woman in front of them, they’d do the same. I was just being a goddamn gentleman.

Then there was the Syllie problem. Da had shut me down and Cillian considered watching me squirm an orgasmic occasion, so I had to do my own digging. I shadowed Syllie’s ass at work when he wasn’t paying attention. He was still basically the only motherfucker to be remotely civilized with me, but I knew what I’d heard, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Problem was, I’d had zero luck and even less opportunity thus far.

Syllie wasn’t taking any private calls in the emergency stairway, and I needed to up my game. In the five days that followed the pub brawl, I surprised myself with the effortless commitment I put into tailing his ass. I experienced a soul-crushing, gut-burning urgency to know what he was up to.

Then there was the final, last problem: Sailor.

I hadn’t discussed what happened in the pub with her, but I imagined she was freaked out about being called fugly and having no man among the hundred or so in the pub dispute that assessment.

Let the record show that I, personally, would pork the hell out of her.

Like, yeah, she wasn’t fuck-hot in an obvious kind of way. She didn’t have big tits, curves for miles, lips that looked like a neatly shaved vagina, and glossy hair. But she was the kind of girl who, the more you looked at her, the more her beauty crept up on you. She was unusually attractive, but still attractive. Kind of like Lily Cole. (It took me three times until I finally managed to jerk off to a Lily Cole picture. But once I found my rhythm, she was one of my favorite models to nut to.)

There was something whimsical about Sailor’s red hair and pale skin and sage eyes. She looked like a fairy from an Irish folklore, one where a lot of strange, magical shit happened.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but if I were, say, to plow into Sailor Brennan one day, you could bet your ass I’d be looking at her face and whispering sweet nothings into her ear. (Profanity about what I wanted to do to her uterus was considered sweet, right?)

However much I found my roommate delectable, I couldn’t tell her flat out, because she already suspected I wanted into her pants (guilty) and also because we’d both acted weird since the pub brawl (also guilty).

What I couldn’t explain to her was this: I’d always been the idiot. The fool. The fuckup. I blurted shit I thought would make people laugh, because I was never expected to say anything meaningful or deep. Mildly entertaining was all anyone had ever expected from me. I was so committed to being a careless idiot, that the idea of not being one intimidated me.

With Sailor, I couldn’t be an idiot. She constantly threw me out of my comfort zone, and I kept scrambling back to it.

After we’d wolfed down our McMeals and stunk up her car, we got back home and she’d tended to my wounds in the bathroom wordlessly.

In the morning, I’d walked in to find her in the kitchen. It was seven-thirty, far too late for her to still be home. I’d watched as she shoved two Advils into her mouth, washed them down with a bottle of Evian, and dragged herself back to bed. I went to work, and when I got back, she was out, probably training.

The next time we spoke, it had been about how Nora’s food was so spicy our rectums were about to sue our mouths, and how we should let her go and just DoorDash everything. Sailor confirmed that finding good food spots was her talent. Which, side note, made her marriage material, if I was into monogamy.