Odin's Murder (20 page)

“Memory...”

“Don’t. Not now. Come on.” She threads her fingers through mine and leads us down the sidewalk. My face is going to hurt like a bastard tomorrow, but right now, I’m walking as high off the ground as she is.

20.

Mercury

The girls’ dorm lobby is empty but for the resident monitor, playing ping pong with a guy in a wrist brace and two visual art majors clutching their portfolios. Ethan turns his face as the paint-daubed pair walk by, and I give them the get-lost eyeball when they cast curious glances. They do.

“Where would I find a first aid kit?” I call to the girl with the paddle. “I need a Band-Aid.”

She doesn’t look up from her game. “Bottom drawer of the desk. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Just a scratch.”

I grab the eye wash from the metal box, and antibiotic ointment, suture bandages and gauze. Ethan examines the inner lid, where a capped syringe is held by sterile tape. “Is that like what Julian has?” he asks, taking the stuff from my hands and shoving it back in the case. He tucks the container under his arm, and glances back out the door we came in. No one is approaching the steps to the dorm.

I nod, watching the table tennis players. She’s about to serve. “Thanks,” I call, and when she bounces the ball, I tug Ethan’s hand. “C’mon.”

He reaches above my head and pivots the convex mirror away from the hallway leading to my room. We pass no one in the corridor.

“Where’s Faye?” he asks, turning a slow circle around our room, and I have to smile at the look on his face, gawking at the kaleidoscope of fashion scarves and fetish necklaces, nail polish and potpourri.

“She hasn’t been here,” I say. Nothing has changed since I left the room. No wrinkles in the cover on the bed, nothing shifted on her desk. “Probably still at the library.” I grab a Coke from the little fridge, and exchange it for the kit in his hands. He presses the can against his mouth, unopened, a makeshift icepack. I unwrap the gauze and swab at the splits in his skin, starting on his knuckles. “You want to wait for her here? She’ll be back before midnight. I don’t really feel like having a run-in with Jeremy again.”

“If I stay, I won’t be able to leave. Does the RA do a room check?” He traps my fingers with his own as I smear a bit of ointment on his fist. “And will Faye mind?”

“No,” I say. “And no.” I reach up to mop the blood off his cheek. He’s holding his breath, and I follow his gaze to my open shirt buttons and the eyeful of me. I click my tongue at him and shove him backward, until he sits on my bed. He’s huge and rough and out of place and perfect. I don’t do up the buttons on my blouse; he’d won a fist fight for me after all.

“Enough,” Ethan says, wincing. “Stings like a mother.”

“Shhh.” I ignore him and blot the cut below his eye with cotton balls soaked in saline. I’m close enough to him that I smell him, salt sweat and hot boy. I blow on his cheek when he shies from the burn, and goose bumps rise on his skin. He holds bone still, watching my face.

“This might need stitches,” I tell him. “Do we need to get you to the infirmary?”

He glances at the mirror hanging on the back of the door. He’s not in bad shape, but there’s no way he’s going to be able to pass this off as ‘falling down some stairs’. I rummage in the first aid kit, dumping out the various paper-wrapped, single-use portions of medical supplies. He pulls away when I place a suture bandage under his eye.  “I’m okay,” he mumbles around the cold can against his lip. “That’s prolly vhere Jeremy ivs.”

“Thank you.” I add another strip. “For defending me. Again.”

He snorts, tries to hold a smile. “That was as much about me and Jeremy as it was about you. He’s been riding my ass since I got here. It’s like he’s made it his personal mission to try to get me in trouble.”

I clean up the trash and dirty cotton balls and throw them in the garbage can by my desk, then unclasp my sandals, dropping them one at a time on the floor, and sit on the bed next to him, my knees pulled to my chest.  “My brother told me to stay away from the guy drama. He was right, of course. This is going to get you in trouble. You’re not going to be able to hide those wounds.”

“I don’t plan on trying. It was only a matter of time before I got busted for something.” He looks away from me. “Jeremy wasn’t lying about my file. I’m one step out of an adult term. Any violation will get me sent back. This place was the last chance my case worker could come up with—” His hand slides to his pocket, brows twisted with some unvoiced thought.

I groan, and scrub at my face with my hands. “There must be something we can do. I can say you fended off an anonymous attacker. Or not so anonymous. Maybe Jeremy can take the fall for it.”

“They won’t take the word of a convict over a grad of the program, Cherry.”

“I’d testify.” But they wouldn’t believe me, either. They’d say I brought it on myself. They’d be right, too. I look behind me, at my closet. If anything in there goes past my knees, it’s so skin-tight I need body lotion to get it on. The other kids call Faye ‘the hobo girl’. I don’t want to know what they say about me.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” he jokes, but it falls flat in the room, and something, his tone, the way his eyes evade mine says he means it. “You weren’t shocked when Jeremy told you I’ve done time.”

“The way you eat,” I shrug. “And how you look at open doors, like they make you nervous.” I lean into him, kiss his cheek on the one spot that isn’t damaged. “Jeremy doesn’t know me at all, if he thinks that makes a difference to me.”

“It should.”

“I’ve dated boys that didn’t have a criminal record and should have.” He touches his cheek, where I’ve kissed him. I wish I had something for his restless hands, a teddy bear. Or his camera. “What did you do to get sent there in the first place? Get caught stealing?”

“Assault. My temper gets me in trouble.”

“Sometimes you have a reason, though,” I say. “Like tonight.”

“Oh, I always have a reason. They just don’t usually see eye to eye with it.” He kicks off his shoes and falls back on my bed. The fight has ebbed from his body and the bruises are starting to bloom under his skin. He squirms, and digs at the covers beneath him, pulls out a bottle of nail polish. It’s the most demure color I have, a light cerulean appropriately called
A Little Blue
.

“Swiping my make-up, now, are you?” I ask him, taking it from his fingers. “I have shinier shades.” I shake it until the BBs in the bottom rattle loose. Julian would like the color. I resist checking my phone for messages. He’ll be asleep by now anyway; the antihistamine drugs they always give for allergies knock him right out.

The cot groans under my weight as I stretch out alongside Ethan. His skin is warm.

“When was the last time you slept?” I ask.

“I fell asleep before dinner.” His voice breaks, rough. “Not much before that. Sunday night, maybe.”

“That was the last time I saw my brother.”

He turns to face me, raising a hand to push my hair out of my face. “We’ll figure this out. Faye will help us. Maybe someone used another pen-thing on him and he got confused. There’s one in the first-aid kits, right?”  He gestures, some vague hand wave that ends aimed at my torso. My shirt is rumpled sideways, exposing skin and curves. My bra is showing, I know, but I make no move to cover it. He drags his eyes up to my face.

I nod, take a deep breath, force the worry off my skin, and manage a smile. He grins back, and it pulls at his mouth and the adhesive, and his eyes drift down again, to the black lace. 

“I just wish I hadn’t fought with Jules,” I tell him, inching closer. “We almost never do. I mean, we tease each other all the time, but we don’t—”

“Shhh.” He touches my lower lip with his thumb. “He wasn’t mad that night. He wanted to apologize. I’m the one who stopped him, told him to give you some time. You said you wanted to be alone.”

“You guys talked about me?”

“Yeah, I caught him out front with Faye. They were cool, too." His eyelashes are darker than his eyebrows, smudged under exhausted lids.

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head. “Do you really not see it? You share dreams and half a brain but you can’t see past yourself to figure out what was going on with your brother.”

I lean up on one arm. My hair falls over his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

“Julian and Faye. It’s torture, watching them. She’s tying him in knots.”

I laugh. It comes out hard and silly, and I swallow it with a hiccup, glancing at the door. “No way. Julian isn’t like that about girls. Women are abstract to him. Like a mystic symbol or something. I thought he might be gay for a while.”

“Nah,” he says. “Though I’ve never seen a straight guy use so much hair gel. It makes sense, though. Have you ever met a chick more abstract than Faye?”

His smiling mouth—so close to my own—makes me restless, like caffeine on an all-nighter. The suture bandage tugs at his skin, and I smooth it back down with a finger. “So you think all those trips to the library—”

“Yeah. You’re just too freaking self-absorbed to notice.”

“I’m not self-absorbed. I’m not
mannaz,
or whatever Faye says the stupid rune means
.
”

He tucks his hands behind his neck, propping himself up. “Yeah, right.”

I push against his chest. He doesn’t budge. “I’m not.” I shove again.

Ethan grabs my wrists, fingers loose enough for me to break away. “It’s who you are. This crazy-hot chick, who uses her mind and body as a weapon. You’re smarter than these poor bastards you hook up with. You lure them in, hoping one of them will be up to the challenge, and they never are. They’re never enough.”

I wriggle free, but move closer, half-climbing on top of his chest. “So where do you fit into all this?”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re doing with me.” His eyes are wide open, fixed on my face. He swallows, Adam’s apple moving up and down under a gold shadow of stubble.

“I think you do,” I whisper. His lips are fuller than they should be on a guy so rugged. I lean forward, close enough I can feel his breath.

“It’s a bad idea,” He tells me but his hand is already on my back, touching the skin between my shirt and skirt. “That kiss was deadly, Cherry.”

“Since when do you and I care about something being a bad idea?” I kiss his jaw, gently, avoiding the bruise. No sparks zap my brain.

“I’m not big into pain,” he lies. He’s a glutton for pain, but his voice has a catch in it that strips the flirtation from the room. I kiss him again, soft, promising something, I have no idea what, a delicate kiss between his eyebrows, and one bolder, close to his mouth. My hair hangs between us, and he pushes it away. “Do it,” he whispers.

So I do. Right on the mouth.

21.

Enervation

“Good?”

Her lips curl into a smile. “Good.”

“Again,” I dare her, hand still tight on her hip in preparation for the blast that doesn’t come. She leans forward, breasts on my chest, heat and soft and fuck, she smells good. A different fire comes, a slow burn that starts in my stomach and warms lower, where Cherry’s legs are splayed over my groin, skirt bunched at her waist, boobs threatening to fall out of her shirt with every move. Yeah, I’m hoping.

She kisses me again, teasing, sucking, tongue and teeth and she’s killing me, and I’m more than willing to let her. Her shirt is damp with sweat, mine and hers and the summer’s humidity, sticking to her skin, straining the buttons as she moves. Another pops open like it’s doing me a personal favor. Thank you, very much.

Her nipples are the palest pink, half-moon coins rising out of black lace, and I wonder if she’s really blond underneath it all. She reaches for another button, and I force my gaze up, to her smile, bold, lips parted, watching my eyes.

“Wait,” I say, cursing myself even as I continue, because we may only be four kisses deep, but we both know where this is going. I sit up. “Are you sure about this? Things aren’t really in control right now.” 

She stares at me for a minute, eyes narrowed, lips twisted in a pout. She’s striking a pose, but there’s hurt underneath it all. I look at the door, ready to bolt from her need and my hypocrisy and this whole mess when she slides even closer, takes my hand in one of hers. “Maybe this is how I take back control,” she says, “The same way you do with these.”

She brings my fist to her lips, kisses my busted knuckles, and I have no secrets left anymore. I want her as much as she wants me and it’s not as much about control as it is about comfort and contact and the dead certainty that the moment I walk out that door tomorrow morning, I’ll never see her again. So I push her back on the bed and my hands find her hair and my mouth lands on hers. “What about—”

“Faye?” She tugs at my shirt, slides her hands underneath, palms on my chest, fingernails trailing over skin. “I doubt she’ll be back until the library closes. We’ve got an hour.”

I pull my t-shirt over my head, with her help. “I meant protection.”

“Oh.” She rises to her knees, digging in a bag on the shelf over the bed, and I’m treated to a spectacular bottoms-up view of her breasts in the clinging shirt. She settles back down, ass cuddled over my erection.  “I’m on the pill, but—” She thrusts a small pink box into my hands, condoms, packaged for girls, still sealed. “If you think we should—”

“I’m clean,” I tell her. “It’s been two years.”

“I am too,” she says. “I got tested. I had a physical. Before I came here.” She fiddles with her shirt tails, looks away from me, the first time I’ve seen her nervous, and Jeremy’s parting shot about her reputation breaks through my hormone-fogged brain. I drop the box on the floor, and grab her, pulling her down to kiss her smile. She undoes the button on my jeans as I undo her shirt. “No boyfriends in the cell block? You’re awfully pretty,” she teases.

“I’m six foot four, Cherry. No one would dare.” I slide my hands up her thighs, and I know I’m going too fast to be a gentleman, but goddamn, she’s just as eager as I am, and I thank all that is holy because there is no way I’m going to last long at all with this girl grinding on me as she tears at my clothes and hers. I work her with my hands, hoping to calm down, but she’s already slick. Her little whimpers and the way she reaches for me, legs sliding around mine, have me groaning. She catches my wrist and pushes me back, and climbs over me, guiding me, wet push deep inside.