Page 38 of Book of Night
“When I saw you tonight—what he’d done, what he wasdoing,I wanted to kill him. I was furious and I haven’t stopped being furious. I don’t feel guilty. I wish he was alive so I could kill him again.”
Astonishment robbed her of breath. Vince didn’t get angry. He didn’t talk about his feelings. He didn’t sit alone in the dark, talking about shadows and stars.
He turned to her. “Pretend I didn’t say any of that. If you can, pretend tonight never happened, Charlie.”
She smiled a little, trying to regain her equanimity. “Then what are we doing together out in the cold?”
“Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her. A desperate kiss, his mouth bruisingly hard. Nothing like the way he’d kissed her before. Charlie’s body reacted, the sharp shock of her desire unexpected. His lips moved along her cheekbone to her throat and she swallowed a moan. Her nails sank into the muscle of his arms.
She wanted him, right then, against the concrete steps. Despite everything that had happened that night. Maybe, horribly, some part of her even wanted him because of it.
Nothing about him was careful as his body bent in a cage over hers. All she had on was a robe, easy to part.
“I need to…” he began, hesitating. “You must be…”
Hurt. Tired. Uncomfortable.
She kissed him before he could finish the thought.
One of his hands stroked along her rib cage, his finger skimming the edge of the old bullet wound before moving to her thigh. Parting her legs. His desire was raw-edged, vulnerable. As though he’d shown her something true about himself for the first time.
She dug her fingers into his hair. Bit his lip.
Anger confused her body, making her desire burn brighter, making everything faster and sharper and hotter. Better. His hunger answered her ferocity. Blotting out the night and the fear and the cold and everything.
As her thoughts spiraled away, her gaze fell on the aluminum siding of the house. She watched as her shadow-self arched her back and rose up off the stairs at an impossible angle. Without Vince’s shadow, it was like being in the grips of a demon lover. Possessed. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
12THE PAST
Hall Pass, they called her in junior high, as in “Did you get your Hall Pass?” Asked to the boys by one another, snickered about by the girls. There was some glory in it, to be thought of as the girl with all the experience, especially when in fact Charlie had absolutely none. But it was mostly humiliating, her body drawing boys to her and repulsing them at once. It made group assignments fraught. Push your desks together and Matt Panchak spent most of his time sliding one sneakered foot up your leg, taking your lack of complaint for desire.
Never mind that you’d gone to kindergarten with him.
Never mind that once, during PE, he’d gotten a soccer ball kicked into his stomach so hard that he threw up, and you were the one who walked him to the nurse’s office.
No, now you were a pair of legs with boobs on top, with the ability to banish all his insecurities. Venus on the half shell.
In gym class, while she was changing, Doreen Kowalski asked Charlie all kinds of questions about when she’d gotten her period and whether she shaved her underarms and what size bra she wore. At first, she wondered if Doreen wanted to be friends, but once Charlie answered, Doreen rushed back to her knot of buddies, giggling.
They didn’t understand how her bra straps cut into her shoulders and underwires cut into her ribs, and that the bras that fit looked like ones a matronlynurse would wear in an old war movie. There was no way to make them understand.
Charlie put on darker eyeliner and wore baggier clothes and stompier boots.
Rand didn’t seem to know what to do with her either. When he’d recruited her at twelve, she’d already looked older than her age. By the time she was starting high school, her body let her pass for a grown woman.
It didn’t help that Charlie got a little too good at all the wrong things. She had a nose for where an unlocked window or door might be when she approached houses. Her pickpocketing was deft enough that Rand didn’t let her get close to him. And when she played a role, she disappeared into it.
He liked the idea of passing on his knowledge to a kid with some natural talent, but he didn’t want her to be better than him. And he definitely didn’t want her as competition.
“You and me, we’re the same,” he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. “We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”
Sometimes after she’d done particularly well on a job, he’d be in a spiteful mood. He’d condescendingly call her “Little Miss Charlatan,” go over every mistake she made, and give her less of the take than she deserved.
But if Charlie’s growing skill frustrated him, he also clearly enjoyed having someone to whom he could complain, or brag, or rant. The natural consequence of criminality was that he had to be discreet about it, and Rand wasn’t a discreet person by nature.
Sometimes he could be fun. He took her with him to the Moose Lodge in Chicopee, where a bunch of old racketeers drank, and let her sit around drinking burnt coffee with lots of cream while they regaled her with stories. She rubbed elbows with fences and forgers. Learned how to count cards from Willie Lead, who told her about Leticia, his late wife and, according to him, the greatest stickup artist ever to knock over a liquor store.
“It was the throat cancer that got her in the end,” he said mournfully. “The cops never even came close.”
