“You just asked me that question.”
“No, I asked if you enjoy beating Joey up. I mean, generally, do you enjoy your job? Do you enjoy beating people up?”
“And like I said, that’s not my full job. I do other things.”
“And I suppose you’re not going to tell me the other things.”
“You suppose correctly.”
“Okay.”
But you know how sometimes you feel like you have a gut instinct about someone? You know how sometimes you feel like you’ve known them forever even though you don’t know anything? That’s how I felt about him. Like we were kindred spirits.
If I’m honest, I thought he’d had some sort of broken, crazy relationship as well, and we’d found each other in the night and that’s why we’d fucked like rabbits and had this chemistry.
But now it was sinking in how much I truly didn’t know about him—and how much he knew about me. Could this really be a coincidence? Could I really end up randomly meeting the guy that I’d paid to beat up my ex at a train station?
I’m naive, but I’m not that naive. Something else was going on here. But if he was lying to me about that, there was no way I would get him to tell me the truth about everything else. But perhaps I could get more information out of him if he thought that I did believe him. Maybe I’d catch him out in some sort of lie. I already told you I’m no private detective, but I’m not dumb. I can read people, and I can read situations. I know when someone’s telling me the truth or not, and I knew there was a lot more that Jackson wasn’t telling me.
“So are you Russian, then?”
“You just can’t give up on that Russian thing, huh? Why do you care so much?”
“I don’t care so much. I’m just curious.”
“My parents are Russian, yes. Hence Alexei.”
“So you were born in Russia?”
He stared at me for a few seconds, his fingers tapping against the side of his pint glass. I could tell he was thinking. I didn’t know why the question required so much thought.
“You don’t have to answer me if it’s going to be this big of a deal.”
“It’s not a big deal. I was actually born in Ukraine,” he said quietly, a hint of an accent in his voice.
“You have an accent?” I stared at him in surprise. “Have you been faking your voice this whole time?”
“I’m not faking my voice. I sometimes have an accent. I sometimes don’t. But I could put it on very easily,” he said in a very deep Russian accent now. He laughed at the look of shock on my face. “I thought that’s what you wanted me to sound like. You seem to care so much if I’m Russian.”
“I don’t care that much. But which is your real voice?” I was confused now. Maybe I was too tired. Maybe I was too drunk. Maybe it had just been too crazy of a week.
“I have an American accent, Rosie. My parents are Russian. I was born in the Ukraine. We moved here when I was 13, okay?”
“Okay,” I said softly.
I knew he was telling the truth and I knew that it pained him to tell me that information for whatever reason. I wanted to ask him where in the United States he’d moved to, but I could tell that he wasn’t interested in giving me that more information, and I didn’t want to push him away. Sometimes you catch more bees with honey, and sometimes you can’t play your hand too soon. I knew how it worked, even though sometimes I wasn’t patient enough to not ask the questions I wanted the answers to.
“So what else do you want to know?” He leaned against the back of his chair.
“Why did you tell my mom no?”
“I told you why. The sex is too good.”
“So sex with me is worth $100,000?”
“Sex with you is worth $1 million, maybe more.”
“What if we never had sex again? What if I said to you now that I knew all this information, I’m walking away? What if—”
“It wouldn’t matter, Rosie. Not now. Maybe if things were different, but not now.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“I think that’s something you have to tell me.”
“Why do you think I’m in danger?”
He looked surprised at my abrupt change of question. He sat back, picked up his Guinness, and drank until it was finished. For someone who didn’t like it, he’d certainly drunk it quickly.
He put the pint glass down. “I think you’re in danger because you’re being followed and someone’s sending you photos.”
“But there has to be another reason why.”
He shook his head. “We cannot talk here.”
“But we’ve been talking here.”
“We cannot talk here about the important things.”
“This wasn’t important?”
“This information, many people know.” He looked around. “The walls have ears.”
Reflexively, I looked around as well. “Do you think someone here is spying on us then?”
“Rosie, someone is always listening. Someone is always spying whether they know you or not. Are you not aware of that? Every day, people listen to strangers’ conversations and they repeat them to other people. Every day, information that you would have no idea was being passed along about you is being passed along. And sometimes that information gets into the wrong hands. We cannot take that chance today.”
“But you’ve already told me so much.”
“The information I’ve told you, it’s public knowledge.”
“No, it’s not public knowledge. I mean, I didn’t know it.”
“To the people that matter, it was public knowledge.” He squeezed my thigh. “I want to take you back to my place. Stay the night with me?”
“You want to go back to the hotel?”
“No, not the hotel. We’ll go back to my place.”
“So you do have a place?”
“Yes.” His eyes laughed at me. “You couldn’t possibly think that that hotel room was my home?”
“Well, no, but ... “
“We’ll go back to my place.”
“I don’t know. I really should get home. If my father figures out that I spent the night out, he’s going to be pissed off and I just don’t know what.”
“I can take you home, then.”
“You don’t have to take me home. I drove here.”
“One more drink?”
His hands slid up my thigh until it was rubbing against the lining of my panties. I gasped as he slipped a finger underneath the cotton material and rubbed.
“Jackson,” I mumbled breathlessly, “we can’t.”
“We can’t what?” he whispered. His fingers rubbed gently against my clit, applying more and more pressure until I sat back, my legs widening. I couldn’t believe I was letting him do this to me here, right in public. But no one could notice, could they? I closed my eyes. His fingers felt so good.
“Come back to my place, okay?”
“But Jackson, I ...”
“I promise you it’ll be worth it no matter what your father does.”
“Okay,” I murmured because I couldn’t say no to him. Not now, not when I wanted him so badly. Not when I had the opportunity to see his place and perhaps get more answers—because I needed more answers. I needed to figure out what was going on. I needed to take control of my life.