As she bent toward him, his thumb went to her cheekbone, brushing lightly over her skin. Her hair fell around them in a canopy.
He levered up to kiss her, mouth careful, as though she was something fragile and precious. Spun sugar. The wing of a butterfly. Someone who wasn’t a human callus. Or a rock ready to be thrown through a window. Someone who wasn’t Charlie Hall.
Maybe that was how he thought he was supposed to kiss girls, the way he’d kissed the girl whose picture was in his wallet. Maybe he wanted to be respectful. But every time he did it, Charlie couldn’t help thinking of it as a challenge.
She reached down, hand on his chest, fingers sliding beneath the waistband of his sleep pants. She loved how his breath caught, went uneven. Loved the way that when he kissed her again, his mouth was looser, his tongue dirtier.
Pulling away, she squirmed out of her panties, kicking them to one side of the bed, not bothering to take off her shirt. Then she crawled back, on her hands and knees. He bent over her, covering her body with his. His mouth went to her throat, to her shoulder, his fingers tracing over the part of her breast just above her heart.
When pleasure hit at the base of her spine, she let it carry her past all regrets.
6
MARSHMALLOW TEST
Charlie groaned and rolled over. Coffee was brewing in the other room, the scent of it making her feel incrementally more awake. Outside, someone was using a leaf blower, the sound a steady, grating thrum. Above her, the familiar dried brown rings of a water stain from their leaky ceiling formed Rorschach-like patterns. A gun. A goat. An hourglass. In tea leaves, those would all be warnings. She rubbed her face with the heel of her hand and got up.
Her underpants were somewhere beneath the comforter. She found them and tossed them into the laundry pile, along with the shirt she’d slept in.
Naked, she flopped face-first on the mattress and took out her burner phone. She needed a better plan than the one that was just (1) go to the MGM and disappoint Adam by not being Amber, then (2) get him to go home and disappoint Doreen by being himself.
But … if Adam truly had the Liber Noctem, Charlie wanted it.
I think I can get to your place by 1:15am, she texted. Leave a key at the desk and I’ll just come up.
Almost all hotel elevators needed keys to operate, which would mean that if she didn’t have one, he’d have to come down to get her. Maybe he’d be willing to make things a little more convenient for both of them.
OK, he texted back.
See you tonight, she wrote.
As soon as she arrived at the hotel, she’d get that key. Then she’d text to say that she’d changed her mind and felt weird about going straight to some guy’s room. The casino floor served drinks until four in the morning; she’d suggest they meet there. He might be tired, might get frustrated by her, but she didn’t think he’d give up on a job because she asked him to come downstairs first.
Since she’d have his room key, she could just waltz in while he was waiting for her at the casino bar. So long as he didn’t keep the book in the wall safe, she could find it, grab it, and go. And even if he did keep it in the safe, she had enough information from knowing Doreen—kid’s birthday, his birthday, wedding anniversary—to guess the obvious passcodes.
Disguise wouldn’t be a big deal. Charlie just wanted to look different enough that she wouldn’t be noticed on security cameras, in case he got somebody at the hotel to show him the footage. She had a collection of wigs shoved in the bottom of a dresser drawer, packed in ziplocks, for just this purpose.
She tossed an auburn one into her backpack, along with a tube of distractingly red lipstick, a sparkly yet stretchy dress, and a pair of flats she could run in. Then she changed for work—a black t-shirt, skirt over bike shorts, and her trusty, ugly Crocs.
So long as her Corolla could get her to Springfield and back, she might be able to have something she never thought she would—the satisfaction of taking something away from Lionel Salt. Maybe she’d destroy it and send him the twisted melted metal remains.
After she got the book, she’d dob in Adam to Doreen and let her figure out how to get him home.
* * *
Charlie’s body was on autopilot as she stirred bitters into old-fashioneds, pulled drafts, and doctored abominable Smirnoff Ices with half shots of Chambord. Up on the stage, a drag trio in sinister yet glittery Elvira-esque attire belted out songs from the nineties. Mixing drinks, she found herself glad of something to do with her hands, some distraction from the churn of her thoughts.
In the hours before a job, adrenaline kicked in. She was alert, focused. As though she only truly came awake when there was a puzzle to solve, a potential triumph outside the grinding pattern of days. Something other than getting up, eating, going to work, eating again, and then having a few hours before bed with which you could work out or do your laundry or have sex or clean the kitchen or watch a movie or get drunk.
That grinding pattern was life, though. You weren’t supposed to yearn for something else.
She’d done a couple of credits at the local community college before screwing that up too. Criminals, her ancient and slightly doddering professor declared, have no self-control. There was a test, where a marshmallow was placed in front of a child. The child was told that if they can wait for the researcher to return, they will be given two marshmallows. The one-marshmallow kids were the ones who were most likely to turn into criminals, who were reckless, who sought pleasure and excitement over all else, stole when they thought they could get away with it, lied when it benefited them. Who chose the temporary thrill over the permanent gain.
Charlie poured three shots of Chartreuse that glowed the bright green of poison. Shook up a dirty martini, dropped extra olives into the cloudy brine of the drink.
Her mind went over all the things that could go wrong, and she thought of the receipts in Odette’s office, one of them revealing the name of the dead guy who wanted to fence those pages from the Liber Noctem. If he was the one holding the rest of the book, with Adam in charge of moving it, she was screwed. It wouldn’t be at the hotel. But if she knew the dead guy’s name, she could hit his place next.
Maybe she hadn’t changed much after all.
If someone had put a marshmallow in front of her as a child, she would have eaten it straightaway, because adults couldn’t be trusted to keep their promises.
At ten, Charlie got a half-hour dinner break. It was her chance to pee and scarf something down before she was back on until one, with just one more fifteen-minute break between. Usually, she went a few blocks over to Daikaiju for ramen, but tonight she walked to the convenience store on the corner and got microwavable mac ’n’ cheese, a container of sad-looking grapes, and a coconut water.
She drank the coconut water on the way back, tossing the container in the garbage before she passed through the large black double doors of Rapture. She headed straight to the break room. Although technically part of the backstage, it had a microwave and a place to sit.