SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT, AND October followed suit. Seasons bled into one another. The trees had changed, but we hadn’t. In fact, it was when the leaves started falling, dancing together in orange, pink, and yellow, that what we had grown together became stronger and more alive.
Dean and I fell into a routine. It wasn’t flawless, but I learned at a very young age that nothing was. Even if it seemed so from the outside.
We spent every waking, available moment together.
When he was at work and I didn’t have a shift at The Black Hole, I came to see him. We would always lock the door to his office and close the electric blinds. Sometimes, it would be enough to hide what we were doing there. Mostly, though, I walked out with cheeks the color of beetroot and watched the whole floor judging me with their gazes as I fixed my hair and covered my stubble-scratched neck with my hand.
Sue, especially, would look at me like I sacrificed innocent babies for a living.
One time, I came in wearing a thick coat and nothing else. When he slipped the coat off of me, he was so happy to find me naked, he ate me on his desk for forty minutes and missed his Skype meeting with the rest of the HotHoles. He did scold me right after for not wearing clothes.
“You could get sick.” He bit my ass cheek—and not softly. “Stop fucking with what’s mine and wear a goddamn sweater.”
When I did have shifts, we tried to do lunches together. Sometimes he would drop by unannounced, sit at the bar, ask for an Americano, and pretend like we didn’t know each other. Especially if there were other customers around, we would play a game where he hit on me by dirty-talking his way to a quiet orgasm that came in pleasant chills. It always made the person sitting next to him squirm. One man even asked me if I wanted him to call the cops on Dean.
I said yes before I declined, just to see the look on Dean’s face.
We laughed. A lot.
We cried some, too.
Well, I did all the crying. When you volunteer at a children’s hospital and work with premature newborns three times a week, sad things are bound to hit you in the face. At the end of October, we had lost a newborn. A baby girl named Kayla. She was tiny, born at twenty-four weeks yet wrinkly as a hundred-year-old woman. I broke down in tears in the hospital hallway the night her doctor told me that she didn’t make it. When I got off from that shift, Dean was waiting for me on the other side of the road.
I collapsed into his arms and cried until I had no more tears in me, and he kissed my head and told me that if he could suck the pain out of me like venom, he would.
And I believed him. One hundred percent.
Not everything was great, though.
Dean’s phone was bombarded with Nina phone calls every single day. He never took them—ever—and was careful not to answer unidentified calls. She wasn’t a mistress, and wasn’t in the picture anymore. Those were the crumbs he’d thrown my way when I asked him about her. Anything else about Nina remained a complete mystery.
Countless times I found myself itching to pick up his phone, call, and ask her what the hell did she want and why couldn’t she leave him alone. But I didn’t. Because I was a freaking hypocrite to try to milk a truth I wasn’t ready to deliver myself.
When October rolled in, and with it the official signs of winter, Mama and Daddy got back to their nagging, but it was better than the radio silence I’d suffered through September. As far as they were concerned, I was single and alone and dying a slow, painful death. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. My health issues were under control. My lungs, along with the rest of my organs, were in good condition. Other than my heart. This one was in the hands of the man who had once broken it, and I had no guarantee that he wouldn’t do it again.
Our Todos Santos crowd and friends knew about Dean and me. First, there was the Facebook relationship thing that got people talking, and then—there was the fact that the HotHoles knew almost everything about one another.
Millie was happy for me. Vicious was indifferent—as he was toward everything else—Jaime and Mel were wary but glad for us, and Trent, who still lived in Chicago with Luna, didn’t give a damn because he had more urgent matters to deal with.
Dean never answered Nina, but sometimes, he would still drink when her name or number showed up on his screen (he said there was no point changing his number. She always found out what it was, somehow.) When I asked him why he didn’t have her arrested, he said it was complicated.
I hated when he drank, but it didn’t happen more than once every two weeks or so. When it did, I had to humor him all the way down to the pit of hell and drag him back into the light once he was done. I bowed down and let him use me like a pawn. Perhaps ‘use’ was not the most accurate term for what we were doing. I enjoyed his evil version as much as I enjoyed sweet lovemaking in front of the TV, carton takeout boxes decorating the floor beneath us.
I enjoyed it when he spanked me. I enjoyed it when he fucked my mouth with his cock until tears ran down my cheeks. I did not complain when he angrily took me in a dark alleyway behind Madison Square Garden and fucked me against a brick wall that made my back look like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper.
The night before Thanksgiving, we were going to grab dinner at a diner across from The Black Hole. Or so I thought.
I was jogging my way across the road in my thick, black hoodie and wool hat—it wasn’t anywhere near freezing, but I always kept myself covered just in case—and slipped into a red vinyl booth, placing a little brown paper bag on the table, containing Dean’s favorite chocolate chip cookies I got him hooked on, the ones Elle kept begging me to stop eating so I wouldn’t balloon. And now, ironically, not only did I eat them all the time, but my boyfriend was wolfing them down, too.
I waited for fifteen minutes before I texted to see where he was. Dean was always late, but never by more than a few minutes.
Rosie
Sirius to Earth, are you coming or what?
Dean
I am. On your face. Tonight. BOOM.
Rosie
Cute. Where are you?
Dean
Right here.
Rosie
Where is here?
Dean
In front of the diner. In a taxi. Waiting for you.
Rosie
?
Dean
Shit, I forgot to tell you I’m not hungry. So I thought we could skip dinner and just fly out to Todos Santos to tell our parents that we’re moving in together. Oh, and dating and shit. Happy Thanksgiving.
Rosie
??
Dean
Come out.
Rosie
???
Dean
Now, Baby LeBlanc. I got places to go, people to see, a pussy to eat on our way to the airport.
Rosie
NO.
Dean
Too late, I already asked for a limo with a divider and tinted windows.
I didn’t mean the oral. I meant the surprise trip across the country.
I looked out.
He wasn’t kidding.
There really was a tinted-windowed limo.
This man was born to be my downfall.
What the hell, God? Was cystic fibrosis not enough for you?
Making my way across the road, I narrowed my eyes when Dean stepped out of the vehicle and opened the door for me, exaggerating a bow.