Chapter Text
Friday 31 October, 1997
Considering that the Dow is fucked, his job is at risk, and his boss’s boss is gonna take a quick jump out of a very high window if they’re looking at another Black Monday, Trevor is having a pretty good Friday night.
Not so different to most of his Friday nights, if he’s honest; bass thumping, lights flashing, sweaty bodies writhing. Except when he looks out at the sea of people crammed onto the dance floor at the Limelight on a normal Friday night, he isn’t greeted by the sight of a ton of slutty witches and mini-skirted cats and Poison Ivies. Damn, he loves Halloween.
Last year was really awesome. Ari had just hit on some big deal and taken all the boys to Miami, where Trevor had scored with this smoking hot blonde dressed as Princess Leia. Well, dressed as slutty Princess Leia, obviously. Market crash aside, this year isn’t looking as promising. There’s always a danger in a club in the city that he’s gonna hit on someone he’s already slept with and get a glassful of vodka cranberry thrown in his face. Forget the city, in the whole tri-state area. Even if he’s had a great time with a girl, it’s not always their faces he’s thinking about when he remembers the great time in question. And Halloween is even harder- if he’s gotten with a redhead in a pair of tight jeans, how’s he meant to recognise her in a black Uma Thurman bob and a white shirt? Not that that’s gonna stop him trying, obvi, it just adds a certain tension to the proceedings.
And he’s hot, literally. Metaphorically as well, sure, but he’s actually sweating. That’s what head-to-toe Armani in a packed club does to you. Thank God for Men in Black, he didn’t even have to swing by his place; a $5 pair of bodega sunglasses and he was set.
It’s just one of the rules of Halloween- the hotter you are, the less effort you gotta put into a costume. That’s why Jerry from Legal is fully Jim-Carrey-Masked up and his secretary Brianna has just whacked a pair of bunny ears on top of the same black Hervé Léger bandage dress she’d worn when Trevor fucked her in the bathroom stall at the Palladium last Christmas.
That was fun, actually. Maybe if nobody else catches his eye tonight, he’ll ask Brianna if she’s up for a repeat- fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Fuck, no, he won’t be asking Brianna anything, he’s finding it hard to even remember she exists because now Trevor is looking at one of the hottest women he’s ever seen in his whole life. The hottest, maybe, in real life, if you don’t count that time he saw Kim Basinger getting into a car outside Le Cirque.
As far as he can tell, anyway, because half her face is covered with a mask, more Mardi Gras than Halloween, sweeping up across her face with peacock feathers framed around the sides. Usually Trevor wouldn’t look twice at a chick in a mask- the ultimate weapon of the secretly ugly- and technically he doesn’t look twice at this one either, because looking twice would mean looking away. And it doesn’t seem like he’s physically capable of doing that. Mask or no mask, there’s no mistaking how fucking fine this girl is, there’s no missing that bone structure, those insane blue eyes. Girl? Woman? He’d guess she’s got a decade on him, but you don’t get that many fortysomething milfs slutting it up on Halloween. Freshly divorced, maybe, showing her ex that if he doesn’t appreciate how tight she’s kept it, someone else will. Someone like Trevor, for example.
He just needs her to look at him. To make eye contact, he’s great at eye contact. He’s so great at it that he’s basically burning a hole in the side of her head right now, willing her to look at him. Because obviously, once she looks at him… Trevor knows what he looks like. He knows he’s one of the hottest guys in this place, or at least one of the hottest guys in this place who’s interested in women, and he’s not saying that Extra-Hot Milf should be flattered by his attention, exactly, but he can be pretty sure she’s not gonna get a better offer tonight.
They should have resumes, he’s always thought so. References he can pull out of his pocket when a girl is looking him up and down, past lovers’ signed affidavits swearing that he’s amazing at eating pussy, knows where the clit is, and never kicks you out until at least nine the next morning, after coffee and bagels. Then maybe he could walk right up to this woman, tap her on the shoulder, show her his file and get busy.
Although… he could do that anyway, right? Does he really need references if he’s got a charming smile and a jawline Tom Cruise would kill for? Do hot older women come out clubbing for any reason other than trying to get some hot younger guy? Especially on this, the sluttiest of holidays?
Okay, so the shoulder tap might come off a little desperate. He doesn’t want to give her the wrong impression, make her think that he has to try too hard to get laid or anything. So instead, Trevor shifts a little to the right, in time with the beat of this shitty Prodigy remix, trying his best to slide into Extra-Hot Milf’s line of sight.
It kinda works. She looks at him, he’s pretty sure, even though that mask makes her face hard to read. But he’d swear there isn’t even a flicker there, no sudden onset horniness that he can see. Definitely no “come here, baby boy” smile. Well, he’s just gonna have to try harder. He slides closer, grin in place, putting a little sway into his hips so she can see he’s got moves, which he does, and when he’s too close to ignore, he doubles the effort he’s putting into the patented Lefkowitz Fuck Me smile. He can practically hear the gleam of his own white teeth.
“Hi,” he tries, even though he knows it’s way too loud in here to actually be heard. “Drink?”
EHM just looks at him as he mimes tipping a glass to his lips. Oh, she’s hotter up close, actually, now he can see her crazy collarbones and the sharp line of her own jaw even better. And it’s hot that she’s not smiling back at him, he’s gotta admit. Little T will perk up for basically anything, but a woman over forty who’s looking unimpressed with him has the same impact as giving the little general a bugle call. With that same unreadable expression on her face, she holds up her own mostly full glass to him and shakes her head. Who orders champagne in a club? It must be the sweetest, cheapest shit going but this chick is sipping it like it’s top shelf Bollinger.
“Dance?” He tries again, holding his hand out for her to take it. His move would usually be sliding his hands over that tight ass and just pulling her into him, but his gut is telling him that that would end with cheap champagne all over his suit and shards of glass embedded in his skull. This time, EHM tilts her head to one side a little, examining him like she’s out for surf and turf and choosing which doomed lobster she wants the chef to sacrifice in the boiling water. Not a no, but clearly not moving the needle either. Okay, last ditch effort here.
“Blow?” He offers her, drawing a little bag out of his pocket like he’s presenting a treat to a moody housecat. Oh, so now her eyes light up. And her sexy fucking mouth curves into something at least approaching a smile. Well, Trevor is too goddamn good-looking to be used for his drugs. She can at least have the decency to use him for his drugs and his dick.
“If you dance with me.” He leans in to yell it into her ear and gets hit with the smack of some perfume that doesn’t really smell of anything in particular except expense. Oh, he likes that. He likes that a lot.
She doesn’t need to dance with arrogant boys to get her hands on a little coke, obviously, but they like it when they think they can (quite literally) lead her by the nose. The smile on this one’s face when she slid her hand into his and let him pull her into something barely more sophisticated than a bump and grind was so wide, so little-boy-on-Christmas-morning, that she almost feels bad for him.
Almost.
Fuck last Halloween, Trevor decides as the sixth song plays and the hottie in his arms shows absolutely no sign of pulling away or sneaking her hand into his pocket to steal the little baggie of the good stuff. Slutty Princess Leia was hot, but this chick… He’s drunk on her, and it really is her, he’s only had a couple of watered down Manhattans and, like, four tequila shots. A toddler couldn’t get actually drunk on that. But the softness of this girl’s body in his arms and the smell of her hair have got him feeling dizzy, high as a kite. Fuck it, he doesn’t even need the coke, she can have it. The thought of her hair falling all over her face as she bends down to get at a line he’s meticulously laid out for her is hot, hot hot.
“You wanna-” he starts to say in her ear but she’s instantly nodding, moving, moving away except- fuck- she hooks her finger under his belt and fucking drags him with her, out of the sea of bodies, and he’s goddamn happy to go. She could put a leash on him if she wanted, take him anywhere. He'd crawl around the sticky, disgusting floor if she-
“Drink?” Oh, her voice is even hotter than he'd expected. Low and rich, in both senses of the word. She could work a hotline, for sure. He'd pay to listen to that voice telling him he was a dirty little boy who had to jerk off because he didn't deserve to get real pussy.
“Or, y'know.” He raises his eyebrows suggestively, patting his pocket. “If we can find a, uh, flat surface.”
“In this dive?” Her eyes skim over one of the hottest spots in Manhattan like it’s a fucking Staten Island Hooters or something. “I have a much better idea.”
Perfect mouth curving into a smirk that, for some reason, sets off a little spark of fear at the base of his spine, the goddess in front of him grabs his tie and nearly makes his knees buckle.
“We should just go right back to my place,” she purrs. And, because he isn’t crazy, Trevor isn’t gonna argue.
The boy is so busy looking at her ass that she’s not sure he notices she’s leading him to her own car instead of a cab. Not that it matters what he notices, really, it’s not as though he’s going to get the opportunity to tell anyone, but the sight of Thor’s bulk in the front seat has been known to put men off their game a little.
This one doesn’t seem perturbed, though. The noise he'd made when she finally took her mask off would have stroked her ego very nicely if she'd let it and there's no doubt at all that he's enjoying himself. He’s all over her, hands sliding around her body with as much desperation as a sailor on shore leave, although she’s quite sure it won’t be more than a few days since he had his hands on some other poor woman. In his defence, he’s at least a little more adept with them than most of her conquests, not that that’s saying much. Quite adept, though. And the way his tongue just flickered behind her ear was really rather-
“Shit.” He’s pulled back to look at her, and for the first time in a long time, she realises she’s been taken by surprise. She’d let herself drift into it, the pleasant physicality of it. Stupid. Sloppy. And now this dick-driven, Hefner-wannabe stockbroker, or whatever he is, is looking at her like a puppy who thinks it’s been bad.
“I just realised I didn’t ask your name and now I feel like a dick,” he says in a low voice, eyes pleading, seemingly forgetting the fact that she hadn’t asked his name either. Is this a play, she has to wonder? Or is it actually possible for the business school breed to exhibit a tiny spark of conscience here and there?
It won’t hurt to tell him. Might help, even, relax him a little. And yet, she still feels a strange reluctance to do so, like she’s being drawn into something that could prove to be beyond her control.
“Hetty,” she says finally, shortly, and watches his face split into a grin like she’s just imparted some kind of treasured secret. Silly, trusting boy.
On the ride back, not a single part of Trevor's brain is paying attention to where they're actually going. It's pretty much all taken up with where his hands and mouth are going, where they should go next, and if she's gonna make that noise again any time soon. He's vaguely aware that they're heading uptown, but he could have figured that out anyway, just by looking at Hetty.
Hetty. Great name. Kinda old-fashioned, kinda prim, but in a sexy way, like some buttoned-up chick in an old movie who's about to shake her hair out of its bun and light a cigarette. He'd love to see Hetty do that, her hair is next-level gorgeous, he thought his hand was gonna get lost in it. And her face, without the mask on? Fuck. Even better than he'd thought. He wants to bite her cheekbones, and he's pretty sure he's never wanted to do that to anyone before.
So yeah, he's a little occupied. Which means that when the car- her car, evidently- comes to a stop and he opens the door, he doesn't know exactly where he is but a glance down the street gives him a pretty good guess.
It's not actually Park Avenue, he's pretty sure, but it might as well be. His place is nice, yeah, but this? This is nice. Like, Vanderbilt nice. Has he managed to pick up Gloria’s hot younger sister? Some Rockefeller cousin?
“Put your tongue away,” Hetty says from behind him and gives him a tiny little shove so he'll start moving again. “Or are you scared you'll go into withdrawal if you're this far from Wall Street for five minutes?”
“No,” he says, without pouting. Okay, maybe pouting a little. But then she starts clipping up the stairs and his eyes are drawn back to her ass and he cheers up again. “Your place is nice, that's all.”
Hetty makes a little noise as she unlocks the front door, but that's all, so he bends his head to kiss her neck, distract her a little. It seems wrong, that someone who lives in a townhouse that must have cost twenty times more than the house he grew up in just… has a doorkey. He feels like she should have fucking armed guards or something, putting their thumbprint on a scanner before they can get in the building.
Or at least, like, a maid. When she leads him inside, the place is so quiet his own breathing suddenly sounds way too loud, like he’s a perv making a crank call. And yeah, it's probably big enough to have servants’ quarters, a cook and a housekeeper and some guy in a penguin suit asleep upstairs but some prickle of intuition tells him that there's nobody. They're all alone.
His reaction to the house just confirms that she made the right choice tonight. For a moment in the car, just a second, she'd had a flicker of doubt. When she'd moaned as he bit her earlobe and he did it again, harder, she'd wondered if perhaps he wasn't quite as selfish and oblivious as all the others. A willingness to learn is never a bad thing, after all. And it's not as if she never changes her mind, just fucks them and nothing else, catch and release. It's happened, here and there. That gorgeous sous chef who'd seemed like a top-grade, pussy-hunting asshole at the bar but made a beeline for her first edition George Sands when she brought him home, asked her intelligent questions about them and actually listened to the answers. The sweet Australian model who kissed her for what had felt like hours and insisted on going down on her before she'd so much as feathered her fingertips over his obviously uncomfortable erection. A small handful of men who've proven that they do, in fact, deserve to live.
But it doesn't happen often. And Trevor- or at least that's the name he gave her as he felt her up in the back of the car- had ruined his chance when he looked at her building like it was ninety degrees outside and her townhouse was a pitcher of ice-cold beer.
A gold-digging finance guy who'd scented out the smell of money dripping off her and decided to chase a cougar’s tail instead of bothering helpless sex kittens tonight. She'd known it from the second she laid eyes on him.
Hetty's heels clack loudly on the marble floor as she strides off into the depths of the house and he's gotta scurry after her to keep up, feeling kinda like a dog she's taking for a walk. No leash, though. Not yet, anyway.
Lights come on as she walks by them which feels like some serious sci-fi shit, even though he knows logically that it’s the same sensor lights as they have at the office, only they’re warm and flattering instead of harsh and cold. The heels come to a stop in the kitchen, and as she bends over to get a bottle of wine from the rack, it briefly occurs to him that the sum total of all the bottles in that rack has gotta be more than his dad’s yearly salary. Just briefly, though, because he’s mostly thinking about Hetty’s ass. That dress, damn. It’s not really a costume but doesn’t that prove his rule? When you’re as hot as her, you don’t have to try.
He moves towards her with intent, wanting to get his hands on that ass again. The coke is still burning a hole in his pocket but if she wants to drink instead, that’s fine by him. Trevor likes coke sex, but he likes red wine sex just as well. Better, maybe, for the first time with someone he actually might want to see again.
“This place is crazy,” he tells her, to break the silence as much as anything else. He liked it better when they were kissing, can they get back to kissing? “Are you, like, a crime lord? A drugs baron? Because that’s hot, and I totally want in.”
“Not quite.” She gives him this look, assessing him like he’s an overdone steak tartare at Café Boulud. “Don’t tell me you were expecting anything less. I could see the dollar signs in your eyes when they were roaming all over me earlier.”
Trevor frowns, trying not to feel a little hurt. Why the tone? And if she thought he was some shallow prick, why did she bring him home? Or, if she thought he was just some shallow prick. T-Money cannot deny a certain degree of shallowness, but it’s coupled with a very real and very deep desire to bury his face in cougar pussy until he suffocates. Was he not making that pretty fucking clear?
“I mean, I don’t think anyone at that party was exactly fucking blue collar, but the only thing I was thinking about when I was checking you out was if you were gonna come home with me or I was gonna have to go down on you in the bathroom instead. You were the one who suggested coming back here. I’m equal opportunities, baby. I’d fuck the lady who does my dry cleaning if she had tits like yours.”
Nearly did, one time, before her scary Russian husband had come out brandishing a wire hanger like he was auditioning for a Mommie Dearest remake.
Hetty’s eyes are narrowed and he’s kinda got to wonder what the problem is. Burned before, maybe, by guys who were more interested in her bank account than her incredible tits.
“I think you’re insanely fucking hot,” he clarifies, in case there was any doubt about that. “And I was really looking forward to eating your pussy, if you’re up for that. I’m not gonna be clingy, I’m not gonna- hey, I don’t even know your last name, babe. You don’t like what T-Money does with his mouth, you can toss me out onto the sidewalk and what am I gonna do? Your driver guy is goddamn terrifying, I couldn’t take him-”
“Okay, you can stop talking,” she interrupts him, her face a little softer and smoother. “Bedroom is up the stairs, first door on the left, and you can go first so I can look at your ass this time. Got it?”
Ma'am, yes, ma'am. She's not gonna have to ask him twice.
This part doesn’t go the same way every time. They don’t always make it to the bedroom, for one thing. If they’ve managed to really piss her off in the car home, sometimes they barely make it past the hallway before she’s forced to take care of business. That’s not her preference, though. No point staining the hardwood floors just because she loses her temper, not when things downstairs are such a well-oiled machine by now.
But sometimes she’ll grab a bottle of wine from the kitchen and slink right down to the basement, stockbroker or corporate lawyer trotting behind her like a well-trained horse at the prospect of sex no matter how arrogant they’d been moments before.
If they aren’t making her skin prickle with irritation or she’s decided they’re likely to be exceptionally good in bed, she’ll take them upstairs instead of down.
She wouldn't place bets on Trevor being exceptional, necessarily. Men this sure of themselves usually aren't, men who work on Wall Street usually aren't. But in the taxi he'd kissed her like he was headed for death row, ironically enough, and she bought his little speech about eating her out. He isn't exactly difficult to look at, either, so she's willing to give him a chance.
She's just not expecting him to slam her against her bedroom door the second it closes and get busy making her knees tremble. Most men like him kiss as though they're trying to prove something to her, take something from her. Trevor kisses like he's trying to give her something and she can't understand how he knows that running his fingertips over her hip just like that will make her entire body shiver? Hetty isn't even sure she knew it herself.
For once, she loses herself in it. She doesn't really have a choice- her brain seems to switch off, only about to think about the right angle to shift her hips to rub against his growing erection, how his hair is soft and not all messy with product. Trying to pull herself back to the surface seems exhausting, when she could just let go, let him give her pleasure and take control-
But no. That's the one thing she can never, ever do and if that thought isn't quite a bucket of ice water, it's certainly a wake up call. She grabs his tie, yanks at it, and when he breaks the kiss, he looks like she's just pulled him out of his own dream. He's a pretty thing, with his eyes all glassy and his lips kiss-bitten.
“You're so hot,” he murmurs, for the umpteenth time. That's all these men have got, she reminds herself. You're so hot, you're smoking, you've kept it so tight. Surface level, always, they couldn't go deeper if they tried.
“I know.” She tightens the knot of his tie as she says so, too tight, and he seems to wake up a little, lust-glazed smile turning into a cocky smirk.
“I mean it, though.” His hand snakes down her back to grab her ass, as subtle as the Empire State Building. “Seriously fucking gorgeous and I already know you can do crazy things with that tongue. How are you single?”
His head tilts, his pretty mouth getting more smug by the second.
“Maybe you’re not single. That’s okay too, baby.”
Of course it is, with a guy like this.
“I am,” she says crisply. “I don’t need a man as a permanent fixture in my life when all I have to do is click my fingers to get one for a night. I didn’t even have to do that with you, did I?”
She pushes him backwards, using the tie as a rein to keep him walking until those very solid thighs hit the side of the bed.
“I didn’t have to do anything. Just stand there and look pretty and wait for you to come to me.”
“You complaining?” He lounges back on her bed, hands sliding up her thighs, pushing her skirt up, and she lets him. She’s going to let all of this happen, unless he proves to be shockingly untalented with his tongue. Under her control, at her pace. It has to be.
This might already be the best hookup he's had this year, and most of his clothes aren't even off yet. The most gorgeous woman he’s met in months is sprawled on top of him, her tongue in his mouth, her pussy wet under his fingers as he teases her through whatever sexy silky thing she’s got going on here. His mouth is fucking watering at the thought of tasting her, and the soft curls he can feel have gotten him wildly turned on. It would be gross to ask if she’s a natural redhead when he’s pretty sure he’ll find out for himself soon, but it feels like literally the most important question in the history of the world right now. She must be, right? That alabaster skin pairs so perfectly with all that copper. If you could pay for that in a salon, wouldn’t everyone be walking around with those crazy golden glints in their hair?
Hetty runs her tongue over his bottom lip and it makes him shudder, pressing his body up against her without really meaning to. The urgency he’d felt when she first brought him upstairs has kinda dissipated, turned into this all-encompassing need that can probably wait, because he can’t imagine ever not feeling it. Can’t imagine not needing her. And it’s up to her, right? What happens, when it happens. What he does, what she does.
“Is this what you were looking for when you came out tonight?” She asks him, all silky. It’s hard to concentrate on the words, what with the way she’s looking down at him and the feeling of her fingers working on his shirt buttons.
“Hmm?” is all he manages in response. The answer must be yes, right? He was looking for her? He must have always been looking for her?
“A fuck, Trevor.”
Just hearing her say that makes his stomach muscles tighten.
“Well, yeah,” he breathes as she runs a fingertip over his nipple. “Like everyone else in there, I guess. Halloween, y’know. Everyone’s looking for- but I could never’ve… you’re so…”
“Mm, we’ve been over that.” Hetty dismissed her own insane levels of hotness with a little toss of the head, and he doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that at all. The hand that isn’t busy between her legs tightens on her hip, as if he can show her he means business with just the force of his fingers.
“And I’m gonna go over it again. You own mirrors, right? You’re not like a vampire or some shit who can’t look at your own reflection?” His hand slips all the way inside her panties, his wrist bent at a slightly awkward angle so he can tease her clit but that could not matter less. “Sure, I’d have hooked up with someone else if I hadn’t seen you tonight. But that would have been a fucking travesty, yeah? You need me to prove that to you?”
Her eyes narrow, but her breathing’s getting shallower, he can tell. She likes what he’s doing with his fingers and she’s not as good at hiding it as she thinks she is.
“Do you?” He croons. Shit, she’s wet. Getting a finger or two inside her pussy is gonna be… mmph. Getting his dick inside it… he could die a happy man, he’s already sure. “You getting moody because I haven’t flipped you over and gone to town with my tongue yet, baby? All you have to do is ask. Forgive me for really getting into the foreplay, gorgeous.”
“Oh, you’re already letting your tongue run away with you,” Hetty hits back, her nails sharp against his chest. “Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?”
“Everybody,” he grins up at her, unbothered. Too much talking, not enough licking? No fucking problem.
Having to pull his hand away from her soaking little cunt sucks, sure, but the way her eyes go huge when he roughly grabs her ass makes it worth it. And there’s a reason T-Money spends half his free time in the gym- if you haven’t got the strength to basically bench a chick, what have you got? He rolls her onto her back real fucking easy and his head’s between her thighs in a second. It’s not hard to guess what she’s thinking, that he can’t walk the walk. Can’t even blame her for it, most dudes probably can’t. But if Trevor is confident about anything, anything in the whole world, it’s that he can eat pussy like a fucking champion. He can reduce a composed, dignified ice queen to a sweaty, babbling mess with nothing other than his tongue. She doesn’t know what she’s in for.
But, he thinks as he looks up at the dark, sultry expression on her face, maybe he doesn’t either. He just can’t wait to find out.
The boy- the man beside her is asleep, totally wiped out. How long is it since she let a man fall asleep in this bed? Ten years, probably. Even the pretence of sharing a bed with Elias full-time hadn't lasted past their son's birth, and when he'd rolled in for their occasional bouts of unsatisfying hate sex, he almost always rolled right back out again to his own room, the way she preferred it. Her post-divorce playthings always got kicked to the curb as soon as she was through with them and obviously in the last couple of years, anyone she's let up here has gone down again very quickly.
But Trevor Whateverhisnameis is slumped on her pillow, snoring lightly, a smile on his face like even sleep isn't going to let him forget that he just bestowed four world-shattering orgasms on a woman he probably thinks is a sex-starved cougar, his fingertips still brushing her thigh.
It was… she quite literally doesn’t have the words. Hetty’s sexual vocabulary isn’t exactly extensive and she’s never… well, she’s never spoken about something like this before because nothing like this has ever happened to her before. Not the first time that she’s come during sex, of course, but the first time she’s come during sex without having to touch herself just the right way, the way only she knows how. Ridiculous, probably, to get to 46 without ever having an orgasm that didn’t come at least partially from her own hand- or perhaps not. When she thinks about the braying gaggle of the friends she and Elias had shared, all those awful couples, she can’t imagine a single one of them having a satisfying sex life. It’s impossible to picture any of her ex-husband’s school friends or golf buddies doing anything except huffing and puffing away for a minute of missionary, entirely bent on their own pleasure.
Trevor had… oh, God. Just thinking of it now makes her squirm with a hot, delighted embarrassment. Men have performed oral sex on her before, of course; almost all of the chosen few she slept with before she killed have attempted it, as if they had something to prove. As if by clumsily lapping at her cunt, they could cement themselves as having some kind of decent moral character. As if they were doing her a favour. Trevor dove between her legs like he might be able to find her Black Card down there, licking and sucking like it was his favourite thing in the world to do. Like he really cared if she came, like he wasn’t just doing it in the hopes that she’d get on her knees for him afterwards. And the noise of it; obscene wet sounds she could hardly believe came from her own body, Trevor’s enthusiastic moans of pleasure, her own entirely unfamiliar wails as she had to be stopped from suffocating him with her thighs.
She's not a sentimental idiot, of course. Being able to make her come doesn't magically make him a good person. It doesn't even mean he deserves to live. Letting him fall asleep beside her isn’t some kind of commitment. There’s nothing to say she can’t shake him by the shoulder and seductively purr that she has something to show him in the basement. Nothing stopping her shoving him down onto that old leather couch before he has time to notice the bloodstains, straddling his lap, and licking her tongue into his mouth before she slides her favourite piece of cold, sharp steel inside him.
But there’s also nothing to say that she can’t do that in the morning. Nothing stopping her letting him sleep for a while and getting a little rest herself before shoving his head between her legs again or climbing onto whatever morning erection he might sport. It seems a shame to waste a man who had asked her what she liked and proceeded to actually do it, instead of watching greedily as she circled her own clit and then coming too soon for it to matter. If it's a con, if he's trying to get his foot in the Morris Hunt-designed door, at least he's putting the work in.
Just this once. She can kill him in the morning, there’s no harm in it. A little indulgence for herself for once- her therapist is always saying she doesn’t do enough of that. A little treat for her. A little treat for Trevor too, although he doesn’t know it. A few more hours for his heart to beat. She can kill him in the morning. There’s no rush.
It's not like the movies. When Trevor wakes up, he instantly knows exactly where he is, who he's with, and why he was there. In less than a second, he goes from REM or whatever the fuck to bolt upright, feeling stupid guilty. Weird, to wake up in a woman's bed feeling guilty for not sneaking out in the middle of the night.
And Hetty isn't here, which makes him feel even worse. She's probably got shit to do today, and here he is sprawled in her bed, pushing himself into her life, after he specifically said… too damn late now. Should he just get up and go, put his suit back on and join the legions of other New Yorkers doing the walk of shame this morning?
For a second, without his permission, his brain chooses to fantasise about Hetty slipping back into the room any second, wearing only his shirt, two mugs of coffee in her hand. Maybe they’d be a little shy around each other for a minute, the way you get with strangers you fucked stupid the night before, but then she’d kiss him and they’d lose all that shyness in the slide of tongue on tongue. They could talk more, maybe, actually exchange last names. He could tell her about his job, bravado out the market crash, ask her about her investments. There’s so much more he wants to know too; did she buy this insane house or were her family already tripping around the Upper East Side while his were still in Poznań? Has she ever been married? What does she do for work? What does she do for fun? Would her mouth feel as crazy around his dick as her cunt does? All kinds of stuff.
And whether he’s overstayed his welcome or not, it’s not like last night wasn’t good for her. Sure, all guys think they can tell when a chick is faking it, but he doesn’t think anyone could have faked the way Hetty’s body had arched off the bed like she was being fucking exorcised when he made her come on his tongue the first time. At least he had the decency to be good in bed before he fell asleep in hers.
When the door opens, he’s halfway through buttoning his shirt, no pants in sight, and his heart thuds with the weird certainty that it’s gonna be some sniffy British butler saying that he’s sorry, but Madam would like him to cover up his junk and get the fuck out. It’s not, though. It’s just Hetty, looking preternaturally smoking considering their late night, like Vogue’s version of a business bitch in a tight little pencil skirt and heels.
“I am so sorry,” is the first thing that comes out of his mouth, trying to forestall any scolding. She could scold with the best of them, he’s guessing. “I just fell asleep, I was- I mean, you tired me the fuck out, but I was gonna leave-”
“It's fine, Trevor. Really.” And she doesn’t look mad, as far as he can tell. Takes a second to give his legs a good look up and down too, not that he can blame her. His calves are masterpieces. “I’d thought we could…”
She trails off, but there’s no mistaking the naughty little look on her face. Oh yeah, they could.
“But something’s come up and I have to run to the office,” she continues, and he should not feel as supremely disappointed by that as he does. Tease. “Stay, though. Have breakfast. Leave me your number.”
None of the three things she mentions feel optional, not with that tone of voice.
“Yeah?” He sounds too eager, he can hear it, but he’s never been great at treating ‘em mean. Doesn’t work, in his experience, especially not with women like Hetty, women who are sure of themselves, which is basically the only type of woman he wants to spend more than an hour with. “I mean, I'm not gonna say no to trying that shower, I bet your water pressure is crazy. But you gotta work on a Saturday? What do you do, exactly?”
Hetty tilts her head to the side, appraising him, before shaking it. Man, those curls can swish.
“Leave me your number,” she repeats. “We can save the personal information for the, uh. Second date.”
Oh, fuck yeah.
She pushes forward and ghosts her lips over his cheek and he’s hit with a wave of her perfume again. Different one to last night, which is hot; sex perfume and work perfume, so everyone at her office doesn’t find out she’s a mega-freak.
“Last night was amazing,” he blurts out before she can pull all the way away and she laughs at him, just a little.
“Enjoy your weekend,” she says, but with a little smirk that makes him want to drop to his knees and tongue her pussy til she screams. And then she’s gone, leaving him alone in her bedroom.
It feels kinda good, actually. Like she trusts him or whatever, knows he’s not gonna steal her fucking Faberge eggs or go through her underwear drawer to jerk off with her panties. Although something tells him she might not be totally opposed to that, if she was there to watch. She was electric last night, totally on fire when he got her warmed up. So responsive when he bit her nipples, pulled his hair like he was a goddamn show pony.
She’d better mean it. She’d better call him. If she doesn’t, he’s not totally sure he’s not gonna end up on the sidewalk in front of the house every night, go totally Every Breath You Take.
There’s a notepad on the end table next to the side of the bed she’d slept on and he almost falls over himself in the rush to write his number down. Almost falls over again when he reads the letterheading.
From the desk of Henrietta Woodstone
Woodstone, as in Woodstone? Well, damn. Suddenly the house makes a lot of sense- his first thought about the Vanderbilts hadn’t been too far off. He went to Wharton with a Woodstone, David, some offshoot branch whose dad definitely had more money than Trevor’s but not enough for a 61st Street address. Still, could be an in there, if she doesn’t call him. Which she’s gonna, she’s gonna call him.
He writes down his number and then, after thinking for a minute, draws a love heart and scrawls a message too:
Said I wouldn't be clingy but I had so much fun last night. Promise I'm not a stalker or an axe murderer, I just think you're super hot.
And then he leaves his address, just in case, so she can see he's not a scrub who lives in Park Slope or something. He might be a needy fucking mess but he’s not a scrub.
When she gets home, at around 2pm, a non-small part of her is hoping he might still be there. A crazy part, obviously, because it would undoubtedly be better for both of them if he just disappeared off into the concrete jungle forever. Better for him, certainly, because it’s not like she’s taken killing him off the table forever. The thought of it still makes her pulse jump; Trevor’s soft mouth opening in surprise as she sinks her favourite knife between his ribs. Just because she wants to fuck him again first, that doesn’t save him. Not forever.
And better for her too, so she can keep believing that that’s true. That she wouldn’t show mercy, that she doesn’t think anything in particular of the pretty boy with the sad, brown eyes and the clever tongue. So she can ignore the way she’d totally lost her self-control the night before and forgotten what she was meant to be doing here.
And, of course, it would be genuinely irritating to find an entitled guy who’d spun an invitation to help himself to breakfast into license to spend the whole day invading her space. But it’s frighteningly easy to picture him lounging on the brocade couch in the study, reading her Times or stroking the cock that had felt so right pressing inside her, because evidently she’s even more deranged than she’d previously thought.
He isn’t there, though, obviously. Just like every other day, the only person in the house apart from her is Thor; today, standing over the sink washing her and Trevor’s breakfast coffee mugs. Pointedly washing her and Trevor’s breakfast coffee mugs, if she’s not mistaken. She wouldn’t put it past him to have watched for her from the front windows and sprinted in here just in time, towel slung over his shoulder and all.
“Well, that was a phenomenal waste of time,” she says airily, dropping her Lady Dior on the kitchen counter. “Absolutely nothing that couldn’t have been dealt with over the phone.”
Thor just grunts in response, but she’s used to that. Some days, she’s lucky if she gets more than ten words out of him in total. Not that Hetty minds too much; he has other uses.
“No, uh, clean-up job this morning,” he says after a few loaded moments, as she’d known he would. It’s not a question.
“Not today.” She keeps her voice breezy, rifling through her bag, looking for nothing. It’s absurd, really. She shouldn’t be feeling guilty for not sticking six inches of steel into a man’s chest.
“Where’s your friend now?”
Thor isn’t looking at her, so Hetty feels free to roll her eyes to high heaven.
“God knows.” Her voice is a little sharper now. “I can’t imagine I’ll ever see him again.”
He gets like this, when she lets them go, loveable hypocrite that he is. Most of the time he’s begging her to give the whole thing up, but when she finds another man she doesn’t think is the scum of the earth, he gets a little jealous.
“Wouldn’t be so sure. You see the note?”
Her heart swoops into her stomach, unbidden. She hadn’t been sure, despite her insistence, that Trevor would leave her his details. He’d seemed as though he wanted to, certainly, but this is Manhattan; if you’re not good at pretending, you’re not going to survive a week. And she hadn’t been sure that she definitely wanted him to. Had been sure that she shouldn’t want him to. The risk to both of them…
But all of this is risky, Hetty isn’t stupid enough to think otherwise. Since the very first time she touched the sharp point of a knife to a man’s chest, she’s known she won’t be able to get away with all this forever. The Woodstone name and the Woodstone bank account have spent a hundred years covering a multitude of sins, but never (as far as she’s aware) wholesale murder. Not on this scale, anyway. Not of men, men with position; up-and-coming young defence attorneys, well-established hedge fund managers, even a fairly successful architect. Who’s to say her great-grandfather wasn’t disposing of an unruly prostitute here and there without a care in the world? Nobody would have noticed. Hetty’s clean-up jobs have already attracted attention. Speculation on local news, a few things scattered across the morning papers, even a whole goddamn Time Magazine feature on “The Danger of Ambition” positing that men from middle-class backgrounds were the most likely to be swallowed up and spat out by the unstoppable vice of America’s big cities and citing three of Hetty’s discarded playmates as examples. She isn’t going to get away with this forever.
But it’s a better alternative than sitting around in her post-divorce haze, waiting for the Belvedere, the coke, and the diazepam to send her to an early grave. They fucking deserved it, all of them. She’s doing this city a favour. No regrets. That doesn’t mean she wants to get caught, of course, and seeing the same man twice feels like voluntarily tightening the noose around her neck but… then she remembers his firm grasp on her hips as he held her in place to be licked so eagerly a current had been running through her whole body, right down to the tips of her curling toes. She’d been surprised to find her hair wasn’t standing completely on end when she first looked in the mirror this morning. And people famously do stupid things for sex, don’t they? Wreck marriages, betray families, spend thousands, screw over friends. Hetty isn’t doing that. The only person she might be screwing over is herself.
“I didn’t,” she tells Thor after a pause he will most certainly have noticed. “Where is it?”
“Bedside table.” He turns round to face her, half-apologetic, half-defiant. “Didn’t know if there was going to be a job for me to do in there.”
Honestly, any problems she has with Thor intruding on her privacy disappeared into thin air the second he helped her with the first body. He’s seen far worse things in this house than her unmade bed.
She doesn’t rush upstairs, obviously. That would be undignified. But waiting for as long as she can before she physically has to scurry upstairs and read Trevor’s little missive doesn’t make her breathe any easier once she has. She has to sit down on the edge of the bed, breathing too hard.
If she can believe that the unabashed hunger of his note is real hunger for her, she’s putting him at risk. Using him, in the way that Elias had used countless coatcheck girls and cocktail waitresses. Doesn’t that make her just as bad as all the men she’s trying to get rid of? And if she can’t believe it, if this really is all a middle-class striver’s ploy to get his hands on her wallet, she’s just as stupid as Elias always thought she was- blind to the truth, easily manipulated, weak. The safest, cleanest, easiest thing would be to cut things off entirely, to neither manipulate or allow herself to be manipulated. It was one night, it should hardly feel like severing a limb to say that she’s not going to see some random young man again.
She won’t call him. She won’t. She’ll make the sensible choice for the first time in the last three years. That’s final. It’s decided.
And nobody ever needs to know that instead of tearing the note into a thousand tiny pieces, she slides it carefully into the drawer of her bedside table instead.
It takes three days for Hetty to call him, which Trevor has to respect. Game recognises game. And when she does, she sounds all haughty and cool, like she can barely remember his name but is gonna do him the courtesy of acknowledging his existence anyway. As her voice comes down the phone all rich and dark, he's picturing her in a room that's rich and dark too; an office, probably, sitting at a huge mahogany desk in a sharp suit, high heels. A desk he'd totally fit under to get his mouth on her pussy again, coincidentally.
“I suppose it's too short notice to ask what you might be doing this Friday,” she says, stern and disapproving, like he's done something wrong before he's even said more than hello. Not unhot. “You'll already have plans with some poor woman whose skirt you're trying to get under.”
“Free as a bird,” he lies, because he did actually have a date set up Friday night. Natasha, a super pretty brunette from his gym. She's nice, in great shape, funny. The thought of spending an evening with her now makes him feel kinda… not sick, exactly, but desperate, panicked. Like, he's supposed to sit through a whole dinner with some chick and make conversation about work and family and that other get-to-know-you shit when he could literally be burying his face in Hetty's pussy? Over the last few days, he’s thought about Hetty’s pussy a lot. Theorised, even. When he’s played back the way she gasped and groaned and fucked her hips into his face, he’s started to think that she hasn’t had a lot of good oral in her life. Maybe not a lot of good sex of any kind, actually. She’d seemed almost surprised that she was coming, surprised that she liked it, even. Which does kinda beg the question of why she clearly spends a lot of time picking up guys in clubs, y’know, if she doesn’t usually have a good time when she does, but hey. Chicks are weird. And it’s such a fucking ego boost to think that he could have broken an unsatisfying sex slump for her. He can’t wait to do it again.
Hetty doesn't just invite him over, though. That's what he'd been expecting- a hook-up, something clandestine at her place. Sex, nothing more. When she suggests meeting in public, somewhere nice, Trevor doesn't really know what to do with that. His self-esteem is pretty solid. Kinda solid. Solid enough. But he still didn't think she'd want… not after she all but accused him of being a gold digger.
He's always said he wasn't gonna go for anything serious until he turned 33, same as another awesome, hot Jewish guy. Assuming Jesus was hot, but he probably was, right? Ripped from carpentering, glowing skin from all that miracle fish. Obviously he doesn’t actually believe in- but that doesn’t matter, the guy had the right idea. Just good vibes for thirty years, then start to get your head in the game, then resign yourself to the end times when you hit the big 33. A solid life plan. But the thought of Hetty being a one and done situation, even like a month-long thing where they bang everything out of their systems and never see each other again, it doesn’t feel good. Crazy after one night, maybe, but this shit is supposed to be crazy, isn’t it? Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan touch hands one fucking time in Sleepless in Seattle and they know they’re gonna be together forever or some shit. If Tom had had Meg’s legs hooked around his shoulders while she panted for more like Hetty had, he’d have been dragging her straight to City Hall. And Trevor isn’t gonna do that, but he doesn’t really wanna see anyone else either, not right now. He wants to focus on giving Hetty Woodstone the best Trevor Lefkowitz Boyfriend Experience he possibly can.
That means flowers, obviously, sent to her house the morning of so she doesn’t have to carry them around the city all night. It means his nicest pants (make his butt look great), his second-nicest sport coat (herringbone, worn in a little so it doesn’t look like he’s box-fresh and never been anywhere fancy before), and doing that thing with his hair over the sink so it fluffs up nice without too much product in it (in case someone wants to really get in there with their fingers). She says no to him picking her up at her place, which deflates him a little in one way but actually feels kinda encouraging in another. Maybe it means she’s taking it seriously, doesn’t want to move too fast after their one night stand. That’s totally okay. He can definitely go without sex for one night if it means he gets to see her again.
And it actually goes… kinda amazingly well? Her smile when she arrives at the restaurant is wider than any he’d seen the other day, like she’s really pleased to see him instead of laughing at him for turning up ten minutes early. And it barely takes them any time to warm up, no time at all before she’s telling him about her life (busy) and her job (nepotism) and her family (complicated), and listening as he does the same.
And it turns out they have a lot in common. Basic shit like loving New York and the high life, sure, but other stuff too. Her dad had resented his daughters for not being boys, and although his mom's great, Trevor knows she'd always wanted a girl. Hetty had been forced to write with her right hand instead of her left since grade school, and he'd been treated like a backwards dumbass until middle school because he was so fucking bored all the time. Her ex-husband cheated like crazy, Trevor’s dad… yeah, just also cheated like crazy. On the surface, they're pretty different, but there's a lot there if you look for it.
And obviously, they're both smoking fucking hot tens. That counts for something.
When they've dragged dinner out for as long as humanly possible and the waitstaff are shooting daggers at them, Trevor has to fake his smile as he insists on paying the check. Because that means this is over and who knows if she's had as good a time as he has? Maybe this is normal, maybe this is what all dates are like if you're not just trying to get laid. He doesn't think so, but who knows? Maybe she was just faking it when she burst out laughing at the story about his childhood rabbi and his brother's pet hamster. She might not want to see him again.
And as much as he likes her, Trevor isn't gonna make a fool of himself if he doesn't have to. He's not gonna come on too strong, he tells himself as they leave, just say he had fun and he'll see her around-
Or that's what he tells himself until Hetty grabs him by his scarf and pulls him into a muscle-tremblingly insane kiss.
Her mouth, God, her lips. He wants to unhinge his jaw and swallow her down whole, he wants to kiss her until every muscle in his body aches from the effort he's putting into it. He wants to grab her ass and pull her against him so she can feel what she's doing to him, right here in the middle of the street.
But T-Money is a fucking gentleman when he needs to be, so he breaks the kiss before the little general can stand all the way to attention and grins at Hetty like a goofy idiot.
“This was really fucking awesome,” he tells her earnestly, best intentions out the window. “Please say I can call you tomorrow.”
For one heart-stopping second as Hetty raises her eyebrows, he thinks she's gonna say no.
“Hypothetically, yes, you could call me tomorrow. But I'd assumed there wouldn't be much need. Truth be told, Trevor, I was planning on taking you home and wearing you out for at least another twelve hours. Not what you had in mind?”
More than he could have hoped for. She won't regret it. He'll make her come until she's too sensitive to take another second, and then he'll do it again as soon as she lets him. He'll be the best two-night stand she's ever had, and then maybe she'll keep calling. Keep kissing him. Just keep him around. Forget all the romcom shit, that's all he wants. Just to be in Hetty's presence, touching her perfect body, for as long as she'll let him.
As December frost starts to cover the sidewalks of New York, Hetty is faced with a startling realisation.
For the first time since she was 21, she has a boyfriend.
Neither of them would use the word, obviously. They aren’t teenagers. But that’s undoubtedly what he is. Does anyone other than a boyfriend sleep in your bed for five nights in a row when he has his own perfectly comfortable apartment a mile away, because (as he’s whispered into her ear in a an exhausted post-coital moment) he can’t stand the thought of not being able to turn over in the middle of the night and bury his head between your legs? Does anyone other than a boyfriend send a dozen yellow roses to your office with an absolutely obscene note he tells you to tuck into your brassiere so he can feel close to your (quote) perfect tits (unquote) for the rest of the day? Does anyone other than a boyfriend cook you tuna tartare in your own kitchen, wearing an apron some old housekeeper had left behind that says “You say tomato, I say Bloody Mary” across the front? Hetty is a little out of practice, of course, but she thinks not.
Trevor Lefkowitz is, for all intents and purposes, her boyfriend. And it’s actually going surprisingly well, considering that two months earlier, she’d intended to stick a knife in his ribs and have Thor dump the chopped up bits of his body in the salt marsh at Inwood Hill.
She can’t kill him now, of course. It would be a lie to say that the urge never, ever comes upon her; sometimes when he’s naked under her and she knows she would have a perfect shot at that expanse of muscly chest, her mouth waters. But even if she was desperate, it would be far too dangerous. Not after they’ve been seen in public together in so many places; dinner at La Cigare Volant, dancing at Nell's, even strolling through Central Park like they’re in some terrible movie. It’s one thing dispatching a man when you could only have been seen whispering in his ear in a dark corner of a nightclub by tweaked out twenty-somethings too busy grinding on each other to pay attention. It's something else entirely to run the risk of allowing his blood to seep into your floorboards when a whole city full of people could have noticed you.
Because it isn't as though they're an inconspicuous couple. The age difference gets them looks everywhere they go, curious or judgemental or admiring. And they do look… striking together. His dark head resting against the brightness of her hair, she understands why people take a second glance.
If she's entirely honest with herself, a lot of their little outings have been her idea for exactly that reason. Self-preservation. Trevor-preservation. Nipping in the bud any lingering ideas she might have had about adding him to the list. Number 16. She’s made her peace with the fact that there’s unlikely to ever be a Number 16, mostly. 15 is a nice, round number to finish on. Trevor would definitely notice her bringing home some lawyer with a bad attitude and a six-pack, and definitely notice the sounds of screaming, struggling, and hacking through bone. And whereas before, with her life empty and nobody but Thor to care, it had been difficult to care too much herself about the possibility of getting caught. Now, though… blame and suspicion could fall onto Trevor, for one thing. And she’d be depriving herself a future she can see stretching out in front of her, for the first time in years. Taking the little shreds of humanity she feels and cutting them into ribbons. It doesn’t seem worth it.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Thor has been sulking with her ever since the first morning Trevor had trotted back out onto 61st Street with a spring in his step and no gaping wound in his back. She can understand it to an extent; Trevor has certainly knocked their equilibrium out of whack.
He’d accepted her mostly-true story about meeting Thor in rehab and taking him in with a shrug and a smile, but she’s seen the odd curious look shot in Thor’s direction and she can’t blame him. How many men would be able to just accept that their new sort-of-girlfriend has another man living in their mother-in-law suite? Especially one who looks like Thor. And she can't blame Thor himself for feeling a little twitchy either. They'd been doing okay on their own, for a certain value of okay, and she knows he feels she's being stupid, bringing someone else into their literal and metaphorical space. And there’s never been anything between them in that way but she can understand him being a little jealous too. They’ve been the only person the other one has for more than two years now, and she has to admit that she’s been neglecting him a little since Trevor showed up.
Most of this discord has presented itself through passive aggression, on both their parts- Thor making coffee for the two of them and “forgetting” to pour a cup for Trevor, Hetty leaving the paper out open at the movie theater listings with an 8pm showing underlined so she and Trevor can have the place to themselves- but after Trevor strolled into the kitchen in nothing but his boxers last week, the tension had come to a head.
“He's always here,” Thor had seethed at her once Trevor left for work. “Always. Poking around everywhere, could ruin everything.”
“But he won't.” They're just as stubborn as each other and she'd had no intention of backing down. “Nothing bad has happened, nothing bad is going to happen. You worry too much.”
He hadn't liked that.
“Risked a lot for you,” he’d grunted in the way he always does, not meeting her eyes. “Stupid boy isn't worth it.”
“And I’ve thanked you a thousand times,” she’d tried to placate him. “I’m grateful for everything, all of it. I don’t know where I’d be without you. But you can’t really be angry that I want to stop? It’ll be safer for both of us and-”
“Not angry.” He’d just sounded defeated. “Confused. You really think he’s different? Just another Elias, Elias with pecs.”
And Hetty can see why you might think that, if you hadn't had Trevor's eyelashes brushing against your cheek in the middle of the night while he murmured ridiculously earnest things about feeling safe in your arms. She had thought it at first, that's why she'd brought him home at all. She's just a big enough person to admit when she was wrong. Sometimes. This time.
Of course, that does open up the possibility that she'd been wrong all those other times. That some or all of her fifteen men could have turned out like Trevor if she'd given them the chance. But that way madness lies, and Hetty tries her best not to think about it. Besides. There's nobody like Trevor.
And she's not the only one who thinks so. As December marches on and Trevor barely spends a night at his own apartment, Hetty finds little ways to integrate him further into her life. Make it harder for him to leave once he realises that she's an insane harpy lurching into real middle-age whose perfect breasts and huge bank account don't actually make up for everything else that's wrong with her. One of those ways involves introducing him to some of her so-called friends, the people who'd insisted on sticking around after her divorce; for gossip, mainly, as almost all of them are still friends with Elias too. When she takes Trevor to dinner with two other couples, she's glad for the first time that all her friends are- to use Trevor's parlance- snakes. Let them run back to her ex-husband and tell him every little detail, from the shiny brown of Trevor's adorable eyes to the way his arms strain at the fabric of his shirt to the fact that he barely stops touching her throughout the whole meal.
“How did you do it, Hetty?” Howard Barclay asks her, his cheeks ruddy from too much Merlot. He's one of Elias's oldest friends, prep school buddies, and just like Elias, his new girlfriend is even younger than Trevor. The poor girl looks bored stiff and she's certainly having no trouble keeping her hands off Howard.
“Do what?” As if she doesn't know exactly what he means. A man like Howard would never believe that any other man would go for someone over 25 with non-plastic breasts unless they were bought, tricked, or hypnotised.
“Ensnare your young man, of course.” She should hate the question and part of her does, because it’s undisguised chauvinism, but there’s also a part of her that is just goddamn grateful to the old pig for giving her the opportunity to show off.
“I think you’d have to ask him,” she says coolly, a casual sip of wine disguising any irritation she might have let bubble to the surface. “How did I ensnare you, Trevor?”
She doesn’t doubt that what Trevor says next is genuinely felt. She also doesn’t doubt that what Trevor says next is a calculated performance, designed specifically to piss Howard off and make her look good. That’s exactly why they make such a good couple.
“I mean, have you seen her?” Trevor shoots Howard an overtly incredulous look, like he can’t believe someone could have reached his age without gathering a modicum of common sense. “You need me to answer that question? I saw Hetty, I was, uh, ensnared. Obviously.”
At another time, in another life, Hetty thinks that Howard might have laughed that off. When he was only seeing her through Elias’s eyes, probably aware that their sex life was sporadic and unsatisfying, he might have thought the very idea was laughable. But as he glances between her and Trevor, she can almost see a new line of thought taking shape in that wine-soaked sponge he calls a brain. She can see as he starts to look at her a little differently, it’s almost visible in his face, the second that he starts to look at her through Trevor’s eyes instead.
“Well, of course.” Howard shifts a little closer, a grin on his face that she imagines he thinks makes him look like some roguish boulevardier from the turn of the century, rather than a balding insurance executive with indigestion. “Stupid of me to ask.”
His eyes rake down her body quite openly, as though Trevor and- Kerri? Kristi? Hetty can’t remember- his girlfriend aren’t there at all. Genetic throwback that he is, he probably thinks that’s a compliment.
It’s not a compliment she particularly wants, of course. She’d rather die than touch Howard with a fifty foot pole; well, she’d rather Howard died than touch him with a fifty foot pole. But it feels like wiping away another muddy footprint that Elias had left all over her life when she kicked him out of it and that’s… God, even if Trevor wasn’t hot and charming and extremely good in bed, that would make their entire relationship worth it.
That does make her feel the tiniest bit guilty, though. As if she’s using him to bolster her reputation, her market value- no better, really, than Howard or Elias. Keeping something young and pretty on a string to make her look good. She’s always been too keen on playing a man’s game, taking her bite of the apple whenever she can. And Trevor’s (comparative) silence on the way back to her apartment makes her wonder if he’s thinking much the same. He tends to give the impression of having the emotional resilience of a rubber band, but perhaps she’s upset him, perhaps he feels hard done by.
Of course, the second the front door closes behind them and he pushes her up against it, it becomes clear that her worries were quite unfounded.
“You’re a goddamn tease,” he tells her, pinning her by each wrist to the solid oak door. Hetty’s breath catches in her throat; there’s a quirk to his mouth that tells her he isn’t angry in any way that matters, but he usually doesn’t take charge like this. In the month or so they’ve spent together, she’s been the one calling the shots and making him beg. This masterful Trevor is new and more exciting than she wants to let on.
“What on earth do you mean?” She uses her most imperious voice, the one she normally saves for insolent car valets and incompetent shopgirls. “How dare you?”
“Nuh-uh, none of that, baby. You know what you were doing. Preening in front of that fucking prick, basically shoving your tits in his face. You trying to make me mad, yeah?”
Forget catching in her throat, that knocks the breath out of her completely, and her whole being is concentrating on trying not to moan. Oh, it’s monstrously unfair that the same gorgeous man can be so good at playing her grateful little sex toy who exists only to eat her out and this swaggering, domineering bastard who thinks he can speak to her like that because she wants his cock.
“Not everything is about you, Trevor,” she begins, but he doesn’t let her get any further before his tongue is in her mouth. They’re in the hallway, her zipper is digging into her spine, one of her heels is about to slip off, she doesn’t care. This is just so… he’s so…
“You drive me so crazy,” he pants into her ear, hips thrusting against her like they don't have at least four layers of clothing between them. “Was seriously thinking about just pulling you onto the table and fucking you there. Howard would have loved it, seeing your pussy split open for my dick. Seeing my come drip out of you, I bet he'd have jumped at the chance to clean you up after. He was fucking leering at you, baby. You ever fucked him?”
“No,” she manages to gasp out as he sucks what she can already tell is going to be a luscious bruise onto her neck. Justifying herself to her jumped-up little toyboy, this yuppie puppy who's only alive through her good grace, should rankle. It shouldn't be weakening her knees. “No, I wouldn't, I don't want… I don't want him.”
“That's right.” Trevor pulls his head back to stare at her, almost glare at her. Both his hands clamp possessively onto her ass. “You don't. You want me.”
God help her, she does, more than anything.
“Next time we got a dinner with him, I'm coming in you before we go,” he tells her. Doesn't ask her. “And you're going bare under one of these tight little skirts. Let him try and get a look, try and shove his hand up there. He'll get the message.”
She has to kiss him before he says something that makes her legs stop working entirely. He's obscene, it's obscene, she's obscene. She's never been so aware of how empty her cunt is when he isn't inside it; shouldn't that feel like the default instead of feeling horribly, painfully wrong? And shouldn't she hate him telling her what to do like that, just as she'd hated it when Elias would tell her she should wear a dress instead of a suit or make sure to be charming to some investor? That had felt wrong, every time, made her prickle with anger until she forgot what it was like to not be all spikes. But Trevor ordering her around like that, her usually docile puppy barking his commands, just makes her feel like her blood has turned to molasses; deliciously slow and heavy and sticky.
Her brain is barely working as he leads her upstairs, her legs trembling the whole way. Trevor fucks her up against her bedroom wall like he's furious. Usually he mumbles and moans and babbles his way through sex like he's terrified she might think he's not enjoying himself if he stops for a moment, and Hetty likes that. But tonight he's… God, he's not taking his tongue out of her mouth for long enough to say a single word and it's melting her. She's no longer sure she has body parts that aren't mouth or cunt, and she's only sure of those because Trevor is inside her. Her pussy- when did she start thinking of it as that? His fault, everything is his fault- is going wild around the thick length of him and she knows even before it starts to really build that if he keeps going, she could come without any attention paid to her clit. She snakes a hand between her legs anyway, just to make sure, because the frantic way he's pounding into her doesn't suggest he's mastered his self-control tonight.
And the noises she makes when she does come are really pathetic, embarrassing, all high-pitched, girlish, worlds away from his harsh groans as he buries himself to the balls inside her and fills her up. If she weren't still so keyed up and frenzied, she'd hate him for turning her into that. As it is, all she really feels is desperate for another orgasm. But then Trevor gives her this sweet, dopey grin and her stomach swoops with some other feeling entirely.
“You good, baby?” He nuzzles his face into her hair but she's not ready for the wind-down, not even nearly.
“Yes, yeah,” she gasps, grabbing his hand and pulling it between her legs. “Put your fingers inside me. You need to… all of them, I don't care, up to the wrist if you have to, just… I need…”
Now it's his turn to make a crazy noise. She can actually see the sweetness fade from his face.
“Nah, you can't take that,” Trevor murmurs as he starts to circle her clit. “Not with a tiny little pussy like this. All my fingers, babe? No way. You'd cry. Beg me to stop, all that shit.”
“I wouldn't.” Hetty hears herself whine, can't stop it, not when she's this empty. “Come on, Trevor. Howard would do it, if he were here, if he got the chance to touch me.”
Oh, he does not like that one bit.
“Howard would do it?” He echoes, his lip curling sardonically. “You think Howard would do it? You think Howard even knows what a clit looks like? You think he'd see it all puffy and hard like this and want to suck it into his mouth? You think he'd even care about whether you came or not? No way, baby.”
He pushes three fingers inside her without even looking at what he's doing, not breaking her gaze for a second.
“I literally don't ever want to hear you saying his name again, ever,” he tells her, deadly serious. “I don't want to hear you saying any other guy's name when you've got my come in your pussy, actually. You hear how fucking wet this cunt is? That's because of me, baby, because I turned you on and then I fucked you full. Me, nobody else. Got it?”
She should tease a little more, argue. But…
“Another,” she begs him. “One more finger. One more finger and I won't say another man's name for as long as I live, Trevor.”
Evidently he does like that. He likes it a lot.
When she’s lying in bed an hour or so later, Trevor happily dozing beside her, all she can think about (apart from the delicious, empty ache between her thighs) is how badly she wants to cling on to this. All of it, the sex, the intimacy, the warmth she’s never felt from another person in her entire life. It’s absurd to feel this way after less than six weeks and it’s probably absurd to trust this man so deeply at all, but she doesn’t seem to be able to help it. It could be a long con, a total scam; he could have a long-term girlfriend out in Long Island or somewhere equally depressing, a woman waiting for him to wire her cash he siphons out of Hetty’s purse, a woman he calls from the office every day to cackle over the stupid, gullible bitch who’s delusional enough to think he likes her.
But he doesn’t, does he? She’s always scorned the idea of feminine intuition but there’s something in her body telling her that Trevor Lefkowitz is, more or less, exactly what he appears to be. An obscenely attractive young man with a good heart who wants her with an alarming ferocity. Something she hadn’t even thought existed. Something that, according to every iota of her worldview, ought to be entirely impossible.
It’s still a little early, but Trevor is pretty sure that this year, he’s landed a genuine Hanukkah miracle.
This might really be it. The one. Forever. Which is just so fucking crazy, because when he went to that nightclub on Halloween, he wasn’t looking for anything more than someone to spend the night with, a way to let off steam after a shitty day. Some fun. And hey, he found fun. Making Hetty laugh is the best thing in the world, probably, and her laughter comes way easier than he’d ever imagined. That seductive, ice cold goddess from the club can be stupid cute sometimes, when she’s curled up with the crossword in old cashmere sweats and her glasses on, and can’t stop herself giggling when he pretends to think that “Yogi Bear” might be the answer to three clues in a row. She’s both, the hottest woman alive and the cutie he wants to come home to at the end of the day. He literally hadn’t thought that was possible.
His mom is gonna freak, seeing as Hetty is closer to her age than his, but he can deal with that. Once his folks get a handle on how happy she makes him, they won’t care about anything else. Except maybe grandbabies, but there’s gotta be a workaround there somewhere. Hetty’s only mid-forties and don’t all rich women do that freaky cryogenic shit to keep their bodies permanently 22? Trevor isn’t super clear on the details, but she’s gotta at least have options. And if she doesn’t, they can adopt. No one is saying no to giving a Woodstone a kid or two. The vision is so clear in his mind- little feet running along those hardwood floors of hers, zipping them up in adorable Ralph Lauren parkas to ice skate in Central Park, all of them squashing up on the couch so he can show them Back to the Future for the first time. The kids peeking through the bannisters upstairs to see the two of them getting ready to go out somewhere fancy, all dressed up, as in love as ever.
He hasn’t said any of this to Hetty yet. Not even the part about loving her, although he thinks she knows. He’d say it, he’s totally ready, but he’s not sure she is. Sometimes when they’re having a sappy moment all tangled up post-coitally or something, her face will go all sad and serious, even just for a moment, and that’s what stops him. She’s got issues, stuff coming from her first marriage, he knows that. He doesn’t want to push her. She’ll be ready when she’s ready. He can be chill.
Okay, he can try to be chill. It’s not like he’s told her he’s been haunting the display cases at Harry Winston whenever he gets a spare minute, she doesn’t need to know. He isn’t gonna propose yet, he’s not crazy. At least, he doesn’t want Hetty to know how crazy he is. They’ve gotta at least hit the three month mark. And her birthday is mid-Feb, he could… Or he could just see how it goes, y’know, like a fucking normal person. But he’s pretty sure it’s gonna be the first one.
One of the most marked differences between her life now and her life two months ago is that these days, when Hetty gets home from work, she comes through the front door with a spring in her step, actually excited for the evening ahead. The Hetty of September or July or last year would have nothing to look forward to except as much vodka as she could handle and a decidedly unrestful sleep. Tonight, though… a little shiver sparks its way up her spine at the thought of what tonight might have in store for her. She’s late back from the office, so she imagines Trevor will already be lounging on her couch or busying himself in the kitchen. He’ll kiss her hello enthusiastically despite how icy her face is, and then… mm.
He’ll be waiting to greet her and-
He isn't there, though. He's not in the kitchen, either, or the breakfast room, or her office. He isn't anywhere to be seen. But his coat is hanging on the coat stand and she's almost sure she can smell the lingering trace of Dior Homme in the sure. There's food on the stove. He's in the house. So that must mean…
Her stomach lurches. No. No. No. Even as she tries to tell herself that her instinct is wrong, he isn’t down there, her feet are already heading for the basement door, her heart thumping so fast it feels like a foreign body stuck in her chest, trying desperately to get out.
This is all her fault.
In Trevor’s defence, he wasn’t trying to snoop. It’s not like Hetty has ever told him not to come down here, his girlfriend isn’t a character in a weird, scary fairytale. He’d assumed it was just a normal basement, as boring as everyone else’s; unused skiing equipment, an old armchair or two, maybe some of her kid’s stuff she didn’t wanna throw out. The wine rack upstairs was empty and he’d thought maybe she kept the reserves down here, thought there might be something less than twenty years old he wouldn’t mind her splashing into the chicken chasseur.
And there is wine down here, it turns out. There’s just a lot of other shit too.
The couch is the first thing he notices. It’s so not Hetty, the brown leather is cracked and worn and it just looks like a piece of total junk. Weird, he thinks. A hell of a lot weirder when he’s close enough to see the stains. Super fucking weird. The back of his neck prickles out into goosebumps, but then it is fucking freezing down here. And all basements are kinda creepy, aren’t they?
And then he sees the… the restraints. There’s nothing else they could possibly be; chains coming off the walls with leather straps on the end, weird buckles, like nothing he’s ever seen in real life, not even in his kinkiest girlfriend’s dedicated playroom.He can’t- what would she even need these for? What would anyone? Maybe it’s a relic of some weird Woodstone ancestor, those Gilded Age types were freaks. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just weird down here. The rest of the house feels modern even though it’s been here for longer than the Statue of Liberty, updated over the years, warm and cosy despite Hetty’s taste for sharp edges. This just feels old. Spooky. Everything in it feels old and worn out in a way she’d never put up with in the rest of the house.
Except those tarps in the corner. Those, those look pretty new.
He knows he shouldn’t look. That looking is actually probably the last thing in the world he should do. It would be so much better to just turn back round, go upstairs, lock the door again, and pretend that none of this happened, ever. Pretend he never saw the terrifying murder basement. What he does instead is walk right over and nudge those tarps with the toe of his Pucci loafers, kicking them around a little bit and uncovering the dark stains spattered all over the inside.
T-Money has never been great with impulse control.
Apparently Hetty hasn’t either.
This can’t be real. It can’t be happening. There’s some totally innocent explanation he just hasn’t thought of yet because he’s freaked out by the fucking bloodstains-
“Trevor.”
As he wheels around, his hands spring up defensively, he doesn’t even mean them to. This is just so fucking confusing. Part of him is expecting to see something horrific waiting at the bottom of the stairs, instead of the woman he was so sure is the love of his life, staring at him like a deer caught in the headlights. Hetty looks as scared as he feels, her gorgeous eyes huge, her posture defensive. For a moment, he feels guilty for making her look like that. Terrified, but guilty.
“I can't believe you didn't let me see your sex dungeon, babe.” He can feel his pulse pounding in his throat but he does his best to sound normal. A little dumb. Like he really does think this is just a freaky, kinky playroom and not… y'know. Whatever it really is. “You know I'm up for all that shit.”
But he can’t fool her, can he? That’s been clear since day dot. Her eyes are still wide and terrified, she hasn’t relaxed an inch, because… because… because she’s scared that he knows… fuck, no, this isn’t real. His girlfriend, his Hetty. She can’t be…
“Trevor…” she says again, and as she steps towards him, he can’t stop himself stepping back. Away from her. In case she… because she…
She won’t. She wouldn’t. Would she?
It’s only as she stands there looking at Trevor that Hetty truly realises how stupid she’s been. Nothing else has brought it home to roost in the same way; not the feeling of a man’s hot blood leaking all over her fingers; not watching Thor haul two industrial strength garbage bags into the trunk of his car and mopping up the mess left behind; not seeing the names of her victims there in black and white in the New York Times. None of it had convinced her of the consequences in the way that this does.
It hasn’t seemed real, somehow. Even when it’s been visceral and urgent and frantic, she hasn’t been afraid like this. How could she ever have thought that she could just pretend none of this ever happened?
He looks so frightened of her. The man who, less than 24 hours earlier, insisted on taking a nap with his head on her thigh because he “didn’t think he could sleep if he had to be more than a few inches away from her pussy”. One of her favourite things about Trevor is the way he looks at her, like he’s winning the lottery every time she smiles back at him. The way he’s looking at her now is enough to make her physically sick.
And the worst part is, she has nothing. No excuse, no reason, no justification that he can even pretend to believe. All this time and she’s never found a reasonable cover story. There isn’t one, she supposes, nothing anyone would believe. That leaves her with two options, and two options only.
The first is that she can attempt to inch round him as she stalls, babble out some nonsense for long enough to allow her to reach the sharp, serrated knife carefully nestled between an old X and a Y on one of those overstuffed shelves, and slide it right between Trevor’s ribs. It’s not as though he’s armed in any way and Hetty really believes that even if he saw her coming towards him with a weapon, he’d find it difficult to lash out and hurt her. Because he… well, she thinks it would go against his instincts.
And the second option is that she can simply tell him the truth. Whatever he chooses to do after that is up to him.
As she opens her mouth again, she still isn’t quite sure which she’s going to do.
“I can explain,” she begins, but it seems to make his face fall even further.
“I… Can you? Because I don't… Hetty, what the fuck?”
More reasonable than she deserves, in all honesty. He isn’t trying to run upstairs and call the cops or batter her with the nearest thing to hand. Because she’s made him trust her. Even after seeing all this, part of him trusts her. She has no choice but to do the same.
“I’m not going to say it isn’t what it looks like because that wouldn’t be true,” she starts slowly. She takes a step away from him, rather than towards. If he does want to bolt upstairs for the cops, she isn’t going to stop him. “Whatever you’re conjuring up in your head now, I’d bet good money the reality is worse. And I want to say I’m sorry, Trevor-”
“Just tell me.” His voice isn’t half as harsh as she deserves, but it still makes her flinch. “I feel like I’m gonna have a goddamn heart attack, Hetty, just tell me.”
“I need you to know that I didn’t set out to do any of this, the first time- well. It was about two years ago. You know about the divorce, rehab, the rock bottom I was at after Elias. Treatment got me off the pills but I was drinking myself-”
Her breath catches in her throat as she realises she was about to say something she’s never acknowledged out loud before.
“I was drinking myself to death,” she continues quietly. “If Thor hadn’t quite literally picked me up off the floor and read me the riot act, I can’t imagine I’d still be here. Liver failure or something even worse.”
Trevor makes a frustrated gesture. She understands, she does; if she’d walked into his apartment and found he had an iron maiden in there or something, she wouldn’t want to wait around and listen to the backstory. But this is the only way she knows how to tell it.
“But he did,” she goes on quickly, her nails digging so sharply into her palms that the pain is making her head spin. “I was in a terrible place when we met and he told me he wasn’t going to sit around and watch me slide all the way back there, I had to start doing something with my life instead.”
“And you chose-”
“No!” Her voice is too loud for the space and Trevor flinches. It’s a knife to the heart, but doesn’t she deserve one? “I didn’t plan it, I really didn’t. But I wanted to at least pretend, for Thor’s sake, that I was turning my life around. I started going out more, dressing up, trying to meet people who weren’t intense Norse ex-junkies or Elias’s business buddies. Still drinking too much but doing it in bars and clubs instead. Met new people, for what that’s worth, tried the latest party drugs, had some deeply unsatisfying sex.”
“None of this is sounding like a justification for the torture devices on the walls, Hetty.”
“I said explanation, not justification. But you’re right. To cut a long story short, I’m sure you’ve slept with enough unhappy, middle-aged lushes to picture the state I was in. And one night, I brought someone back here and… well, I was sick of it all. I didn’t want him anymore, didn’t want any of it anymore.”
“So you killed him?” It sounds so stark coming out of Trevor’s mouth. She and Thor have always danced around the wording- even in the privacy of her own brain, she doesn’t think of what she does in such harsh terms. But isn’t her boy good at cutting through all the bullshit when he needs to be?
“He didn’t take my change of mind very kindly,” she tells him shakily, wanting to gasp for breath but needing to continue before he can interrupt. “I’m not claiming it was self-defence, I don’t think he would have hurt me, but he started spilling this awful bile the moment I said no… that I was lucky he’d even deigned to look at me, he’d only given me a chance because he thought I’d be easy, my ex was probably fucking some 19 year old whose tits still pointed upwards, on and on. This diatribe about how unattractive and repellent I was, when just a few minutes before he’d been panting in my ear that he couldn’t get enough of me. Just like Elias. And I just thought, this arrogant little nothing who’ll never do anything worthwhile in his whole life truly thinks he has the right to say all this to me, truly thinks he’s better than me because he was born with a prick between his legs. And then… I don’t know if you’ll believe me but then I didn’t really think any more at all.”
Her gaze hasn’t left his face once and she’s seen it tighten up as she talked. He looks less afraid now, his expression almost blank. It doesn’t make her feel any better.
“I know this is a horrible cliche but I didn’t realise what I’d done until he was already bleeding out on the kitchen floor. It was too late, far too late and I- well, I wasn’t sorry. He was vile, Trevor, and he’d have kept on being vile until he was a septuagenarian feeling up cocktail waitresses and cheating on his third wife.”
Again, he looks as if he’s going to say something and again, she interrupts him.
“It felt good,” she confesses, because she wants to tell him everything. “I was terrified someone would find out, of course, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done the right thing. The world was free of at least one unrepentant, misogynistic leech.”
“Feels like a lot of people could talk about me the way you’re talking about him,” he says finally. “If they didn’t know me.”
She already knows she’s lost him forever. Lost everything, probably. What she has to say next won’t change that. That doesn’t make it any easier to force the words out.
“I know.”
As she watches realisation flash in the brown eyes she’s grown so fond of, all Hetty wants to do is reach for him. She doesn’t, she can’t, and it’s ridiculous to think that feeling those strong arms wrap around her just once more would change anything. But if there’s one thing that’s become clear to her over the last two months, it’s that when it comes to Trevor, she is ridiculous, utterly and completely. Homicidal mania doesn’t change that.
“On Halloween,” he starts, his voice cracking in a way that makes her feel far guiltier than any murder ever has. “You wanted…”
The only thing she can do is nod.
“I can’t believe… so I came this close to being dumped in the Hudson? My mom and dad having no freaking idea where my body was or what- God, Hetty. How are you this calm? You’re acting like I should just be chill with this?!”
“I don’t think that.” Her own voice is cracking, but Henrietta Woodstone hasn’t cried in front of another human being since she was six years old. She can’t let it happen now. “I just want you to know, what I’ve done, what I’ve been doing-”
“What you’ve been doing,” Trevor repeats. His face is no longer blank, and she’d been wrong before. No expression at all was much, much better than this look of abject disgust. “More than just this random guy and… and me?”
“There are a lot of candidates to choose from in this city,” she says simply. “The first time was terrifying. The second time was… easier.”
Trevor doesn’t need to know the details; how simple it was to pick up that blonde barrister who’d spent the entire ride home bragging about the bitch of a chalet girl who tried to bring a paternity suit against him, or how simple it was to plunge a knife right into his back.
“And the third time?” He asks her, eyes narrowed. “The fourth? This is… down here, it’s a goddamn… operation, you’ve got freaking infrastructure.”
She’s never given him enough credit for how smart he is.
“By the time I got to you, yes. We have a pretty well-honed system-”
Once again, he interrupts her.
“Hetty. Who the fuck is we?”
It’s not as though she could have ever got away with not telling him. She would never have fallen in love with someone who didn’t have the brains to figure out that no number of Pilates classes would allow her to lift the weight of a bulky man’s body into the back of her car.
“Who do you think?” She says softly. “There’s only one other person in the world who would care if I was rotting in a jail cell, Trevor.”
Even from the distance she’s deliberately keeping between them, she can see the way he’s trembling.
“You- so he helps you-” He’s shaking his head over and over again, and the fear of orange jumpsuits and lethal injections that she hadn’t managed to stir up for herself is now tingling through her body for the only real friend she’s ever had.
“He hates it,” she interjects as quickly as she can, and now it’s her turn to raise her hands defensively. “He hates that I do it, he’s not responsible, it’s just…”
“Do you even know how crazy this is? You’ve just told me my life is the plot of a fucking Stephen King movie and you’re just standing there like… like…”
He breaks off, breath hitching. The silence that follows wrenches at her insides. It doesn’t seem possible that the person who changed her life just by looking at her like she hung the moon can be looking at her like this now. It shouldn’t be.
“I don’t know what else to do, Trevor,” she says finally, and she means it. The dry, humourless laugh that he lets out in response is surely worse than any blow with a knife.
“Really? Because it seems to me like you’re pretty fucking great at contingency plans. You’re telling me you’re not already thinking about how you’re going to get my blood out of that couch?”
The fact that that feels like a punch to the solar plexus probably makes her the world’s biggest hypocrite, as well as a murderer, a liar, and a truly terrible girlfriend.
“I know you have no reason to believe me, but I can promise you that I’m not. Trevor, Halloween was- yes, I brought you home because I thought you were just like the others but you’re so… I’ve never met anyone like you before, not in my whole life.”
Her hands feel wrong. They should be touching his skin, shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t everything feel better for them both if she was touching him? It’s hard to wrap her head around the idea that he won’t ever want her to touch him again. He won’t ever want to touch her. From the way his head has dropped and he’s staring at the floor, it seems like he may never even want to look at her again.
“That’s kind of the problem,” he says finally, eyes still fixed downwards. “You’re saying I’m different to these guys, you’ve decided I’m… I don’t know, whatever you think I am. You didn’t fucking gut me because you decided you liked me. What happens when I piss you off, Hetty?”
“I can understand why you feel that way.” It would be funny, that she sounds like she’s in a boardroom meeting with a difficult client, if she were still capable of finding things funny. “Can I make a suggestion? I’ll go and stand facing that wall, and I won’t leave this room for ten minutes. That should give you enough time to gather anything you’ve left here. What you choose to do after you leave the house is up to you. I do appreciate that you’ve no reason to believe me-”
“Stop.” He does look at her now, anguished, more anguished than before, even. “This isn’t a fucking merger. This is…”
“I know,” she says again, because she really does. She’s been betrayed before. It had felt like the world ending, and that was only run-of-the-mill infidelity. Nothing like this. “I know, Trevor. All I’m trying to say is that I’m not going to stop you leaving, or… or anything else you want to do.”
He looks wrecked, running one hand through his hair over and over with the other poised defensively at his side.
“I… shit, for some reason, I believe you. But do you know how terrifying it is for me to realise that you could? If you wanted to?”
Her mouth is opening to speak of its own volition, but there’s nothing left to say that wouldn’t make it worse. He moves past her without touching her, giving her the same careful distance she offered him, and for a ludicrous moment, she thinks he might say something else- that he might soften, or look back, or hesitate.
He doesn’t.
The sound of his footsteps fades up the stairs, and then the front door closes with a soft, decisive click that, along with the smell of his cologne and the burnt chicken chasseur, lingers long after he’s gone.