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"Being in love with you."
That hurt so bad I didn't know how to answer it. My first reaction was to ask if he even still was. My next would have been to question the crack about sex he'd made back at the pancake place. Because we'd been doing it every damn night.
Which was exactly how that would have come out of my mouth, so I was glad I had the sense not to start it. "What do you want from me, Mark?" I asked, but it didn't come out as an accusation or in anger. "You knew who and what I was when you met me."
He nodded slowly at that, not looking at me while he waited for a traffic light to change. As he started up he said, "Maybe I thought sometimes you would be something more."
Not something else. Something more.
"Maybe I thought I'd be more important than the job."
"Am I more important than your job?" I asked.
He didn't answer that.
We both apologized.
Neither of us backed down.
When Mark went to work Monday morning, I went to work trying to find Cole. That was crazy, and not something I would have ever thought I'd do. But the craving was back and hotter than ever and I needed him. He hadn't sent me away with the magic opiate cure. If I thought I was ready to be in the real world, he said, then I should be in the real world. That didn't make sense, because other people would get the cures while continuing on with their lives. Unless he meant to only cure people he found interesting or attractive enough to beat on.
But the stuff wasn't yet cleared by the FDA, not that I cared. Fentanyl isn't either. Maybe that was his concern. Whatever.
Sunday night,Mark offered to take me to dinner and I offered to cook and somehow both offers turned into sex that started in the living room and continued into the bedroom, and out again so we could order in pizza, more pizza than we could eat because at that moment we were so fucking hungry and couldn't seem to focus on which of our appetites most needed assuaging.
Our coupling was fast and hot and repeated. It started in one room and went into another. It featured mouths and hands and everything else. And still it maintained a sweetness.
It never rose above love. Or below it.
There was no biting. There was no restraining. There was no hitting. There were no implements.
Mark hadn't been wearing a belt.
Now on Monday I was searching for a man who might be lying about the rainforest cure. Maybe I had started to recover only because I wasn't in that deep and because I didn't have access to anything else and because I had been taken well in hand.
Maybe I was searching for him because of both addictions. To the drug. And to the way he made me feel when he just took me and did what he wanted to me.
It hurt. It fucking hurt and while it was happening I was humiliated and furious and promised myself that never again would I let him do what he was doing to me.
But I didn't leave.
There was the fact that I wanted my job back. And now there was the fact that Samuels was gone and I didn't know what that meant for my job. Obviously I fit into the whole chain of command, just like any other police officer. But Samuels had been my handler and undercover narcs weren't the same as rank and file officers.
It was a waiting game with PD. While I waited to find out when they wanted me back and what I was going to be doing, I might as well continue to beat down the addiction..
That's what I told myself. Carefully avoiding considering my use of the term "beat down" rather than simply "beat."
Cole St. Martin obviously lived in Las Vegas. That's where I'd first been taken. After that I didn't know. I could find his principal residences – all seven of them, and not all in the U.S. – but I couldn't find out where he was now. I could contact his staff at his pharmaceutical company, but I absolutely couldn't get my call put through, and I was not going to leave a message.
I could put a PI on him but I didn't have that much money and most PIs actually know and work with the police and they're not that reticent. It would get out. I had no idea if Cole had a reputation for what he did and I didn't want to find out when it came back to bite me in the ass.
I’d joined PD after two years of junior college and finished the rest of my degree as a hybrid online and on campus student who was also a patrol cop and who never slept. I never regretted it. By the age of 20 I was wearing the uniform. By 23 I was back out of it and going undercover. Now as 24 was getting long in the tooth, I was back out of deep cover and wondering if I'd ever get to go back in.
But the whole time I'd been working my way up, I'd had to put up with the good old boy network, same as any woman who pushes her way into a non-traditional career. I hadn't been wanted in my tae kwon-do class until I proved myself by never lusting after or dating any of the men who fit so easily into the do chang. I wasn't wanted at the gym in the heavy weights section where I was once told to leave after a businessman using 30 pound dumbbells to do concentration curls became angry that I was using 45s. I definitely wasn't wanted on the force when I came in as a twenty-something recruit. Big boobs. Big eyes. Not enough testosterone.
I wasn't going to blow that work, the work I'd put in to not be one of the guys laughing at guy humor and making dick jokes. It was work I'd put in to show that I had their backs the same as they, hopefully, maybe theoretically, had mine. I didn't want to be seen as kinky or even sexual, or as a gold digger looking for her way out of the job, or as a woman pining for the man she'd met on "vacation" when she needed some of her saved up downtime to take care of "family matters." I didn't need to remind anyone that my father was facing charges of impropriety on any of his cases.
So I searched on my own. I still had a week. It wasn't much time. It would have to do.
