Page 54 of Justice

“That ain’t what I asked you.” He lifted his head, trying to see my face in the dark. “Somebody did that to you. Somebody cut you. Who?”

And I was already moving.

I got off that man. Found my shirt on the floor. My hands were shaking so bad I put it on inside out and didn’t care.

“It was a long time ago. It’s nothing.”

“Baby.” He sat up. “Wait. Talk to me.”

Baby. That word almost took my knees out from under me.

“I have to go up.” I couldn’t look at him. “Rita gets up early. I have to be up.”

“Skye.”

“Goodnight, Justice.”

I left him sitting there half dressed in the blue light of a movie neither of us had watched a single frame of, and I went up those stairs so fast I nearly fell.

I made it to the second floor before I heard it.

A door. Closing. Somewhere down the long hallway, soft, careful, the click of a latch being eased shut by somebody who did not want it to make a sound.

I stopped dead with my hand on the wall.

The hall was dark. Dream’s door was shut like I’d left it. Rita’s was shut. Nothing moved anywhere. I stood there in a shirt I’d put on inside out, that man’s hands still all over me, listening to a house that had gone completely silent.

Then I looked down toward the end of the hall.

Under Storie’s door, a thin gold line of light.

It went out while I was looking at it.

27

JUSTICE

I read the same line in that permit agreement four times and could not tell you one word it said.

My head kept drifting back to that theater. Back to the weight of her settling into my lap in the dark, the sound she’d made against my mouth right before she caught herself and swallowed it back down. I could still feel the exact shape of her hips under my hands, still hear my own name breaking apart in her mouth like she couldn’t decide whether to say it soft or scream it. Any other woman it would’ve been a one night stand. I’d be over it as soon as I nutted. But not with her. She was a living, breathing thing inside of me.

Every hour since had me wanting to shut my office door, call her up, and hear that same voice say my name the way she’d said it with her lips against my ear.

I pulled her file up on my laptop, the one from the background check I’d run the week I hired her. I’d read it once back then, filed it, and moved on with my life. This morning I scrolled it slow with different eyes, looking for something I hadn’t gone looking for the first time.

She told me last night her husband left her for her own sister. That kind of thing usually leaves a paper trail somewhere, a divorce filing, an old address, a name on a lease. I went through that report twice and there wasn’t a sibling listed anywhere in it.

Maybe that’s nothing. Plenty of people cut family off and never look back. But something about it didn’t sit right with me. Something should’ve come up about a sister. What was she hiding?

I had my phone in my hand twice that morning, thumb hovering over her name, and both times I put it back down. What was I even gon’ say? Good morning, I can’t stop thinking about your body, and by the way, who cuts a woman like that. Wasn’t a version of that conversation that didn’t sound crazy said out loud. So I sat there instead, caught between wanting to drive straight to my own house in the middle of a workday just to put my hands on her again, and wanting to pull every thread on her past until I understood exactly what I’d let sleep two doors down from my daughters.

I had two more clicks left in me before my office door swung open without a knock.

Prime came through it already talking, phone in one hand, truck keys in the other.

“Yo, we got a problem.” He didn’t sit down. “Judge out in Maryland just called an emergency hearing on the Freetown grading permits. County’s trying to block us before we break ground. Camille’s already headed to the courthouse. She needs us in that room in an hour or that judge rules without us.”

I closed the laptop. Whatever was sitting in Skye’s paperwork could wait another day. Freetown couldn’t.