Downtown Devil: Book 2 in series (Sins in the City) (28 page)

“Dinner, then maybe drinks back at your place? I mean, it’ll have to be your place, for the time being. Until he moves out. Otherwise it’d look like an invitation to another three-way, or some kind of weird move on my part.”

“No, I agree. And that sounds great. Have you been to Kaya? I’ve only been once, but it blew me away. It’s over in the Strip. Caribbean food, cool atmosphere.”

“Never, but I’ll make us a reservation for this weekend,” he offered. “Tomorrow okay?”

“Hey, I’m free whenever—unemployed, remember? Damn, I can taste the swordfish now . . .”

He laughed. “The last time I saw that look on your face, you weren’t thinking about food.”

“No, I bet I wasn’t . . . Okay, here’s another weird question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“If this all goes well, and we decide to date or whatever . . . would it be okay, acknowledging everything that went down? In a filthy context, I mean.”

“Like dirty talk?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see why not. It’d be hard to feel jealous, considering how you and I wound up in bed together the first few times, right?”

“I hope that’s the case. Those were probably the most erotic
nights of my life to date.”
Probably? Try undoubtedly.
“Because of both of you.”

“Listen, in theory, if you and I ever got serious . . .”

“Yeah?”

“If he came back to town at some point, or if you ever decided to come out to the Southwest on one of our trips . . . like, it’s on, as far as I’m concerned. If you’re up for it, and he’s up for it, and nobody’s heart is in danger of getting broken? That’s the one tiny loophole I can see in my monogamy policy.”

“That’s a very intriguing proposition, Mr. Tucker.” And what a delightful loophole it was, the only stipulation being that all parties were present. And, Jesus . . . if she could get over Mica emotionally but still get to enjoy that body, that face, that voice and all its sinful suggestions . . .

She shook off the haze of lust fogging her brain and found Vaughn smiling. “What?”

“Just the look on your face. And maybe I can’t be straight with my dad about everything I’ve experienced, and maybe I wouldn’t be willing to with any woman I might date, normally . . . but it’s a relief, knowing that you already know, and that it doesn’t freak you out—”

“Quite the opposite.”

“And it’s more than a relief, really. It’s . . . I don’t even know how to say it. It’s like this part of me I’ve been so paranoid about not wanting anyone to know about, but you
do
know, and you’re not just tolerant of it, you’re into it.”

“Understatement.”

“Yeah, exactly. So yes—you want to talk about it, in bed? Sure. You want us all to go there again if the opportunity presents itself? I’m probably game. Play it all by ear, but probably.”

“Wow. Dating you comes with unexpected perks.” Though right
now those perks weren’t much more than intriguing. What truly sounded exciting, even novel, was another chance to find herself alone in bed with just this man, to feel all his energy pouring into her, and all of hers into him. Two bodies, two voices, two sets of needs and hands and eyes, trading jokes and pasts and secrets and pleasure.

“So is that our plan?” she asked. “Let’s just see where this goes?”

“Let’s see where this goes,” he agreed, sounding earnest and eager. He took her hands. “Maybe nowhere, maybe somewhere amazing.”

“I’m in. And let’s make sure right now that it doesn’t go nowhere.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning come to my room. That’s not nowhere, right?”

He smiled. “Just you and me, huh?”

“Yeah.” She kissed him, a flirting graze of her lips across his, and she grinned as their eyes met once more. “Just you and me sounds like plenty right now.”

Later that summer

T
he Feurhy was packed—easily forty people already buzzed around the small gallery, and the doors had barely been open ten minutes. Two servers circulated with trays of complimentary red wine and champagne, and the room hummed with cheerful conversation, set to the click of high heels on hardwood. On three of the pale gray walls hung eighteen large color photographs on uniform white mats, all framed in black, though the photos’ diverse subjects were every shade that human beings came in.

The woman of the moment held court by the door, having her glass tapped again and again, as each new well-wisher approached to toast her big night. Vaughn hung back and snapped a few shots of the photographer herself. Just cell phone pics, not like the true works of art on display tonight. He’d watched Clare meticulously cut each and every mat, Windex every pane of glass and attach every hanging wire, and long before that, fuss and obsess over which images to use.

“This one or this one?” she’d asked him a hundred times over the course of the summer, holding up two seemingly identical prints.

“Uh, that one?” he’d hazarded when confronted with such a side-by-side comparison of photos of Zariya, his colleague from dispatch.

Clare had shot him a skeptical look. “Can you even tell what’s different?”

“Not at
all
. Can you?”

“Look at her necklace.”

Vaughn had. “They both look blue to me.”

She’d rolled her eyes and taken the prints back. Where he saw
blue
, Clare probably saw turquoise and azure and cerulean and cornflower and a hundred variations in between. Whatever she’d tweaked, the change was lost on Vaughn.

“Sorry. I’m useless at art stuff.”

A smirk had curled the corner of her lips. “But dynamite in the sack. You’re forgiven.” She’d drawn him in by his collar for a kiss, the both of them sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, surrounded by the clutter of her craft. They’d wound up in her bed not long after that, and Vaughn never did figure out what the difference was between those necklaces.

Whichever print Clare had gone with now hung opposite him, on the far wall, dead center. Zariya herself was coming later that evening, and several of Clare’s models were already here.

Not Mica, though.

Vaughn checked the time. Six fourteen. But this was Mica he was talking about—fashionably late, when he did manage to show up at all.
He will. He can’t pass this up.
Vaughn would text him if he didn’t show by eight thirty.

He flipped through the photos he’d snapped, smiling, then glanced across the way at the real thing—that glowing, grinning, captivating
woman he somehow got to call his, looking slinky and sultry and smart all at once in her little black dress.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her this happy,” said a woman at Vaughn’s back. He didn’t need to glance and confirm—Clare’s mother had a distinctive, distinguished voice, full of authority. She’d intimidated the shit out of him the first couple of times he’d had dinner with the two of them, but they’d grown fond of each other quickly. She was a ballbuster, a real force of nature, but if you could go to the mat with her in a lively debate and hold your own, she wasn’t so tough to charm.
You make her laugh,
she’d told him once at a restaurant, when Clare had been using the restroom.
I never understood why she ended it with her last boyfriend, but when I think about it, I don’t remember him once making her laugh the way you do.

As he watched Clare now, that compliment made him glow. “She should look happy,” he said, pocketing his phone. “She worked her ass off for this.”

Clare’s mom clinked her glass against Vaughn’s. “Amen.”

Clare had pulled this show off with a lot of hustle and countless all-nighters, finishing it amid the stress of a job search. She’d landed a position with a stock photo company, which she’d started only two weeks earlier. Some actual studio photography, but mostly image enhancement. Not her dream job, but miles closer to where she’d like to get, plus she was using her degree.

“You feeling proud, Ms. Fowler?” he asked her mom.

“Don’t make me keep telling you—call me Desiree. And yes, very. She deserves every smile she wears tonight.” She took a sip of her champagne. Vaughn was nursing a glass of seltzer—he’d partaken in a splash of the bubbly stuff to toast Clare right before the doors had opened, but he was driving. Clare had charged him with making sure she didn’t get too tipsy and embarrass herself, but there was little
chance of that. She was too busy fielding her admirers’ questions to empty her flute.

Clare’s dad had come as well—he was chatting with Vaughn’s father, in fact. They were off in the corner, hovering by the cash bar, each with a beer in hand. Vaughn didn’t need to be in earshot to guess what they were talking about—his dad was miming throwing a football in slow motion, so the topic had to be the Steelers’ chances this coming fall.

Vaughn wandered with Desiree from photo to photo, and though he’d seen them all before, Clare’s talent still took his breath away. You felt like you knew these people, the way she captured them. Little moments frozen in time, curious expressions, busy hands, freckles, wrinkles, scars, tattoos . . . every tiny mark that made a person unique. He lingered for a long time before Clare’s self-portrait, feeling bewitched, trying to catch each and every murmured compliment that slipped from the nearby guests’ lips.

“This is your roommate, isn’t it?” Desiree asked, drawing his attention to his left.

“Yeah, that’s Mica.” Mica, perched on Linnea’s fire escape back in May. Eyes black, dangling Christmas lights bright white, a ribbon of blue-gray cigarette smoke jetting from his lips. Vaughn shivered. Clare had an uncanny knack for capturing people’s essences, and that single image triggered too many emotions to count. Vaughn’s best friend, in all his charismatic, untouchable, infuriating glory . . . The man he’d wanted to punch more than once, wanted to fix, wanted to do unnerving and unanticipated things with—and had. The man who’d led him to Clare, as well. A man who might walk through the door at any moment.

Vaughn made his way to each and every photograph, eavesdropped on the other guests. Eyed the entrance, always scanning for Mica but
never finding him. He chatted with Clare’s friends; with both their fathers, still hovering by the bar; met an old professor of hers and a couple of former classmates. Again and again, his eyes jumped to the door, and again and again, the new arrival stepping in from the balmy night wasn’t Mica. At eight thirty, Vaughn checked his phone, then looked across the bustling room to Clare. She was talking with just one guest at the moment, and Vaughn seized the opening, picking his way through the crowd toward her.

Clare caught his eye over the shoulder of the man she was chatting with, and smiled in a way that said,
Just a sec.
He nodded, lingered nearby. He studied the photo of Clare’s chef acquaintance as he waited, rewarded when she slipped free and greeted him with a quick rub on the back. Pleasure warmed him, just being seen with her. Being hers, openly, officially, in this room full of her admirers. Her achievement felt like his in a way, and filled him up with pure, selfless pride.

“Hey,” she said. “Hanging in there?”

“Of course. I’m having a great time. But what about you, Ms. Popular?”

Her cheeks grew round with a suppressed grin. “I’m happy. Very happy. I was just talking with a journalist who writes for the
Post-Gazette
’s Local Arts section.”

Vaughn glanced over his shoulder, noting that the older man did indeed have a pad in one hand and a digital camera dangling from a strap around his wrist. He was eyeing Clare’s self-portrait intently.

“Hey, now. Think you’ll get a glowing write-up?”

“Here’s hoping. You look nice,” she said, smoothing the collar of his shirt.

He laughed. “That’s, like, the fifth time you’ve said that tonight. Should I take a hint?”

“Certainly not. I like you in jeans and sweats just fine. But the change is novel. Makes me wish I had a wedding I could bring you to. You dress up real nice, Vaughn Tucker.”

“You’re not too shabby yourself.”

Her expression changed, growing cagey or shy as her grin faded. “Did you, um . . .”

Vaughn nodded, knowing what she was getting at. The thing they’d discussed last night in bed, between lingering kisses and lazy yawns.
Want me to talk to him?
Vaughn had asked her.
Feel him out?
She’d said yes, he should. She was down; Vaughn was down. Mica was leaving for LA in two days. It was now or never. Or if not never, now or next summer, at the earliest.

“And?” she prompted, fingers drumming her dwindling flute.

“I asked him this morning. Well, not asked. I told him you—and me, both of us—that we’re down for another night like back in the spring. No strings, just three friends. Just sex,” he concluded in a near whisper.

And it
would
be just sex. Clare was over Mica, well and truly. Her bruised ego had healed up quick, though they’d spent the summer focusing on just the two of them, their own deepening romance. But as the weather grew hotter, so did their pillow talk, and idle, filthy remembrances of the three-ways had gone from fantasy fuel to a distinct possibility, the more they talked about it, in and out of bed.

As for Vaughn and Mica, they’d been a little strained, for a time. Not long, just until it was clear Clare wasn’t hung up on Mica anymore, but there’d been a space between them this summer. Not a bad thing, necessarily. Vaughn suspected his friend needed that space, had put it there himself, in order to keep his complicated feelings for Vaughn in check, out of respect for Vaughn’s no-longer-single status. Thoughtful, really, coming from someone as self-serving as Mica could be.

“What’d he say?” Clare asked.

“He played it cool, but I think it’s a go. He sort of glazed over,” Vaughn said, recalling it. Mica’s expression had stayed casual, but the focus had abandoned his eyes, as though he’d flashed back to those sinful spring evenings the moment Vaughn acknowledged them. “He said let’s talk tonight, after the show.” And he’d licked his lips, always a hint at the man’s baser intentions.

“Looking like that,” Vaughn added, giving Clare a thorough up and down, “he’d be a robot to say no.” And Mica was far from robotic. He was the most hot-blooded man Vaughn had ever met. “You sure you still want it?”

“Yes,” she said, softly and with certainty, squaring her shoulders. “For both of us, yeah, I want it. I know things with him and me didn’t have the most mutual conclusion . . . but I don’t care about that anymore. He was what I needed, when I needed him, and it was fun for what it was. And he brought you and me together, most important of all. And the three of us . . . well, it seems like you two needed me, maybe, to take care of some unfinished business from your trips.”

Vaughn swallowed, feeling hot for a dozen clashing reasons. “Sounds about right.”

“But I’m over him, romance-wise,” she said firmly. “And you two are solid. He’s leaving, and we both still want him. If he wants the same, we’d be fools to pass up the chance.”

He nodded.

“And if he doesn’t? Oh well. You and me are plenty hot enough just on our own.”

“No doubt.” Though Vaughn would be lying if he said there was nothing more at stake tonight than passing disappointment. Nothing that underpinned his and Clare’s relationship, or even his friendship with Mica. But something.

A part of him wanted—
needed
—a repeat of that last threesome.
The sexual side of his and Mica’s relationship . . . it wasn’t some external add-on, a thing that could just be disconnected, ignored, overridden. It lived inside their friendship, woven in just like their shared memories, their shared hobby, their trust and their bond, dozens of talks out there in the desert, opening up about things neither had with anyone else. The sexual side of them made things stronger, even if fear had left Vaughn feeling it was more like a toxin for so long.

Being with Clare had changed all that. Talking with her about the things the three of them had done, and seeing the way it excited her, had made him grateful for those encounters. It replaced the burn of shame with a blush of lust. He’d refused to integrate those sexual encounters into his concept of himself, always blaming them on the alcohol, or simply on Mica. But he’d wanted those things, too. He’d enjoyed them, but hadn’t been ready to admit it, not until he’d met someone he respected as deeply as he did Clare, and discovered that his darkest secrets didn’t repulse her. Quite the opposite—

“Oh.” Her little exclamation pulled Vaughn from his thoughts. Her brows were high, eyes trained over his shoulder. “He’s here.”

Vaughn turned, and his stomach dropped into his good shoes. He’d just seen Mica this morning, but nonetheless . . .

And you took your sweet time.
No shock there.

He’d dressed up, or as much as Mica ever would—corduroys and a black henley. Even if he was the most casual man in the room, it didn’t matter. People as beautiful as him elevated whatever they wore, made cotton look like cashmere. His dreads were down, brushing his shoulders, sleeves pushed up to his elbows. He approached Bree, who was chatting with some friend of hers and Clare’s. They’d never met, but she listened to whatever he said, glanced around, and gestured in Clare and Vaughn’s direction. Mica made his way over, expression cool and unreadable. Vaughn shivered, shocked by how much he had invested in Mica’s verdict regarding tonight.