Singe (2 page)

David Manzella’s twenty-four-year-old daughter? She’s pretty much the Thanksgiving dinner table. Eli’s an idiot even for bringing it up.

Still, though. Still.

“I mean, I didn’t know about the bra,” he tells her, downing the last of his beer and setting it down on the bar. He hasn’t quite had a hundred, but he lost track a while ago. It’s the arson is what it is—he fucking hates arsons. There hasn’t been one for years in the County, and the last sent him on an all-night bender. This time around, he’d prefer to work through his shit in a different way.

When he glances over, Addie’s watching him with that same incredulous expression. She doesn’t seem particularly put out.

“Strapless, huh?” he asks, pulling on a grin. “I’m thinking about it now, I can tell you that much.”

Addie laughs again, loud and honest. “Shut up.” She kicks him under the bar like they’re teenagers in a lunchroom, her knee brushing his for a moment before she pulls it away. Now that Eli’s got it in his head, he can’t un-want it, can’t help imagining what it would be like to lay her out on his mattress and peel that sober dress off. She looks like she’d be soft underneath.

He’s also fundamentally not a predatory piece of shit though, so he grins at her one more time and pulls out some cash to pay their tab.

“Okay,” he says, settling up with the bartender. No matter what happens or doesn’t, Eli never minds paying for women’s drinks. “I hear you. I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole. I’m gonna go home and sleep it off. I’ll see you at the station tomorrow, yeah? You’ll know me because I’ll be the one with the raging hangover.”

“Hey, we’ll be twins.” Addie smiles, kicking at him one more time, but friendly. “You gonna cab it?”

Eli nods. “Sure thing,” he promises, ducking his head to kiss her on the cheek before he makes his way through the crowd to say his goodbyes. The heat outside hits him like a wall of sand. It’s still completely light out, that weird underwater feeling of having spent all day in the dark, disconcerting. He thinks of Drew, the suffocating heat and the chemical smell of the accelerant. There’s a dive down the block that serves until three a.m.

He’s just starting to move when the door to the Pint opens and there’s Addie on the sidewalk, her hair slipping out of its knot.

“So here’s the thing,” she says, squinting in the harsh, sudden sunlight. “My place is walkable.”

Eli stops. His hands are balled up into fists, the resolve of what he was going to do. He makes himself unclench them. “That a fact?”

Addie brings one arm up to shade her eyes like a girl on a beach. “That is a fact,” she enunciates, careful to fit her tongue around the words. It makes Eli want to kiss her. She’s got a wide, pale mouth that he’s always liked, hanging there like a promise at the bottom of her heart-shaped face.

“Show me,” he commands.

Which is how he ends up hoofing it two blocks down and three blocks over to Addie Manzella’s shitty second-story instead of drinking his brains out, the humidity so thick he sweats through his starchy dress shirt in about ten steps. It’s better. It’s a relief. Eli pushes the thought of Drew aside, concentrates on Addie’s swaying hips instead. She can’t really walk in her heels, unpracticed or drunk or both. Eli wants to put his hands around her waist and feel the bones shift.

“It’s a walkup,” Addie announces finally, stopping in front of a dingy club to pull off her pumps. It takes Eli a second to realize they’ve arrived, his focus still one-hundred-percent on her ass. He looks between her dangling cross and the unlit neon sign reading
LOOKOUT
, a collection of sad flyers advertising a Saturday night drag show.
Come out of the closet and cum in LOOKOUT
, the chalkboard sidewalk sign reads.

Addie catches him staring. “That one’s new,” she says. “Last week was
Come analyze our anal
, although I think it’s mostly a lesbian bar.”

Eli blinks. “You live above
this
?”

“Uh-huh.” Addie grins at him, wide and delighted. Her temples are soaked from the walk, the dip of her collarbone bathed in sweat. “Look, you coming or what?”

Which—yeah. Eli is.

She unlocks a side door and leads him up a narrow staircase, stepping aside to let a mangy-looking cat scurry out the door onto the sidewalk. “That’s Chicken Cat,” Addie tells him as the thing darts by. “He’s part mine, I guess? He lived here before I did.”

Eli edges out of her way on the tiny landing so she can open the door to her apartment, close enough that he can smell the faint floral scent of her perfume. It’s very, very hot. “How long’s that?” he asks.

“Not long,” Addie says, though her voice is nearly drowned out by the wheezy hum of the ancient-looking window unit in her living room. Eli peers over her shoulder at a good-sized space jammed full with a crazy hodgepodge of furniture, a futon and a beat-up IKEA coffee table alongside an antique wingback chair. There’s a huge photo collage of Addie with a bunch of other girls hanging on one wall, from back in high school maybe, plus one of those ornate carved medallions on the ceiling, like possibly a chandelier used to hang there in the days before the building was carved up into starter apartments and a sad-looking nightclub. There’s clothes and magazines and assorted detritus heaped on pretty much every available surface. Eli’s skin prickles in the suddenly chilly air.

“Ignore the mess,” Addie tells him, dropping her heels on a denim-covered beanbag chair and padding over to the kitchen in her stocking feet, opening the Reagan-era freezer and cracking some ice out of a tray. “Here.” She fills two glasses from the tap and hands him one of them, hopping up on the Formica countertop. Eli watches her throat work as he gulps, not entirely able to help it.

“Hi,” Addie says when she’s finished, looking at him expectantly. Her mouth is very wet.

“Hi,” Eli echoes. Slowly, he puts both hands on her thighs. The fabric of her dress is like an oven, all this heat radiating off her like she’s a human hot water bottle. Her hair would be warm to the touch too, he bets, inky-brown and sun baked.

“Hi,” Addie repeats, quieter now that he’s close. She’s looking for a kiss, Eli can tell. It’s a way girls have of holding their faces.

Shit where you eat
, he thinks.
David Manzella’s daughter.

“We all good here?” he asks, leaning forward into her neck so he won’t be tempted by that wide mouth. He has to clear his throat twice to speak.

Addie laughs, loud and jangly in his ear. “
I’m
good,” she declares, legs opening. She’s fidgety, wiggling on the Formica. “I should probably go re-apply deodorant before I let you any closer though.”

Eli shakes his head, feeling the beer swim along with him. “No fair.” She smells good actually, that rosy perfume sweating off her and getting mixed up in the salt. He wants to strip her down and investigate all the damp places. “If I can’t, you can’t.”

“Mmm.” Addie turns, nose smushing up against his cheekbone. Her breath is just slightly stuttery. “Okay then,” she says, soft. Eli is rubbing higher and higher up her thighs with each pass. “S’a deal.”

Oh, fuck it. Fuck the arson, fuck the bad memories. Eli has both hands underneath her dress. “Deal,” he agrees and turns his head to kiss her.

Chapter Two

He’s good at this, Addie thinks vaguely, winding her fingers through the slightly damp hair at the back of Eli’s neck. There’s none of the first-makeout awkwardness. The last guy Addie dated, this grocery-store manager named Anthony whose mother is a friend of her mom’s, was kind of unbearably spitty. Eli—
shit
, Addie thinks, tilting her head back so he’ll press his mouth against her jawline, the faintest scrape of his teeth along the bone—Eli knows how to kiss.

She lets herself sink into it, one leg hooked around the back of his knee and the warm weight of his hands on her thighs. They’re far enough away from her noisy AC unit that she can hear the zipping sound his short nails make as they run across her nylons, hear how his breathing’s gotten faster. When he bites at her neck, Addie lets out a quiet gasp.

That makes him smile, the curve of it just as distinct against her skin as his teeth were. When he pulls back his eyes are warm and friendly, dark dark dark just like hers. “That okay?”

“Umm,” Addie says, sounding noticeably breathless. God, she can’t believe she’s doing this. She’s definitely never just brought some random guy back to her apartment before—she’s never even
had
an apartment before, how she lived at home with her freaking parents until this past spring. Not to mention that this is
Eli Grant
of all possible randoms, arguably the sluttiest guy at Eleven and maybe even all of Berkshire County. Addie doesn’t know what’s gotten into her—the heat, maybe, or the tequila, or the morning spent kneeling in a pew at St. Bonaventure’s saying goodbye to a twenty-seven-year-old fireman. “Yeah.”

Eli grins like she said something smart. He fits both hands around her calves and tugs, dragging her across the countertop. Addie’s hose are the only thing that keeps her from sticking. “Right,” he says, planting a kiss on her lower lip that is somehow both silly and businesslike. “Let’s try for better than okay, how ’bout?”

“’Kay,” Addie agrees nonsensically. The yank forward has him pressing her hips open, not quite his belt but his stomach, the weight of it all against her inner thighs. Her dress is
hiked
now, Mary Mother. For no reason at all Addie thinks of
The Friendly Giant
, every morning on her grandparents’ rabbit-ears set before church, “Look up, my friends, waaaaaaaaaay up.” Screwing around in mourning clothes, Jesus Christ. Probably that’ll be an extra rosary.

“You taste good,” Eli tells her, mouth opening against her collarbone. He has to hunch a bit to do it, how absurdly tall he is—Addie doesn’t know how she never noticed that before, Eli Grant’s tall, good body. Maybe she just wasn’t looking.

She puts a tentative hand on his back, on top and then underneath his jacket, sliding her palm down to feel where the sweat has gathered at the base of his spine. The fabric of his dress shirt is limp. When she scritches, Eli hums like a cat.

Suddenly Addie is impatient, a pinching ache in the cradle of her hips. “Let’s—” She pushes at his chest, trying to get him to move so she can jump down. “The futon, how about?” It’s underneath the AC unit, for one thing. Addie feels like alcohol is coming out her pores.

“Futon works,” Eli mumbles, but then instead of getting out of her way he leans in closer, scooping her up right off the counter like she weighs even less than her little cousin, Paulina, who’s seven, and heading for the living room.

Addie bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, is this your
move
?” she asks, tipping her head back to see his face more clearly. Her messy bun is done for, the elastic slipping right out and fluttering to the carpet. “The fireman’s carry? Seriously?”

“Shut up,” Eli tells her, but he’s grinning. His arms are steady and strong underneath her, the smell of soap and sweat and beer. “It is kind of my move, yeah. I’ve never tried it on an actual fireman before.”

“Oh no?” Addie asks as he sets her down on the futon. He’s a ridiculous person, honestly. Addie can’t believe she wants him to undress her as much as she really, really does. “Jim won’t let you do this, when you guys fool around?”

“Oh you’re funny.” Eli gets one knee on the mattress and leans over her, looming a bit with this faintly amused expression on his face like he’s trying to decide exactly what to do to her and in what order. Addie feels her breath catch deep inside her chest.

“Off,” she demands, reaching up and making a fist in his dress shirt. For no reason at all, she suddenly wants to stall, prolong the moment before Eli Grant focuses all his attention on her. “If you’ve got any stripper moves, now’s the time to shine.”

“Get bent,” Eli tells her congenially, shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it over her wingback chair. His shirt is wet under the arms and around the back, faintly see-through. “You too,” he adds, starting to unbutton. “I seem to remember something about a strapless bra.”

Addie shakes her head. “Gotta work for it, my friend.”

“Oh sure,
I
have to.” Eli drops his tie on her chest, a coil of warm linen. Addie wraps it around both her fists, petting the heavy fabric. “You just sit back and relax then, princess.”

He hangs his shirt over the chair too, shaking it out carefully; Addie doesn’t have the heart to warn him about the cat hair. Underneath it he’s wearing a tank, and for the first time Addie can see that the old burns at his wrists go up over his shoulders, raised and pink down his arms. They’re common among firefighters, burns like that, but Eli’s are the worst Addie’s ever seen.

“That got you pretty bad, huh?” she says now, pushing at his chest with her stocking-covered toes. It must have been some fire, right through the protective gear like that.

“Yup.” Eli pulls off the tank and she can see the burns fan across his chest too, just faint. His broad body tapers toward his hipbones, a trail of tawny hair disappearing into his waistband. “Pretty much.”

Addie nods. His voice is not the voice of somebody who wants to talk about it. It’s probably something he has to explain to girls a lot. “Pants too,” she orders instead, planting her foot in the middle of his chest again, but this time Eli grabs her heel and pushes until her knee bends, getting one leg in between hers on the futon.